Crab Orchard Review Vol 11 No 2 S/F 2006

Bastien Desfriches Doria received an MFA in Photography from the College of Mass Communications and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

In this volume: Richard Garcia

Thomas O’Grady

Peter Schmitt

Stephanie Allen

Nola Garrett

William Olsen

Steven Schreiner

Alison Apotheker

Joy Gonsalves

Regina O’Melveny

Steven Schwartz

Rane Arroyo

Sean Hill

Marissa Palmer

Betsy Sholl

Ellen Bass

Luisa A. Igloria

Cynthia Parker-Ohene

Kim Gek Lin Short

Paula Bohince

Linda Susan Jackson

Elise Paschen

Erin Elizabeth Smith

Jody Bolz

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Alan Soldofsky

Louis E. Bourgeois

Jee Leong Koh

Edith Pearlman

Cathy Song

Ralph Burns

Lance Larsen

Jon Pineda

Dana Sonnenschein

Anthony Butts

Jeffrey Thomas Leong

Iain Pollock

Kevin Stein

Marcus Cafagña

Julia B. Levine

M. Lynx Qualey

Emily Gray Tedrowe

Leslie Chang

Moira Linehan

Jill Sisson Quinn

Alison Townsend

Martha Christina

Susan Luzzaro

Shelley Renee-Ruiz

Maureen Waters

David Citino

C.P. Mangel

Charles Reynard

Charles Harper Webb

Steven Cramer

Jeffrey McDaniel

Rachel Richardson

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Tricia Currans-Sheehan

James McKean

Jennifer Richter

Michele Wolf

Anne-Marie Cusac

Derek Mong

Paulette Roeske

Dominika Wrozynski

Sarah Cypher

Lenard D. Moore

Natania Rosenfeld

Bro. Yao

Jarita Davis

Josh Morse

Lise Saffran

Karen Zealand

Marlon Unas Esguerra

Danika Paige Myers

Marjorie Saiser

Yvonne Zipter

Phebus Etienne

Thu Anh Nguyen

Jane Satterfield

CO R

Crab Orchard Review

published by the Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale

$10.00 ISSN 1083-5571

Volume 11, Number 2 Summer/Fall 2006

Neil Aitken

Crab Orchard Review

Cover: Three photographs by Bastien Desfriches Doria © 2006

Crab Orchard Review $10.00us Vol. 11 No. 2

D F E F A I M N I I L N G Y

A B ORCH AR R C D •

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REVIEW

A B ORCH AR R C D •

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REVIEW

A JOURNAL OF CREATIVE WORKS

VOL. 11 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 Jacob Boyd Jason Brown Aaron Deutsch Desiree Dighton Patty Dickson Pieczka Rebecca Oliver Elisabeth Randall Timothy Shea Brigette Stegall

Assistant Editors Chris Bryson Tracy Conerton Elisabeth Meyer Ingrid Moody Elena Pearson

Special Projects Assistant Renee Wells

Summer/Fall 2006 ISSN 1083-5571

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

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

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

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Crab Orchard Review and its staff wish to thank these supporters for their generous contributions, aid, expertise, and encouragement: Arthur M. “Lain” Adkins, Susan H. Wilson, Karl Kageff, Barb Martin, Larry Townsend, Robert Carroll, Kathy Kageff, Bridget Brown, Mona Ross, and Kyle Lake 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

The editors and staff of Crab Orchard Review wish to thank our departing Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Dr. Shirley Clay Scott, for her steadfast support and encouragement since 1999. We wish her the best in all of her future endeavors.

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A B ORCH AR R C D •

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REVIEW

SUMMER/FALL 2006

VOLUME 11, NUMBER 2

FICTION & PROSE 1

Stephanie Allen

Sympathy

Tricia Currans-Sheehan

Contended Cows

35

Sarah Cypher

Hamsa

47

Thomas O’Grady

Christmas in Killarney

71

Edith Pearlman

Life Jackets

74

M. Lynx Qualey

The Second Wife

83

Lise Saffran

The Machinery of Travel

101

Emily Gray Tedrowe

Claudia Leaving

111

Jody Bolz

Croup

150

Louis E. Bourgeois

Downtown Hanoi

153

Susan Luzzaro

My Mother’s Daughter

155

Jill Sisson Quinn

Rooms

182

Natania Rosenfeld

How We Sleep

189

Steven Schwartz

Storefront

211

Poetry Neil Aitken

Prodigal

19

Alison Apotheker

On the Parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Early Death

20

Rane Arroyo

Temporary Sanity

21

Ellen Bass

A Child Is Born

22

Paula Bohince

Origin of the Valley

23

Ralph Burns

Surreptitious Swimming

25

Anthony Butts

Progeny

27

Marcus CafagĂąa

Last Judgment Through a Glass, Darkly

30 32

Leslie Chang

Shanghai, 1919, Redux

33

Martha Christina

Twilight

34

David Citino

Ohio Snow, Cerebral Atrophy

54

Steven Cramer

Falling Asleep Over The Iliad, or The Odyssey Reading to His Son

55

Anne-Marie Cusac

The Emptying

59

Jarita Davis

Return Flights

60

Marlon Unas Esguerra

Balikbayan Law

61

Phebus Etienne

Mirror Image

63

57

Richard Garcia

Towhead

64

Nola Garrett

The Relative Heart

66

Joy Gonsalves

Elegy for a Distant Relative

68

Sean Hill

In My Father’s House

70

Luisa A. Igloria

Rice

86

Linda Susan Jackson

The Women in Me

88

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Epithalamium Fifty-Five Years After the Fact of Your Saddest Day

90

Jee Leong Koh

What’s Left

92

Lance Larsen

Cleave

93

Jeffrey Thomas Leong

Approaching Hong Wan Village Gate, Taizhou

94

Julia B. Levine

1964: A Litany

95

Moira Linehan

Recovering

96

C.P. Mangel

For a Son Born in Jail, 1995 Fen

97 98

Jeffrey McDaniel

Oblivion Chiclets

99

James McKean

Panama Hat

126

Derek Mong

Uncles

128

Lenard D. Moore

Reunion Joke

130

Josh Morse

Stutter Spooked, Or a Tale Spun of Your Origins

132 134

Danika Paige Myers

Burning the Hives

135

Thu Anh Nguyen

Heir

136

William Olsen

A Godfather Human Ashes

138 142

Regina O’Melveny

Caps of Silk

144

Marissa Palmer

As You Talk Idly of Divorcing My Sister

146

Cynthia Parker-Ohene

Prevalence of Ritual

148

Elise Paschen

Fertility

149

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Noon, Saturday, Madison Square Park

164

Jon Pineda

Reflection Song

166 167

Iain Pollock

Affection

168

Shelley Renee-Ruiz

Childhood Home

169

Charles Reynard

Family Life in Arraignment Court

170

Rachel Richardson

The Waiting Room

172

Jennifer Richter

In the Air

173

Paulette Roeske

Immaculate

175

Marjorie Saiser

Template

176

Jane Satterfield

Governess

178

Peter Schmitt

The Ropes

179

Steven Schreiner

Trade

180

Betsy Sholl

Childhood The Drinking Gourd

192 194

Kim Gek Lin Short

A Study of the Entomology of Wombs

196

Erin Elizabeth Smith

Of Course I Want My Father to Love Me

198

Alan Soldofsky

Jack Tone Road

199

Cathy Song

Two Mooncakes for the Price of One When They Removed Your Breasts My Mother’s Last Gift

201 204 207

Dana Sonnenschein

To the Patricide on Death Row

210

Kevin Stein

Middle-Aged Adam’s and Eve’s Bedside Tables In Human Hands

226

Alison Townsend

A Bottle of Jean Naté

229

Maureen Waters

An Accustomed Place

231

Charles Harper Webb

Manpanzee,

233

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Coming Home

235

Michele Wolf

Immersion

238

Dominika Wrozynski

Poland, 1945

239

Bro. Yao

Shoeshiner’s Inheritance

240

Karen Zealand

1–800–AUTOPSY

242

Yvonne Zipter

Pedigree

244

Contributors’ Notes

228

246

A Note on Our Cover The three photographs on the cover of this issue are the work of Bastien Desfriches Doria, who recently received an MFA in Photography from the College of Mass Communications and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Announcements We would like to congratulate three of our recent contributors, Michelle Morano, Barry Silesky, and Elizabeth Wetmore.

Michelle Morano’s essay “Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood,” which appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 10, Number 1 (Winter/Spring 2005), was selected by Lauren Slater to appear in Best American Essays 2006.

Both Barry Silesky and Elizabeth Wetmore have been awarded 2006 IAC Literary Awards from the Illinois Arts Council. Each author received $1000.

Barry Silesky’s poem “The House of Her” appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 10, Number 1 (Winter/Spring 2005).

Elizabeth Wetmore’s story “Practice” appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 10, Number 1 (Winter/Spring 2005).

D E F F A I M N I I L N G Y

Stephanie Allen Sympathy The

man Ephraim is traveling with doesn’t say anything when he lifts the hood of the motor truck and steam billows out, rising up into the blank, black Pennsylvania sky. While Ephraim watches, the man draws thumb and finger down his hollow cheeks and spits into the dirt road. The engine hisses and sputters. It is the only sound, seemingly, in all the cornfields for miles around.

Ephraim was asleep in the back, lying in a pile of onions, when the man pulled over and shook him until he woke. He hadn’t been dreaming. He didn’t dream. Wasn’t a dreamer, his older sister Sophie sometimes said, because she knew this about him somehow though he’d long since forgotten ever telling her such a thing. The way she said it, looking at him from the table where she was pounding dough, was one of the hundred reasons why he ran off from her neat little house in Albany. Only to get himself into a pickle here, as Sophie would have said, hundreds of miles from home and not a wheel to carry him farther.

Well, he doesn’t care. He’ll find another ride. Right now, though, the man who’s offered his last lift stands staring at his engine. A kerosene lamp perched on the engine block casts a weak glow over him, showing wiry neck and hands, a threadbare shirt full of patches, molasses-dark skin that seems to absorb the night. Ephraim looks off down the deserted road.

“Reckon we be here a while,” the man says. Then, to Ephraim, as the man rolls up his sleeves, “Fetch me that toolbox in back, boy.”

“Yessir,” Ephraim says.

Out behind the truck, it isn’t pitch black. There is a faint glow to the sky, like from leftover daylight or far-off rain. At the truck’s gate, Ephraim can see the rising mound of onions, the faint shape of the burlap sack he’s slept on, but nothing like a toolbox. It must be buried under the onions. He’ll have to dig it out. He rubs his hands together, glances off down the road again, and this time sees it.

The glow isn’t from rain. It is being cast up from a field into the sky a few miles away. As Ephraim strains to see its source, sound touches Crab Orchard Review

◆ 1

Stephanie Allen his ears. Voices, music, thinned and tossed around by the faint breeze but still recognizable. He drops his hands into his pockets and walks toward the glow.

He imagines a big farm, or maybe a mill. But the glow isn’t from either of these. When he gets to it, he can see the light comes from torches around an open-air stage down in a sloping field. There are people milling around, standing, seated, watching something Ephraim can’t quite make out. He hears the tinkling of a piano, laughter rising now and again from the crowd. Uninterested, he turns and walks back down the road.

There, motor cars and trucks, mule carts, buggies and wagons line the road. All he has to do is guess the right one, and he’ll be carried on his way by some unsuspecting farmer heading home after the show.

He walks along, looking for a truck to his liking. In the two weeks since he’s left Albany, he’s stuck with rides that would have put Sophie at ease, Negro farmers, jolly or taciturn or straight-arrow men like the onion farmer he left down the road. All of them gave a twelve-year-old Negro boy a ride and a bite to eat without a thought. Now, though, there is no telling whose truck he’ll wind up in, what they’ll say if they catch him.

Don’t give any of that white riffraff a chance to get their hands on you, he can hear his sister saying in his head.

But Sophie isn’t here. He finds a big truck with a cloth canopy and a bed full of crates and boxes and climbs in. In a few minutes he’s made himself at home and fallen asleep.

What wakes him up is someone pulling on his foot. He opens his eyes to full daylight, a vast space yawning where the crates that hid him rest no longer and a ring of faces stares at him. Roughnecks, he sees at once. Four or five of them. The kind of white men who huddled on vacant Albany lots early in the morning, looking for trucks gathering up workers for the docks down along the Hudson, and hung around saloons at night.

“Well looky here,” says one, a bald man muscular as a horse. “We got us a stowaway.” He pulls Ephraim by the ankle until he’s dragged him onto the truck gate, where they surround him. “What you doin in there? You stealin?”

“No sir,” Ephraim says. “I was sleeping.”

Another one, older and slack about the arms, says, “You stay put.”

Over his shoulder, he says to someone, “Go get Conger.”

2 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Stephanie Allen Ephraim knows better than to look into any of their faces. If he keeps his mouth shut, they might let him go. Out past them he sees nothing but cornfields.

In a few moments another man arrives and exchanges a few words with the older man. He is short, dressed like a dandy in a plum-colored, high-waisted coat and a matching bowler. He looks at Ephraim out of cold, black eyes.

“Anything missing?” he says to the men, though he stares at Ephraim.

One springs into the truck and looks around for a moment before saying no, there isn’t. He jumps out again.

“You think you’re joining the circus? This ain’t no circus, boy, it’s a medicine show. This here is Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth Medicine Show and we don’t take on tyros, got it? Last pickaninny I had ran off on me after a week. You got anything you can do? What can you do?”

Ephraim has no idea what he is talking about. “If you don’t mind, sir, I just be on my way,” he says.

He slides off the gate, drops to the ground, and walks through them. Nobody touches him.

“Wait a minute,” says the dapper man.

Ephraim turns around. The roughnecks have begun to drift off into field, where it looks like a group of men is just starting to put the stage up again. There are only a few crates down so far, though, with panels spread across some of them, and a backdrop painted in lurid reds and yellows. There are a lot of people walking around, performers, Ephraim guesses, from their garish clothes and loud voices.

“I’ve got a job for you.” The man waves the others back to work and then beckons matter-of-factly to Ephraim, as if they’ve discussed and struck some kind of a deal. “Come on. It’s so easy a monkey could do it and the pay’s good.”

Ephraim looks out over the cornfields, which stretch unbroken as far as he can see. It can’t hurt anything to do what the man wants for a while, long enough to get himself some dinner, maybe, and his bearings. His stomach growls. He can always light out later.

“Yessir,” he says, turning and following Mr. Conger into the field.

The job turns out to be pasting labels onto amber bottles of tonic. Mr. Conger sets him up in the back of an emptied truck with a mountain of the bottles, a stack of labels and a paste pot and brush.

Ephraim carries on with it all afternoon, pausing when he gets bored Crab Orchard Review

◆ 3

Stephanie Allen to watch the performers idling or strolling around and the stage and tents slowly rising into the air. He sees one woman all in black, another powdered and ringleted one in a frilly white dress and white cowboy boots. Some flounce around in bright neck scarves or toot on horns or spring handstands. When he gets bored with them, he goes back to pasting labels again.

Around dusk he is hoping food might be forthcoming soon when Mr. Conger shows up again. “Forget about that stuff,” he says, waving Ephraim out of the truck. “Come down here. I got something else for you to do.”

Should he go? Ephraim stands watching Mr. Conger’s back recede and wonders. These people seem harmless enough, even silly in all their strange clothes. But he thinks maybe it is time to be on his way.

Mr. Conger turns around and stares at him for several moments before he says anything. Then he smiles and says, “This ain’t like nothing they got back at home, boy. Guaranteed.”

He knows what the man means, and though he doesn’t care about whatever adventure he is being invited into, he follows anyway. If it isn’t like home, it is fine with him. Back there, oftentimes, Sophie would hear about some child falling down the stairs and breaking her neck, or read about some poor woman forced out of her home and driven insane, and she would sit in the parlor chair and rock and weep and moan. If he came near to ask if he could help her, she grabbed him and held him to her heaving bosom, sharing her grief over someone neither of them knew, until she sensed he was simply waiting to be let go. Then she pushed him away from her with a snort of disgust. Other days, he might be in the parlor alone and lift the pictures Sophie kept of their dead parents, one by one, from the small table by the window.

He might finger the silver frames, trying to remember these people who died only a few years after he was born, when Sophie, much older than he, had been sixteen. But he couldn’t recall them. They were only faces to him. Try, try to remember! Sophie would exhort. Surely if you try, you can remember your own parents! Once he heard her tell a member of one of her women’s groups about his dismal failure. I can scarcely believe, she said, my own brother could be so cold-hearted!

Mr. Conger stops in front of one of the tents, which has a banner with pictures strung across the front of it. “This is Sheba the Great’s tent. The gal that usually sells tickets out front is sick tonight, and I want to try something new.”

Lightning bugs begin to wink around them, and band sounds 4 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Stephanie Allen swirl through the air. Off a ways from where Ephraim stands with Mr. Conger, there are already people arriving, farmers in overalls, farm wives in cotton dresses and heavy shoes, gaggles of children milling around them.

“Now here’s what I want you to do,” Mr. Conger says.

He is close to Ephraim now, and he seems different in the semidarkness, friendlier somehow, as if he likes Ephraim. He lights a cigar and smiles.

“Now you sell some tickets, see, and send the first bunch of rubes in. Only they won’t find anything, and they’ll come out complaining.

So you go on in and wait for a minute. Got that? A whole minute. Then you come running out of there like you just ran into the Ku Klux Klan.

You hear me boy? You fly! And you keep right on running like you’re not going to stop ’til you get to California. You think you can do that?”

“Run out of that tent?” Ephraim says, trying to see what’s inside.

The flap is closed, though, and he can see nothing. Even the dim images on the banner are impossible to make out in the dying light.

“That’s it!” Mr. Conger says, grinning.

He takes a roll of tickets out of his pocket and some coins and shows Ephraim how to sell admissions. Then he directs him to climb up on a stand set up in front of the tent and leaves him.

Though he’s confused, Ephraim stays put. After a few minutes, just when he’s decided to jump down and take a look inside the tent to see who or what this “Sheba the Great” might be, people start to gather, waiting to go in. The crowd swells quickly, filling the air with buzz and chatter, pressing around Ephraim, a sea of white faces flickering in the light of the torch mounted in front of the tent.

What should he say to them? Was he supposed to say something?

Mr. Conger had said only that Ephraim should wait until he had a “good crowd” and then start selling tickets. But how long was that?

How many people?

Then someone calls out from the crowd. “That gal really got two heads?”

A rushing whirl of oohs and aahs and murmuring swirls up from all the people.

“Naw, dummy, can’t you read? She only got one head!” another voice calls back.

Then there’s laughter, all at once, rushing past Ephraim like a thousand touching fingers and then ebbing into giggles and more chatter.

Crab Orchard Review

◆ 5

Stephanie Allen After that he can barely follow the back and forth. “She ain’t got no eyes!” Gasps and laughter. “Yes she do.” “I seen her! She got a head so big she can’t lift it off the ground!” “That ain’t true!” “Sure it is!”

Breaths flying all over, tangles of words, jabbering cries. “Can you see her brain? Her head opened up, ain’t it?” Ahhs and oohs, guffaws, giggles. On and on it goes.

Ephraim watches the writhing, churning, noisy crowd cranking itself up higher and higher and for an instant thinks he will just slip away, get out of there, away from these people. But just then they surge forward and he knows it is time, and he begins taking money and handing out tickets as fast as he can. He sells too many before he remembers what Mr. Conger told him. Then he stops and yells that the rest will have to wait.

The first ones push in and the crowd goes absolutely silent. Music from the stage drifts over and fills the air. A minute passes, then two.

People spill back out of the tent.

“Ain’t nobody in there!” says an angry voice, a man waving his ticket. He hitches up his overalls. “This ain’t nothin but a cheat!”

“Yeah,” says another. “Ain’t nothin inside. Gimme my money back!”

Again, Ephraim wants to run. But Mr. Conger’s words take him over and he mutters and backs into the tent himself as if he will see to the problem.

As soon as the flap falls over the entrance, the noise muffles and the air tastes heavy as dirt. He takes a breath, not sure whether it will do him any good, and then breathes out more easily. It is too dark to see anything in the tent, and he has no intention of poking around inside, looking for this Sheba. Maybe Mr. Conger didn’t even put anything in the tent. Maybe it’s a hoax. He feels a vague shame, the singeing heat of Sophie’s disdain at him for getting mixed up in something so unsavory, and he resolves right there to carry through with it just as Mr. Conger told him to. He squares his shoulders, parts the curtain, and rushes out again, screaming at the top of his lungs.

The people part for him as if he is the king’s procession. He dashes on, feeling a little foolish, but hollering for all he’s worth. A few bodies don’t move fast enough, and he bumps elbows and shoulders in his crazy flight away from the tent. Then he clears the edge of the crowd and barrels on across the dark field, giving it a few more squawks and screams before he guesses he’s far enough away to quit the whole charade.

He turns around, his chest heaving, his eyes watering a little, and 6 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Stephanie Allen watches the result. Another of Doc Bell’s people has taken his place on the ticket seller’s stand. Already the crowd has swelled to twice the size it started at. Yells and cries go up as the people push forward, waving hands, some clutching dollar bills, over their heads.

Ephraim’s breath eases. He gets it now. He, Ephraim, has just put on a show as good as anything happening on the torchlit stage.

But he and Mr. Conger are the only ones who know it. He laughs out loud, then claps a hand over his own mouth and looks around to see if anyone heard him. There’s nobody there, though. He’s fooled them all, he and Mr. Conger have fooled them. And Sheba the Great, if there even is any such thing.

They let him sleep in a truck that stays parked on the show grounds when all the performers pile into motor cars and a big motorbus at the end of the night. He hears them pass by as he lies there, hooting and hollering and singing amongst themselves. He’s asleep before the noise of them dies out.

And just that easily he falls in with Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth show. Mostly the performers pay him little mind as he slips among them, doing whatever chore Mr. Conger has given him, watching, from the corner of his eye, to discern their secrets. He gets to know the lady in the frilly white dress as Fannie Oakley, cowgirl and fancy shooter who loads her “pistols” with talcum power and topples her targets with a few well-placed threads. And Madame Lucretia, the psychic, who starts her performance by reading the “fortunes” of one or two show members planted in the audience. Even the singers and dancers and comics have a practiced air about them and refer to the people who come to the show as “rubes.” Sometimes, when someone catches him watching, Ephraim gets a wink and a smile.

Mr. Conger shows him how to count out the wrong change. He explains it when he makes Ephraim the regular ticket seller for Sheba the Great after a few nights. It’s all a matter of saying a few wrong things while he does it, like that he’s been handed ninety cents when it’s really sixty or that there’s fifty cents change due when there’s really twenty. He looks at Mr. Conger quizzically, doubting anyone will miss what he’s up to. But they do, just as Mr. Conger says. Pushing and shoving, their eyes bulging, their mouths full of screams and curses and such when they aren’t the absolute first to get in, every rube on the lot Ephraim tries it on falls for it.

Late one night when the show’s wrapped up for the evening and Crab Orchard Review

◆ 7

Stephanie Allen Ephraim believes all the performers have left for their boarding houses, he sits on the gate of his truck, tired beyond belief. It’s been almost a week now. Mr. Conger has told him he’s welcome to travel with the show when they move on in another week. No money for pay, of course, just a spot to sleep and food; nobody in his right mind pays good money to a pickininny, he says, but Ephraim’s welcome to tag along. And maybe he will. Perhaps he just will. Sophie will be worried sick about him by now but there’s not much he can do about Sophie. He’s never been a comfort to her, like her lady friends. He’s sorry for it, but he’s tired of trying.

He reaches around and lifts the tarp on a crate to see if it contains what he thinks it will. His hand finds bottles. Doc Bell’s tonic. He’s pasted so many labels he doesn’t have to see it in the dark to know what the bottle says. Doc Bell’s Pep Tonic. Restores your vim and vigor!

Ephraim uncorks the bottle, swirls the liquid under his nose and yanks the bottle away. He knows the aroma from visiting flophouses with Sophie to hand out anti-tuberculosis flyers and from tripping over bums stewing on Albany sidewalks. It’s nothing but booze.

Nothing but booze all those fools are falling over each other, every night, to buy. He smiles.

For a while he sits there holding the bottle, wondering what to do with it now. Eventually he upends it and pours the contents into the grass, where it quickly soaks into the ground, smell and all.

A few days later, Mr. Conger pulls Ephraim aside and says, “I have a new job for you.”

“Yessir,” Ephraim says, and drops what he’s doing at once.

“Attaboy,” Mr. Conger says, but he doesn’t smile. “After tonight’s show, I want you to get Sheba back to her car. It’ll be waiting up there.”

He points to a spot along the edge of the road, and Ephraim nods.

“Yessir.”

“She’s not in too good shape,” Mr. Conger says, lighting a cigar and puffing. “Take it easy with her.”

That puts Ephraim to thinking about this Sheba the Great again, whom he hasn’t wondered about much despite spending most nights right outside her tent. By the time the evening’s show is beginning, though, he’s starting to wonder. Why does she need somebody to get her back to her car? And why doesn’t she ride the bus with the rest of the performers, anyway? As he stands outside her tent, he looks for the first time at the banner strung there. Hailed in the Palais Royale de France, 8 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Stephanie Allen it says under one blurry picture. Under another, Verified by the British Medical Society. By the time he’s reached the last picture, it’s clear that nothing on the banner is going to tell him much about this Sheba the Great. If he wants to know, he’ll have to go have a look for himself.

So he does, steps in and lets the tent flap fall shut behind him. It’s at least ten or fifteen minutes until dusk, so he has time. But it’s dark, so dark inside that he can’t see a thing. Should he get a lamp? He’s thinking about it when he hears what he did not hear the one other time he entered the tent. A heavy, rasping breathing comes from the far corner.

And there’s a faint light there, a lamp obscured by something in its way. Ephraim can hardly see it. He looks around. Faint outlines of objects come clear as his eyes adjust, small boxes, a large trunk, other things he can’t identify. He moves forward cautiously, his ears pricked.

This is not what he expected.

“Miss Sheba?” he calls out, wondering if that’s what he should call her. “Miss Sheba, you in here, ma’am?”

Nothing comes back to him but the breathing, which gets louder and rougher as he approaches the dim corner.

The hair stands up on his arms a little. He’s seen the faces of people rushing out of the tent for many nights now, and he took most of them for foolish, as foolish coming out with their gasping breath and big eyes and hands clutched to their chests as they were going in. Now he frowns. Is there more than some phony thing Mr. Conger has rigged up waiting in here?

The next moment he’s reached a canvas inner wall of the tent, the shade that’s shielded the light, and stepped around it. And he sees. But he doesn’t know what he’s seeing. A molten mass of shadows running together in an impossible way. He blinks, trying to comprehend what the kerosene lamp sputtering on the floor is showing him.

It’s a woman in a red dress. She rests slender hands and arms on the chair’s arms, sits motionless, except for a slight trembling of shadows where her head should be.

Ephraim steps closer, staring still. And finally he sees her head, huge and swollen, floating as if without attachment above her narrow shoulders. It is splotched with patches of hair and glistens where the scalp stands exposed.

Sophie, at that moment, rises up in him. Poor woman, poor soul, to suffer such a terrible affliction! Weeping, wailing, Sophie is inside of him, thrashing, writhing in an agony of mercy that starts to knot up Crab Orchard Review

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Stephanie Allen every organ inside his body from his throat down to his bowels. God have mercy on this poor, tormented soul! But the woman raises her tremendous, piebald head and fixes him with a gaze that is as still and steady as the ground itself. The eyes flick down his length, rise back to his face, and stay there.

He shudders. Shakes himself. Clenches his fists and bears down until Sophie and all her churning and torment are gone, expelled through his pores. He takes a deep breath, a full, fresh breath that feels good even in the stuffy air inside the tent. He steps forward and sticks out his hand.

“Evening, ma’am,” he says. “Pleased to meet you. You can call me Ephraim.”

“Antoinette,” she tells him much later, as he escorts her to her car, is her name. Her voice sounds like dried leaves blowing across a sidewalk. “Not Sheba.”

“Yes, Miss Antoinette,” he says.

With her arm in his, he walks her across the black field that cloaks the two of them in total darkness. Even the ground is invisible. He would like to laugh, laugh with her about this Sheba game they play together, but something about her makes him not do it. She wears a hat, an enormous black hat decorated with curls of ribbon and ornate bits of mesh, and though he cannot see it in the dark, he can feel it lifting and waving gently as she walks, like some great, silent bird hovering over them. She walks slowly, with the aid of a cane, forcing him to slow his own step until they fall into a perfect tandem.

He tells her about his first night, the screaming bolt he made from the tent, watching the results of his performance from afar.

“Was you hiding in there?” he asks her.

She doesn’t answer him. There’s only the deep silence of the Pennsylvania night, dragged back and forth by the rough sound of her labored breathing.

Well, she must be tired, he guesses. A whole night of acting, and her health isn’t good. But her grip on his arm is so firm it burns.

So he talks for a bit, rambling on about this or that, until he feels himself babbling. He shuts up. They’ve nearly reached the area where the show’s vehicles are parked and others are loading equipment and piling into the motorbus and cars that will carry them to boarding house rooms for the night. In a few moments, they are there.

The car she’s directed him to is a big touring model, already 10 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Stephanie Allen idling. A woman gets out and opens the door as Ephraim and Miss Antoinette approach. She’s wearing trousers, Ephraim is startled to see, and a cigarette hangs from her lip.

“Put her in back,” the woman growls.

Once he’s helped Miss Antoinette inside, the car burps and pulls away, leaving him standing there alone. But he’s not alone, really. The feeling of her, the impression, lingers on his empty arm.

He decides right there. Yes, he’ll go. He’ll stick with the show as long as they’ll keep him on.

The next morning Mr. Conger wakes him early and sends him out to the boarding house where she’s staying to run errands for her, get her anything she needs. “Then get your behind back out here,” Mr. Conger says.

It’s not far, the walk through cornfields and past red barns and lowing herds of black and white cows. The few farmers out working their fields ignore him. He’s at the house Mr. Conger described in no time.

At the back door, a skinny Negro woman in a yellow headscarf gives him a plate covered in a napkin to take up since he’s headed that way anyway. He mounts a set of rickety stairs and finds the door.

When he knocks, there’s no answer.

“Go on in,” says a voice from below. The woman in the headscarf, Ephraim sees when he peers over the railing. “She don’t never answer the door.”

Then she’s gone, and he wonders whether he ought to barge in. What else can he do? He pushes the door gently and announces himself as soon as he has a crack big enough to stick his face in.

Inside, the curtains on the window are drawn and the room lies in shadows. It takes Ephraim a minute to make out a high bed, a low bureau, and finally a chair under the window where she sits.

“Good morning, Miss Antoinette,” he says. “I brung your breakfast up.”

She is clad in a simple cotton dress now, faded and flowered, and in place of the elegant hat wears a soft turban that looks gray in the half-light. Her spindly hands reach out for the plate, and he gives it to her. She removes the napkin and begins eating with her fingers without saying a word.

“She didn’t give you no fork? I be right back with it.”

And he leaves and runs down the stairs, startling the woman in the kitchen with his demand. He’s back in a flash. Miss Antoinette Crab Orchard Review

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Stephanie Allen takes the fork, glances at him, and then begins to eat with it. Her head, somehow, looks larger wrapped in cloth than it did bare. He would like to touch it, not in the groping way the spectators in the tent want to, but to know about it. She is like nobody he has ever seen before.

She hands him the plate, half-full of greasy food still, when she is done, and he takes it downstairs. Then he comes back.

“Mr. Conger said I’m to fetch whatever you need,” he says.

She simply stares at him for a few moments, then shifts her gaze elsewhere. The moment she does, he feels cooler, more loosely assembled from fingerbones to knees to neck, and he wishes she would fasten her eyes on him again. Look at me, Miss Antoinette, he thinks, but he knows she won’t and that it would be rude to ask. What are you thinking about? also rises to his lips, but he keeps that to himself for the same reason. It is hard to figure her, she speaks so little, and yet he cannot say that he dislikes it. He walks backward and settles himself on the bed, facing her.

Then she does look at him again, for a few moments, and he takes this to mean he should stay with her. So he does. Perhaps she will send him down the road, into town, to fetch her some of the headache powders that Sophie kept a box of in the cabinet. Or perhaps she will want him to escort her on a stroll out-of-doors to take in a little fresh air in her free hours. Maybe she will have him fix a shoe whose sole has come loose, or mend a tear in the seam of her frock. Read the newspaper to her. Sing her a song. Whatever she asks, he will do.

She asks nothing, though. He begins to fidget, wondering if he did something to displease her. He stares at her, ready to snatch his eyes away if she catches him. But after a while he relaxes, still watching her.

And a while after that, he feels his breathing slip into sync with hers, which is slower now, and quieter. And then stranger things happen.

He falls into a stillness that erases all his thoughts, moving inward from the little worries that surround him to all his guilt about Sophie and home to that part of him that sits watching Miss Antoinette, who must be doing this to him somehow; and even that part of his thoughts he yields to her and they slip away. His heart stops. He’s sure of it. And it doesn’t scare him. He only marvels, wishing he could raise a hand to his chest and feel the silence there.

When Miss Antoinette stirs, Ephraim cannot say how much time has passed since he entered her room. Minutes? Hours? Weeks?

“Go on, boy,” she says. “Get on your way.”

That’s it. No Goodbye, Ephraim. No Good Day to you, or anything 12 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Stephanie Allen like it. He doesn’t mind. He gathers himself and slides off the bed, not sure he remembers where the floor is going to meet his feet. But when he stands up, he is steady.

And he’s steady when the sun, slanting bright at him, hits his eyes on the other side of her door.

That evening he looks out on the crowd forming to go into Miss Antoinette’s tent and knows what he will do.

“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen,” he says. Mr. Conger has not asked him to say a word, but he knows Mr. Conger would be pleased to hear him. “Step right up. It’s only two bits to see her, ladies and gentlemen. Sheba the Great!”

People stop talking amongst themselves and start looking up at him, as if they are surprised he can talk at all. Heads turn his way. He takes them in without the least flutter of nerves.

“You ain’t never seen nobody like her, ladies and gentlemen. I guarantee it. You ain’t never seen nobody like Sheba the Great and it only take two bits to go in there, ladies and gentlemen. That’s all.

You gonna want to tell everybody you know you seen Sheba the Great, cause they ain’t never seen nobody like her.”

He sells his first admissions much earlier than usual, well before there’s even much of a crowd. And he doesn’t stop talking.

“Come on up, come on up here and buy your tickets,” he says, and more come to him, wide-eyed and grinning.

“That’s right, come on up here to see Miss Antoinette—” He catches himself too late, tries to fix the mistake by just talking over himself.

“—see Sheba the Great, right here in her own tent, ladies and gentlemen. You gonna be so shocked and surprised you might faint.

Come on up.”

Nobody even notices. They keep coming.

A lot come. More than he’s seen the last few nights. Ephraim keeps talking, except for a moment when he looks up and sees Mr. Conger standing off in the distance, watching him. Ephraim goes back to work. When he looks up again a few minutes later, Mr. Conger, apparently satisfied, is gone.

For the next several days things continue the same way, Ephraim bringing Miss Antoinette her breakfast, staying with her to await orders she never gives him, doing whatever work Mr. Conger Crab Orchard Review

◆ 13

Stephanie Allen gives him on the showgrounds, nights hawking tickets and escorting Miss Antoinette to her car. Ephraim begins to wonder where they’ll go next. Travel is only days away.

He’s standing outside Miss Antoinette’s tent, watching customers start to gather, when he hears a noise behind him, a crash from inside the tent. He jumps down, listens next to the flap, but hears nothing more. What was it? There are only a few people waiting to go in, so he decides to slip in himself and check to see that everything’s all right.

Inside he calls, “Miss Antoinette? You okay?” She doesn’t answer, and while he knows there is nothing odd about this—not for her, anyway—it makes him uneasy, and he walks in deeper, picking his way around all the props he now understands to be “souvenirs” of all of Sheba’s “travels” around the world.

When he reaches the cul-de-sac where she sits, a shock runs through him. She is slouched sideways in her chair, her body in its red dress crumpled, her head lolling and resting on the back of the chair.

He lifts the lamp and shines it in her face, but she doesn’t react at all.

Just stares vacantly off into space, her eyes half-shut and seemingly focused on nothing.

An impulse makes him take her hand. It’s limp. He drops it, backs up a few steps, puts down the lantern and runs.

Through the flap, across the field that separates the small sideshow tents from the main stage and audience. Behind the stage he searches for Mr. Conger, gets a tip he’s out by the show’s vehicles, and runs on.

When he finally finds him, Mr. Conger is talking to men Ephraim doesn’t recognize and seems unhappy to be interrupted.

“Lot worse?” he asks, chewing his cigar.

“Yessir. She real sick,” Ephraim replies, wishing Mr. Conger would hurry up.

“Course she’s sick, boy. She’s got a case of water on the brain that’s going to kill her one of these days. You see something new tonight?”

“Yessir,” he says.

He’s trotted too far away for Mr. Conger to question him further, so Mr. Conger calls out to someone Ephraim can’t see and they follow him back across the dark field to Miss Antoinette’s tent.

Mr. Conger plunges right in. Ephraim is about to follow when the other man, a burly fellow who talks funny, swats him away and says, “Vait here, boy.”

Ephraim does as he’s told, though he can barely stand still now.

The crowd’s grown larger, and some of them start to ask questions.

14 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Stephanie Allen “What’s going on in there?”

“They gonna let us in?”

“Hey, boy, what’s this all about now?”

The voices come at him like flies, and he waves at them to drive them off, but they won’t go away. He can hear nothing from inside the tent. Someone puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, boy—” He bats it off, whirls to face the leering eyes and mouths. “Ain’t no show tonight. Ain’t no show! Get away from here!”

They fall back from him.

“It says—” someone begins.

“Ain’t no show tonight!” Ephraim yells, his voice rising. “I said it ain’t on for tonight, so go on somewheres else!”

Muttering, grousing, the people begin to move away. Ephraim turns, and turns again, watching them go and willing them to go faster. He wants to punch right through the flaps and go in and see what is happening, but he holds back. Mr. Conger and the other man come back through the flap just after the last local has wandered off to watch the performances over on the stage.

The man with the accent, who has a doctor’s bag in one hand, goes off in one direction. Mr. Conger looks around and chews his cigar.

“You some kind of doctor now?” he asks.

Ephraim doesn’t understand. “I’m sorry, sir?” he asks.

Out of nowhere, Mr. Conger cuffs him. His ear rings like a train whistle and pain blurs his sight.

“You do what I tell you,” Mr. Conger says. “You hear? From now on, you’re back to pasting bottles. Nothing else.”

Mr. Conger whistles to somebody as he walks away, and a figure approaches him. He points back at the ticket seller’s stand. The figure approaches, and Ephraim sees it is the woman who drives Miss Antoinette, still in trousers but without a cigarette this time. She steps up on the stand and ignores him.

Ephraim stands there for the longest time, half-aware of people drifting in, of the lady selling them admissions. Music comes intermittently from the stage, but he recognizes none of the songs. Miss Antoinette must be all right, he thinks, but what he saw tells him otherwise and his legs twitch, urging him to defy Mr. Conger and plunge into the tent. But he doubts he would get past the woman, and finally he moves away, out into the field, into the dark, where there is no Mr. Conger, no stage show, nothing but blood flowing warm down his cheek.

Crab Orchard Review

◆ 15

Stephanie Allen The next morning, when Ephraim awakens, it is to yelling.

Shouting so loud it shakes his bones, and the rumble of truck engines all around, including the truck whose bed he has slept in.

But why is the engine running? His truck is one that remains parked on the showgrounds night and day. He looks out to see the old roustabout beckoning to him, the same one who kept the others at bay when they discovered him that first day. The man is waving a slack arm at him.

He crawls out and stands in the daylight. What he sees makes his head swim. The field is empty, no sign of the stage and tents. There is only trampled grass, a few muddy spots. Ephraim whips his head around. The motorbus is just pulling into the road, and behind it cars and trucks are stirring to follow.

“Mr. Conger says you’re to stay put,” the roughneck, a thin man with a scrim of red hair, says, and swings himself up into the truck.

“Stay ’til when?” Ephraim asks.

The man disappears into the canopied bed without answering, and Ephraim finally understands. He’s being left behind. They’re not taking him along.

The wind goes out of him, as if he is dropping off a mountain. It’s too soon, too soon for them to leave—but nobody ever told him the day, ever said exactly when Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth show would once again take to the road.

He whirls around, looking for the car he knows better than any other. It is near the front of the caravan, and even running full out, Ephraim cannot reach it until it is on the dirt road already. He runs along beside it, yelling to Miss Antoinette, whom he can see through the side window in her big, black hat. She will want him to come. He knows it.

She stares ahead.

“Miss Antoinette!” he yells. “Wait for me! Let me in!”

She looks at him. Then she turns her eyes away from him, back to the road. She doesn’t lean forward to tell the driver to stop, doesn’t open the door so he might jump in. The car begins to pull away from him, and all he can see is the dark cloud of her hat through the back window of the motor car.

He falls in the dirt, scrambles up, and chases the car again, yelling and screaming in a way that tears at his throat. He falls back from her car and white and Negro faces alike watch him from the windows of other vehicles, grinning and laughing at him. He stumbles and falls again, but this time Ephraim doesn’t get up as the caravan rumbles past him, one by one, until there is nothing but a quiet Pennsylvania 16 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Stephanie Allen day around him, only billows of road dust and his pounding heart to remind him there was ever anything else at all.

Saturday evening, and the ladies of Sophie’s Negro Women’s League chapter gather slowly in her little parlor, each of them an assemblage of linens and serges and crinolines so fresh they still smell of the iron. Ephraim goes to the door each time there is another knock, takes coats and capes, stands umbrellas in a corner, leads the way to where the others sit in a circle around a small but game fire crackling in Sophie’s tiny hearth.

Three months, now, he has been back, and when he glances at his sister, no longer does he see in her wide brown eyes the wondering about how long he will stay. He goes into the kitchen, pours hot water from the kettle simmering on the stove, and carries the teapot, teacups, sugar, cream and spoons out into the parlor on a tray patterned with roses. Since he has been back, he has gone every day to Miss Van Vlack’s primary school, recited multiples and conjugations and the fifteen rules of proper conduct for young men of good bearing. He passes a teacup to Miss DuBois, a plump lady with copper hair. He has accompanied Sophie to the crowded homes of the poor, where she delivers impassioned lectures on the use of hygiene, clean dress and fresh air to combat tuberculosis. He has stood with Sophie on a street corner, his sister trembling in the bitter morning air but refusing to go indoors, and watched a group of Negro troops back from the War walk silently down Calders Avenue. They carried white banners handlettered in red with messages saying things like, “Uphold Liberty for All / Stop the Crime of Lynching.”

This afternoon, the women of Sophie’s chapter of the Negro Women’s League have gathered to parse and package donations from their church to send to the families of killed Negro soldiers. Rags and castoffs, it looks like to Ephraim. Junk he would be embarrassed to give to anyone. Dolls with cracks, clean but threadbare bloomers, forks, hatpins, thimbles. The ladies make neat bundles, bind them in twine, and then commence to writing long letters full of ink blotches to accompany each parcel. These take the longest time, and they converse quietly as they write.

Sophie looks up from her letter, rubs absently at the mole beside her nose, and beckons him over.

“Put away the tea, brother,” she says. “Come and join us.”

Reluctantly, he puts the tray on the kitchen table and returns to Crab Orchard Review

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Stephanie Allen the warm parlor. Sophie pats the seat of an empty chair beside her, and Ephraim slowly sits down.

He started to tell Sophie about Miss Antoinette once. His sister’s eyes brimmed with tears. When Ephraim saw this, he stopped, never even getting to the part about how Miss Antoinette left him behind.

Left to itself, his hurt and confusion shrank and shriveled into a scab inside of him. He has not said a word about the rest, the roustabouts, the performers, the phony medicine. And as if she doesn’t really want to know, Sophie hasn’t asked. He has been waiting patiently for Sophie and the tasks she sets for him and the instructions she gives him for being good, for helping the unfortunate, for giving himself to the Lord’s service, to blot all of it from his memory. He knows it is best for him if he does exactly what she asks.

She hands him a lumpy parcel and a clean sheet of paper. She merely nods at the inkwell and pen lying on the small table between them and fixes him with her deep brown eyes until he takes the pen in hand. Using the parcel as backing, Ephraim spreads the paper. He has no idea what to say to people he’s never met, never even seen. He wants to get out of the stuffy room, away from this thing Sophie wants him to do. But he stays.

“To the family of Bliss Thompson,” Sophie says. “Shall I spell it for you?”

Ephraim shakes his head. Dear Famely of Blis Tomsun, he writes slowly and awkwardly. Then he bites his lip, thinking. The next thing he knows, Sophie is grasping his shoulder. “Brother,” she says, “this is not the time to daydream. Remember your task.”

Yes, Ephraim thinks. And the rest comes to him easily, as if he knew it all along. The triles of this world are only the meens by which we become stronger. God sends us no trile to great for us to bare. From todays misfortun springs tomorrows firm risolve. He dips his pen and continues. We are all marching toward a greater glory. There is peace in the knowlege that we have done our best to serve others. Time heals all woonds. Tomorrow is another day.

Sophie smiles at him, and Ephraim continues. To seek after things we can never have is to find only sorrow. He dips his pen and writes, and the words become his own.

18 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Neil Aitken Prodigal Here is a grief grown white as the moon tonight, so round with yearning your mother has no more words.

She will not say she has come alone to the shore again to draw something from the dark echo of wavesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; some memory of you as a boy with impossibly small hands.

You with hair that will not part. You curled in the space between bodies like a small bulb of light.

Not how you left, so awkward and pained, your want as deep as the fear in your knees, as the regret in the hollow bones beneath your skin or that betraying hand, the one that trembled at your side by the last needle wound. Your eyes now as still as pebbles laid in the river bed with no memory of mountains or shores.

She cannot say hell, cannot whisper God, or even the grave and its diligent worms. What is belief then?

What is faith? If she lets these go, what then?

We want what we cannot see, the other face of the moon, the one missing. The one turned away at this precise moment.

We want to see, but it is dark in here, in the small narrow world.

It is dark always, then someone opens a door.

Then another. Then another.

There are more rooms than two in the world beyond.

Somewhere her son is sleeping.

Crab Orchard Review

â&#x2014;&#x2020; 19

Alison Apotheker On the Parents’ Early Death Their feet will not grow strange to them.

They will not fall nor bruise nor bleed.

Their faces will not threaten to slide or shift or line themselves.

She will never see their hands chatter, their fingers curl like brittle vines, saliva gleam on their chins, eyes go cataract dim.

Their backs won’t swell into ornamental gourds. She will not have to hug their dried bones gently.

She will never fear breaking one.

She will never see them without their teeth. Their knees will always kneel, their elbows akimbo. She will remember their voices as the voices of parents: They will not rasp or whine or lose one word.

Their hair will not return to the susurrus wisps of the new born.

Their breath will not sweeten, their skin turn the frangible wings of a moth.

They will never lie propped in their beds, and let her feed them, quiet them, or stroke their heads.

20 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Rane Arroyo Temporary Sanity I’d watch the Muppets just to piss off Papi. I came home briefly in my 20s: a failure as a poet, lover, martyr.

He wanted to watch sports, but I insisted Miss Piggy and Kermit helped heal me. Mami would give Papi that look: it’s your fault that your oldest son is acting like un niño. I was always good at chess, revenge à la my pop-up Scorpio nature.

Papi would groan and growl whenever the maddening Swedish Chef mumbled.

This is stupid and America is stupid.

How I’d laugh, later, at the bars where go-go boys stayed-stayed. Take that, Papi, for not buying me those shoes that I needed to try out for the track team. Slowly, I became addicted to the Muppets (all the toys I never had come alive). My Kermit, I now live in a city whose nickname is Frogtown and Papi has run away to Puerto Rico, where animals are slaughtered before they learn to speak and sing.

Crab Orchard Review

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Ellen Bass A Child Is Born Shoppers crowd into booths, shiny bags clustered at their feet.

A tree is lit, a small crèche tastefully arranged by our table.

We’re three old friends, eating lunch, drinking decent merlot.

Between us, we’ve raised seven children. Our job was easy back then—a pity we couldn’t appreciate it, exhausted and fighting with our husbands.

Now our kids are adrift across the globe, and we’re counting the ways in which they are not happy: One is etching the skin of her inner arm, a cuneiform no one can read. One’s lain in bed for months, spooning cold cereal.

The youngest, who was never any trouble, swallowed ecstasy and climbed out on the balcony, his arms raised to the lashing rain.

I’ve walked the city alone, at a desperate speed, all day and into the dark because I could not hold the two thoughts…my child, suicidal.

But here we are, eating sweet crêpes, laughing even.

My friend turns to the ceramic figures gathered in the open stable, picks up the tiny baby Jesus from his lump of straw.

“It’s the whole a-child-is-born thing,” she says “We think he’s going to save us, but he’s headed for the cross.”

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Paula Bohince Origin of the Valley Begin with a tintype of faded men, arms akimbo in shirtsleeves, impatiently wasting daylight.

Sturdy women in high-necked dresses stare unblinking at the black-hooded camera.

In an instant they will rise to stir the pinto beans left warming. Their men will change into overalls, anxious to scatter silverfish with the heavy heft, swing, and release of cinderblock.

King, decades later, will go on helpless as a rat drunk on soaked grain, his entire life thrown like a bone into the gullet of Chicken Street.

When he tells the stories, we become his dead brothers, livers slowly turning to stone, sisters leading us through darkened rooms for our weekly homemade shampoo.

O the muck and filth after the fifth head has dipped, eyes seared from lye’s sting.

We almost believe these girls who cry handsome!, squeeze the bulge of our biceps and marvel.

On walks to the Polish Club, starched hankies are given up to our pitiful coughs and rattles. Poor Grace, poured into Anna’s dress,

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Paula Bohince hands herself to temporary men who grin like sailors.

We imagine the white dress at home floating beneath a meringue of tissues, soft bones of girdle endlessly turning.…

And then King will turn to us, his story falling behind like bread, for we know every ending.

Our eyes stream with whiskey, recollection so fierce one of us must rise to fetch the bird figurines that Anna, our tiny sister of dust, collected.

We must pass them from one dumb hand to the next, each looking for himself in the swan, in the S of her glass neck.

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Ralph Burns Surreptitious Swimming We waded out where gasoline made a rainbow on tan water. A motor chuffed off. A fat man with his shirt like a skirt, red all the way from waist to crown, all the way to his blond hair crested like a bird, told us get the hell out of here rednecks, get the fuck off the boat dock.

So we left, my brothers, my father, and me—we loaded our ice chest and fishing gear and rubber donuts with daisies and ducks, opened the trunk, slammed the lid, got into the Ford Fairlane, sky blue, and drove over weeds and a green garden hose for some reason, under a wire which held three blackbirds, one still laughing.

I asked, Why did you let him talk to us that way? And I remember my father’s glare. Not at me. I know what it’s like to say something and keep saying it, though something else rises in the chest like a bride unwilling to be touched, like a crab apple eaten by a beast unable to disgorge.

I think all day that my father would have preferred to put his hands on people differently, that the jazz leaking out of his brain might soothe itself out like sunshine on water.

I think all day the fish are biting,

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Ralph Burns the insects sing in grass near the knife, that stuff drifts past the bright flashing.

I would not like to carry the transistor radio, the thought of danger, the soft lunacy still rising, on beyond the highway where my father stared, home.

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Anthony Butts Progeny In my parents’ living room, with Ethel of the Thirteen Children, my wife and I learn of our error in not wanting to give them more grandchildren. We both shake our heads.

I change the subject as my father smiles like some slave master looking over the bright buck and his fitting accomplice in wedded bliss as if the only reason to marry stems from making better servants for “The Man.” He smiles, and calls me by pejorative names. They’ve planned this for days—the child writing her name as if she could somehow fit “Butts” back into her mother’s name change, as if Leah would want to somehow add my surname to her own. The problem with institutions: that people want to manipulate them to their own ends. We don’t own our marriage—just a chance for my parents to have their forty-seventh grandchild. Why are you being so selfish?— almost every decision I’ve made countered by them. I sat there, the esteemed college professor at the near-Ivy League institution, and all they want to tell me involves coming back to Detroit to slave eight hour days in a factory in order to just get by.

(They think they know best.) Their opinions have never mattered more than the fact that I would pay attention so I wouldn’t get hit, then turning on my heels to do what I should. Yes, everyone has the potential for upward mobility. But what if no one has an interest in seeing you succeed? What if they have no idea of what success really means? What if every institution they believe in reinforces their reduced expectations? Do we continue to placate them

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Anthony Butts as they fall progressively behind? Do we allow ourselves to have a permanent underachieving class? Do we victors want to claim all that they never prepared for, all that they taught our siblings to shun? The problem with questions: that they only lead to more questions. What question ties them all together? Why do we pretend that every kid has an equal opportunity to succeed?

Why are there so many kids who have never received a challenge to actually develop an original thought? A war ravages our land— a constant challenge to our hearts, nothing accomplished by pushing those kayaks off the shore into a hinterland of our discontent.

Look at those trees, spreading all their coppery oak leaves in autumn. Look at those squirrels gathering nuts without paying you a bit of mind. Look at how lazy we’ve become, how complacent to let the impetus of that boat propel us forward.

We didn’t bring any oars for our journey. And because we see only Indians on the shore, we won’t accept the wood they toss us.

We don’t need anyone’s help in this journey, we hear.

Just rubber stamp my impetus; rubber stamp my mistaken notions of genius. The wake spreads—others catching the spirit of our movement. Can we do anything to keep learning if we stall? Will we use our hands for propulsion instead of catching all that we need to survive? I won’t allow the fall of empire. I will continue to write until my progeny populate the world, until they carry their briefcases to work, until they meet in boardrooms to make up new commerce for the heart, until they recreate the greatness we once held so dear. I will birth a new nation of words. I will care little about what they do, so long as they do something valuable. I will not try and define that value.

I will not attempt to get the interviewer to see what I intended. Tell me more about what you see. I never thought that my poem could

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Anthony Butts spur such thoughts. Poems have a way of getting away from you, like the knowledge of how much energy resides within an atom. We can use this! Watch the blast wave cross the page as faces change to skulls.

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Marcus Cafagña Last Judgment We are wandering through Vatican City when the two of them appear. A mother and son, in the rags of gypsies, turn their pitiful soot-streaked faces up. Reaching out their palms, they take us in. Shirttails flying, I dig for the money belt inside my pants, so contort my body for a few thousand lire— all the pickpockets know we are easy marks and, what’s worse, American. Up close, the grime that covers them makes me shudder, feel sick to my stomach, ashamed to be a tourist. That year, the Sistine Chapel is undergoing a restoration, the dust of centuries painstakingly lifted.

With half of it cleaned, the painting seems unnaturally bright and doesn’t match the pictures I’ve seen in books. At the center of the room, the scaffolding rises all the way to the barrel-vaulted ceiling and obscures our view of Genesis from below.

No hand of God extends to man as we file past the Last Judgment and back through double doors where our bus idles. And there at the stop they stand, the mother and son who my wife and I felt sorry for. Only now these two are unrecognizable, she in Roman sandals and frock, a carton of smokes tucked under an arm, and the boy beside her sporting his Hawaiian shirt. Though neither one will acknowledge us, their scrubbed features shine

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Marcus Cafagña in the sun, skin and hair look damp from a shower.

We are struck dumb to find both so renewed in their best suburban finery, decked out as Michelangelo never would have painted them.

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Marcus Cafagña

Through a Glass, Darkly Most nights my father keeps the gas station open late, downstairs in the service bay the clank of wrenches on concrete, the grind of casters sends him rolling under cars.

Behind glass, on the second story, I can hear the engines idle and come back to life, see the horse on high with wings that light up Mobilgas in neon’s ad nauseam.

Its color thrown against walls reminds me of blood, of my mother driven from here.

Her volatility matched only by his.

In spite of the rain drifting sideways, I spy him in uniform standing beside the pumps, downing beer. He is gauging how long the storm should last. And when it stops, his opera will come right through the floor, the wind outside grow so still even his smoke rings hold their shape.

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Leslie Chang Shanghai, 1919, Redux It is summer, late morning birdsong quelled by heat.

My great-aunts, three sisters stationed among relatives in the ornate garden; there are shadows before a rainstorm.

A missing detail, spoken offhandedly, revises what I know, Theirs was an order for widows.

The oldest ran off, took vows when she learned that a marriage was arranged for her. Her sisters followed. So this story has to do with deciding one’s own fate, and the bond between sisters, unless, bereft of a future, my aunt with her oval-shaped face was in love with someone else.

Which rearranges the visible, marring their otherworldly stillness held for the tented camera: ruffled bonnets, black silk dresses.

A widow-bird opens its wing, and the rest is hearsay, conjecture pure.

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Martha Christina Twilight In the shadows of the back porch Aunt Jeannie, new war bride, new widow, fanned herself with a plastic palm leaf from Pemberton’s Funeral Home, The Wedding at Cana hand-painted

by Velma Pemberton above the phone number and address.

My cousin Suzanne and I knew little of loss then, our late uncle almost a stranger, not from here. His funeral meant tables filled with neighbors’ casseroles, and meeting two new cousins, his brother’s boys. And though we said we hated them on sight, we also giggled and agreed they were cuter than the hometown boys we liked.

Out on the lawn, after the miracle of extra desserts, we chased the bright bodies of fireflies, dismembered them while lit, and stuck them on our ring fingers, pretending we were new brides, without remorse, without regrets.

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan Contended Cows Gabby carried two buckets of warm water from the house.

One bucket was for wetting them down and washing those udders with Dove soap because she wanted to keep them moisturized. After she soaped them, she rinsed them and wiped them off with a soft cloth.

Petunia I, Petunia II, Rose, Peony and Bluebell were their names.

The Petunias’ mother, Lilac, was out to pasture. Dad had milked her for eons before he died seven years ago. Lilac was old but they weren’t going to send her to the rendering plant to be made into fertilizer.

Some morning they’d find her dead underneath an oak tree and they’d dig a hole and bury her.

Gabby wasn’t the milker. Her sisters Maude and Dell had the hands for that. Gabby’s other job was to play the piano while they worked.

This job was as important as pulling on those udders. They sold their milk and cream to the Organic Food Co-op under the label Contented Cows with musical notes circling the brown and white Ayrshires.

Their ad read: Our cows are pampered. They graze in the rolling grassy hills above the Des Moines River. When they are milked, piano music is played to them. They like Bach and Mozart for the morning milking and Beethoven and Chopin for evening. Their milk and cream has been pasteurized, but not homogenized. We want to keep it as close to the real thing as possible.

Gabby looked out the barn door at the frost on the grass. More oak leaves had fallen during the night and the wind scattered them around the yard. Winter was coming and that meant she had to play with cold fingers for five months. She wore a pair of dress gloves with the fingers cut off but she was still cold. Her upright piano was near the door and she kept it covered with a bedspread when she wasn’t playing it. She had it tuned once a year but it quickly went out because of the change in temperature. When she played, she sat on a wooden chair but in winter she brought a pillow with a heating pad and plugged it into the extension cord.

She had a space heater that she turned on five minutes before Crab Orchard Review

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan playing. Her sisters were afraid that the heater was going to start the straw on fire. So Gabby placed it on two gray block tiles and was careful about unplugging it when she was done.

“I propose playing a tape for the morning milking,” Gabby said at their meeting the first Saturday morning in October at their dining room table.

Maude looked up. “We could be sued for false advertising. The TV show says we play live music twice a day.”

Gabby wished now that Iowa Public Television (IPT) hadn’t put them on TV. As a result they had bought Rose, Bluebell and Peony because they had more orders than they could handle. It seemed folks wanted milk with cream that rose to the top of the old-fashioned milk jars. But it was getting to be too much. Since the TV show aired, people stopped by to watch the milking. They had signs on the walls that the spectators had to be silent and stay back behind a rope they’d strung between two poles. The cows didn’t like visitors and neither did the sisters. They had to dress up more. After a few months of unexpected guests, Dell ordered three long pink coats, like the kind doctors wore.

The Contented Cows logo was on the right pocket. Gabby had knitted a pink beret and scarf to wear with hers.

Gabby had taught music in the public grade school for fourteen years until she was let go when the school consolidated. Then she became the church organist and gave piano lessons after school, but she always had to quit by 4:15 in order to play for milking. Maude, five years younger, worked in town at the bank in the loan department. She was always home by 4:00. Dell, only 43, retired from a 25-year career in the military, was always on the computer updating their Web page or on some natural foods listserv yakking about their great cream.

“I want out,” said Gabby. “My fingers get too cold and lock up.”

What would she do if her hands wouldn’t let her play for mass on Saturday evening and the three masses on Sunday morning?

“I don’t like it one bit. That’s your part in this business. If you can’t pull your weight, you’re not going to get a third of the profits.”

Dell tapped her pencil on the legal pad she always had with her for meetings. Dell, who didn’t look at all like her sisters, wore her hair shorter than most farmers. Her one concession to womanhood was wearing vitamin E Barely Berry lip gloss which she carried in her pocket and applied once an hour.

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan Gabby hated this talk. “You know, I was milking for years before you came home. And we gave you your share of the profits.”

“There weren’t any. You could barely pay for the feed,” said Dell.

Maude jumped up. “Let’s not do this again.” She walked into the kitchen and came back with a cup of coffee loaded with cream.

“Gabby’s getting worse. So I say it’s okay. Who’s going to be checking on us at 4:30 in the morning.”

“I just want to see that she’s doing her share. I don’t want her staying in bed while we’re out there working.”

“You know, you make me burn with that kind of talk,” said Gabby.

“I have piano lessons all Saturday afternoon while you watch TV. Do I tell you you can’t do that because I’m working? Do I?” “You call that working. You sit in your recliner and listen and say a few words. That’s pretty easy. But I bust my ass each day doing all the pasteurizing and cooling. I think I should be getting more. I don’t think this three-way cut is fair. I should get half and you two should each get a fourth.”

Gabby was angry as hell at Dell who’d talked them into using Dad’s life insurance money to buy new pasteurization equipment and a cooler. But what really got her goat was that she didn’t have money to buy her seasonal new dress and high heels. She loved shoes and especially the two-and-a-half-inch heels with some unusual design that she’d find in the Spiegel sale catalog.

After that fall meeting, Gabby and Maude formed a silent alliance against Dell. They talked about the old days when they had one cow and shared the milking. You got to sleep in every other day and the extra milk and cream went to the neighbors. They didn’t charge but they were paid back. When they gave their neighbor Erlene cream and butter, she gave them eggs and a fresh loaf of bread. When they gave Clarice milk, she gave them honey and sweet corn. Once a month they made homemade ice cream for Father Kevin, and he saved Gabby a parking spot right in front of the church and gave them tickets to church dinners in the deanery.

Once Dell arrived home and took a couple of courses in business at the community college, their barter system had ended. “You two don’t see the gold mine we have here. If we get a few more cows, we could be making money.”

How the piano came in was by accident. Gabby was given the piano six years ago when her neighbor moved to the nursing home.

She had joked that they could put it in the barn so she could play to Crab Orchard Review

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan the cows. And when she got home from Saturday mass one evening, it was in the barn. And when she played before milking she noticed that Petunia rolled her head and quit kicking and gave more milk. They had so much milk they didn’t know what to do with it. Maude had a customer at the bank who was from Vermont and wanted natural milk with the cream still on top. That’s how they began selling the milk to her. And one day when this Vermont lady stopped to pick up jars of milk, Gabby had been playing Mozart’s “Alla Turca” to them and this woman thought that was so wonderful.

The Gabby and Maude alliance versus Dell made their house an unpleasant place. Dell was angry and stayed in the barn office more.

She took her TV and rocking chair down there. Maude and Gabby noticed that Dell wasn’t putting money into the weekly grocery jar.

Every Saturday morning Maude and Gabby shopped for groceries and took Dell’s list with them. Now Dell was going shopping and putting her groceries in the cooler in the pasteurization room. Gabby was real upset when she saw bags of Snickers and containers of yogurt in the cooler. Dell wasn’t sharing her candy, and Gabby thought it disloyal to buy yogurt when they could be making their own.

On the next Saturday Dell called a meeting of the Contented Cows stockholders. Dell handed Maude and Gabby a sheet of paper with her plan. She wanted to buy them out and run the business herself.

“So who will you get to play the piano?” asked Gabby.

“I know some folks who play,” said Dell.

“And who will milk the other cows?” asked Maude.

“I’m going to buy milk machines. It’s about time.”

“But we advertise that we milk by hand,” said Maude. Her face fell and her chin shook. She was always near tears but it was worse since she was going through her change of life. Ever since her husband left her eight years ago and she’d come home to live on the farm, she’d been looking sadder and sadder.

“Don’t you worry your head about it,” snapped Dell. “It will be my business and I’ll do what I want.”

“Wait,” said Maude. “Four thousand dollars. This isn’t enough.

You have to pay us for renting the barn and for the electricity you use.

We own the barn, too.”

“And so do I. Father left it to all of us,” said Dell.

“Except the house. That’s ours. We bought it from him before he died,” said Gabby.

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan “How about the cows? Gabby and I raised and took care of Petunia I and II and their mother.”

“Petunia I is past her milking days. Can’t you see she’s giving less and less? She’s going to have to go out to pasture with Lilac. I’ll pay you six hundred for Petunia II.” “But what about the others? We bought them together. We should get a third of their worth.”

“That’s in the buyout. Look at the paper in front of you.”

Gabby felt sick. She didn’t know what to do. She hated the thought of giving up on the business but she also got excited thinking of sleeping everyday until seven, especially in January and February.

Maude said, “I’m checking with Gary first. I’m not going to be bought for such a pittance.” Gary was a teller.

Dell’s face tightened. “What does Gary know? He flunked out of law school. I took classes in running a business and I know all about this buyout stuff.”

Maude glared at Dell. “It seems to me you’re trying to cheat us.”

And she stood up from the table and walked into the kitchen. She stopped and looked back. “I’ll let you know next Saturday.”

“Don’t do that,” said Dell. “I’ll give you a thousand more.”

“That piano is mine. I don’t see that you’re paying me for that in this agreement,” Gabby said.

“That piano is a piece of junk. And it was given to you.”

“It’s still mine.”

All week long there was silence in the house. Dell slept in her bedroom but spent most of the time in the barn watching TV. She bought a microwave and put it down there and was eating Hungry Man TV dinners everyday.

“How did it get to this?” asked Gabby, spearing a Brussel sprout at the kitchen table. “We’re a family. We’re supposed to get along.”

“It’s just greed,” said Maude. “Gary says she’s cheating us big time trying to buy us off for four thousand.”

“I thought she was going to give us five thousand. Didn’t she say that?”

“Oh, five still is a steal. She should be giving us twelve thousand.

We started the business and did all the work of setting it up. And now we have a name and are known all over this corner of the state.”

“Aren’t you tired of it?” Gabby asked.

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I want to be screwed,” said Maude. “I got Crab Orchard Review

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan screwed by my husband so I don’t want to get screwed by my sister.”

“I want to get out,” said Gabby. “I’m going to be 62 and I can collect my retirement and I want some time for me.”

And Gabby gave in and signed the agreement for five thousand dollars but only saw one thousand of it. Maude held out for a while and signed an agreement for eight thousand dollars but she only got one thousand, too. What really hurt Gabby the most was when Dell hired one of her students to play the piano when visitors from Japan stopped to see the operation. And this student even wore her pink coat.

When the new milking equipment was installed, Dell hired Dustin, a young man just out of high school, to help with the work.

Dell bought two more cows and put Petunia I out to pasture with her mother. One afternoon when Gabby went to feed them, they were gone. She had been at church playing for a funeral in the morning and then helping with the dinner in the hall in the afternoon.

It had rained and sleeted the night before and the yard was muddy.

Gabby wore her galoshes to the barn to get the feed. She saw the tire tracks going to the wide doors in front but it didn’t click with her until she realized Petunia I and Lilac weren’t near the water tank where they were every evening. She hurried into the barn and it made her sick to see all the cows hooked up to the milk machines. It reminded her of that alien movie where the humans were hooked up to machines all the time they were traveling through space for four hundred years.

Her cows didn’t look happy and the music was “Satisfaction” from the Rolling Stones. What happened to Mozart?

Gabby walked into the pasteurization room and found Dell looking into a glass window in a stainless steel vat of milk that was filling up.

“Where are they?” Gabby said.

Dell looked surprised to see her since she had kept away from this room since the new kid was hired. “What?” Dell asked. The music was too loud and Dustin was nodding his head to the beat of it. Gabby noticed that he wasn’t washing the udders like he should. She’d always made sure their bags were thoroughly cleaned before they milked.

“Where are they?”

She saw the kid smirk and look away.

“You didn’t,” she said loudly, looking at Dell.

“They were costing too much. I don’t know why you ever let Lilac hang around for four years when she’s worthless. Didn’t get nothing for her. Had to talk them into taking her.”

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan Gabby felt the tears coming and she didn’t even care if that stupid kid saw her. “We had an agreement not to kill them.”

“That was your plan, not mine, and I own the business now. You don’t.”

“I wish you’d never come home,” said Gabby. She hated Dell at that moment and wanted to slap her ugly face. And she was an ugly one with her big nose and caved in chin. But her green eyes couldn’t be traced to any relative. Gabby and Maude took after their mom who’d been pretty and had a distinct chin and brown eyes.

That night Gabby took her flashlight and crept down to the barn.

She was always glad that they kept two night lights—pink shells—on in the barn where the cows slept. She opened the piano and cut a string with her wire cutters and left.

When the delegation from Poland came with the Chamber of Commerce to visit that next evening, Middle C was dead. She heard Dell stutter, “Sorry. We’re going to have to get the piano tuned. The cold weather does this.”

Maude, who did most of the laundry, threw a brand new pair of blue jeans in the wash machine when doing the pink coats. She didn’t say anything to Dell and when folks from the Fort Dodge Health Co-op stopped in to visit, Dell was wearing a pink jacket with blotches of blue on the one sleeve and on the back.

For a few weeks things calmed down and then the blizzard hit and the electricity was off for two days and the milk machines wouldn’t work. Dell came into the house with a flashlight on the morning of the first day and said, “I need you both to help milk.”

Maude and Gabby had been enjoying their coffee, which they made the old fashioned way on their gas stove. They both loved blizzards and had gotten up early to watch and listen to the wind whip around. Two candles burned on the table.

“You pay me what you pay your young man, then I might think about it,” Maude said.

“I shouldn’t have to pay my sisters,” Dell said. She looked frazzled.

“No, you shouldn’t if you’d treat them like sisters.”

“Okay, I’ll pay you what I pay Dustin.”

“And how much an hour is that?” Gabby asked.

“Minimum wage,” Dell said.

Maude stood up. “What?”

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan “You heard me,” Dell said.

“You lie. Remember that I cash his checks. He told me what he makes and it’s more than that. I’m not going out there.”

Dell’s face blanched and she stomped out the door.

The wind blew and the snow came down harder. A half hour later Dell came back in the house covered in fat thick flakes and stood at the kitchen door with her gloved hands folded in front of her.

“Okay. I’ll pay you what I pay Dustin. But I need you now. Bluebell is thrashing around and Rose is missing and something’s wrong with Petunia’s udders.”

Maude didn’t move but slowly took a sip of coffee.

“Come on. I need you now,” Dell said. “Rose went outside and I can’t find her.”

“I want my money first,” said Maude Dell dug into her jeans pocket and pulled out a twenty and some fives. “Here, dammitt.” She threw the bills on the table.

Maude took the money and put it in the grocery jar on the window sill and said to Gabby, “We’ll keep track of our time and tally up tonight.”

So Gabby and Maude put on their coats, hats and boots and filled two buckets with hot water, put flashlights in their pockets and, holding hands, made their way across the yard while the wind buffeted them. They could barely see the red barn and almost ran into the side before they realized they were there.

Once inside Gabby felt sick seeing the dirt and her piano wasn’t covered with the bedspread anymore. Dust had settled between the keys. The barn was dark but Dell had two large flashlights hanging from hooks on the ceiling.

With a flashlight in one hand and a rag in the other, Gabby began cleaning Petunia II’s udders. It seemed like such a long time ago since she’d done this. And she saw that those udders were cracked and swollen. She’d have to put iodine on the cracks and then salve so they could heal, but she was worried about mastitis.

Maude was right behind her with her old stool and as soon as Gabby was done with Petunia II, whose bag was leaking, Maude began.

“I can’t believe what a mess this barn is,” Maude said loudly. “Good Lord, what does that young man do?” Maude was kicking manure out of her way so she could sit down.

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan with the cows again. Gabby always felt safe in the barn. But she also felt strange with the three new cows—Sweetpea, Daisy and Zinnia. She didn’t know them. Sweetpea was feisty and tried to kick her. Gabby spoke softly and rubbed her nose before she could finally get her udders cleaned.

Dell was mumbling and saying, “How am I going to get this milk pasteurized without electricity?”

“You need a generator,” said Gabby.

Gabby went to her piano and began playing but was mad at herself for cutting the wire to Middle C. She played the best she could but she felt crippled. Two hours later they were done with the milking but they had every bucket filled and had to pour milk into the pasteurizer just to store it. Rose was missing and they couldn’t go looking for her or they’d get lost in the swirl of wind and snow.

Maude had gotten her old pitchfork out and was mucking down the stalls. “These cows will get infection in their hooves if you don’t keep these stalls clean,” she scolded Dell.

“That’s Dustin’s job,” said Dell.

“Well, he’s not doing it,” said Maude.

And Gabby couldn’t resist. “And that great piano student needs to keep this piano covered. It’s getting wrecked from the dust.”

Dell shot back, “She quit because it’s a piece of junk. And I think I know who helped make it that way.” Dell glared at Gabby and Gabby turned away.

By afternoon the blizzard was worse and Dell couldn’t find anyone to bring out a generator. They had to throw out all the milk and cream because it was dangerous to drink unpasteurized milk.

For two days the blizzard went on and they got 26 inches of snow. By the end of the third day the electricity went on but they had thrown out so much milk and cream that they had a skating rink of frozen milk at the bottom of the hill. Then their tractor with the scoop wouldn’t start and they had to hire the neighbor to shovel them out and the creamery truck skidded off the road and overturned before even picking up the milk. And because it took two days to get the truck pulled out, the milk had to be thrown. Rose was dead. She’d stood with her face to the north and the snow and ice covered her nose and mouth and she couldn’t breathe.

Petunia II had mastitis, and the veterinarian said her milk had to be thrown until she was better. Dustin quit when Maude yelled at him for not cleaning correctly and Dell was mad again at Maude.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” Gabby kept saying.

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan And then it happened. The inspectors came and closed down the dairy because they found bacteria in the pasteurization machine and when they saw Petunia II’s mastitis they said she’d probably infected all the milk.

It happened so fast. Two days later Dell sold the cows and tried to sell Petunia II but Gabby stood in front of her and said no way. And when the man from the sale yard saw the red iodine dripping from her udders, he thought she was bleeding and refused to take her.

A half hour later they heard the truck start and the driver put it in gear. Maude and Gabby stepped outside and watched. Gabby’s eyes began to tear up when she saw Bluebell and Peony standing in the back of the truck with the others and they mooed and Petunia II mooed back.

Maude turned to Dell. “You never cared for them, that’s for sure.”

And Maude charged at Dell, knocking her into a snow bank. Dell was stunned and didn’t even fight back.

“How can I care for them when I don’t even care for you guys.

You’re just two dull mutts who sit around criticizing.” Dell’s nose was dripping and her eyes leaked as she looked up at them from a snow bank. No one said anything for a few seconds.

“How do you know you don’t care for us?” Maude said.

“Cause I don’t feel nothing for you guys but revulsion.”

“Oh my,” said Gabby. “That’s pretty serious. But that explains why our house has all those bad vibes. Been feeling them for some time.

Tried to burn some sage to cleanse it.”

“See. That’s what I mean. I go into my bedroom and smell that damn stuff and I know you’ve been sneaking around. God, why couldn’t you just say something?”

They had moved back into the pasteurization room, painted all white with a stainless steel counter. Gabby saw why the inspectors had closed this down. It was dirty and messy. Dell hadn’t scrubbed the counter or gotten into the corners with a rag. Under the counter were boxes of filters and magazines and newspapers.

“What were we to say?” said Gabby “Anything would have been better than silence.”

Gabby felt the steam rising in her. “Who moved out here during the day so we never saw you? Who did that, huh?” She pointed to the rocking chair and TV on top of a box.

“Well, I don’t have to hide out much longer. I’m leaving.”

“Where you going, honey,” said Maude.

Dell spun around. “What’s with this ‘honey’ stuff?”

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan “Always called you that when you were just a button of a kid,” said Maude “Yah, I remember that. ‘Honey’ and ‘Sweetbread.’ Those were her words for you,” said Gabby.

Dell shook her head and opened up one of the boxes under the counter. “I re-enlisted yesterday.”

Maude sucked up a bunch of air. “Thought you were so glad to be out.”

“Nope. Never should have left. I like getting orders. A person knows what to do.”

Maude stacked the magazines and newspapers into a box. Gabby grabbed the Windex and sprayed the window and wiped it down with paper towels. They worked silently while every once in a while Petunia II mooed from her stall in the other part of the barn.

“Look at you two,” said Dell. “Can’t even wait until I leave to take over.”

Gabby and Maude stopped and looked at Dell who had filled three boxes with equipment that smelled of sour milk.

“Good Lord, we’re just cleaning,” said Maude. “And you should be cleaning that before you put it in those boxes.”

“See. That’s taking over. Well, I’m not leaving until tomorrow so this is still my place. Get out,” said Dell.

Maude and Gabby dropped what they were doing and walked to the doorway. “It’s this kind of stuff that makes my blood boil,” said Maude.

“Yah,” said Gabby. “We help and you get mad. Then if we don’t help, you get mad. You know, you’re impossible to figure out. You want it both ways—always have.”

They walked into the other part of the barn and talked and suddenly they were back.

“Nope. We decided. We’ve had enough from you,” said Maude.

“You’re leaving us with your mess which, by the way, we won’t take on. We’re sending the bill collectors to you at the base. You’re going to have to pay them back. And Dustin.”

“But the barn is ours, too,” said Gabby.

“No, it isn’t,” said Dell. “In buying the business, I bought the barn too. And I own Petunia II.” Maude and Gabby looked at each other. “You didn’t.”

“I did. And I’m charging you rent for keeping Petunia in here. I want a thousand dollars for her.”

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Tricia Currans-Sheehan “Wait a minute. You still owe us money from the buyout. What are you talking about that we owe you. Good Lord,” yelled Gabby.

Maude and Gabby glared at Dell, turned, and left.

When Dell was in the barn with the farmer who came to buy the equipment, Maude and Gabby were throwing her belongings in boxes.

An hour later all of Dell’s things were lying outside the back door of the farm house and a note was attached: Room and board for the eleven months you were home = $400 per month times 11= $4400. We’re taking your car for payment.

If you want to negotiate, then you’ll have to see us.

Maude and Gabby had both car keys which Dell kept in her bedroom on the dresser. Gabby kept one set in her pocket and Maude kept one set in her bra—a key per cup.

And that’s how it shook out at the end. Dell signed an agreement to sell the barn and Petunia back to them in exchange for room and board. Dell also signed an agreement so Maude and Gabby wouldn’t be stuck with bills that Dell incurred when she owned the business. And all the while they were working out the deal, it was snowing on Dell’s belongings. And that night, Dell would have to pay twenty-five dollars for sleeping in her own bedroom so she packed up her car and left at midnight.

“Love. She certainly doesn’t know what it means,” said Gabby.

“Yah, love to her means screwing her sisters,” said Maude.

“Do you think she’s really our sister? You know Mom and Dad weren’t getting along before she was born. And Mom was gone a lot with that man who was Deputy Sheriff.”

“Yah, that must be it. Because how could blood be so mean?”

“You’re right. I think that explains it.”

And the two sisters stood at the window and watched the brake lights of Dell’s car go on as it neared the end of their lane. Then the car was on the gravel road heading away from them, maybe for good. They were back to one cow who needed lots of pampering. Gabby would take her piano book out there and play for her all morning. That might help ease Petunia II’s loneliness and help her heal quicker.

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Sarah Cypher Hamsa The

week after her father’s death was ordinary. School began its new trimester the first Saturday in May, the fifth grade. Her lunch was identical to every other lunch that had been tucked into the wide plastic jaw of her lunchbox since the beginning of time: a tomato sandwich folded in waxed paper, a thermos of water, a bag of Oreo cookies, and a bag of either grapes or short celery troughs packed with peanut butter. At home, she still had to clean her room and make sure Justin bathed. She still had to go out to the backyard every other evening and carry in his toys, and brush her teeth. Her mother still took each of them by the hand and pulled them onto the circuit bus to go to church.

The house smelled of disinfectant and laundry detergent. Saida had set herself to the knuckle-scraping work of washing her husband away with a cotton rag, a wooden horsehair brush, and a bucket of chemicals. Her skill, God-given or otherwise, was for finding the natural order of a room and making adjustments so that it emerged.

She changed nothing, created nothing, and added only one object to the house. She nailed a hamsa over her bedroom threshold, a silver filigree hand, one lapis eye set into its palm to ward off evil. A man at the Khobar suq sold the trinkets for a few riyals apiece.

Rules changed. They—the children—were not allowed to move around at night. Their door was to stay open so Saida could look in from the hall and make sure they were still breathing. Whenever her silhouette shifted out of the doorway, the hamsa glinted after her like a little silver fish.

But Tashi left her bed as soon as her mother was gone, tucked her brother tighter into his bunk and closed the door. Then she lay down again and pulled up the covers. Her father had been a geologist, teller of old truths. He said there was no dragon coiled at the earth’s center, nothing that hugged the planet’s core against its belly like a hot stone.

There was no hell. Only molten rock. No cackling djinns, no demons in a black realm under the desert. She whispered her own clean name Crab Orchard Review

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Sarah Cypher to herself, Tashi, the sound like sand blowing across basalt. He had given it to her.

The accident took the lives of four men counting Joseph Najjar.

He was not supposed to have been there at all. He had driven himself across the stretch of red morning desert, southwest to Abqaiq to meet one of the other geologists for tea. The two men were in the habit of touring the plant’s metal landscape, the kind of thing he would describe whenever he got home from work out of fascination with industry, with what men had wrought to harvest what he called the earth’s blood and breath.

She had watched the news in the days after and tried to understand what had happened, to fill in the gaps. The two men stopped on a metal catwalk. Her father liked to be above, looking down—on vacations to Paris and London, Thailand and New York, he always took her to the highest point so they could view the entire shape of a patch of earth.

At the Abqaiq plant, series of white pipes passed below his feet like the parallel veins on the inside of his forearm. Bright spherical tanks glittered all around, reflecting the heat and light that made sweat trickle down the sides of his face. The other geologist’s eyes widened, and he tapped his brow with the palm of his hand, excused himself, and went to fetch a dish of date cookies from the trailer. While he was gone, a pipe burst, a cloud of vapor exploded in blue flames. There was a second explosion ruffled with orange flames and smoke. The news reports were more interested in the damage, the faltering oil production and the spike in the market price per barrel. The deaths were a footnote in the local broadcasts. The details were just flourishes, gossip between housewives when they stopped their carts next to cereal boxes and soup cans in Dhahran’s commissary. There was no evil in that.

Like the company town in Abqaiq, Dhahran was an artery of oil culture. It lay a few miles from the site of Saudi Arabia’s first oil well, and began as some fluttering white tents and a load of drilling equipment alongside a rise in the desert just before World War II. Since then, it had Americanized. The Arabs who lived there were for the most part Western-educated, like her father, many of them naturalized U.S. citizens. They returned for work because oil was money and they spoke the language, and maybe because they missed Middle Eastern life, which coiled itself around the outside of the town like a splendid, glittering snake. Sometimes the smell of cusa and baking kibbeh or lamb shish kebabs wafted across a front lawn, mingling with the ozone smell of air conditioners. But mostly, Arab culture ended at Dhahran’s 48 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Sarah Cypher main gate, at the chain link fence that extended from both sides of the highway and crowned an endless sand embankment. Inside camp, women wore shorts, girls sunbathed by the swimming pool, fathers with strong, tanned arms lit their barbecues and invited the neighbors for supper.

No one knew what to say after his death, how to stretch their stiff condolences far enough to wrap around the space. So the American families cooked their sympathy into strawberry pies, chili and mashed potatoes, casseroles, and vegetable platters. Food showed up with the Joneses, the Fosters, the Macurdys, and was stacked like bricks in the refrigerator. Everybody wanted the widow to eat. The Arab families, Saudi and Lebanese and Jordanian, brought plates of stuffed grape leaves, loaves of bread and their great Arabic overstatements of grief.

Saida left the food wrapped on the counter.

The seventh night after his death, Tashi stopped trying to sleep and opened the bedroom door to a silent house. She crept past the hamsa with her face turned away, then into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator door and stood there in the cold lane of white light.

The lane led to this cobbled wall of food, a nowhere.

And the next morning, four taxis pulled up to the curb. Three of Saida’s sisters and her brother and his wife, Nuha, arrived from Miami at the house with so much luggage that two of the taxis were full of nothing but floral-upholstered suitcases. Tashi crouched below the picture window. A tall, black-haired woman in layers of orange stepped out onto the driveway. She shouted for the cabbies, and fanned her arms toward the house like she was waving in a jumbo jet. Other family members filed out of the taxis and into the parade of luggage, closing in on the front door.

“In the house, in the house,” Nuha said. Her voice was at the porch.

The front door swung open into the living room, and a millipede’s worth of legs entered the house, laying down suitcases as they went.

“Out the door again, out the door,” she shouted into the cacophony.

“Take your money, robbers, all of you.” Engines turned over in the taxis, and one by one they drove away. A presence behind Tashi made itself felt. Nuha’s long face was tilted down at her from the top of a tower of orange chiffon.

Tashi stood. Her head came up only as far as Nuha’s breasts, which were the jumping-off point for the cascade of orange fabric.

“My little duckling,” Nuha said, “it is seven fifty-two in the morning. You have eight minutes to get to your desk in homeroom.”

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Sarah Cypher She twisted a gold watchband on her wrist, and called over her shoulder, “Saida, habeebti, we’re here.”

Years ago the family had arranged Saida with Joseph through a church connection. Ten days after they met each other for the first time, they were wed. And after two years in Dhahran he was still a junior geologist with the company, too shy of his facial scars to ask for a raise, even to make more than a handful of friends outside his ring of Thursday card-sharps. The only money left was Saida’s savings, a wad of riyals in a flour jar. The aunties panicked on her behalf. Nuha swore they would do a better job the second time around. They pooled the names of all the bachelors they knew, distant cousins, maybe-husbands, men who might take pity on a Christian household. Meal after meal Nuha stripped the cellophane from the dishes of food, sniffed at it, and scraped whatever it was out onto a row of clean plates, and passed them out. Saida stopped cleaning and slept sixteen hours out of the day.

One night, there were no plates for Tashi and Justin. “I’m hungry,” Justin said to Saida. She retied the strings on her bathrobe and looked to Nuha, who came out of the kitchen with a bowl of chicken and rice in each hand, and a bottle of Pepsi under each arm.

“Go, go,” she said, and herded Tashi and Justin to their bedroom.

“Someone very important is coming tonight to meet your mother.”

She set the food on Tashi’s desk and turned on the Mickey Mouse lamp next to the bed.

Justin asked, “If Mama likes him, Auntie, do we get to go out to the living room?”

“Ya’Allah, demanding, like all the Najjar men except his sainted grandpapa.” She jabbed a hand into the air. “Even if you have to burst, don’t come out.” She made sure their schoolbooks were with them, and then swung the door shut. In preparation for the meeting, her lips were painted dark red, as if she herself were for the taking.

They ate their dinner sitting on the floor across from each other.

Justin wanted to play with his food, but Tashi made him eat it, and then scraped out the stray bits of rice into the garbage can and ordered him up to his bed with his homework. When the doorbell rang, she sat on the floor and put her ear to the door. The greetings were elaborate and loud. A man’s voice rose and fell, then the voices dropped out of hearing. She got out the tin lunchbox from her desk drawer, opened it up to the neat index of tapes, looked for something harmless; The Sound of Music.

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Sarah Cypher She woke later. The tape deck snapped; the music was over. There was a commotion in the living room. She lifted her science book off her chest and marked the page with her finger. Voices argued, her mother with Nuha, then all the family at once. “He’s just the sort of man,” somebody said. “I say we’re done.” Tashi put her forehead against the door. A new father would enter the house, and with him, eventually, new siblings—a new family around him like a sandstorm, his brothers, his parents—and if she was very lucky he would work in Dhahran. But she had seen the letters, the lists of phone numbers on the kitchen table; men from Bahrain, Ramallah, Damascus, Amman.

Two more in Miami.

She dog-eared her page and dropped the textbook into her backpack with the tape deck and headphones, took a Pepsi bottle of money from her shelf, and climbed out the window. Her feet thumped onto pillowy grass. She caught her balance with one hand on the damp lawn, and dried her palm on her jeans and pulled the window down far enough to look closed, but open enough for her to get inside again.

The dining hall was at the north end of the compound, a half hour’s walk, and when she got there supper was over. Four men played cards around a back booth. There was a long salad bar at the center of the room, and a tiled wall with a cash register between two buffet windows. Steel cages were pulled over them. At the front of the hall was a soda bar with stools and a broken jukebox. There was no one else around but the card players and a few aging couples. In the back, laughter swelled and someone said, “Goddamit.” Cards fluttered against the tabletop. Cigarette smoke wafted toward the door.

She stepped inside and let the door bump closed, the air pressure knocking apart the smoke’s fine gray fingers. Two of the men looked up, then back down. If she got too close they might tease her like everyone else did, whittling at her, needling, patronizing, until there was just a girl with an ugly mat of black hair and nothing to say to their laughter. She slid into a booth close to the jukebox and slouched over so her head disappeared behind the seat. Poker chips clicked, a match was struck. Cards whisked, were dealt and gathered and tapped into piles. A long silence, then their bets ticked, chip on chip.

“Whatsat? You trying to skin me alive? Doug, give me two.”

“Three here.”

“Just one.”

“Pass.”

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Sarah Cypher in a glass for crying out loud,” and one of the Filipino staff stepped out of the back and tugged open the cooler. He turned and their eyes met, and he nodded at her, then slipped out of sight to deliver the bottle.

Later she would doubt her memory, but a moment after he had gone, the booth across the aisle was no longer empty. Her father sat there. He was alone, hands folded at their smallest knuckles. His head was cocked forward over a newspaper printed on yellow paper, and his spectacles gleamed in the window glass. Relief lifted a dense layer up and out of her body, as if since his death she had been breathing fumes. She had not considered that the accident might have been a mistake. That the company men in dark suits who had stood in the kitchen, saying the news, were just nightmares. Her hands were flat on the table, palms down and starting to sweat. She stayed very still.

“Dad?” He turned his head, face tilted down, shy, eyes naked over the top rim of his glasses. They were not dark brown like the rest of his family’s, but hazel, changeable in different light. The dining hall’s florescent glare turned them cloudy green like a pane in a church window, the grass outside the tomb. There was a burst of laughter from the poker players. He nodded toward the back table and rolled his eyes, smiled and laid a finger over his lips.

She lowered her voice. “Why?” He tapped twice on his newspaper.

The other side of his table was perfectly vacant. It pulled at her, invited her to leave her booth and join him. But her mother’s superstitions flew up at her from a dark space of bedtime stories and admonitions, of djinns that ate souls and stole babies and ruined any of a thousand dear things and crept along the outer edges of hell. Tashi pushed herself closer anyway, slid to the edge of the seat and put her feet in the aisle between their tables. His eyes had returned to the paper.

“I think there was some mistake,” she said.

He kept reading. She searched his face again. The sun had darkened his scars to a jaundiced color. One of them seemed more intentional than the rest, the one that curved around the outside of his eye and backwards over his cheekbone to his ear like a half keyhole, as if he had been marked. He continued to read, the scar toward her, and she could no longer be sure it had always been there.

“Hey, I meant to ask you something,” she said.

He would not look up. Cards slapped on the back table, and then a loud, dull crack. The bottle had fallen off the table and broken. One 52 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Sarah Cypher of the men swore. Her father kept reading. Her voice, the commotion, none of it registered on his face. The booth and the window, the square of yellow newspaper, they pulled back and drew in on themselves. He was less familiar, a face on the other side of a window, or something twisted around on itself, hanging inside a drop of water about to fall.

She grabbed her bag and ran for the door.

Fifteen minutes later, she stopped in the road and bent in half, hands on her knees. The desert air was cold as the white starlight, and her breath rose up in a transparent cloud against the sky. Who had left whom? She straightened and shut her eyes. Palm fronds raked against one another in the wind, making a dry chorus that separated her from her father’s clear voice, the voice that had once explained the earth.

She reentered her house by the window and fell asleep with her clothes on, and woke from nightmares she couldn’t recall. Old memories slanted over the bed, almost dreams: the time her mother grabbed her out of her father’s arms in an airport. The time in the Miami house her mother had crept into her room and laid down against Tashi’s back, and wept so quietly that the only sound in the room was the small noise her shoulder made as it trembled against the sheet.

These stayed in her mind as her mother dismissed the first maybe-husband, and the next, and four more. And then, one hot, thick morning in Dhahran, four taxis pulled away from the curb in front of their house. The family was gone. Some did not write again for months, insulted, disappointed, righteous. The search for a new husband seemed to have been abandoned. Saida’s torpor lifted. She watched cartoons with her children, began to eat cereal more than once a day, practiced her English during the afternoon soap operas, and looked for a better job with the company. In July she found a secretarial position in the main building, and every Sunday, the circuit bus took the three of them to church. One clear day the sun cast a watery patch of light through the stained glass window, and it dyed the back of Tashi’s hand green. She turned her hand over, palm up.

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David Citino Ohio Snow, Cerebral Atrophy It’s Father’s hair, this blowing snow, a tangled wonderment that brings to life a rusted rake stuck in frozen soil of Ohio, one tree bereft of purple plums, the name that means the world to me.

It’s Mother’s face, this stinging wind, her back cracked from the fall.

He can’t, he can’t, hear her call because he’s nearly deaf and won’t wear a hearing aid, the world struck dumb except for her pain a room away, John. O John.

A graveyard now in Michigan, the pearls that she was buried with, the skull that made the face of me and this astigmatic world of falling snow. A feast, this cold that brings the lost back to our nights.

They descend, dance, ghost-birds of ice that light upon the darkest branch.

We’d pray, O stay with us, but know our breath would melt them, so we praise the joys of loss, of memory.

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Steven Cramer Falling Asleep Over The Iliad, or The Odyssey Sleep: you can’t live without it. You could be a trucker from Ithaca who gets by on fifteen minutes per night.

Or was that a dream?—a dream so carved with stick figures holding tiny spears and shields, after the Cro-Magnon cave walls, it’s just a few millennia before Athena’s billowing down, in female form, to touch the soul of sleeping Telemachus, igniting him with dire prophecies.

Last night, a friend in his seventies got impatient when I said the word “soul” too many times—twice. He’s one of two men I kiss on the lips, the other not yet a man but my son. Everyone knows, or else should know, that no man got Odysseus in and out of trouble more than Odysseus; and many know the step-ladder-speaker-wire kind of trouble stalking or snaking its way, like Polyphemus or Tantalus, toward boys like my son. One day he’ll stop kissing me on the lips.

Around the time her son shed the gossamer shift of childhood for the poisoned tunic of adolescence, another friend told me how his boy/man body dozed off and slumped against hers: a nap she foresaw as his last permission for such touching.

Her arm pinned against her hip, both hip and arm went from numb, to needles, to lead. She held firm.

So a 200-pound Greek hero clings to the underbelly of a sheep, and we take this seriously, because it’s not a lie but a myth. Imagine everybody needing fifteen minutes of myth per night.

Imagine Helen pleased with her gray hair, naked by the Crab Orchard Review

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Steven Cramer fire with naked Menelaus, all that brouhaha over Paris the distant flicker of a big misunderstanding.

Imagine they kiss, on the lips, past the lips, before sleeping together in the sex sense of it; then—the embers red enough to warm them—sleeping for real; hip to hip or, if you will, soul to soul.

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Steven Cramer

Reading to His Son When Papa was away at sea…

—Outside Over There He remembers the librarian’s finger pressed to her lips; after a tearduct operation went wrong, she couldn’t lift a glass of water.…

His son’s look says: what gives?

Each picture in their picture book shows oak limbs thickening into text— cat and rabbit, fox, goat and bear all huddled into the hunter’s glove.

The snow’s too powdery to pack or roll and stack into a man.

Their quiet is the quiet of libraries he disliked as a child, all those readers bent over their pages, as if for heat.…

In the new book across their laps, an infant turns ice-grey, metal chill enough to skin tongues.

What would he have given to talk back to those moods going cold and colder, to hear them say their one name, father?

—At the window, three hooded children, about to steal

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Steven Cramer the newborn. On his son’s upper lip, a sign he’s near sleep: sweat he wipes with a thumb and, sometimes, tastes.

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Anne-Marie Cusac The Emptying One day I will think again of the ones who went before me: Grandma in her housedress, cotton washed to a rotting softness I loved; Eileen almost exactly my age, who took so long I sometimes forgot she was dying, though her hands collapsed and stiffened; Aunt Jadie at nineteen, long-legged, reclining her blonde body for the cheesecake snapshot, bright mouth wide open at the joke; Uncle Donny at church, and his words, “No one hires for work this fabulous,” as he jerked his chin toward the rafters, his hard palm up in his lap, his fingers curling— I’ll think of them and understand yet again that they are more like me than unlike, that, however separate they were once, however in their bodies, flushed or annoyed by flesh and its constraints, aches, snags, now (it’s an emptying thought) they are me, and I see just the inside of my skull when Jadie dresses the Brown Betty in its lime and black tea cozy and leaves it on the warm burner; when Eileen tells again how boys lined the school hallway singing raunchily, “Come on,” and rocking on their haunches as she ducked by in the dress she forgot not to wear; when Donny’s smiling voice says “Dawg,” and the Scottie rolls belly up; when Grandma snuffs her cigarette just as I open the screen door, threads spin to the ceiling, and I’m not supposed to notice because smoking means heart failure again, and she’s given that up.

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Jarita Davis Return Flights The seventeen-year-old on the plane from Sal to New York knows Cape Verde is not a place you leave.

It’s the shuttling across the Atlantic, his carry-on filled with letters written and saved long ago, photographs his family forgot had been taken: His mother, standing by a cove, leaning against jagged rock in a bikini the same color as her warm brown skin. A black-and-white photo of his father that could have been the boy himself except for the yellowing crease at the corner. Video footage: fast music, quick hips. That’s my uncle’s house. The walls brown in the camcorder’s dim light. That’s my cousin.

That’s my cousin, too. He wears the necklace his girl gave him though it pinches his neck.

One tiny bead has an “F” for “Fatina.” That’s her name, Fatina. I’m coming back next summer.

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Marlon Unas Esguerra Balikbayan Law being poor here vs. being poor there is the postage that finds us perishable.

I don’t know how momma chooses what goes in the box, only that she’s known this science of folding, squeezing air, tucking every last corner into place. she pins envelopes to the pant-inside, pocket-outside. the money rarely exchanged to peso, if at all, goes farther than the miles between us. she entrusts the door-to-door service-men, packing extra for their trouble. the men won’t go unbribed, never go for last year’s levi’s, at the least will opt for the corned beef. compact, dense bullets, she processes the need, accounts for each can, each cousin, each dinner saved its empty helping. she can’t begin to tell me the need, but I know there are lists, countless lists, airmailed with the seasons, and she is sure to check off each line before moving to the next. melong needs shoes for his interview marivick’s second baby is coming totoy’s teeth and lourdes’s tuition board exam fees, property tax, lola’s walker, lola’s medicine, lola’s gravestone. the box, never really sealed the lists never stop coming but she has had her fill of absence,

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Marlon Unas Esguerra is always the last to eat at our table. deliberate in her dinner and soft when she reminds me to chew well before swallowing.

Notes: —Balik in Tagalog means to come back.

—Bayan means hometown or homeland.

—Balikbayan means someone who is coming back home.

—A Balikbayan box is a care package of goods and supplies sent back home.

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Phebus Etienne Mirror Image When my father watched his mother lavish attention on his half-brothers, he rode the tap tap at dusk for women, rum, a dance, some ephemeral ecstasy to fill the hollow.

To escape my mother’s perfume lingering in the attic like dust on her slippers, I rode the interstate rails and met an almost divorced man on a king’s bed.

I lay silent under him, envying the woman who raised her hem behind the apricot house in the lakou.

An audience with mouths dry listened, she chimed and her lover unbuckled against her body.

Next, I found a Tunisian ten years younger.

The thrusting against a glass wall in a garden of palms and gardenias, something close to a fantasy until I became curious about his dawns away from me.

A handsome southern boy, obsessed like a satyr, admired my slacks because they mimicked fire.

I craved his vanishing once our limbs were saturated with sweat and sent him home as bells signaled the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth midnight since I knelt beside by mother’s coffin.

Abandoned by my first love, a strange embrace is testament.

I am my father’s daughter.

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Richard Garcia Towhead Your brother had a different father, Mother said softly, as if speaking to herself, His hair was like corn silk.

Dipped in the inkwell, my brother called me, Your pigtails were dipped in the inkwell and it soaked all the way up.

He played with my dolls, I liked his six-gun, his cowboy shirt.

Once in a while Father under his breath behind his newspaper would sigh, Damn towheaded milkman.

At night in the treehouse we lay side by side, two Scottie dog magnets.

Was there a moment we could hear the stars click, feel the treehouse come unmoored before we each woke under different stars?

He said, I’ll be a bank robber, write you a letter on the back of a wanted poster.

Maybe he is.

Maybe he’s nearby or far.

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Richard Garcia of gurneys, IVs, I think I see a shock of blond-white hair against a sheet and catch my breath, half fear, half hope.

Sometimes I’m alone waiting in an old car outside a bank.

He leaps in the driver’s seat, still a teenager.

We speed off.

Sirens diminish.

In the country now, we turn toward each other and smile. Both of us with silky, cream-colored hair.

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Nola Garrett The Relative Heart My great-great-grandfather, Enos Thompson, assassinated a high-ranking member of the Know Nothing Party, then retreated to California. My family said his stories of giant redwoods, painted deserts and mountains so high trees wouldn’t grow made politics seem unimportant.

Grandfather Weed was a certified chicken thief, spent 30 days (along with Uncle Morris) in the Crawford County Jail to make it official.

All my uncles said that farmer misunderstood the deal, and besides the Depression was hard times.

Cousin Bob was found in a field naked from the waist down in a compromising position with a chestnut mare.

My relatives were grateful it wasn’t a stallion or worse, a gelding, so it wasn’t a completely unnatural act.

My second cousin Bruce, on my mother’s side, shot his daddy (who beat him regularly) and then his mom (after she complained) with a .22, because they wouldn’t let him wear blue jeans.

The family maintains he solved all his problems and some of theirs now that he’s required to wear denim.

My third cousin once removed took her husband’s life insurance and finally got to travel. Cousin Lola was the first white woman to spend the winter at Point Barrow, Alaska, and the last to leave a Greyhound bus where she had quietly died at the age of 89.

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Nola Garrett Uncle Otis drank himself to death, but served as an example to my father who never touched a drop.

My brother, Joel, one fresh June morning on a dare chug-a-lugged a ďŹ fth of vodka, lay down and died in the back of his pick-up truck.

My mother still remarks how heart trouble runs all through this family.

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Joy Gonsalves Elegy for a Distant Relative Instead of dying, my great-grandfather hung around my Grandmama’s house, usually in the front room by the din of the old television. I feared him the way children fear disability, but I liked to peek at his undisturbed order, to wonder at the tremor in one of his hands. I made him into play, a giant gentleman who would not (could not!) strike, even should I snap off the light of his table lamp for its joyful noise, or snatch his maple cane, to feel where his grip had loosened its grain.

I’d been told to let him be, that he could not pick himself up. But one of us wanted the company.

And, as ripe for death, as docile, as everyone claimed he was, he knew—like I—how not to mind. My Grandmama straightened him out. When she shaved him at the kitchen counter in his blue-and-red-checkered robe— then, he was a life, who knew better than to move.

He’d warned me twice to stay out of his light, but I leaned in close enough to count his hairs.

I can tell you now how his skin used to sound

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Joy Gonsalves against that steel: like the slow tearing of paper, but a little less. His flinch was still quick to the razor’s skip, and the way that stool screeched beneath him, anybody could see he was able.

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Sean Hill In My Father’s House The leaper, Rev. Freeman, 7 ft tall when I was 4 black as the Bible in his hand stood in front of the congregation and filled with the holy ghost jumped straight up to God got up 3 or 4 ft before coming down died a couple of years ago heart failed while preaching mid-leap.

The gasper, Rev. Lasitter, after Things ara have to be done ara in a certain order ara Church, heed God’s instruction haw illustrated his point with a halting recitation—a recipe accentuated with gasps. It makes biscuits as light as his breaths.

The thunderer, Rev. Hill, he prays. His voice builds—roars and cracks the way it did when I was a kid and he took the belt to me; his voice alternated interrogating then coaxing something better than my I don’t know.

I sit agnostic in his Father’s house judging him ultimately praying for me.

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Thomas O’Grady Christmas in Killarney “Well,” said the brother-in-law, “maybe I should just hang the mistletoe from my belt buckle. Would that make anybody happy?” He was speaking to his wife but loud enough for all of us to hear, including his three young daughters. (Mavournin, Brogan and Glorvina: such names to stick on innocent children.) His wife—my wife’s sister—had just laughed at him after the sprig of mistletoe that he had twice taped above the parlor doorway had fallen a second time and had to be wrestled out of the dog’s mouth.

“Mr. Furlong!” His wife pretended to be put out but, as always, she really seemed pleased that he had found a new way to belittle her. She always called him Mr. Furlong—instead of Jack—when he insulted her, especially about her weight, and she forgave him.

“Did I miss something?” A voice from the kitchen. The motherin-law—Jack’s and mine—had not quite heard the whole exchange.

She’s a saint of a woman and a great cook—she cooks constantly, so she ought to be—but she misses half of what goes on in her house because she never leaves the kitchen. As a result, she has developed the habit of asking questions from a distance, like an echo, so no one can see her face and figure out if she has a secret motive for asking in the first place. “Did you ever meet Mrs. So-and-so?” she might call out, seemingly to no one in particular. If we were all in a good mood we might humor her and take turns answering from the next room.

Eventually, though, the brother-in-law would find some way to put a stop to that. “Is she a heavyset woman?” he might ask. “I think I did meet her.”

“No, she’s not heavyset. She’s very petite.”

“Well, then I don’t know her. I’ve met only heavyset women. That’s the story of my life.”

I used to like these Christmas get-togethers with the wife’s family—well, not like them…but at least I didn’t mind them. I didn’t even mind the hours spent playing penny-ante poker with the fatherin-law, a taciturn man but surprisingly well-read for an ex-Marine.

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Thomas O’Grady “Hell,” he proclaimed one year, standing up and raising his glass when my wife called on him for a toast during Christmas dinner, “Hell…is other people.”

The story is that the father-in-law always wanted sons and what he ended up with were two daughters…and now three granddaughters.

Right up until his wife had her hysterectomy, a couple of months after Betty was born (Betty is my wife), he held out hope for a son—actually, for three sons: “A pair plus three of a kind makes a full house,” he supposedly said at Betty’s christening. And he meant it.

After his wife’s operation, or so my wife believes, the old exMarine felt emasculated for years. That is, until Janie (my wife’s sister) married Jack and, two years later, Betty married me. Then he seemed rejuvenated, as if just the thought of having a grandson had increased his sense of his own…virility. I suppose that explains the special toast he proposed for the first half-dozen Christmases after his daughters got married. We would all be sitting around the dining room table, the turkey carved and ready for serving, a big bowl of mashed potatoes steaming on the sideboard. Bing Crosby would be crooning on the hi-fi in the background—“White Christmas,” “Mele Kalikimaka,” and the mother-in-law’s favorite, “Christmas in Killarney.” (Her mother came from Killarney.) Janie would lead us in grace—“Bless us, O Lord…”—and then the father-in-law, tapping his plate with a spoon, would rise and, tipping his glass toward his two daughters and his two sons-in-law, say simply: “Hope springs eternal…”

But now there is no hope…no hope at all. Last year, just before Christmas, Betty and I learned that we cannot conceive. Ever. We have still not had the heart to tell her parents, or to tell Janie and Jack either.

For years we had all (even Jack) imagined and planned for future Christmases when “the cousins”—Mavournin, Brogan and Glorvina and the brood that Betty and I would have—would all come together: “Christmas in Killarney, with all of the folks at home!” we sang along with Bing, carried away by the thought of such a gathering.

And this year? Last night after Janie and Jack finally got their girls into bed, we all sat around small-talking, the father-in-law and Jack and I playing five-card stud at one end of the kitchen table, Betty and her sister and her mother at the other end tying ribbons around tins of shortbread cookies. (“The ones the dog didn’t scarf down,” the fatherin-law said. Jack could never resist: “Or Janie…”) Mavournin, Brogan and Glorvina would load the tins onto a toboggan and deliver them to the in-laws’ neighbors the next day. “Our girls look forward to that 72 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Thomas O’Grady so much every year,” Janie was saying. “I would love to have another little one…just to see the Christmas joy in another pair of little eyes!”

Stop, Janie. Just stop. After three children in her first four years of marriage, she explained (not for the first time), she had started to “take precautions,” but now here she was on Christmas Eve feeling “ready to have another one—maybe a grandson for Daddy.” I could tell that Betty was being eaten up inside.

Betty tried to change the subject. “So tell us, Jack, what did you get Janie for Christmas this year?”

He looked up from his cards and paused. In that interval before he answered, I knew that I would never spend another Christmas with him and Janie. Or with the in-laws either. Or with Mavournin, Brogan and Glorvina. I wanted to say it out loud: Hell…is other people’s children.

Jack put down his cards, face-up, on the table. “A vasectomy,” he said. And he meant it.

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Edith Pearlman Life Jackets In the first months of the War, a trim but already obsolete

destroyer was torpedoed by a U-boat in the North Atlantic. The destroyer was part of a convoy, helping out the short-handed British.

When Jeannie received the news—her husband was on the destroyer— she stared in a thoughtful way at the man in uniform standing in her living room. He felt she was trying to be of comfort.

Her innocent smile on opening the door had blinded him. Now he couldn’t help noticing that she was plain—narrow cheeks mildly nubbled by girlhood acne, small eyes further reduced by spectacles, long hair limp—and that she was short and skinny. But her straightforward gaze reduced his own anxiety. Still…had she not understood what he had just said—did she think that his husband had gone to an icy grave?

“I…” he began, not knowing how to address her misplaced concern.

Then she staggered to a nearby chair and brought her hands up to her face, covering it entirely, knocking the spectacles off. This was the sort of thing he was used to in this horrible assignment.

Fortunately the couple across the hall was available to take the new widow into their arms. They keened together, all three. The bearer of evil tidings left. Twenty minutes later Jeannie’s best friend Rowan flew into the room, her parchment curls awry as always, her pale eyes wide. Shortly after that, Danny came too. Danny was Jeannie’s second cousin. Just eighteen, he would ship overseas in two weeks.

In the months to come, Jeannie, following the war like every other American, became expert on that particular disaster. She knew that the destroyer had been blown tidily in two, that one hundred and fifteen men had perished including the captain and all the officers, that there were parts of human bodies floating about in the ocean.

Some torsos wore puffy orange vests.

She had been born long after her parents had given up hope for a child. Her mother, weakened by the unexpected blessing, succumbed to influenza when Jeannie was four. Jeannie’s father’s 74 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Edith Pearlman unmarried sister moved into the faded apartment on West 82nd Street near Broadway. The girl enjoyed a peaceable childhood with this undemanding couple. She was accustomed to their mild sadness and alert to its occasional deepening. She became aware that her presence in the room lightened their spirits. It was like discovering an aptitude for mechanical drawing or juggling. Her father liked to hear her play the piano, though she was only moderately talented at that. In the evenings he sat on the sofa, listening, eyes closed, faintly smiling. Her aunt loved anagrams despite a limited vocabulary. Jeannie often let the maiden lady win.

They were both dead by the time of Jeannie’s hurried wartime marriage—groom in uniform, bride in an unbecoming turquoise dress.

The guests were Rowan and Jeannie’s mother’s cousin and his wife and Danny, their son; and an ancient great-aunt who lived in Bridgeport.

After two days of honeymoon on the Jersey shore, Jeannie’s husband was gone. Soon he was gone forever.

The war was over now. Jeannie was still the small dark biddable woman who had faced the bad-news Lieutenant (he had lost a leg in Normandy). She had recently cut her hair. The cropped style was borrowed from a character in South Pacific, the first musical to turn the recent conflict into entertainment. Her cousin Danny detested the show. “War makes us crazy, not slap-happy,” he said one night. “Those two boobs”—he meant Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein— “should be taken out and shot.”

Jeannie would have shuddered at a musical based on the sinking of a destroyer, but high jinks on an occupied tropical island didn’t seem worthy of disapproval. Still, she kept her face solemn as usual.

Any man who earned one of her rare smiles felt willing to live another day—at least that’s what her suitors said, both of them.

Danny had said the same thing, in a more matter-of-fact manner.

He was studying dentistry on the G.I. Bill, and he’d have liked to reproduce an X-ray of Jeannie’s mouth onto his future letterhead. “But even if illustrations were appropriate, I couldn’t use yours,” and he shook his square boxer’s head—he’d been lightweight champion of his company and had the broken nose to prove it. “I can’t claim credit for your excellent occlusion.”

“Well,” soothed Jeannie.

She now shared the apartment with Rowan. The Lieutenant, home in St. Paul adjusting to his disability, remembered that living Crab Orchard Review

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Edith Pearlman room better than all the other places he had blighted—the walls were curdled cream, the woodwork shiny brown, the glass in the built-in cupboard cross-hatched with wire.

Danny often looked in on his way home from Columbia to Brooklyn. He ran up to the sixth floor, leaping three steps at a time.

The stairs wound around the elevator—a closet with a door of sagging metal lozenges, the whole thing enclosed by a grille. Anybody could watch the elevator at its uneasy labors. “It gets snooped on, the poor convict,” said the janitor, who was slightly deranged. He had lost his only grandson at Anzio.

Danny told Jeannie to avoid the dubious elevator. He told her to get married again. She needed a consort more substantial than a photograph framed in silver—he said that from time to time; the words themselves seemed framed. He said it again the night he was fretting about South Pacific.

“Should I marry the lad down the hall?” she inquired, not naming names. Danny preferred titles and sobriquets and specific nouns like bicuspid. He disliked romantic tales (South Pacific offended in that category, too), and the color yellow, and most vegetables. He hated displacement. In Europe he’d watched lines of refugees, each wearing one ragged overcoat on top of another. They were bundles of old clothes, walking. Despite the long daily commute, he continued to live in his parents’ Flatbush house.

“You wouldn’t have to go far if you married the lad down the hall.

Though you’d still have that elevator to worry about.”

“No.” “No? The elevator would magically repair itself?”

“No, I wouldn’t have to go far,” said Jeannie. Rowan would feel less deserted if Jeannie were only a few steps away. Danny would still drop in.

Danny went on. “The lad is a terrific skater. At the rink he is exuberance made flesh.” Jeannie sat without speaking. Danny reduced his effusion: “good on ice.”

“Like whisky,” and she grinned at him.

Colin Corrigan, the lad down the hall, had served in the steamy Pacific. He had helped capture Guadalcanal. He had seen men on both sides shot in the neck and the stomach: bayoneted: decapitated.

He had operated a mortar. “When memories get too bad I think about a movie we saw on the ship going over,” he told Jeannie.

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Edith Pearlman “Which movie?”

“Our Wife, frothy, about a love triangle. Starring the heavenly Melvyn Douglas.”

Colin had a pointed nose and reddish curls and brown, distracted eyes. His considerable height was mostly in his legs. At the rink he wore a plaid suit and a long orange scarf. Last winter he had taught Jeannie the T Stop and the Tango Stop and they had been working on the Mohawk Spin when spring came and they had to put their skates away. Now, on Saturdays, Colin took Jeannie, and sometimes Rowan too, to musicals. He gazed at the tap dancers—Jeannie could almost share his longing.

If he’d been interested in set designing or window dressing his life would have been smoother. But Colin was a rising executive in a big toy company. He loved his work. “Supplying children with toys…it’s a high calling.” He hoped for promotions.

Big companies were suspicious of bachelors. Colin kept his preferences to himself. In fact, his preferences weren’t very strong.

Yearning was pleasure enough.

“You’re an ascetic,” Jeannie recognized.

“Yes, though I look like a clown. But asceticism won’t do either, not in the business world.”

There was an East Side educator who’d have married Colin in a minute—she wanted cover for her heavy friendships with women. But she emanated a lack of charity. It was Jeannie he loved, in his temperate way. Such a smile. He wanted to marry her. “I can do it,” he said with careful ambiguity.

Rowan said, “You are wise about human feelings, Jeannie, but ignorant of physical pleasures. Two days in Atlantic city…hasty lovemaking…you don’t even know if you like sex.” Rowan did not like sex—her own brief marriage had ended in divorce. Her passion was playing the flute and she was very fond of Jeannie. “Try him,” she recommended.

So Jeannie spent a night now and then in Colin’s bedroom, colorful as a toybox. The sleek experience was different from the painful confusion of her honeymoon. Colin kept his eyes closed. She kept hers open, and wondered what the fuss was all about. Maybe she’d get pregnant and the matter would be settled. She liked him very much. She enjoyed skating.

The Lieutenant, too, had been good on ice, before Normandy.

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Edith Pearlman fingers through her unsightly ringlets. “You’ll just chuck him out, and his decorations too?”

The Chevalier Bob—Robert Cessou—had won his badge and ribbon in World War I, for bravery. Off the battlefield he liked his comforts. He’d emigrated to New York immediately after Versailles, convinced that no good would come from that treaty. He’d married several rich older women. Not one of them regretted what other people considered folly. The Chevalier was faithful and kind. He tolerated the resentment of his grown stepchildren, and he nursed his wives through final illnesses, and he always observed a sincere year or two of mourning before marrying some other mature infatuate.

He’d met Jeannie at a piano concert: one of his rare expeditions from his house in the Village. By now he was almost an invalid. A disease was thinning his old blood, Danny muttered later. Danny had escorted Jeannie and Rowan to the concert.

“The Chevalier is exhausted,” noted the kindly Colin. He too had attended the performance—the pianist was a handsome young Czech with dramatic gestures.

“The Chevalier is doomed,” Rowan summed up.

Sometimes Jeannie played for the Chevalier in his cool dark living room. He agreed with her—sighing in satisfaction—that her playing was timid and full of mistakes. Some Sundays he had himself driven to her apartment. He agreed with Colin that the post-war mood was one of uncompromising uniformity and he agreed with Danny that Jeannie needed a worldly protector and he agreed with Rowan—or said he did—that the individual was more important than the nation.

Jeannie, thinking of the destroyer, frowned and turned away.

“Marry me,” the Chevalier urged Jeannie frequently, but not so frequently as to irritate. “Rubies would suit your coloring.”

“I like your company,” she assured him. His skin was a faded weave of mauve and bruise, but his fine glossy eyes suggested an imperial time when soldiers marched in tunics and breeches. Blood soaked their uniforms long after they were dead. One of his ancestors had died at Waterloo. “I don’t require riches,” she heard herself saying, though she couldn’t help thinking of the silken feel of old bills, especially those of a large denomination.

“This sofa of yours needs new springs. If I simply leave you my little fortune without a proper marriage, my stepdaughters will have you in court before I’m cold. I was demented, they’ll claim. I was influenced, 78 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Edith Pearlman they’ll claim further.” He bowed his head. “We marched under a green cloud of chlorine,” he said, continuing an earlier conversation. “My colonel was shot through the chest as we organized an assault. He returned to duty ten days later. We had gained two miles. I still smell the gas.” He raised his bony head again. “Jeannie, it would be my last, my greatest pleasure, to be benefactor to you.”

And what a benefactress Mrs. Robert Cessou could be. She’d free Rowan from night-school teaching. She’d supplement Danny’s G.I. benefits. She’d magnify the endowment of the little Preservation Society she worked for, which tried to save old buildings from obliteration, and then helped relocate people when those efforts failed. So many of the residents were veterans.…She’d buy Colin a new scarf.

The Lieutenant—who had been fitted with an artificial leg— joined his family in their prosperous business, a chain of department stores.

Neither suitor was importunate. Neither demanded much of Jeannie’s time. Once every few weeks, Colin took her to a company party, or out to dinner with a company couple.

“So you are Colin’s fiancée,” a woman said one night in the Ladies’, scrutinizing the spectacles resting on the wedge of a nose, the skimpy hair, the maroon crepe dress.

Colin had given her a double choker of amber beads. Jeannie glanced at them in the mirror. With two yellow stripes around her neck she resembled a woodland animal. “Yes, I am Colin’s fiancée,” as she had agreed to say.

“And when are you…?”

“Oh…soon.” Oh, never. Oh, tomorrow. In her girlhood, how simple it had been to satisfy father and aunt, father-and-aunt. She had kept from this welded parent the fact that she smoked and read contraband novels; she delighted them with surprise cakes and newly memorized sonatinas. And now, how difficult it was to please a person she loved without displeasing the others. She brought her hands abruptly to her face, and knocked off her glasses—a gesture that the Lieutenant had never forgotten. He didn’t see it this time, of course, though he did happen to be in New York that weekend, attending a Men’s Wear Show. He almost called Jeannie—he hadn’t forgotten her name, either, and it was still in the Manhattan telephone book—but his prosthesis was bothering him.

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Edith Pearlman The Chevalier didn’t take Jeannie to restaurants, didn’t introduce her to anyone except his lawyer, who was also his friend— another old man French by birth. A cook made dinner for the three of them and the chauffeur. The foursome dined in the cobbled garden behind the house. “What do you think of these white asparagus, Jeannie?” A line deepened itself in his white cheek—the equivalent of a smile. “Lucienne flavored them with truffles.”

The chauffeur drove her home early, for the Chevalier was quick to tire. Sometimes she found Danny waiting at her door, still glistening from his run around the elevator. He’d come in for a while. He talked mostly about teeth—their early appearance in evolutionary history, their tendency to decay sooner than the rest of the organism, their habit of making excursions within the mouth. He spared her an accounting of a face he’d seen with the mouth blown entirely away, though the dead eyes were undamaged and the dead forehead as bland as a blotter.

One night he announced that he’d received the highest grade on an anatomy test. “Let’s celebrate on Saturday—a bang-up lunch.”

“Saturday is Rowan’s birthday.”

“Ah—two reasons to celebrate.”

But on Saturday Rowan was called to an audition. Danny and Jeannie found themselves ignored at a restaurant table set for three.

At last it occurred to Danny to tell the waiter that their friend would not be joining them. He stood and advanced towards a tuxedo who listened and then bowed to the tweed jacket, his eyes on the exact place where Danny’s medals would have been pinned. Jeannie had never seen Danny’s medals, had only heard about them from his mother.

The waiter removed Rowan’s place-setting and brought whisky; and now the cousins spoke of ordinary topics—the Mayor; the new War in the Far East; the wrecking balls loose in Manhattan and Jeannie’s Society’s failure to restrain those balls…They did not speak of the suitors, except when Jeannie said that they couldn’t linger over dessert: the Chevalier was visiting at five.

“Late tea?” asked Danny, picking his teeth.

“Or early supper. Either way, he’ll drink one glass of water and eat half a cookie.”

The Lieutenant—in town again, this time for a Furniture Show— saw them walking along Broadway towards the grim old building on 82nd Street. He could tell from their matched tempo and their occasional easy comments that they had known each other for a long time. But they weren’t holding hands, were they. He limped into a doorway.

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Edith Pearlman Jeannie and Danny climbed three concrete stairs and pushed open the building’s outer door and then its inner one, supposed to be locked, never locked. The elevator was waiting. Jeannie entered it. Danny drew a breath and entered behind her. The thing rose in its pained way. Then it stopped with enough of a shudder to throw them against the back wall and then more or less against each other, shoulder to shoulder. They stared through the lozenged door at horizontal masonry separating two empty spaces.

“That’s the fourth floor above us,” said Jeannie.

“That’s the third, below.”

“Push the Help button.”

He pushed. Silence.

“It’s supposed to ring in Mr. Rizzu’s apartment.”

“Perhaps it did.”

“If he doesn’t come we’ll have to shout.”

“Yes.” “Is this…is this like a foxhole?”

“No.” Silence. Then: “It’s more promising than a foxhole.” Silence again. “In Montecassino, after the bombing, I saw a young woman.

She was wearing a porous lump of what had been a wall on top of her head…in order to carry it to the place that had been her home…in order to begin again. You know what, Jeannie? She made me think of you.” His brow was wet, as if he had just run up the stairs. “Everything made me think of you,” he confessed. “Everything still does.”

She cried, “I can’t marry you, Danny,” though he hadn’t asked.

“If you let that torpedo scuttle your future,” though she had not mentioned torpedoes, “then you have allowed the enemy to win the war.”

They stood there not embracing. Patience ran in their family. “…a kind of desertion,” and she raised both hands, palms up, one for each of her heroic suitors. “I can’t, really I can’t, I can’t marry… anyone.”

“Any one,” he corrected with light pedantry.

“War makes us crazy, you said so.”

“Do something crazy, then.”

“Put a stone on my head?”

“Make everybody happy.”

“Bonjour,” said the Chevalier at their feet. He was on the third floor, standing on his chauffeur’s shoulders. Colin, addressing their scalps, inquired: “What the hell?” He was on the fourth floor, kneeling. Then Mr. Rizzu, operating some emergency levers from below, shouting all Crab Orchard Review

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Edith Pearlman the while, guided them upwards past fourth, past fifth, to the sixth floor. The elevator stopped and they stumbled out.

Rowan was waiting. “I got the job,” she crowed.

Jeannie married the Chevalier on a Friday, in Manhattan’s City Hall. The lawyer and the chauffeur and Rowan were present. She married Colin the following week, in Hoboken, attended by Rowan and Colin’s boss. The Chevalier was delighted. “Such a gentilhomme.” A few weeks later she married Danny in their great-aunt’s Bridgeport home.

This was her biggest wedding. The celebrants included Rowan and Danny’s parents and friends and cousins—about twenty people. The Chevalier supplied champagne from what appeared to be his deathbed.

But Jeannie kept him alive, with Danny’s help, for almost a year.

Danny did manage to wrench himself away from Brooklyn. The subway ride to school from the Village was briefer than the one from his parents’. He had more time to study, and his grades, always good, got better; he attributed some of this improved mentation to the vegetables so delicately prepared by the Chevalier’s cook. When he went into practice, he remembered to address his patients by title and name.

Jeannie’s own name disappeared from the Manhattan telephone book. The one-legged Lieutenant allowed himself to be rescued by a St. Paul society girl.

Colin showed up on occasional Saturdays, and he and Jeannie went skating. She mastered the Mohawk Spin. Every few weeks he also showed up to take her out to dinner with influential personages.

He showed up at the funeral service for the Chevalier. By that time, he had been promoted twice. The following year he was sent to the Netherlands to open a branch of the toy company. There he posed as a separated man. Though he wrote to Jeannie from time to time, and twice came back for a visit, he faded gradually out of her life. But the two never bothered to dissolve their union.

With the muscular, gentle Danny, Jeannie at last discovered what the fuss was all about. They had four children, one after the other. In a technical sense, the children were illegitimate. But their parents never mentioned that fact, nor did Rowan. Rowan occupied a small apartment converted from the Chevalier’s cellar and the chauffeur’s quarters. It opened onto the garden, where she and the frequently smiling Jeannie spent a lot of time; and where, on a summer night, she often played her flute, delighting some of the neighbors and annoying others.

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M. Lynx Qualey The Second Wife The lights go out.

There’s laughter, and someone keeps clapping for a minute, a girl’s voice breathlessly singing, even though the music has stopped.

Hips and shoulders stop shaking. The girls and women who were dancing drift to the walls, knocking against each other, groping for the edges of straight-backed chairs.

“The lights are out,” one of them says. Several others snort and giggle. The room seems bigger now, echoing with our fast, raspy breaths.

A bottle of perfume hisses, and sweet-smelling droplets fall onto our heads and arms.

“Just wait,” Eman says. She has a high-pitched, pleading voice.

“They’ll come back on in a minute.”

We touch each other’s arms and faces, fumbling our way into chairs.

It feels good to sit down and I lean back, resting my head against the wall.

“Just a minute now,” Eman says. “Any minute.”

She is exactly what I expected—nervous, helpless, and skinny. We sit for a while, resting, before the screens of mobile phones light up in the darkness. Half-formed faces start to emerge—large, drooping eyes and shifting, oddly-shaped noses. Women whisper to each other, and their phones beep. I feel around on the floor and find my own purse.

My hand gropes past the packet of tissues, Marwan’s plastic Spiderman, and finally to my phone. I press hard on the power button and type a message to Gameel. He’s the one who demanded that I come.

“You’re going to love Eman,” he told me. “She’s just out of school and she’ll never bother you. Anything you say, she’ll listen.”

Of course I’m not like some of these women, the ones who whine and tear at their hair when their husbands say they’ll take a second wife. A second wife is like anything else—a chance to be defeated, or a chance to get what you want. I told him, “Okay, I’ll be nice. But I need a car, and Marwan has to enroll in a language school. This year.”

Gameel grabbed at his forehead, scratching at it. “Woman,” he said, “do you know how much trouble you cause? Are you trying to Crab Orchard Review

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M. Lynx Qualey ruin us?” But as he shouted and moaned, his nostrils twitched like he wanted to smile. After a few days, we came to an agreement. He gives me what I want, and I let him marry this silly girl.

I press the send button and slip the phone back in my purse.

Everyone is whispering. The girl next to me asks her neighbor if she wants to leave. They don’t seem to be Eman’s close friends. None of the girls seem to be close with Eman.

A few of my cousins were shocked when I told them that Gameel wanted to marry again. But they don’t understand—this girl is exactly what you’d expect from my husband. A few weeks before our wedding, I came down with a terrible flu. Gameel visited me every afternoon, bringing magazines and sweets and tiny stuffed animals. One afternoon, when I was too dizzy to stand, his eyes filled with tears. He got down on his knees and grasped the bedcover, begging me to get better.

“Softhearted,” my father said. “The boy is too softhearted.”

I ignored my father then. I told him that modern men were softer, and that I loved Gameel’s gentle heart. But I remembered Father’s words when we were at Gameel’s mother’s, when she told the story of poor, poor Eman. His mother sipped hot tea and talked about this girl, one of Gameel’s distant cousins. Her father had been arrested under infamous circumstances.

“What’s to be done?” His mother shook her head.

Gameel leaned forward, his forehead creased.

“She’s a good cook and a pretty girl, but how will she find a husband?” his mother asked. “Unless, God willing, our family helps out.”

I squeezed my tea glass, hard, as the news worked its way through Gameel’s large body. That night, he caressed me slowly, then faster, kissing me all over until I was in a frenzy of pleasure. Afterwards, I rested my head on his belly and considered the options.

“What’s this?” my mother shrieked, when I told her. “Don’t you have two beautiful children? Aren’t you a loving wife? God is merciful and dispenses mercy. We’ll get rid of this girl. We’ll stop this marriage.”

I shook my head firmly. “No.” If I’d followed Mama’s advice, I’d be divorced by now, living with two children on a tiny stipend. But instead I have a car, a nice apartment, and my son starts at language school next month.

I walked into this party just after nine—in a beautiful red dress, my hair curled and my face made up—and there was Eman, shivering in her blue dress. When I introduced myself, she flushed and turned away. Then she slowly turned back, gazing at me with her nervous 84 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

M. Lynx Qualey brown eyes. There was almost something—a hardness in her eyes—but then she shook herself and greeted me, welcoming me to her home.

She’s up near the door now, her thin shadow in the doorframe.

“Wait,” she says, her voice loud and whiny. “Mariam, you sing.”

Mariam opens her mouth and starts with an old, slow song.

Mobile phones stay lit up in women’s laps. The phones beep loudly as messages go back and forth.

When the song is over, a couple of girls get up and slip past Eman, walking out.

“Wait a little,” Eman says. “Please.”

The girl beside me stands up and I follow her to the door. Eman tugs at the straps of her blue party dress, begging the girls to stay, and I slide off in the other direction, toward the tiny bedroom.

It’s quiet in there—just a bed, a wardrobe and a bureau. I open and close a few drawers, pulling at them slowly so they won’t creak.

Eman is whining in the main room. “Sing again, Mariam. A fast song. For dancing.”

In one of the drawers there’s something familiar, a photo, and I bring it up to my eyes. Somaya and Marwan. I touch the photo, rubbing at the surface. Why, in the name of God, does she have a picture of my children? There’s a strange smell coming off the photo, something sharp and musky. I put it to my nose and breathe in for a moment. Then I weigh it in my hand for a moment before I slip it into my purse.

I pat through the rest of the drawers. Nothing. The lights flicker on and there’s a rising “ahh” in the next room, but they die out again.

There are sewing shears in one of the drawers and I take them, too.

In the main room, there’s a crush of girls at the door. “Sweetheart, we’ll be right back,” they’re telling Eman. “We’re just going out to smoke.” I shove my way through the group, fingers tight inside the scissors’ metal holes. Then I’m behind Eman, my left hand on her shoulder, kissing her soft, powdery cheek. She smells like jasmine and nervous sweat.

“I have to go check on the children,” I tell her. “Make sure they’re doing their homework.”

“Oh,” she says, looking around. “Thank you, I—” “Goodbye,” I say.

I raise the scissors behind her back and, quick as a djinni, snip off a lock of hair and stuff it into my purse.

“Bye,” I say again, elbowing my way into the corridor. “God be with you.”

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Luisa A. Igloria Rice In the beginning we rocked in a vessel of water, an envelope of skin. Membrane waiting to be written on, tissue wound from the breath of others. We swam up passages bathed with a strange light formed of language and chants, laughter and crying. Words showed the way, waiting to swaddle us in the only true clothing. Open your mouth, your fist— In the beginning, this is how the first grain of rice came to our people: out of drought, out of a season heavy only with lightning and dust storms. Everyone was hungry, crawling into the corners of huts to lie in piles of mud and excrement.

They forgot their names, their desires, the pathways to rivers that had shriveled into dreams without current, without fish.

Threads hung in ragged curtains from the loom.

Combs of tortoise shell fell soundless to the floor and boxes of betel nut and leaf surrendered to sunlight, withering into green dust.

Despair laid its bones in a circle and begged

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Luisa A. Igloria for wind, for breath, for the sound of stone striking stone, anything to twist like fire in the gut, like a singing knife severing hair from the gaunt literature of the body. The earth mother spreads a blanket of fog, fragile as grace. She sheds tears of love and pity, causing rivers to film over with water and leaping sound. For food she bends over the now dark soil and squeezes her breasts, watching white milk churn in the furrows and change into spears of grain. She squeezes so hard, blood flows from her breasts, the color of red mountain rice.

And when we eat the fragrant food, we mingle in our mouths like this the taste of rain and birth, the salt of blood-remembering.

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Linda Susan Jackson The Women in Me could cut you with an eye sure as look at you.

To church they wear Soir de Paris and silk dresses they make themselves.

Some wear the slow slur of Lester Young on their butterscotch faces because they are loved by a parade of men in & through their lives.

Some marry, have children, sometimes too many.

Some never marry, needing only a space in the bed & their thin ďŹ ngers, drawing on instinct & intellect, signifying with a dropped handkerchief, a suck of teeth, a backward glance, a raised eyebrow, a Hey sugar that lies like a purr.

Some drink. Some try to drink.

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Linda Susan Jackson There was that one time an aunt drank herself drunk so she could know what her husband knows every weekend she locks him out.

Once he threatened to leave.

Without lifting her eyes from the ironing board, she said Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll mourn you for six days.

Like the rest, she believes no hurt should last longer than creation took.

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Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Epithalamium Fifty-Five Years After the Fact of Your Saddest Day Widow to so much, what you want is your Greek village where Gypsies washed in the sea, bodies and clothes.

What you want is to wear one young boy’s crescent-muscled arms like a sweater to ward off cold weather, the cold man about to take you to a snow-smothered forever foreignness.

Your first name means something like silverness, your maiden name a built-in tarnish deepening.

He with the cobbler’s name will have you metal-shod and heavy-gaited down an aisle leading straight to wilderness stripped of its silvery light and so mute from this day forward.

Widow, too, to touch.

I mean silence on the inside.

You will not hold yourself steady at the sight of him.

You do not feel drunk with the sly secret that awaits you in the wedding bed.

Nothing in you will sway in the sway of his sway.

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Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis Yiayia, wish it so that I could take you back to the dressing room where they pinched your cheeks, varnished you like kindling, wrapped you in a satin gown so white it shadowed blue and misted you with a gossamer shroud, made it hard to know your own face in the thick glass mirror.

You were more a spiderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intended than a bride, your back a dumb length of chain sewn in just under the skin, each link painfully plain.

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Jee Leong Koh What’s Left to my father Some things leave us like a sigh. Your father, puffing out his chest, with no fanfare, walked out on your family for another.

When he returned to live off you and mother, he filled our two-room flat with his sour air.

Some things should leave us: a sigh like your father.

No one among your seven sisters and brothers would take him in. For ten years, you took care to leave him alone polishing, one after another, his walking trophies—applying wax to smother the golden tokens while listening in his chair for something. Leaving us, sighing, your father tuned his battered radio to a voice farther than yours, not once asking his son to repair what’s left or trade the set in for another.

His funeral rounded up your sisters and brothers.

The women wailed. You were the only heir of something leaving, like a sigh. Your father.

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Lance Larsen Cleave No mirrors, you said in Delivery, I want to stay inside my body, not play the part of a rubbernecking pedestrian.

And afterwards, after your body turned against itself to save itself, after you heaved and the room contracted, after our son inched from you in a slow slither of salts, the o.b. handed me scissors: Hey, Mr. Dad, how about doing the honors. Then she aimed a section of umbilical at me—a diver’s lifeline, a loop of snake?

From a dish of water at your shoulder, our newborn mewed.

Your face floated safely beyond the chaos, clean, more naked than the viscera inches from my wrist.

If the body is a cathedral, if its doors swing both ways, if worship, if the profaned hand, if the eye.…Which we was I ending? Whose delicious pain owned the room?

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Jeffrey Thomas Leong Approaching Hong Wan Village Gate, Taizhou What I most need to know about those last moments, blood stroke of future years, is your bend beside a gate, to place down a cry as if offered at an open temple, intersect of passageway and place where things are left each day: thoughts, hurry, pushing toward a home.

You (whom I will never know) drop all that behind, not going anywhere, but, perhaps, leaving a self behind at a juncture visited only sporadically—unlike the returnees whose commute to factory or garden regular mouths opened to an everyday rice— yours was final, fixed.

Though, you will never pass it again without a shudder… a small uttered “oh,” pain of letting in omission, the less of loss.

That voice (baby’s cry) heard no more except in your thoughts (always in thoughts, farther away than here).

You must carry what you’ve unburdened: her, and, too, these drippings of why you went there, a there that continues and will, at least, in what you think each hour.

Not the idea of a 9-month-old carried in foreign arms, nor of a me you cannot begin to imagine, no, dare not imagine for the opaqueness of eyes shadows that me thinking, of transfer, where at an opening still, if motioned through, we inadvertently brush elbows, stuck in a middle beneath the weight of ancient columns.

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Julia B. Levine 1964: A Litany And the chicken pounded flat and flour-dusted And turned six times in the spitting grease.

And her fat brown volumes of Julia Child Laid open on the counter, pages stained with wine and milk.

Her housedress buttoned over Bermuda shorts.

The pan she’d bought in Mont St. Michel, brilliant copper, Long, long handled, and the omelettes she folded once, Kneeling at the basement hearth.

And the fondue pots and sterno cups and the clear thin broth With white, hairlike noodles and the finely chopped steak And small green onions.

The corn and beans snapped between her knees, Her head turned up, staring out across the yard.

The wedge of iceberg lettuce, Her body bristling in the kitchen, And the oven’s heated drawer where his dinner sat.

The cardinal she pointed to from the kitchen window, Before locking us outside to play.

And how he ate with us from time to time, Rising more than once to knock my fork out of my hand.

And how that winter the sweet pears came in a box, Wrapped in purple tissue, and she protested They were for a party, and sulked, While he laughed and cut them carefully, His fingers dripping, slice by slice, And fed us, Our three mouths open, leaning out across the sink.

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Moira Linehan Recovering Three days after doctors split his sternum with a saw, spread open his chest, hooked him up to a heart-and-lung machine, stopped his heart for, count them—one, two, three, then three more bypasses of the first three—I watched his younger son hover (though at six-seven such hovering’s all relative) oh, so close over my brother, rubbery gray tubes hanging from his chest, hospital robe loosely tied at his waist, my brother, fitful fogged bird, trying to say something become urgent as never before, Pat urging him, Use your words, Dad.

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C.P. Mangel For a Son Born in Jail, 1995 The sun spins in its place and geese like game pieces move across the board of a sky.

I wait for your afternoon soccer match to end.

Leaves flat and glossy as cards litter the bench.

Six years after your birth is when you came to us. How I wish we could have found you sooner, could have spared you those many foster homes.

Soon you will turn ten, and we have had you but three of those years, the book of our life together missing those pages. You came beautiful and marred. There is no way for us to know what we will be able to repair, what devastating cracks may yet emerge.

Marbles of clouds translucent and flecked with gold roll across the frayed carpet of hills.

Why did they wait so long to take you from her?

Birthmother who never loved you, never would, who would love only the ecstasy of crack.

Why did they wait long enough for you to be damaged and almost broken? The summer hue of your brown skin has faded. After your bath, I rub cocoa butter on your long thin legs and find the small round scars uniform as gum drops.

Now I see where someone played tic-tac-toe.

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C.P. Mangel

Fen If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can get across it if I try.

—Marianne Moore Why are they always black, the prison men?

My black son asks me when we pass the inmate crew along the road, picking up trash, as we drive to his school. And why can’t my daughter tell her grandparents she went to the prom with a black boy? She with pearl shoulders in a flowing dress of lustrous teal and he with obsidian eyes in a charcoal tux.

Before we reach the school, we cross a sprawling bog, and dank air seeps into my truck.

Sometimes when it rains, the waters rise and wash over the low narrow bridge, snake of a road.

Today there is a wooly light above the blankets of air. Under the swamp’s dull yellow green sheets, the crocodile stirs and the cottonmouth.

How to make sense of it, of any part, and how to teach them to be unafraid?

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Jeffrey McDaniel Oblivion Chiclets A voice wants to know why I wasn’t there the day the doctors splayed you out on the operating table, you who carried me like a bouquet of splinters in your belly, you who held me to your coveted breast. A voice wants to know how I can seal my heart up like a submarine. The truth is I don’t know what’s in there, and if I open that valve too quickly the pressure might break me, might rip my ventricles at the seams.

When I saw you outside the methadone clinic, half your teeth gone, I had to turn away, couldn’t watch the family tree being hacked into firewood. Yes, I want to crush and snort the knuckles of the doctor who prescribed you the oblivion Chiclets, but you’re the one playing Paul Bunyan, swinging the vodka bottle like a liquid ax, and my tongue is not a velvet ambulance shrieking toward you. I know reality is a mosh pit that keeps spitting you out, that beauty seeps from your face like sugar from a punctured sack.

I know death is on the staircase, but you were a ghost all along, an apparition with a wine glass floating through my childhood. I know you were born in a Polish neighborhood with an aluminum spoon in your mouth, Crab Orchard Review

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Jeffrey McDaniel that booze runs through us the way politicians run through promises. I know about the more in morphine, what it’s like to wake and feel like a chalk outline of yourself. I know about days passing so quickly they don’t even wave, let alone stop and say hello. I know it’s been one of those months, one of those lifetimes, when you dream of a Laundromat, a place to unscrew your skull and toss your dirty thoughts into a machine, come back an hour later to your mind all folded and clean.

If I could, I’d have a scientist shrink me down and inject me into your bloodstream, and I’d go with a wash brush and suds bucket, and scrub the opium out of each one of your cells. I used to think I was tough ’cause I could hold a machine gun of whisky to my cranium and take bullet after bullet to the brain. I used to think the greatest display of strength was lifting a hunk of metal in the air, but now I know it’s far more difficult to put something down.

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Lise Saffran The Machinery of Travel The monsoons had taken out the phone lines, but strangely,

the faxes got through. Once a week I walked down a street crowded with resting cows and three-wheeled vehicles that tilted and honked as they passed, between two huge mud-red puddles that formed beside the blind weavers’ cloth stall and into the Central Post Office of Nugegoda, Sri Lanka, where I wrote a one-page message that ended, “Everything’s fine. Don’t worry. Love Zoë.”

The Central Post Office occupied the space below the Purple Rain Hair Salon. It was cramped and dark and almost as pungent as the muddy street. The Postmaster who fed the slip of paper through the fax machine had hands that were as small as my own.

“You keep this, yes?” He extended the curled paper in my direction, wagging his head from side to side in a mannerism that Sri Lankans and Indians both shared. His hair was so black I could almost see colors in it, like an oil slick.

“Thanks.” I stuck it in the pocket of my dress. I’d kept all eight of the faxes I sent to my mother so far; they were valuable tender in the currency of our worries: hers of foreign dangers and civil war, mine of five-year survival rates.

It was the summer I was twenty and I was in Sri Lanka on an internship with the nation’s Family Planning Association. The Sinhalese couple I was staying with belonged to a small minority in the country of charismatic Christians. Nalini and Nihal hosted a Bible study once a week and, from my room down the hall, I could hear them praying. It was a comforting noise, a human sound amid the chorus of honking horns and the whir of the fan they had lent me to keep away mosquitoes.

In my immediate family, my stepfather was the only person who prayed in a traditional sense, and the only thing that brought him to the synagogue, that actually got him to put on a yarmulke, was general anesthesia. It wasn’t really the anesthesia he prayed about, although his brother the physician reminded him that that was often the most Crab Orchard Review

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Lise Saffran dangerous part, the anesthesiologist letting the patient almost die, then bringing her back a little, then pushing her further toward death once again, in a very careful, sober dance.

The biopsy was what worried him, the cutting and what the cutting led to, the news. Perhaps he thought it most likely that God would intervene during that small window of unconsciousness, the moment between having someone and giving them back to the world. Perhaps it wasn’t intervention he was looking for at all when my mother got sick, but simply some high ground where he could escape the flood of fear and memories, the lightning crack that illuminated five short years of marriage and then threatened to sweep them away. Even new synagogues had a memory of worse and their walls had a strength that was not generally found among secular structures.

I had found prayer difficult during the worst part of my mother’s illness and now, from this great distance, it seemed almost absurd. I was a singular western presence on the streets of Nugegoda. I was anonymous in my strangeness. Rather than Zoë, twenty-year-old college junior from Oberlin, Ohio, I was simply “The American Girl.” On homesick days when the monsoon washed out the road and I arrived home with my legs covered in mud, I imagined this anonymity extending even to God. Who is this girl to me, I imagined him saying, and why should I care?

I paused on the steps of the post office and unfurled my umbrella against the sun, which was far more brutal than the rain. I had not lied in the message to my mother; the country was resting in the lull of a ceasefire. This interruption in the civil war would not last long, but for the time being Sri Lanka seemed to be breathing deeply. The German and Australian tourists were returning to the beaches and when they talked about the Troubles, my colleagues at the Family Planning Association used the past tense. The unsettled future revealed itself only in the rumors that leaped from public water tap to market stall to kitchen table.

A bus hijacked. The mayor of a small town in the east kidnapped. New soldiers on the streets. Rumors that leaped to life briefly and then died.

When I arrived at the compound from the bus stop, I knew Nalini would be waiting for me at the gate. She’d have tea brewing up in the house, in a kitchen where geckos climbed the walls. That’s where we sat in the afternoons and ate curd and jaggery or biscuits from England.

“Did he wear western clothes?” she asked that afternoon, when I told her about a man who exposed himself to me on the Colombo bus.

“You know him?”

She laughed. “I know the type.”

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Lise Saffran We talked about the difficult older son who lived in Canada, the younger one who needed a wife. The Troubles. My mother.

“She’s in remission,” I said, in response to her worried look.

She nodded. “They’re making so many advances.”

Later, lying on my bed in the sultry dusk and listening to the cacophony of prayers from down the hall, I would hear my mother’s name.

There were six of us in one office at the Family Planning Association and at the beginning, until the iguana whom we had heard for days scampering on the roof finally peed through it onto a desk, I was the only excitement. The American Girl who came from my college the year before was slimmer than I and so my appetite for sweets provided early fodder for conversation, as did the fact that, at twenty, I didn’t have a boyfriend. Last year’s American Girl, I was told, was twenty-one and engaged.

On my second day, before my stomach had adjusted to the strong tea that was served every morning at ten o’clock, a research assistant named Sharmini pulled an atlas out of her desk and opened it to the page on which North America sprawled. Each of the familiar state shapes was a different color, like a child’s drawing.

“Point to where you live,” she commanded, leaning in to the desk.

Sharmini was young and modern. She wore a cotton skirt and blouse and had cut her black hair to shoulder length.

Everyone left his or her desk and gathered around to see. The brown arms of the two older women, left bare by the wrap of their saris, pressed against my pale upper arms, the cap sleeves of what I hoped was considered a modest blouse.

“Here,” I said, putting my finger down in Ohio. The town I lived in was swallowed up by the seam in the book.

“And your parents?” asked Mr. A.J. Benedict, who, nearing retirement, sat for hours each day at his desk with his eyes closed, swaying slightly, drinking tea. His sandaled feet were wide; his toes leathery and bent.

“There.” I traced my finger across the country toward the jagged edge of California. Five pairs of eyes followed. I had already explained that we lived far from one another, but there were no distances in Sri Lanka like the one I was showing them.

“Ahh,” said Mr. A.J. Benedict.

“Ahh,” said the others. They looked at me with sympathy and a tinge of curiosity.

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Lise Saffran “It’s normal in my country for children to move away from home after high school,” I said.

Mr. A.J. Benedict lowered himself heavily into his chair. “But who takes care of the parents when they become old?”

I thought about my mother sitting vigil by my grandmother’s bed and wished, for just a moment, that I could walk through those brightly colored pages to hers.

The night before I left for my first semester in college, my mother surprised me with a stack of home videos. My stepfather was in the kitchen making veal piccata for my farewell dinner.

She sat barefoot and cross-legged on the rug, sorting through tapes.

“Here’s one from when you were a baby,” she said and slipped it into the machine.

The screen filled with the image of a woman holding a child. My own fat cheeks were recognizable to me, but my mother was a wonder.

She was so happy then and so young. And now with my stepfather, that happiness had returned.

“God, you were so cute,” she breathed.

“Is Dad in any of these?” I asked.

She did not turn her head from the baby on the screen. “He liked to be behind the camera.”

I was starting college in less than twenty-four hours and the nostalgia was beginning to get to me. I searched the stack of tapes until I found one dated from the year that I was fifteen.

“Let’s watch this.”

In the video, my mother had to have been standing in our doorway, filming me as I climbed the stairs after school. I was dragging my purple backpack behind me. My dark hair was deeply hennaed, my clothes uniformly black. I looked up, saw her, and lowered my head until just my dark roots were visible. I didn’t say a word until I was right next to her and then the only thing I said was, “Too much time on your hands?”

“Vampira.” Stu set a plate of bruschetta on the coffee table in front of us.

Embarrassed, I was moved to confession. “We used to sneak out in back of the youth center every day and smoke pot.”

“I knew that,” said my mother and then in response to my look she added, “Well, the essence, if not the specifics.”

“Why didn’t you stop me?” How surprising it was to find that I had not been invisible after all. So much for the power of disguises.

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Lise Saffran “How would I have done that?” she asked. “Tied you up? I watched you to make sure you were all right, but I let you find your way. I still do.” She smiled. “You turned out fine.”

I hoped she was right, but I suspected I was still turning.

The next morning, on the way to the airport, I asked my mother if she had a sense of the time that had passed since those videos were taken, if she felt like she knew where it had gone. The drive took us through the fog-cooled city and the windows in the car radiated a chill.

“If I do it’s because of you,” she answered.

I studied her face. My mother’s hair was blacker than mine but our eyes were the same. When people said we looked alike, they were seeing our eyes.

“It’s hard to lose track of time passing when you have a child,” she said. “Especially an adventurous one like you. The years between when you turned ten and when you turned fifteen, for example. So many changes were packed into those five years, so much living.”

Her voice was wistful and later I would wonder if she knew already, or suspected, the lump that was growing in her body.

The ride was short and ended the way all my subsequent visits would, with a hug in the airport lobby, our skin washed out and naked under the fluorescent lights. The escalator, the moving sidewalk, all the machinery of travel, sped me away.

Without children, I devised other ways of keeping track of time.

The key, I decided, was to keep moving. My mother and stepfather’s elaborate meals, our partings and reunions, these represented days that blended together, indistinguishable one from the other in their connectedness and thus easily forgotten and as light as fireflies. A string of unique moments, memories on a chain, a trail that could be looked back upon and traced, those were the things that made a life, I thought. I was being drawn forward into the world and I didn’t believe I would ever yearn for those firefly days.

The temperature in the inland hills was low enough to produce fog, a substance that was as much a comfort to the English who retreated whenever they could to the mountain town of Nuwara Eliyah, as it was to me, a girl from the San Francisco Bay Area. The rain didn’t turn into steam as soon as it hit the ground as it did in the flatland, but remained, round, sweet drops of water. The milk inside of King Coconuts sold along the roadside, sucked through a straw after the top of the coconut was hacked off with a machete, was cool. Riding in the van next to the Crab Orchard Review

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Lise Saffran family planning workers, young unmarried women in matching white saris, I wore a sweater for the first time in weeks.

We traveled from town to town, interviewing women about their contraceptive choices and recording the answers in little brown notebooks. I’d had a pregnancy scare or two of my own and was an enthusiastic volunteer. The red clay roads were deeply rutted and if we tried to write in the van our notes veered wildly out of the lines.

Our driver took the mountain curves with the recklessness of an action figure, pounding his horn frequently and screeching past languid cows with a grim expression. We bounced into one another and occasionally knocked our elbows or heads against the steamed windows of the van. Every now and then our driver skidded the van to a halt, sprang out the door and charged up to a roadside Buddhist shrine. He tossed a few small coins into a slot designed for offerings, bowed three quick times and hopped back behind the steering wheel.

These pauses caused him to increase his speed, and thus our danger, but I did not begrudge him these moments in prayer when, shortly thereafter, we miraculously missed an elephant and his barefoot handler who were ambling down the center of a rain-slick road.

Over lunch packets of rice and curry, a young woman with light green eyes and skin the color of burned butter sang a song in Sinhalese.

When she was done she turned to me. “Now it is your turn.”

“Yes,” said another. “Sing an American song.”

I didn’t know the words to “Purple Rain.” The only song I could think of was “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and so that’s what I sang, trying to pitch my voice low, trying to sound like it was a song I’d sung often. Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.…

That night we stayed in the village. The family planning workers walked down to the well in pairs to bathe. I had seen both men and women draped in sarongs or cloths tied under the arms around the body, washing themselves in wells and rivers, and had marveled at their ability to maneuver the fabric so that their bodies remained covered as they cleaned.

“You can come with me to the well,” said Chandrika Ranawake, whose home we were staying in, two to a bed.

“I’ve never bathed in a well,” I said.

The house where I’d been staying in Nugegoda had a shower and I dreaded embarrassing myself, inexpertly allowing the cloth to drop around my ankles. I glanced at Chandrika’s cousin and our driver who sat impassive in front of the TV. 106 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Lise Saffran “We’ll help you,” said the green-eyed woman, her wet hair dripping a trail onto the pink blouse she had changed into out of her work sari.

They pulled me into the bedroom, followed by three other women and waited while I took off my dress.

“Wrap it this way,” said Chandrika, tying the thin cotton cloth around my breasts and knotting it under my arm. “It won’t fall off.”

Seeing my relief, they smiled.

“Come now.”

Not only the five women, but Ramesh the driver and Chandrika’s cousin, as well as her husband Gihan, escorted me down to the well.

Ramesh lead the way with a flashlight. I was in the middle, barefoot and naked under a thin cloth that extended only from above my breasts to my knees. Everyone was talking excitedly. Our driver was smoking. The night was moonlit and beautiful and I was hoping that the procession would never end.

The well was in a small clearing and the men veered off slightly to the side. They smoked and talked, calling out occasionally to the women, their eyes discretely elsewhere. Five pairs of hands pulled me forward onto the wet stones. Chandrika hoisted up a bucket and dumped it over my head.

“Yeeesh,” I called out and everyone laughed, including the men.

The women crowded around me, as synchronized as dancers, untying my cloth and holding it over me like a tent, retying it strategically, handing me soap, guiding my hands to the bucket so that I might splash my whole body with water.

“Squat down now,” whispered Chandrika and I did what I was told.

I splashed cold water between my legs. Around me, the conversation and laughter, the smoke rings drifting on moonlight, never ceased.

Under my feet, the stones, polished by foot after foot and endless buckets of water, were round and flat and as smooth as marble.

I had gone back to California for a brief visit before leaving for Sri Lanka. By then my mother’s hair had grown in, but it was finer now and more mixed with gray. In Ohio where I went to school, I often missed the coast and though I was about to depart for an island nation, I insisted we go over the mountain to the beach. She handed me the keys.

The illness had changed her from driver to passenger. She leaned her head back against the headrest as the curving highway rose toward the ridge. The car moved in and out of fog; we opened every window.

“Do these people you’ll be staying with have any children?”

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Lise Saffran “Two grown sons. One of them’s in Canada.”

“That’s a long way away.” Her voice was melancholy, as though she was already sympathizing with this foreign mother whom she would never meet. “You’ll call every week, right? And if we’re not home, you’ll leave a message on the answering machine.”

“Sure.”

The air on the other side of the ridge was heavy with salt. A surfboard-laden car passed us, honking.

She sighed. “I don’t know, Zoë. It seems so risky.”

“I promise I’ll be all right.”

She turned to look at me, eyebrows arched.

“Well, I’ll be extremely careful.”

“That’s better.”

The last year had proved to both of us the folly of making promises.

“I’ll call once a week,” I repeated, not knowing yet about the monsoons.

The fog burned off quickly and the beach sparkled. Fishing boats bobbed on the horizon. A small cluster of surfers chased the mediocre waves. A golden retriever ran back and forth along the sand, barking at gulls. We walked slowly, near the water’s edge. At one point, my mother stooped and retrieved a rock before it tumbled back out to sea. She took my hand, unfolded it, and placed the stone in my palm. It was the size of a silver dollar, worn smooth from years spent among waves and debris.

“Here,” she said, closing my palm on the stone.

The expression on her face was familiar to me. Pay attention, it said, there is magic being done. It was the look she got when she lit a candle in a Roman Catholic cathedral, or rubbed the belly of a Buddha, or lit the menorah. My mother believed in the potency of her own belief and any gods would do.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said and then I laughed because the beach was full of rocks like the one I held. “Do you want one, too?”

She smiled and walked on.

I stuck the stone in my pocket. When I left the next day, I dropped it in the top drawer of the dresser I used as a child. The memory of something, I had learned, was easier to carry than the thing itself. I had learned to travel light.

I thought of that stone while I stood in my bare feet near the well, bathed for the first time since I was a child by a woman who was not my mother. I did not wish I had taken it with me. I wished for a life 108 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Lise Saffran in which frequent cups of coffee, and shared meals and shared years erased the need for magic stones.

Sri Lanka was exactly halfway across the world from San Francisco.

I knew this because it was what my mother told me when, for the first time in my life, she asked me not to leave. She reminded me that it was a country at war. I leaned into the thick towel that Chandrika offered to stop my shivering. At the time I had thought, halfway across the world, halfway across the country, what’s the difference? Perhaps I had to come so far, I thought then, following the flashlight and my friends back to the small, lighted house, to see that I was less anonymous than I feared. My limbs glowed clean and strangely pale in the moonlight.

In my imagination I could hear God say, I know this girl because I know whom she belongs to, and who belongs to her.

On long flights, people often first start talking to their seatmate when the plane is close to landing and the threat has passed of an eight-hour conversation you can’t escape.

“We’ll be touching down at SFO in about twenty minutes,” said the pilot over the PA system.

I stretched my back as much as I could in the narrow seat and turned to the person next to me. She looked slightly older than I was.

Her skin was olive but under both of our eyes there was the same quarter moon of shadowed skin.

“Is California your home?” she asked.

I hesitated before answering, struck by how much there was to say. My things were in Ohio but this was the place where my mother was waiting for me. It was the place to which I suspected I would always return.

“Yes,” I said, deciding finally on the answer that was simultaneously most simple and most complicated. “I’ve been on an internship in Sri Lanka for the summer.”

“So this is the end of an adventure.” She reached under the seat to pull out a small case. She plopped it on her lap, undid the latch and lifted the cover, which turned out to be a mirror. “I’m going to a meeting with my spiritual advisor.” She said it casually, as if this were something one heard all the time on planes.

“Are you Buddhist?” I asked. After all those weeks among the Sinhalese, it was the first religion that came to mind.

“Sufi.” She unscrewed the top off a small pot of smoky green eye shadow and began applying a coat to each eyelid with a tiny wand.

“Is that Muslim?”

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Lise Saffran “Yes,” she said. “But a mystical kind. Not the kind of my parents.”

Ignoring the banking of the plane, she drew a liquid line of black under each eye. For the next few minutes she continued to decorate her face with a quality of attention that seemed to me surprisingly free of vanity, as if she were painting a picture or tending a garden. Finally, she rubbed the blue-red tip of a lipstick against her lips and turned her face toward me, transformed.

“Did your parents object?” I asked.

She nodded. “I am sure I made the right decision, however. Since I became a Sufi, everywhere I look I see the face of God.” I watched, absorbed, as she packed her make-up back into its tidy case. My adventure was far from over, I suspected. There were many things I had yet to see.

On my last day in Nugegoda, I had found a bakery that made westernstyle pastries and carried a chocolate sheet cake through the red mud streets to the office. We ate cake and listened to Michael Jackson cassettes from the cherished collection of a research assistant from Jaffna.

That night, though my plane was to lift off the island at the stroke of midnight, Nalini and Nihal drove me to the airport and waited with me. The streets were dark except for the occasional small fire or the sudden glint of a bicycle. The airport lobby was as bright as an operating room. They had placed their hands on me and prayed for my safe return and that I would find a nice place to rest at Heathrow.

Next to me, my temporary traveling companion stowed her makeup case under her seat. I leaned back and waited for the gentle drop, the moment where the plane on its descent into San Francisco looks as if it will land among the fish in the bay.

Later, I would read a small article in the international news section about bombs going off in Nugegoda and I would try for days to get through to my friends on the phone. I would long for Nalini’s voice but would be happy enough with the fax, when it arrived, telling me that she and Nihal were fine.

That day was still several months off. The plane hovered over the water, dropped again, and touched land. At that moment, the thing I longed for most was the glimpse of familiar country through a rounded window. The wheels scraped the runway and only when I exhaled did I realize that I’d been holding my breath. The woman next to me shifted and smiled. I grinned back at her. It seemed quite possible to me that the face of God would have lips the color of ripe bing cherries and be as familiar to me as the face of a friend.

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Emily Gray Tedrowe Claudia Leaving When the phone rang, Claudia was back in bed but had been awake since 4:20 a.m. Reese, her youngest daughter, had developed new nighttime antics that revolved around undressing herself, with pajamas and diaper then tossed happily over the crib rail so that a naked baby could talk things over with her stuffed animals, until shrieks of “Mama—wet! Mama! Wet!” ripped Claudia from sleep and brought her racing into the nursery. She’d started regular searches now for any brand of toddler pajamas that zipped up the back, and in a dark hour had even stared long and hard at an advertisement for a product described as a “crib tent.” One of Claudia’s many relentlessly cheerful infant sleep handbooks did contain a brief mention of an attention-craving behavior called “stripping.” This was in a chapter titled “Special Kinds of Night Waking Problems.”

Fumbling with the receiver, Claudia made a mental note to actually sit down and read one of these books, see if they offered any real solutions or advice for a twenty-month-old whose prime hours seemed to be from 2 to 5 a.m. However, she already knew—even now, when she was so tired she was past tired—that whatever the cause was, whatever was keeping Reese from sleeping through the night, it had to be Claudia’s own fault, had to be one of her many documented singleparent failings. Of this, she was certain.

“I knew you’d be up.” Ellen, of course. Her mother-in-law. “Here’s the latest: forget all about tarte tatin. Really. Forget it. You’ve got too much on your plate. We’ll go down to Magnolia and get cupcakes for the kids, some kind of pie for us. Nobody has a wheat or fruit allergy, do they?”

Claudia looked at Reese now next to her on the pillow, her tiny mouth open and pressed against a wet circle. Zonked.

“Then what am I supposed to do with eight pounds of Gala apples?” So they were pretending everything was normal between them. Were they?

“What? Oh, there’ll be some use for them. Make some sauce, why Crab Orchard Review

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Emily Gray Tedrowe don’t you. No, I’ll come over and do it next week. And another thing, do you still want him to wear that cape? Because I found something perfect last night—my old fox stole. It’s a rag, but it could be perfect. Can’t you see it? Sort of, I don’t know, wrapped around him sideways?”

“Maybe…but we ironed that big crest onto his cape already,” Claudia said, rolling her eyes at the memory. Reese stirred. “Family shield. He wears one and Lady Macbeth has one on her dress.”

“Oh, pooh. It would have been darling. But I can’t have anything ironed onto Mother’s fox. No, no, no. Now about the pie— suggestions?”

“Whatever you think looks good.” Claudia made funny fish faces at Reese, who, hair mussed, was sitting up now wearing a huge soft T-shirt that said RACE FOR THE CURE 1990. One of Paul’s.

“Fine.”

Before her mother-in-law could hang up, Claudia hurriedly said “Ellen? About last night, our talk? Should we—” “What? What? I think I see the cross-town.” Click.

Claudia carried Reese downstairs after a quick sniff at her diaper. Greg and Charlotte, ages eight and six, were on their stomachs in front of a PlayStation game. They answered “Morning,” without looking up, only after she had nudged each one with her foot. She buckled the baby into her highchair and sprinkled a handful of Cheerios onto the chair’s tray. Reese immediately set to lining them up in careful, obscure patterns before slowly, solemnly, placing the first one into her mouth.

Claudia switched on the coffee machine and grabbed the Times from the hallway, turning it over in case the front page had more photographs of that earthquake’s devastation in Turkey.

She gave an official two-minute warning and heard Charlotte scramble up to set the kitchen timer kept on top of the TV. When it dinged, Greg burst into the kitchen. “Mom, my play tonight!”

“I know, sweetie, isn’t it great?”

“We better practice that knife part again.” This from Charlie— the nickname had stuck despite the gender confusion it occasionally caused—who had been originally unhappy with her older brother’s moment of stage glory, and was now intensely bossy about rehearsing him. Claudia steered her away from snatching up a dagger (butter knife), and reminded her that Greg knew all his lines. Then she immediately reassured Greg of this, too, inwardly wishing there was someone who could do the same for herself.

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Emily Gray Tedrowe “What did Ms. O say about video cameras, did you remember to ask?

Maybe I’ll just bring the digital.” Claudia dealt out toast, cereal bowls and boxes, and set out four different kinds of jam plus peanut butter for Charlie. Not for the first time, she wondered what would possess a fourthgrade teacher to stage a class production—albeit a much abbreviated one—of Macbeth. Probably the gore appealed. And the witches. In any case, Claudia had been won over as soon as quiet Greg, fresh from first rehearsal, announced his new plan to become a world-famous actor and take them all to Disney World. Twice. She hadn’t seen him this excited about school since even before Paul had died.

When the kids had been corralled into putting their things into the dishwasher, sent to pick out clothes for her approval, and Reese settled into the downstairs playpen, Claudia went up the curved stairway to take her shower. Their Upper West Side duplex was awkwardly structured, with only one full bath, in the upstairs hallway just off the nursery. There was no master bathroom, and only a small toilet closet next to the kids’ shared room downstairs. (But at $595,000 for a doormanned three-bedroom on 72nd in 1997, she and Paul hadn’t given it a second thought.) Claudia made sure to send all guests upstairs when they asked for the restroom, sparing everyone Greg and Charlie’s wet and messy bathroom, toilet paper always missing, Reese’s (sometimes full) plastic training toilet on display.

She cleared the undersized tub of last night’s water pistols and rubber duckies, and one waterlogged Barbie, and stood motionless under the full force of hot water. I’m going to miss this shower, Claudia thought. It was one of the few in their building, she knew, that had somehow escaped summer’s mass installation of the dreaded water-conserving showerheads. She tried to remember what the Asheville house had in the way of water pressure. She hoped she had remembered to even check during the pre-closing walk-through. But it had all been done, the papers, the lawyers, in a happy haze she blamed partly on the celebratory mimosa she’d had at her sister—soon-to-be neighbor—Lauren’s home. And in the giddy thrill of completing something—the first thing!—entirely on her own.

Through clouds of steam, Claudia watched herself dry off in the mirror. Toothbrush in mouth, she combed out her short dark hair, winced, and then quickly tousled the dark grey streaks back into hiding.

And then froze, hearing Reese’s distinctive bellow, suddenly from next door. Bursting into the hall in a towel—“Hey! What’s the rule about carrying her on the stairs?”—Claudia stopped. She could hear the older kids still chattering downstairs, TV on.

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Emily Gray Tedrowe In the nursery, in a bright red pantsuit, Ellen continued her cooing over Reese on the changing table. Several of the baby’s fussiest outfits were draped over the glider-rocker. Her mother-in-law, in stocking feet, turned to size up Claudia, then gestured at the saggy T-shirt she was pulling off Reese.

“Really, Claudia.”

“What do you want me to do? It’s not like she doesn’t have pajamas.

And where’s Deirdre already?” But now it was coming back to her, vaguely, something the nanny had asked about last week. Ellen nodded encouragingly. “I gave her the day off, didn’t I,” Claudia said.

She went into her bedroom and yanked open a drawer. “Why did I—why would I do that? Today?” Charlie came in and sat cross-legged on the floor. Stocky and strong, her father’s build in miniature: now she had her backpack already strapped on, and gave a ta-da! gesture to her flowered over-alls dress and the cargo-style khaki pants bunched underneath. Claudia opened her mouth and then thought, never mind.

It’s a look. She gave the thumbs up.

“You said she had the procedure yesterday for her, you know, See Why Ess Tee,” Ellen called out.

“What’s a see tee, Mommy?”

“—And since you said you had an errand downtown, I thought the three of us could do that and then the bakery. Plus it never hurts to swing through Barney’s. Not that you’ll need any nice new things in…North Carolina.”

Claudia, one leg in her jeans, considered the tone of this, its chirpy deadpan quality. She muttered something to herself about the general inadvisability of giving a set of house keys to one’s mother-in-law and realized this meant that she and Ellen would be spending all day together, including Greg’s play and the dinner afterward. In the wake of what she had finally (“finally!” according to TJ, her best friend) told Ellen last night on the phone. That they would be leaving New York by January at the latest.

Ellen went on talking to Reese. “Almost two is getting too big for a crib, yes it is, yes it is, sweetie pie. Right?”

Charlie called out, “Nana, Mommy says in the new house we each get our own bedrooms. And mine has the better windows!” Claudia smiled tightly at her and held her breath.

In the nursery, sounds of a grouchy Reese being wiggled into an itchy dress. “Well, that surely is exciting, Charlotte,” Ellen finally said.

“Sounds like a beautiful house.”

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Emily Gray Tedrowe After Greg and Charlie were sent to the lobby to meet Rebekah, the sullen Goth teenager from 3B whom Claudia paid fifteen dollars a day to walk them to and from Pierson Academy (Greg) and West Side Montessori (Charlie), and Reese had been changed again (wailing) and strapped into her umbrella stroller, a conciliatory sippy cup in hand, and Claudia had found the keys, and her phone, she announced their collective readiness to depart. Ellen meanwhile had emptied the kitchen trash, made the kids’ beds, and left a note and check (forging Claudia’s signature) for the cleaning lady, suggesting firmly that Elena not again forget to vacuum under the radiators.

It was bright and windy out, crisp, the newspapers fluttering inside corner garbage cans and Robert the doorman wrapped in an orange scarf. They turned down his offer to flag a cab and walked two blocks over to the C stop instead, where Claudia let Reese out to hold Ellen’s hand, and dragged the stroller down behind her.

For three weeks after Paul’s death, Ellen had paid for a car and driver simply to sit outside Claudia’s building, or circle the block, a rental child’s car seat buckled in the back middle, waiting for the slightest indication that she or the kids needed to go somewhere. But none of them wanted to go anywhere, so after a few days Claudia started sending TJ out to the hired Lincoln, or her parents with the kids, for milk and toothpaste or more thank-you notes, to get driven a whole four blocks to the Associated on Broadway. And so that she might be able to fit in another small furious breakdown, while alone. It took six more months for Ellen to be persuaded of the ease and efficiency of the MTA—she had the suburban expat’s passion for her car, parked forever and uselessly in some exorbitant garage, and ventured down into the subway only because Claudia insisted on taking the kids everywhere that way.

Even now Ellen sat tense and wary as a perfectly calm homeless man snored away, slumped against a window. Claudia handed Reese her play cell phone and noted that they should get off at West Fourth because of the elevators.

“I suppose you’ll use Reggie?” Ellen said briskly. That would be Regina Friedland, Ellen’s realtor, who had helped Claudia refinance last year.

“Probably,” Claudia could only say, keeping to herself the three times Reggie had already brought prospective buyers over.

The subway car slowed to a stop and over the intercom came something loud and garbled.

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Emily Gray Tedrowe been thinking about this,” Ellen said, “The south. And what ‘we’? If you mean ‘you,’ say it, for heaven’s sake. You’ve been thinking about this, if it can even be called ‘thinking’—uprooting them, changing everything just as they begin to recover, and when Benna said they need stability—yes, Benna! What does she say?”

“She says a change of scenery might be good.” Actually, the kids’ therapist hadn’t said any such thing, only nodded thoughtfully when Claudia herself used that phrase.

“I agree! We’ll go to the Cape for a month. For the summer! I’ll put it all together.” Claudia shook her head. “And I can’t believe your sister Lauren—she finally got her way. I hope she’s happy.”

“I thought you’d be happy that we’d still be near family! How could I do this otherwise?”

“Fine. Fine.” Ellen brushed imaginary dirt off her pants. “I’m sure my grandchildren will do just fine in some backwards farm school, overcrowded, understaffed, some public school—” “It’s a good school system! It just won some kind of award!” But Claudia recoiled at the withering force of Ellen’s tone, which assailed her main weak spot. Both she and Paul had been prep-schooled, and with the usual mix of pride and guilt had willingly paid up for their own kids to follow suit. And now an image of Greg’s determined young Ms. O came to mind, and the late night emails she sent to parents, with relevant Web links to age-appropriate Shakespeare word games, should parents and children want to explore these together as the class play approached. So how, exactly, would leaving this be the right thing? For the kids? For her? Claudia felt a sharp pang of doubt, of real fear. What were the things to say, to make Ellen, to make herself, calm and sure?

Last night, Claudia had tried to describe Asheville and the mountains—but how to explain those mountains, their solid beauty, their cool dark presence? She’d said something about the pale yellow cushions in the window seat in the house on the corner lot that Claudia knew she would buy even before they finished pulling into its driveway. She’d tried to conjure for an unlistening, shattered Ellen the way the kids had run around the farmer’s market on Labor Day with their cousins, shrieking in delight, filling a cart with ears of summer’s last corn, and the way she, Claudia, had been startled by the first hint of happiness since it had happened; so funny to find something it took her a while to recognize as peace there in the parking lot on the north side of this new city, with the sun glare and the crowds and her sister tugging on her sleeve.

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Emily Gray Tedrowe She turned to say something more along these lines to Ellen, but her mother-in-law was now touching her ring fingers very gently to the outside corners of her eyes, struggling to compose herself. Claudia stopped.

They got off at West Fourth Street.

Reese screeched with happiness when she caught sight of the basketball court on Sixth Avenue, so they paused at the chain link fence and watched a few minutes of the pick-up game, teenagers smoothly executing highlight film shots, and the men who chased after them, their steamy breath puffed out in wispy clouds.

“It’s really beautiful down there,” Claudia said quietly. “I know you can understand why it would make sense, maybe not the leaving part, but for us to move to Asheville.”

“I can’t understand why anyone would move to Asheville!” Ellen exclaimed. But something about this, in all its utter Ellen-ness, made Claudia laugh out loud. Reese clapped. And even Ellen smiled, a little.

Today all of lower Manhattan was turned outside for lunch hour, it seemed, women wearing their heeled leather boots for the first time this season, and Con Ed workers in blue helmets and matching pants; the usual array of pierced teens in homeboy jeans; cell-phoned men in suits. Everyone was carrying an oversized Starbucks cup; everyone kicked through the first fallen leaves on the pavement. Claudia thought of Paul, how when weather like this arrived he’d start planning a justbarely-ironic family trip to go apple picking, somewhere upstate. She bit down hard on a familiar wave of sorrow, and bent to button up Reese’s coat, Charlie’s reluctant hand-me-down. Reese, who had known her father for just ten months and one week.

Specific times Claudia had missed Paul so much she had thought she would simply burst: September 11th, and the clenched weeks of fear that followed; the time Charlie had said, “But she’s just some dumb black girl” about a classmate and Claudia had spanked her without explanation; that week in March when all of them had a stomach flu and their building lost power for eighteen hours; when Greg had said “it’s on me, Mom,” and proudly counted out his bills and change at the coffee shop; the day she’d discovered she could squeeze back into the size-4 black Levi’s, the pair oblivious Paul had always, always complimented.

Mostly, then, she’d just called Ellen. Across the park, willing to be over in a flash, Ellen.

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Emily Gray Tedrowe the news came of Paul’s death, unreal, horror-drenched hours that unfolded in a sickly blur of grief and oddly pressing practical matters, decisions to be made. That first morning, after someone—a neighbor?— had taken the children away, Ellen and Dale (Paul’s father) arrived in disarray and shock. The three of them wept, and they made coffee.

They made phone calls. People began to come over, bringing things to eat. Claudia’s parents were on their way to the airport.

At one point, Claudia saw Ellen rush upstairs to their bedroom.

She followed, stood in the doorway and watched her mother-in-law look around wildly, tear at the bedclothes, ransack piles of dirty laundry. Then she must have found it, what she had been searching for, because she held up a soft men’s sweatshirt and then pressed it hard against her face. But immediately let it drop, in dismay.

Claudia moved to her side. “God. I’m sorry, that’s—me. He gave it to me. I—I wear it to the gym.” Ellen managed to nod, and Claudia held her. They had held each other, there on the bed.

Claudia led them east on grungy Waverly Place, past a new Belgian French fry place and the run-down Episcopal chapel, past the chess-players corner of Washington Square Park and then the looming burnt-umber façade of Bobst Library, to a squat NYU administration office. Ellen and Reese set up to wait near a bench in the lobby while Claudia navigated the long lines and confusing array of teller-type windows, always asking the wrong person where and how she could get an official copy of her certificate in Appraisal Studies; a superfluous degree, she admitted privately, but one that only took up nine months of class work and provided some smattering of credibility for the finehome furnishings buyer job that Lauren had finagled her from an acquaintance. Flexible hours, little travel, decent benefits.

More of a distraction, really, a way to put down roots. True, it had been money that first sent Claudia looking to move out of the city. One afternoon at her lawyer’s office, sitting beside her father, she had seen the figures in a new light—the mortgage, taxes, tuition payments—and had realized with a cold flush of terror the utter responsibility she would now bear for their finances. Of course, she was lucky. She could have help, and had had several offers. Ellen had said as much, again, last night.

But those pages of numbers, how different they looked, how blankly apparent in a way they had never seemed when Paul was alive, when the two of them would heartily complain about the property tax hike but then just write the check and move on. That first startle of insight at 118 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Emily Gray Tedrowe the cost of her New York life—reinforced, perhaps, by her father’s soft outblow of breath when he saw just what Montessori really meant—had set off in Claudia a cascade of questions about the future.

Over coffee, her friends would ask, hushed, hesitant, But…the insurance?

Yes. It bought time. They wouldn’t have to worry about money for some years, thanks to a good policy, and the life insurance lump sum— not to mention the voluntary extra payments made by Paul’s company, shocked, eager to stave off legal unpleasantness, who had ordered him to fly back to New York the night he died rather than cover the extra costs of a hotel and the airline’s charge for changing a reservation, and so caused him directly or indirectly (certainly one or the other, thought Claudia) to be in the livery cab that flipped, and then incinerated, after skidding out on an icy airport access road near Detroit, killing instantly both Paul and a Haitian driver named Jean-Lyn Megraux, who were each, as it turned out, fathers of three young children.

“Disgusting,” Ellen said cheerfully, after they were led to a table at DoJo’s on the corner of Mercer.

The bored waitress slapped down three grimy menus and Reese held one up in awe. “My pasta!”

“OK, honey, but let’s see what they have. Can she get some kind of plain buttered noodles? And I’ll have the veggie burger, no fries.”

“We don’t have fries,” the waitress said.

“Just a salad for me,” Ellen said. She waved off everything the girl was saying about tofu and tempeh with “A normal salad, please.”

Claudia studied her mother-in-law, who had pulled out HandiWipes and was scrubbing at every surface that surrounded Reese. Just after Greg was born, Ellen and Dale had retired to New York, trading the enormous Queen Anne in Scarsdale, Paul’s childhood home, for an elegant classic-six just off Park Avenue. And that was always how Ellen referred to their move, “retiring to New York,” as the host of a waning dinner party might suggest guests retire to the living room. Claudia remembered those first rocky months, with Dale at loose ends, nothing to do, and Ellen overwhelmed by big city charity fundraisers and constant Metro-North rides to lunch with friends; how she and Paul had had to delicately decline, often with a lie, too many invitations to brunch, museum outings, and other get-togethers.

Paul tried, but he lost it once after Dale called him at work, miffed that Paul hadn’t yet responded to a forwarded email joke he and Ellen had sent earlier that same day. He raged at home about feeling like their Crab Orchard Review

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Emily Gray Tedrowe goddamn teenager again. So Claudia took charge, found ways for Ellen and Dale to come over just before Greg’s naps, a pre-planned way to cut short the coffee and danish, or, more often, just met them out on her own, with Greg in the Baby Bjorn, on the front steps of the Met or for a walk to the duck pond. She accepted Paul’s abashed thanks for this duty, prodded for them after especially trying visits where Dale would list everything he could think of that made him miss the suburbs or Ellen would wonder aloud why women Claudia’s age dressed so sloppily. Back then, she’d been polite. Carefully cheerful, and never too open.

Now, though. Claudia half-listened to Ellen relay, with an air of deliberate denial, some gossipy situation brewing in one of her many board committees, took in her perfect Elizabeth Arden blowout and pearl-and-diamond studs. She alone knew about Ellen’s two eye-lifts, and plans for a third. She knew that Ellen had contemplated leaving Dale once when the boys were teenagers, when he was raising his voice to her too often, and that Paul had asked her opinion about proposing to his college girlfriend, gone so far as to take one of her heirloom rings in to be appraised, before deciding not to. “What a dud,” Ellen had remembered grimly. “Horrid buckteeth that were sure to be genetic.” Claudia had shivered with guilty delight, imagining how this must have humiliated Paul. She chose not to ask Ellen what had been said before she became his fiancée, or whether her own reworked sapphire was from that same ring.

Claudia knew it was hardly out of the realm of possibility for a woman to know exactly her grandchildren’s rapidly changing sizes, teachers’ names, and favorite TV characters. As well as their food preferences, best friends (variable), and the rigid minutiae of bedtime routines. Many grandmothers must be that way, that kind of indispensable. But how many mothers-in-law, she wondered, holding out her Coke for Reese to sip from, could claim such intimate status in a son’s wife’s self?

Even TJ wasn’t immune to how rapidly Ellen had climbed into the inner circle, and made snarky but grain-of-truth jokes when she was bumped off Claudia’s other line for Ellen’s calls. When Claudia prefaced too many sentences with “But Ellen thinks.…”

Somehow, it had become the norm—no, a need—for Ellen to be inside everything. And not just because of their shared loss, not just because in odd moments her mouth twisted up at one corner just as Paul’s had, times that made Claudia heartsick but somehow thankful.

One night this past February, a bad time, just after the first 120 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Emily Gray Tedrowe anniversary of his death, Ellen had come over to baby-sit while Claudia went to a going-away party for a friend she’d once worked with at Sotheby’s. They put the kids down together, and then Ellen made her change into slinkier pants, strappier heels. She’d gotten on the phone to order sushi (“nothing raw, do you understand me?”) and waved a reluctant Claudia towards the door.

At one in the morning Claudia was back, drunk and weeping, huddled on the couch and telling Ellen how she’d let herself go home with an old co-worker, how they made out fast and sloppy in the cab and then in his apartment, how she’d taken off almost but not everything and tried to force herself to go through with this, the first sexual encounter since Paul, and how there had been a detached running commentary in her head the entire time, noting all the strange differences of another man’s mouth, body, and how kind he was when she’d stopped just short of screwing him, and how he’d gone out to Madison to hail her a taxi and then said that he would get her number, and call.

“But it doesn’t mean he’ll call,” Claudia said, overcome by shame, sadness, and glee. Ellen studied her. “He just feels sorry for me,” she whispered, hiccupping. “Because of—Because I’m a widow.”

“Not too sorry, apparently,” Ellen said, gesturing to the camisole under Claudia’s sweater, which was inside out.

“Do you think this was about sex, or would he want to date me? Oh Christ, I can’t go on a fucking date.” Claudia scrubbed at her face, and looked around the orderly living room. “You cleaned, didn’t you.”

Her mother-in-law shrugged. Paused to think. “Well, why don’t you ask around, see if people think he’s available, and interested…You could put the word out—isn’t that how it’s done, these days?”

Caught up by the careful way that Ellen spoke this, and by her intent gaze down to her hands, lying still in her lap, Claudia’s heart constricted. In an instant vision, one that humbled her, she saw Ellen whole, saw the shimmering expanse of her love for Claudia, and the exact dimensions of what it took to be this generous, at this moment. It was as if Ellen had gently put aside the claims of her own motherhood, because such a thing had somehow been asked of her.

“It doesn’t matter,” Claudia said. “It doesn’t matter, because I don’t want to see him again. I’m not ready.” She sniffed hard to emphasize this, and Ellen gave a small flicker of smile, though the older woman stayed focused on a few rings she was twisting and straightening.

“Well. You took that first step, anyway.” Now Ellen seemed more herself. Surely soon she would begin to wonder aloud why Claudia Crab Orchard Review

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Emily Gray Tedrowe refused to reupholster her old living room set in a nice floral chintz.

“Actually,” Ellen went on, confidentially, “if you did plan to see him again I think it would be very smart if you—you know, googled him first.” She sat back, looking pleased with this advice, until Claudia snorted, and then broke into laughter. “What? What’s wrong with that? There was a whole segment on Dateline!”

Claudia could only laugh, which somehow shaded into weeping, and when Ellen hugged her then it was like a puzzle piece finding its place: the shape of this singular comfort, perfectly fitted against her pain.

At Dojo’s the late-afternoon sunlight fell across their table.

Reese had picked at her spaghetti, then eaten two boxes of raisins that Ellen had produced. At the moment, she was busy transferring ice water from one glass to another, using a straw and her forefinger.

“Will it help if I say I’ve got some doubts? OK, then. OK? You know I do. Jesus, the way my sister and I used to fight, when we were in school.…And everything you do for us—” “Don’t do me any favors, Claudia. You might be less concerned with my feelings, and more with making good decisions for—” Here Ellen gave a sharp nod at Reese.

“If you’re mad at me, that’s one thing. But don’t go dragging them into it to make your point, all right?”

“They are my point. These children need to be in their home, they need family—” “Lauren is family!”

“—They need me.” Ellen finished with a slight quaver.

“I know. I know they do, and we will make that happen, I promise. We’ll visit constantly, and I’ve already been planning out the holidays.”

“Or why don’t we have the children just split their time? Summers here, or every other weekend.” Ellen spoke now with a new, hardedged lilt to her voice. “Isn’t that the usual arrangement? You know, when there’s a custody battle?” She tried to laugh this off, and gathered Reese into her lap.

Claudia didn’t know what to say. The fact that Ellen could say such a cruel thing, even in the form of a joke, crumbled something inside her.

“I can’t—I can’t believe you could compare—” Reese looked back and forth between her mother and grandmother, and then started to cry.

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Emily Gray Tedrowe it’s all right. Everything’s all right. Aren’t we silly? Why is Nana being so silly?” She reached out to rub Claudia’s arm, and shook her head at herself, ashamed, and a little older now—just forget all that, please— and began to sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

They stood on the corner of Broadway and Fourteenth, waiting for the light, heading back home. Traffic had picked up, and the day had thickened with a tired, dim chill. Without discussion, they had passed up any shopping, except for a quick stop at the bakery for tonight’s desserts, and a black-and-white cookie for Reese, who was now asleep in the stroller. Claudia ran through all that had to be done: early dinners for girls, helping Greg with his costume, making it to the auditorium on time. She tried to count back the weeks to the last time Reese had slept through the night and cursed herself, again, for never sticking to a proper nap schedule.

Having noticed their confusion, Ellen offered directions in perfect German to a young tourist couple, who thanked her profusely. They’d clucked over the baby and then held hands and jogged across the street to Union Square Park, camera bags bouncing, turning back once to wave before melting into the crowds.

“There’s a spa in Asheville, downtown, called the Grove Park Inn? I took a brochure for us.” Claudia said, feeling shy. She took a deep breath.

“I thought we could get seaweed facials, the kind you like? When you come to visit, I mean.”

Ellen was surveying the backed-up lanes, watching for the light to signal. She took a long time to respond. “I suppose I shouldn’t take it as an insult. The suggestion I could use it?” She lightly brushed at her own finely-lined cheek, throat. She squinted against a gust of sharp autumn wind. From behind, a record store’s flashing sign sent orange stripes of light moving across the pavement where they stood. “Well, you’re right, and we all need a little pick-me-up. You should remember to call ahead for a reservation. If it’s any kind of good place, they’ll book up fast for the holidays. A-ha! Finally, green!” And then she pushed the stroller, with gusto, into the crosswalk. “Claudia?” Ellen called back, charging ahead. “What on earth are you waiting for?”

Later that evening the school auditorium was packed, standing room only. A number of wheelchairs were parked on the precarious decline in both aisles. Stuck between the pages of each program was a consent form notifying the audience that tonight’s Crab Orchard Review

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Emily Gray Tedrowe performance was being taped for future use in the school’s publicity, and that discussions were “ongoing” with a number of cable access programs.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair! Hover through the fog and filthy air!”

Three little girls, one Claudia knew was Cintra White, Greg’s crush, crouched at the corner of the stage, and shrieked their surprisingly eerie witch curses. She felt Dale shift again, next to her, under the weight of Charlie on his lap.

“It’s only 45 minutes, the whole thing,” she whispered. He made a face that said really?, and then hey, not bad. Claudia agreed, still shaken from what happened when they had arrived.

Pinned to the top of the curtains was a large brown-paper banner collectively made by Greg’s class: The Tragedy of Macbeth, By William Shakespeare, it read, in off-kilter painted cursive. Since they’d been early to get good seats, Charlie had spent several minutes impressing her grandparents by pointing to and then slowly sounding out each word on the sign. She knew Greg’s character’s name already, and was given a brief run-down on Shakespeare as the world’s most famous writer.

But when Charlie had looked up with her sweet frown of concentration, and said, “So what’s ‘tragedy’ then?” all three of them, Claudia, Dale, and Ellen went silent, caught off-guard. Parents bustled past, filling the rows, waving or calling greetings to one another.

“Tragedy means that a very, very sad thing has happened,” is what Ellen finally told her. Charlie took this in with no further comment, and shortly the school orchestra started. In the darkening room, Claudia saw Dale rest his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

Now, to her left, Ellen bent over Reese playing in the aisle, handing her toys and books. Occasionally she’d look up to watch Greg marching stiffly up and down in his cardboard crown, and would mouth his lines along with him. Claudia had no doubt that her mother-in-law had pulled out her leather-bound Collected Works to prepare for tonight’s performance.

“Get thee back! No man born of woman can challenge me!” her son cried, crouched before the avenging Macduff (played by a young Asian girl named Marie), and Claudia grinned, her cheeks burning in the overheated room. My baby, she thought, and had to stifle an urge to stand up and cheer.

The last few moments of the play featured Macduff explaining triumphantly “I was born of a cesarean section!” to a Macbeth who turned and shook one fist. Rats!

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Emily Gray Tedrowe Finally, Greg’s de-crowned head was held aloft, thanks to some complicated stage effects involving a sheet and a stepstool, and the actors bowed to their standing ovation.

“Nice touch, his tongue hanging out,” Dale said, but Claudia was glad the girls had been distracted.

After congratulating Greg’s harried, hoarse teacher, and wiping his fake blood off with cold cream, and taking forty digital pictures of the star with everyone in the cast, Claudia found herself alone with Ellen on 90th Street. The kids had gone ahead with Dale in the car; they would catch a cab and follow. Claudia’s feet hurt and she had no idea why she’d agreed to a dinner party tonight, with Greg’s godparents and a few other friends of Ellen and Dale’s.

“I think I see one,” Claudia said, stepping off the curb. It was only 6:30 p.m. and already dark out. “No—shit. Off duty.”

Ellen was staring, a Burberry scarf wrapped almost to her ears. “I can’t remember Paul ever saying anything about the south, one way or the other. What would he think of this?”

“Maybe he’d be glad the kids could get a chance to…” But Claudia trailed off. She wouldn’t do that, use him in that way. “It doesn’t matter what he would think,” she said gently, knowing how hurtful the words were.

Ellen shut her eyes. “Don’t do this to us,” she whispered. “To us,” she said fiercely, now looking at Claudia.

What was her line? Claudia stepped forward without thinking to grip her mother-in-law’s shoulders and kiss her firmly on the mouth, the dry, closed lips of both women pressing together, making everything stilled in the rush of evening traffic up Amsterdam.

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James McKean Panama Hat When I tug the brim and glance over my shoulder at the mirror hung on the hallway closet door— wool coats and bad light falling on vinegar-washed floors— I see my grandfather startled a moment and jowly, lips for once without their Chesterfield brought near to kiss me. I remember his shiny hands, the skin transparent when he placed them on my shoulders and walked me into the slow dominoes-filled afternoon.

My mother would return at five.

Even then I knew that no matter how well his new wife baked, my mother had banished them to this apartment and my two visits a year.

A grandfather, who pays his rent in cash,

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James McKean who waits down the hall, shoes shined, a large sleeve-gartered, solitary man my mother told me to forget, buried I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know where but rising now, a Panama hat hiding one eye, the other in the mirror, looking at me.

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Derek Mong Uncles Tonight’s insomnia consists of this: my mattress stacked three uncles deep, tuned into their snoring baritone. I am two within a row of hairy legs, lumber-like and sleeved in sweat, each one set upon by disease: DVT, OCD, schizophrenia fill men who turn their torsos close, hold a pulse to mine and liquefy like daylight filling a vase. Do I embrace the oldest whose vision dimmed after fifty years of living deaf, those first months punctuated by afternoons when, left to his quietude he’d bawl and howl until an uncle, aunt or family friend would kiss his cheek, clasp a hand? Three days ago I did, his body like a somnambulist’s: one jutting wrist to guide its narrow frame. We shook, he sat, I shook to think my sight might turn itself inside out, a porthole I’ve been walking from, then settle into a stainless night. Does he still scream, upset to find his world reduced by thirds, or is anger merely an afterthought, wasted on a man who must, one morning at a time, return to the mental life: covers drawn over his voice? Another uncle on my father’s side let his skin cancer metastasize until narrow continents bridged his lower back and shoulder blades. One Sunday night they burst, black and sputtering, till blood loss unloosed a daze of memory he’s been swimming in to date. I helped tally up the few assets we could put toward his medical bills (among them krugerands, a row of silver bars) while his legs swelled with fresh thrombosis. In the aftermath he described his near-death experience while splicing carbuncles from his calf, called it dreaming with your eyes plucked out, then left to tourniquet

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Derek Mong his knee. He used a plastic shopping bag. Lately, when I return from the grocery store and scrunch the bags into themselves, my daydreams wander into hypotheticals. Example: Do uncles claim the Y chromosome, piggybacking bloodlines my parents set down, or do they sleep inside my REM cycle, recurrent as tectonic aftershocks, as hail? Do our genes magnetize till males (circle/arrow) point, en masse, in one direction? The answers narrowed when my last uncle’s paranoia (a by-product of insomnia) turned into foreign whispers. Recently we split a hotel room and, waking just after five a.m., he stripped his PJs off, filled the bathtub up, and read a dayold newspaper. The paper dripped, he soaked and reminded me his basset hound had not been fed in Oregon. These days we never talk, though as my uncles go, he’s grown controlled, charting his sleep’s length in dayto-day graphs and journals—pages opening to taller black bars, each set up like a domino, like afternoon shadows cast by men mid-stride, my uncles.

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Lenard D. Moore Reunion Joke Great-great-aunt Sarah squeezes me in century-old arms; her straw hat blots out Labor Day sun. A medley of voices lifts into smoke of grilling steaks.

A heavy old man in suspenders gums boneless chicken breast, spoons more greens onto his overflowing plate, sits breathless in a borrowed funeral home chair.

Greetings over, we gather around a table filled with fried chicken, fish, barbecue, cornbread, collards, deep pots of corn. Sweet potato pies wait beside a barrel of iced lemonade.

A minister bows his head: “Let this food nourish our bodies, nourish us fully, oh God. Amen!”

Steam rises from blue enamel pots and pans.

“Your great-grandma Eva was laughing so hard one time,” Great-uncle George says to my daughter, “her teeth fell 130 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Lenard D. Moore right on the ground and she hid them with her foot, corns on her toes.”

My daughter can’t stop laughing.

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Josh Morse Stutter Sadness begins for my brother and me the night he wakes me, asking me to come see Princess Leia in the living room, by the wood stove.

I watched a twig’s shadow scratch on his tongue while he struggled to mouth the words, his stutter grown in the night the way all darkness grows— by blotting out the light, my brother’s tongue confounded. I pieced together each particle, the vocal fragments, to make a picture of Nathan watching the movie, how still he sat when she walked on the screen, how he swooped his head with Luke Skywalker swinging on the rope that carried him and Leia to safety, her hair rolled to pinwheels on the sides of her head.

Her voice was fluid, so sure of itself.

I rose with him to go find her.

The moon shone bright, lighting the way.

We ran to keep our backsides safe, but no one was there. Empty blocks of moonlight.

Nathan searched the kitchen, the bathroom, the wood box with spiders, the cupboard under the sink, the terrible dark-space behind the couch, stuttering the whole time—she must be there.

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Josh Morse Finally I opened the wood stove to stoke the fire, and that’s when his tongue froze completely.

The firelight dancing the way it does, we sat and watched, two brothers silent, Nathan searching now for a way to explain his failure to the brother he still adored, and I, the elder, who couldn’t hear the silent wrangling of flame twisted like boys’ bodies tangle over most anything: magnifying glass, box of rocks.

In the orange light that washed over the spell of silver and shadow, my brother became invisible while I knelt, hating my own failures: a boy with a defect of disbelief.

I remained oblivious as Leia must have been when Nathan saw her, kneeling, head bowed as if in prayer.

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Josh Morse

Spooked, Or a Tale Spun of Your Origins for my nieces Not from the oak leaves, sapped to a five-fingered wither on the power line’s buzz, breathless as a corn husk, nor the cricket’s unreal stammer, their updrawn crescent in twilight; not from the open-throated teens queuing at Frontier Drive-In, tall boys rattling chew-spit and mint, nor Noah’s Ark, the petting zoo down the road, whose look-only lion’s roar we marked meat-time by, suppertime, tabletime, and hunger; not your mother’s leg swinging, nor her foot-into-stirrup, nor from the sudden hush as we watched her settle in, soft like she’d always been there, or wasn’t there at all; not the Un-God; not a mouse; not your mother’s pumpkin hair, or the Return of the Stallion; not the rapture, exactly, but a scrap of paper, a sheaf of words, sickle in her eye’s periphery, reared in the dappled mare’s mind.

Your mother’s hair spooked to a smolder above her nape, the instant shock my eye gathers about her still, wondering what could it have said? as the mare galloped homebound, dust-spray flung up behind them, and a two-toned scream, part-girl, part-horse, dopplered between the spent quills of the Doug firs and we ran after her, girls, through the riddle of dust and mounting wreckage, through the years of the needled eye, the moldering distance.

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Danika Paige Myers Burning the Hives My brother in the meadow wears a cloak of bees.

Under the bees, he is sheathed in white gauze.

No room in our house has walls as white as the white beneath that hungry fabric of bees. My brother in a cloak of bees stands taller than his bones.

The weight of his head buzzes around in a cloud. He is unpapering bees from the hive, dressing a thick tissue of bees over his shoulders.

These bees cling there, droning, droning on. He teems.

This lifetime of bees has papered his skin, opened a crisp veil of brown, heavy bees over his arms: his skin was pale.

But a cloak of bees wears over his days.

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Thu Anh Nguyen Heir During 1997–98, more than 300 cotton farmers committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh. Most of the 300 dead were the male heads of families who were unable to pay back loans. In accordance with Indian policy, the government pardoned the debt of hundreds of families.

As if I could lift this, I made a promise to make things different (more fun, more lively), as if I could lift myself above you and not be pulled down.

For you, I have shed daily afternoon tears of frustration, wet paper with my determination to get it right, my promise to you to be smart, to be a good girl.

My ties to you did not break that afternoon when you were cut down; you thought sparing us the trouble meant the same thing as sparing us you. Some fool told you that saving us meant passing on, meant not passing on debt. But everything is handed down— you can pass on this: the memory of dinner-time games of High/Low

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Thu Anh Nguyen (my high was always a joke you told); or debt; or unfulďŹ lled promises. And weight too, even that is passed on, so that there is no way to get beyond, rise above this; and I am impossibly heavy.

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William Olsen A Godfather The trees behind this dive are in the dark, The windows of the houses lit unknowns, It’s raining now, the roof is corrugated, Some blind cane on it is tapping Morse code So fast and regularly it comes out tinny, Rain lowering the sky into the ground.

Why should women love my serious unhappiness?

If I shrug my shoulders at myself can’t They see me doing that? Do ever we relate To each and all? Rain falls and follows and falls As if the present could curl up in the fireplace, As if the future could as well be ashes, As if the past could malinger out in the open For everyone to see like a wall of sombreros!

The hope is one day love will find new loves Without conditions, no gesture too late, Without the unspoken disappointments Instantaneously deafening us to each.

All families ripped apart have magically healed, Tables haloed with faces, new festive orders, Funky festoons—gold cardboard-paper chains— It’s Chinese New Year’s in a Midwest Mexican Dive and the walls are all sombreros, We’re as multicultural as famine and plague— We are a family but the family doesn’t get it, It is teeth needing braces, it is an overbite, It is a child, her single mother, our friend, And my loving childless partner and childless me, It is a nitwit among conspiratorial giggles, Staggering like a beast back into tenderness At the exact center of everything that matters: Threesome I love, family I’m not a part of, 138 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

William Olsen Everything past family: I must not go there, Already I am there.…Such drawn-out meals, Lian my goddaughter assailing a burrito As if inside were the prize of happiness, Daneen the mother eating almost invisibly, Nancy my wife my sister my strange selfOf-a-lover asking about Lian’s lovelorn school.

Can I envy a gender except I’m such a fool, What didn’t I learn that I should have—Lian hides Behind her mother, again, again, no mother Is too big for her, there is no mother that Big and I am, I think, the father from whom Daughters must be hidden, to reappear, I’m happily the one who doesn’t fit, the male, No matter how you try to make it work, Despite our best collective selves, it’s true— Such mysteries here, all of them so old.

Here comes the waitress who is our absentee Parent because now it is best for us to regress— Which I love…our anarchy, slicing up Napkins into snowflakes, fashioning Concordes From menus, play where our family started, Play where she entered her world and made a home, Because we let her tear up anything in sight Just to hear ourselves laugh with that laugh, In Guangzhou, China, our four-star White Swan Hotel— She tore up the fancy paper napkins and then The pages of the hotel’s visitor’s brag book, Shredded the Queen of England and the President, She made short order of each and every King And Queen and movie star and global luminary, Shredded to human confetti for hilarity, Our profligate delight in harmless chaos— Now she’s a chrysalis of self-consciousness.

Not too long ago she held my hand at the zoo For the dopey peaceable kingdom to see, That ad-hoc bond as tenuous as breath, As crucial as same. Even the giraffes’ Infinite tongues won’t tell this or the next Moment’s story of how far every moment’s Crab Orchard Review

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William Olsen Sympathies deepen, these leaning giraffes Inclining all by themselves—no matter what Words now come to a child’s a lover’s a mother’s lips— To their hunger—God—the world is lit with it—.

Toying with tamales, I understand how to look Lost and hopelessly preoccupied If that serves preconceptions—love is attendant.

If only love weren’t also the great rememberer For the slight, the disinterested query That turns on a dime into a peremptory, Dismissive, disingenuous, refractory Smile and then only the rain is listening.

And then even the nearest could be a stranger.

Then even that’s over, the check is written, Then dinner and another comes along.

All this time others have made my time for me.…

Ever on that jag of being unappreciated, I must be preternaturally understanding, Aspire to become the happy telepathist, Bring kindness to love, live resentment down, Seek out womanhood for mysteries it teaches, Revere the child and her mother no less, And if the social world is a lullaby Eventually we must get to go to sleep But first it must be that we will have a meal, It must be that hunger must have families.

Even a godfather is as an infantile hunger What with our bodies going away and how From sky comes night and ravening day.

All this time hunger has gathered so many, All this time we have had bread to hold, Hearing greetings even in every goodbye— Lian, Nancy, Daneen, familiar graces, Faces we come across, our own we know the least, Actions we fathom no more than our own, Such secrets hidden sometimes in the open, Sometimes safe there in the din of families, A deep-sea-submarine-clanging from the kitchen, Tintinnabulation of forks and spoons And endlessly replenished pitchers of ice water, 140 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

William Olsen Stacks of plates balanced in the crooks of arms Rustling skeletally without the whole contraption Of a budget-evening-out coming down, Graceful waitresses lost smiling to their work, Families in some sort of boisterous revery Inclining to a mongrel culinary experience.

Yet also that detectable look in individuals, That special family time warp each to his own, Nobody else’s, while the general voice Could be a deaf collective answering machine, Each family a circle of eating, talking mouths, Closed, open, smiling, breathing, grimacing, Deafening sighs, sub rosa mumbles, laughter, Sometimes in chorus, sometimes grotesquely askew— What could exist so apart that Lian looks A captive jewel of six middle-aged doting eyes, Bezeled yet always released by loving arms— Orphan, single mother, two default…what?

Godmother as in fairy? Godfather as in thug?

Just how authoritative is authenticity— Our clarity addled by the plainest emotions, Tenderness more baffling than all the rest.

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William Olsen

Human Ashes in memory of my mother Even if we are what we were, our sense, our crying, laughing, so many dawns, such long nights, so many dreams and wishes, even if fulfillment betrayed longing, even if it didn’t, even if what we are is joy that loves itself and anger is a way of seeming free from disappearance, even if we are creatures with pasts, even if

beasts with prayers, some lasting aspect

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William Olsen of our essence is beyond its sad occasion, what part was strong then, what part weak, what part as a child did I touch, whatever part placed my head in its hands and soothed me and whatever part loathed the rest to death doesn’t anymore feel that discrepancy between the fire and ash, love or love lost.

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Regina O’Melveny Caps of Silk My great-grandmother Annunziata moves in the full-length slant of perfumed mirrors through half-lit hotel corridors cloaked with dust, her paste gems heaving upon the acquired breath of linen.

Her ancestors locked the true gems in dark vaults licked by saltwater.

Topaz, jasper, sapphire, ruby, diamonds lit from within. Uncut opals burning.

And all the furtive gold chains, unclasped.

(The courtesans in this city are not allowed to wear gold, silver, or silk as part of their dress… exception being made for caps of pure silk.

—Sumptuary Laws, Venice, 1562) Indolence runs in the family. Even my grandfather frittered his fortune, languidly counting his last coins while others slept in the ochre rooms or twined in the hissing wheat of midday.

My mother says the blood of the Prince of Savoia runs in our veins! Or falters there like paint seeping into wet plaster, our frescoed past a ceiling that flakes mildewed graces, winds, angels upon us.

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Regina O’Melveny Dark grit of grandeur, pursed lips of pleasure, royalty, royalty, remolata.

My fine inheritance comes to nil.

And the old villa closed now, staggers beneath caustic rains, raw sun, stink of the dead deprived even of final rites, the coins snatched from beneath their tongues by kin in flagrante delicto, the hundredyear-old wisteria razed to make way for a dance floor that never was built.

Only the caps of silk are left in a tattered trunk in the old seamstress’s attic.

Only the unnetted pearls that scurried beneath the bed. The silver chains stolen by crows in the sumptuary hours.

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Marissa Palmer As You Talk Idly of Divorcing My Sister I fumble for an anecdote to change the subject and try not to look concerned.

Stranded with you on your back porch, I stare off into the yard cluttered with the wreckage of suburban life—toys, too young now for your son, layered in dirt, sticks the dog fetched only so far, anything forgotten long enough to be abandoned out here.

I think you want me on your side; that you want me holding her down while you talk your sense into her.

I wish I had a watch I could check and a ticket for a plane leaving five minutes before you said, I may be once divorced, as if it was nothing, as inconsequential as the flotsam in the grass.

But I am here in this July Portland air, sticky and thick with its own tension.

You drone on from where I will not look: calm, perhaps rolling another cigarette,

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Marissa Palmer my ears follow my eyes away from you, a man I held as family, and I bury your voice, brother, deep in this broken backyard.

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Cynthia Parker-Ohene Prevalence of Ritual after a painting by romare bearden these women these salteaters purl untucked sheets leftover from baptism reset a paraffin lamp recessed in lichen a perched daguerreotype atop a scarred chiffarobe clutches an unknown girl standing beside trumpeter swans the inscription reads lucinda 1879 kilmarnock its wings appear to cloak her hairline forming a muted halo but it’s only the birthing caul she came seeing an already the camera angles her brand she’s wearing a loose burnoose shawl from potato sacks crushed glass beneath her left foot shines nacre from her shore borrowed from turtle island on the back of the frameless capture a scrawl somma dem bones is mine.

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Elise Paschen Fertility Early spring, we toe the towpath along the Delaware and Raritan Canal. Our sneakers fit the holes hoofed by mules a hundred years ago, hauling barges once heavy with coal along these muddy banks.

Downstream, near the Bridge Tender’s House, a fisherman above a lock attempts to trawl for shad. The fish have returned to their natal rivers to reproduce and die. We stomp in muck, six-months-married now, growing older, and hoping to conceive.

It’s spawning season and each roe shad will release into the water column 400,000 eggs.

A human female will drop one egg every month in three days’ time.

Let us proliferate like slicks, hairy-back, skipjack, nanny shad, though they scrounge mud for food, ignore their young. We head upstream, retrace the donkey’s labor, towing the cargo of our hoped-for load.

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Jody Bolz Croup When our children were very young, we lived in Guatemala

one summer so that my husband could study Spanish for his work.

During the first six weeks, we boarded with the family of Hilda and Magno Perez on the outskirts of Antigua by arrangement of the language school. The Perezes had three daughters—two fully grown (one with children of her own, the other working in Guatemala City) and the youngest, Raquel, still at home in high school.

Antigua itself is a spring garden, a small city nestled among volcanoes in a high valley, and a showplace of Spanish architecture.

But we were stuck on the edge of town, a long walk from the central park with its surrounding arcades of shops and cafés. Worse yet, the Perezes lived across the street from an active tannery that stunk of uric acid and from dusk to dawn, except on Sundays, produced a dull hammering. We registered each thud in our ribs when we lay down to nap. Despite these facts, despite the insurgent winged ants in our bedroom, the over-subscribed bathroom and the overabundant, unfamiliar food, we felt at home with these people. Señora Hilda, a handsome woman in her late forties, was wonderfully gracious to us.

The chance to learn each day from her clear Spanish was well worth the inconveniences.

One day in late June, a month into our stay, our two-year-old daughter Jessie began to cough—an ancient barking—and lost her voice entirely. Her fever was minor compared to the long fever our son had endured earlier that month. We’d stayed up nights testing his pulse, terrified it would slow as his fever rose, a sure sign of typhoid.

We’d begun to blame ourselves for taking risks, for choosing adventure over safety and comfort at our children’s expense.

It was a simple case of dysentery from which he fully recovered.

With Eli’s return to health, we gained confidence, and so we weren’t worried about his younger sister—a wide-cheeked comedienne with ringlets and an appetite. But for some reason our hostess was: even though Jessie seemed strong, Hilda tracked her every movement,

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Jody Bolz frowned at every cough. I wanted to make light of it, but my Spanish was too new, and I was newly awkward in this woman’s home.

The Perezes’ house was built in the traditional fashion around a rectangular courtyard, only this courtyard had been defiled—paved as a makeshift driveway for the family truck. No bougainvillea here; no hibiscus bushes; no banana palms. All of the bedrooms, the bathroom for guests, the open kitchen, the pantry, and the dining room faced onto this dreary concrete yard. We crossed it over and over each day en route to meals or the bathroom. We washed our clothes in a plastic tub there, gave the children baths there, lined up chairs to construct “trains” there with Hilda’s young grandsons. It was the common space for the family and their several language-school guests.

A couple of nights after Jessie got sick, she woke up at two in the morning to pee. I carried her to the toilet, stopping to point out the full moon above the open courtyard. I didn’t expect to see anyone, so I nearly screamed when I spotted Hilda standing near the kitchen— staring back at me, ablaze in her white nightgown. She must have been cleaning up after Recuerdo, her husband’s hunting hound. ¡El aire es peligroso! ¡Cuidado! she was ranting in a whisper. How could I have failed to protect my child from the dangerous night air?

I felt she was angry at me for the first time—for the first time not polite—as she covered Jessie’s head with a towel and patted it down.

What could I say? Should I apologize? The words she’d taught me thickened in my throat.

The next day, after an oddly silent breakfast, Hilda called the best pediatrician in town, a doctor well-known throughout the country and a family friend. She made an appointment for Jess. I was embarrassed but grateful, and that afternoon we took a taxi into town.

We spent a half-hour or so in the waiting room, watching hare-lipped children file in and out (the doctor was famous for corrective surgery) and listening to worse coughs, witnessing the effects of higher fevers.

When he called us into his office, I did the best I could to describe Jessie’s symptoms in sketchy Spanish. He asked questions, nodded yes, and prescribed an antibiotic and something to relieve her breathing.

He told me to steam her twice a day in the shower and insisted that we keep her quiet for the rest of the week.

I took Jessie home, gave her the medicine, tucked her into her cot (our beds were tight as piano keys against the back wall) and sat down on the floor with Eli to play Crazy Eights. Oblivious by now to Crab Orchard Review

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Jody Bolz the tannery’s thud, we listened to the courtyard sounds of scouring, sweeping, mopping—the cadences of Hilda’s household. Jessie slept fitfully for two hours, her mouth wide open, her breathing raspy and irregular.

After dinner that night my husband took the children to our room, and Hilda lingered at the table as she never had before. Buttoning her sweater, pulling at the pockets of her smart grey dress, she asked me how I thought the baby was doing. I said that Jessie seemed fine, that we called this “croup” in the States and it was common. Hilda’s face changed: she looked old and exhausted.

“I see,” she said in Spanish, watching her own hands as they gripped the table’s edge, “Well, I have been worried about Jessie. When one of our daughters was two years old, she had a cough like this for a few days.” She turned to me gravely.

“When the fever broke and she seemed well, we decided to go ahead with a trip to the countryside to see my in-laws. It was a warm day, and we left the truck’s windows wide open. She loved to ride with her head out, breathing the country air. That night, the cough came back.” She stopped. Why was she outraged, her eyes full of tears?

“The next day her throat closed up, and our daughter died.”

I didn’t move. I’d forgotten I was listening. When I realized where I was—what I’d heard and understood—and that I was crying too, I placed my hand around hers on the sticky plastic tablecloth.

“You didn’t know about her—but she was Anna, our third daughter—before Raquel.”

We stood up and embraced, the heavy chairs scraping the cement floor as we crossed the line that had kept us as we’d been: polite and separate. Hilda had moved toward me, a mother toward a mother, blaming herself after twenty years—missing the daughter our daughter had raised from the dead.

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Louis E. Bourgeois Downtown Hanoi to wayne o’brian bourgeois 1949–2005

The drive home was darker than usual; there were no stars

and only a hair strand of moon. My uncle drove and smoked hash from a short ivory pipe and listened to hard rock at top volume on the stereo.

I sat in a tense silence. I didn’t like loud music or the smell of hash, even though I was used to both. He turned down the stereo and said to me, Why you always so nervous? A boy your age shouldn’t worry about nothing.

It was then I saw the first of the crabs. I saw them before he did and it sent a chill down my spine. I’d heard that under rare conditions crabs will migrate from one side of the marsh to the other in search of saltier and less polluted water, but this was the first time I’d seen it happen.

As we drove into the crabs, the crunching of the shells grew thicker and my uncle just laughed and laughed, and for some reason the bursting shells made my eyes water. The further we drove, the more frightened I became. The more frightened I became, the more my uncle laughed. You see, my uncle had seen things, or rather, had heard more than was good for him. He’d only been home from Vietnam for about six months. He had served as a radio operator guiding B-52 pilots over their designated targets and attempting to lead them to safety if they were in trouble. He heard men’s prayers from way up in the sky and then heard their screams as they went up in smoke and headed straight to the ground. He heard the distant crackle of death, and the voice of guilt as a ton of beautifully wrought silver bombs were dropped on some silent village. He had heard more than most of us—he heard too much—and now those voices were in him and he had become them. He complained of deadness in the mouth, as if he was constantly tasting cardboard or Styrofoam. The incessant smell of burnt copper, he claimed, stayed with him no matter where he was or what he was doing.

We stopped in the middle of the highway and sat in the car in silence and watched the crabs crawl through the headlight beams.

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Louis E. Bourgeois He was crying huge whelps of tears. It was the first time I’d seen him cry. My God, he said, I’ve never seen anything so awful in my life, so beautiful. And then I started crying; I cried because even at that young age I understood that boyhood is not real and there is no such thing as Patria.

1975

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Susan Luzzaro My Mother’s Daughter “This is a dying street,” my mother whispered. We were standing

on the front porch of the house my parents would be murdered in; it was a little after 4:00 in the morning, almost the same hour of their deaths. But the time of year was wrong, the air not cold as it would be on that fatal January night, rather a tropical storm off the coast made the atmosphere moist and dense. The pervasive smell of night blooming jasmine was an argument for living. My mother had called me out of a deep sleep to drive my father to the hospital because he was having chest pains. I am the oldest daughter, a fact which is its own story. I lived only a few blocks away, so I was able to get there fast. As it turned out, the pains were not the fatal kind. The doctors in the emergency room diagnosed them as being related to gastritis. The crisis subsided, but my mother’s prediction, extant as an evil egg, gestated.

Another summer, around 1957, my three brothers, two sisters and I climbed into the back seats of the family station wagon. My father was at the wheel and my mother had the map of the U.S. spread out across her lap. From San Diego we were driving east to Craig, Missouri to visit my father’s mother and the tiny town my father grew up in. A wash of pale morning light fell on our white stucco house, the brown shutters stood at attention, as did the two pine trees planted in honor of my older brother’s and my appearance in the world. The fact that my parents planted a tree upon the birth of each of their six children has always seemed hopeful and romantic to me. But on this particular morning all hope was dashed by my mother’s dramatic pronouncement: “Turn back and look at your house, kids, you may never see it again.” My mother was given to statements like these. Was it drama, thwarted literary aspirations, or a real, though temporally incorrect, premonition?

On our journey east we took a hotel each night. As an after-dinner ritual, my mother took out the map and forewarned us of the dangers we would face the following day. On the second day out, we were fully aware of the cliffs, the elevation above sea level, and the narrowness of the road approaching the Feather River Dam. The crowded car had Crab Orchard Review

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Susan Luzzaro no air conditioning, and all the windows were open. The hot summer air tangled our hair, made us one with the elements. Vulnerable. We played typical cross country games that have to do with car makes or licenses, and the games ultimately broke down into laughter or silent fierce pinches. But what I most clearly recall is the way we glued our eyes to the road ahead, the way we prayed our way across the Feather River Dam, across the country.

I am my mother’s daughter. From her, I have inherited Fear of Everything and an abiding sense of Fatalism. I never set out lightly on a trip, or on what some people call vacations. Any departure fills me with angst. I look for reasons to postpone; I pare down the number of days my husband and I plan to be away. I pray to whatever presents itself: the moon, a falling star, my post-faith Lutheran God. I put things in order as if the doctor had just given me a terminal pronouncement.

As I turn the key in the door to leave, my heart balloons with longing to return, to be back inside the house, to be safe.

This behavior is not limited to trips. Ten times a day I have to still my heart, beat back worst-case-scenario images, shut tight my inner eye. If my grandson is balancing on a wall, I see him fall. If it is raining, I see my husband’s car spin out of control. If I hear a siren, I am forced to pray though I have yet to find a Being I believe is listening. A thin layer of good fortune and flimsy molecules separate my loved ones and me from tragedy.

Recently, my daughter and her family set out on a five day trip to Yosemite. Before they left, they stopped by to say goodbye. Goodbye being the operative word. Kisses and I love yous. Do you have chains for the snow? Did you bring your Triple-A card? Did you pack the vitamins?

Get off the road by dark! All the while my eyes were checking the tires for tread, the rearview window for clearance, my grandchildren’s seat belts for proper buckling. At last, as I handed my daughter a phone card so that she could call me six hours later, it gratified me to see the silvery glint of the good luck ring I had given her on her finger. I have made my daughter as sick as I am.

My mother haunts me. The longer she is dead, the more space she takes up within me. She is large, martyred, Christ-like. Though it’s been fifteen years since she was murdered, I still long to save her.

From Everything. An early image of her is still a painful question. It must have taken place around the agonized age of twelve, a confused age, when part of me wanted to run through the streets bare-breasted like a boy, and the other part was begging for a training bra. What I 156 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Susan Luzzaro saw when I entered my mother’s bedroom confused me even more, perplexes me to this day. My mother took a nap each afternoon; it was a sacrosanct hour; she lay in the dark cool bedroom and closed the door to rest from us. Because she was not to be disturbed, I can’t imagine what panic drove me to throw open her door; whatever the emergency was has long since been obliterated by the sight of my mother lying in the curtained darkness with tears rolling down each side of her face.

How can I save her if I don’t know what happened? Were we out of money with two days left in the week? Was my father cheating on her?

Did one of her children, did I, let her down? Did she love someone other than my father? Like most children, I could never see under the adult surface of my mother, never fully imagine her own particular turbulence. But maybe it was none of these, rather the future weighing down on her like a stone. Maybe like Christ in Gesthemane, she was already negotiating with the Future: Take this cup from me.

The future is a shattered cup. In discussing the direction of time under ordinary conditions, the renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking, offers this example: Imagine a cup of water falling off a table and breaking in pieces on the floor.…The explanation that is usually given as to why we don’t see broken cups jumping back onto the table is that it is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics.

This says that disorder or entropy always increases with time. In other words, it is Murphy’s Law—things get worse.

An intact cup on the table is a state of high order, but a broken cup on the floor is a disordered state…The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that gives a direction to time and distinguishes the past from the future.

Perhaps it’s too crude to pull scientific laws into the quotidian world, but the second law of thermodynamics is heavier than a premonition.

It was the very arc of my mother’s life. What distinguished her past from her future was how dramatically it worsened.

Like many women, I wanted clear demarcations between who I was and who my mother was. As a teenager I was venomous, hated her version of the female. During the time when I was forced to kneel to make sure my skirt touched the ground before I could go to school, I stood in my mother’s closet and ripped up her stupid polyester pants, Crab Orchard Review

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Susan Luzzaro the ones with elastic waistbands where belt loops and buttons should have been. I never wanted to be old in the way that she was old either— I began to seek this distinction when she was fifty-five, the age that I am now. I can remember looking at her pot belly and rushing home and doubling my sit up regime. I saw the dry skin on her legs when she wore Bermudas and slathered more apricot oil on my own. Now I lean like a sunflower after the set sun, a little more in her vanished direction every day. My hands are my mother’s. My voice is also my mother’s. When I catch myself using a gesture that once belonged to her, I am happy to have snatched a bit of her out of the impoverished air. I embrace our similarities.

What I should have been resisting is not her outward form, rather her persistently tragic point of view. As surely as the front window in our house gave only a southwest view, I learned from my mother only a pessimistic view. The world was a narrow escape, a darkening sky, a bitter cup. What is the relationship between thinking the worst is going to happen, and what actually does happen? Even if there is no relationship, I no longer want to be this fearful being trembling through her only life. I want to break the cycle, break the training. I want to save my daughter as well as myself. From Everything.

But who are these laughing beautiful pictures of? Who is this woman who after giving birth to each of her six children dieted herself into curvaceous thinness? In all her early photographs my mother has a flashy, unrestrained smile. She is sexy and vital and unbent by the weight of the future. It’s hard for me to believe that the Queen of Polyester and comfort clothing was so fashionable. In a diagonally striped top with pleated, wide-legged trousers, my mother sits on the roof of a car. Her abundant curls are pinned up à la Hedy Lamarr and her coffee-colored eyes are concealed by sunglasses. In my whole life I never saw my mother wear sunglasses—neither for utility nor vanity.

This is a different woman. Her smile is pure confidence; it’s obvious that she and the man behind the camera, my father, find her beautiful.

In a daring two piece swimsuit she turns her sleek profile, her thinly clad bones to the camera, to my father, and like a starfish she reveals her perfect exoskeleton. Why is she in a Hawaiian skirt, her naked leg, naked foot, suggestively peeking through the straw? While my mother lived, I never bothered putting the snippets of stories together, never developed a composite picture of her before she was my mother. In trying to retrieve her, I get a startling new view of her.

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Susan Luzzaro her detested breakfast, a soft-boiled egg, in her mouth until she was out the door then spat it into the bushes. Her mother never learned to cook, she complained. And neither did she. Salt and pepper were the only condiments in my mother’s spice rack. Pepper itself was racy and rarely applied. Once, when I asked her when she was going to teach me to cook, she said, If you learn to cook, the next thing you know you’ll get married. I, of course, was angry with her for responding this way. I was in a hurry for my own gold band, my own kitchen, and for what I mistook for safety. But maybe, just maybe, she was trying to tell me to slow down, enjoy life. How long I have taken to receive her message.

My grandmother once told me my mother was like a chameleon, liked to try on new personalities. She changed her name every year and graduated as Penelope Elliot instead of Katherine Jewel Elliot. After high school, my mother and her older brother took over an abandoned church. I’m not sure what religion they invented; they had escaped their father’s Catholicism and their mother’s Christian Scientism.

All I know is that they delivered their own sermons, decorated their own altars, and robbed from their own collection plates. Robbing the collection plates is petty; in a way, you might say they earned it. What impresses me is that my mother was not afraid to fool with God. Later, in advance of her times, she left her small Decorah home and followed her older brother and his wife to Wichita. There my mother met my father, and after my uncle and my father graduated from aircraft school, the four of them set out for California with only a few suitcases, two bags of tools, and in my mother’s case, notably, no marriage certificate. They were inventing their own lives, playing with their future. They took their time crossing the states. My mother laughed when she told me about her grand entrance to California. She said the border guard insisted on unpacking their suitcases. From my mother’s, he extracted tons of Kotex, pad by pad. I forgot to ask why she had so many, but the joke was on the border guard—my mother didn’t deign to be embarrassed.

In San Diego she lived daringly and happily, lived with my father without marrying him. She taught herself to drive by shoving an old Ford down a San Francisco-style hill; she just took off. She was crazy about dancing too, and often crossed the border to jitterbug in Rosarita or Tijuana. My uncle tells me that no matter how poor they were, Katherine always had her bottle of good whisky. She loved to party. She seems to have lived fully in the present or the immediate future, the short piece of road illuminated by headlights. The more I Crab Orchard Review

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Susan Luzzaro probe my mother’s early years, the more joyous I realize they were. It only occurred to me recently that she married my father in l942 and didn’t have her first child until 1945; she dallied in the carefree times.

I can’t remember ever being as happy or as daring as my mother.

Though I knew the Declaration of Independence, it never dawned on me that anyone would take the part about pursuit of happiness seriously. I was cowed by religion and cultivated responsibility. I spent a lot of my childhood taking care of the two brothers and two sisters who were born after me. As a teenager, though I halfheartedly did the Twist and the Mashed Potato, the joy of moving to music evaded my body. I married young and had children immediately. I stayed in my home town, close to my parents. In almost every way, I was the opposite of my mother. What a revelation it was when a dear friend said to me that her idea of happiness was to get up in the morning, decide what she wanted to do, and then do it. A person was supposed to be happy and there was a formula for it? I contemplated this idea like a coin from a foreign country. What could be the value of it?

When did my mother change? When did she become the morbid, fearful woman who made me? The ragged King James Bible tells me my mother joined my father’s Lutheran church, Missouri Synod, shortly before the birth of her first child. She had two normal children, a boy first and then a girl. Her life must have seemed almost perfect. My father loved babies and happily divided the work with her. In all the pictures from that time, my parents smile down on my brother and I as if we were earth’s first children. Perhaps that’s why my brother told me, quite late in life, that he had never gotten over not being an only child. In the photos, my mother is fantastically thin and still well dressed. My brother and I sit atop ponies, or at miniature tables with china tea sets.

We are bonny and beautiful and bound for a better life.

Then Richard was born. For a while, we still walked in the sunshine. Financially and physically, three children were still not too much of a strain. But it’s like that idea of parallel universes, where each time you make a choice, one you goes off on one path and another you takes the branching path. An unseen misstep and we were irreparably launched on the descending path, while our happier, better dressed counterparts continued to ascend. Around the age of two, Richard had a severe illness. One fevered night spiders climbed the walls and after that he was retarded. In this same time frame, Ann was born. She did not get enough oxygen to her brain, and she followed in Richard’s slow footsteps.

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Susan Luzzaro The reality of this situation must have emerged gradually, a cup falling in slow motion. We were stuffed into the hot station wagon and driven to L.A. to a multi-story medical building. Richard and Ann went inside for testing while we children sweltered in the parking lot.

When they emerged, little flecks of green gum were stuck to their hair.

I was so fascinated by the gum and the idea of testing someone’s brain that I forgot to look at my mother’s face, register the change.

Anything can happen. Can even happen twice. Not just one retarded child, but two. Some people give credence to the idea that trouble comes in threes but, for me, the real point is—it’s numerical.

Trouble is a magnet. The filings are out there waiting to be called.

Once my mother learned the terrible truth about her beautiful babies, she became fatalistic, began to expect the worst. My parents went on to have two more children, which only increased the possibilities for trouble. As an adult, I asked my mother why she had so many children.

She said simply that birth control had failed her.

After the birth of the last child, my brother Melvin, my mother bottomed out. At that time we still only had a two bedroom house.

Three girls in one bedroom, two boys in the other, and my mother and father on a fold-out couch in the living room. When she came home from the hospital with Melvin, we tiptoed past the darkened living room, tried not to disturb her. She began hemorrhaging and my father and my grandmother urged her to return to the hospital. I heard her beg them to just let her be. I know now she was so unhappy that she wanted to let her life flow away from her as quietly as her blood.

Six children. Six times Everything. The quality of life receded.

My father took on a second job which left my mother with our care both day and night. Still the money fell short. Sometimes my aunt, the sensible one with fewer children, would have to drive down two days before pay day and lend my mother money. She was my mother’s younger sister—that fact must have chipped away at my mother’s pride.

One year on Christmas Eve, the Lutheran church delivered Christmas.

Well-dressed women knocked on the door and my less-than-elegant mother opened to shame. The Lutheran Women’s Club came in and placed their presents under our tinseled tree. Belatedly, I wonder why the spectacle was necessary, why not just a check in the mail? I can only begin to imagine how it impacted my beaten and altered mother.

Finally, she gave up going to church, gave up praying to God, gave up believing in the possibility of joy in the here or the hereafter.

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Susan Luzzaro my parents’ tidy, insular, middle class street, with its tame little flower beds and well-filled bird feeders, you would not envision tragedy. Yet, now it’s impossible to believe that my parents could have had any other death—it is so finished, so set in the stone of the past. It’s difficult to believe that they might have made other choices—kept their dog, double-locked the back door, kept the gun in the house instead of in the garage. How far back in time did their deaths begin to take this particular shape? We mistook each forward step for progress when in reality it was really only a step closer to the terrible and chaotic future my mother had always imagined.

On the January night that my parents were murdered, Ann, who still lived at home, woke to scuffling sounds outside her door. She said at first she thought it was an opossum. An odd association, but she said my parents had been putting cat food out on the patio for an opossum and she thought it had gotten into the house. As the struggle grew more intense, my sister heard my mother cry out: “We’re going to die.” Her last dire pronouncement. As I have written extensively about elsewhere, my mother and father, who had been sleeping quietly in their bed, were brutally stabbed to death. For what? Nothing was taken and no motive was ever established. Fifteen years later, the assailant, who fled leaving a trail of bloody footprints on my parents’ patio, has never been identified, let alone apprehended.

I have to decode my mother’s last words, “We’re going to die.” Was it the shock of recognition, the long-expected horribleness corporeal at last? Or did she fling those words to my father who was fighting the murderer up and down the short hallway; were her words a kind of farewell? Some people die quietly in their sleep; my mother had to see her own death and my father’s in action. When I try the words out in my head, try to catch their tone, their intent, they become a haunting plea: Help, someone, please, or we’re going to die.

Anything can happen. Can happen twice. Not one parent killed, but both. What am I to do with this terrible knowledge? My mother’s tragic view, and by extension my own, was validated in the worst possible way. How am I to save myself from becoming more my mother than my mother ever was? How am I to save my daughter from falling and breaking?

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Susan Luzzaro your cluttered desk, decreasing its entropy, the total entropy, including that of your body and the air in the room, actually increases. You see, to clean your desk you have to expend energy; you have to disrupt some of the orderly molecules of fat in your body to create this energy for your muscles, and as you clean, your body gives off heat, which jostles the surrounding air molecules into a higher state of agitation and disorder. When all of these effects are accounted for, they more than compensate for your desk’s decrease in entropy, and thus the total entropy increases.

Which means my efforts to avoid tragedy only disturb the air, agitate the possibilities? In cautioning my daughter against Everything, in making her afraid to proceed, I only succeed in whipping up the potential for chaos. For example: her husband has become exasperated with the timid way of life he has married into, becomes increasingly daring, is driven to riskier and riskier adventures. Wants to camp in remote areas. Bicycle with the children on streets that should only be traveled by cars. Take small boats out into vast turbulent waters. Drive down to the tip of Baja. Wants to live.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps my mother’s attitude toward life did not play a part in her fate. She is not complicit in her own murder, and whatever attitude I take toward life will not be instrumental in my fate.

But there is still the question of how to live given what I know. Memory bends the arrow of time backwards, reconstructs the shattered cup. I am the daughter of two distinct mothers. And this implies a choice—for me and my daughter. One mother had a very sad life and a terrible death.

The other mother flaunted God and convention. Courted happiness.

Followed her heart, even married on Valentine’s Day. There is still time to embrace the mother who unwittingly danced the entropic two-step, who once upon a time looked brazenly into the camera, and into the dazzlingly unpredictable future and said: “I dare you.”

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Ricardo Pau-Llosa Noon, Saturday, Madison Square Park The almost young and prosperous slide behind baby carriages like summer clouds.

Some with boisterous children, or dogs quiet joyful to find themselves amid the breeze-combed paths.

The patched shades rhyme with trees they smell.

A setter with his new penny coat saunters past a fox terrier’s rage.

The squirrels ignore. How, the setter asks, would more yelping help corner another in his fears?

To ritual, all are native.

Another couple and progeny smile to see the squirrels race over the wire mesh that keeps the dogs from the grounds. They dart and still, in twitches feed and smell, only to volley up the fence or tree. The squirrels are summer’s version of fall’s kinetic leaves.

They fatten now and mate and bulge above the talling grasses, like notes on a score.

The music’s in the pauses, too.

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Ricardo Pau-Llosa claims as real. Are we truly bound to this hive of choices, passing from lit to dark like moons in time-lapse?

The young natives traverse the path’s metronome, humming in weekend linens and pastels.

They seem at home in the two paths light and shadow have made of one.

But we are never home— we are the time keepers.

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Jon Pineda Reflection Morning light gathers in the river.

The blue heron with its wings spread wide between the many worlds of its reflection.

A couple sits on a bench and listens to their son, newborn, whispering what can only be the last of some message brought with him.

The great bird pauses among clouds and cool air.

Beside the small library yet to open, the wife points to houses on the other side where they could see themselves living at some point in their lives.

There would be more children, perhaps even a dog bounding about the backyard fenced with tufts of cord grass, the Elizabeth still touching this edge of the dream as well.

When a door opens behind them, the tall librarian waves from a distance. They don’t realize this man is only shielding his eyes from the sun. It changes nothing at all.

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Jon Pineda

Song Because we come from the dream, I am singing our daughter to sleep.

Shades drawn in our room keep away what they can, though there is still the whirring sound of a plane outside, circling above before landing at the base nearby.

Newborn, our daughter’s heft is barely there in the cradle of my arms.

I look down and find her fingers reaching for my voice.

It leaves us both.

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Iain Pollock Affection One Friday a month, my father pulled clippers— Wahl’s—from a worn shoebox to tighten my fade before the school dance. The cut was accomplished with an economy of words and movement: I sat quietly under his hand, listening to the electric hum of the Wahl’s as his precise strokes sent flurries of curls to the bathroom floor, and his light touch on my chin rotated the angle of my head left or right, up or down.

When he bent the tops of my ears flat to shave behind them, it was only a moment until a grum How’s it look? and I shot up from the red folding chair to swivel in front of the mirror and inspect.

Once satisfied, I stamped up to my room to dress for the night, while downstairs my father swept a month’s worth of hair from the floor tiles, the whisk of the corn broom over linoleum sounding softly as the cradle song that a child heavy with sleep only half hears.

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Shelley Renee-Ruiz Childhood Home Some nights I still revisit its perimeter.

My shadow disappears in black mud and in slipping sunlight I dive into its memory with a clamor of insects rising around me.

The water tank I hid behind.

The arbor that patterned light across my skin.

Shadow of a fire truck with pedals, plastic pool, patch of bamboo in the driveway.

I finger my empty pockets searching for the key to the battered brass knob of a house reassembled.

Feel along vine-covered siding, break a window with a stone.

I set pictures straight along hallway walls, touch the doorframe where I sliced my height with a knife notch every year.

Someone’s swabbed it over, wiped off my fingerprints, swept away the shoe marks but I smudge muddy footprints behind me on the carpet and run my fingers on the carvings planed beneath the new white paint.

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Charles Reynard Family Life in Arraignment Court It is First Appearance, the bail hearing, before all fermented hope is lost.

He winks and twitches in withdrawal from vodka or dream-cloud smack.

He itches with the bright need as well to talk—good morning, your honor— even if obviously smarmy, disclosing well-traveled knowledge of the drill, in orange coveralls, rubber flip-flops.

He needs to tell the judge he needs to get out now in order to get to his new job before he is fired.

Besides he no way hit his girlfriend, who (shadow blooming blue and black on her eye) is sitting in the back bench of the courtroom, with their six-yearold son, five-year-old daughter at her sides.

She says, with sore plaintive conviction, It did not happen, let him come home.

And the boy and the girl who were asleep (and, of course, did not see or hear anything, yet know everything) will, in so few years from now, know they are no songs of joy, they are rough edge creatures, with no words

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Charles Reynard to adorn their quite odd symmetry. Only a blade edge of yearning to simply ďŹ t in a world where they felt not so very old.

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Rachel Richardson The Waiting Room They will never find Vida here, on the underside of the manicured house, the crumbling.

Cockroaches burrow, wisteria creeps, and the girl searches in slatted shade, digging for something that can live out the scorched days.

She stoops, too tall for the low porch, and finds a dull fork from games of house, hours of pretending in the cool dark space.

Pale sun filters between boards; she hears the steady refrain of the rocking chair, an answer for every call, loss retrieving gain. She hunches below the sound that creaks mother, father—there’s nothing here but clumped dirt. No silence, no voice. Below her heavy father, she watches the light knife in and out as he rocks.

Vida imagines her mother in that sterile room, hair undone, blinds shut. Doctors watch her, the hospital buzzes, she swallows her robin’s-egg pill.

On another floor, babies are being born, one after another, anonymous in their cribs. She hopes her mother remembers them, simple as they are.

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Jennifer Richter In the Air The neighbor knocked when the snow and the seventh newspaper piled up, and the man inside opened his home as he does now for the one reporting live, says he and his family are opening their bodies to this season, to the holy ghost, says there’s plenty to live on in the air so they sit and wait for the spirit to fill them.

They haven’t eaten in days and the studio doctor cuts in, warns us against this and shakes his head so my son shakes his, pleased to practice the skeptical gesture though already he’s a believer in what he can’t see: the hidden block, my face behind a cloth, imaginary water in a cup he holds to my lips.

He palms each of the flat faces on screen, camera slowly panning the family that in months could be us lined up on the couch: mother, father, son, daughter who waits in me, breathing the air in my blood.

The anchorman stacks his papers, smirks, and of course it’s crazy, all of it: why something like birth should work, why certain days give way to grace— Luke walks up humming to say his kettle’s ready, offers me the small empty cup and saucer.

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Jennifer Richter plenty, he might say somedayâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; so I take it to my lips again and again.

He palms my belly, his sister still in her world of water; when I drink, he waits and watches, his mouth, like mine, opening.

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Paulette Roeske Immaculate If my mother had been a nun, they would have called her Sister Immaculata, bright, sparkly, like Glenda the Good Witch, only sacred.

In our neighborhood of tract houses, ours was the one that looked vacant— bereft of clutter, toy or hose, everything hidden, deadheaded, cut to the quick.

Inside, she swept through the rooms, flipping switches to interrogate the dust, stopping only to browbeat the spider.

Driven by ammonia, vinegar, and bleach, we fled red-eyed, holding our breath.

Alone in silence and blinding light, she scrubbed every smudge, every fingerprint, erasing all traces of us.

My mother hated sex, never said the word, but years later, when my father told me how they did it, at last I understood the manner of my conception.

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Marjorie Saiser Template I saw my father sag down on the stairs, fold like a couple of sticks and weep, a few tears on his face near his nose, his eyes shut, his arms at his sides, as if he kept a carnivore he couldn’t turn loose, and my mother stood a few feet away making piecrust in a bowl, her fingers diving into the flour and Crisco and the dash of salt, because it was what she had to work with.

Her one-legged grandfather, his crutch down and forward and down again, had crossed the hard-packed earth to the barn where he couldn’t climb and couldn’t fork hay but could manage, with elbows and shoulders and a manger to hang onto, to perch on a low stool to milk a Holstein.

My mother could mutter with her lips practically closed.

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Marjorie Saiser My father could cry on the stairs and none of my words can lift him or make my mother’s hands stop shaping and rolling and turning the thin white circle of piecrust, dragging it limp through flour.

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Jane Satterfield Governess Charlotte Brontë You hate the work, starched petticoat you slip in and out of, sole model of good will and restraint.

While brother dear brawls in the tavern, you stiff-upper-lip-it, admonished sweetheart, Miss “put-upon”…handkerchiefs, lessons, & linens—I thought I should have vomited.…

But still it’s better than being idle, at others’ mercy, empty-handed & alone by the fire. Cut loose. Cadaveresque.

And how you’ll pay in the end for your freedom, bouts of illness bringing you back into the circle of sisters where stories spun out around you. Beyond the hedge, pollen rises like smoke; you’ll cringe at stains in your charge’s dress, all that you couldn’t bring to birth, intimations that to ask for more would be your own undoing.…

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Peter Schmitt The Ropes The night they tied my brother to a tree, someone ran to call me from my cabin.

But I got there—as usual—too late; they’d let him go, and he’d run off to hide, and cry, not to return until morning.

But I found the tree around which the kids in his bunk had danced, and laughed, calling him names like Retard! Dummy! and I found the ropes, coiled at the base of the tree like snakes.

That summer, we’d learned about tying knots, and how a tourniquet stops the flow of blood— except for my brother, who couldn’t, was slow, who to this day can’t tie a knot or make a bow, yet may know as much about them as any there that night, or anyone not.

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Steven Schreiner Trade Daddy is driving the red car, which is the color of worry, on the Garden State Parkway when the front tire blows.

The car fights, but he wrestles it to the side of the road.

We bump to rest like an apple under the trees.

I am bored but hopeful, as though we are going somewhere more important than Howard Johnson’s for dinner after visiting another stranger he knows well.

But the evening begins to feel full of misery, as though we are done with the pretense of a family for another day.

He lies down on his back across the front seat, his feet on the ground as if to take a nap. As usual he wears his gray wool trousers, black Ban-Lon and silk socks, the shoes I’ve shined until they were perfect, but now I see the scuff of a cloud in their toes. My brother and I stand stiffly beside our mother, 180 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Steven Schreiner dutiful and beleaguered, before the open trunk.

A stranger stops to help us.

He lifts the car with one arm and, while it tips to the side, we all stand in the shadow of the trees.

My stepfather comes forward to give the man a gift, a box of what he sells to make his living: gherkin pickles in dusty bottles, warty green with vinegar, and the rind of watermelon the color of the sea; sweet potatoes swimming in amber syrup, and cocktail mixes without the booze. For the holidays yet to come, glassy maraschino cherries too sweet to eat, bloodshot cocktail onions, and a handshakeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the tools of his trade.

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Jill Sisson Quinn Rooms I don’t remember ever using the chamber pot, although my grandmother kept one in the pantry of her house. I don’t remember not using it either, although I know I must have neglected to at least once, when my mother was on a school field trip with one of my sisters, and I had been left at my grandmother’s house. Nor do I remember finally letting go and wetting myself after what must have been hours of holding it in, or feeling wet, or mustering the courage to confess, or the trauma of being discovered. What I do remember is that, because there was no bathroom in the house, I was washed at the dining room table while seated on a cushioned chair. I had escaped the weirdness of peeing in the pantry, but then had to endure the oddity of taking a bath where I normally ate. My cousin, who was there too, was washed on a chair as well, as if my accident had also somehow tainted him. Maybe a bucket of water in that house was still too precious to waste on one child, and a clean child impossible to keep if a dirty one was around. Regardless, the two of us were soon straddling separate chairs, parked side by side like on the wide seat of a bus. We were naked from the waist down, in this room where we usually shared Christmas dinner, eyeing a bucket full of soapy water set strangely on the patterned carpet, waiting for that shameless, efficient swipe of my grandmother’s washcloth.

My grandmother did not live in Alabama, in a rotting plywood cabin at the foot of a mountain named Panther or Rattlesnake, her home equipped with a single, outdoor, cold-water spigot. On the contrary, she lived in a two-story farmhouse on a level acre just thirty minutes from the city of Baltimore, in the center of the village of Patapsco. She was surrounded on all sides by neighbors. Bright yellow aluminum siding had long ago replaced the stained cedar on the outside of the house, and new shingles sparkled on the roof. For Christmas she put blinking, colored lights around the front door and on Halloween plastic pumpkins glowed in the upstairs windows. Her home had hot, running water in the kitchen. But somehow the upgrading over the years had not 182 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Jill Sisson Quinn included putting in a bathroom. She was still using the chamber pot in the pantry or the outhouse at the corner of her property when I would visit her as a child in the early 1980s.

When the United States Census came out in 1940 (the first time, I suppose, it asked about toilets), citizens were offered five choices: a) flush toilet in structure, exclusive use; b) flush toilet in structure, shared use; c) nonflush toilet in structure; d) outside toilet or privy; e) no toilet or privy.

Forty years later, had my grandmother been asked this same question, she would have checked letter “d,” having remained in the 2.5% of the population that still lacked an indoor toilet by that decade.

By the time I was five or six, my grandmother dropped out of that 2.5% and had a bathroom added on to her home. I was happy to use it, of course, every Christmas after dinner, or every January 2nd—my grandmother’s birthday—after cake and ice cream, but in that second floor room, balanced on the toilet, staring out a large window that seemed new but had in fact always been there, I would experience a weird kind of vertigo. On the other side of the glass was the tip-top of a fir tree that grew very close to the house. I watched as it blew in the wind, and sensed that I was moving with it; all of a sudden I felt very flimsy and uncertain of the entire room, so recently built, the glue perhaps still wet or the boards too warped to hold the weight of a whole new room. I worried that it might blow off the house entirely. I ran outside to check, to see that the bathroom was not teetering off the edge of the first-floor roof. But try as I might, I could not find that room. There was the fir tree. There were the windows. But the shape of the house was unaltered, the same as it always had been. Where was the new room I had just come from, that had been added on to the house I knew? I ran back inside and climbed the stairs, unable to fathom that a room could be divided, that a new room could be created within walls already there.

I burst into the bathroom and, sure enough, the mirror above the sink stared back at me. I could see myself in a room I couldn’t see except when I was there. It was as if the bathroom sprouted unaided from the second floor only when in use, as if the parts didn’t mean anything, the sum always the same. I puzzled and puzzled, trying to fit in that extra room. Something had been altered inside my grandmother’s home, Crab Orchard Review

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Jill Sisson Quinn an extra piece added, an entire era gone, but nothing on the outside appeared to have changed at all.

As practical as she was, there were things that my grandmother did that seemed extravagant, like digging out the plastic Halloween pumpkins each year, and putting up the large-sized Christmas lights that outlined the front door, one side blinking awkwardly on and off while the other three sides shined continuously, pretending not to notice.

She also made bread-and-butter pickles using cucumbers from her garden, and dyed them neon green, so bright they looked toxic.

On holidays she made ice cubes out of punch. And that is also when she brought out the root beer in large two or three gallon glass jugs, with their tiny handles and narrow pouring necks. Home-made, it never tasted quite right to our young mouths—a little too sweet and not carbonated, or, at least, not carbonated enough. But we drank it anyway, because we could see it was something the adults loved. One year, as I sipped my root beer from a paper cup, something slipped into my mouth and onto the surface of my tongue. Although it did not move, I could tell it was alive. Somehow I spit it out without gagging and escaped upstairs to the bathroom with an older cousin. Leaning over the sink, we passed the root beer carefully from cup to cup until we had isolated the soft, undefined object in an empty one. It looked like a giant euglena with a root-beer colored eyespot. We ran downstairs to show our parents, who did not make their own root beer, but who we trusted would know what it was: a bit of undissolved yeast, collected and clumped into the shape of something I had seen once in science class under a microscope. It had changed its proportions in my mind, but I had sensed, rightly, that it was somehow alive.

Before my oldest sister, and even that oldest cousin, was born, my mother had a miscarriage at my grandmother’s house.

Because there was no bathroom, you can guess where it happened.

I don’t know the details: if it was sudden or expected, if she was just visiting her mother for no reason, or if she was there for support. This is from a conversation that we had when I was six or seven, and only once. She told me this while she was stirring the tomato gravy we used to make to pour over meatballs and white rice; I don’t know how the subject came up. My grandmother put the older brother or sister (how could they not have known which? I wondered) into a canning 184 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Jill Sisson Quinn jar and they rushed to the hospital, but it was too late—or too early.

My grandmother canned many things and I knew this, but I always imagined the baby in a root beer jug—the only thing remotely large enough to fit an infant as I knew one. So there was my older brother or sister, like a ship in a bottle, squeezed through the thin neck of the jug, its room all window as they rushed to the hospital, and the whole world, instead of one tree, blowing interminably by it.

We first noticed something was wrong with my grandmother when she called to inform us that someone had stolen her cantaloupes.

“What?” my mother inquired, squinting, holding the phone close.

“My cantaloupes! I had six of them, almost ready to pick, down along the corner of the garden farthest from the house. And this morning they’re gone! All six of them!”

The first time, we hung up the phone and wondered could someone have stolen the cantaloupes? Was someone in Patapsco angry at her over something? But then she called us back a few hours later and confided, laughingly, “They’re still there. All six of them! Ripe and ready to be picked.” Or maybe we drove to her house and took her out and stood at the corner of the garden to see for ourselves. Maybe my mother pointed down at each one, clinging to the vine, safe and ripe.

“See? There they are, mom. They’re still there. Why did you think they were gone?” Most probably, my grandmother simply didn’t mention the incident the next time she called.

“Did you go out to look for your cantaloupes? Were they there?” we would have asked.

“What? Cantaloupes? Sure, I’ve got six of them out in the garden, just about ready to be picked.”

“Do you remember that you thought someone had taken them?” we would prod. “Was it just that they were hidden? Had they rolled under something?”

“Huh?” Who would want my cantaloupes?”

I don’t remember which way it happened. All I know is that one moment her cantaloupes were gone, and a moment later they were back again, untouched, but something else was lost.

In spite of what our brains may know, it is difficult to react to anything other than what they perceive. When my Grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she was stripped of all her responsibilities: home, garden, cooking. In less than a year, we had Crab Orchard Review

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Jill Sisson Quinn moved her in with us. She must certainly have felt suspicious, if not of the disease, which we told her about but about which she seemed not to care, then of us—whom she still recognized at first but who had taken from her all of her work, her life.

Once, my mother was putting away cans of tomatoes she had just brought home from the grocery store. My grandmother stood watching nearby and suddenly snatched a can from my mother’s hand.

“Those are my tomatoes!” she growled, accusingly.

“They are not,” my mother rebuked, wrestling the can from her old mother’s hand, and then banging it down on the shelf.

I know how my mother felt: wounded, like a child disciplined for something she hadn’t done. We were appalled that my grandmother dare accuse us, her new providers, of taking something that was hers.

Regardless of what we knew about her condition, we felt unfairly persecuted. In spite of what the doctors had told us, in spite of every article we had read about dementia, living with my grandmother during this time was like standing outside of her house so many years ago; we could not gain access to this new place in her mind. What was important to us at that moment—which really begged compassion or diversion—was our own reality: to make sure my grandmother understood that the can of tomatoes was ours and not hers, and that we would fight her for it.

Scientists at the University of Plymouth have successfully trained goldfish, popularly rumored to have just a three-second memory span, to push a lever to get food at the same hour every day. First, they rewarded the goldfish for pushing the lever by giving them food.

Then they reduced the reward to just one hour of the day. Eventually, the goldfish stopped randomly pushing the lever. When it approached feeding time, they began pushing the lever again and stopped at the end of the feeding hour whether food had been dispensed or not. They remembered this behavior for up to eleven months.

Gradually, before her diagnosis, we began to see that what was fast becoming lost was my grandmother’s memory. Worried that she might forget to eat, we would ask her what she’d had for dinner. Once, she replied, “Three baked potatoes.”

“Most people,” we suggested, “will eat one baked potato…and a hamburger…and a vegetable, for example.” But she would just nod her head and smile.

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Jill Sisson Quinn my grandmother’s near the end of her life, the researchers at Plymouth University had also proved that goldfish could tell time. This too, began to escape my grandmother. And I can see now how it would be difficult to have one without the other. For twenty years, every Friday morning at eight or eight-thirty, my mother had paused her car for a few moments on the precarious curve of road in front of my grandmother’s house to pick her up to do their weekly grocery shopping. But in the dark hours early one Monday or Tuesday morning, a ringing phone woke us up. I can still see my mother, breathless in the kitchen at two a.m., holding the receiver in shock.

“Well? Are you coming?” my grandmother’s voice would have sounded oddly calm.

“What? Where?” My mother’s heart must have begun to beat with that middle-of-the-night phone call terror.

“Shopping! I’m just sitting here waiting.”

We can’t really know what happened that night in my grandmother’s house. Was it something forgivable, forgettable? Did she stumble downstairs in a dream and dial our number? Or were the negatives that soon formed in our minds more correct: was she waiting at the dining room table all dressed, her pocket book sitting next to her with its expectant straps, listening for my mother’s car?

We could understand how at some point in life one might lose the whereabouts of a watch, or that a clock might become too complex, its Roman numerals like runes of some ancient text. But hadn’t she opened the curtains to reveal the darkness outside, or at least noticed that behind them, drawn, the only light came from the moon? Or was her entire world, at that moment, that room?

After she moved in with us, I had to watch my mother take my grandmother apart each night, and in the morning attempt to put her back together again.

“Your teeth! Your teeth, Mom!” my mother would say each evening before bed, pointing to my grandmother’s mouth, trying to get her to take out her dentures. My grandmother would laugh in response. My mother would commence to tug at her own incisors, upper and lower, clacking her fingernails on their enamel, repeating her useless commands over and over, gesturing at a glass of water on the bathroom counter.

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Jill Sisson Quinn by them? I listened to my mother and grandmother in the bathroom together trying to pass the truth back and forth between them, the wrong one frustrated and the other one smiling, none of us able to create any meaning.

My grandmother did not live in Alabama. She lived on the East Branch of the Patapsco River. At the bottom of the hill just below her garden, a small spring emerged from the hillside and produced a tiny meandering stream that nearly lost itself in dry weather on the way to the river. But where it sprang from the hillside, the water was always clear and plentiful, and emerged with such force that one could easily collect a sample of it in midair before it completed its fall into the pool. For years my grandmother fought with the man next door over her property line, over whether it fell at the top of the hill, or at the bottom. They argued from their neighboring porches over who owned the spring as if they were pioneers settling the west. Even in this century, and this far east of the Mississippi, they remembered what is necessary for life.

There were creeks all around us, but whenever my sisters and I won a goldfish at the carnival, it was to this little spring—regardless of to whom it belonged—that my parents always brought us to collect water for the fishbowl. While my friends sat, heads-in-hands, at kitchen tables in their town-homes, their own goldfish swimming in small circles in the squat plastic bags we brought them home in, my sisters and I were down at my grandmother’s house, straddling her spring. We didn’t have to wait the suggested twenty-four hours for the chemicals to evaporate from a pitcher of tap-water. At my grandmother’s house, in an instant we filled their bowls, gave them a room of water so transparent it was impossible to hide, impossible to forget, and I still remember: it was a room we could take home, and there was life inside it.

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Natania Rosenfeld How We Sleep My father: Only on his back, as long as I can remember.

My mother: On her stomach or on her side, one arm beneath her head, legs scissorwise.

Me: Also on my stomach or side, legs less sprawled, except in extreme heat. In adulthood, sometimes on my back (partly to feel what it’s like to be my father).

Him: Side or back, the latter with open palms next to head in a gesture of surrender.

Bella, the dog: Peaceful, except when paws, ears, nose, mouth twitch epileptically in dream-hunt.

As far back as I can remember, he always napped in his Fruitof-the-Looms, on his back, hands covering genitals. As a child who’d seen a great many crucified Jesuses in churches across Europe, and also knew that Jesus was a Jew, I thought my father looked anguished and excessively thin.

When she slept, it was to forget—her exhaustion, her unfulfilling job, innumerable frustrations. There was a period—I never knew this until later—when she crept to bed every night in an alcoholic stupor.

When I saw her sleeping, I always wanted to wake her; out of anxiety, but also to make her pay attention to me.

I was something of an insomniac then, and am again now. I had elaborate only-child rituals involving imaginary friends. We’d get the bed rolling and finally take off into the sky, then fly to Prapruninma, my imaginary country. I was the legendary hero of Prapruninma’s national epic—the one who tamed the wild red horse. The national anthem was all about me and that horse. I’d sing its opening lines in bed in a stentorian voice.

He is a miracle to me, taking up so little space with his thin, lithe body. My mother, visiting, said, “I peeked into the bedroom to see if he had come home yet”—he was out late at a theatre rehearsal—“and his side of the bed looked empty. Then I saw a line under the cover like a human Crab Orchard Review

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Natania Rosenfeld string bean.” He is modest, never forcing himself into anyone’s space.

And that gesture of surrender in the early mornings! It opens his torso, proclaims his lack of fear, his vulnerability. It scares me just a little.

The first dog we had, gorgeous red Dubi, had the usual range of sleeping postures. Sometimes he rolled over on his back, sometimes he curled in a tight circle. We loved him so much, and he got cancer in the prime of his life and we lost him. A second after the injection, his tongue protruded from his mouth, and Neil bent over, helpless on the floor, crying out, sobbing.

My father always seemed stern, even when asleep. The severe, long-nosed face, the hands over the genitals, were an accusation. He was always accusing me of a desire to hurt him; and I would have liked to hurt him, if only to get through. But there was another side to his sleeping, an absurd side: his unbelievably loud snoring. Whenever we had to share a room, which happened most often at my grandparents’ house in Philadelphia, my own sleep was disturbed by those snores.

He never liked others to raise their voices, but it was impossible to put a stop to his snoring. “Just pinch my toe,” he’d say; so I pinched, first tentatively, then a little harder, and heard an enormous, shocked snort and, ten seconds later, a resumption of the earlier snoring.

My mother’s body: a perpetual source of fascination and attraction.

It grew heavier over time. We love to hold each other; when she visits us, or we visit her, I say, “Can I tuck you in?” I crawl into bed and put both arms around her, a baby polar bear cradling her mother. Then we talk, and nuzzle, and repeat old mantras about how much we love each other: “oodles and oodles,” “to the moon and back,” “more than there are hairs on all the orang-utans of the world!” The older I get, the harder it is not to anticipate, fearfully, the final sleep, the different resonance of the phrase, “My mother’s body.”

But sleep is not death. His sleep is a perpetual renewal of a perpetual calm energy. How is he like that? He sleeps so soundly, usually naked, cold when I’m hot, warm when I’m freezing. Sometimes, but not usually, he remembers his dreams. He is up before me in the morning, often for hours; he has read the paper and knows the news of the world when I am just rubbing my eyes and wondering where I am and how I got there. He is closer to being in sync with the rhythms of the universe.

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Natania Rosenfeld the morning. More often, it’s self-torture in the wee hours. Thank goodness for that drug that starts with an “A” and renders an easy, deep sleep (eventually) without after-effects the next day. Thank goodness for a pillow to put between bony knees (the only bony part of me) and one to cradle in my arms, for ear plugs and eye mask and his tiptoeing consideration. Two hand positions comfort me: one is the thumb nestled inside the four fingers, the other is both hands together at the palms, cradling my face in the classic gesture that says “sleep.”

As if the gesture could invoke the act.

She: her face! It is a slender face, the face of a mongrel princess, a face you want to kiss and kiss till she wakes up and looks at you with her clear, mustard-colored eyes. When her paws twitch elaborately— the very pads seeming to have lives of their own, the tip of her tail its own being—I worry a little, and want to know what she’s dreaming.

Do I look at her the way people look at their child asleep? I don’t know: I have no child, and never will. He and I are each others’ child, and she is our child, our charge. Or is she my little sister, the sibling I never had? Dubi was a kind of guardian, lumbering and self-sufficient but always happiest when his belly was rubbed; this dog is delicate, refined, evoking protective desires. When we fight, she crawls between us, interposing the prime imperative: stroke me. Stroke me, she says; stroke each other. In the end, she lies against his back or mine, asleep and content.

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Betsy Sholl Childhood In my aquarium the fish went round and round—kissing fish and clown fish and something else very blue with a mouth grimmer than Grandfather’s, whom we could offend without knowing. Then no amount of running next door to beg through the locked screen, what did I do? would help. No amount of saying sorry, always stammering on the first snakelike S that sizzled into frayed rope.

No amount of whistling to our dog Ruff would make him stay and not race across fields as if running were breathing to him.

But we wanted to fondle and smooch, to throw sticks and have him fetch them right back.

We chained him up because we loved him.

Grandfather must have felt this way about whatever was inside his head he never let out, his long list of reasons to be bitter, that gene he fattened and passed on to three generations, which probably was passed on to him, locked midway in the chain, since his own father caught an infection from a horse and died just days after conceiving him. Plant matter to coal, coal to diamond—things pressed down long enough turn hard, then a grown-up finds them precious and snarls or hisses when you get close.

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Betsy Sholl came on, my dog would speak, my fish would let me hold his golden fin-flutter to my lips, and my own dead father would step out from the vanishing point at the end of our street.

It was winter, so what I got was frostbite and a weeping mother bathing my hands in pans of cool water. Still, I wonder, what if we could reel through our memories of childhood to the exact moment before the salt went into the wound, that moment of pure perception before the hardening began?

Leaning from her arms to hand an apple to a horse’s brown teeth and velvet nose, laughing at its warm breath—“Little Miracle” my grandfather was then, child number ten, birthed out of his mother’s long black clothes.

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Betsy Sholl

The Drinking Gourd For homework we were to connect the stars into constellations along dotted lines, but, when I stepped outside, those lines tore apart like perforations and the stars scattered. Chicken feed tossed in a dark yard, water flung from a bucket.

Underneath that crazy fizz of light I was illiterate, able to read just one shape, the dipper, what fugitive slaves called “the drinking gourd” in the song our teacher sang about the North Star leading them through dense woods and bogs.

During the evening news, when the reports showed mothers shrieking at little kids trying to walk to school, or big kids getting yanked off their soda fountain stools, I’d step outside. I couldn’t see color on our old black-and-white, just grown-ups snarling like dogs. Away from the slant of window light, under the sky’s bright litter, I’d look for that drinking gourd, and shiver with my own fears. Dried vines, night things grabbing from behind. Then something new— those raging mothers like feral creatures ready to tear apart the little kids walking slowly, their eyes fixed straight ahead on the door, while around them, barely held by sawhorses and police, women raised 194 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Betsy Sholl their fists and screamed as if the stars had come undone and were spiraling out of the sky.

Teacher said the fugitives had no map but the pole star flickering high above.

We raised our hands to ask about clouds, rain, were there briars? was it cold? what did they eat?

Did it take a long time to find that river, the one with wet relief on its far side?

Yes, teacher said, a long time from Alabama to Ohio, or down three city blocks to school.

And longer still for starlight to reach us— as if it too had been kept out of school, told to go away, back to where it belonged, and not shine down on our small clannish lives.

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Kim Gek Lin Short A Study of the Entomology of Wombs My daughter imitates me: a study of plant-thorns.

Hand-holding is prickly when I do not know the flower she is asking.

The flowers line the bottom of the pond she is dipping in; bubbles too small, the oxygen dies.

I would compare it to the feeling my belly had when her movements were small as butterflies, and I have to tell her the red beetle she is poking assassinates its quarry with paralyzing saliva.

But can I say in verbs what paralyze means to a child’s fast mind?

Like a tightly-capped vial she pressures me in a leakproof stubbornness I remember from inside my womb, the way I now pressure her—learn this.

If she were any older I would take her quicksilver head as a trophy in my archive of heads.

I hate doing it. I hate thinking it.

The color silver like the leaves of educated plants.

But I could not assume she would understand this place in my abdomen that cramps and relaxes, so show her the place in our garden where females lay eggs in slits of bark.

If she were any older I would punish her imitation of me: silvery-gray scales of a house moth where I laid eggs in an old woman’s dusty swelling.

I hate doing it. I hate saying it.

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Kim Gek Lin Short I would hate that too.

So for now I list the nouns who tend the bright feminine colors.

I show her the place where verbs breathe like very pregnant ladies: with diďŹ&#x192;culty.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith Of Course I Want My Father to Love Me I’d like to say all I want from him is love. But it’s not.

For starters, I’d like a night when he doesn’t leave the table to shoot the armadillos that break through the fence.

Like him to forget the unruly hibiscus, the orange tree with its sour fruit.

To have him clear his garden of its wet peppers, cocoon of jalapeño, and stop bringing in the rat snakes, letting them slink along the kitchen floor like vines.

Don’t want to be ten and left alone in his house, the turkey vultures assembling in our backyard pine.

Or to have him lean out of his briefcase to remind me it was my fault my mother left, that living in Florida couldn’t be all sweet tea and orange juice. I’d like once to know he were more than a man who loves only troweling his soil, boxing his hedges. Yes, I wish love were enough.

Wish I needed him to call on birthdays, to have a memory of us cooking his tomatoes, opening a picnic basket of his greens.

Wish love could be muscadines or honeysuckle, something more than blue crabs in a trap, their claws clicking like the map that unfolds and sets them free.

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Alan Soldofsky Jack Tone Road All night I dreamed of my home, of the roads that are so long and straight they die in the middle— —Larry Levis On either side, fields with the skin peeled back, the black dirt asleep in the furrows, the enormous sky hanging like unwashed muslin.

If there are angels, this would not be their country.

At the first decrepit fruit stand we saw, we stopped for peaches. Plums slumped from boxes onto the cracked concrete floor.

Tiers of red grapes sat withering on a table, and cherries dusted with gnats. Everything overripe, the smell of water rotting in the drains. Flies.

I fingered loneliness in my pocket like a lint-wrapped dime. Then I asked my oldest if he wanted to drive.

We changed seats. He put his hands on the wheel, and lurched us forward. There was little traffic.

The van ran perfectly, drifting toward the shoulder stripe when he held on too tight. Bugs smashed themselves against the windshield.

In front of us the world smeared. To keep us going, what would I sacrifice? I kept whispering slow down, slow down as he steered through each narrow, heat-pulverized town, stopping him finally when the patrol car Crab Orchard Review

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Alan Soldofsky materialized behind us out of a ditch and he, fifteen and licenseless, stood fuming on the scorching roadside where we switched.

If he was relieved, he wouldn’t admit it.

He wouldn’t play Isaac and let the light rescue him after he had been taken to the altar. We stayed quiet a long time, watching the mountains congeal out of the smog’s brown shadow. There were times when I would have rather quit my life than go without what I wanted, my desire no less than a mountain.

I understood finally what my sons required of me, veering like linnets away then back, rising toward the dusk ahead of what I could see.

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Cathy Song Two Mooncakes for the Price of One That’s what it feels like, my sister and I poor substitutes for our mother who lies in a carehome not far from here.

Not quite up to the mother’s original recipe, we are stand-ins at the restaurant where we gather to share a bowl of noodles with her sisters, our aunts, the three alive and well.

The order is simple: three wonton fun and two wonton mein, Hong Kong style with shrimp-filled, rosebud dumplings.

“My treat!” the eldest chimes.

“I just got paid for jury duty!”

We marvel at her sprightly painted lips that tie a bow to the grace she gives before we slurp the subtle broth, just right, not too salty.

No one is complaining.

To clean our palates, we sweeten our tongues on mango pudding and taro tapioca, comforting as morning jook, comforting to be with our aunts. Their wistful smiles let us know they miss her, too.

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Cathy Song A quick inventory of items for the grave—candles, oranges, water, incense, paper, flowers— and we move from the table to the cemetery up the road, deep into the valley, and park under the pink plumeria tree.

The offerings of paper, leafed with a gold window for wishes to fly through and messages to return, seem too pretty to burn, a shame really, these heavenly banknotes we give to our ancestors to spend in ways they could not here on earth.

Folded, they puff into pastries and catch fire quickly as if our grandparents have been waiting to go on a celestial shopping spree.

Practical granddaughter of shopkeepers, I want to pluck from flames the worldly possibilities of so much pretty paper: stationary, origami, elegant purse sleeves for earrings and other small jewelry.

I want to retrieve the tiny paper clothes for a child to play with here on earth.

Here on earth where a doll has more clothes than my grandmother wore over a lifetime.

The bouquet of red candles, flowered yellow and blue, drip thick lozenges of wax.

Smoke from the heavenly notes and the winged ashes we chase away like moths.

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Cathy Song “Hurry!” the eldest warns as the rain begins.

I feel a blessing in the rain, a longing in the sweet incense, delicate as my grandmother’s calligraphy.

Her daughters, having found a conversion of faith, remain faithful to the old ways. Every April they return to burn offerings, bring bouquets of incense, stalks of fresh-cut flowers.

Next April they will remember another.

They will bring flowers for my mother.

As the aunts head back to the car, I huddle among the stones: between the ashes and the flames, how little time we have to pray.

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Cathy Song

When They Removed Your Breasts it was July in Cincinnati.

Blueberries flooded the city, gushing rivers in grocery store aisles, spilling alongside roads with eighteen-wheelers easily doing eighty.

In the hard flat light beyond strip malls, we sealed ourselves in your apartment, intact as a memory of singing past bedtime, our voices sweet as the guitar you strummed, fading out, as if you read my mind, to go it alone.

Someone’s mother always hollering, someone’s brother revving up—even then— nowhere to go.

I stood by with ice packs, videos, and all the blueberries I could carry, blueberries bubbling up from paper sacks, rolling like marbles across the countertops.

I cooked vegetarian, juiced blueberries into sapphire smoothies— your stomach soured at the color.

Blue food. So much blue.

I pulped wheatgrass, prattling about the benefits of chlorophyll.

Numb with pain, you didn’t answer, or chose not to hear.

Silence seeped out of your room, the wound-fresh smell of sadness.

I talked, working up to the next liquid meal, the next wobbly trip to the toilet.

I cursed the surgeon who inserted implants 204 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Cathy Song the size of melons without first letting the site heal. Without first giving you time to decide if you really wanted breasts the size of melons.

After the procedure, the saline imposters made the surrounding tissue swell.

We laughed to keep things light.

Wow baby wow, let the guy at the pro shop eat his lonely heart out.

The one who called you once a week to bring him beer and a pizza and while you’re at it, a quickie in the closet.

I plied you with blueberries, worried how truly inorganic they were.

The indigo iridescence stained my hands, the abundance, flooding the city, wasted on you.

I got to know the color blue, while you slept, or didn’t sleep, the bruised shadow of your face like a mummy’s, as if the living sap that keeps flesh plump had ceased to flow.

I thought up more jokes to tell you when you woke up.

Not even a year into your life here before they removed your breasts, and the furniture, which you paid too much for, still not paid in full.

I peered into your room, the shades pulled down so that night and day threaded a watery cloth I could neither hide under nor throw off, removed with washcloths the seepage, and waited for you to wake up.

Quick trips to the mall reminded me that there were people who bought toys for children, who planned dinner parties and vacations away from the noise, the heat, the blueberries rotting by the bushels.

The day I left you made it to the door.

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Cathy Song When they removed your ovaries, it was another summer.

Nothing to implant, nothing to graft, nothing to conceal.

Leaving Ohio, the temporary reprievals at work, the lousy car loan, the furniture, and the guy at the pro shop who never did show up after the last blowjob and a peek at those porn star breasts, you came home.

Your brother carried you into the old house, propped you with pillows in a makeshift room.

The tumor’s removal left you hunched as if you would forever carry as something precious and breakable the missing parts of yourself.

Those unsuitable breasts, unnecessary now, held you down.

Once the chemo began, you prepared to give up your hair.

Those last days you looked radiant, like a nun coming down from a mountain retreat, your dark eyes shining.

That vow of silence you took as a girl when you realized you didn’t fit into the ways of this world returned like a blessing.

Your voice, your walk, your smile seemed softer.

We joked about you being the bolo-headed, sexy old nun with your outrageous breasts— the only ripe thing about you— what monk could sutra chant with you around?

I went in search of magic.

I dragged you from one healer to another.

When one therapy didn’t do the trick, I sought another.

Each time you reaffirmed your vow to remain silent.

Whatever shark oil/noni fruit/megavitamin/macrobioticand-meditative remedies the healers advised, I chased after, dragging you along.

And when you didn’t respond, how disappointed I chose to be with you.

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Cathy Song

My Mother’s Last Gift My mother’s last gift was to slow dying down until we could catch up.

Had her death been sudden, we would have mourned an illusion, a picture we took and framed and chose to remember.

We would not have seen ourselves in the fullness of her light.

Into dementia she slipped, becoming brighter.

She lost the defenselessness she maintained in health, the core of her becoming more real than the one that fended off disappointments, a husband’s unhappy harangue, the chiming insults of children.

We took it personally, as if she decided simply one day not to speak.

She would outlast us, watching us in silence while we spent ourselves, a penny for her thoughts.

There were not enough pennies in the world to change her mind.

We substituted our thoughts for hers, speaking for her,

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Cathy Song always putting words into her mouth.

However blasphemous the claims, she did not correct us.

Once the small explosions ignited there was no stopping the fuse, the deceptive length of it the time we needed to grasp the decline of the body, the enemy invisible, striking at first in midsentence, then in midstride, and retreating to withhold more damage that by dawn would be apparent.

Propping her from buckling under the crippling descent, the pressure of our will caused more harm than the internal detonations that left her skin powdery, so easily bruised.

We wanted her back in her old form, the one we counted on as a receptacle for our scorn, our stubbornness, our imaginary heroics, unable to be grateful for what was transpiring, what we did not deserve.

Toward the end we would sit, simply sit, by her side, asking nothing of her.

She floated incandescent, out of but not quite the body, coarse and determined as the ground.

She became lighter as the body solidified, purifying herself in the last days of life on earth.

It was difficult to meet her gaze.

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Cathy Song Not fully of this world, she ďŹ&#x201A;oated above the body, taken up with the concentration such art required.

In her presence we became more real to ourselves than we had ever been.

As if manifesting her true potential, she shook herself free of us, having led us thus far.

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Dana Sonnenschein To the Patricide on Death Row A judge gave you the chair: he knew the way a life sentence will end at twenty years—and you so young and unrepentant.

But the past knocking around in bone will out. In time, you feel something like love or rage undone, a grief that turns fearful.

Once your father sat you down on a hot stove in tears.

You never told on anyone until you were behind bars.

Was it the burns, the bruises, rape, a short circuit, or a gene for hate that bent you in his shape?

Hasn’t it always been too late, and you the elect son whom sins are visited on?

From when you can’t remember, when you had no words, your name one stroke engraved, so you saw stars, a bright throne in a white-hot sky.

The ways of man to man are rust.

Someone will close your eyes.

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Steven Schwartz Storefront My

father’s younger brother, Sam, who hated my father, died last year. He outlived both my father and their older brother Max. The three brothers ran a business together for over forty years, the Stanley Furniture Company, named after a five-and-dime that had occupied the site in Chester, Pennsylvania, until the 1930s. Their start came during the Depression when the brothers and their mother (their father died when they were all boys) found a storefront building to live in on Third Street in Chester. They’d put their clothes dresser in the window because that was the only space large enough for it. A man came by, assuming it was for sale, and asked them the price.

My grandmother didn’t hesitate. “Twenty-five dollars,” she said, which was twice the amount she’d paid for the highboy dresser.

She took the money and bought two other dressers, sold those at a profit and bought four more. That, the story goes, is how they got into the furniture business.

After World War II, business became so good they soon needed three warehouses to stock inventory. Max, the eldest, managed a second store on Third Street while Sam, the youngest brother, worked with my father at the main store around the corner. My father was the front man, selling, ordering, traveling to the furniture shows in Chicago and North Carolina, handling the advertising and promotion.

Sam, meanwhile, although he occasionally sold out front, ran the back office, managing the store’s accounts. His desk was at the end of the store’s center aisle, behind a counter with an etched window of seagreen glass where customers made monthly payments.

Max had only an eighth-grade education, same as my father and Sam, but he aspired to higher culture, getting involved in theater when he was a young man and dating actresses, acquiring a taste for opera, and marrying, ultimately, into a wealthy upper-crust family, heirs to the Frank Beverage empire. He had wavy golden hair, dressed in Brooks Brothers suits, spoke in a commanding baritone, gestured as if royalty on stage, and generally carried himself with patrician Crab Orchard Review

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Steven Schwartz airs, although he could easily descend into a rant, yelling through the barricaded doors of his West Philadelphia apartments (that he’d bought with his wife’s money) to demand the rent from his tenants who counter-demanded he fix their plumbing first. Once, when Max was still running the store on Third Street in Chester before he became a landlord in Philly, he’d walked over to the main store and gone into the vault, which was right behind Sam’s desk. He took a cash box of silver dollars that belonged to all three brothers and were used as gifts for birthdays and bar mitzvahs.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked him.

“I’ll return them,” Max said, but he never did, an act Sam found as unforgivable as when Max squandered all the money from the sale of their mother’s house after she died (an investment that “went bad”).

Max had taken unaccountable sums of money from the store he ran on Third Street, while Sam, who felt bossed around by my father and Max all his life, had dipped his hand in the till too, claiming both brothers were cheating him. My father didn’t get involved. Perhaps he accepted the store’s social Darwinism or perhaps, being the optimist that he was, he wanted to believe things were always better than they appeared.

When I was ten, I decided I wanted to be a businessman like my father. I’d come in on weekends to watch him sell—his patience and intimacy with customers, his singular focus, a young couple perhaps, just married, whose parents had bought furniture from him many years ago. The young husband worked as a machinist at Baldwin Locomotive or maybe a cutter at Scott Paper. The wife was pregnant, and they’d just moved out to the suburbs but still drove into Chester to shop because they were loyal and they’d grown up here.

My father would listen, ask questions, take their history: What were their likes and dislikes? Colonial? Contemporary? French Provincial?

What colors did they have in their new house over in Springfield? Did the den have a lot of natural light? He only wanted them to be satisfied and comfortable, and he’d put his hand over his heart in pleasured agreement at the yellow lace curtains the wife said she planned for the nursery. Or maybe his pale blue eyes would dim with concern behind his horn-rimmed glasses when the husband mentioned his father’s worsening problems walking because of his diabetes.

He’d wait for the right moment, then surprise them by remembering what the husband’s parents bought at his store more than twenty-five years ago when they were just starting out. Yes, they still have that coffee 212 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Steven Schwartz table! the husband might say, or That was me and my brother’s bedroom furniture! My father would nod, smile benevolently. Like a clairvoyant working the crowd, he knew the secret was to say too little and not too much: nine out of ten boys slept in twin beds with pine headboards.

And then he’d put his hand gently on the small of the wife’s back and guide her to a recliner—she shouldn’t stay on her feet too long with the baby due in a month—and they’d flip through fabric colors for the sofa model they’d already picked out. On his order pad, he’d write down item numbers. Would there be any more off the list price? The redlettered sign in the window (which had been there for years) screamed SALE!! He’d soothe their worries. All would be figured out at the end.

The end? Their eyes would dart around the store. All? And he’d take them downstairs to the basement where everything from baby strollers to vacuum cleaners to throw rugs to cribs to grandfather clocks to prints of Washington crossing the Delaware were for sale. He’d show them the new fade-resistant webbed patio furniture—very popular this season! And perhaps…well, they really should have a cedar chest for their damp basement. Soon they’d come back up and pause again in front of dinette sets the wife had admired, and my father would throw out names…Broyhill, Drexel, Link-Taylor, Thomasville, the best of the manufacturers, and tell the husband that the table’s maple was milled in one of the finest factories in North Carolina. He’d show the husband a brochure with statistics about hardness of the wood and qualities of the three coats of finish, while the wife studied her reflection in the glistening polished surface. My father invited the husband to crouch down with him so they could examine the craftsmanship and beveling of the legs. Then they’d disappear with him into his office where he’d write up their contract.

In about twenty minutes, they’d come out, shaking hands, excited and nervous, having just financed the transaction to the tune of several years of payments. They’d walk over to the glass window with its round speaker hole and slotted opening for payments. My uncle Sam would get up from his creaky chair. A long knifelike shadow of a man whom you might glimpse from the side on a dusty street corner, his eyes tracked you like two large black olives. He would take their deposit and give them a payment book with the solemnity of placing a Bible in their hand.

Back in enchanted furniture land, my father would escort the couple down the center aisle to the front of the store, out the high, skyblue double doors that swung both ways like a saloon entrance, under Crab Orchard Review

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Steven Schwartz the glass transom stenciled with STANLEY FURNITUR E , and pause with them on the sidewalk, partaking of a final moment. He’d promise them that if they should have any problem whatsoever with their purchase he’d come over personally for a house call within fortyeight hours. He would contact them the day before the delivery. And, please, let him know when the baby arrives.

I’d be reading a comic book in the appliance section of the store, scanning occasionally the black and white TVs and the one or two new color models for 1961. I’d glance up to see his exuberance at the sale immediately fade when Sam barked something at him—a customer problem, a billing mix-up, a warehouse delivery. Only a minute before, my father could have come right out of one of my comics, a super-powered salesman of sorts. But now, his voice would be low and guarded when he answered Sam, straight information only, though, interestingly enough, always a touch conciliatory. Bitterly dark weather would cloud up the store like poison gas: I could hardly breathe there for all the tension. I don’t know how my father’s two other salesmen, Sowden and Travis, and the two secretaries tolerated it. Somehow they just ignored the bad blood. Sowden was a big man who looked like his name, with rosy cheeks, always jolly and in a good mood, and Travis was as compact as Sowden was expansive. Travis had a resonant, if buzzy, voice, greeting customers as if talking from inside an old radio.

They never complained and had mastered an important precept of sales and of working for a family business: the neutrality of pleasantness.

Sometimes my older cousin Bruce, Sam’s son, would be there too. He would take a two-dollar payment and then slip the customer’s statement card into the hulking NCR tabulator. Sometimes he’d just do his homework. Bruce was an academic star at Chester High School, a tennis champion, president of student council, and the pride of his family. I was thirteen when he started college at Johns Hopkins. We all expected that he’d go to law school or study medicine; no matter what he did, we knew he’d continue to be a success by every measure.

But just shy of graduating from Johns Hopkins, he drove up with some friends to Millbrook, New York, to seek out Timothy Leary and wound up staying on the estate’s three-hundred acres at Leary’s Victorian mansion, dropping the famous and highly potent Owsley acid. One evening, after Bruce had left Millbrook and moved back to Baltimore, he got stuck in traffic while tripping. He smashed the car in front of him, then threw his car into reverse and hit the car behind him. He got out and started a fight with the driver in front, then bolted 214 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Steven Schwartz toward the harbor in his sandals and bellbottoms, flailing his arms as he went. A workman scooped him up as he ran by and held onto him until the police came and took him away to jail.

One afternoon, riding my bike through Chester Park, I decided to stop in and say hello to Sam and Soph. I’d never been to their house and had no idea what to expect. Around the store, Sam could hardly bring himself to say a word to me. I was an extension of my father in his eyes, or at best invisible. They had a row home on the Chester side of the park in an older neighborhood. My father had built us a new home at the Garden City entrance to the park, a large Colonial house on three-quarters of an acre, a home featured in the Chester Times for its mix of period authenticity on the outside and modern furnishings on the inside, an obvious step up from what Sam could afford for his family, though I didn’t give the disparity much thought back then.

Sam opened the door and stared at me a moment. “What?” he said.

“I…I just stopped by to say hello.”

He blinked sharply. He was wearing an open-necked shirt. I’d hardly ever seen him without a tie and jacket. His gray hair was combed straight back in thinning quills and his mustache, which usually all but covered his upper lip, had been trimmed.

My aunt Soph came to the door.

“I just stopped by to say hello,” I repeated.

It must have dawned on my uncle then that I had no ulterior motive. He threw open the door, a broad smile on his face—I’d seen him smirk but never smile—and they both nearly mauled me with hugs and warm greetings as they took me inside to their small dining room. Soph offered milk and lemon cookies and bagels and lox—it was a Sunday—and they both asked me questions about myself, about school, about my brother (who was away at college like their son, Bruce), as if they hadn’t seen me in years, which in some sense they hadn’t. Though I came down to the store almost every day, if just to ride along with my mother when she picked up my father (we had only one car) and Sam was always there, we never acknowledged each other. This wasn’t Steven, son of Benjamin from The Store. This was their nephew, fourteen years old, whom they’d always loved and cherished. They brought out photographs to show me of Bruce at Johns Hopkins—this was before his breakdown in traffic and before Timothy Leary—and pictures of their daughter Sandy’s wedding, just married in Baltimore, though of course we hadn’t gone or been invited.

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Steven Schwartz Soph went upstairs and came back with a box of clothes that Bruce had outgrown, sweaters, shirts, sport jackets, ties, and asked if I would take them: “We’re alone here,” she said. “What should we do with all these things?” When I left they embraced me—Uncle Sam hugging me!—and came outside to stand on the sidewalk, wave fervently, and watch me pedal down their older tree-lined street back through the park to our side of the world.

I’ve thought many times about their outpouring of affection that day. The most plausible explanation is I had somehow stepped out of time, out of the sweep of our family history. With my simple knock on their door to say hello, I’d short-circuited years of acrimonious suspicion and caught them unawares as the loving aunt and uncle they would have liked to be, except for the years of bad blood that stood in the way. I had not been mistaken when I saw tears in my aunt Soph’s eyes as I left—freshly cleansed from a life void of family closeness.

The next day, a Monday, my mother and I came down as usual to pick up my father from work. When I walked in, I looked at my uncle expectantly for some acknowledgment of our breakthrough. There was nothing. Just a scowl as deep as the worn grooves in the floor of the store’s rickety freight elevator that I was never allowed to ride. I looked again, to make sure he’d caught my eye, and I smiled, but his expression was as unwelcoming as black ice. My hopeful anticipation at seeing him turned to pinching frustration. Nothing had changed. My intervention had produced no magical reversal, and in my disappointment, I could never bring myself to stop in on my aunt and uncle again.

I listened to my college professor explicate D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” about a boy who rides his childhood rocking-horse into a trance state from which he returns with the names of winning racetrack horses. No matter how much money he wins and gives secretly through his uncle to his unhappy mother, she remains disheartened. The walls continue to whisper, There must be more money, there must be more money. At the story’s end, the boy, riding his horse in a fury of determination, lapses into unconsciousness after reckoning the winner of the big Derby. Later that night he dies from fever. “Poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner,” the boy’s opportunistic uncle offers as a summation of his nephew’s existence at the story’s conclusion.

As I sat in class and took notes on the possible interpretations 216 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Steven Schwartz of the story—Lawrence’s interest in sex and the insatiable demands of repressed desire; a social commentary on the evils of capitalism and industrialization with death as the price of success—the professor also offered that you could take every mention of the word “money” and substitute “love” (this was 1970, after all) and read the story as an allegory for a materialist life stripped of human connection and meaning. “Steeped in loneliness,” he added. “Bereft of heart.” I thought of my own depressed mother, Jeannette—she’d been born Jane but her name had been changed to Jeannette after her first-grade teacher in 1918 thought she was too pretty to be called Jane—who brightened every time my father would bring home news of a big sale at the store, though her lifted spirits never remained long before she became worried and anxious again. And I thought, too, how much as a child I’d wanted to earn so much money that it would make my mother happy once and for all and win her unfettered love.

Stanley Furniture was going downhill fast while I was in college. White flight had taken its toll on Chester and mostly left behind black workers at low-paying jobs with little income to support the economy. With crime on the rise, people feared coming into town to shop. Many of the businesses had relocated to the suburbs, and Sam tried to persuade my father to go too. I had always considered it noble of my father that he chose to stay in Chester out of loyalty to the city and its black residents. He dreamed of rejuvenating the town and chaired the redevelopment committee, implementing business campaigns— Saturday sidewalk sales, free parking, a pedestrian mall—to get people downtown again. But Sam interpreted my father’s staying as his wanting to remain a big-shot in the Chester community rather than move the store to a strip mall in Springfield where Sam believed they had a better chance of succeeding. It was yet another example for Sam of how he wasn’t listened to and taken seriously. When business became so bad that the store could no longer support two partners, Sam left and took a job as a salesman at Stern’s in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, my father hung on, despite the boarded up stores around him. He ran the business with one salesman who came in on weekends and for holiday periods, and a part-time secretary (my mother helped with the books), and the cleaning lady who kept the diminished inventory dusted off.

At Stern’s, Sam was on the floor one day when Max walked in looking for cheap furniture to fill up his West Philadelphia apartments near the University of Pennsylvania so he could rent them for more Crab Orchard Review

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Steven Schwartz money to students. Sam came over to him and stood there a moment.

They hadn’t seen each other in five years. Max looked at him blankly.

“Max,” said Sam, “it’s me, your brother.” Max’s mouth opened.

He hadn’t recognized his own brother. “Just like in the Bible with Joseph,” Sam would say later. They embraced but nothing came of the encounter. They never saw each other again, though when Sam brought up the meeting to Bruce years afterward—he couldn’t get over Max not recognizing him—a tear ran down his cheek. Still, it wasn’t enough to keep Sam from crying out “I hate that son of a bitch!” when Bruce pleaded with him to reconcile with Max before they both died.

Decades had not softened his fury.

Had they always been enemies? I know little about their parents, my grandparents, who died before I was born. I’d heard that my grandmother was a taskmaster, and in many ways, she had to be. Her husband, my grandfather, died before the boys were teenagers. She lost two other children: a son, Izzie, at twelve, and her only daughter, Bernice, at eleven. Izzie, the eldest, was looked up to and loved by them all, and evidently kept the boys in line, their leader—hair white like a baby’s, a pure blond, my father recalled. He had a congenital ailment called a leaking heart, a defective valve that often causes scarring. The phrase, when my father told me, resonated with a romantic fatalism.

Bernice, a prodigy on the piano, had a brilliant future ahead of her until she died from influenza. Perhaps the three remaining children took their grief out on each other, the tender emotional heart of their family cut out by the death of their two favorite siblings, especially the loss of their only sister who doted on them and had a knack for making each of the brothers feel special. By the time they were teenagers, Max, Sam, and Ben were helping their mother run the army and navy store, but the business went bankrupt twice before they called it quits and scraped together enough money to move into the storefront building in Chester and got their serendipitous start selling furniture. She made the boys work. That’s mostly what they knew, work and survival, and the ever-present wolf at the door, the poorhouse being real in those days. This should have brought them all closer together, but maybe there was too little love to go around and too much work. Then again, there was plenty of time for love in my family but that didn’t stop my brother and me from being at each other’s throats over money too.

I had no intention of becoming a writer. I was going to follow my father into business. I liked to play sports, and when I did read, 218 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Steven Schwartz it was MAD Magazine or comics, avoiding anything between hard covers. My brother, Louis, was to be the future writer. Unlike me, he wanted nothing to do with business or selling and spent his time on more ethereal pursuits, especially the avant-garde, reading everything from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood to the Russian surrealism of Andrei Bely’s The Silver Dove to Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, and, in his less literary moments, gazing through his telescope to make star charts. No one had any doubt he would become a writer; it was what he did in his spare time even in junior high, typing stories on his Olivetti portable with titles like “At the Center Lies a Body” that were part crime capers, part German Expressionist meditations on evil in which characters contemplated the idea of action.

“Nothing happens,” I would tell him about the stories.

“It’s not supposed to,” he’d insist. “All the movement takes place in the mind of the killer.”

“What killer? He’s not in the story.”

“He’s suggested,” Louis would say, a word like “ineffable” that he used frequently in talking about his work. “You’re so literal,” he would accuse me.

Our split, like my father and his brothers before us, came over money. Louis was in the midst of a bad marriage, teaching four classes a semester at a college he didn’t like in a small town he hated, and in debt up to his nose. He asked for money—I now had some by marriage—and then he asked for more. Always he’d call at the last minute and declare it an emergency: he needed to make a car or house payment; the utility company was threatening to shut off the electricity; his wife’s nursing degree was in hock until they paid off her tuition bill…I sent the money at every request. Meanwhile, my parents had their own problems: the store had gone bankrupt by this time; the house had fallen into disrepair; the refrigerator and washer had died; they had medical bills from my mother’s continuing strokes. What I didn’t know was that they were also giving money to my brother, which was really the money I sent them. My wife—we’d only been married a year—felt confused by the peculiar money rites of our family, not to mention cornered and intimidated by the nest of baby bird mouths that had suddenly become gargantuan maws demanding succor.

I told my brother that I couldn’t send him any more; I had to concentrate on Mom and Dad. His demands were creating resentment and strain in my marriage. I didn’t tell him that my continually bailing him out was only reinforcing his dependency on Crab Orchard Review

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Steven Schwartz our parents, via me, or maybe on me directly. When he called late one night to ask for an emergency loan of a hundred dollars to pay his car insurance, I said no. He blew up. Here I was taking a trip to Europe with my wife and we couldn’t even loan him a hundred dollars for car insurance! To him it was only a hundred dollars, but to us, after many such emergencies by this time, it was the principle, as it always is the “principle” versus the specific reasonable request. I didn’t hear from him for months, nor would he return phone calls. They rarely answered the phone, letting the answering machine get it, because, as he’d told me, creditors called all the time, threatening them in their own special just-within-the-law way.

We sent him and his family Hanukkah presents. They sent them back to us, still wrapped.

Two years later I saw my brother at our mother’s hospital bed—the first time we’d spoken during all that time. Our mother had suffered her worst stroke yet. She was on an IV and clot-busting drugs and hooked up to a cardiac monitor and blood pressure cuff. A ventilator was inserted in her windpipe. She kept opening and closing her mouth as if gasping for air. The nurse told me she was in discomfort, though she didn’t know if it was pain exactly. My brother Louis was in the room and said, “Steven is here.” My mother opened her eyes, blinked, squeezed my hand. Her lips were cracked and dried and her tongue looked bloated and spotted with blood. The nurse said that was just the rawness from the tube in her throat. She had a 102º fever. This was her second major stroke and only my father was optimistic she wouldn’t die.

She drifted off, what turned out to be unconsciousness. The machines started beeping wildly and the nurse picked up the phone and barked “Code 99!” Two teams of medical personnel appeared and began to resuscitate her, while Louis and I waited outside. “She suffered in life and now she’s suffering in death,” my brother said.

Our mother would die three months later, but that evening the doctors were able to stabilize her, and my father, brother, and I went back to the house for some rest. I don’t remember how it started or why, but my brother and I got into an argument about his having to be the one on the scene here in Philadelphia to take care of Mom and to support Dad while I was out in Colorado without any responsibilities other than to call in. The argument progressed to my general selfishness. “You always make it easy on yourself,” he said, “and money, I suppose, gives you the right to feel like you don’t have to help out in any other way.”

The next thing that happened—the phrase always seems so pallid 220 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Steven Schwartz as a transition in these cases—was that I had my hands around his throat choking him. He struggled to unclench my hands, gasping for air and for me to let go, flailing at me when I didn’t. Our father ran into the room, and in tears begged us to stop, “For your mother, please, for your mother, don’t do this!” and all the hate went out of me. I stood there empty of venom, deflated in shame, picturing my mother’s poor terrified face. A miserable, rented cry tore from me as I stooped over catching my own breath. I have never attacked anyone like that before, or since, but I could well imagine killing someone in such a moment of anger, and I saw reflected in my brother’s eyes both his fear and the naked atavism of ourselves at the bleakest moment of our brotherhood.

“I found out why Sam wouldn’t go to your father’s funeral,” Bruce told me.

It was the fall of 1999, and we were in Teaneck, New Jersey. My brother was marrying for the second time. My cousin Bruce had come up from Baltimore for the wedding. He had six children, two of them adopted. He owned a software company that specialized in applications for agencies that worked with the disabled. He and his wife had recently adopted a fifteen-year-old girl from Ghana, brought to this country for medical treatment for the polio she suffered as a child. And he’d started a pilot program that hired the homeless in Baltimore to refurbish old computers. His latest project? Developing funding to build an orphanage in Namibia.

In many ways he’d turned out to be every bit the mensch his parents had expected, except he was a Christian. For a year they didn’t talk to him after he became one. “They had no problem while I was living at Millbrook with Leary doing acid, but when I took to Jesus, then they freaked out.”

Bruce, taller than me, about six-two, still had most of his hair— unlike me. He had the same color eyes as I did, hazel, and his forehead sloped back at the same angle as mine, the same flat Russian shape as our fathers’ skulls. We’d found a quiet place to talk in the backyard where Louis and Jean had just married under the chuppa. Bruce had been explaining—always a mystery to me—what caused the final rift between our fathers: “Ben was running the business by himself. Dad had been working at Stern’s for three years. Then, in 1974, the IRS started coming after Ben for federal withholding tax from employees’ paychecks. He hadn’t Crab Orchard Review

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Steven Schwartz been paying it. Also the state came after him for sales tax—I don’t know how much. Ben asked Sam for help and Dad hung up on him.

So your father told the state that Sam was still his partner and to collect the back taxes from him. One day Mom and Dad came back from work to find a notice on the door of their home. It said the house was being seized for the payment of back taxes. Mom didn’t have any money. She was working in a low-paying CETA job and Dad wasn’t making much at Stern’s, certainly not enough to come anywhere near what was needed to pay off the taxes and release them from the lien.

Dad didn’t know what to do, but Mom stepped in and called Max. She made a proposal. Dad would pay one-third, all they could afford, Ben would pay one-third, and Max would pay a third.” Bruce took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Max hung up on her.”

I remembered something while Bruce was telling me this. My parents had put their house into my brother’s name just before our father declared bankruptcy. I’d always been told it was just standard procedure for protection from bankruptcy. Nothing about anyone else’s house being jeopardized.

“Who paid all the taxes?”

“My sister. Sandy paid everything—from the period when Sam worked at the store and from after he left too.”

I wanted to get up and walk around the block, try to make sense of what I’d just heard. I had trouble believing my father had called Harrisburg and sold his younger brother down the river like this, sacrificed him. He would always say how much he loved Sam and protected him as a child, and I wanted to hear his side of the store’s story.

But he was dead, almost five years now, from a heart attack. Max had died too, and only Sam remained, who had Paget’s disease, his bones deformed and fragile, and I couldn’t ask him.

“I don’t want you to think your father is the villain here,” Bruce said, seeing my concern. “Ben worked harder than Sam or Max and deserved to be the boss. He gave his life to the store. I know because I saw him constantly on the go there, talking to the reps, working the floor, taking all the flak when things went wrong. Dad never wanted to be in the business, and I believe he felt trapped there all his life. He and my mother took a six month honeymoon after they married— six months!—while all the time collecting his salary from the store.

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Steven Schwartz California and Florida while the other boys stayed behind to run the business. It’s hard to say if Ben and Max treated him like a perpetual little brother because he acted that way, or he acted that way because they never let him have any power.”

Substitute the word power for money.

We walked over to watch my brother and his new wife Jean feed each other a bite of wedding cake. Bruce told me he became a Christian after his breakdown, though not without much personal turmoil. “I was a Jew after all, you know, allergic to Jesus. I’d been looking for something to take away the angst I’d had all my life. I didn’t see any contentment in our family, I didn’t find it at the synagogue, and I certainly didn’t see the presence of grace anywhere at the store.” Then he met a young woman, a Christian, who eventually became his wife.

I didn’t want to reduce his decision to that of a psychological reaction to his upbringing, but it struck me that he’d chosen a faith based on a practice unknown among our fathers: forgiveness.

I glanced at my brother standing with his new wife alongside their wedding cake. He beamed; he was marrying someone for love, not need, and I saw that Jean loved him dearly too, loved his sometimes brilliant, sometimes fractured talk and his capacious laughter: “You laugh just like the Car Guys,” she’d told him when they first spoke on the phone, falling in love with his outsized amusement at the world.

How my brother and I reconciled adds to the great store of commanding evidence for the human comedy. I’d come to New York City to watch one of my stories read by an actor to an audience at Symphony Space.

I’d invited my brother. He declined—too busy—but then called back a few weeks later to say he could make it after all. It just so happened he was going to be in New York at the same time for a film conference, staying at a hotel across the street from mine in Midtown. He would like to go hear my story…but could I get him a free ticket? I swallowed my irritation—couldn’t he even afford the ten dollar ticket?—because we’d started talking on the phone by this time, making small steps toward becoming brothers again. As it turned out, even though I left a ticket for him at the box office, he bought one in advance on his own.

At the reading, which he said he enjoyed, he met my editor.

Afterward, a number of us, including my brother, went out for drinks, and then Louis and I walked back to our hotels, stopping on the way at a bookstore. He bought close to ninety dollars worth of books.

We went upstairs to my hotel room to talk. He was exceptionally complimentary about how well he’d thought the story had gone over, Crab Orchard Review

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Steven Schwartz but before he left, he asked if I would reimburse him for his ticket to the reading. I tried not to explode.

“I left you a ticket at the box office.”

“I forgot.”

“How could you forget? You were the one who asked me for a ticket.”

“I have a lot on my mind,” he said.

I gave him the ten dollars, which meant I’d spent twenty, counting his unused ticket at the box office.

Five-thirty the next morning the phone rang. It was my brother.

He’d rolled over in bed and crushed his glasses; he couldn’t see a thing without them. An extra pair was in the glove compartment of his car, in the hotel’s parking garage below.

“Can you get them?” he asked me.

“What?” I was groggy and exhausted from the events and celebration of the night before—I’d only gotten to bed a few hours ago.

“Can you get me the extra pair from the car?”

My eyes shut. A weary moment passed before the solution to his problem occurred to me. “Have the bellhop or valet bring them up,” I said.

And then, as if no reasonable person would disagree, he declared, “I’m not going to tip that guy two dollars to go down and get my glasses!”

“Wait—you want me to get out of bed at five-thirty in the morning, get dressed, go across Eighth Avenue to a dim parking garage and bring you your glasses because you don’t want to tip somebody two dollars!”

“I can’t see.”

“I can’t believe this, Louis! You just paid ninety dollars for books—” “I can’t find my wallet without my glasses. You could bring two dollars and give it to the bellhop.”

I hung up, just like my father and his brothers had hung up on each other.

Was my brother’s behavior a reaction to the successful reading of the night before or just our usual money madness or were rivalry and money so entwined through the generations that they had long ago forfeited their separate properties?

I thought for certain the incident would effectively lose us all the ground we’d gained, but not long afterward he called and said that he 224 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Steven Schwartz had wonderful news, thanks in part to me: he was dating my editor’s best friend’s sister. My editor, knowing his field was film theory, had sent him an anthology of writing about film she’d just edited; my brother had called to thank her and knowing she was single (although not knowing she was attached) asked her out. She’d explained her situation but told him about her best friend’s sister.

As he and Jean posed for pictures now, my brother seemed the happiest man alive. I don’t know what comes of moments when you put your hands around your brother’s throat, if they can truly be buried or forgiven or redeemed by setting your estranged brother up to meet his beloved, but we have managed to move beyond our troubles. I sometimes marvel at the irony of how carefully we avoided any business relationship—we wouldn’t fall into the same trap as our father and uncles!—and yet we’d nearly let money ignite our relationship into ashes.

I said goodbye to Bruce. He asked me to visit him and his family in Baltimore if I should be on the East Coast again soon. I told him to look us up in Colorado, two thousand miles from here; it was no coincidence that I’d moved so far away. When I was younger I imagined I’d always live near my parents: my troubled mother, with no end to her sadness, my fantasies of redeeming her suffering through taking over the family business and making millions. Nor could I protect my father from what I privately feared in my idolizing of him—that he was but a common failure, and I could become one too. Instead, I had ridden my rocking-horse out West to where people always believed they’d find gold in one form or another. I was fifty-one years old, and I knew I wouldn’t realize the winning ticket that I always hoped would bring lasting fortune to those I once most loved. But I knew, too, I would not die doing so.

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Kevin Stein Middle-Aged Adam’s and Eve’s Bedside Tables Hers A deluxe princess phone with snaking cord.

One stopped clock blinking its red eye, 12:01.

E-mail from her Fidelity broker. Abel’s baby book.

Mr. Happy, the sore-back’s best buddy.

Victoria’s Secret Miracle Bra minus its left breast cookie.

Tuesday’s grocery list: milk, bread, Macintosh.

Her plaster dental mold’s cracked smile.

Congealed remains of last night’s rib dinner and her Original No-Sin Low-Fat Cheese Cake.

Empty Cool Whip tub. The Audubon Book of Trees.

Friedan’s dog-eared The Feminine Mystique, a toppled wine glass. One Applebee’s matchbook, 666–2480 scribbled inside. Selected O’Keefe postcards, orange poppy on top. Here and there, an iris of dust from which he came and to which she’ll soon return.

A handful of candles scented Tranquility, never lit.

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Kevin Stein

His White iPod and headphones, its playlist: “Stairway to Heaven,” “Devil with the Blue Dress On,” oh anything by Phil Collins and Genesis.

Duct-taped black rim bifocals. 700 Club golf tees.

Garden of Eatin’ blue chips, mostly crumbs.

Camping photo in poncho and Angels cap.

Fig-leaf boxers, XL. His bookie’s wager: $500 on a Cubs vs. Red Sox World Series 2004.

Your new Verizon phone # is 666–2480.

Can you hear me now? Her bra’s left breast cookie.

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

A Bud Light bottle, the morning’s apple core.

This week’s TO-DO LIST: Rake leaves into piles (check) and ignite with angel’s flaming sword (check).

Rename bears and bulls and blackhawks (check).

E-mail Cain, the wanderer (check). Update Will and Trust.

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Kevin Stein

In Human Hands Once I admired the hand for the violence it could do but mostly doesn’t, the apple tree for the fruit it sets then gives away— one for restraint, the other for generosity we’re not known for.

This, the sort of thing told in Confession, whose plea begins “I have sinned.”

Supplication’s less atonement than fear, the better reason to beg a blessing, fear of what we’ve yet to do, will do, as it is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

That’s why saying the rosary it’s easy to lose count, one bead nearer to hell or heaven, who knows?

There’s all that kneeling, the purple robes, a cross and someone nailed to it.

The story goes like this: one hand held a spike, the other a big hammer. A question swung in the balance, and the man’s hands answered for us. Yes, he nailed, yes yes yes. We’d kill anything, even our gods.

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Alison Townsend A Bottle of Jean Naté My mother smelled like this when I was a girl, though I must twist the cap on the bottle I bought at Walgreens to remember the lemony amber, suspended in woody florals she’d splash over her body after a bath, laughing, repeating the ad that urged women of the early ’60s to “tingle at the touch of Jean Naté” and “glow from head to toe.”

She did glow then, the way the living do, as she lay in the bathtub, stretching a long leg to turn the hot water faucet with her toes, no cancer yet, her small, blue-veined breasts high and firm, covered shyly with a washcloth when she caught me looking, studying the flesh that had made me like a map of who I might become.

I sat there, on the closed lid of the commode, playing with the black velvet ribbon around the bottle’s neck, sneaking glances at the mysterious world of her body, talking about things I cannot remember. Though my body does, and precisely—those summer afternoons she stood beside me, wrapped in a Turkish towel, splashing cologne the color of Pernod or celadon across her neck and arms, then splashing me, dabbing a bit behind Crab Orchard Review

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Alison Townsend my ears, the cool, green scent rising around us in a cloud—tingling, glowing, and not quite gone but hidden, the way the body’s private story is till something jars it loose, nothing of those moments left but my one ecstatic life, burning brightly, dying to remember.

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Maureen Waters An Accustomed Place the Bronx, 1950 Why should I go back to that kitchen with its fickle gas stove and worn linoleum, a thicket of clothes strung outside blotting the barest glimpse of sky?

In fact, it’s all rubble and ashes, a few bricks—filched for my garden from the steps of neighboring houses leaning toward the river, crumbling, indeterminate.

Yet, once upon a time in winter when the river wind was stinging ice, we gathered in that kitchen for bowls of stew served up with Sinn Féin politics and pots of tea.

Mother read brave fortune in the leaves.

That kitchen shone: Waterford glass, iron pots, the floor scrubbed and polished, windows washed, the table set.

Our days were framed in homely ritual; idleness was the privilege of the cat.

Setting an example, Father chanted lines from Tennyson and Yeats while he mashed potatoes, stacked plates.

Literature and domestic arts assumed congenial counterparts.

Barricaded nightly behind our books, we scholars mused upon the peril of time

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Maureen Waters in Shakespeare, Keats, and Marvell.

The inward eye was trained to see beyond our narrow purview.

The heartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s need was amply met squeezed round our kitchen table.

Though voices were shouting in the street, we knew the ease of certainty in an accustomed place.

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Charles Harper Webb Manpanzee, they called him: throwback to sabertooths and caves.

Jim, his handler, kept his body shaved, and raised him like Mozart: prodigy and cash cow. He understood English, could dress himself, and count to twenty on fingers and toes. He thought he was human, poor ugly duck, and cried to be more like the smooth-skinned boys who spoke so well, and kept his ape-lips shut.

But when the circus closed, Jim had to sell cars.

The woman he married had her own sons. Manpanzee was sold. A zoo. An end to shaves, and shirts and pants and shoes, to Frosted Flakes and tetherball.

No need to practice signs no one could understand.

Back with the slow kids, lesson in mainstreaming done, Manpanzee sat alone, loathing the raw greens and moldy fruit his keepers dumped onto his foul “habitat” floor—scorning to grab with hands that once held knife and fork, and lifted teacups to his prehensile lips. Five years passed, then ten, like one interminable mugging by the trolls that hooted inside his cage, and out. But one day the keepers— armed with poisoned darts in case he went ape— led him to a room where TV cameras burned down on a sweating man. “He may not know you,” a chesty redhead told the man. Too many chicken nuggets and chili-cheese nachos, too much smoking and beer, too many soul-withering jobs and years steeped in his wife’s contempt had changed him until his own bank teller doubted his ID. But even

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Charles Harper Webb gray and bloated, he was Jim: such tenderness in those blue eyes, such love with no good place to go.

If Manpanzee could have whispered, “There, there,” or “It’s all right, Dad,” he would have as his long fingers slapped that quivery human back. But only ape-noises squeezed out—and what the voice-over guy called monkey-tears.

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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Coming Home for Besie-Nyesuah Besie runs toward me, arms wide, despite the crowd at the airport, she’s screaming, “Mo-mm-m-m-ie,” and everybody stares. Arms around me, my daughter holds me tight, and we almost fall beside her suitcase I have just lifted off the belt. At nineteen, she is now a woman, tall, slender, her soft, small arms and fair skin remind me of Ma Wani, my mother-in-law. In a moment, I am looking her all over, counting to see if she is not too skinny for a girl her age. Every girl becomes woman when she can come home, knowing how like her mother she is becoming—a woman like all the other women before her. “This is Pittsburgh,” I say, “isn’t it beautiful?”

We’re driving past houses in the distant hills along Pittsburgh’s winding freeway, houses that lean and rush past us as we also rush past them. Everything here leans sideways, almost free, as if to fall into the merging rivers down below. My college-age children are coming home to Pennsylvania, where we are surrounded by hills and valleys and cliffs, and the university where my new students speak with an accent they refuse to admit.

“So this is home now?” Besie says as if to herself while I turn into our new driveway in a neighborhood Crab Orchard Review

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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley of rolling hills and brick houses overlooking one another.

“We are the first black on this property,” I say. But this is going to be home—all these valleys and green, green hills will be home. “But this is Pennsylvania,” Besie says, as doors bang and everyone rushes out to welcome her home after too many months away. “We are all trying to find home,” I say, as my words become lost in the din of screaming children and my husband, lifting Besie up in the air and swinging her around in circles. All my children are under one roof again, I tell myself, for the first time, all my children are under one roof in our new state.

But Michigan is that ghost that stands at the outskirts of your new town, where your memory refuses to shut out so many years, and that year when you arrived with nothing and looking to find home among strangers, where the cold, cold winds became a new friend.

Your second chance at finding home, now becoming memory too. Michigan haunts the holidays, another ghost to carry around among all the other ghosts we are seeking to undo. In Monrovia, families will gather and discuss the many years we have been away from home. Monrovia is the true ghost story of lost peoples in the Diaspora. In America, we are the new nomads, the wanderers coming home or looking to make home or running away from home among new people, and one by one, our children, who will never know

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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley where we really come from, are leaving only to come back to decorative lights, Christmas trees, holiday music, and turkey baking in the oven, stuďŹ&#x192;ng, and pies. We are becoming new people, I tell myself.

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Michele Wolf Immersion We practice the language, froth of words, that formed The slosh and current of your life before You could speak: “Ni hao ma?” we greet our teacher, Who passes out toys and asks us to repeat as she holds up flash cards: “Panda”—xióngmāo—followed by “baby,” “mother,” “father,” “dog,” “Cat.” All the girls in the circle—and the sole boy—are Chinese Toddlers. Most of the mothers and fathers are middle-aged, white.

At summer’s close, we carried you down the blue-tiled steps Of the synagogue’s bath—a swirl of piped-in rainwater, Municipal water, and a bit of chlorine—and swiftly dipped you Three times, the water snug to all your surfaces. At the top of the steps, A trio of rabbis chanted the blessings, calligraphied midnight Blue on the pale blue walls. I recited along in a language I had never Formally learned, some of the words and all the intonations familiar.

Little flame, you will be the birthright of who you are, Independent of water or vocabulary.

We work on the words. That’s why in the post office, just a few weeks After we had brought you home, when the Asian-American clerk, In her sixties, spotted you soaking up your new world From your stroller, puckered up her face, then gazed again at me And, with accented English, clenching my heart in her hands, Inquired, “She’s yours?” I managed to answer, “Yes. And I’m hers.”

Why couldn’t she see I had become Chinese?

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Dominika Wrozynski Poland, 1945 For my mother Your three-year-old arm, white as rain-soaked birch, dangles above your mother’s kitchen linoleum.

They’ll have to cut it, you know, sever the elastic marrow: cells—dervishes without a trajectory—will never duplicate.

You will wake in your own bed—goose feathers that make you sneeze—missing the German shepherd you let escape from the gate, rub the raised scar on your ankle where he bit down. When it thunders, the absent arm will tell secrets you already know are dripping from orange-shingled roofs: the soldier who discharged the rifle will become your brother, for the first time wielding a gun, not a paintbrush: you will pose—a sulfur butterfly pinned to the canvas of livingroom walls by his bullet. And though he will be sorry, paint you from the neck up—you will still dream of pirouetting solo across an empty stage.

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Bro. Yao Shoeshiner’s Inheritance i have willed shame to my children to set them free shotgun in my mouth tears i never cried where i come from black shined shoes on a pedestal, spit and the crack of the rag my black hands glossed leather’s face men stared down on the back of my neck boy and nigger spoken cloaked crimes the stain i now give my sons to sing, this shame with their soft hands signing papers opening books what i took from the sky with my head to the ground

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Bro. Yao what i hand down they will never disguise stones i carry stories i weave half history, half disease when i look them in the eye it is the casket of men swimming under the river i ďŹ nally breathe

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Karen Zealand 1–800–AUTOPSY My daughter said there was such a number, the state medical examiner having given it to her when none of our hometown pathologists would take blood and tissue samples from her best friend’s mother, obese, over fifty, with a heart condition, because her doctor sold her herbal speed in diet pills.

I was bending over the sink scouring last night’s pizza pan when an empty wine bottle leapt from the windowsill and hit me in the head.

Because she’s a Manhattan lawyer, my daughter had to show me how a gust of wind must have knocked the bottle from its ledge.

I repeated my exact posture, head low over the pan, one hand holding it, the other with a Brillo pad, and even she could see that the trajectory would have been impossible unless the bottle had sprung upward.

She heard my Ow! with the glancing blow, the missile’s splash in the sink while on her cell phone to a West Virginia coroner.

To prove to her stranger things have happened than hopping bottles, I told her of the time her daddy and I were in grad school on food stamps in subsidized housing with no money to buy her diapers and a sample of Pampers came in the mail.

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Karen Zealand of her symptoms—urinary retention, pain in her kidneys, which must have been failing for days while her doctor didn’t call back.

I was weighting the wine bottle with water for a lily from my garden. She said, The Pamper thing was a coincidence.

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Yvonne Zipter Pedigree I Color, bone, temperament, ein, zwei, Kinder, threadbare scrap of likeness.

Consider me the ragbag of heredity.

II Thrilled and vexed, lofted atop my grandfather’s shoulder.

“Rags for sale! Rags for sale!” he’d call.

His face, sun-worn even in winter, so beautiful, and my hand against it like a small white star.

Indian, he’d joke, about that beak of nose.

And how easy to see him, wrapped in buffalo skin, bow slung on his shoulder, treading the sharp-tongued grass.

Gypsy was my mother’s guess, a caravan of uncles traversing her memory of youth.

Or Jewish, I think, knowing what he never knew I knew.

“Rags for sale! Rags for sale!”

From room to room he’d cart me in a game from when even refuse was dear, and the language of it equally dear.

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Yvonne Zipter

III Spontaneously I might have generated, a lonesome blue-eyed transmutation, until a cousin gated my mother’s snapshot face with a veil of white paper, and I saw, for the first time, my own eyes looking back, their languid slant like hammocks where good humor lazed.

IV That seersucker sundress with yellow spaghetti straps: remembered some forty-odd years later. But only for the splatter of red that blurted from my nose as I floated like a cork on the vinyl sea of the Chevy’s oceanic backseat. “We’re going to your father’s,” my mother’d said.

And then the eruption of white tissue, as she pressed one to my nose, others to the Rorschach blot of perfidy edging out the sunny plaid.

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Contributors’ Notes

Neil Aitken is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review (www. boxcarpoetry.com). A former computer games programmer, he is currently completing an MFA at the University of California, Riverside.

His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Avatar Review, RHINO, Washington Square, and DIAGRAM. Stephanie Allen is the author of A Place Between Stations: Stories (University of Missouri Press), finalist for the AWP Award Series in Short Fiction and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in Debut Fiction.

Her work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Connecticut Review and Water~Stone, and is forthcoming in Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women (Paycock Press, 2006). “Sympathy” is the opening of a work-in-progress tentatively titled Behind the Black Curtain.

Alison Apotheker teaches creative writing and composition in Portland, Oregon. She has poems published in or forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Mid-American Review, and many other national literary magazines.

Rane Arroyo is the author of five books of poems, the latest being The Portable Famine (BkMk Press), the 2004-2005 John Ciardi Poetry Prize winner. He is also the 2006 Cesar Chavez Visiting Writer at Saginaw Valley State University. His newest poems have appeared in AGNI Review Online, FIELD, and Cream City Review. He lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio, though his new manuscript of poems, Far West Of Eden, is about his wild horse years out west.

Ellen Bass’s latest book of poetry is Mules of Love (BOA Editions).

Her new book, The Human Line, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2007. She teaches writing workshops in Santa Cruz, Big Sur, Cortes Island, Mallorca, Tuscany, and other gorgeous places. Her website is www.ellenbass.com.

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Contributors’ Notes Paula Bohince’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Crazyhorse, FIELD, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. She won the 2005 Grolier Poetry Prize, has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, and has been awarded artist’s grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

Jody Bolz is the author of A Lesson in Narrative Time (Gihon Books).

Her poems and essays have appeared in the American Scholar, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and River Teeth, and in literary anthologies. She taught for many years at George Washington University, serving twice as director of the creative writing program. She is an editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal.

Louis E. Bourgeois lives on a farm in north Mississippi. His most recent book, Olga, was published in 2005 by Custom Words. He is working on a collection of stories titled The Gar Diaries.

Ralph Burns has recent poems in Perihelion and Crab Orchard Review.

He is completing a new manuscript, tentatively titled CAFE WHA?, and he teaches and co-directs creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Anthony Butts is the author of, most recently, Male Hysteria (Pitt Poetry Series, 2007). He is also the author of Little Low Heaven, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2004 William Carlos Williams Award, and Fifth Season (both from New Issues Poetry & Prose). His poems currently appear in Callaloo, Poetry Southeast, ABZ, hotmetalpress. net, and Caketrain. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Marcus Cafagña is the author of The Broken World (University of Illinois Press) and Roman Fever (Invisible Cities Press). He has new poems forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Many Mountains Moving, and the anthology Manthology (University of Iowa Press, 2006). He coordinates the creative writing program at Missouri State University.

Leslie Chang received her MFA from Columbia University. She is a recipient of the Grolier Poetry Prize and the Bennett Poetry Prize, awarded by the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared Crab Orchard Review

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Contributors’ Notes recently or are forthcoming in Literary Imagination, AGNI, and Iowa Review. She lives in New York City.

Martha Christina recently retired from Roger Williams University, where she taught creative writing, edited Calliope, and directed Ampersand Press. She is the author of Staying Found (Fleur-de-Lis Press), and new work appears or is forthcoming in Bryant Literary Review, Louisville Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.

David Citino (1947–2005) authored thirteen volumes of poetry, including The Book of Appassionata: Collected Poems and the forthcoming A History of Hands (both from The Ohio State University Press), as well as a collection of prose, Paperwork (Kent State University Press). He coauthored the 2005 edition of The Bible as Literature: An Introduction (Oxford University Press) and received grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was awarded the Career Medal of the Ohioana Library Association and the Bjornson Award for distinguished service to the humanities. For thirty-one years, David Citino taught at The Ohio State University, where he was named Poet Laureate.

Steven Cramer’s fourth book, Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande Books), won the Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was named a 2005 Massachusetts Honor Book. His work has recently appeared in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and is forthcoming in The Autumn House Anthology of American Poems and Prayers. He directs the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Tricia Currans-Sheehan is a professor of English/Writing at Briar Cliff University and editor of The Briar Cliff Review. She has had stories published in Connecticut Review, Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, Portland Review, Puerto del Sol, CALYX, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, South Dakota Review, and Wisconsin Review. Recently she won the Headwaters Literary Competition sponsored by New Rivers Press, for her collection of short stories, The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors.

Anne-Marie Cusac’s award-winning first book of poems, The Mean Days, was published by Tia Chucha Press in 2001. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The American Scholar, 248 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes Provincetown Arts, Madison Review, The Texas Observer, and other journals. Recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a 1997 Wisconsin Arts Board Artist Fellowship Award, Cusac now teaches at Roosevelt University and is a Contributing Writer for The Progressive magazine. Her articles for The Progressive have won several national awards, including the prestigious George Polk Award.

Sarah Cypher is an editor and writing teacher living in Portland, Oregon. She studied at Carnegie Mellon University and Trinity College, Dublin, and is at work on a novel.

Jarita Davis earned a B.A. in classics from Brown University and both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. She was recently the Featured Emerging Writer at the Tom Dent Literary Festival and has received fellowships from the Mellon Mayes program, Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and the Nantucket Historical Association. Her work has appeared in the Southwestern Review, Historic Nantucket, Cave Canem anthologies, and Crab Orchard Review. Jarita Davis lives and writes in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Marlon Unas Esguerra is a second-generation Filipino-American Muslim, born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of three chapbooks: Thirty-One Dollars Per Hour, When the Blood Leaves You, and homestay. His most recent awards include a Michener Teaching Fellowship from the University of Miami, the Wallace Douglas Award for Excellence in Teaching, a Columbia Award for Scholarship, and two Eileen Lannan Poetry Prizes from the Academy of American Poets. He is currently completing his first manuscript of poetry and is co-editing a new anthology with Nick Carbó, titled Son of the Dragon: Literary Dialogues with Asian American Men. Phebus Etienne was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and grew up in East Orange, New Jersey. She completed writing programs at Rider University and New York University. Her poems have appeared in The Butterfly’s Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature, and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. She received a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a grant from the Whiting Foundation.

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Contributors’ Notes Richard Garcia’s books include Rancho Notorious and the forthcoming The Persistence of Objects (both from BOA Editions). A chapbook of prose poems, Chickenhead, is due out from Foothills Press.

Nola Garrett lives in Palm Harbor, Florida. Her poems and essays have appeared in Arts & Letters, Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, Sewanee Theological Review, and are forthcoming in FIELD and Tampa Review.

Joy Gonsalves has been published in Verse, The Independent, and Sable, and she recently contributed to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry. A Cave Canem fellow, she teaches fulltime at North Carolina Central University.

Sean Hill’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and other journals, and in the anthologies Blues Poems and Gathering Ground. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and was awarded a 2005 Bush Artist Fellowship. He lives in Bemidji, Minnesota.

Luisa A. Igloria (previously published as Maria Luisa Aguilar-Cariño) is Associate Professor in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. An eleven-time recipient of the Philippines’ Palanca Award for Literature and four-time recipient of the Philippine National Book Award, she is the author of nine books, including In the Garden of the Three Islands (Asphodel/Moyer Bell), and most recently Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions). She is also the 2006 Stephen Dunn Poetry Award recipient.

Linda Susan Jackson is the author of two chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty. Most recently her work has appeared in Gathering Ground, Heliotrope, Los Angeles Review, Rivendell, Warpland, Brooklyn Review 21, and Brilliant Corners. Her work has been featured on From the Fishouse audio archive (www.fishousepoems.org), and she is a Cave Canem Fellow. She is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Medgar Evers College/CUNY, and she lives in Brooklyn.

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Glimmer Train, West Branch, and Hotel Amerika.

“Epithalamium…” is from her first book, Intaglio, winner of the 2005 250 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and forthcoming in Autumn 2006 from Kent State University Press.

Jee Leong Koh’s poems have appeared in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, Rogue Scholars Collective, andwerve, and Softblow, and are forthcoming in Crate and The Ledge. He lives in Queens, New York.

Lance Larsen’s second poetry collection, In All Their Animal Brilliance, won the Tampa Review Prize. His work has appeared in New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Southern Review, Times Literary Supplement, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, The Pushcart Prize XXIX, and elsewhere.

He teaches at Brigham Young University.

Jeffrey Thomas Leong’s poems have appeared in Manzanita Quarterly, Asian Pacific American Journal, nycBigCityLit.com, and Flyway. In 2003, he and his wife adopted a baby girl from Jiangsu, China, and he has since become totally immersed in fatherhood. In between a daytime job, housework, playtime, and meals, Leong writes of his quest to understand the mystery of adoption in China, a thread that runs throughout his family history. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Julia B. Levine has won numerous awards for her work, including the 2003 Tampa Review Prize for her second full-length collection, Ask, the 1998 Anhinga Poetry Prize for her first collection, Practicing for Heaven, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She has been published in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Nation, and Southern Poetry Review.

She received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley and lives and works in Davis, California.

Moira Linehan is the first-prize winner of the 2006 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, and her collection If No Moon will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2007. She lives in Winchester, Massachusetts.

Susan Luzzaro has published two books of poetry, Flesh Envelope (West End Press) and Complicity (Trask House Books). Her poetry has received many awards, including the Los Angeles Arts Council Award, AWP Intro Award, Santa Cruz National Writer’s Union Award, and a Bread Loaf Scholarship. She is currently working on a nonfiction Crab Orchard Review

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Contributors’ Notes book. Her essays have been published in the San Diego Reader, Puerto del Sol, Sunshine/Noir, and Under the Sun. C.P. Mangel is an assistant general counsel for a corporation in North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, four children, and three dogs—two Great Danes and a bulldog mix.

Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Splinter Factory (Manic D Press). He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

James McKean has published two books of poetry, Tree of Heaven (University of Iowa Press) and Headlong (University of Utah Press).

Tree of Heaven won the Iowa Poetry Prize and Headlong won a Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer Award in Poetry. He has also published a book of essays, Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports (Michigan State University Press). His poems have appeared recently in Southern Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, and The Texas Observer.

Derek Mong was born in Oregon, raised in Ohio, and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A recent graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, he has won Hopwood Awards in both essay writing and poetry, the latter for a manuscript in which “Uncles” appeared. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review and Missouri Review. He is the 2005 recipient of the Larry Levis Prize in Poetry.

Lenard D. Moore is a Cave Canem Fellow and the author of Forever Home (St. Andrews College Press). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Midwest Quarterly Review, Callaloo, North Carolina Literary Review, and Pembroke Magazine. He is the recipient of the 1997 Margaret Walker Creative Writing Award, and he is founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. He teaches English, community journalism, creative writing, and AfricanAmerican literature at Mount Olive College.

Josh Morse received an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2001, and he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Nicaragua in 2002.

He is currently academic dean of a small Buddhist high school in Honolulu, Hawai’i.

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Contributors’ Notes Danika Paige Myers received her MFA from George Mason University.

Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal and Meridian, and is forthcoming in Nimrod. She was a finalist for the 2005 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and won the 2004 Editor’s Prize for Poetry from Meridian.

Thu Anh Nguyen teaches creative writing and English literature at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Boston University. Her poems have appeared in Connections and Salt River Review. She won the Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize at Wellesley College in 2002.

Thomas O’Grady is Director of Irish Studies and a member of the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

His stories and poems have been published in a wide variety of literary journals. His book of poems, What Really Matters, was published in 2000 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

William Olsen’s most recent book, Trouble Lights, was published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, which will bring out his fourth volume of poetry, Avenue of Vanishing, in 2007. He is a 2005–2006 Guggenheim Fellow.

Regina O’Melveny is a writer and assemblage artist whose work has been published in The Sun, LA Weekly, Solo, Bellingham Review, and Barrow Street. A collection of her poems with reproductions of her assemblages, Blue Wolves, was published by Bright Hill Press in New York, and was the recipient of their poetry book award. She teaches at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Marissa Palmer received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2005. Her poems have appeared in Ice Floe: International Poetry of the Far North.

Cynthia Parker-Ohene received her MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was the Chester Aaron Scholar in Creative Excellence. She has been the Zora Neale Hurston Scholar at Naropa University, a recipient of the Vesle Fenstermaker Award from the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and a Hurston-Wright Fellow. She has published in nocturnes (re)view, x(London, England), Reed, and other publications.

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Contributors’ Notes Elise Paschen is the author of Infidelities (Story Line Press), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts (Sycamore Press).

Her poems have been published in The New Republic, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, among others, and in numerous anthologies, including The Dance: Poems and Dire Elegies: 60 Poets on Endangered Species of North America. She is co-editor of Poetry in Motion, Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast and Poetry Speaks, and editor of Poetry Speaks to Children. She teaches in the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s sixth book of poems is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press, which also published his last three titles. He has new work in MARGIE, Ontario Review, RHINO, Salmagundi, TriQuarterly, and other magazines. His website is www.pau-llosa.com.

Edith Pearlman is the author of three collections of stories: Vaquita (University of Pittsburgh Press), Love Among the Greats (Eastern Washington University Press), and How To Fall (Sarabande Books).

Her work has been chosen for selection in Best American Short Stories, Best Short Stories from the South, and The O. Henry Prize and Pushcart Prize collections. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Preservation, and Yankee, and her travel pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and salon.com.

Jon Pineda is the author of the poetry collection Birthmark (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition. His recent work has appeared in Prairie Schooner and Sou’wester, and is forthcoming in Contemporary Voices from the Eastern World: An Anthology of Poems (W.W. Norton, 2007). In 2006, he will join the faculty of the Kundiman Asian American Poets Retreat.

Iain Pollock is a poetry student in Syracuse University’s MFA program.

In Spring 2006, he presented poems at the University of Michigan’s “Bearing Witness” conference and the University of Illinois’ “Race, Roots and Resistance” conference. His work is forthcoming in The Fourth River.

M. Lynx Qualey splits her time between Cairo, Egypt and St. Paul, Minnesota. She is currently raising a two-year-old boy, and she attends 254 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes the MFA program at the University of Minnesota. Her fiction has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, The Fiddlehead, Third Coast, and Fourteen Hills.

Jill Sisson Quinn’s poems and essays have appeared in Phoebe, Antietam Review, Fourth Genre, and American Nature Writing 2003.

She received the 2003 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction from Bellingham Review.

Shelley Renee-Ruiz lives near Austin, Texas, where she manages a not-for-profit health organization and edits the Banyan Review. Her work has appeared in Coe Review, Eclipse, Poetry Midwest, and DMQ Review. She is an MFA candidate at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

Charles Reynard serves as a Circuit Court Judge in central Illinois.

His poems have appeared on WGLT’s “Poetry Radio,” and in the anthology Where We Live: Illinois Poets, the 2004 Emily Dickinson Awards anthology, the literary journals After Hours and Kaleidowhirl (online). He is co-editor (with Judith Valente) of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press).

Rachel Richardson was a 2004–2005 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared most recently in Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Antioch Review. She lives in North Carolina.

Jennifer Richter is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Carolina Quarterly, and A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry, published by CALYX Books.

Paulette Roeske’s five books include Anvil, Clock & Last (Louisiana State University Press) and Bridge of Sighs, recipient of the Three Oaks Prize in Fiction (Story Line Press). An earlier title from Louisiana State University Press, Divine Attention, won the Carl Sandburg Book Award for Poetry. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in Poetry East, Threepenny Review, and River Styx.

Natania Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of English at Knox College Crab Orchard Review

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Contributors’ Notes and the author of a critical book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton University Press). Her poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, Exquisite Corpse, Cimarron Review, and Antioch Review. Her personal essays have been published or are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Ninth Letter, Another Chicago Magazine, and Post Road. Her poem “The Ply,” set to music by composer Mark Grey, will be sung by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in Disney Hall during their 2007–2008 season.

Lise Saffran is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Hedgebrook Community of Writers. Her work has appeared in the Granta anthology Family Wanted, as well as in Puerto del Sol and Gulf Stream.

Marjorie Saiser’s first book, Bones of a Very Fine Hand (The Backwaters Press), won the Nebraska Book Award in 2000. She is the author of Lost in Seward County (The Backwaters Press) and co-editor of a book of interviews with writers titled Road Trip (The Backwaters Press).

Her poems are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner.

Jane Satterfield’s second collection of poems, Assignation at Vanishing Point, was published by Elixir Press in 2003. Chapters of a nonfiction manuscript, Motherland: A Year in Britain and Beyond, have received the Heekin Foundation’s Cuchulain Prize in Rhetoric for the Essay, Crab Orchard Review’s John Guyon Prize in Literary Nonfiction, and the Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize in Nonfiction.

Peter Schmitt is the author of two collections of poems, Country Airport and Hazard Duty, both from Copper Beech Press, and a forthcoming chapbook, To Disappear, from Pudding House. He lives and teaches in Miami, Florida.

Steven Schreiner is the author of Too Soon to Leave (Ridgeway Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, River Styx, and elsewhere. He teaches at University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Steven Schwartz is the author of two novels, Therapy (Harcourt) and A Good Doctor’s Son (William Morrow & Co.), and two collections of 256 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes stories, To Leningrad in Winter (University of Missouri Press) and Lives of the Fathers (University of Illinois Press). New stories and essays are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Crazyhorse. He teaches creative writing at Colorado State University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.

Betsy Sholl’s most recent book is Late Psalm (University of Wisconsin Press). She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the MFA Program of Vermont College.

Kim Gek Lin Short’s work has most recently appeared in the Big Ugly Review, POOL, and FENCE, among other publications. She lives with her husband and daughter in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she is completing a novel, China Cowboy, and a book of poetry.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she serves as the editor of Stirring. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, West Branch, Willow Springs, Gulf Stream, Good Foot, Bellingham Review, Reed Magazine, and the strange fruit.

Alan Soldofsky is Professor of English and Creative Writing at San Jose State University, where he also is Director of the Creative Writing Program. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and he has just completed a collection of poems titled Sins of David.

Cathy Song is the author of Picture Bride (Yale University Press), Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (W.W. Norton), and School Figures and The Land of Bliss (both from the University of Pittsburgh Press).

She lives with her family in Honolulu, Hawai’i.

Dana Sonnenschein teaches literature and writing at Southern Connecticut State University. Her two chapbooks, Corvus and No Angels But These, are soon to be followed by a full-length collection, Natural Forms (Word Press). Her most recent publications include an essay that won Quarter After Eight’s 2005 Creative Nonfiction Contest and poetry in Seneca Review, Northwest Review, and West Branch.

Kevin Stein is the author of seven books of poetry and criticism, most recently American Ghost Roses (University of Illinois Press). Recipient Crab Orchard Review

◆ 257

Contributors’ Notes of the Vernon Louis Parrington Medal for Distinguished Writing, he teaches at Bradley University. Since 2003, he has served as Illinois Poet Laureate.

Emily Gray Tedrowe lives in Chicago, where she is currently working on a novel. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Other Voices, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Sycamore Review. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature, and she has received several grants from the Illinois Arts Council for her fiction. “Claudia Leaving” is dedicated to the memory of Rosemary Salley.

Alison Townsend is the author of two poetry collections, The Blue Dress (White Pine Press) and What the Body Knows (Parallel Press).

Her poetry and creative nonfiction appear in Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, MARGIE, Southern Review and Water~Stone, and in the anthologies Best American Poetry 2006, Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework, and Kiss Me Goodnight: Poems and Stories by Women Who Were Girls When Their Mothers Died.

Maureen Waters has published three books: The Comic Irishman, Lady Gregory: Selected Writings (co-editor), and Crossing Highbridge (Syracuse University Press), a prize-winning memoir. She has contributed to Yeats: An Annual, Irish University Review, New York Irish History, Eire-Ireland and Etudes Irlandaises.

Charles Harper Webb’s collection Amplified Dog won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and was published in 2006 by Red Hen Press.

His book of prose poems, Hot Popsicles, was published in 2005 by the University of Wisconsin Press. He is a recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations, and he directs the Creative Writing Program at California State University, Long Beach.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s exploration of themes of war, suffering and living in the Diaspora has allowed her to be featured in many magazines, including the Bloomsbury Review, the BBC World Radio, and New York Newsday. She is the author of two books of poetry, Becoming Ebony (Southern Illinois University Press) and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (New Issues Poetry & Prose). Her work has appeared in several other magazines and anthologies. She teaches creative writing at Penn State Altoona.

258 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes Michele Wolf is the author of Conversations During Sleep (Anhinga Press), winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and The Keeper of Light (Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series). Her poems have also appeared in Poetry, Hudson Review, and North American Review.

She is an instructor at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Maryland.

Dominika Wrozynski teaches composition and creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Southeast Review. She also teaches poetry for Runaway With Words—a program that brings poetry instruction into at-risk communities.

Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is co-founder of Karibu Books, an independent Black bookstore chain. He teaches at the Duke Ellington School for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. His poetry has been published in African-American Review and other journals and anthologies.

Karen Zealand’s collection, X-Testaments, was 2003 winner of the Elixir Press Chapbook competition. She has received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Poetry. Her manuscript, Friendly Fire, was a runner-up for the Maryland Artscape Emerging Voices Award.

Yvonne Zipter is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection The Patience of Metal (Hutchinson House), the nonfiction books Ransacking the Closet (Spinsters Ink Books) and Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend (Firebrand Books), and the nationally syndicated column “Inside Out.” Her poems, short stories, and humorous essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the Sprague-Todes Literary Award.

Crab Orchard Review

◆ 259

Announcements 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 Fall 2006: Crab Orchard Review will be accepting submissions for our 2007 Summer/Fall special issue, “Come Together ~ Occasions, Ceremonies, & Celebrations,” until October 31, 2006 (postmark deadline). We hope to have editorial decisions made for that issue by mid-February. We will not consider submissions for the 2008 Winter/Spring general issue until February 1 through April 30, 2007.

Our two submission periods each year are February, March, and April for the Winter/Spring general issue and August, September, and October for the Summer/Fall special issue. During May through July and November through January, we will be working to complete the editorial work on each of the issues and would appreciate writers waiting until the beginning of the appropriate submission period before sending new work to Crab Orchard Review.

Thank you for your consideration and understanding.

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry 2006 OPEN COMPETITION AWARDS Announcement Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press are pleased to announce the 2006 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition selections.

Our final judge, Dorianne Laux, selected If No Moon by Moira Linehan as the first-prize winner. Ms. Laux selected Red Clay Suite: Poems by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers as the second-prize winner. Both collections will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in March 2007.

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/>.

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2005 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Roam Poems by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett “Susan Somers-Willett’s Roam is not so much a debut as a laying of claim: Poetry is her birthright by virtue of a spiritual bloodline that makes her the child of Whitman and Rukeyser. On these roads of our country, she tells us, the soul is a beautiful thing that can, after so much horror and mischief are unearthed, grid the land with compassion…. I am thrilled by the joy she conjures, and the grace of her accomplishment.”—Khaled Mattawa, author of Zodiac of Echoes

“There’s a breathtaking, sly intellect at work in the luscious poems of Roam. Susan B. A. Somers-Willett spins an elegant geography of vast terrains and intricate histories. Her poems make unexpected landings and linkages everywhere. And I’ll bet you want to keep reading “In Memory of a Girl” over and over again as long as you live. I do.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of You & Yours Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 96 pages ISBN 0-8093-2690-6, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2005 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Always Danger Poems by David Hernandez “Fierce and swift and crisp, David Hernandez’s poems drill their way into the real and always find something alive and surprising there. There’s plenty of cleverness here, but what is special about these poems is an unusual quality of determination. Hernandez’s imagination goes at the world in attack-mode—not to show off, but to discover its human depths.”—Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems

“Always Danger blends a sense of menace, of ever-present harm, with almost painterly devotion to the images central to these poems….Hernandez’s achievement is the double witnessing of violence and beauty, the one unavoidable and the other, by the end, earned.”

—Bob Hicok, award-winning author of Animal Soul, The Legend of Light, and Insomnia Diary Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 63 pages ISBN 0-8093-2618-3, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2004 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

American Flamingo Poems by Greg Pape “My happiness is the poetry of Greg Pape. He’s Lorca’s demon in Frisco Jeans and a Chino shirt, praying on a Tejano squeezebox a poet of work and cantinas, love of place and family, and a spirit that redeems all sorrow in its plenitude. I can as easily do without Greg Pape’s poems as the high deserts and mountains of which he writes can do without rain and lightning. His American Flamingo is pure splendor.”—Garrett Hongo, author of Volcano

“You want to be the poet’s friend, because he makes you cry and laugh, to share his shadow and nuanced eye.…Greg Pape celebrates the delicate and daily exchange living beings make with each other. This is a beautifully compassionate book.”—Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 96 pages ISBN 0-8093-2622-1, $14.95 paper ISBN 0-8093-2621-3, $27.50 cloth

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2004 Open Competition Award

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Circle Poems by Victoria Chang “Nothing’s too large or small for this alchemical poet, from a KitchenAid mixer to Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden to the most serene rendering of an oceanside landscape. Her technical skills are flexible and powerful, her voice is fearless yet capable of great lyrical tenderness, and her vision—global, principled, sympathetic—is a gift to contemporary poetry in America during a needful time.”

—David Baker, author of Changeable Thunder

“Victoria Chang… is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric.

Her talent is conspicuous, and this book a most impressive debut.—Linda Gregerson, author of Waterborne

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 63 pages ISBN 0-8093-2618-3, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2003 Open Competition Award

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Birthmark Poems by Jon Pineda “Birthmark is brimming with a wisdom that seems not contrived from literary ambition, but born of a joy for life quite incidental to such ambition.

It is the wisdom of Telemachus, the prototypical son, gained from long hours contemplating the missing father, then reconciling to the father’s return. It is a wisdom that begets tenderness and broadcasts, with strength and humility, a vision of contraries reconciled at the core of longing.”—Richard Katrovas, author of Dithyrambs

“Jon Pineda’s strength lies in an unusual music and his feel for tidewater Virginia and the marvelous stories it tells him. … Birthmark is, like its namesake, tender, bright, lasting, and filled with identity we are called to remark is, if not our own, close enough to feel our own.”—Dave Smith author of The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 80 pages ISBN 0-8093-2570-5, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2003 Open Competition Award

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Year of the Snake Poems by Lee Ann Roripaugh “This is Lee Ann Roripaugh at the height of her powers. Precise and unforgettable images about family and community make these poems sing and stay with you days after you have gently put the book down. She is a ‘fish with a third, wide eye’ delivering unflinching truths. I believe that Roripaugh is one of the dozen or so best poets writing in America today.”

—Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man

“What lyrical gems. Poems like diamonds faceted with the Japanese-American diaspora, our lives scattered and thrust into Lee Ann Roripaugh’s utterly exquisite canvas of sky and pen.”

—Lois-Ann Yamanaka, author of Heads by Harry

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 80 pages ISBN 0-8093-2569-1, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2002 Open Competition Award

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Pelican Tracks Poems by Elton Glaser “Elton Glaser’s Pelican Tracks offers us an intimate and intricate portrait of gritty down-home life in Louisiana.

The characters and places that populate this book reveal lives thoroughly lived and remind us that whoever and whatever surrounds us quietly invades us—in the best and perhaps worst sense of the word—and, finally, becomes us.”

—Tim Seibles, author of Hammerlock and Hurdy-Gurdy

“These beautifully made poems—rich as redeye gravy, crystalline as Ohio ice—will delight anyone seeking a fresh understanding of the American soul.…Glaser is a national treasure. His poems are at once gritty and reverent, profound and comic. If you worry for the fate of literature, read this book and take heart.”—Alice Fulton, author of Felt and Sensual Math

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 91 pages ISBN 0-8093-2516-0, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2002 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Becoming Ebony Poems by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley “The poems of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley are fearless, eye-opening, breathtaking, and compassionate. She writes of a homeland devastated by war and violence, of a culture’s survival beneath the flames of that war, and of the everyday courage of people whose stories would be lost if not for these poems. …These are political poems in the best sense of the word—wise, necessary, undeniable.”— Allison Joseph, author of Imitation of Life and Soul Train

“In ‘Requiem for Auntie,’ Patricia Jabbeh Wesley writes, ‘the mysteries of this world are…in the silence that the dead refuse to take along.’ Her new book is a translation of that silence into the vital song of poetry. Wesley epitomizes the poet as compassionate witness, and with such poets the answer to the question—Did this poem demand to be written?—is always a resounding yes.”—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 79 pages ISBN 0-8093-2517-9, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2001 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

MUSE Poems by Susan Aizenberg “Clearly Susan Aizenberg has chosen to serve the most demanding of the nine muses, Clio, the muse of history.

Aizenberg honors her with rich and vital poems of personal history, elegy, and what could be called Lyrics of the Long Haul—poems of the middle years, poems which testify to the difficulties of grace and the precious arrival of wisdom.

This is an elegant and sustained volume.

More importantly, it is an instructive one.”—David Wojahn, author of Spirit Cabinet and The Falling Hour

“…Aizenberg forces us to confront disturbing questions about how the aesthetic can be reconciled with the ethical. She faces these questions unflinchingly. They are the heart of her enterprise.

A real, three-dimensional human being emerges out of the phrasing, the images, and the thoughts of these memorable poems, shaped out of words but entangled in the gritty detail of ordinary life.”—Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 63 pages ISBN 0-8093-2443-1, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2001 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

FABULAE Poems by Joy Katz “Joy Katz is the quintessential storyteller, spinning her marvelous tales out of the gossamer of the imagination, but always with the goal of capturing the flash and flicker of the real world.…But the pleasure of reading Fabulae comes also from the way the elements of narrative, from the simple to the fabulous, are compressed into beautifully crafted poems.…Katz combines the art of the fabulator with the art of the sculptor. Hers is a distinctive and original voice.”—Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine

“In poems shot through with grace, intellect, and control, Katz considers the history and culture we all stand, finally, as heirs to: from Dachau to the deceptively still surfaces of American suburbia, from Proserpina to Plath, from the subjugation of women to the lust for empire—the result is a collection as rich as it is ambitious, announcing an already accomplished new voice in poetry.”

—Carl Phillips, author of Pastoral Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 59 pages ISBN 0-8093-2444-x, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2000 Open Competition Award

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NAMES ABOVE HOUSES Poems by Oliver de la Paz “Oliver de la Paz creates the legend of Fidelito—a boy whose yearning to fly becomes a metaphor for immigration, sexual awakening, religious passion, and the imagination of a poet-in-the-making.

As Fidelito’s family trades Filipino omens of baby teeth and rats for those of the ‘moonlike glow’ of American television romances and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, de la Paz’s deft storytelling— part magic realism, part Aesop fable— seamlessly pulls us from one adventure to the next. ”—Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day: New and Selected Poems “Names above Houses points to a new direction in Asian American poetry in which the creative genius of Oliver de la Paz hangs in the sky as luminous neon verse. He takes the urbane colors of John Berryman and mixes them with the sensuous hues of Arthur Sze. This is a book enriched with unexpected shifts of language, vertical and horizontal perspectives, and a full spectrum of emotion and insight.”

—Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 78 pages ISBN 0-8093-2382-6, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2000 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

MISERY PREFIGURED Poems by J. Allyn Rosser “J. Allyn Rosser’s poems are savvy closereadings of her daily experience. She knows how to balance cynicism with the hope for love in language that is freshly minted and full of local surprises. In the words of her own metaphor, she writes with heart and wit about the friction inside the machine of her life.”—Billy Collins, author of Sailing Around the Room and Picnic, Lightning

“It is Rosser’s splendid articulation that impresses initially, not just that her poems are well written, but that they are so resolutely anchored in the idioms of speech and the necessities of the human heart. …I do not know of another poet so unafraid of the rhapsodic and yet so capable of high wit, of addressing the world’s ‘full frontal mundanity.’”— Rodney Jones, author of Kingdom of the Instant and Elegy for the Southern Drawl Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 75 pages ISBN 0-8093-2383-4, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2000 Open Competition Award

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THIS COUNTRY OF MOTHERS Poems by Julianna Baggott “Julianna Baggott has a fierce imagination which probes the ordinary details of a woman’s life and lights up both the sacred and profane. In a poem called ‘Blurbs,’ she half-facetiously hopes for the words ‘sexy,’ ‘elegance,’ and ‘bite’ to be applied to her work. Happily, in this book, she earns all three.”—Linda Pastan, author of Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998

“Baggott’s world is haunted by blood, miscarriage, suicide, and family love—and set against the world of the Bible.…In these large, passionate, compelling poems, the speaker’s family and the holy family merge in love and suffering—wholly family, wholly loved, wholly suffered for.”—Andrew Hudgins, author of Babylon in a Jar: Poems and The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2006 Editor’s Selection

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Lizzie Borden In Love: Poems in Women’s Voices

by Julianna Baggott

Praise for Julianna Baggott “…Julianna Baggott draws themes as sharp as razors. She is an accomplished poet of the eye and ear, of the definitive feminine experience, and her poems of private life are expansive enough to suggest a vision of a political and historical era. If Baggott’s large subject is memory and, especially, its defaults, the clarity that so many of her characters seek to deny is her great virtue.…a poet of substantial powers.”

—Rodney Jones

“Julianna Baggott amazes with the scope of her imagination. Part biographer, part ventriloquist, part genius, she inhabits characters we thought we knew—from Katharine Hepburn to Helen Keller. In reopening their lives, she is reopening history, retelling it intimately and urgently and wisely in the voices of the women themselves. Baggott’s talent is almost spooky. Lizzie Borden in Love is a dangerous and elegant collection from one of America’s finest young poets.

—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Great with Child and Tender Hooks

Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women’s Voices 80 pages ISBN 0-8093-2725-2, $14.95 paper

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2005 Editor’s Selection

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

For Dust Thou Art Poems by Timothy Liu “Liu excels at the short oracular lyric that seems to erupt from a primal cave, whether a pagan sybil’s or that of St. John upon Patmos. He is like an unnervingly wise child singing in the presence of elders who grow less skeptical and more awed by the minute.”—Harvard Review “A gifted poet, an apostate who cannot stop praying, Liu strives to make secular sacraments out of actual experience, creating outward signs of inward grace.”—Library Journal “Timothy Liu is too often reduced to being a poet of sexual audacity. He is audacious, but perhaps in his baroque architecture, his fluency, his intricacy, and his unwillingness to reduce himself by dogma or theory or design. I love his growing, growling work, and his violent soft hints about the whole body politic in progressive zooms. Nothing is more learned than these fugues of ideas, these ‘racing thoughts.’ Moreover, because he is such a builder, some will be attracted to one window or one door and find single joys throughout. But the permanent, complicated delight is Liu’s poetry itself: uncontrollable melancholy and music.” —David Shapiro, author of A Burning Interior and Mondrian: Flowers

For Dust Thou Art Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

66 pages ISBN 0-8093-2652-3, $14.95 paper

Available at bookstores, or from

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the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2004 Editor’s Selection

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Twenty First CENTURY BLUES Poems by Richard Cecil “Twenty First Century Blues speaks to all of us whose lives fall short of the triumphs we had planned. Yet the jaundice in Richard Cecil’s eye is offset by clear vision. This book tells bitter truths, redeemed by memory, by wit, by craft, by accurate and resonant details.

These poems say ‘I came, I saw, I did not conquer, exactly, but I understood, I laughed, I celebrated by writing this down.’”—Charles Harper Webb

Praise for Richard Cecil “Richard Cecil’s most distinguished poems range persistently along, accumulating data until patterns and conclusions that have been latent become apparent. Again and again a faith in the lurking significance of things pays off, and the early particulars add up to revelation.”

—William Stafford “Cecil’s poems are powerful, moving, and original. There is clarity, honesty, and delightful quirkiness. He captures—he recaptures—the human situation. He is just as shocking, radical, and aggravating, in his way, as language poets, for instance, are in theirs. He makes it almost possible—let me say possible—for a well-educated generalist to read poetry again.”—Gerald Stern

Twenty First Century Blues

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

96 pages ISBN 0-8093-2597-7, $14.95 paper ISBN 0-8093-2596-9, $27.50 cloth

Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry FIRST BOOK AWARD Dark Alphabet Poems by Jennifer Maier “Maier has written a first book that doesn’t read like one, replete as it is with the evidence of a mature craft and an established vision.…While keeping the lives of people at the center of the design, Maier gets poems as easily from the willow pattern on china as from the template of myth she sees in what she sees. Signs appear to her, also, of the literal sort. Patterns in the form of words—on cardboard over a market-gardener’s truck, on a licence plate frame, or in fortune cookies—can launch her into the spirited vernacular rendered in this alphabet. Dark Alphabet, it may be, but the poems are unsolemn, leavened by wit and brightened by metaphor, even when the subject is loss.”—Jason Sommer, author of The Man Who Sleeps in My Office 80 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2726-0 $14.95 paper

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southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry FIRST BOOK AWARD Strange Valentine Poems by A. Loudermilk “Like many first collections concerned with the broad categories body and place, Strange Valentine carries a sense of urgency: these poems had to be written. But unlike many urgentfeeling first books, the language in these poems is playful and interesting.

A vernacular sensibility traces back to the locations the poems depict— trailer parks, bedrooms, hospital rooms, church—and there finds the sources of a fierce love.…They come at you like a country song, layered with cockiness, longing, raw sweetness, heartache, and just plain heart. Unafraid to go over the top or to dig deep, they are honest without being too earnest.”—Julia Kasdorf, author of Eve’s Striptease 96 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2661-2 $14.95 paper For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

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southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry FIRST BOOK AWARD BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE Poems by Amy Fleury “The minute I finished Beautiful Trouble, I wished I had copies to give to all my friends: To the poets, of course, who will admire it for its art, but also to those who don’t read poetry. Fleury proves that a book of poems need not be baffling or condescending or selfabsorbed. With ordinary words placed with perfect precision, this book throws open dozens of windows onto fresh new ways of seeing, and loving, the world.”

—Ted Kooser, author of Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps “These are troubles beautiful as plain days distilled to the wonder seed.”

—Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft

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67 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2598-5 $14.95 paper For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry FIRST BOOK AWARD Consolation Miracle Poems by Chad Davidson “Reading each poem in Consolation Miracle is like watching a seine net pulled onto the beach at sunrise: the arc of poetry revealing its haul, one by one, and then suddenly, a multitude of sleek, puffing, shiny things full of fear and trembling. The tight curtail sonnets, ‘Almost Ending with a Troubadour Line’ and ‘The Match,’ are every bit as beguiling as the longer, meditative lyrics, ‘All the Ashtrays in Rome’ and ‘Cleopatra’s Bra.’ And the longest poem in Davidson’s striking first collection, ‘Space,’ stakes its claim as one of the benchmark long lyrics for the new century.”—Ruth Stone, author of In the Next Galaxy and Ordinary Words 64 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2541-1 $14.95 paper For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

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southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry FIRST BOOK AWARD WHITE SUMMER Poems by Joelle Biele “In White Summer, Joelle Biele exhibits a Roethke-like affinity with nature and nature’s creatures. …These pitchperfect poems are written with a delicate, meticulous attention to craft and music. Like the joy she takes in her subjects, this collection is a joy to read.”—Elizabeth Spires, author of Worldling “The ‘sprung rhythms’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins are ghostglimmerings that spark White Summer’s finely glossed, soul-breathy, delectably lyrical poems…a bravo debut.”—Wanda Coleman, 2001 National Book Award nominee for Mercurochrome: New Poems 67 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2468-7 $14.95 paper

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from

For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry FIRST BOOK AWARD TRAIN TO AGRA Poems by Vandana Khanna “Vandana Khanna’s sensual, evocative poems sweep the reader away on a journey of family, culture, and spirituality. In Train to Agra, Khanna’s deft language and bright, revelatory imagery bring both physical and emotional landscapes to life. Khanna’s gifts as a poet are many, and she uses them to cross borders and countries, to bring alive ‘The India of Postcards,’ to fill in ‘colors, the smells, to translate to English / To translate into the present, into beautiful.’ Vandana Khanna is not only a poet to watch; she is a poet to savor.”—Allison Joseph, author of Imitation of Life, In Every Seam, and Soul Train 55 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2405-9 $14.95 paper

For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

MFA in Creative Writing ~ Southern Illinois University Carbondale FACULTY IN FICTION Pinckney Benedict Beth Lordan Mike Magnuson Jacinda Townsend

FACULTY IN POETRY Rodney Jones Judy Jordan Allison Joseph

A 3-Year Program in Fiction or Poetry Financial Suppor t Available for All Students Admitted to the MFA Program

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