Marc Moxon is a student in Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Back Cover: Photograph by Masha Zager © 2000 Masha Zager is the author of “Disappearing DUMBO,” which appears in this issue.
In this volume:
Dolores Hayden Kate Lynn Hibbard Robin Jacobson Joy Katz Irmgard Keun Ruth Ellen Kocher Karen Kovacik Leonard Kress Jeffrey Levine Jeffrey Loo Patrick Madden Shahé Mankerian Anna Meek Philip Metres Adela Najarro Aimee Nezhukumatathil Soo Jin Oh Melissa Peters Mary Pinard Katherine Poltorak Nicole Louise Reid
$6.00
Susanna Roxman Natasha Sajé Ruth L. Schwartz Jan Selving Paula Sergi Amar Gaurav Shah Purvi Shah John Oliver Simon Carol Spindel Virgil Suárez Margaret C. Szumowski Maria Terrone J.C. Todd Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Gary J. Whitehead Crystal Williams S. L. Wisenberg Terry Wolverton Carson H. Wu Masha Zager
ISSN 1083-5571
Volume 6, Number 2 Spring/Summer 2001
Opal Palmer Adisa William Allen Elizabeth Alexander José Manuel Arango Tina Barr Dorothy Barresi Jan Beatty Earl S. Braggs Geoffrey Brock Eleanor M. Brown Victoria Chang Isabel Cole Stephen Cramer Sharon Dilworth Cornelius Eady Eden Elieff Amina Lolita Gautier Valentina Gnup Jeffrey Greene Tony Grooms
Crab Orchard Review
Front Cover: Two photographs by Marc Moxon © 2000
Crab Orchard Review $6.00us Vol. 6 No. 2
The City
Past, Present & Future
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REVIEW
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REVIEW A JOURNAL OF CREATIVE WORKS
VOL. 6 NO. 2
“Hidden everywhere, a myriad leather seed-cases lie in wait . . .” —“Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” Thomas Kinsella Editor Richard Peterson
Managing Editor Jon Tribble
Poetry Editor Allison Joseph
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Special Projects Assistant Adrian Harris Book Review Editor Jon Tribble
Spring/Summer 2001 ISSN 1083-5571
Board of Advisors Ellen Gilchrist Charles Johnson Rodney Jones Thomas Kinsella Richard Russo
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Address all correspondence to: Crab Orchard Review Southern Illinois University Carbondale Carbondale, Illinois 62901-4503 Crab Orchard Review (ISSN 1083-5571) is published twice a year by the Department of English, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Subscription rates in the United States for individuals are $10 for one year, $20 for two years, $30 for three years; foreign rates for individuals are, respectively, $14, $28, and $42. Subscription rates for institutions are $12 for one year, $24 for two years, and $36 for three years; foreign rates for institutions are, respectively, $16, $32, and $48. Single issues are $6 (please include $3 for international orders). Copies not received will be replaced without charge if notice of nonreceipt is given within four months of publication. Six weeks notice required for change of address. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Crab Orchard Review, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois 62901-4503. Crab Orchard Review considers submissions from January through April, and September through November of each year. All editorial submissions and queries must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Please notify the editors of simultaneous submission. Crab Orchard Review accepts no responsibility for unsolicited submissions and will not enter into correspondence about their loss or delay. Copyright © 2001 Crab Orchard Review Permission to reprint materials from this journal remains the decision of the authors. We request Crab Orchard Review be credited with publication. The publication of Crab Orchard Review is made possible with support from the Chancellor, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and through generous private and corporate donations. Lines from Thomas Kinsella’s poem “Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” are reprinted from Thomas Kinsella: Poems 1956-1973 (North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1979) and appear by permission of the author. Crab Orchard Review is indexed in Index of American Periodical Verse. Visit Crab Orchard Review’s website:
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C RAB •
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REVIEW
SPRING/SUMMER 2001
VOLUME 6, NUMBER 2
FICTION AND PROSE Eleanor M. Brown
Dateline: Everywhere
1
Sharon Dilworth
Alex Lives in Prague
7
Eden Elieff
Police Work
21
Amina Lolita Gautier
Palabras
66
Anthony Grooms
Bombingham: Excerpts from the Novel
74
Irmgard Keun translated by Isabel Cole
Late Fall and the Big City: An Excerpt from The Rayon Girl
115
Nicole Louise Reid
Shimmy Twins
122
Carson H. Wu
The Places Family Takes You
126
Patrick Madden
I Saw a Mountain
161
Carol Spindel
Plot Turnover
170
S. L. Wisenberg
Plain Scared, or: There Is No Such Thing as Negative Space, the Art Teacher Said
211
Masha Zager
Disappearing DUMBO
216
Book Reviews
Recent Titles by Lucy Honig, Erin Belieu, Kim Addonizio, Forrest Hamer, Dorianne Laux, Chuck Wachtel, and Anthologies on Poems about Wildlife in the City and NuyorAsian Writing
224
POETRY Opal Palmer Adisa
london paris lagos
33 35 37
William Allen
Treptower Park, East Berlin Pushkin Café
39 40
Elizabeth Alexander
Visitor
42
José Manuel Arango translated by John Oliver Simon
Ciudad / City (Medellín)
44 45
Tina Barr
True Religion Infusion
48 50
Dorothy Barresi
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles
51
Jan Beatty
Going Deep for Jesus
53
Earl S. Braggs
Separated City
55
Geoffrey Brock
Transit Gloria Mundi
57
Victoria Chang
A Skeleton of Color
59
Stephen Cramer
Blanket
60
Cornelius Eady
Portrait of Girl w/Flowers, MacDougal Street Dead Man Rides Subway
62
Valentina Gnup
City of Fire
64
Jeffrey Greene
Thin Gold Chain
90
Anthony Grooms
After the Quake, 1886
94
Dolores Hayden
The Milliner’s Proposals
96
Kate Lynn Hibbard
Power Failure
98
Robin Jacobson
Rockefeller Plaza, December 24th
99
Joy Katz
24th and Mission
100
Ruth Ellen Kocher
Interstate 81 Jezebel Above the City Pastoral
101 102 104
Karen Kovacik
Blue Paris From the Indianapolis City Directory, 1916: A Tally Church of St. James, Warsaw, Ochota District / W kosåciele SÅw. Jakuba, Warszawa Ochota
106 107
Leonard Kress
Visit to the Polish Writers’ Union, Krakow
110
Jeffrey Levine
Crédit Egyptien
112
63
108
Jeffrey Loo
the returning
114
Shahé Mankerian
Educating the Son Books
136 138
Anna Meek
Eating the Zoo
140
Philip Metres
Negatives and Soundtracks
142
Adela Najarro
San Francisco Redlands, California
144 146
Aimee Nezhukumatathil Mr. Mustard’s Dance Club: Ladies’ Night
148
Soo Jin Oh
Panoramic Panegyric
149
Melissa Peters
Steel
152
Mary Pinard
Elegy: The Discordant Note
154
Katherine Poltorak
St. Petersburg Subway
156
Susanna Roxman
Troy Welcome to Elsinore
158 160
Natasha Sajé
Marble Steps
186
Ruth L. Schwartz
The Swan at Edgewater Park Failure Aliens Can See Us Now
188 189 190
Jan Selving
The Consolation of Coincidence Ghostsickness
191 192
Paula Sergi
Fond du Lac
193
Amar Gaurav Shah
Midsummer in Bombay
195
Purvi Shah
Urban Pastoral
196
Virgil Suárez
Havana Blue
198
Margaret C. Szumowski The Knife
199
Maria Terrone
To Hold This Splendor My Brother Listens to His Police Scanner
200 202
J. C. Todd
At the Polish-American Festival, Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia
203
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
I Used to Own This Town What the Land Carver Said From the Sky
204 206
Gary J. Whitehead
Ginsberg Dying
207
Crystal Williams
Parable of Divas: Aretha Franklin & Diana Ross
209
Terry Wolverton
City of Salt
210
Contributors’ Notes
240
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2001
249 260
A Note on Our Cover The two photographs on the front cover of this issue are the work of Marc Moxon, a student in Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The back cover photograph is the work of Masha Zager, whose essay “Disappearing DUMBO” appears in this issue.
Announcements
We would like to congratulate past contributors Rigoberto González, Garnett Kilberg Cohen, Lynne Kuderko, and Fern Logan. Rigoberto González’s essay “Our Secret Other Worlds,” which won the 1999 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize and appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 5, Number 1, was named a Notable Essay of 1999 in The Best American Essays 2000, edited by Alan Lightman. Also, we would like to congratulate two contributors to Crab Orchard Review, Volume 6, Number 1, and our cover artist for that same issue. Garnett Kilberg Cohen, whose story “Swarm to Glory” appeared in our Fall/Winter 2000 issue, and Lynne Kuderko, whose poem “Mother-in-Law’s Tongue” appeared in the issue as well, both received 2001 Artists Fellowship Awards from the Illinois Arts Council. Fern Logan, whose photographs graced the cover of Volume 6, Number 1, also received a 2001 Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council.
This Special Issue on
The City: Past, Present & Future is dedicated to the memory of
Gwendolyn Brooks June 7, 1917 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; December 3, 2000 Illinois Poet Laureate and Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress
Eleanor M. Brown
Dateline: Everywhere Dateline: Washington, D.C., 1987
You grew up in this city, where cherry blossoms litter the sidewalks in the aftermath of a natural ticker tape parade, where your friendships are recycled like aluminum cans every four years, and where no one would ever dream of paying to get into a museum. You have listened to the recording at the base of the enormous preserved elephant a hundred times, the shrieks of kids on field trips echoing through the lobby of the museum, drifting over the belly of the blue whale and into the facets of the Hope Diamond. When you are 16, your boyfriend drives you to the Washington Monument one night. You notice, maybe for the first time, that this city is flat, the buildings never rising further than you can see. That is, except for the one you are standing at the base of, watching it soar, phallic, into the dim sky. You sit on one of the benches while he smokes, lighting Pall Mall after Pall Mall, which he steals by the carton from the local drugstore, and no one cares, because no one has smoked Pall Malls for years, except for your boyfriend. “I just want to get out of here and establish a lifestyle as soon as possible,” your boyfriend says, exhaling thick, chalky smoke into the chilly air. You huddle into your coat and look down the street. You can tick off the buildings by heart—the IRS, the FBI, the National Archives—and in the distance, the dome of the Capitol rises menacingly, threatening to overflow with Republicans. You wonder what lifestyle, exactly, he thinks he is going to establish, and what kind of place he needs to be in to establish it, and you wonder mostly why he can’t do it here. The city is white buildings and dark people, and you can see Lincoln musing over the reflecting pool while gunshots echo in the distance and your boyfriend lights another cigarette, coating the glimmer of the stones with tar. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 1
Eleanor M. Brown
Dateline: Moscow, 1990 Red Square at night, the flag flapping above the Kremlin despite the still air, the soldiers outside Lenin’s tomb, the bulbous Christmas lights of St. Basil’s. You are standing on what used to be the executioner’s circle, having a strange half-conversation with a group of students from Italy. You don’t speak Italian, and they don’t speak English, so you are speaking in French, and poor French at that. A group of sailors pushes by, blustery and drunk, cheap Russian cigarettes hanging from their lips. One of them takes you in his arms, dances you around, stones clicking under your heels. You laugh as he sings to you, matching his clumsy waltz with the thick, erotic slurs of his language. His friends call to him, so he puts you down, kisses you goodbye. His breath is hot, and stained with vodka, which is the only word you know how to say in Russian. You are staying with a family of four, in a tiny Stalin-gray block of apartments. At night, you sit perched on the edge of the couch as they pull the dinner table up to you and feed you hot dogs and ice cream. You don’t have the heart to tell them you are a vegetarian. But the hot dogs are sinfully good, and you don’t mind at all. At night, their younger son, who listens to Def Leppard and has grown his hair long, takes you out to pulsing underground clubs, where you have entire conversations with people in broken English over the din. You marvel that wherever you go, people know you are American, and you get to love being treated like a celebrity. That lasts for about five minutes. Then you start to hate it. But you love this city, the combination of dingy and desultory existing beside ornate and ornamented. You love the way strangers on the street ask to buy your clothing, but would give you their own off their backs if you needed it. You cry when you leave, but you miss fresh fruit. Dateline: London, 1994 You have been in the city for a month now, and you wonder if there are any English people here at all. You share a flat with three other Americans, your next door neighbors are Australian, and the man pulling pints at the pub is a Kiwi. Your hair smells constantly of 2 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Eleanor M. Brown
cigarette smoke and you are always sweetly tainted with sweat. Rush hour on the Northern line, and you dive into the belly of the beast, pushing your way onto the Underground, marveling at the way there always seems to be room for one more person. It is a marvel of engineering, really, the way that woman has turned sideways and the man behind you is balancing the fold of his newspaper on your elbow, and the tourists stack their bags from Harrods so the doors will close and the train operator doesn’t have to yell at you. You have to duck your head slightly as you wrap your hand around the cool metal bar and feel the sweat tickling along your hairline. You are too tall for most things in this city, though you have never considered yourself particularly tall before, and the only people who can look you in the eye are German. The car lurches to a stop, and somehow, through another marvel, no one bumps into each other. You unlock your knees and press out the door, spurting onto the platform, lubricated with sweat. As you walk back to your dormitory, you look at the tiny blue plaques on the houses in this neighborhood, proclaiming in a very understated way, the historical significance of the dwelling. You wonder, for maybe the fifteenth time that day, how you can ever get to the point where you take such things for granted. In the British Museum, there are cases and cases of artifacts, so many that they do not even bother to identify them all, it is more a show of quantity than of particulars. On the weekends, you take the train out of the city, and as it clatters by castles, everyone buries their noses in Page Three. Dateline: San Francisco, 1997 Your friend Chad has come all the way from Des Moines to see the Castro. “My people,” he proclaims, throwing his arms out in the misty air as he spots his first rainbow flag. He is walking on air, floating up the steep hills, grinning at everyone walking by, gay or not. You stop at a crosswalk, smell the air from the bay, and your stomach clenches. You wonder why he does not see what you see, that this city is dying. The men in the café windows, huddled close over coffee, are ashen in contrast to the flags. You shiver.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 3
Eleanor M. Brown
Chad wants to go dancing, so you do. The club is cavernous, threatening to explode with the sheer volume of the music and the heat of bodies. You stand, amazed, as Chad disappears onto the dance floor. You have never seen so many men in one place before. Young, heated, T-shirts stuck to their chests or torn off completely. Tattoos circle muscular arms. You yell at a bartender wearing a flag tied around his waist, black combat boots, and he brings you a bottled water. As you walk back to your post along the wall, feeling less feminine than the drag queens you see up on the stage, another woman grabs your hand. “Hi!” she shouts over the din. You clasp hands for a moment, yell a greeting back, move on. Your estrogen returns to normal levels. On the ferry to Alcatraz, you look at the city disappearing behind you, shrinking and widening at the same time. The hills look higher from here, mostly because you have learned not to look up when you are walking. Instead, you watch your feet, admire your calves, which are becoming alarmingly muscular. You wonder if this happens to everyone who lives here. Later, you buy blintzes from a crumpled old woman and let the sour cream drip down your chin as the fog rolls in, just as it does in all the movies. Dateline: New York, 1999 You step over puddles of urine in subway station corridors, remembering that you should be wearing what your friends call “survival shoes.” Emerging onto street level, you scan the sky for the sun, but it is blocked by the rise of skyscrapers, and you pull your sweater around you, wondering what the weather is like that day. Perhaps you will watch the news when you get home. They’ll tell you. At five o’clock, you meet your friends for a smart cocktail at a smart bar, where you chat with smart men wearing smart business suits. Your smart pumps are scuffed from skirting trash bins on the sidewalks, the garbage strike has been going on for a week, and the city has become one very large Dumpster. You have become conscious of every plastic wrapper you peel from around the cap of your apple juice, every Chinese take-out carton, every cotton ball coated with Clinique that falls into your garbage can. Around you, people are grinding cigarette butts into crystal ashtrays, dropping 4 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Eleanor M. Brown
swizzle sticks on the gleam of the mahogany bar, flicking bottle caps onto the floor, and all you can think of is landfills. That night, when you are in bed with one of the smart men from the smart bar, his smart business suit puddled out in the hallway, and your smart pumps kicked off by the door, you are still thinking about garbage. His head is between your thighs, and you are idly stroking his thick blond hair as he laps lasciviously. But still, what fills your mind is the image of heaps of garbage, the detritus of life in Gotham, rising higher and higher, looming past the windows of your fourth-floor walkup, teetering to the side like some sort of Leaning Tower of Trash, the Parthenon of Rubbish. You imagine the sun being blocked out by these mounds of waste, if it weren’t already blocked out by the buildings, you imagine styrofoam cups dropping from the sky like snowflakes, and you shudder. “Oh god,” you moan. He thinks you are talking to him, and he pops up like some lewd jack-in-the-box, satisfied that he has satisfied you. It is about then that you realize you have to go. Dateline: Nowhere, 2002 The sun is setting low and fire-orange in the distance, and you wrap your hands around a mug of something steaming, maybe tea, herbal, of course. You prop your feet up on your porch railing, and your dog, a golden retriever, probably, comes up and nudges your elbow with a cold, wet nose. You pet him idly, savoring the silky feel of his coat, and smile at no one in particular. You haven’t talked to anyone in two days, and the only signs of life are intermittent smoke signals of dust sent up by trucks on the road in the distance. They are comforting, in their own way, it is nice to know that life as you once knew it is continuing, though you have dropped out. You are connected, surely, there is a phone, maybe a fax machine and a computer, but there are days you forget what the ring of a telephone sounds like, and you never turn the fax machine on anyway. Sometimes at night, you see yourself walking through the streets of a strange city, the blur of faces you don’t know and will never remember swirling by you. But when you pull yourself out of the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 5
Eleanor M. Brown
dream, there is only the gentle hum of crickets, the sedate purr of the refrigerator, and the soothing click of Bo (which is, in all likelihood, what you will name the poor dog) walking across the floor. You fall back to sleep, filled with the peace of quiet. But then, after a few more months, you miss museums, and you miss smart cocktails, and you miss shopping for clothes that arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t flannel. Being well-rested has made you restless. When you turn on your laptop, Bo looks at you sadly, and slinks off to the kitchen. He knew you would never make it. You begin to wonder what Paris is like this time of year.
6 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review
Sharon Dilworth
Alex Lives in Prague
Alex dances around her small studio apartment in anticipation— only two weeks until her Guy Fawkes party. Alex has invited everyone she knows to come celebrate. Her list is long—fellow Brits, a few locals, and the medical students from Oslo. Maybe even that strange group of Poles, the beefy blondes in those fur caps that tie under their chins like baby bonnets. The American college kids will come. Afraid to go anywhere alone, they will descend on her party like a lost army searching for battlefields. The old communists in Prague love the Americans. They’ve never seen such straight, white teeth. Alex hates the Czechs’ worship of Americans. “Aren’t they clever?” a woman at the bus stop once asked Alex. “To have come all this way, across the ocean and everything?” Alex, who is always optimistic about her love life, hopes she will have a boyfriend by November. It would be nice to have someone help her get things ready for the party. She has no prospects, nothing on the horizon, but Prague is an ever-changing city. People come and go all the time. The sound of a hard object hitting the ceiling interrupts her dance. BAM. BAM. BAM. The noise sends her into a fit of giggles. It’s Olaf. Bloody, daft Olaf. Olaf is her stupid landlord. He works the graveyard shift at the post office and spends his mornings in bed. His snores are loud and guttural; she hears him all day long. The stone tiles in her small studio apartment are cold and she puts on her big black boots with no socks and stomps in a continuous circle, knowing the noise is driving Olaf crazy. The blisters on her heels irritate and incite her. She pounds harder. Knowing he will say no, Alex has not said anything to Olaf about the party. Olaf ’s house, which is just off the park, is a perfect place for a party. There is a large garden, a shed, and even an open space for the bonfire. But Olaf is dull and doesn’t like to have a good time. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 7
Sharon Dilworth
Like most of the Czechs Alex has met, Olaf is gloomy. He spends his days talking about the end of the world, which he feels is inevitable, given the state of things in Prague. He’s employed by the government, but talks about how he spent his life trying to screw the Communists. He insists on talking politics to Alex even though she’s told him she doesn’t care. Things were better before, he says as if reciting a mantra. He hates his job, and complains that one day he will be replaced by a computer. “We’re all going to be replaced by computers,” Alex tells him. “Don’t think you’re so special.” Olaf has a stone fireplace in his garden. He uses it to smoke pig sausages, the only thing he loves to do. When he’s smoking meat in the garden, he doesn’t talk of doom and despair. He’s not happy, but at least he’s not complaining. Olaf uses cherry wood—wood that he’s brought down from the forests that surround the town where he was born. Alex enjoys it when Olaf smokes his sausage—the air fills with the sweet musty odor of meat and burning wood. People strolling in the park come over and stand in front of the house. The smell is like nothing they’ve ever experienced. Olaf won’t sell any sausages, no matter how many times the strangers ask, or how much money they show him. When he’s finished with his work, he sits at the kitchen table and eats them one by one until he moans that his stomach is going to burst open. It’s the only thing that makes him happy. Olaf thinks Prague is a lousy place to live. He’d prefer to spend his life in the small village where he grew up. Except that up there, there are no jobs, and there’s nothing to do except drink beer, watch football on the television, and complain about the government. His parents, he tells Alex, have spent their lives trying to screw the Communists. “They are good people,” he says. “They deserve better.” Alex avoids Olaf as much as she can. If she had wanted to hear about employment woes, she would have stayed in London and listened to her parents. Olaf is difficult to ignore. He sits at the kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. In the afternoon, he drinks beer and smokes more cigarettes. At night his friends come over and they sit at the table drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes. Olaf tells her the same things over and over. Her Czech is not great, but she understands most of what he says and she doesn’t like hearing repeated stories. Alex knows all about his Aunt, the one who deeded him the house. “Twenty-two years, she never left this house. She never spoke 8 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Sharon Dilworth
to anybody,” Olaf tells her the woman’s strange behavior is something he is proud of. “She had her vegetable garden, her chickens, and when she needed something she would walk to the store in the middle of the night and leave a note explaining where to put the necessary supplies. It was a great mystery why she gave me the house.” “Yes,” Alex says. “I know. Some of the members of your family are so angry that you got the house that they won’t talk to you.” “They won’t talk to me,” Olaf says as if she hasn’t said anything. “My brother. The only brother I have. Three years. Not a word spoken between us.” Olaf converted the upper floors into studio apartments. He rents to foreigners, who have money. And only to women. He likes women living in the house. He makes deals with the women when they can’t pay the rent. Alex knows the French girl across the hall bakes pies for him. Alex can’t cook, so she sleeps with him. It was Olaf ’s idea; at least this is what she tells herself. Olaf comes to Alex’s room when she doesn’t put the rent envelope on the hall table. “I don’t have the money,” she says. “Can I come in?” “Now?” she asks. “Now is good,” Olaf says. Alex grimaces. “I’m doing this because I like the apartment,” she tells him in English. The studio is the best thing she’s seen in Prague. It has a window that overlooks a park and a heater that doesn’t use coins. There is always plenty of hot water. Olaf shrugs. His English isn’t good, though he sometimes repeats what she says as if they are in a language class, mimicking, but not comprehending. Alex locks the door. No sense announcing her deal to the other tenants. Alex is a clumsy girl, always getting herself into uncomfortable situations because she doesn’t know how to say no. Her mother hopes she’ll grow out of it. “It’s childish, the way you behave,” she scolds Alex. “A grown up doesn’t go around trying to make amends for the damage they’ve done.” There is nothing childish in sleeping with Olaf, but it is uncomfortable. Alex is used to men being in love with her. Especially Crab Orchard Review ◆ 9
Sharon Dilworth
the ones she goes to bed with, and Olaf ’s gloom confuses her. He seems unaffected by their sexual encounters. Her apartment has a Murphy bed, which she likes, except when Olaf is there. He stands in the center of the room, watching as she struggles to unfold it from the wall, but doesn’t offer to help. When she finally secures the bed’s legs and locks the bolts into place, he’s struggling with the buttons on his shirt. “Clothes. Take them off,” Olaf says in Czech. Naked, she stretches out on the bed. Her stuffed crocodile is on the pillow and she touches his worn fur as Olaf stares at her. Sleeping with Olaf is better than giving away money, she reasons. Any sane person would do the same. “Hurry,” she directs. His body reeks of nicotine. She doesn’t like the feel of his skin against her body. She once tried to keep her pajama top on and he made a fuss. The rolls of flesh are the first thing she feels as he moves onto the bed. The bolts in the wall groan with his weight. His hair is oily, and she can see tiny flakes of dandruff. Olaf is always scratching his head; sometimes he scratches so hard, his scalp bleeds. Alex closes her eyes. Tomorrow she will buy a red skirt or a silk scarf, a goofy madein-Prague toy to send home to her little sister. He runs his tongue across her breasts and she tells him not to do this. She doesn’t want to respond to his embraces. “Don’t,” she says. He licks his fingers and tries to excite her, but she shakes her head. “Don’t touch me down there.” She grinds her teeth, certain that one will crack in two one of these days. She closes her eyes and thinks of chocolate bars. “Look at me,” he says. He breathes through his nostrils. His hands are large, his fingers thick. The skin around his knuckles is raw, and red. She thinks not of the smoky smell of the sausages he cooks in the backyard, but of the pigs before they are slaughtered. She wants to vomit. It’s over. His body is wet with sweat, and he doesn’t protest when she pushes him off her. “You’re too heavy,” she complains. He gets up. The bed lifts without his weight. She keeps her 10 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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eyes closed. She hears his zipper, then his belt buckle, then comes the swish-swish of his corduroy pants which means his fat legs are walking down the corridor, down the steps. He makes enough noise to wake the dead. She is sure everyone in the house knows that score. The water in the pipes rushes as he flushes the toilet. Her rent is paid. Alex takes the sheets to the Laundromat. While her things are drying she goes to the shop on the corner and buys a large chocolate bar that she devours. At midnight, she goes to the British pub and buys her friends beers. She’s drunk after two pints. There’s not enough room to dance, but everyone does. They stand in place and move together, everyone drunk and sweating. She makes her mind a blank and has forgotten about Olaf when the boy from Iceland asks if he can walk her home. They make noise coming in. Alex does not tell him to be quiet. She moans and cries, laughs out loud. BAM. BAM. BAM. Olaf pounds on the ceiling. She puts her stuffed alligator on the boy’s chest and punches it with her fists. “Shut up. Shut up,” she yells and the boy from Iceland thinks she is wild. He has never met anyone who laughs during sex. “I’ve never seen anyone like you,” he says, and that gets them both laughing. They sleep most of the next day. The shadows falling across the bed covers warn of nightfall. The boy is famished and wants her to make him something to eat. She has a whopper of a headache. Her mouth is dry, and her body shakes. She is no longer interested in entertaining. “You have to go,” she tells him. “We’re not allowed to cook in our rooms.” She has a refrigerator full of food and a hot plate sits on the windowsill. “I have a hangover,” he says. “Give me some coffee. I will feel better after I drink some coffee.” “No,” Alex says. He was cute the night before, but now he looks thick and slow. His hair is gray. His skin is almost the same color. She knows if they were to spend the day together, he would end up being moody. Next time she’ll sit at the American table. At least the American boys with their perfect white teeth are happy. They don’t smoke, never have dandruff, and smell like spearmint or clove. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 11
Sharon Dilworth
Alex follows the boy downstairs and unlocks the tricky latch on the front door. Olaf, sitting in his chair, barks at her. He’s hunched over the ashtray, already full of cigarette butts. The smoke hanging around his head like a dust cloud is still and thick. The odor of nicotine permeates everything that comes close. “No visitors allowed,” he yells. Alex knows the rules. She’s signed the agreement that says she won’t have anyone in her room overnight. She doesn’t care to be scolded. The boy has given her a rock that he claims came from a still active Icelandic volcano. It is black and imperfectly shaped, resembling rocks from every country she’s ever been in. Alex takes the rock out of her pocket and tosses it down the hall. She’s amused when Olaf starts screaming. He cries out in pain as if struck. She stomps up the stairs. Olaf ’s insults are easy to ignore. She goes upstairs and stands at the window. She’s hungry, bored, and restless. If she stays there doing nothing, she’ll get homesick and waste money on a phone call only to find out that nothing is happening in England anyway. As soon as she hears her mother’s sighs, her father’s dry bored voice, she’ll remember why she wanted to leave London in the first place. It’s the end of October, and the windows are frosted. The sky dims as the sun moves lower into the sky. She gets under the covers and sleeps until morning. Alex likes fun. Life is short and shouldn’t be wasted by foolish complaining, or by doing things that bore you. A good party, a good laugh, a good drunk is the best way to pass the day. She was wrong about Prague, which isn’t even her fault. Everyone told her it was the best city in the world, especially for fun-loving foreigners. But Prague is not what she expected. Her job at the New Works Theater was advertised in a freeweekly newspaper in London. It was supposed to be exciting, a perfect opportunity for a young, innovative, creative person. Alex spends her days sitting at a card table in a room crowded with junk—manuscripts, books, theater props, unopened letters, trash. There are no windows. She translates from French into English all day long. It’s dull, and she knows that being bored isn’t the worst 12 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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thing in the world, but it’s not why she left London. Traveling to a new country was supposed to have been a good time. Olaf inherits a cat from his friend, the English speaking taxi-driver. Alex does not understand why or how they are friends. The taxi-driver is the one who got her the studio in Olaf’s house. He is a slow-moving man, someone who discussed death like the weather. The world, he feels, is just about over, and he sees no reason for happiness. He’s jaded and sad, but gives Alex and her friends free rides when he passes them in the streets of Prague. His melancholy moods are consistent and a small price to pay for getting around town with no charge. The friend is allergic to cats. His eyes burn, his skin breaks into a rash. The whole experience with the cat has depressed him. He thinks he will be alone the rest of his life. He can’t adjust to animals, how can he possibly live with a woman? Olaf is cruel to the cat. He makes the cat sleep outside. He refuses to give her a name. He wants her to kill the mice in the house and when she does, he rewards her with huge chunks of sweet potatoes. The cat sits outside Alex’s window and whines to come in. She gets the help of the French girl from across the hall. Alex lowers a rope and the French girl puts the cat in the basket. Alex pulls the basket into her room. Alex feeds it leftovers—white rice and boiled cauliflower. The cat sleeps at the foot of her bed. She makes strange noises. Perhaps she has a hairball caught in her throat and Alex hopes she doesn’t throw up on the duvet cover. The next morning, the cat is immobile. Alex touches its bloated stomach. She thinks the cat is pregnant, and keeps her locked in the room. That night she hears Olaf calling for the cat. You. You. Where are you? He takes a flashlight and searches the gardens. Alex moves away from the window, not wanting to be seen. The cat hasn’t moved since morning. Alex believes the babies will come that night. Instead the cat dies. The French girl has gone away for the weekend and Alex blames her for the cat’s death. Olaf calls Alex stupid. A stupid, stupid girl. How old is she anyway. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 13
Sharon Dilworth
“Twenty-two,” Alex answers, before she realizes that Olaf didn’t want an answer to her question. “I told you not to feed her,” Olaf says. “She was hungry,” Alex says in her defense. “She was not yours,” Olaf says. “You’re too stupid to know you don’t feed a cat food like a human.” He buries the cat under the mulberry tree, using a tree branch to mark the spot. He turns off the water. Alex has no water, until Monday when he finally leaves the house. Then she lets herself into the basement and finds the right knob that allows her to run a hot bath. She takes two, one right after the other. Without a cat in the house, the mice are not afraid to wander up to the second floor. Alex hears them moving around all night. She turns on the light, and pretends to read. She turns the pages, one after the other, but doesn’t register a word. She talks to the other tenants, but none of them seem to know about the mice in the walls. It’s Saturday and Olaf is smoking his sausages. The sky is clear, the sun almost warm. She goes outside and stands behind him, waiting for him to turn around. He ignores her. “I’m sorry,” she tells Olaf. “I don’t want to talk to you,” Olaf says. His face is red from the warm fire. The sausages are laid out on a steel tray. They are so red in color, they are almost purple. “I thought the cat was hungry,” she says. “I got worried. I didn’t mean to kill it.” He bends forward, tending to the fire with a greenish twig. The odor is enticing, and she is suddenly famished. There is not much meat in Prague, and she would love a taste. “I’m sorry,” Alex says a final time. The next day, she stops at the flower cart at the entrance to the park and buys Olaf some daisies. They’re expensive. She puts them in a vase on the kitchen table, but Olaf stays angry with her. November 4th, and Olaf knocks on her door. “What?” Alex asks. “No party,” Olaf says. The English speaking cab driver must have heard about the party. 14 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Sharon Dilworth
She doesn’t know how else Olaf would know about it. “No party,” Olaf repeats in English. “And you pay rent.” “Okay,” is the only thing Alex can think to say. She can’t un-invite everyone. It’s not possible. Olaf will be at work. It’s a Friday night, no reason for him not to work. The post office is across town and by the time he gets home, the party will be over. Besides, there are no rules about having parties in the back yard—she’s never signed anything that told her not to have people outside the house. Alex’s friend, Natasha, lives next door to a pub where the guy who makes the beer deliveries has agreed to look the other way while Natasha and Alex steal a keg of Guinness Stout. He wants to go on a date with Natasha, but Natasha has a fiancé in Norway. “Norway’s a long way away,” Alex advises. “Go out with this guy once. Bat those dreamy eyelashes of yours at him and we’ll have him stealing anything we want.” “I’m not like you, Alex,” Natasha says. “I’m shy.” “You like to have fun, don’t you?” Alex asks. “Not like you do,” Natasha sighs. She is prettier than Alex is, and people are always flirting with her. She laughs and ignores them in a way that Alex thinks is stupid. Guy Fawkes Day, and Alex, with no boyfriend, has no help making the effigy. She’s had to do it all herself, and the result is a bit shabby. The dummy is wearing a pair of her pants, the stretch ones, a shirt she doesn’t want to give up, but has no choice and a hat she found in the back hallway. He looks a little like a scarecrow from a farmer’s field and a bit like all the thick, scowling men who wander the streets of Prague. Alex makes three large signs and nails them to the trees on her street. PARTY THIS WAY PARTY STRAIGHT AHEAD GUY FAWKES PARTY RIGHT HERE!!! The night air is frigid. Alex drinks beers, smokes cigarettes, and stomps her boots into the frozen earth. The bonfire starts slowly. The wood they’ve collected is damp and smells. It burns for a few minutes, then sparks out. “Let’s get this going. Let’s make the fire big,” everyone shouts. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 15
Sharon Dilworth
The Americans invade, but they’ve brought supplies—glass bottles of beer and vodka that break and smash throughout the night. Alex is drunk and when the guys who are tending the fire ask her where to find more wood, she points to Olaf ’s shed. It’s a damp dark place that is usually locked. She hears someone laughing and understands that they have kicked off the lock. She wants to stop them, but doesn’t. She doesn’t want to bother telling people what to do. It’s a celebration and everyone should be having a good time. The Americans clear the shed of Olaf ’s wood, the special wood he uses to smoke his beloved sausages. Alex sees them throwing the cherrycolored logs onto the fire, and knows there’s something wrong, but she doesn’t do anything. To stop them would be to slow the fun. The bonfire is red and yellow. The party roars. She stumbles around the circles of people. Everyone is having a good time; she shouldn’t have drunk quite so much—she can’t focus, things seem a bit fuzzy. She doesn’t know if she is having fun. She goes to the trees and throws up. She’s sick again, the party roars. She blacks out. The next thing she knows it’s daylight and Olaf is pounding on her door, threatening to kill her. She’s confused and can’t translate his rage. He yells and yells, but she really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The taxi-driver friend is brought in to translate. He explains Olaf ’s anger. “You burned his wood.” “I’m sorry,” she says and stands up. She needs more sleep. The pain in her head is pounding and she thinks she’ll vomit again. The taxi-driver friend tells her to sit down. “The wood was from his grandfather’s home town. Cherry wood that smoked the best pig sausage in all of Czechoslovakia.” Olaf crosses the room and removes a knife from the cupboard. He slashes it in the air, a grand motion as if he means to cut Alex’s throat. “He’s an animal,” she tells the friend. “It was his wood. You had no right to burn it.” “I’ll pay for it,” Alex says. “How?” Olaf yells at her. “A price cannot be put on that wood,” the friend explains. “It was worth more than money. It was all he had. It was all he loved.” “It was just wood,” Alex says in her defense. “It’s not like I 16 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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killed his father.” The taste in her mouth is rancid, worse yet, she can’t remember certain parts of the night. Especially the end, she’s not exactly sure how the party ended. “It’s not my fault,” Alex says. “Besides I said I was sorry.” Olaf comes over and spits on the floor in front of her. Alex doesn’t have to stay and be treated like a criminal. She’s sorry for what happened. But she wasn’t the one who burned the wood. Get the Americans who raided the shed. They’re the ones who are responsible. “She’s a whore,” Olaf spits as he talks. Alex recognizes the word. “I am not a slut.” “You slept with me for money,” Olaf says. “I did not.” “You did,” Olaf says. “That’s what whores do. They go to bed with men for money.” She runs up the steps and locks her door shut. She stands there listening, half expecting Olaf or his friend to come up and get her. She hears them arguing, but they leave her alone. She gets back in bed, the bed covers smell of her vomit. In that moment she’s sorry about the party. It wasn’t the great time she’d thought it would be, and now there’s the problem with Olaf to deal with. A wave of self-pity washes over her. I’m just hung-over, she thinks and forces herself to stop crying. She knows she’ll feel better when she’s had more sleep. Olaf uses his own key to get into her room. She smells the whiskey, pungent and powerful, and she tries to scream, but he’s got something over her mouth. She bites down, but the material is wet, smells of his sweat, and she can’t breathe. He drags her to the car and pushes her into the back seat. “I’ll get the police on you,” she threatens. She knows Olaf means to scare her, but she’s not afraid. She’s angry. Olaf drives like a crazy man. The day is gray, full of rain and fog. The passing cars flash their yellow floodlights. Olaf hunches over the steering wheel. He moves into the far right lane, and the cars on either side of him burst into a cacophony of honking horns. Alex yells for him to slow down. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 17
Sharon Dilworth
She worries that he’s going to abandon her in the countryside. She imagines a scene where she’s talking to a farmer, trying to find a train station or a bus to get back into the city. Her clothes will be wet. She’ll be cold, her nose running. She tries yelling, but they’re on the expressway and no one can hear her. He stops the car. Her chin hits the front seat, which angers her further, but Olaf is pulling on her hair, and doesn’t care that there’s blood on her cheek. A thin layer of snow has fallen, but the streets are still gray. Everything is cold. It’s too cold to be outside with no coat, nothing to keep her warm. Olaf pushes her against the car, yelling something until she understands that he wants her to get into the boot of the car. “You’re insane,” she shouts. She turns, hoping to flag down a passing car. They will stop and demand that Olaf leave her alone. The road is empty. She doesn’t recognize where they are. He picks her up, hurting her leg, and she has no choice but to do what he wants. He slams the boot shut. The smell of gasoline fills her nostrils. She panics and screams. He’s crazy. Crazier than she had ever imagined. The car starts. It jerks forward and she smashes her head against a steel rod. It’s not a game. She’s frightened. It’s not right that this is happening to her. She didn’t mean to make him mad, that’s not why she had the party. She didn’t know he cared that much about that stupid wood. It’s dark and frightening and she worries that she’ll make herself sick. She demands that she think of other things. Nothing bad will happen to her. She doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment. It was a party—she was trying to have fun. She reminds herself that it’s just Olaf. Bloody, daft Olaf. He won’t do anything to hurt her. He wouldn’t. He’s angry. He wants to scare her. She calms herself. Whatever happens, it will be over soon enough. She stops crying. It’s time to leave Prague. Alex wants to go someplace new. Anywhere else, but Prague. She cannot call home for help. Alex imagines being stuck someplace and calling her parents for help. Her mother would answer. “Hello Mommy,” Alex would say. 18 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Sharon Dilworth
“It’s not a good time, dear.” Her mother’s voice would be distracted. “Can you call back later? The basement is flooded. The rains won’t stop and your father has gone up north.” If Alex were to say something about wanting to come home, her mother would jump all over her. “Did you lose your job? Not again. When are you going to grow up? Life means work and you can’t keep getting yourself canned.” She would not give Alex time to explain the situation. “Where are you going to get another job? You have no idea how bad things are in London right now. Call me next week. Okay sweetie? Call some other time.” Alex is dizzy from the car starting and stopping, the sharp turns. She wonders if it is nighttime. She’s not sure, but she thinks the car is slowing. No. They speed up again. She hears other cars. If only she knew what Olaf was thinking. She brings her hand up to her mouth and breathes through her fingers to keep from inhaling the gasoline fumes. She feels the car surrounding her like a coffin, her heart starts racing, the panic rises. “Help,” Alex cries. “Somebody help me. I didn’t do anything wrong.” She imagines herself taking the red and blue shuttle bus to the airport. That’s what she will do. She will go to the airport. There she will be around people getting out of Prague. She likes this plan. At the airport, she will sit on the heat grates by the plate glass windows in the main room and watch the travelers come through the sliding doors. She sees the scene clearly. She can almost touch the scene in her head. The large room will be cold, but the forced air coming up from the grates will make her comfortable. The boy next to her will be American. “Hey,” she’ll say when she feels him looking at her. “Hi.” Clean smelling, the calculated casual looks of a kid whose parents have a lot of money. “You traveling about Europe?” she will ask. He will nod and smile and offer her some potato chips. “They’re terrible, aren’t they?” he grins and offers her more. “Yes. They’re terrible,” she agrees. They will not smell like the boot of a car, and when she’s finished them all, she will lick the salt from the plastic bag. She doesn’t ask, but he will tell all about himself. A little Crab Orchard Review ◆ 19
Sharon Dilworth
prompting and American boys will tell you everything, as if their boring life stories are worth hearing. She will let him talk. The car stops and so does her daydream. She holds her breath, straining to make sense of the noises she hears. Nothing. Maybe the car hasn’t stopped. She’s not sure. Everything is dark. Unclear, as if the fog covering the streets of Prague has somehow seeped into the boot of the car. Alex and the American boy will stand in the queue for the bus into downtown Prague. The bus comes and they sit in the way back— the windows are grimy, but he is enthusiastic, excited to be in a new city. His teeth gleam, perhaps they are only highlighted in the grayness of the afternoon shadows, but they shine white. It will be easy. Alex will take him into the city, show him the sights. They’ll go to a bar. He’ll drink pint after pint of the best beer in the world. He’ll get drunk fast, and she’ll check them into a hotel. They’ll make love, and then he’ll pass out. She’ll take his Visa card from his wallet, the one he is sure to have beneath his Eurail pass, and charge a one-way ticket. She’ll speak in French or in Czech. She can do it right from the telephone in the hallway—he won’t have any idea what she’s saying. She feels better now that she has a plan. By the time the boy’s parents get the bill, Alex will be in Torremolinas, Biarritz, maybe even Nice. Someplace warm. She’ll be on a beach, in a city where the people are happier, someplace where life is much more fun.
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Eden Elieff
Police Work
The air on Chicago’s South Side has teeth, my father would say during the rare times he accompanied me on the three-block walk to school. He would walk with me, sometimes holding my hand, sometimes not, the day after the local TV news carried some report of a particularly grisly murder—he would distinguish between what he called a garden-variety murder and a grisly murder. If the report revealed horrific details of the victim’s extensive suffering, earning it the latter label, a sense of guilt would rouse him to get up off the couch the next morning, put some clothes on over his boxers and V-neck T-shirt and deliver me himself to the squat school building, to make sure the same fate didn’t befall me. I never pointed out to him that he was a day late in protecting me since the crime happened yesterday, because I was happy to have him walk with me any time, crime or no crime. When I was ten years old, more than my fear of the streets was my fear of my father melting permanently into the couch. “Yessirree little lady,” he’d say as we’d cut through the alley. “This air out here’s aggressive. It’ll flip-flop on you.” “Yeah,” I’d say with great seriousness, nodding my head slowly, though I wasn’t sure what on earth he was talking about. I would imagine he was describing how the summer thunderstorms would gnaw away at the apartment buildings, leaving dusty particles of the chestnutty brick to hover everywhere. In other words, he was talking about erosion, which we learned about in fourth grade. On the days he didn’t walk me to school, I’d think about erosion and brace myself for whatever menace or danger that might emerge from the grittiness of the air, as if one of those TV criminals would materialize right in front of me and do me in. I liked to imagine the horror that would overwhelm my father’s face when my image would appear on the television screen that night: his own daughter, the city’s latest victim! As the days got shorter, the air got thicker—I imagined erosion was spreading as we headed into winter. On the days he didn’t walk me to school, I’d hide in the hallway gloom of our apartment to watch my Crab Orchard Review ◆ 21
Eden Elieff
father as he lay on the couch, watching the window turn black while he jangled the ice cubes of his drink. The Al Jolson songs would be playing—I’m sitting on top of the world over and over again. The lights wouldn’t be on because he hadn’t bothered changing the bulbs and I was too afraid to change them myself, thinking he was preserving the dark for some private reason. To give myself something to do, I’d play with the rubberiness of my face, twisting it into the bizarre, unreal shapes I’d seen in paintings or horror movies, in defiance of his solemn warnings that I risked permanent disfigurement doing so. “You want your face to freeze like that, with your mouth up by your ear?” he’d say. But watching him as he stretched out on the couch, I knew he was bluffing. His right hand was cupped around a drink so much these days, especially since my mother had left us, and he looked totally unconcerned that his hand might freeze forever in the shape of a C. I heard him mutter one day, “Three times three is thirty-three.” I released a startled, formless sound. Without turning his head, as if he’d always known I was there, he said in an urgent, heated voice, “Stare long enough, anything can equal anything.” In the fall of fifth grade, I got to stay home from school for a day to boycott the mobile classrooms Mayor Daley was planning for the schools in the black neighborhoods of the city, to the west and north of us. The year was 1964, and in my school, which was more than half black, this plan of the Mayor’s did not go over well, even though we were not directly affected. Everyone said the black neighborhoods should be getting money for new schools, not those trailer park arrangements. See? people in Hyde Park would say. Daley was a bad man and not fit to be Mayor. He cared only about the Irish neighborhoods. They’d say, name one Paddy who’s ever even seen the inside of a mobile classroom—or of a jail cell, for that matter, since all the Irish crooks were out on the streets running City Hall. So the adults and community leaders said: Mobilize! Which meant boycott work and school and join the big march downtown, the first civil rights protest in Daley’s reign. My father wasn’t particularly political, and he became even less so after my mother had left in an effort to diminish her influence on us, so I had no idea how he’d react to all this. I told him I would become an outcast if I didn’t participate in the boycott—even though deep down, I shared his indifference. As far as I was concerned, if being political meant no school, then political I was. 22 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Eden Elieff
“We might as well move to Marquette Park if we don’t support the boycott. You know, where neo-Nazis march down Cicero Avenue,” I said to my father on the Saturday morning before the boycott day. I was repeating word-for-word what I’d heard some mother say at school, knowing the Nazis were the one topic that could get him going. Marquette Park could have been in St. Louis as far as I knew. “What do you mean, neo?” He looked up from the bowl of pancake batter he was whipping up. It was always pancakes on Saturday morning. “If your father was a Nazi, and you’re still a Nazi, then that’s what you are. A Nazi. I’m not a neo-Democrat.” I thought about this for some seconds. I’d always thought his father was a Republican. “What if your father wasn’t one but now you are?” “You’re still a Nazi.” “So you’re saying I can go downtown to the march?” “Yeah, yeah,” he said, coughing into the pancake batter. “Have yourself a ball.” My neighbor Natalie and I decided to boycott the boycott and make trouble in Madison Park, the enclosed area where we lived. A long rectangle, Madison Park was a jungle of bushes and towering trees, a perfect playground. And it had a dozen narrow alleyways that connected the park to the busy artery of Hyde Park Boulevard to the south. In those dark thoroughfares, Natalie and I would wait to stalk or spook people—people like Mad Mildred, an old lady with a chin full of whiskers who lived on the ground floor of the retirement hotel at the park’s east end and whom we’d often see in the corner drugstore stuffing rolls of toilet paper into her purse. With fists and head shaking, she’d explode in curses of some phlegmy European tongue when we threw ourselves in front of her, as though we’d shocked her clear back to some war-blighted homeland. But making trouble in Madison Park really meant one thing: finding more ways to torture Mr. Johnson, the park’s old caretaker, who could be found every morning tending to the grass and abundant plant life. Mr. Johnson was black like the kids in school, but to us his skin simply covered him the way his coat did, and no one was going to spend time thinking about the color of anyone’s old coat. He was black the way a blackboard was black—opaque and neutral, a blank slate we could fill with anything we wanted. And we didn’t hesitate to heap the worst of ourselves on him, as we were natural and sworn Crab Orchard Review ◆ 23
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enemies: It was his job to tame the jungle playground we were hellbent on exploiting. He’d curse us, calling us “devil children” and hollering at us for all the antics we pulled. We stole everything we could get our hands on—his rake, spade, shears, or work gloves; we overturned the sod he planted; we made confetti from the leaves he piled. We dared these antics because, as tall and big as he was, we knew he couldn’t catch us. He had a curved back shaped like a meat hook and walked with a catch in his gait. All morning Nat and I waited for Mr. Johnson on top of the park’s hill. The sun was strong, cooperative. “I’m sure he’s at the boycott. Let’s go back to school,” she said in a resigned voice before yanking a toadstool out of the ground. “Eat it,” I said. “It’ll make you so smart you won’t need school any more.” She fingered the brown feathery stuff under the mushroom cap and then brought it to her nose. I wanted to shove the thing in her mouth. There was only one way to find out if it was really poisonous. If she got sick we’d call an ambulance and they’d pump her stomach and everything would be fine. And then we’d have avoided the boycott and school. But Mr. Johnson emerged from a nearby alley, saving her. Somebody was with him, a tall kid, holding a rake. “Look!” I gasped, nodding in their direction. We watched them for maybe half a minute; we’d never seen anybody with Mr. Johnson before. They were familiar with each other and they stood eye to eye, which made me assume the kid was Mr. Johnson’s son. Nat whispered, “He’s a freak!” She was right. The kid had strange streaks of discoloration across his face and arms. We had an albino girl in third grade, and I once saw someone in a shoe store with what my mother called a wine stain in the middle of his cheek, but those white streaks on Mr. Johnson’s kid were new to me. I was tired of being sensitive about things on people you couldn’t take your eyes off of—we had to pretend not to notice the pink eyes of our albino classmate—so I agreed that the kid was a freak. “It’s like somebody tossed him in a washing machine and poured bleach all over him,” I said. Nat got all technical and claimed bleach couldn’t do that to skin. “But acid can,” she said in triumph as if she’d just discovered a new element, and right then we became convinced that Mr. Johnson hurled acid on his kid and not only that, had done it to dozens— 24 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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killing not disfiguring them—and not only that, had buried them all in Madison Park. “It’s why he leans over his rake all the time. He’s looking at where he can bury everybody,” Nat said. “Or seeing if anybody’s gotten dug up,” I said. We agreed he must be breaking into apartments and houses all over Madison Park and looking for new victims. Why else did all those keys hang from his waist? Anything can equal anything, I thought. “He is very evil. He brought his son to help him today. Maybe he’s brought him here a hundred times already. We could be . . . you know . . .” Neither of us dared finish the sentence. When I came home that afternoon my father was asleep on the couch. The room was half-dark. I was dying to ask him what he knew about Mr. Johnson. And if he asked about how the City Hall march went, I’d tell him I had a ball, just like he ordered me to. His head was nestled deep in the pillow, his chin raised, his mouth slightly open—a deep sleep. He had lost weight over the past year, which was good on the one hand but strange on the other; he didn’t seem like himself unless he was stretching his clothes tight. He sought refuge in sleep so much that looking at him that afternoon, I remember thinking all he must have are good, perfect dreams, dreams that provided better versions of his own life. I wondered if I was ever in his dreams, or if he ever had a sense of me in his sleep. I looked at him stretched out on the couch, his arm dangling so that his hand almost touched the floor. For all he knew, Mr. Johnson could have killed me today, and what I knew was that he’d be like this through the rest of the afternoon and as the night settled into our place. Hello! I went to the kitchen and got a bowl and filled it with warm water. When I came back he hadn’t moved a muscle—I was quiet enough in the kitchen not to disturb him. I went over to him quietly, placed the bowl with the water on the edge of the couch and, putting all my concentration into controlling my breathing, lifted his arm and put his hand carefully into the bowl. You were supposed to pee in your sleep if your hand met with warm water. His hand floated in the bowl like a lily pad. His breathing halted a bit, but otherwise he didn’t react to what I’d done. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 25
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I was too afraid to look at his crotch area to see if there was a wet spot forming on the cornflower blue boxers he wore all the time. Instead, I trained my gaze on the living room window and bit the inside of my cheeks to keep myself from breaking down. My father’s dreams must have left his head and taken up residency in mine. I fell asleep thinking about Mr. Johnson, spooking myself that he was hiding in my closet and would emerge the second I fell asleep. I dreamt lightning had seared the face of Mr. Johnson’s son, giving him the streaks on his face. In the dream he told me heaven had kissed him, that his streaks were bruises from heaven. I laughed and said that’s stupid, heaven doesn’t have lips that burn you like a clothes iron. Okay, he said, suit yourself, but you better run when you hear thunder. When I woke up, I thought, I’ll name him Thunder. With the days shortening, Nat and I abandoned play and investigated Mr. Johnson as the sharp cold night hovered above us. On some days the darkness was our ally, providing our cover; other days—and you couldn’t predict when or why—it threatened us, as it seemed to hold the dangers that would make the evening news. On the good days we boldly collided with shadows in alleys and apartment lobbies, our flashlights rudely exposing their secrets. We traced the streets we thought we knew well, hoping they’d cough up evidence. To our amazement, they did; it was as if somebody had fed the neighborhood truth serum. We found enough stuff to hold our own rummage sale. Dirty white tube socks. Nylony scarves. Pink lipstick. LBJ for President buttons. Coins. Baseballs. White Sox T-shirts. Cigarette lighters. Red bandannas. 45’s, some broken. Razor blades. A wallet-sized school photo of a little girl with plain brown hair. Shoelaces, which glowed in the twilight like worms. I volunteered to keep track of everything. I’d spread the stuff on my bed and pore over it for hours and then record it all in a notebook, our evidence notebook. I was convinced the items were signs of something, omens of some kind. Tell me a story, I’d ask of it all. Tell me. Who owned you? The girl in the photo? Was she strangled? Knifed? Shot? What items went with what? The lipstick with the scarf? The LBJ button and the shirt? I dressed in every combination I could, to see what might match and to see if I might somehow feel their histories with the items on my skin. Often, I 26 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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dreamt about the brown-haired girl in the photo, the girl with the toothy smile and oversized glasses. In one dream, the glasses floated above me and led me outside to the Woodlawn Avenue part of Madison Park. Settling on the ground, they caught the sun and collected enough rays to start a fire. The flames settled in a small circle the way a tornado touches down in one place, and they bored a hole deep in the earth as if to lead me to her remains. One evening I kept the scarf around my neck as I went to the kitchen to heat up a store-made rotisserie chicken. I wanted to see if actually doing something while wearing the clothes would somehow reveal their histories. The scarf was long and sheer and a bright salmon color, and in honor of its glamorous aura, I did my hair up in a French braid. I set the table with the good blue and gold China dishes; the antique breakfront cabinet in which they were stored hadn’t been opened since my mother left. When my father sat down at the table, he stared at the empty plate and then looked at me sternly. “So what’s this?” he said, grabbing the edges of it. “What do you think it is?” “What do I think? I think it’s a really bad idea.” “Dad, Jesus.” “Don’t Jesus me.” He put his hands over the plate. “What’s wrong with the dishes?” He gave a loud sigh, picked up the plate as high as his chest, and for a second I thought he was going to hurl it across the room. But he thought the better of it and put it back on the table. He continued to stare at it. “You want to know what’s wrong?” His voice was loud. “What’s wrong is that I don’t like eating on old things. These plates are just too goddamn old for us.” The next day Nat and I waited nearly an hour on the boulevard before sighting a police car—an answered prayer. We flagged it down, waving our arms wildly. The cop veered toward us but didn’t bother pulling up to the curb. Cars had to weave around oncoming traffic to pass him. Through the half-open window I handed the policeman the evidence notebook I’d made. His fingers were thick and ugly. I stared at his ring finger. The gold band seemed to be choking it. Nat elbowed me, too afraid to take the lead. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 27
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“Um, we found all these things,” I said, nodding to the notebook. I felt proud of my list—long, neat, very official. “They’re evidence,” Nat said. The policeman looked like a walrus, but with unexpectedly bright eyes, a nice kind of walrus. He glanced at the list, pursed his lips and then tilted his head toward us. “Where’d you find all this?” “Around. We think the bodies are buried in Madison Park.” “Bodies?” He closed one eye and looked squarely at me. “Uh-huh. These things came from the bodies when Mr. Johnson brought them to Madison Park. They’re evidence of the bodies.” “Hmm.” He kept looking at the list. “There’s a lot of stuff here.” “That’s why we’re telling you.” I was feeling impatient. “We think there’s a lot of bodies buried in Madison Park.” “You’re certain about this now?” The radio in his car snarled and coughed. The sound twisted my stomach: Bad things were happening somewhere. “You see, we can smell the bodies.” I wasn’t lying. I was smelling all sorts of smells in Madison Park. “Tell you what,” he said. “You keep up the good work. And when you find a body, make sure you flag me down again, okay?” I shrugged. “Okay.” Radio static hissed. He flipped through the pages of the notebook before closing it. He saw the word EVIDENCE on the cover and then closed his mouth so that his lips disappeared. He looked away for a couple of seconds, rubbed his eyes and then turned back to us. “But don’t work too hard, you hear? You shouldn’t be out so late. You don’t want to be joining those bodies, right?” We nodded. He handed back the notebook, told us again to make sure and stop him if we needed him, rolled up the windows and drove off. “He didn’t even ask us about Mr. Johnson,” Nat said. “He doesn’t need to,” I said angrily. “Don’t you see he already knows all about him?” Silently, we watched the car until it disappeared into the traffic. As we turned the corner into Madison Park, we froze. Mr. Johnson was shuffling down the sidewalk, hugging a bag of groceries. When he approached the entrance of the Madison Park Hotel, a dozen yards away, he stopped and glared at us. I took off, instantly fearful that in his expression was the knowledge that we 28 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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had exposed him to the police. Nat followed. I sneaked a quick glance back at him and saw him continue into the hotel. Meanwhile, the pale sun was no match for the winter night. It disappeared more quietly each day and Nat wouldn’t venture out with me. Alone, I found my wanderings became less about investigating and more about surrendering—to the night, to my fears of it, but at the same time to the allure of its dangers. With my mother gone, I could roam freely, knowing I wouldn’t have to account for my whereabouts. To buck myself up, I’d wander to Lake Michigan at 55th Street to look across the water at the buildings. When calm, the water looked like some kind of tar soup, almost like you could walk across it. The buildings looked best at twilight—sharper, more serious, not softened by haze. According to my father, this South Side perspective was the best view of the skyline in the whole city. “Pick a building,” he’d say countless times. “The way they thrust into the sky like that, any one of them’s telling the world to fuck off. That’s the South Side attitude, and that’s your roots. Don’t ever hesitate to tell the world to fuck off, okay?” I liked to sit on the rocks and stare at the buildings and wonder whether my father’s advice would be enough to protect me against the TV criminals or anybody else who’d do me harm. I’d never admit it to anyone, but I hoped I’d someday get to test the power of his wisdom. I’d walk back home, my ears alert to the sirens, willing myself to brave the cold darkness. I practiced over and over in my head how I’d express the South Side attitude if I ran into Mr. Johnson on the street. Often, I’d hear voices in the wind whisper things, as if the wind had carried the quarrels of people across the city to replay them for my benefit. I became disoriented to the point where I was no longer sure of anything, especially anything to do with myself. As the night filled the streets, I’d wonder whether I was really an orphan, and I became convinced those who’d brought me into the world were prowling the streets looking for me to do who knows what. One night a maroon car with darkened windows drove astride me for nearly two blocks as I walked along my usual route back from the Lake. I bolted for an apartment lobby, wheezing, my head splitting with fear. I slumped against the lobby wall, too paralyzed to lean my arm against the row of little black buzzers for help. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 29
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Outside, the car slowed, then passed, and the darkness closed in again. Eventually, the distant watery street lamps drew my eyes toward the street outside. A tall man was peering into the doorway, his hands cupped over his eyes against the glass. Our eyes locked for some seconds, and as he turned to disappear, the angle of his face caught a shaft of pale lavender light from a street lamp, revealing those strange acidy streaks I had seen on the face of Mr. Johnson’s son. Thunder. I waited a long while before leaving the building. On the way home I couldn’t stop thinking about Thunder. Had I seen him just in time? Or maybe—and this thought stopped me dead in my tracks—Thunder had prevented the people in the maroon car from getting to me. Maybe Thunder had somehow intervened and saved my life. Or maybe it wasn’t Thunder after all. By the time I reached the park I was crying. Approaching the hotel, I saw through the glaze washing my eyes the silhouette of someone tall moving behind the illuminated shade in Mad Mildred’s ground-level apartment. I stood there for a long time, wondering, for as much as we’d spooked and followed her, why I’d never noticed such silhouettes before. All the evidence was sneering at me the next day. How could I keep things against someone whose son might have saved my life? On the other hand, what if Thunder was out to get me for collecting evidence against his father? Whatever the case, I could hardly bear to look at the stuff anymore. I wanted to be done with the whole business. I wanted to get rid of everything and do so in a way Mr. Johnson and Thunder would know, clearing Nat and me in their minds. So every day just before dinner, when I figured he’d be finished working, I’d drop off an item or two in the lobby of the Madison Park Hotel—I remembered Mr. Johnson going in there with the groceries. I’d sneak in when the scowly desk clerk turned away, headed directly for the hallway across from him, and proceed just a bit down the dim hall toward the residences, where I’d place the stuff against the wall. Somehow I figured all residents had to pass this way. Mr. Johnson would see the stuff and reclaim it. It took me ten days to get rid of everything. When Natalie asked me about it, I told her the items were doing fine, that they’d hold up well until we cracked the case—which, because of her own fears of the 30 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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dark, she lost interest in. After a while she stopped asking altogether. Mr. Johnson disappeared as winter settled. And so did Thunder. It was like they just got up and migrated somewhere. Not that there was anything for them to do anyway, with the ground frozen solid and covered with snow. But I stayed outside throughout the afternoon anyway, because my father had moved from the couch to the wingedback chair facing the front door. It was as if he realized my mother wasn’t going to come flying through the window, so he turned his attention to the door, and I felt too weird breaking into his plane of expectation. Often, I hung out in unlocked cars. One afternoon I found myself in an old Pontiac that was parked in front of the Madison Park Hotel. It was full of new and old phone books. To pass the time I looked up everybody I knew until my fingers got numb and then decided to go to sleep. The books made great pillows once I padded them with my jacket hood. Leaving the car after it got dark, I looked at Mad Mildred’s apartment and was jarred fully awake by the sight of silhouettes moving behind the lit shade—the same thing I’d glimpsed the afternoon Thunder had peered at me. I watched the figures walk back and forth for a while before realizing that the shade was not pulled all the way down and that if I could stand on something, I’d be able to peer into her apartment through the sliver of exposed space. I grabbed both the White and Yellow Pages of Chicago, and a Western Suburbs Yellow Pages, and a bunch of neighborhood directories. It took me two trips. I stacked them under the hotel window, hoisted myself on top of them and braced myself against the cold cement ledge. If I tiptoed, I could see right into the room. A big wooden table occupied most of my view. Mad Mildred, wearing a White Sox T-shirt, was sitting at the end of it in front of a place setting. She didn’t have hair; she was bald as a sock darner. My mind raced through my encounters with her . . . in the drugstore, on the street . . . and I couldn’t summon a clear image of her hair— just a vague brown mass—that, come to think of it, was always covered. Which made me look at her neck, because around it was a salmon-colored scarf. The windowsill behind her was filled with objects—a lipstick, a baseball, a cigarette lighter, shoelaces, a 45 RPM record leaning against a window. Oh my god, I began to think, and seconds later I nearly toppled to the ground because Mr. Johnson, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 31
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dressed in a neat blue workshirt, emerged from a doorway in the back of the room. His signature key ring hung from his waist. I grabbed the ledge. He walked over to the table and right in front of her placed a light blue egg cup with an egg poking out of it. Mad Mildred nodded at Mr. Johnson. Barely smiling, he returned the gesture and lightly patted her back. He leaned over her from behind and started peeling away the eggshell, his big fingers working their way around that egg slowly and deliberately like he was doing some kind of surgery, taking care to place the little shell pieces on a napkin. She sat there patiently, a picture of calm, looking down at the yellow soup of the egg. They had a brief conversation and he left the room the same way he entered it. Meanwhile, I could barely breathe at what I was seeing. I hopped off my ladder of phone books and headed straight for the boulevard, hoping to find the policeman we’d stopped earlier, because who else might be able to explain what had gone on in there? Please, I’d say, you told me to find you. Please, I don’t understand, Tell me.
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Opal Palmer Adisa
london
i had an affair in london that took me to brixton where reggae music bounced from the walls of a little hole in the ground pub where men who have never set foot in Jamaica spoke a potois thicker than mine they knew how to rub-a-dub rub-a-dub and grind on electric avenue emerging from the tube i stopped at a corner store and had curry roti and wondered how i got to india without my sari and this love affair or one-night stand was taking me to places that belonged elsewhere i kept losing my way not knowing right from down so when he asked if i wanted to see buckingham palace and the crossing of the guard i came awake and this lust affair was denser than the london fog and as proper as the queen with the man in her bedroom and how was i supposed to tell
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Opal Palmer Adisa
what time it was when ben was cloaked and i had a date in piccadilly square to see a comedy was it errors or shakespeare
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Opal Palmer Adisa
paris
not the eiffel tower the quays of the seine not even louis xiv versailles or centre pompidou charmed me as much as the sights on the metro and diversity of paris the senegalese walking with their robes flowing the arabs in their turbans the martinicians with their caribbean flair and the somber algerians who have invaded paris just like france attempted to take over their countries they demand benefits from colonization redistribution or retribution in the open market i buy a mango from cĂ´te dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ivoire much larger than both my cupped palms i purchase spices from morocco and witness the black world spread before me a smorgasbord their goods on sale on this weekday flea market everywhere africa
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Opal Palmer Adisa
arabia and the caribbean are for purchase the city is no longer its former self and though these new parisians are scorned their faces will not be erased negritude is alive in french spoken in many dialects paris is now part of the third world
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Opal Palmer Adisa
lagos
across the six-lane freeway they come at you selling telephones ironing-boards suits newspapers name it they have it mostly boys but some girls young men in colorful garments women with babies tied to their backs darting in and out of the zooming vehicles that never slow a driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nightmare the array of colors and tongues is dizzying yoruba ibo hausa fufu eba dodo cluster of skyscrapers obliterates the african landscape men so fine my heart pauses dressed in the most intricate design agbadas lounging in the streets chewing on kola nut talking to their brothers holding each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hands women in bubas with matching geles that attempt to meet the sky or spread to unite east and west glide as gracefully as lizards a cacophony of voices assault my ears entreats demands requests bartering
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Opal Palmer Adisa
something is being sold everywhere in this market place where my history began
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William Allen
Treptower Park, East Berlin
Three Scotswomen and I take a double-decker bus from Hermannplatz, though no one knows exactly where it goes, to reach the monument before the final bulldoze. As we cross what once was No-Man’s-Land, only a crow on a pole guards the gates to unseen barriers of sound. By the Volkspark, automatons with ersatz patent leather briefcases, set out for The Village of the Damned, trudging without smiles or lifted eye. We have to pass through a concrete Mother Russia’s legs, approach a ransacked marble Chancellory to reach the tomb of the unknown soldier, who coddles a Kalishnikov and an ivory doll. Lotti, four, secretly traps beetles she calls po-po bugs as they creep about asphalt doors below a hill where B. meets kids from Lodz and New Orleans. Ice-blue pines sift silk across a leaden sky where, within a year, these fields will be pulverized, like the crumbling Prussian chestnut biergarten we head for afterwards, for Berliner Kindl, the beer with green stuff in it to make it sweet. Laughing, we gaze at paddle-boats that circle Jugend-Insel, hausfrauen fox-trotting to Marlene Dietrich’s Marie Marie, playing with fringes of each other’s hair. Carrie is dazed— this isn’t Fassbinder or Murnau—the tinny schmaltz of two-penny vibraphones is a last lament for Treptower Park and its already-smoggy hinterlands, now cast to the winds of commerce from the West.
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William Allen
Pushkin Café In the vineyards near Rome, flowers shudder, trying the mind’s borders. Near Vejvodova, charming Ludomila serves us schinken-sandwiches and coffee, the decor is Santa Fe just as the Iron Curtain has just begun to tear. We wonder who owns this fabulous palace of chandeliers— maybe the Greek poet in the corner who assumes we’re German brokers dreaming of Czech sex, under a photo of Jan Palacha, who set himself on fire in ’69. Carrie starts in right away to narrate her dream: elderberry brambles instead of leg hair, her thin brown legs curving into mandrake root, though now instead of Apollo, it’s a woman wearing a crown of stars that chases her through myrtle fields to a place called Father Island. Hexameters, written on walls in some otherworldly gloss on the golden mean: she loves you, she loves you not . . . A canoe, out on the Vltava: I say it’s brother and sister, soaking wet sharing a slight caress, but C. says it’s lesbian lovers from Utrecht—this is what’s not always clear between us. On Saturday night, after too much Budvar beer, we hear a reeling Swede say to a hooker outside our flat at Rijna 12: How much do you cost? and then, Is that normal? At breakfast, at the café, we both fall in love with Ludomila, as we both did with a pianist in Weimar. But this woman has a son to raise and puts us off with Mozart. Artists and shoemakers are silent, romance blurs as soon as it ignites: in a bar called O Golem there’s no plum brandy the night we arrive, . . . is it normal that nothing but ostrich is served? But the dream persists in both of us all day, even up to the hilltops of Petrin, where gaudy mirrors and the hunger wall attract us, and we see scratched into a broken heart in tree bark 40 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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the fingernails of Boleslav the Cruel, and have to look to good Queen Drahomira to see what’s truly valuable in love. So to our flat to finish the Cutty Sark, thick and dark, sleep another night in frankincense and myrrh, wake for another breakfast at the Pushkin, where we discover after fifteen years of friendship it’s each other we want to be with. We drink again, smile, head home, past tourists who even in daylight pee on God’s gargoyles, past angels with coal-soot quills atop the Charles Bridge, to the heart of Prague where we hear black-marketers hawk their polished eggcups, to what sounds like: Hobbes! Hobbes! Hobbes!
Notes: —Boleslav the Cruel, medieval executioner. —Queen Drahomira, pagan mother of King Wenceslas of Prague. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 41
Elizabeth Alexander
Visitor Belo Horizonte The city rocks at close of day, busses lumber, workers hustle home. Sunlight’s a silt on these buildings outside my hotel window. I am high up, a visitor to this new city, excited and weary as Lorca or Senghor. Here, they say it straight: white women to marry, black women for work, mulattas for fucking. There are hundreds of words describing color, skin, and who I would be in this city is unclear. A car horn plays “La Cucaracha,” just like Uptown, U.S.A. Streetlights and headlights appear like chicken pox. I could look out this window for hours at the finishing day, the lancets and whippets of shiny rose light. My eyes are a gemologist’s, divining mica from mud, mining iridescence, a country, composed in legible lumens, color. Days later on the night-flight, almost West and home, the wide sky wakes. America becomes visible beneath plush clouds outside bituminous Pittsburgh, grey and mottled, gridless, dappled. Then the clouds clot and we are in heaven. I am black again. The sky is pale and pink.
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Elizabeth Alexander
My suitcase is full of poems in Portuguese, beads to protect me that will break in a month, vacuum-packed coffee beans, ebony fists, black soap that lathers up creamy, and white.
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José Manuel Arango
Ciudad Y salí al balcón, melancólicamente, para cambiar de pensamientos, mirando al menos un poco de la ciudad que amo . . . — C. Kavafis 1 Como si se desprendiera de las montañas, de sus flancos que a esta hora son de un violeta muy terso, la sombra comienza a descender sobre la ciudad, rueda por los tejados, cae en las calles. Es como un derrumbamiento. Las montañas rodean, hoscas, erizadas de puntas. Así llevamos en el corazón el peso de estos montes. Que ahora caen sobre la ciudad, hechos de tiniebla, deshechos en tiniebla. 2 Ésta es una ciudad amurallada entre montañas. Uno mira en torno, alzando la cabeza, y ve sólo
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José Manuel Arango
City (Medellín) And I went out to the balcony, sadly, hoping to change my mood, gazing at least for a bit on the city I love . . . —Cavafy 1 As if it peeled off from the mountains, from their flanks which at this hour are a polished violet, the shadow begins to descend upon the city, rolls over the roof-tiles, falls into the streets. Like a slow landslide. The mountains all around, sullen, bristling with spears. We bear the weight of those mountains in our heart. Now they fall on the city, made of shadow, dissolved in shadow. 2 This is a city walled-in among mountains. You look around raising your head, and all you see
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José Manuel Arango
la línea azul de los montes, lejos, sus picos. Es el borde de una copa quebrada. Y en el fondo de la copa está la ciudad, ensimismada, dura. 3 Hablo de la ciudad que amo, de la ciudad que aborrezco. Mientras anochece sobre los búcaros, en las laderas, en la boca del perro, en sus dientes. Mientras anochece en el hueso seco del corazón.
46 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
José Manuel Arango
is the blue line of mountains, distant, their peaks. It’s the edge of a broken cup. And in the bottom of the cup is the city, stunned and hard. 3 I’m talking about the city I love, the city I despise. While night falls on the ledges, on the slopes, in the dog’s mouth, on the teeth. While night falls on the dry bone of the heart. —translated by John Oliver Simon
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Tina Barr
True Religion
Fruits are displayed in flats, backed against the wall, stacked floor to ceiling. Small blackening bananas hang in clusters. I smell cantaloupe through their skins, buy piled apricots the size of walnuts. Chanting begins. The muezzin sings the call to prayer, Allah u Akbar. A little boy is trying to get my attention. His galabiya is dirty, as if some church mother, for his part in a play, raveled its hems, stomped it in dirt, and commanded flies to climb from the piled oranges to the dust in his ears. A woven straw basin cradles a block of ice. As a man hits the ice with a pipe, chips fly; the block splits. Chanting from the Koran rises through the radio beside him. His pipe makes a rhythm as it strikes. A man hoists a live sheep to his shoulders. As he strides forward, a turbaned Saudi, his scarf thrown over his robe, thumbs each prayer bead strung on the tasseled necklace that swings from his right hand. A boy holding the reins stops his donkey cart. Every sundown he drags shucking from sugar canes out of the juice shops, 48 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review
Tina Barr
piles it high at the back of the cart. His grandfather sleeps beside chaff. He dreams of the coming hour when you cannot tell a white thread from a black. When I carry my bag of mish mish back to the lobby, Mustafa has disappeared. I come right up against the desk, then see he is behind it, on the floor crouched in prayer. Something stitches through meâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a thread, a possibility, the same as his touch on my fingers, handing me the key.
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Tina Barr
Infusion
Saffron, pepper, cardamom are piled in open cloth sacks beside dry hibiscus. A man in a turban with a sickle-shaped knife cuts a coconut. Yasir is being shaved with a straight razor as he sits in his wool stall. His scales, with their graduated weights, glint on the counter; a framed verse from the Koran hangs above him. I do not shake his hand; before prayers he would have to wash again. A little girl chases me, on my walk to Fishawi. She prods me with kleenex packets. A tiny piece of silver hangs on a string through her ear. A beggar with no legs walks on his hands. At Fishawi’s, the waiter carries coals in a long-handled pan. After placing them on waterpipes with tongs, he feeds them apple-flavored tobacco. Bubbles gurgle when the men inhale in sips, lounging on wooden couches. I bruise mint leaves under my spoon; others drink anise tea, a yellowy green, or red karkade made from hibiscus. Later Yasir will offer fruit cups, layers of melon, apricot, and banana leaking juice among the custards. Anyone can come here and sit— any day for the last two hundred years.
50 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Dorothy Barresi
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles
The brown rats that shimmy up thatched, hula-skirt palm trees live closer to the divine, high in the whispering, razoring fronds. To them, our glance is a blow. To scurry their fate. Half-dissolved in moonlight, released from the ground, they are astronauts wedged in capsules of fur and rabies; they are the true romantics, or else, why would they love so rapaciously in a paradise unkind? They see and they see. In all the dark bungalows below them, in mansions where the sacred is simple and the profane complex, they witness the rhetoric of family: who will shower first, who folds the clothes, who feels misused. Who kisses who goodnight, and how, and how, and how. Déjà everything. A woman gives herself over to boozy abandonments, a man lies down with the lamb— we are all like Adam, born a day old and a dollar short. Last week, a luxury coupe
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Dorothy Barresi
disappeared from a driveway. The rats know who did it, but arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t talking; no one thinks to ask them. And we, who choose to believe ourselves fundamentally ratless, hump and snout and the scaled reptilian tail, trembling, mean no harm, though harm will be done. There is a gun tucked under a goose down pillow. There is a toddler learning to jump on a bed. It is like the form of the act of forgetting: blind faith. Like the Pleiades, the red eyes keep watch over our wilderness and our safety.
52 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review
Jan Beatty
Going Deep for Jesus Run to the street light, make a right at the blue car, and go deep —Sharan Watson 1981, I’m on the back of a cherry red Kawasaki with my boyfriend Stush, my biker jacket bought with a tax return from a year of waiting tables, stuffed in my pocket the bad check I wrote to see Stevie Ray play the Decade. Riding down Beck’s Run through Carrick, we hit Carson Street, my cheek resting on Stush’s firm shoulder till the ground rises up with the hulk of J&L across the Mon, steel house that burns it all, burns like an up-against-the-wall-fuck, thick & ripping and everything is smokestacks & yellow blaze. We ride the river roads, looking for deserted two-lanes, newspapers stuffed under our leather for warmth. I want to forget my name, address— everything but the sharp lean into the next turn, the cheap slap of the wind. Stush goes on & on about his watercooled, two-stroke engine and I nod like I’m listening, but all I want is the contact high of leather, metal, and the slow burn of a few joints. We ride past the bridges & bridges, away from our fast-food jobs and our run-down apartment, toward the smell of the Ohio River, its perpetual mire, the rotting docks Crab Orchard Review ◆ 53
Jan Beatty
and lean-tos, to what we knew. I knew the muscles in his back & his low voice would make me come back to my self. We stop near the bog of the river’s edge to have hard sex on the ground, trying to shotgun a moment, to split open our lives in the brilliant light until we were the mills, we were the fire. It was then I decided that god and orgasm were the same thing, that if jesus had an address, it would be a dark two-lane, not some white-hot road to virtue, that if god were here, she’d shove down like a two-stroke in a rainstorm, she’d let it fly.
54 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Earl S. Braggs
Separated City Kaliningrad I’ve counted 17 dogs this morning. All coming from the same unknown direction. An orange Lada, as old as 3 decades, drives by. In the East tulips are in much-needed bloom. I stand at the window of a crowdedly-furnished room 2 stories above the rush. It’s Saturday early and already Pavlo is standing up, leaning drunk, but I do not blame him. He blames himself for the state of things, the price of bread and meat. He lives not in the street, but in a cellar, a wine cellar. On Pavlo’s street, bus riders wait on benches painted yellow and blue. Bicycle riders ride by one by one and two by two. Koenigsburg was the name when Germany was here. Now only the bitter taste of stout is left in the bottom of glasses on tables at streetside patios and outside cafés. Pavlo preaches to himself. There are few street signs. You know or you don’t. Morning newspaper readers wait for the cable car bus. Out into the blanket breeze, a Bible man strolls carrying his Jesus as one would carry a jacket in the heat of the day. In this city separated, Pavlo walks the same line as the Bible man, that line that divides the poor from the poorer from the poorest people these unnamed streets afford. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 55
Earl S. Braggs
Pure white they paint the bottom of tree trunks for decoration, for observation, for something untranslatable. Make no mistake. Pavlo eats well. There is meat, good meat at the market, but he prefers to drink the entirety of his atmosphere instead. Like a little kid, he lives for a good time. Another dog. That makes 18. Somewhere in the distance a cat or woman or maybe it’s Pavlo who yells out to all of Germany, “Give back to me my city.” Upstairs two stories above the noise, I shut the window and turn the dial to Radio Free Pavlo. Slowly, I’m learning to understand the language of 18 dogs who move unaffected by the absence of street signs in this unnamed separated city.
56 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Geoffrey Brock
Transit Gloria Mundi
Philadelphia It will be dark when I descend From my apartment, and dark still When I sidestep the familiar blend Of bliss debris and the body steaming on its grill, And dark when I descend below the wind To enter the warm animal that will bear Me to 40th Street, where it will shrill Out of the dark mouth of its lair Into the early morning’s enlightening air. Houston Here in the black macadam sluiceways Of five o’clock, a mottled shoal Of glass-and-metals hovers in a daze Of idling heat, each painted shell Sweating light. Mute swan-necked streetlamps raise Their lowered heads above their captive Audience, and from behind a swell Of offices, a traffic helicopter Shudders toward us like some beakless raptor. Las Vegas Hiking up, we saw nothing of the plains But the pale yellow underbelly Of the heaped cumulus above them, which rained A light so pure and pale it seemed angelic. But when we reached the mesa, a simmering lake Of neon shocked the dark and shorted all Crab Orchard Review ◆ 57
Geoffrey Brock
The stars; a slope of slow arrivals propelling Downward toward the distant terminal Became the single constellation visible.
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Victoria Chang
A Skeleton of Color
The script of Taipei did not include industrialization. Now exhaust froth covers constellations in the sky. Moped riders navigate through streets, wearing surgical masks. Shopkeepers emerge in layers, the older ones nearest evening, round, round, they crank the canopy down, sweep in metronome. Schoolchildren hopscotch in hieroglyphics and chase locusts from yesterday. They loiter to hear my English: to them like the sound of Bus 71 hoeing into the asphalt, to me, how beautiful the sky would look with even a skeleton of color.
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Stephen Cramer
Blanket
Penn Station’s cavernous staircase, and two children whisper to the waists of commuters—please ma’am, god bless you sir—each time one drops coins to the cardboard they hold. But beneath the wilting trays, their hands sift through pants— deftly, even gracefully—easy enough when people’s sensations are lost somewhere between missed cabs and this backward syntax that sticks in their mouths like sugar burnt over peanuts on these corners. Later, tallying cash and bruises, the boys’ll toss down a grate the incidental keys to no place they know. But now, when a nearby woman approaches, cradling a baby, they give each other looks. Please, you say, not her. Not her. But then, the timing just right, the woman—I can’t say this slowly enough—she casts her baby to the air— and there are seconds when the baby’s suspended with nowhere to land but pavement before a stranger—what else to do?— drops his bag to catch it. He’s looking for burns, expecting blood, when at once the woman and two kids grab what they can, which is 60 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Stephen Cramer
everything—bag, wallet, keys. How long does it take him to know this was a design, a ruse repeated time and again to perfection? This time two incidental cops disrupt their practiced sequence so, trading their sister, their daughter, for a slim handful of spoils, the three turn into crowd, and the man’s left holding a child at arm’s length, offering it back to everyone or no one. When no one takes, he finds himself holding her to the sky as though to bear witness that, yes, here is a child, a breathing prop, paused in a man’s arms before the landslide of years—before her hands can grow streamlined to pocket lining, before she can sell herself beneath these tattered lights, trading the cardboard for an orange mesh tanktop with tears in all the right places, her skin barely cupping the curve of flesh where it swells to deeper brown. But wait—none of this, as yet, is so; something out there wants to lift her from her own life. Look— already someone opens a blanket embroidered with a map to the air, spreading India, Egypt, Peru, over her shoulders arched against the siren. And when they take her away, that’s the last anyone sees— not a single finger or knee-cap of the girl, but only a blanket that swaddles a lucky child in the folds of a created world.
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Cornelius Eady
Portrait of Girl w/Flowers, MacDougal Street
The flowers are slung over her shoulder. What’s been won, or lost? What’s about to be given? This is dusk in New York City, here she is, deep in its Comings and goings. The flowers are slung over her shoulder. We feel their lovely weight from across the street. We can’t help but watch. They seem nearly as tall as she is. Against the current, she pauses, and lifts her foot From her sneaker, now she’s Our weird bird, rubbing her heel Against her slacks. The flowers are slung over her shoulder. The day rumbles between Its gears. A soft ax bobs as she steps.
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Cornelius Eady
Dead Man Rides Subway New York Times article, 6-15-99 He lolls, he sways, this lone male sleeper Minding his business on the B’way local. Some let him snooze and think they’re doing him a favor, Others wait to see his head snap awake, His drowsy panic, Uptown when he meant to be Downtown, Downtown when he intended to be Up, And feel a bit cheated when his nap proves to take longer than their stop. Need I tell you life in New York City is different? Difficult? There he floats, quietly out of style From the rest of us.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 63
Valentina Gnup
City of Fire for Brendan Constantine Lost pigeons, sky the color of smoke, I know you the way I know Berlin— your desperate lies, your decency. I see you as I see Belfast. Notes from an oboe, your deep voice, city of shipyards and sadness, your rusted bicycles, your broken laws. Cathedrals in sharp wind, I see Paris; your fruit-stand optimism, the bitchy waiter in you. Fragrance of cherry blossoms, stench of old men’s urine— city of your devil laugh, your artist’s hands. I know you as New York. The café where blind grandfathers eat bagels and argue over chess, Sunday morning faithful to a sugar-cube God who dissolves on your tongue, the way I dissolved on your tongue. City of prostitutes sucking off soldiers, your tattoo parlors, your bleached hair; I know you as I know any city— the promise that around the next corner holds something lovely as a thousand origami cranes, something beautiful enough to enter.
64 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Valentina Gnup
I know your city, Hollywood. I see your thin walls, your holy ambition; I see your blue eyes, your face painted in watercolors. City of celebrities, city of brilliant alcoholics, I know you. City of graffiti, city of fire, I know youâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; like a city I have always lived in, like a city where I will never live.
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Amina Lolita Gautier
Palabras
The last letter from my grandfather, Papi, to my father went like this: My dear son, We are hoping this letter finds you well and happy. Alas, mi hijo, your poor dear mother and myself are not happy at all without you. My son, we wait eagerly for your return. We are getting older with each day and it would please me greatly to pass this business from old hands like mine into strong able ones like yours. And Esteban, he misses you. We cannot console him in the way that only a father can. You have not laid eyes on each other in the last six years. He will soon be nine years old. Do you not wish to see one who is the mirror image of the boy I once knew in you? Soon your mother and I will be too old to care for him properly. Come back to us, my son. We are waiting to welcome you. Love, your father We are waiting to find out what my father will do—marry an island girl or come back to us. My father’s response is a postcard with a backdrop of a beach in Puerto Rico with the sun setting over it that says: Papi, No comprendo inglés. tu hijo “This is how he treats his poor father, Esteban. We are all a joke to him!” Papi says, putting the postcard on top of the cashier. He begins to wipe down the Plexiglas counter with a vengeance, “Everything we’ve done has always been for him.” My grandfather left Carolina, Puerto Rico, for Brooklyn, New York, to forget the life he’d led as a young man, selling mango, 66 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Amina Lolita Gautier
coconut, pineapple and cherry ices from a handcart. He says he left in order to live, to really feel alive and that in order to begin again, you have to forget the life that you have already led. My father was fourteen when they moved to East New York, Brooklyn and opened a bodega across the street from the projects on Miller Avenue under a sky less blue than the one he’d left behind. While my grandfather was trying to forget selling ices during the summers to the turistas at the beaches of San Juan and Isla Verdes, saving to come to the mainland, my father was forgetting his family, leaving us behind. A bell over the door tinkles to announce customers, and Papi cuts off whatever else he might have said to me. Papi’s face is red. He passes me the postcard, “Go upstairs and show that to your grandmother.” I wonder if my father has ever really seen a sunset like the one on the postcard and if he will ever come for me so I can see it for myself. We never know what my father will do next. Sometimes he answers Papi’s letters and paints a picture of his new life in Humacao, saying that he’s living close to nature like a real jibaro, not like a Nuyorican. Sometimes he describes the mountains or El Yunque so well it brings tears of remembrance to my grandparents’ eyes. He talks about Marisela, a girl he met in Ponce and moved in with. Papi wrote to him once, complaining about my difficulty with English. My Spanish was excellent, as advanced as an adult’s, but I had no patience for English and I was suffering in school as a result. My father wrote back that he was pleased my Spanish was so good and that he didn’t care if I never spoke English. Then he said he would only answer Papi’s letters when they were written in Spanish. Papi’s letters vary, too, sometimes stern and reproving, usually florid, they read like translations. He reminds my father of his duty to us and the promises he has made. My father took an extra two years to graduate high school because of his English and, after graduating, he enlisted in the army rather than go to a college for business. They agreed my father would return and take over Papi’s bodega when he finished in the army; when he finished, two years ago, he flew to Puerto Rico and stayed. Abuela’s face falls and she rips the postcard in two. “At least this one’s not all about Marisela.” She turns her back and continues washing the rice for dinner, speaking to me in Spanish, “When is he going to realize we’re Americans? He wants all of the things we left behind. What does he want all these things for?” My grandmother’s back is Crab Orchard Review ◆ 67
Amina Lolita Gautier
bent awkwardly over the sink as she fills the pot again with water and brings the white starchy foam brimming to the top and sloshing over, picking through the grains of rice, looking for imperfect grains burned on the ends and small stones, pouring the water out and beginning again, slower than she was before my father left. I can hate him when I see how old he is making us with his refusal to come back. For him Papi tried to perfect his English, and for him he dragged a wife to the mainland, a wife who, unable to learn English, had no voice with which to complain. Abuela had only the Spanish that Papi was trying to forget. It was for my father’s sake that they opened this bodega, lived in an apartment above the store, accepted subway tokens in lieu of payment and broke open cigarette packs to sell loosies. All for the ingratitude of a man that did not care enough to bear the weight of love. Abuela whispers, “Dios mio, what kind of world is it where the children ignore the wishes of their parents?” Then she turns to me, “Esteban, go over and ask Rosa if she wants a plate tonight. I’m making arroz con pollo.” We try to feed Rosa without appearing to do so. My grandparents call her hija, daughter. Rosa lives on the fourth floor in the projects across the street on Glenmore Ave. She takes longer than usual to answer the door. She opens the door, but stands behind it, half-dressed in a flimsy blue robe with her legs peeking out. She smiles at me, but doesn’t invite me in. “Esteban.” “’Buela’s making arroz con pollo tonight.” “Ah my favorite,” she says. It’s my favorite, too. She looks down the hallway of her apartment and whispers something to someone, then turns back to me, blushing, “But tell her that’s all right. Thank you anyway.” “Okay. See you later.” There is a word for it, but I don’t know what it is in English. A word—or a string of them to describe the way I feel about Rosa. Amor. Cariñoso. I’m sure Rosa knows what it is, but I can’t ask her. Rosa is a full-grown woman with a husband, a lover and secrets. She was born on the mainland like me, a Nuyorican. English is easy for her. She’s unlike any of the other women I know in our neighborhood, who are just like Abuela, who consider themselves ‘trying’ women—women who have divided their time equally 68 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Amina Lolita Gautier
between back-breaking work, cooking, church, telenovelas and praying for sons or husbands or brothers who have lost the way. These women speak as little English as possible and all have ailments. They constantly visit Abuela to discuss them. Mrs. Calderon has moaning knees from scrubbing floors as a young woman, Mrs. Morales’ throat rattles and she wheezes from too much smoking, and Abuela’s hands are gradually becoming claws, twisted and gnarled and arthritic, cramping up on her when she tries to give herself insulin shots. After giving Abuela Rosa’s reply, I go up the fire escape to the roof to see who Rosa was talking to. From up here, I can see the whole neighborhood, the subway and dry cleaners one block away and C-Town, the supermarket, ten blocks away in the other direction after the park, the intermediate school and the hospital. I can see the outline of Rosa’s body from the fire escape. The streetlights shine right through her flimsy curtains and into her bedroom. Across the street, Rosa and Yauba are doing it. Yauba’s never come to see her in the evening before, but I know it’s him. I can tell by their bodies. When it’s Pedro and Rosa, they argue and fight. Pedro will grab her roughly, gripping the tops of her arms and shaking her hard before pushing her towards the bed. In the bed, Rosa will lie still while Pedro moves on top of her. But Yauba and Rosa don’t move that way. I watch as she shrugs out of that robe, then takes her short nightie off, her long arms upraised as she arches her back and pulls it up over her head. I live to watch Rosa. What I wouldn’t give to be the nightie that’s touched her skin. Yauba gets up from the bed to take her into his arms. They move like they’re dancing, swaying and teasing as they edge towards the bed and fall onto it, wrestling and rolling like children. I can’t hear the sound, but I know Rosa is laughing. Across the street, Pedro’s silhouette is heading home. When I come home from school later that week, the front of the store is closed. It’s never been closed early before, and I rush upstairs, anxious. Has my father returned? Nothing short of an emergency would make Papi close early. I let myself in and call out, but no one answers me. I find my grandparents in their bedroom, sitting side by side on the edge of their bed, Papi’s arms around Abuela, Abuela crying. She’s holding a crumpled and bunched paper in one hand up to her mouth like a handkerchief, covering the lower portion of her face with it, moaning, “Esta casado. Esta casado,” he’s married, and I know the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 69
Amina Lolita Gautier
paper is from my father. So he really went and married Marisela and he sends a telegram to tell us; he hasn’t even bothered to call. All the hope I’d had of him returning for me and taking me back is like a weight of lead inside of me dropping from my chest to my feet. Papi notices me in the doorway then. Maybe he has tears in his eyes, maybe he motions for me to join them on the corner of the bed, I don’t know. I race out of the room so as not to see. I can’t say how I’m really feeling. Part of me feels the same hurt and sadness my grandparents felt and part of me feels something like rage that I can’t name. I race across the street and up the four flights and bang on Rosa’s door knocker like the police are chasing me. I can hear Rosa running to the door. Rosa comes to the door, breathless, full of concern. “Esteban? Is something wrong? What’s happened?” I don’t know what to say to her. For a moment, I forget about my problem. The left half of Rosa’s face is a motley of color, shadowblack under her eye and splotchy red spreading across her cheekbone and jaw like a stain. Purplish bruises dot her arms like tight rosebuds unfurling. There is no need to ask what’s happened. I want to ask her if her face was in pain. What I say is, “Why does he put those bruises on your face?” Her left cheek is swollen as if she’d stuffed her mouth with food. She motions for me to follow her into the kitchen, where a bowl of ice sits on the counter next to a miniature TV. Rosa shrugs and puts an ice cube wrapped in a dish towel to her cheek, wincing at the shock of cold, smiling wryly, her smile twisted beneath a mask of bruises. “Why does he do it?” She turns away, lost in thought. “Well, I guess he beats me because I see Yauba.” She faces me again. “And I see Yauba because he beats me.” I can’t think of an appropriate thing to say. I don’t want to make her angry by cursing her husband, who I think should be thrown on the third rail in the train station. Right now, he and my father are the same person. I hate them both. So I stay silent, except to say, “Que lástima,” what a shame. I remembered Abuela saying it when she heard of the hurricanes sweeping through her home town, uprooting palm and mango trees and knocking down power lines and making it so no one could get any hot water or ice for days. It sounds appropriate, but it’s not what I want to say. 70 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Amina Lolita Gautier
Rosa switches off the mini TV on the kitchen counter and puts the bowl of ice in the freezer. “And you? What brings you here today?” I open my mouth to tell her and nothing comes out. I try again and start to cry. “Pobrecito,” Rosa murmurs, kneeling down to my height and pulling me into her arms. I had expected our first embrace to have the full effect of those Roman candles they shoot at the sky out in Pitkin Park on July the Fourth, but it is nothing like that. Rosa feels safe to me, like a dream made real. She’s soft, her voice is the ripple of a wave, and the hand that strokes my hair is the touch I’d always imagined my mother would have used had she lived to love me. I wanted to tell her about my own mother, and that all I knew of her was that she was a morena and she was dead, not even how she died or when or if my father had even loved her and would he have taken us all back to Puerto Rico with him if she had lived? I wanted her to know that I couldn’t remember my own father’s face and that he had gone back to Puerto Rico rather than raise his son and run the store that his father had created with him in mind and now lived in Humacao and was married to a new wife. I wanted her to know that the new wife, Marisela, was from Ponce and was probably the type of woman Rosa wanted to be and hated. When my father was only living with her, he’d written Papi a letter meant to hurt, bragging about how Marisela cooked his flan and mondongo soup and arroz con pollo better than Abuela ever had and that they were thinking of having a baby, and that if they did, he would marry her because he wanted his child to have a father. I wanted to tell her about my pain, pain as real as that stain of a fist on her cheek. “Lo ódio,” I whisper. I hate him. Rosa hushes me. “Como no,” she says. Of course. She knew what it was like to both hate and love the same person at the same time. I didn’t expect to come home and find them on the phone with my father, congratulating him on his wedding. Abuela is talking rapidly in Spanish. At the same time tears stream from her eyes and she leans on Papi to keep standing. They won’t look me in the eye while they fake the part of happy parents. Papi waves me over, “Esteban, come. It’s your father; he wants to speak to you.” Papi tries to smile and lie at the same time, his face twisted into half smile, half grimace. He whispers, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 71
Amina Lolita Gautier
“Somebody had to be the adults,” before he pulls the phone from Abuela and thrusts it at me. My father’s chatter runs in my ears without any pause. He keeps talking about the festivities, how big the cake was, how fresh the pasteles, how sweet the platanos, how light the flan, how pretty the bride. His voice is deep, drunk, with laughter beneath it. He laughs at his own jokes and pulls the phone from his mouth to shout occasional answers to the teasing calls for him to come back to the celebration. It’s difficult to hear him with the music up loud in the background and the shouts of laughter, the rowdy toasts. A woman starts to sing a line or two in the background, then she bursts into giggles. Oh how much fun they are having while we huddle in a tiny storefront apartment and pretend to be happy for him. My father is happy with his pregnant Marisela and high off his wedding while my grandparents stand watching me with hope. While he brags about his pretty new wife, they are hoping he is saying Marisela will now be my mother and that he will send for me or is coming to get me himself. I know they are hoping it because that’s what I’m hoping. But my father keeps talking. I waited for him to ask how I was, how tall I had gotten, did I still like to pick the green olives out of Abuela’s arroz con pollo and eat them first, what would I like him to send me for my upcoming birthday, but he doesn’t say any of that. “Mami?” My father finally notices that no one has been responding to him. “It’s me,” I say. He laughs then, “What happened to Mami? You been hiding on the phone all this time?” “I thought you wanted to speak to me?” “Did Papi say that? Okay let’s speak together.” My father laughs, then pauses. “You want a new mami? A baby sister or brother?” my father asks, his laughter painting a picture of him, not as the uniformed man in the framed picture on our living room wall, the only child of Papi and Abuela’s seven that survived past the age of two, but as a spoiled boy, too weak to do anything else but what he’s doing, and I realize that my grandparents know this. There is una palabra, a word, for a man like my father, a word that is really offensive in Spanish but that translates pretty tamely into English and I struggle to think of it, remembering that the men who come to our store call Pedro that behind his back. “Maybe I’ll give you one of each?” he laughs at his own joke and 72 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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I don’t want to hear it, I just want to forget him. Right now Pedro and my father are the same in my eyes and I wish I could tell him so. “¡No me digas nada! ¡Te ódio!” I scream, I don’t want to hear it, and slam the phone down. My grandparents cry out as one, “¿Que hiciste?” What did you do, and they can’t understand. “¡Dejame en pas!” I scream, leave me alone, and run past them and head for the fire escape. I run up the fire escape, making my way over broken glass and loose paper. My grandfather comes shuffling behind me out of breath. He grabs my arm and pulls me down a few stairs until we are facing each other. I know he’ll beat me now for my disrespect, but I don’t care. “How dare you! Nobody raised you that way, to speak to your father so!” He smacks me and shakes me, “You shame me! You’re going to call him and say you’re sorry. Then my belt’s going to give you what you deserve!” “I’m not telling him anything!” I sob, crying. I try to pull away, but Papi hugs me to him, his chin on top of my head, “Ay, niño, how could you?” My grandfather doesn’t even realize he’s letting us speak in Spanish. I pull away, running up the fire escape to the rooftop. “I hate him!” I shout. “Come down from there!” “I hate him! I hate him!” At the rooftop, I can see better into Rosa’s window. In the middle of my anger, I watch her and Pedro, Rosa’s body lying still underneath his, Pedro on top of her, moving to his own rhythm unconcerned with anyone but himself. I hate him too. “¡Cabron!” I shout at their window. Papi gasps for breath on the fire escape steps behind me. He taught me never to say that word. But that’s the word I want. That’s my father, and no threat of a belt is going to take it from me. “¡Cabron!” I shout it again, hoping Rosa and Pedro can hear it. “Cabron,” I say it one last time for my father, wishing we were on the phone or face to face. I scream it. To me, it sounds like a raw cry in the night air, but it’s really a tiny sound swallowed and absorbed by the revving engines, screeching tires, arguments over games of cee-lo, music from boomboxes, ringing pay phones, ambulance sirens, jingling beepers, the wails of squad cars and glass breaking that make up the sounds of a night on my street. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 73
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Bombingham: Excerpts from the Novel
Cities Are What Men Make Them —Motto above the door of the Birmingham City Chambers, 1963
1.
As with most of our ventures, getting a paper route was Lamar’s idea. He heard that the regular route boy, a teenager, had taken a job at TCI, Tennessee Coal and Iron, the largest of Birmingham’s steel mills. “That’s a mighty rough place for a teenager,” my father said when I told him why the route had opened up. Lamar knew the teenager since they both lived in Loveman’s Village, and he assured my father that the boy was “as big as a man.” He had gotten a girl—“you know” as Lamar put it—so he needed to quit school and take the higher paying job so he could meet his responsibility. “What a shame,” my father said non-committedly and fiddled with an album cover. It had been a Sunday afternoon, after church, and my father was in the living room listening to jazz. His feet were propped on an ottoman and crossed at the ankles. He soaked in the opening bars of Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” It was going to be a romantic afternoon. Already his breath was sweet with bourbon. Soon he would be grabbing my mother around the waist and making her dance in his imaginary jazz room. He deferred my request to my mother who was in the kitchen basting a pot roast. She was not easy to convince. She said that she did not want me riding around Birmingham at the crack of dawn, especially with the KKK running loose. Recently a store on the periphery of the neighborhood had been blown up, and black people blamed it on the KKK or the police, if they made that distinction. “Well,” my father said lazily from the entrance to the kitchen, 74 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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“when aren’t the KKK running loose? We wouldn’t cross the street if we worried all day about the KKK.” “You’d better worry,” Mother snapped. Rolling the papers, Lamar and I took only the slightest notice of the headlines—a bus strike was threatened to begin that day. Later I learned that there were other matters afoot, matters that we children would soon find ourselves at the very center. However, I did notice one small ad. It featured the face of a big jowled, bespeckled white man, Bull Connor, who was the city’s public safety commissioner, in charge of the police and firemen. To us children he was the boogieman. I had heard my Great Uncle Reed rail against him. He said Bull Connor was a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan and his responsibility for public safety meant keeping the public “safe from Negroes.” He accused Connor of having lynched colored men in his jails. He said Connor not only stood by while colored people’s houses burned, but he even ordered his firemen to burn the houses. I probably wouldn’t have noticed the ad, busy as I was glancing at the comet before the sunrise washed it out, but the ad was repeated throughout the paper. Everywhere you turned in the paper, you came face to face with the pip-eyed Bull Connor. I pointed out the ad to Lamar, who made a sour face when he saw it. We held the paper in the light coming from inside the school. The ad complained about an editor of an Atlanta newspaper, and said that the “quisling Ralph McGill, who had integrated Atlanta” was brainwashing you. The “you,” followed by an exclamation point, was further defined as “the people of Birmingham.” Even then, we realized that “you” did not include us—nor did the phrase “people of Birmingham.” Lamar laughed at the banner at the foot of the front page that read, “Your vote could decide outcome of tomorrow’s election.” I wondered aloud what ‘quisling’ meant, and Lamar answered without missing a beat that it meant ‘midget.’ He had learned the word in Mrs. Griffin’s spelling bee, he said. I was not a speller, and did not participate in the competitions. “Yes, you see, this Ralph guy is a midget and if there’s anything Bull Connor hates worse than colored, it’s midgets.” “Why would he call the guy a midget in the newspaper?” “He didn’t call him a ‘midget,’ he called him a ‘quisling,’ which is a bad word for midget. It’s a fighting word.” I took a deep breath and put an armful of papers in my bicycle Crab Orchard Review ◆ 75
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rack. When I turned back to Lamar, I saw him struggling to keep a straight face. “You a lie.” “A-pril Fools!” He rolled on the pavement, laughing, and pointing at me as I coolly gathered more papers. I knew that this would be just the first of Lamar’s pranks. At every chance, right up until a bedtime telephone call, he would try to fool me. Looking back on it, I’m ashamed to admit that he was too often successful. I was not naïve in those days, nor particularly gullible, but I did have a wide-eyed openness to things, especially things wondrous. Lamar played my curiosity: Mrs. Griffin was wearing a wig; Joe Brown had a pet monkey; Arlene Spencer’s father was decapitated in a car wreck; Mr. Edwards, the vice-principal, found a rattler by the swingset. I knew I shouldn’t have believed him, but I wanted to. I studied Mrs. Griffin’s hairline for some clue of a skull cap; asked the hulking Joe if I could play with his monkey; dipped my head in sympathy and morbid fascination every time Arlene passed me in the hall; and sneaked out to the swingset to look for the four-foot diamondback with its crushed head and six-inch rattle. With our route marked out on a paper, we set off on our bikes through the neighborhood. We both had Sears Flyers, simple threespeeds, and both geared to the hilt with handlebar tassels, front baskets, and trumpet-shaped horns. Lamar took one side of the street, and I the other, and we paced each other. This arrangement took us a few minutes longer than dividing the route, but it suited Lamar to a T. He loved being able to talk as we flung the papers toward the door stoops, or slipped them into paper boxes that some of our clients had affixed to their mailbox posts. Though there was a good mix of professions from doctors and lawyers to factory workers, the most common profession in Tittusville was schoolteacher. Next door to where I stayed on 10th Avenue were the Jeterses, both retired from teaching. Across the street was Mrs. Rucker who taught at Center Street. Her reputation for surliness and hard work made us grateful she was not our teacher. Next to her, the Dobsons—he, a factory worker and she, a high school teacher; and, across from them, the Mannings, another teaching couple. My father, too, was a teacher. He taught science at Ullman High School. He could teach any branch of science and so was called on to teach the ninth grade general courses, but his specialty was biology. Father had studied a year at Meharry Medical College, the only medical college for Negroes in the country, and so he garnered great respect from his students and fellow teachers. He had dropped out of college in order to 76 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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support his family; I was well on the way by the time my parents married. If my father regretted leaving medical school, he never said it. Though it was just at the other end of Center Street, Loveman’s Village was across busy 6th Avenue from Tittusville. It was a complex made of rows of barracks-like brick buildings, two units per building, each marked with a concrete stoop in front and back. A narrow lane named for a president separated each row. Lamar lived on Wilson Way. When I first made friends with Lamar, in the first grade, my mother wouldn’t allow me to go to Loveman’s Village. She said that the projects were dangerous. Too many drunks. Too many knife fights. After a year of Lamar visiting our house, she relinquished. Nothing ever happened to me at Loveman’s Village. In those days, it was much like any other black neighborhood in Birmingham, though poorer than most. Sure, there were the drunks, and dopeheads, and a heroin addict or two, but all together they weren’t so mean. If I went quickly by the corners where they congregated, they hardly noticed me. Mother Thompson lived next door to Lamar. A wiry but grandmotherly woman, she was active in Reverend Shuttlesworth’s church. Shuttlesworth was Birmingham’s most outspoken civil rights activist. Mother Thompson dared to advertise the activism by placing posters on her front door, notifying people about mass meetings of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. As children we paid little attention to the posters or to the dozens of pamphlets we found at the bottom of the rank, damp garbage cans in her backyard. One afternoon, the week before we started our paper route, Lamar’s mother, Mrs. Burrell, and Mother Thompson had a confrontation that focused our attention on the civil rights movement. Lamar, Josie—my sister—and I were playing on the back stoop with a microscope Lamar had gotten for Christmas. Since it was a Wednesday, Mrs. Burrell’s day off from domestic work, she was very dolled up. She wore a bright blue dress that pinched her waist and flared out below her hips. Her face was powdered and rouged and brightened with lipstick and she was holding her hands, limpwrist, in front of her and shaking them to dry her nails. Mother Thompson greeted Mrs. Burrell with an approving grunt. “You looking sharp, gal. You must got a beau on the string tonight.” “Naw, Mother,” Mrs. Burrell chuckled and dipped her head in an instant of mock embarrassment, “it ain’t nothing like that. Just a friend.” Crab Orchard Review ◆ 77
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“Must be a mighty good friend.” Mother Thompson threw out wastewater from a pan into her square of lawn, and put the free hand on her hips. “Y’all young girls can . . .” she made a grinding motion with her hips, not meant to be witnessed by the children though we were only a few feet away. I caught a glance of her, but did not look up. “Y’all be wheeling them in!” Mrs. Burrell protested by waving both hands, but she smiled in a way to show her pleasure at the compliment. “I’m too old, for that stuff, myself,” Mother Thompson went on. “Naw, Mr. Thompson was one too many for me!” she said of her long-dead husband. “I only got two somebodies now, me and the Lord. Any man-fishing I be doing now, I be doing for the Lord.” Then she turned serious. “There’s fixing to be another mass meeting, now, Mrs. Burrell, and I want to extend an invite to you. Before you say no, I want you to think about what we trying to do. You know, this time we got Reverend King coming in, and it’s going to be different—” “Now, now, Mother, you know I don’t take no stock in all that mess.” Mother Thompson’s silence was abrupt, and caused us children to look up. She had both hands on her hips, the pan dangling from one. “I sure get tired of triflin’, Mrs. Burrell. This ain’t no mess. This is serious business—and it’s the Lord’s work, too.” Mrs. Burrell forgot about her nails, put her hands on her hips, too, and dipped a hip, to boot. “It might be the Lord’s work, but it’s still a mess. Look around front, Miss Thompson. Now, I don’t mean no disrespect—I was raised to respect—But when you got all them posters and signs tacked all over your front door, what am I supposed to think? That reflects on us all. Building look like a bulletin board! Now, I don’t care what you do—but you got to keep it inside.” Mother Thompson took a step backwards, stopped, and wagged her finger. “You better care what I do. I’m trying to help you. You got a child to raise. You ought to be doing it, too!” Mrs. Burrell turned her profile to Mrs. Thompson. The heat had passed. “I know that. I just can’t do everything. I’m doing the best I can with what I got.” “Girl, you just need to get some more—and I mean get, cause Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann ain’t giving.” Mother Thompson went in and slammed the door behind her. Mrs. Burrell remembered her nails, blew on them, looked a moment at Lamar. “She ain’t going do nothing but get us blowed 78 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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up.” She went in and let her screen door slam, too. When Mrs. Burrell mentioned bombing, Josie slipped her hand inside of mine and squeezed. She was nine; we liked to say nine going on ninety-nine. With her head full of thin, well-greased plaits, our mother’s meticulous handiwork, she looked quite the little girl, but our Grandmother Pic sometimes referred to her as “an old soul.” I took my hand away and patted her on the back and took my turn looking in the microscope. The slide was simply labeled “blood.” Lamar wondered if it could be human blood. I didn’t think so. I said it was against the law to sell human blood. “Not if it’s in the interest of science.” Lamar cocked his head confidently. “Besides, it ain’t even a whole drop of blood. It’s not enough to hurt any body.” “That’s easy to say, if it’s not your blood,” Josie said. “I think they took it from animals,” I said. “Probably from a cow. Probably they got it from the slaughterhouse. Besides, if a person gave enough blood for all the microscopes Sears sold in one year, it would bleed him to death.” Josie took her turn peering into the microscope. “It’s pretty,” she said. “Looks like the windows at church.” “Does not,” Lamar said and took his second look. “Looks like old lady Thompson’s blood to me.” “Be quiet,” Josie said. “I’ll sell Sears plenty of blood after I kick her ass.” I laughed, but Josie stood up. “That’s mean.” Just then Mrs. Burrell called Lamar from inside the screen door. Her tone was scolding. He went in and a minute later came out and told us we had to go home. The paper route ended at 6th Avenue, the thoroughfare between Tittusville and Loveman’s Village and downtown. A few blocks from where the route ended was the burnt-out shell of Williams’ store, the neighborhood grocery which had been bombed a few weeks earlier. We had not heard the blast, only heard about it the next morning when Mr. Jeters interrupted our Sunday breakfast. “Th . . . Th . . . They bombing in T . . . Tittusville, now,” he said. We children called him “Jittery Jeters” because of his stutter. True to his nature, my father invited Mr. Jeters to have a seat. If the news excited my father, he never showed it. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 79
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“Was anyone hurt?” my mother asked. “J . . . just ruined the store.” “Now, that’s a shame,” Father offered. “And just on the outskirts of Tittusville. I didn’t know Williams was doing anything political. Is he a race man?” “You don’t have to be a race man,” Mother interjected sharply, “you just have to be colored.” After church, we took a family outing to survey the damage at the store. Mother wouldn’t let us get out of the car, so we drove around the block slowly, just one of several carloads of sightseers, black and white. Already, my head was filled with images of bombings and lynchings from the stories I heard my uncles tell at family gatherings. Later, I would realize that those stories, as terrifying and brutal as I imagined them, could never describe real violence. Violence has odors, both loud and subtle as the heightened senses pick them out. The stories my uncles told about lynchings always happened at a great distance—in Tuscaloosa or in Albertville, or “over in Georgia,” but never in Birmingham. Birmingham’s stories were about bombings, but never in Tittusville, until the store bombing. It seemed the Birmingham Klan was too sophisticated to toss a rope over a tree limb. It preferred the blast and rumble of dynamite, or the flash of a gasoline bomb—so much so that Fountain Heights on the north side of the city, a white neighborhood where blacks were beginning to buy houses, had so many bombings and fires it was called Dynamite Hill. Bombings were so common that black people had nicknamed the city “Bombingham.” But on that beautiful April Fool’s morning, with the wind whistling around my ears as I headed home from my first delivery, my first real job, what news those papers contained—the affairs of adults—were far from my mind. I was, for a moment, in a suspended time. Freewheeling down Center Street hill toward home, I could think of nothing but wonder in the world.
2. One day, Lamar and I decided to make the four-mile ride downtown to Gaston’s Motel where my father was staying. We rode down Center Street to 6th Avenue South and followed it most of the way. We passed Ollie’s, a big barbecue restaurant, shaped like a 80 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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flying saucer. A sign on top advertised “The World’s Best BBQ.” I always wanted to taste the world’s best barbecue and was amazed that we had it right in Birmingham. Lamar said it was just a ploy. He was amazed that white people could cook barbecue at all, much less cook it better than colored people. But there was no way of comparing, since colored weren’t allowed to eat at Ollie’s, not even at the back door. Sweaty and panting, we parked the bikes near my father’s car. I hesitated a moment, thinking that I might be in trouble because I didn’t have my mother’s permission, but I decided that my father would be happy to see me, after all. I knocked twice on his door, and there was no answer. Peeking through the blinds into his room I saw little. “Why don’t you get someone at the desk to let you in?” Lamar suggested. “You’re his son, that’s all you have to tell them.” I decided against it. I was afraid that my father might indeed be inside. “If he left his car,” I thought aloud, “he’s not gone far. We will just wait.” We waited about twenty minutes, leaning over the iron balcony railing and enjoying the shade until a commotion on the bottom level attracted our attention. We identified the men as preachers by their black suits and white shirts. But two in the group wore work shirts and blue jeans; Lamar recognized one of them as Reverend King. He had seen Reverend King’s picture at the workshops. King had a worried, serious look about him. It was hard to believe that he was the man that everyone was talking about. The white people had made him out to be a devil, a troublemaker, a communist. Some of the blacks thought the same. Others saw him as a savior, practically divine. To me he looked very ordinary. A short, stocky, dark man. Many of the others looked more to my liking for a hero, looked more like they could have been on TV. The group hurried into the church across the street. I knocked again at my father’s door. Lamar said that my father was probably getting some lunch, so we decided to ride around and see if he was at any of the lunch places along 4th Avenue. We looked through the windows of every place that advertised food—Fried Chicken, Bar-B-Que, Meat and Three, Burgers and Shakes—but we didn’t see him. We had been away for an hour, and I thought Aunt Bennie might be getting worried so I suggested that we head home. No sooner had we rounded the corner than we came face to face with the preachers leading a line of marchers. A crowd of bystanders milled around them. Policemen marched in front of the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 81
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demonstrators, some walking backwards to keep an eye on them; others walking with dogs to shepherd them; still others on motorcycles zipping back and forth, creating a ruckus in what was otherwise a sober display of hand clapping and shouts of encouragement. Reporters with TV and still cameras followed along, too. Lamar said that we should cross the street so that we could get in range of the TV cameras. We could see ourselves on TV. “Yeah,” I said, “your mama will see you, too, and knock your head in.” “Your mama would knock you, but mine would be proud of me.” He started across the street and I followed. Suddenly the parade made a turn and everything went into confusion. The white people, the policemen and reporters, were heading down 7th Avenue towards the courthouse, but the marchers went in the other direction, toward 5th Avenue. The policemen scrambled after the marchers, shouting orders and revving their motorcycles. Lamar and I found ourselves in the middle of the rush. We straddled our bicycles as the men pushed around us. Suddenly, I felt the hot breath of a dog against my leg. I froze. The dog snarled and snapped its jaws an inch from my leg. The officer who held the dog gave me a mean look; even so, I could tell he was only trying to scare me. He yanked the dog’s leash and rushed by. Rather than following the marchers, we rode around the courthouse and tried to intercept them. Then, we found ourselves behind the police barricades. Since we could see the marchers from there, we did not dare to get closer. Suddenly, without the fanfare of a speech, a white man, we assumed a policeman, stepped up to Reverend King and caught him by the back of his belt and pushed him toward a paddy wagon. Reverend King did not fight back in spite of the indignant way the man pulled his pants into his crotch and Spanish-walked him. The other man in jeans, Reverend Abernathy (I learned later), was treated in much the same—if not a more indignant—manner. The policeman who arrested him bunched Reverend Abernathy’s shirt in his fist and used the shirt like a leash. Lamar and I watched quietly while the protesters allowed themselves to be escorted to the paddy wagons. A policeman noticed us and asked us if we wanted a ride to jail. We said “No sir,” and he told us to “skee-daddle.” We rode all the way back to Center Street before we stopped to catch our breaths. Lamar said he just couldn’t wait to tell his mother and Reverend Timmons. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. 82 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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“Listen,” I said, “don’t tell your mama because she might tell my mama, and I didn’t tell my mama where I was going.” Lamar gave me a sanctimonious look that made me want to slap him. “You didn’t tell your mama? You told me you did.” “Well, I lied.” “I tell my mama everything I do.” “Well, I don’t.” “Well, I don’t have to if that’s what you mean.” “No, that’s not what I mean.” I pushed off on my bike. “I mean, I wish I could.”
3. After Reverend King said that children could march in the demonstrations if they were baptized, Josie and I skipped school and went to Sixteenth Street Baptist to join the marches. Sixteenth Street Baptist was a cathedral compared to St. Luke’s, our Lutheran church. The red-carpeted sanctuary, with pews arranged in a semicircle, could hold over a thousand people. Above the pews was a serpentine balcony, supported by metal poles. The balcony, a modern addition, clashed with the 19th-century interior and cut up the view of the story-tall stained glass windows, one on each of the sides. Narrow stairs rose six feet to the pulpit, where a couple of simple rail chairs undermined the grandeur of the church. Since Father had often called Sixteenth Street Baptist the “rich colored folks church,” I assumed the simplicity was by design. Behind and above the pulpit was a choir stand, and behind and above it was a silver pipe organ. The effect of the pulpit was that I kept looking up, further and further, until I was looking above my head at the ceiling, three stories up. A rectangular skylight of yellow stained glass dominated the ceiling. At each corner of the skylight hung a spider-like chandelier. Towards the middle of sanctuary, the pews were long, and on the sides, they were short. The shortest of the pews held only two people, and Josie and I selected one next to the window portraying Jesus knocking at Mary’s door. By summer’s end, that window would become a symbol of Klan violence. Just under the window a bomb would kill four girls, but at that time, as I gazed upon the face of the Christ, I wouldn’t have guessed about the bloodshed to come. Christ Crab Orchard Review ◆ 83
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was robed and wore a cape; he carried a staff in one hand and with the other, he knocked at a heavy, arched door. He was the barefoot shepherd calling upon the faithful. He had a kind, expectant look on his face. My stomach quivered. Looking upon the face, backlit by the sun, I told myself that Josie and I were answering His call. Christ was knocking at our door. Behind Christ, past the corner of the house, was a landscape of fields and distant mountains, the promised land. The light played through the colored glass, sparkling blues, pinks and yellows. Within an hour, the church filled with children, ranging in age from elementary kids to teens. One by one, preachers came to the pulpit to tell us that what we were doing was right and that God would protect us. I put my arm around Josie and she leaned into me. She may have slept for a little while. About noon, Reverend King, himself, came into the church. I pointed him out to Josie, but she had already seen him. He spoke encouragingly, and then another reverend told us to get into our groups, about fifty per group. Because we had gotten to the church early, Josie and I were in the first group. We lined up two by two, facing the front door. Older children were placed in front and behind us. The adults hushed us, and someone swung the double doors open. Sunlight streamed in. Slowly the line moved forward. I squeezed Josie’s hand. My heart pounded. It was like going on stage. I remembered the PTA plays, when I waited outside the cafeteria where the plays were held, my stomach knotting, pains shooting through my abdomen and down my legs. As we moved toward the sunlight, I saw the tops of trees across the street and the blue sky. I saw the roofline of downtown, but I could not see the crowd that awaited us until I was on the church’s portico. Most were black, the usual bystanders, but there were also many white reporters. People cheered as we started down the steps. Josie looked at me with a condescending frown. “If they can look, why can’t they march?” I don’t know, I thought. I did not feel badly toward them. I felt raised above them. We began to sing as we had been instructed. The song was one word, a fortifying chant of “freedom” sang in the tune of the old benediction, “Amen.” When we were halfway down the stairs, I saw the policemen and firemen, a line of uniformed and helmeted men making a human 84 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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bulwark. Behind them were fire trucks, ambulances, police cruisers with flashing red lights and, of all things—this struck me as funny— school busses and paddy wagons, together. As planned, the line turned away from the police and started around the park. Both adults and children were in the park, cheering, clapping and shouting encouragement. I realized that some of the bystanders were parents of the children who were marching. By allowing their children to march, the parents were able to keep their jobs while sacrificing a son or daughter to fill Bull Connor’s jail. Realizing this put to order what Josie and I were doing. Since our mother couldn’t march, and our father worked for the city, we could take their places. Where was Father? I wondered. Could he be among the cheering parents? That time on a Friday afternoon, he would have been in the lunchroom of the high school monitoring the behavior of the few students who had gone to school that day. When we had marched two blocks, reaching the far side of the park, on the cattycorner from the church, the line stopped abruptly. A policeman, in a fancy uniform, stepped in front of the line and raised his hands. We demonstrators stopped singing but the crowd of on-lookers jeered. We had been told in the workshops to expect an officer to tell us we were in violation of the marching injunction and to threaten us with arrest. The officer said nothing about arrest. He ordered us to disperse. He pointed over his shoulders at the fire trucks and said that if we didn’t disperse, we were fixing to get wet. The threat seemed insubstantial: We were fixing to get wet? Here we had been bolstering ourselves for one of the worse fates that could befall a Southern black of any dignity—a jail term—and the best threat the policeman could make was “You are fixing to get wet”? We started to march again, but the policemen held the line, so we stood and sang, waiting for them to begin arresting us. Suddenly, there was a roar of surprise and screams as a cloud of fog rolled around us. Demonstrators and bystanders alike were soaked. Then, as if to taunt us, a fire truck let out a blast from its horn. This first volley, I later found out, was from a fogging nozzle, a low-pressure spray meant to dampen our dignity. Up until then, the students, especially the young women, had looked crisp in their school blouses and skirts and their neatly fixed hair. Drenched, the hair lay limp around their faces and their clothes were soaked through, bras visible beneath the cotton tops. Josie’s ruffles hung limp. Because her hair was braided, the water did not have the same Crab Orchard Review ◆ 85
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undignified effect as it had on the hairstyles of the older girls with curled hair or the few guys who had conks. Josie brushed her bangs out of her eyes with her free hand. Our line broke as people tried to get out of the way of the mist. Some ran and hid behind trees or cars. The others of us retreated about half a block and began to reform. We started to sing, and taking courage, we advanced toward the policemen. When the fog cleared, it was evident that the next blast of water would do more damage than just getting us wet. The firemen took the front line of defense and crouched behind what appeared to be machineguns on tripods. I had seen the machine-guns used in World War II on television, and these “monitor guns,” as I learned they were called, looked like those World War II guns. The monitor gun joined together two fire hoses, doubling the pressure and distance of the stream of water. At full force, the water could loosen bricks in mortar and strip bark from trees. If any in our group or in the group of bystanders knew what was about to happen, he gave no sign of it. Rather, some jeered the policemen, daring them to spray us. With a roar and scour, a stream of water so pressurized it looked like a white metal rod whipped over our heads. I wanted to run. I realized that something terrible and unexpected was happening. There would be no friendly arrests. No exasperated policemen helping young women into the paddy wagons. I wished Josie had stayed home. The line broke again, and the marchers fled along with the bystanders. I pulled Josie as I ran. Her toes skimmed the top of the ground as she tried to keep balance and find footing. Inside the park, we took shelter behind an oak. I sat with my back to the tree and put Josie in my lap. The tree was just as wide as my back, and my shoulders were exposed as I huddled around the hard-breathing Josie. “Uh-oh” she said, and I heard what she heard. Even among the chaos of screams and trampling feet and sirens and horns, we heard the scouring of the water. It seemed to run as if along a fuse line across the grass. I turned to see it churning up the ground, creating a muddy explosion as it came toward the tree. Suddenly it hit the tree with a blast. We were showered with water and chips of bark, but the stream had not hit us directly. It turned with a malicious whip to a boy running past the tree. It lashed him in the ribs and sent him tumbling heel over head. He lay a moment in the mud, and, bent double holding his side, limped a few steps before the stream tripped him again. 86 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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Josie wanted to get up, whether to help the boy or to run, I don’t know, but I held on to her and tried to tuck her under me. Her fingers dug into my arm. Across the park we saw some of the children dancing, playing hide-and-seek with the jets and taunting the firemen. It was a dangerous game of tag, because the pressured hoses could have broken ribs and arms or given them concussions if it hit them in their heads. Even so, the dancing was joyous, so pure and daunting that Josie and I relaxed and laughed. I was tempted to abandon our safe place and join them, but I worried about Josie. I looked around the tree for the position of the hoses and saw that they were no longer pointed in our direction. I also saw that more demonstrators were filing out of the church. They went in a direction away from the park, circumventing the chaos. I pointed them out to Josie. They were about a block away, and I said we should make a run for that group. On my mark, we stood, and hand in hand, ran, dodging behind trees. Suddenly we were surrounded by bystanders mounting a retaliation. In the workshops we had been taught to be passive, to cooperate when arrested. If beaten we were to cover our heads but we weren’t to strike back. The bystanders had made no such commitment. A barrage of bottles, rocks and bricks were hurled at the firemen. As I feared, the bystanders attracted the water. The boy in front of us was hit squarely in the back as he tried to duck the jet. The pressure picked him up and bowed him as if he were a sail caught in a gust of wind. His arms flailed like a rag doll as he flew forward though the air. Then he flipped and fell with a splat on the muddy ground. I pushed Josie down and lay on top of her. The stream whipped above us like a mad, flexing tail, and then it went in another direction. We made it to the edge of the park before we had our next encounter with the water. Across the park, I saw a fireman, dressed in the traditional slicker and fireman’s hat, dragging a hose into position. Seeing him strengthened the notion that human beings were controlling the hoses. Before it was more like a freakish natural disaster, something mindless and heartless. The fireman aimed at us and I saw the stream coming, coming as if it moved in its own time, a spotlight at first, then suddenly a shining rod telescoping toward us. I looked for cover, but nothing was near. Cars parked along the street were too far. The water whooshed overhead, and hit the ground a few feet beyond us. Then it traced its path, beating up Crab Orchard Review ◆ 87
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the ground as it came back. First I felt the droplets needling my back and then the full force, like a blunt hammer. It was not so painful as it was numbing. It pushed against my back, pushed me against Josie, and forced the breath from the both of us. I tried to get a foothold, but the mud was too slippery and the force too great for me to stand. Josie was trying to scramble from under me, but I held on to her. Suddenly the water stopped, and I thought the stream had been redirected, but the sound of the water was still just behind us and the spray drenched us. “Get up, and stay low,” I told Josie. We crawled a little ways before the pressure flattened us again. Then, as if it had played with us enough, the stream went in another direction and we ran to the shelter of the parked cars. Behind us, bodies and swaying ropes of glittering water went back and forth. In one part of the park, a group huddled, making a turtle shell of their backs as the water hammered at them. Another group charged like a cavalry and pitched bricks and stones at the firemen. In yet another place, a teenage boy demonstrated a version of “the twist.” He jumped to the right or left to get out of harm’s way, taunting, twisting his hips, swinging his arms, and turning his taunt into joyous rebellion. Josie stood between the parked cars and wiped water out of her face. She tried to straighten her dress. “Are you cold?” I asked. She rolled her eyes, “No, I’m wet. If they had told me they were going to spray us, I would have worn my bathing suit.” We laughed. The skin on my back burned where the water had hit me. Later my back and ribs would be sore, but then I felt a jittery levity, a clear-minded drunkenness, strong as a bull. I could do anything. Shout. Pitch a stone. Shake my tail at the policemen. They had no power over me. Later I remembered the first time I heard Reverend Shuttlesworth talk. He was a dark, wiry, energetic man. He bounced and raised on his toes and clapped and sang and got the crowd into a very good mood. In spite of the fact that it was a serious talk and that police detectives were sitting in the back of the church taking notes, he kept the mood upbeat, making jokes about Bull Connor and Governor George Wallace. The crowd laughed with growing hilarity. At first I was not certain whether to laugh or not. I looked at Josie who seemed in a limbo, as well. But we took our cue from Reverend Shuttlesworth, the little man with the booming voice, unafraid and frisky. We laughed. The crowd 88 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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laughed. The laughter was more entertaining than any cartoon slapstick at the movies, more infectious than any canned laughter from a sit-com. It was laughter that filled me up, tickled me under the ribs, bubbled up deep in my lungs, convulsed my stomach muscles and spilled out of my mouth in chest-clenching heaves. Josieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s little body swayed with laughter, too. Her mouth was wide, her eyes shut tight and her voice loud. The laughter seemed to rush out of her like music. I was outside of myself, witnessing myself laughing and enjoying the laughter. It seemed the laughter was solid, something we could fall back into like a room full of feather pillows, something that held us up, while we let our bodies go limp, while we let down our guard, while we let ourselves feel invigorated and rested and alive.
Note: Bombingham is due to be published by The Free Press, in fall of 2001. Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 89
Jeffrey Greene
Thin Gold Chain
1. The Fish Market Chinatown, in Singapore, in the market three-quarters down below the street, hardly lit in the swelter, fish, without ice, lie hacked through the spine behind their stiff gills. Giant frogs hunch in woven bamboo, sulfurous and still, while black turtles in basins scratch their way nowhere to be free. You sweat at the neckline’s thin gold chain and plead, “Let’s leave here immediately.” Lead the way out then, shadowy as if through a concrete cave of butcher block’s cleavered cartilage, grass eels teeming gold-green or skin stripped pale-pink in the living heat.
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2. Cage Birds British khaki is gone with Maugham and the mysteries of the carrefour of the East, winter steamers with their district officers, their wives released from the shadows of verandahs and the last scratching Victrola, brothers dancing with sisters in sifting tropical light. But the song birds are still here where we drink coffee under their dreamy Chinese cages shaped to each bird’s body and hung on wires between trees, one bird to a cage suspended in sexual proximity. It’s no surprise they sing only to their own, sharma to sharma, merbok to merbok, thrush to thrush. 3. One Degree Above Latitude Zero You shouldn’t hate this place so much, turning your back without sheets or clothes to sleep off the clinging heat,
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Jeffrey Greene
leaving me the divide of your spine. This is the inside-out of the world the way you often love it, en route, and no one else we know at the fulcrum of hemispheres, constellations see-sawing unseen in an Asian city night. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nothing subtle in such opposition, southern autumn, our spring when the monsoon reverses itself across the equator. Its massive system of winds is like a turning in the heart to the strange island continent we left in a downpour over coastal sugarcane. 4. Dark Whatever We navigate the day, voyaging the MRT among the mixed . . . portion of mankind out abroad on their own affairs. At Jurong Lake we stand on the red bridge watching the iridescence of kingfishers swooping the murk and surface break. What did Conrad write of this island? Dark whatever, you say. . . . a deep detachment 92 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review
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from the forms and colours of the world. For us, the contrary, as if these were testing waters to awaken our senses, a blue-green bird an opal. 5. Last Tiger in Singapore Victoria ended the 19th century dying in the first year of the 20th. Soon after, the last tiger in Singapore was shot in the Billiards Room of the Raffles Hotel. Then the last clouded leopard was gone too, the last mouse deer, the last porcupine. A century after Victoria, the dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last rivet hammers a highrise at sunset, the last prayer is sung at dusk in the mosque, the last thought we share about travel on our last stop home, the things we say before sleep, the last words I read to you about the Sri Mariamman Temple, that Tamils still walk the bed of coals but are seen hot-footing the last steps. Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 93
Anthony Grooms
After the Quake, 1886 Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Charleston lays down like fruit tumbled from a basket, Columns and lintels askew, and rooftops balanced On the buckled cobblestone. The old market is strung With colored rags washed in the salty river and hung. White and colored alike, master and former slave, Sleep, side by side, under the wretched evening sky. For two days the ground has rumbled, mostly at sunset As if the twilight drew out the grumbling devils. A white mistress, bent over a pot, begins to sing. A black mother, her former slave, sits tight as a ball, Her only movement is the slow, watchful rock Of her wide eyes. A sound is first mistaken For the rustling of dry fronds, and then for a plague Of insects rising in the dark. Blood is on the fire. The quickening tongues call Satan a liar. Jesus, sweet Jesus, Master, blessed Christ, this Sodom And Gomorrah, this Mount Horeb is opening up, Tell Noah to hurry. The Negress in her unutterable anxiety, upsets the pot. Her hands tear at her head as she fights invisible Crows that fitfully pluck at the roots of her braids. Wailing, she rolls on the ground, kicking in a terrible dance. Among the fallen walls, old Africa has taken possession Of her riches. Down on their knees, white and black alike, Lock their hands to their noses. Jesus, sweet Jesus, Master, Lord, blessed Christ, white And meek. Jesus, crucified Lamb, whom we beseech.
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Anthony Grooms
The world turns slowly, and the night settles. The silver Moon washes the river and the white caps line up in the bay. To the North, the trains have stopped, the rails, twisted, sunken, Torn-up. All over the South, towers have toppled and verandas Broken. Charleston, the peaceful, black-eyed town, is laid open Because a little thief named hunger pilfered, and a noose Tightened around his neck—his bulging eyes— His twisted mouth.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 95
Dolores Hayden
The Milliner’s Proposals You hear of me, among others, as a respectable architectural man-milliner; and you send for me, that I may tell you the leading fashion. —John Ruskin, describing the practice of architecture 1. A small shop is my studio. I sew straw hats with finches nesting on cups of grass, stitch canvas ones billowing like schooners under sail, and twist red sarcenet into turbans. I upholster pith for tropic heat, wind muddy satin rivers crowded with smiling crocodiles and flowers. I am the chief designer here. Hard hats I cast of mock concrete, curling small cloverleafs that whiz with lanes of electric model cars. Picture a park on every street. Imagine a playground on every block— I’ll build one on every single head.
2. Some milliners are men these days, of course. My clients prefer women, well, they just do. Election night,
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the mayor phones me: could I outfit some buildings here, bonnet flat roofs? I spin high hats like merry-go-rounds, scaffold tall crowns with roller coasters, and stuff trapunto tips like peaks with violet velvet, mirror lakes, birch bark canoes. The mayor is pleased. “You’ve got the downtown capped,” she says, “and now I want some transport, too.”
3. I sequin suburban trams: dragons flash chartreuse and silver shoulders. My middle sister cuts the silk, brown-mottled busses glide like boas along the route to the zoo. Rose garden trains trail scent for miles, green cars mantled in buds and crimson blooms. The city’s robed and gowned. The mayor is very popular, she’s learned how much a milliner can do, and phones to say she has new specs. We’re hatted, clad, but not yet shod. I need my younger sister now. She owns a shop by the waterfront where she shapes hand-sewn boots and shoes.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 97
Kate Lynn Hibbard
Power Failure
The night we meant to divide our possessions the power failed, and for a few hours that late summer I was almost happy. We hadn’t gotten very far before the lights went out on our endless fight over last year’s calendar, each week a new scene of the weather outside the house I’d never wanted to live in but was too afraid to leave. I followed her out to the front stoop and she let me hold her for a while, sitting in the hot still night listening to crickets, the woman across the street playing piano, a Brahms sonata I think it was, the dark houses on our block lit with candles in the windows. If there hadn’t been a storm we might have seen some stars, rare grace where lights from the city try to hide us from the night sky. I tried to think of something I hadn’t said before, something to make her stay with me in the dark without lights or our lives in boxes behind us. Then the neighbors whooped like someone had plugged them in, and the world came clicking and humming back to life. But in the darkness I could almost believe we’d make love one more time, override the power of whatever had broken us.
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Robin Jacobson
Rockefeller Plaza, December 24th
Again those white wicker angels line the plaza, skate blades shave the ice below, carols peal from the loudspeakers. Inside Radio City seventy-two waxed legs kick in unison. I walk right past, wanting to see something alive, as if New York at Christmas could hold the heat of such a thing. The only green here is what has been brought in— the enormous fir strung with pinpoint lights, pine garlands framing the dioramas in Macy’s windows, holly wreaths nailed to the red-painted doors of Village brownstones. Seventeen years ago things looked just the same, but the city seemed clean new awake, like a child in a manger, with all the possibilities of love beating steadily in its small breast. I was on my way to meet you. I was ready for a bonfire in winter, for the lick and crackle of you. I didn’t know you’d gone to embers stamped out on that cold grid of passers-by
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Joy Katz
24th and Mission
A girl finishing her fried chicken lets it fall, bones and haunches and razored wings and slaw, a lavish drop—the glory of it— easily as a child lets a stick go, as the hair pulls from the head of the dying man, who wants to know have we been saved? Cups and glass and private trash, Q-tips in the cracks of pavement: the tide of us rising, skimmed off. Chocolate-milk cartons, diapers, and—a little more fun— onion rings and fried rice from the chinese/donut shop. And the frank, soily excess of the shoe-shine men: their rank, their talk. (To be saved, scraped clean, empty as the sound of gulls!) I work my way through our kingdom, past squalls of flowers, rutted plantains, burst tomatoes, to the panadería, for slabs of sugared bread: take and eat and throw some down. The ground with its load of food, doves in their marvelous robes—the sun goes all golden, softened. And the dying man cries out at 24th and Mission, Repent!
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Ruth Ellen Kocher
Interstate 81
The projects were a gift to us, the meek who inherit the earth. Walls for our roaches. Foundations for the rats. The green paneling layered like grass grown in a country meadow we never saw. Sometimes, over the sound of sex above my head, I could hear a distant highway, cars cutting through air as though no boundaries existed between there and here. You must understand this, the hollow tunnel of sound-less-ness echoed in movement, the suggestion of space without walls, a road that went somewhere in a heaved sigh of relief.
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Ruth Ellen Kocher
Jezebel Above the City
I am always this way. Doing my hair, waiting in the window for calamity to find me. A vineyard of soured grapes, a vineyard of men, a vineyard of years each one a turned Taroh on green velvet, seems a small price for the power to leave myself lost above the street, my youth, in her high-heeled boots and zebra-striped fuchsia mini, passing below with a pause to see herself in the hardware store reflection. Every neon sign blinks back the indifference of urban seasons, a series of smells: buttermilk-curdled garbage, gutter leaves, exhaust. Evening threads weave dogs through alleys looking for food and territory, a region.
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I love them like brothers, the throated growl, the constant hunger that gives direction.
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Ruth Ellen Kocher
Pastoral
The taxi cabs spill yellow over a rash of passing acacia trees, each more yellow and full bloomed against the mute gray exhaust of near noon. In the middle of this desert city I forget that my mother misses me by remembering a man I knew whose war sounded like a song just because he wrote it down and in writing it angered his nightmares into a worsening heap, a measured torture, a blue note. Tomorrow, a new wind from the west will unveil a distant mountain draped in three weeks’ smog. I try to sing it: The city swallows the sky whole. Neon lines and headlights, headlights and neon lights, Sammy’s Place, Nails, Pizza, Massage. I dismiss the birds who clamor a morning racket in the reach of my hedge as though we have not stolen their trees or my mother, too far away, does not count miles, pretend again to be unlike her mother building the guilt of Home.
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Ruth Ellen Kocher
Trying to forget the man who sang his war, I strain to remember what I wanted out of youth before it passes through the center of an iris bulb dead in the soil. One day, my mother will wake and be happy, sure that she lives in me and without me. One day I will forget what distance is, forget the man who sings his war, forget that he taught me to sing, and finally forget the song, the toppled want of this bad land.
Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 105
Karen Kovacik
Blue Paris after the etching, “Little Funeral Procession in the Rain,” 1879, by Félix Buhot 1. Paris has been pulled from a stone, Paris has been greased and inked until widows arise, blue as umbrellas and spattered with the dull sheen of crow. Someone’s cranking the awning of the butcher shop into oblivion. A woman is rushing home to a jug of irises, delphinium china, her wallpaper blooming. Will she make love under a storm-colored comforter? Will she drink ink in despair? We creatures of electricity and jazz cannot know these things. We only see what the artist sees. We only feel our blood push through our own blue veins. 2. Consumptive himself, the artist wraps his throat in a grimy silk.¶ The moribund one was no one he knew, but to judge from the horse leading the cortège, a beast of more gristle than style, the unfortunate was probably a pauper—some sclerotic clerk, or a fancier of low art who’d drunk away his liver, or a widow who had spat her last into a basin held by a sister of charity. ¶ Benedictions and a few sous to the stallkeeper who lets artists roost under this awning when it rains in Paris, clogged sewer of a city, barnyard of offal and coal, on days when umbrellas weep, when clouds press themselves to the mouths of chimneys as if to choke back a cough, on days of damp shoes and ankles burning with chill, when the Paris of bicycles, windowboxes, and crisp bread, suddenly shivers in the clutch of ink. 106 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Karen Kovacik
From the Indianapolis City Directory, 1916: A Tally
Only one war memorial, two full pages of labor unions: Asbestos Workers of the World, Federation of Locomotive Engineers, the Musiciansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Protective Association, and International Brotherhood of Book Binders Fifty-two secret societies: the Odd Fellows, Order of Owl, Tribe of Ben-Hur, Masonic Temple (colored), Sisters of the Mysterious Tent (colored), Woodmen of the World, and the Improved Order of Red Men Both a Prohibition Commission and two socialist parties, a Vacant Lots Cultivation Society and the Deutscher Klub und Musik Verein, Kurt Vonnegut, President Schools included No. 3 Mary Turner Free Kindergarten (colored) and The Brooks Preparatory Academy for Boys, adjacent to the Home for Working Girls An advertisement on every page: Fresh Beef, Veal, Mutton, and Pork Indianapolis Abattoir Company Endorsed by the Butchers Ladies Society Brevort Hotel, European Throughout, Rooms with Bath, $1.00 and Up Glide Bicycles, California Disappearing Bed Co., Beatrice Du Valle, Lady Chiropractor Terre Haute Beer: We deliver to all parts of the city Try our Champagne Velvet, an ideal table beverage, or Radium, our effervescent, popular brand of the future Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 107
Karen Kovacik
Church of St. James, Warsaw, Ochota District / W kosåciele SÅw. Jakuba, Warszawa Ochota
The frescoes are burning, in sunlight and in gloom, at Sunday Mass or with a single widow praying, because they were painted with a fiery hand, because the fingers that held the brush knew pleasure, knew where to touch, for how long, with what pressure, and there was no need to call the beloved “beloved” because she saw the rich arterial reds of her body, the umber of brow and belly, transmuted in the suffering of saints. Didn’t she pose as Joan? Didn’t she writhe against a drape of purple, didn’t the blaze scorch her calves, her thighs, hot on the bowl of her hips, her unchaste breasts? And when the flames touched her throat, there was no color for her keening, so the painter chose restraint, elongation, the ecstatic silence of Peter hanging naked on an inverted cross or Paul suffering lightning bolts to the eyes. This painter was no stranger to illumination, to doves big as owls descending, to virgins gazing at angels armed with swords of love. He had seen the capital desolate, all habitation forsaken, loose horses wandering the avenues as in a wilderness. This painter had smelled dynamite and hid in sewers, discovered a talent for small acts of sabotage and once rescued a stranger’s piano. Later, there was nothing to do but mix bloody colors in the unaccustomed calm. Later, there was no need to paint devils because eleven fresh apostles had risen from the palette of hell. These frescoes are burning, and I’m listening to their silence:
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speak, you flame-tongued supplicants and martyrs, O speak, evangelists of shrapnel and of wax.
Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 109
Leonard Kress
Visit to the Polish Writers’ Union, Krakow
Be suspicious, I’m forewarned by the young poet, of any writer who’s managed to live here so long. Since the fifties thaw, he means, on the first floor no less, while he awaits eviction from a fifth-floor walkup under a leaky roof. Don’t be fooled by his work with the Partisans, his Home Army commission during an earlier occupation, when he was barely as old as the young poet is now. He can’t be counted-on, which is, I’m instructed, different from being trusted. But the old poet, son of a village organist, looks like a hawk stripped of its urge to prey. Gracious as an old bowtied hotel waiter. Every word, gesture, thing, in this part of Europe, chides the young poet, is political, pointing out the precious gap, cloying and boisterous, between my words almost and free, dangerous, unbridgeable, into which one’s friends might one day disappear. What right have I to rummage through the past? writes the young poet. He believes, he tells me, only the language of bargehands, words to deliver the tangible smuttiness of coal, flirt with the young panienki hawking trinkets below Wawel Castle—language that won’t give itself to any other abusive master.
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Leonard Kress
And the old poet who emerged almost intact from the failure of civilization with his friends to become hopeful children in a new order. Teach us how to live, they pleaded, step by step, from the very beginning, how to eat, how to build, how to love, how to write. His poems, however, always whisk him back to the harvest. Mother with an apron full of feathers, where cows thrash about in the sagging barn, and men shout across fields gray with flax and rye. Where everyone’s invited to the wedding, and only moldering haystacks at night watch and comment upon your nightmare cry. I am helpless here. Lightheaded, inflamed. After the requisite vodka, toasts, and handkissing, we manage a slow descent. Halfway down the well goes black. Fearful of our steps, forgetting how to count, my wife runs her fingers along the walls, searching like a censor for irregularities in the crackling plaster. Instead of a light switch a doorbell is pressed. Some beleaguered poet or his widow, charlady or porter, is roused halfway to dawn. Like prankish children we flee. A flutter of suspicion, accusation rises up to the moldy vault, its short sleep abandoned—for a more familiar perch.
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Jeffrey Levine
Crédit Egyptien
Really, you should visit Balzac’s house, 47 rue Raynouard, to cool your heels in placid Passy, not only for Balzac’s beloved coffee pot, but also to touch the sky as the métro lifts up through the ground and drifts westward above the avenues, but, in truth, you could do worse than the lobby of the Crédit Egyptien if you need a place to rest your feet and tour the bas-relief. On the same side of the avenue as the Gare Luxor, from which Aïda processions depart in spontaneous felicity, the interior walls offer a potpourri of historical figures: Marat, Charlotte Corday, Cardinal Richelieu, Napoléon, and the eponymous Charles de Gaulle, each in Egyptian profile or seated on thrones with their salukis nearby, all long ears and silky hair, and displays of ancient writing remind that cartoon art, bande dessinée, predates the Great Sphinx— a time when hearts beat on their own, inside loose folds of indigo silk by the grace of perfect ovals and generous gods. Of special allure is the cat mummy, la momie d’un chat, with his whiskers and fixed-forever stare, but the bank claims this is the only place where you’ll also see the cat mummy’s own mummy of a mouse, and the mouse’s mummy of Mimolette, a cheese so hard it almost mummifies itself.
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Jeffrey Levine
If you open an account at Crédit Egyptien, you’ll find an automated teller system in hieroglyphics, and a multi-linguistic guide so your commands will be symbolically correct. There are glyphs for Give! And Okay, Today’s Date, Urgent (contains an asp), What Is Your Name?, Yes (ankh and ibis), and You Are The Owner Of The Gold (something round falling from something like the sun).
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Jeffrey Loo
the returning
flying back east called by the only city whose every artery I see intimately, whose every part is real to me, I love the Schuykill Riverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s winding narrows arched by stone and lined with grasses, trees and houses glinting in the sun suddenly jewels, the parallel expressway flow beaded by brightly painted driven shells, a serpent graceful in its splicings, its canted curves and intersecting clovers, its ribbons streaming past center cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s king and queen chesspieces in their grid of monoliths and the great dividing line of Broad Street, its dark etched blocks splaying so far south they become a pulsing live embroidery where I-95 and the dark Delaware bristle as broad bridges arc and plunge into close-knit streets, and as the jet veers south to where the rivers meet two million homes buildings spires and domes spread like a living god whose each skin cell is hot as sun-struck tar and the insane love of its endless life 114 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review
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Late Fall and the Big City: An Excerpt from The Rayon Girl
I am in Berlin. Several days now. With a night train and ninety marks left over. I’ll have to live from that until sources of income materialize. I have experienced boundless things. Berlin sank over me like a quilt with fiery flowers. The West is genteel with 100-proof light—like fabulous out-of-sight jewels in those hallmarked mounts. Here we have very excessive neon signs. It dazzled all around me. And I in my squirrel. And chic men like white slavers without their actually trading in white slaves, which there is no such thing as anymore—but they look that way, because they would if there were money in it. Very much gleaming black hair and night eyes so deep in the head. There are many women on the Kurfürstendamm. They are merely passable. They have the same faces and much moleskin— so not quite first-class—but still chic—with supercilious legs and much air about them. There is a subway, it’s like a lighted coffin on rails—under the ground and musty, and you get squashed. I ride it. It is very interesting and goes quickly. And I live with Tilli Scherer on Münzstrasse, that’s near Alexanderplatz, there’s nothing but the unemployed with no shirt and lots of them. But we have two rooms and Tilli has hair of dyed gold and a husband who’s away laying streetcar tracks near Essen. And she is in film. But she never gets any parts, and things are unfair at the casting agency. Tilli is soft and plump like an eiderdown and has eyes like polished blue glass marbles. Sometimes she cries because she likes being comforted. So do I. Without her I wouldn’t have a roof over my head. I’m grateful to her, and we both have the same way about us and don’t give each other a hard time. When I see her face as it sleeps I have good thoughts about her. And that’s what matters, how you feel about someone when he’s asleep and has no influence on you. There are also omnibuses—very tall—like lookout towers at full tilt. I ride them too sometimes. At home there Crab Orchard Review ◆ 115
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were also many streets, but they were as if related. Here there are even more streets and so many that they don’t know each other. It is a fabulous city. Afterwards I’m going to a jockey bar with a white slaver type who I don’t care about otherwise. But it’ll get me into the milieu which has prospects for me. Tilli says I should too. Now I’m on the Tauenzien in Zuntz, which is a café without music, but cheap—and many rushed people like racing dust who show you there is action in the world. I am wearing the squirrel and have effect. And across the street is a Memorial Church, but no one can go inside because of the cars all around, but it has significance, and Tilli says it holds up the traffic. This evening I’ll write everything down in my notebook one thing at a time, because so much has built up inside me. Therese helped me flee that evening. I had much trembling in me and fear and tremendous expectation and joy because now everything will be new and full of excitement and expectation. And she goes to my mother and breaks the news to her secretly and that I will elevate my mother and Therese to princes if I manage to pull everything off. And I know my mother as a woman of discretion, and she’s a wonder because at over fifty she hasn’t forgotten herself as she used to be. But they can’t send me clothes, that’s too risky—and so I have nothing and nothing but a shirt, I wash it in the morning and lie in bed until it’s dry. And I need shoes and very many things. But that will come in time. I can’t write to Therese either because of the police who are looking for me without a doubt—I know the Ellmanns, how single-minded that woman is and bent on playing the long arm of the law. I don’t care one bit if she has a stink on my account, because she roasted and ate Rosalie, who was our cat—a gentle animal with a silky purr and a coat like clouds of white velvet with ink spots. At night she lay on my feet and slept to make them warm—I’m going to cry—and I ordered a piece of cake—Dutch Cherry—and now I can’t finish it out of grief from thinking of Rosalie. But I pack it in. And one day she disappeared and didn’t come back, which because she was used to me she never did. I stood at the window and called: “Rosalie”—into the night and the gutter. I was very sad about the animal, because it was warm for me and not only for my feet. Something so small and soft and without help that you can hold it in your two hands—for that you always have much love. And on Sunday I go to the Ellmanns to get back the celery slicer she borrowed from us, the armhole, who’d sooner rot in Hell than buy 116 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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something she could sponge off someone else. They were just about to eat—scruffy Herr Ellmann who looks like a missionary with sanctimonious eyes unshaven on an island eating poor Negroes for purposes of conversion—his teeth were hanging out with greed and with a yellow gleam. And on the table was a dish and in it something roasted—with a certain line—by which I recognized Rosalie. And by the fear in Frau Ellmann’s beady eyes. Then I say it to her face, and she lies in a way that I can tell: I know the truth when I see it. And weeping in my sorrow I bash her in the face with the celery slicer and give her a bloody nose and a black eye, which was much too good for her, though, since Ellmann had work, and they had enough to eat and were never hungry and didn’t need Rosalie. My mother was worse off many a time, but we never would have roasted Rosalie, because she was a pet with a human nature—it’s wrong to eat something like that. And that is one reason why I am keeping the squirrel. I’m wiped out from remembering. And rode one night through. A man gave me three oranges and had an uncle with a leather factory in Bielefeld. He looked it too. And with my sights set on Berlin—why should I bother with someone who travels third class and gives himself second-class airs with uncles in leather, which always looks silly. And had gummy hair—dusty blond full of grease. And smoker fingers. And after an hour I knew all the girls he’d ever had something going with. Wild flings of course and passionate beauties who broke their hearts and everything when he left them—and jumped off steeples while simultaneously taking poison and strangling themselves just to be dead because of leatherman. We all know the things men say when they want to show you that they aren’t as lousy as they are. At that point I just shut up once and for all and act as if I believe every word of it. If you want to have luck with men you have to let yourself be taken for an idiot.— And I arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station, where prodigious life was milling. And I was told that big political Frenchmen had arrived just ahead of me, and Berlin had mustered up its masses. They were called Laval and Briand—and as a woman who often sits waiting in cafés, one knows their pictures from the magazines. I drifted in a tide on Friedrichstrasse, which was full of life and color and has a checkeredness. The excitement in the air! Right away I thought it must be something unusual, since even a city as huge as Berlin doesn’t have the nerves for such a frightful excitement every day. But I started to feel dazed, and I drifted onward—that was thrilling Crab Orchard Review ◆ 117
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air. And some people started to run and dragged me with them—and we stood in front of an elegant hotel called Adlon—and everything was full of people and cops jostling. And then the politicals came out onto the balcony like kind black dots. And everything became one shout, and masses washed me past the cops and onto the sidewalk and wanted peace tossed down to them by the politicals on the balcony. And I shouted with them because all the voices went into my body and came out my mouth. That was my arrival in Berlin. And so right away I belonged to the Berliners, right in their midst—that made me happy. And the politicals bowed their heads, statesmanlike and full of good will, and that way they greeted me as well. And we all shouted about peace—I thought, that is good and must be done, otherwise there will be war—and Arthur Grönland once tipped me off that the next war will be with smelly gas which makes you turn green and swell up. And I don’t want that. So I shouted up to the politicals along with everyone else. Then a gradual crumbling set in, and powerful thoughts rose in me and a yearning to learn about politics and what the statesmen wanted and everything. Because newspapers bore me dreadfully and I don’t understand them right. I needed someone to instruct me, and just then the backwash of the excitement wafted a man toward me, and something of the universal brotherhood still hung over us like a cheese dome, and we went into a café. He was pale and had a dark-blue suit and looked like New Year’s—as if he had just given his last few pfennigs to mailmen and chimney sweeps. But that was not the case. He worked for the city and was married. I drank coffee and ate three pieces of nut torte—one of them with whipped cream, since I was properly starved—and in me was the desire for political instruction. I asked the dark-blue married man, what have the statesmen come for? At which he told me: his wife is five years older than he. I asked him why people are shouting for peace when there is peace, or at least no war. He answers me: that I have eyes like blackberries. Hopefully he means ripe ones. And I was a little bit afraid of my ignorance and asked cautiously why the French politicals up on the balcony had moved us so just now, and if this means that everyone is in agreement when such enthusiasm passes back and forth, and if surely there will be no more war now? The dark-blue married man replied that he is a North German and that is why he is so terribly reserved. And I have found that all people who start out by saying: you know, I’m such a frightfully reserved person—really aren’t at 118 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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all, and are guaranteed to blurt out everything about themselves. And I felt the cheese dome of universal brotherhood lift and float away over us. I made one more attempt and asked whether the French and the Jews were the same thing and why they are races and the Nationalists don’t like them because of the blood—and whether it was a risk for me to talk about it and when under what circumstances the political murders start. He tells me that he gave his mother a carpet last Christmas and is terribly good-natured, and he told his wife it was pure meanness to take him to task for buying the near-silk umbrella instead of having the armchair reupholstered, on account of which she’s ashamed to invite her ladies to coffee, one of whom is the wife of a professor— and that he told his boss straight out: you don’t know a thing—and that I had a feeling in me which he needed, and he was a lonely man and always had to speak the truth. And I know that people who “always have to speak the truth” always lie. I lost interest in the dark-blue married man, for my heart was solemn and stirred and had no interest in affected romance without sense and reason with a municipal civil servant. I said to him: “One moment!”—and secretly went out the other exit. And was unhappy about having no political instruction. All the same, I’d had three pieces of nut torte—one of them with whipped cream—that saved me lunch, which again political instruction wouldn’t have. I had some negotiations with a traffic cop about getting out to Friedenau, where I had to go to Margretchen Weissbach, a former friend of Therese’s. I went into a room where Margretchen Weissbach lived with her unemployed husband. She was no Margretchen, she was a Margrete with a face life will not be kind to. And she was in the act of having her first child. We said hello and used first names right away, because without saying a word we both knew: what is happening to you can happen to me. She is past thirty, all the same it was an easy birth. I went to get the midwife, because all that sorry excuse for a husband could do was smoke agitated three-pfennig cigarettes. I gave the midwife ten marks and made her move, and said for the rest of the costs she should come to me. And so I hadn’t been in Berlin for three hours and was already in debt to a midwife, which hopefully is not an omen. I sat with Margrete when the contractions came. Those are moments when you are ashamed of not being in pain yourself. The baby is a girl. We called it Doris, because I was there and Crab Orchard Review ◆ 119
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no one else—except for the midwife, but her name was Eusebia. That night I slept on a mattress next to Margrete’s bed, because she might need someone. Next to me the baby was in a wooden crate padded all over and with soft blankets with pink roses embroidered on them. Other than that the room was very without color. On the other side of the baby slept the husband. He breathed hollow with happiness because nothing had happened to Margrete, you could tell, even though he acted so hard and gruff. Margrete slept, and he said words without joy: what were they supposed to do with a baby and they couldn’t make ends meet as it was, and better it wasn’t there. But that night in secret I saw his head rise in the darkness, and he bent over the crate and kissed the embroidered pink roses. I went white with fear, because if he had known I had seen that, I believe he would have killed me. There are men like that. And Margrete thinks she’ll get an office job again now that it’s all over. In the morning the baby cried like an alarm clock, and we all woke up. The air was like a round lump, and you couldn’t swallow it. The baby weighs eight pounds and is healthy. Margrete feeds it and feels fine. Her husband made coffee and milk. I made the beds. The husband was black and angry. He was ashamed to say good words to Margrete, but we felt that they were in him. Then he went to look for work, but without hope. Margrete says when he comes home he swears at her and blames her, and that is because he doesn’t believe in what is called God. Because what a man like that mainly needs is a Good Lord, so that when everything goes wrong he can hold it against him and swear at him. This way he has no one he can fling his curses and hatred at, and so he heaps the blame on his wife, but she minds—and what is called God doesn’t mind—and that’s why he should have a religion, or he ought to go political, then he can go ahead and raise hell. And I said goodbye, because I couldn’t stay there. Margrete gave me the address of Tilli Scherer, who used to work with her in the office and is also married, but her husband is often away. On my way I bought three diapers, and I’m going to have a green branch embroidered in the corners with colorfast thread, for luck, and send them to the Weissbachs, after all the baby is named after me. And went to Tilli Scherer. We came to an agreement, and she took me in. She wants to be a brilliance too. And she doesn’t want any money from me. But day after day I lend her my squirrel for the morning for the casting agency. I don’t like to do it—not because I’m stingy, 120 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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but because a kind of strange air always gets into it. I’ve tried film too, but there is little prospect there. —translated by Isabel Cole
About the Author
Irmgard Keun (1905-1982) was born in Berlin, Germany. She grew up in Cologne and as a young woman pursued a career in the theater. Her first novel, Gilgi, eine von uns (Gilgi, One of Us) was published in 1931. It was an immediate success and was filmed in 1932, the year her second novel, Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Rayon Girl), appeared. When the Nazis came to power, Keun was blacklisted as a “harmful and unwanted” author of “obscene works” of “asphalt literature with antiGerman tendencies.” Unable to continue publishing in Germany, Keun emigrated to Belgium in 1936 after the Dutch publisher Allert de Lange offered to publish her next book, Das Mädchen, mit dem die Kinder nicht verkehren dürften (The Girl the Children Were Forbidden to See). She spent the next four years in exile, travelling in Europe and America. Three more of her books were published by Querido in Amsterdam: Nach Mitternacht (After Midnight), D-Zug dritter Klasse (Express Train Third Class), and Kind aller Länder (Child of All Countries). When the Germans marched into Amsterdam in 1940, Keun, sought for treason, was forced to go into hiding. The Daily Telegraph’s false report of her suicide threw off her persecutors, and that same year she returned to Germany illegally with a false passport and was hidden by her parents until the end of the war. After the war Keun lived in Cologne, writing highly successful satirical sketches and essays for the radio. Her last novel, Ferdinand, der Mann mit dem freundlichen Herzen (Ferdinand, the Man with the Friendly Heart), a dark, absurdist comedy of post-war Germany, was published in 1950. She continued to publish books of commentary, the last appearing in 1962. In the late ’70s, a book on the “burned writers”—forgotten German writers persecuted by the Nazis—precipitated her rediscovery in Germany, where nearly all of her writings are now in print. While many of Keun’s earlier works were translated into English shortly after their original German publication, most of these translations are now unavailable, and only After Midnight has been retranslated within the last ten years. A new English translation of Das kunstseidene Mädchen (by a different translator than the translator of this excerpt) will be published in the United States by The Other Press in Fall 2001. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 121
Nicole Louise Reid
Shimmy Twins
One is Pride. And one is Honor. And neither is either. Two shimmy twins. Two blind twins, of which only one is. Corner musicians, corner tooters. Pride’s got the guitar; Honor sways a standup bass. Each wears a hat just for passing: a felt cap with dangly fringe and beads, making music making time on Honor’s head. Their mama got them all wrong. Honor lies streaks—every color there is. Pride sees fit to blame herself. Pride’s the blind one, can’t see a stitch held right up to her nose. Honor’s got eyes, but nobody knows it. Their mama cooked it up, the number, their set. She bet on that money ’til they were five, walked them down to Lexington and Park. The twins clung to her, and she’d say curb, and lamppost, and they made it there all right. Pride on harmonica, Honor singing hymns, folks walked on past. So their mama stopped telling them curb, lamppost, and the crowds were there every day, panting for the stumbling parade. The parade is nothing less now, though each is full woman at nineteen. Pride with her guitar case. Honor wheeling a bass taller than she. Both with red-tipped canes tap tapping the walks. Somehow they manage. On sunny days, Pride might trip through the heat; Honor lets her cane get stuck in a sewer grate: momentary delays that set the crowd’s collective heart aflutter. Few even notice the only difference between the two blind twins: one’s eyes wander up and some to the side; the other’s drift and scan, cannot steady from flicking this way and that when a pretty boy runs past. But then Honor tips her head, brings her eyes back to just tucked up slightly under her eyelids, making a production of the whole thing. So they wiggle and twist. They strum and they pluck. They hoof for pennies. They pass a felt cap making its own music. And they thrust out their hands groping for each other, to grab hold and bow. One is Pride, and one is Honor, but their mama had them all wrong. Now Honor’s light and coppery as the number two chestnut horse last Wednesday, the one that lost her week’s cut of shimmy shake. And 122 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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Pride’s dark as the bay number nine: velvety dark, all sorts of plush look to her—though she’d never know it, and she won’t bet at all. Honor tells Mama she’s off window-shopping, but everyone knows she’s off to Pimlico. She leaves her bass at home, tucks her cane up into her underdrawers, and doesn’t care if Pride won’t come, and so Pride manages the bus steps, knows the hoofy rumble of the track’s stop— even if Honor clamps down all her beads to shimmy the bus aisle in silence. Honor shoots for trifectas every time. And Pride tap taps right on behind her sister, who tries to lose her in the crowds. Even so, Honor’s got a whole system dependent on Pride. She chooses riders’ silks by the color of Pride’s shoe leather, or the green or red feather pinning back a hank of her hair. Honor likes handicapped entries the best; she’s simpatico with a horse made to drag twelve extra pounds in its saddle. And entry numbers are always decided by where her finger falls on the program or how many taps and shimmies Pride makes between the pretzel stand and the only man for miles without spats. And if Honor weren’t so set on picking the one, two, and three each and every time, there’d be a handsome stash in the shimmy shake fund, and Pride and Honor could shimmy and shake at home. But Honor can’t seem to appreciate degrees of winning, so it’s all or nothing for her. She placed three horses once, had a real feel for that race and put everything down on it. “Second race, fifteen dollar trifecta on the two, eleven, and eight, please,” she said. The two because Pride had found Honor on the bus right quick; the eleven whose jockey looked like a peppermint lollipop, was for Pride in her green tapping shoes and pink roll-top stockings; and the eight because Pride cried out her sister’s name that many times when she lost her checking track conditions railside. But Pride stood behind her shaking her head. “Honor,” she whispered, “Honor, I heard someone call a filly Bonnet Strings. Pick her.” Honor hesitated. “You got to be sure, girl,” the pink-nosed man in the window who ought to have recognized Honor by now, looked down over his half-frames at the shimmy twins: “Ain’t that a lot to you? Better know what you’re up to.” Betting fifteen dollars was too much, a month of corner hoofing, but she had it all figured: if she won she’d rake home $168, enough to kick the tap tapping routine. But, Honor supposed, she could Crab Orchard Review ◆ 123
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have miscounted Pride’s calls to her. “Change the eight for Bonnet Strings,” she consulted her program, “the seven.” She placed her bet, took her ticket, and let Pride follow her back to the rail. The bell rang, gates yanked open, the horses shot out like heart attacks, and Honor’s own heart about sat on the floor next to her. Her fingers wrapped the railing like hairbands snapping down. Her view wasn’t of the start and wouldn’t be of the finish, but she’d see them come down for the first turn. Pride lay her palms to the rail, losing herself in the spectacular clapping of hooves right down to her core, a clapping that shimmied her right in to her shake: her feet were going, her arms swinging, her hips knocking side to side. Honor’s horses weren’t anywhere good. The field had bunched up with too many entries, and locked in her favorites. But the eleven broke clean and tight to the rail. The two filly wove tight then wide until she was on the outside and could move. But there was no hope for the seven, whose nose was penned in on all sides and stuck to fourteen’s croup. Eleven still had it by four lengths. The two, travelling the outside, was covering too much distance to make up. At the first turn, Honor bit her lip to see her picks: Pride was wearing a red feather, and Honor was sure she should have kept the sorrel eight horse now easing up out of the pack. Pride licked their wind from her lips and went on shaking. Honor lost sight and stuffed her claim stub in her dress pocket along with yesterday’s and the rumpled remains of that of the day before. She watched the distant cloud of kicked-up mud promising to herself, her mother, and Pride never to come back. She swore it secretly, knowing she couldn’t stick to it; too much of her mama in her. She didn’t even hear the announcer trumpet the two’s digging strides to overcome the eleven, the glorious eight’s snapped tarsal, the track’s fanning out around him and the seven’s cutting through the pack just quick enough to place. Honor did not even hear the winners called, she was already planning her speech to Mama, her plan to earn it all back on the corner with her cane and her tripping here and there. But Pride heard and grabbed her sister’s wrist dragging her this way and that to the betting window to collect, where Honor kissed Pride square on the lips. Honor counted and recounted her take: frontwards, backwards, by sight, and by feel. They didn’t ride all the way home on the bus, but got off at Fulton and Orleans so the sisters could hoof it home, shimmy-shaking all the way there. And with her roll of cash tucked 124 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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up under her skirt, Honor pulled out her cane and rattled and swung, and tripped and slipped, and swore up and down she’d stop while ahead. Pride still felt the track in her, still licked the gales of such speed nettling her lips, and tap tapped her cane in one hand, passing Honor’s hat with the other. The beads, their skirts, their green and black shoe leathers scuffing along, made their music, and the crowds followed them down Parrish to Lexington, down Lexington to Park, dropping pennies—and nickels even—right into Honor’s hat. And she was done with it. Done with the smell and sound and sun-baked rail. She divvied up her win to Mama and to Pride. And Honor swore never again, though anyone could see how pleased her mama was with all that commotion and green. Anyone could see how happy she was that she’d gotten her two babies all wrong, that Pride was Pride and Honor was Honor—and most importantly, that neither was either. But everyone in downtown Baltimore could see Pride stumbletumbling behind Honor stealing away to Pimlico, the one sighted sister running to lose the other around corner bakers’ and newsstands—telling her, Wait here, I’ll go get us some lemon fizzies—then grabbing hold of every bead on her hat and sprinting fast as any horse ever won her a dollar. But Pride just let the hoofy rhythm take her there, wet her lips for the breeze of leather and manure. And soon enough, there was Pride gripping fistholds of Honor’s skirt, behind her at the betting window. Honor turned around for her system, and bet on Pride’s shoe leather and hair feather and where her finger fell on the program when Honor held it out. But no matter if Honor takes Pride’s hand, holds it all the way to Pimlico, or loses her for good in the fish stands at Lexington Market, Honor can’t make her horses pay, can’t make a win from Pride’s anything and suspects her blind sister’s changed her peculiar fashion of greens and pinks and reds, to blues and browns to spite her sister’s penchant for the track. Now Honor’s considering quinella bets, thinking that if she can just get the top two horses, no matter the order, she’ll be back on top. But Pride and Honor come shimmyshaking, tap tap tapping home each time not for the joy but for the coins in Honor’s hat.
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Carson H. Wu
The Places Family Takes You
All airports spoke in English. From the gate number to the fast food stand, travelers from each corner of the globe knew how to be understood. No one actually seemed to be going anywhere though: the passengers, waiting for departure, and the loved ones, anticipating arrival, all lounged together. Only the glimmer of expectation in those waiting to greet visitors separated them from the dull eyes of the traveler. They all waited together, with a solemn and common goal: to leave and reach a final destination. Philip Chang observed people taking pictures of themselves under an airlineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s logo, documenting their first steps in a long journey and memorializing their imminent departure. Philip felt he was late for something, maybe because of all the clocks mounted on the walls. London time, New York time, Tokyo time. Television monitors blinked and contained scrawled information about flights that would soon manifest themselves. Those blinking numbers signified thousands of people from distant places, all of whom would be united for a few ticks in Boston. Philip watched for Mirelle Lin, his cousin from France. He had not seen her in over a decade. Philip and Mirelle had both been born in Taiwan, but separated when their parents had left for college and a future in Minneapolis and Paris, respectively. Mirelle had just graduated from the Sorbonne and wanted to experience the world before starting a new life. The idea amused Philip, since he imagined Parisians were the center of the world or considered themselves as such. Mirelle would be arriving in Boston from Paris, via New York, where she would have proceeded through customs and stated she had nothing to declare. Philip had a pristine photo of his cousin. The picture had been snapped on a Christmas long ago, when their life revolved around the holiday and they had lain under the tree, looking up through the artificial branches and the glowing lights, pretending they were 126 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review
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gnomes in a forest. Mirelle’s nose looked like a crease in her face and her hair was so black it receded into the background of the photo. In exchange, Philip had mailed her a photo of himself, taken at the lab where he manufactured paint. His ambition was to invent a new shade of green or patent a faster drying paint. Although he had splotched his lab coat with various liquids, he wore the colors as though they were badges. Philip put the picture back in his jacket pocket and snuck an abandoned paper off the chair beside him, afraid an irate tourist might claim the paper if seen. But it was yesterday’s edition, left by a red-eye businessman caught between old news and the fresh events just being printed. Philip waited for Mirelle to find him. Wai Gong, Philip’s maternal grandfather, would have had an apartment in Shanghai, circa 1949. Nothing extravagant, but completely adequate for an old bachelor who had no hobbies. For a long time, he received no mail and did not have a telephone, so nobody knew how to contact him or intervene in his life. He could also make a quick getaway. Shanghai had been a cosmopolitan city, city of stars, but people had fled the Communists. The Westerners had indignantly left town, saying China would never become civilized. Wai Gong operated a fashion boutique in the city and he worked at his apartment. He left fabric swatches lying all over the single room. A pile of silks, cottons and linens lay stacked in the corner of the kitchen, the solid colors off-setting the vertical patterns. Wai Gong copied the Western styles that were all the rage among the rich Chinese people who frequented nightclubs and danced the tango. Shanghai with its various quarters had always had a heavy European influence, from the architecture down to the cuisine. Wai Gong still preferred his old-style Chinese padded jacket to anything else, especially foreign suits and shapeless Communist garb. Dresses in various stages of completion hung from the ceiling; dresses were strung over the windows, sunlight filtering through the thinner material; others draped across his bed. Dresses were missing sleeves; others had no backs. They appeared obscene, violated, revealing all and covering nothing. When Flight 23 touched down at Logan, Philip stood up and tentatively looked at the disembarking passengers. He didn’t know what to expect. The passengers walked with heads down, but underwent a Crab Orchard Review ◆ 127
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forced transformation as they noticed people scrutinizing them, seeing who displayed the first signs of recognition mixed with exaggerated affection. “Allo,” Mirelle said. “I speak no good of English.” Philip turned and noticed a short woman, her hair swept back with the strands all pointing in the same direction like an arrow. He said, trying to help her out, “No. I understand.” “Speak you of French?” “No.” He fumbled around for the little French he knew. “Un peu.” “Non,” Mirelle replied, tapping her plane ticket under her chin as if to prop her head up. “I understand.” The only other words Philip knew in French he could use in one sentence, which translated to “I wear a hat going up the escalator.” “Parlez vous Chinese?” Mirelle leaned toward Philip and nodded her head to encourage a response. She paused, then spoke in Mandarin Chinese, “Ni hau ma?” “I’m okay. I didn’t study Chinese too hard. My parents spoke it,” Philip said, discovering after a few minutes’ conversation that his Mandarin included short declaratory statements while Mirelle managed to incorporate adjectives and weave complex ideas together. You could get away with speaking a foreign language to a friend at the airport, but outside Philip realized he’d have to speak English to prove he was an American. He’d stopped being anything Chinese the first day he attended kindergarten and the teacher singled him out and asked where China was located on the big map. For Philip, a definite distinction existed between being American and being Chinese. He didn’t even remember his first four years in Taiwan, beyond bleating horns and the calls of a nearby street vendor. In Boston, he rooted for the hometown team, lived in the South End with a mix of young white urban professionals, while various other ethnic groups encroached on their neighborhood. The closest he got to Chinese was taking the ‘T’ to the park and walking to Chinatown for dimsum. “I’ll teach you my language,” Philip struggled to say in Chinese, forgetting how to say English in Chinese, “and you teach me French.” “Why is your Chinese so bad?” Mirelle asked, settling on English. “You speak of it with an American accent.” “Americans don’t have accents. Well, except for Bostonians and New Yorkers maybe,” Philip said, following Mirelle’s precedent and using English. He couldn’t understand the cab driver who’d driven 128 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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him to the airport because he had such a thick accent, but it wasn’t as bad as a foreigner’s. His parents had spoken with a tinge of an accent. Americans didn’t trust people who spoke differently. Even though Philip didn’t have one, people expected him to and complimented him on his English. Mirelle had a French accent when she employed English, but Philip couldn’t separate his cousin’s Chinese face from her French manners. He stood with her at the conveyor belt, watching the pieces of luggage spin around wanting someone to claim them. “I can’t wait to see of the United States,” Mirelle said. “What is it really like?” “I haven’t seen much of it,” Philip admitted. “It’s such a big place. I grew up in Minnesota, as you know. Then my dad worked in Michigan. I went to school on the East Coast and settled in Boston because I got a job here.” “Have you ever been to Niagara Falls?” “I’ve heard about it.” “The Grand Canyon, no? So far down?” “I saw it from an airplane. Didn’t go all the way down.” “Statue of Liberty? Pointing up at the sky?” “Through binoculars.” Philip realized Mirelle had no idea of America’s scale. She thought you’d end up in another state if you turned the corner. “I go to New York on business sometimes. The statue was always in the background although I prefer uptown to downtown.” “In America,” Mirelle asked, “is it true everyone likes to shop?” “Something’s always on sale. Do all the French have affairs?” “They don’t tell me about it.” “Tell me,” Philip said, wondering if Mirelle could be one of those eccentric family secrets you heard Chinese people kept. He joked, “How are we even related again?” “My father is your mother’s brother,” Mirelle said. Then she clarified, “We have the same grandfather, our Wai Gong.” Standing on the docks, Wai Gong would have seen the huge barges and boats bobbing on the waters, destined for Taiwan. He would have discovered thousands of people had the same idea he did: to leave China. The banks had collapsed; citizens possessed worthless currency, and the Communists had achieved total victory. Pushing through the crowd, he grew urgent, not caring if he Crab Orchard Review ◆ 129
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separated children from their mother’s grasp even as he clutched his own bag containing his most valuable fabric. He maneuvered through the mass of people, concentrating on the mist by the water. When his suitcase got too heavy, he set it on the ground and pushed it, knocking into other people’s calves. Once secure on the boat, he stared at the people left ashore. They didn’t seem to be moving; he cursed their stupidity and their dazed countenances, swaying left and right in rhythm to keep warm. Their confusion, between the sea rolling to the distant horizon and the city behind them where people rioted, rooted them to their spots. Wai Gong pushed back and forth on the deck of the barge. The ship did not leave and nobody knew what they waited for. They were full-up. Bureaucracy, he cursed. He had seen the same thing on trains, which never pulled out of the stations, always pausing for some indeterminable reason before leaving with a hesitation, picking up speed and confidence only after the departure point had receded well out of sight. Or perhaps Wai Gong’s own desire made the wait seem long. When the barge began to move, it drifted, keeping the shore in reach. Wai Gong saw the people on land waving. He couldn’t tell if the gestures were out of desperation or for a fond farewell. He perfunctorily snapped his chin up, as if they could acknowledge the movement. We’ll be back soon, he thought. No reason to get sentimental. When the political winds change, the Communists will fight amongst themselves. Then we’ll return. In the meantime, Wai Gong hoped the people in China would suffer so they would regret giving the land up to the bespectacled radicals who’d been educated abroad. He did not notice the shoving and bumping around him. He moved when a body strained against his. He thought all the suffering was due to the changing moods of the water. Growing up, Philip learned about his family by piecing together countless references and legends about his relatives told over dinner or revealed during lectures his mother gave him. These stories embarrassed him and he congratulated himself on growing up American. As Philip’s family moved around, from Minneapolis to Chicago where his father found a job, to Detroit where they finally settled, the idea of his maternal grandfather followed Philip. When they moved to suburban Detroit, after Philip’s father’s first promotion and raise, they decided to bring Wai Gong over to America for a visit. 130 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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Philip’s mother said his grandfather had been a brave man who escaped China; another day, over Chinese noodles, his father told Philip he hated his father-in-law, who’d wanted Philip’s mother to marry a rich man. “Your grandfather,” Philip’s mother said, “led an army once.” “Your grandfather,” Philip’s father said, “still thinks your mother made a mistake by coming to start a new life in a new country with me.” Other times, Philip’s mother hid things about Wai Gong. When he visited, she avoided the old man. She sliced her father’s apples into small pieces so he could let the fruit melt in his mouth. He never saw much of the United States and when Wai Gong did go out, he went to places that reminded him of home, like the Chinese doctor who prescribed herbs for his arthritis. Philip’s mother clung to the idea of Wai Gong only when he wasn’t around. The old man served as an all-purpose excuse and moral of every story. Wai Gong grew in stature as his mother referred to him more and more. She always used him as the point of her stories. “If you study and work hard, you can succeed. Look at your grandfather.” But when his grandfather was in front of him, Philip only saw a bitter senior citizen. Wai Gong had all his teeth removed in America and replaced them with a set of dentures. He’d also had eye surgery, a hip screw, and orthopedic shoes manufactured for him in the States, as if all the age-old illnesses had finally caught up to him once he visited the West and had time to relax. Philip’s mother expected Wai Gong to die at any moment, believed he could have been a great man if he had decided to die long ago. She even talked about him as if he had passed away, because the stories she recited seemed to have no relation to the crumpled up old man that Philip saw. Wai Gong would have set up shop in Taiwan. Coming from a big city, he expected modern amenities. When he did not find running water, he spat on the floor to wipe away the dust. Eventually, he stopped trying to clean up, letting dishes stack up on the table, adamant in the belief he’d go home the next day. He lived near the train station on the west side of town and smelled the river as he sewed and read. At first, he read the newspapers from front to back, although Crab Orchard Review ◆ 131
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he’d skip to the last few paragraphs first. He left the papers folded and crumpled, not finding the expected headlines proclaiming the failure of the Communist’s bid at power. He hoped the Americans wouldn’t think all Chinese were Communists. The Commies gave Chinese a bad name. Then he wondered why the Americans weren’t doing more to help the cause. When he didn’t find an article on the front page, he flipped to the second, his hopes dimming as he reached the entertainment news. He found solace in the editorial pages, which were sure to contain an article indicting Mao and his fellow rogues. He would eventually get married, watch his children grow and send them off to school. They would never know their mother country. Wai Gong’s wife died and he mourned her. He placed incense beside a portrait of her and, for the first time, comprehended the comfort traditional rituals provided. He’d always thought the holidays superstitious, but he found companionship in knowing a whole nation, like him, devoted time to their dead ancestors all together. Wai Gong planned for the present and expanded his store in Taipei. Taiwan’s industry boomed, supplying the United States with a steady supply of running shoes and T-shirts. Wai Gong nominated himself as a consultant and played translator to American firms. He didn’t get along with people on Taiwan, who also traced their family line back to China, but who had lived under Japanese rule and considered themselves different from Chinese who came to Taiwan after the civil war. Everybody on the island, though, looked up to the Americans. Wai Gong helped the big U.S. soldiers, who occupied the island, negotiate with local vendors and prostitutes. He didn’t like seeing these women sell themselves, but he didn’t consider them Chinese. They had plenty of children by American fathers, proud of the illegitimate kids, not realizing they’d never get any closer to America. Buildings went up every day; Wai Gong complimented the right people. He thought connections, face, and kowtowing were important concepts in Chinese relations, but they applied to Americans as well. Everyone operated on the same principles when making money. Wai Gong secured exclusive rights to Western products that were coveted by people on Taiwan by making foreigners think he understood them, which mostly just meant agreeing with them and laughing with them at local customs. He approached foreign companies, impressing them with his 132 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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English and suggested he was a major cultural figure. He said, “I know people.” He would glance around the room, indicating his connections might, at the very moment, be just beyond the walls. He inserted Chinese phrases and made up rules about Chinese etiquette to make himself indispensable to Westerners. “Never,” Wai Gong said, “swallow the tea leaves!” Mirelle wanted to experience everything in Boston, and she expected Philip to lead the way. On the subway, she leaned over the tracks, delighted at the mice; the other people on the platform craned their necks in the direction the train would be approaching, but Mirelle defiantly looked the other way. Philip tried to remember the history of Boston; how the Back Bay had been submerged under water; who tossed the first snowball that instigated the Boston Massacre; when the Red Sox last won the pennant. This was his history, and he’d learned it from textbooks that wove legends and myths into a compelling narrative. But Philip felt inadequate; he didn’t want Mirelle to go back disappointed in his version of Boston. Philip said, “The French were on our side in the American Revolution.” “So much history here,” Mirelle said, as they surveyed Beacon Hill’s cobbled streets and double-parked luxury cars. They cut across the park, Mirelle astounded at the variety of dogs. They proceeded to the Freedom Trail, a haphazard route that took you to famous sites around the city. She said, “You must wake up and be proud to live in Boston.” Mirelle’s own naïve enthusiasm brought out Philip’s skepticism. He compared himself with his cousin and wondered if he had been like her at one time. A lot of bad things happened in Beantown that weren’t commemorated: bus riots, crime, and segregation. Even as they passed the outskirts of Chinatown, Philip navigated Mirelle away from the porn stores. Philip had never had to consider Boston before Mirelle. “Paul Revere,” Philip said enthusiastically. “He rode on a horse and woke everybody up.” Philip couldn’t remember if Revere had actually stopped in Boston or if he had gotten the myth confused. Mirelle tried to keep her feet on the painted red line that designated the way towards history. The Freedom Trail had been carefully constructed. “These buildings,” Mirelle said. “Which one is that?” Crab Orchard Review ◆ 133
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“It’s a bank now,” Philip said. “Isn’t Paris better?” “It looks nice in the pictures,” Mirelle said. “But if you are to be living there, it’s just noise.” “But France,” Philip said. “It must be romantic.” “It is big and dirty city,” Mirelle said. She watched the pedestrians roaming the streets and the vendors hawking T-shirts celebrating the city’s great accomplishments: the local sports teams; the Revolutionary War; the television shows; the local brewery. “Whoever thought up of Boston must be a perfect genius.” “But Paris has been around a lot longer,” Philip said. He kept his voice down, assuming all tourists must also be eavesdroppers. Philip said, “They have a lot of French stuff here. Croissants. And your movies.” Mirelle laughed. Philip knew associating French culture with croissants was like his co-workers ordering Chinese take-out, reducing a whole culture to a convenient, Americanized version. Still, Philip lived on hot ‘n sour and engaged in chopstick fights with his colleagues. Philip and Mirelle rested. He wondered if they’d have been friends if they weren’t relatives. He didn’t know if her exotic behavior qualified as “European.” She dressed differently, behaved differently. He couldn’t see where they were related. Wai Gong loved his children, but opportunities took them all to foreign lands. His daughter, with her husband and child, left for the United States. His son, who always loved French women, went to Paris with his wife and daughter. Now, they didn’t see much of one another since it required long flights and lost time. Wai Gong still hated Communists, but didn’t think about them as often. The people in Taiwan lived under martial law, which brought advantages to Wai Gong. He had less competition because he knew all the little dictators on the island. His tailoring business expanded into a mall, which soon added a movie theater. Then came the coffee store and, most recently, wine and cigars. This might be the safest place in Taipei, Wai Gong thought. He lived by himself, pausing once in a while to remember where he had come from and if he would ever return to China, the China of a long-ago youth. He didn’t even know if he had any living relatives over there. Even though the government had lifted many bans on travel, he had never found the energy to visit his home 134 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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country. Wai Gong often wondered where he would end up. He never figured he’d stay on the island until the end of his days. Philip and Mirelle trekked through Charlestown. A few Townies congregated at a corner drugstore and offered to provide a full tour of the sites. Philip refused, wondering if it were some scam. He wanted to tell them he wasn’t a tourist, but from Boston. Then again, as a Bostonian, he had been to this Irish enclave once or twice at the most so he might as well be a tourist for all the residents cared. They made it to Breed’s Hill and surveyed the battlefield. Philip said, “You remember Wai Gong? I’ve heard a lot about him.” “He is sitting at home all day,” Mirelle said. “Watching his Chinese soap opera. I saw him last summer.” Wai Gong only visited America to keep his greencard circulating. Wherever he went though, he occupied the best seat. Philip said, “He’s supposed to have a lot of money.” “I wonder if he is lonely,” Mirelle said. “He made a lot of money but made none of friends.” “But he’s seen so much,” Philip said. “And complains about all of what he has seen,” Mirelle said and laughed. “That’s him. Our grandfather.” They felt the breeze. Philip wondered if Wai Gong had ever done things that Americans would count as “Chinese”: footbinding, concubines or secret siblings. But Wai Gong never talked about stuff like that. He discussed the art of business and swindling. Wai Gong never even claimed to have seen a ghost. Still, he considered himself Chinese and told Philip he was too Americanized, too young and too strange. Imagine Wai Gong calling anyone odd. Mirelle and Philip stood by a plaque. They saw the harbor in the distance and the setting sun behind them. Soon they would have to turn back and return where they had come from. “In a way,” Philip said, wanting to tell his cousin everything he knew about their grandfather, “he brought us here.”
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Shahé Mankerian
Educating the Son
I got my schooling at the morgue. A summer job, my mother thought, would keep the streets out of her son. It was a booming business: death. The year was 1975. A civil war was brewing and morticians needed better help. I was in charge of clipping nails. All toes and fingers had to look pristine. With rubbing alcohol and cotton balls, I cleaned and washed dry blood from children with no legs, from men who went to work at dawn and never found their way back home; their faces like shoes with no soles. I smiled because I didn’t know another way to deal with shock. Some afternoons I sat on slabs of marble eating feta cheese on moldy bread and watching wives identifying faceless men as mates, and mothers who like doves descended slowly on their son’s decapitated corpses. Then,
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I wondered if my mother would look for me when the evening came. Would she remember that I was her only son and that I cleaned boys my own age? I witnessed death before I could live. “Mother, stay awake. Don’t look for him among the dead. He lives. He lives. He lives.”
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Books
We didn’t go to school that day because a bomb was found still ticking near the cafeteria. We were euphoric—wild. Who said war didn’t love the children? We were free to zigzag through parked cars, climb over walls, and move away from teachers who pretended that they loved us with their demonic rods. We ran toward a deadend street where the trash rose two stories high. The stench fulfilled our wanderlust. We stopped. We couldn’t wait to start a bonfire. Books of matches surfaced from each pocket. Ready. Set. An underfed cat strolled between our matches and the heap of trash. Our eyes were burning. Someone kicked
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the belly of the cat. Another lit a pile of Al Nahar and some fed textbooks to the fire. We were the amber gods that day; we turned away from childhood, faced the smoke, and screamed much louder than the cat, the scorching rats, the maggots fed on flesh; and louder than the bomb that stopped ticking at last.
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Anna Meek
Eating the Zoo Because of the danger involved in killing them, the lions and tigers survived, as did the monkeys, protected apparently by the Darwinian instinct of the Parisians . . . —Alistair Horne, on the Paris siege of 1871, The Terrible Year In la ville lumière, the terrible weight of light and truth consumed itself in fat bustiers and balls; the prosperity of champagne and its giddy exhibition corseted poverty, revolution. I am reading about the Paris siege as this March afternoon throws grids across the unmapped carpet of the library, every moment of our sudden warm weather graciously unquestioned by any of the open window’s outdoor voices. Still, the papers say that lions are coming down from the California hills, and the ‘City that Reads’ has swallowed another library. It was a terrible year. In 1871, the Hotel de Ville burned, and mobs tore the imperial eagles down from the palace, tossing their busts of the emperor into the Seine. The communards said: the worker can hurl his own art into the river. Have we not been a country borrowing against ourselves, our drunkenness, and secret syphilitic decay? Delirious, purulent, Baudelaire crawled to the bookshelf
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for his books of poetry so he could remember his own name—they must have recognized themselves, the starving citoyens, when they began to eat the zoo and its wildness. Parrot, camel, antelope, feeding on exotica and unrestraint, anything that would not eat them first— in the Champs Elysées the wild-eating wild squawked and pranced through the city. Four shots each to fell the famed twin elephants, Castor and Pollux, for whom they’d hungered all along, their great trunks a delicacy only legend knew. Forty francs a pound. The citoyens peered into the monkeyhouses to read their own names. The monkeys peeled open their bananas like garden flowers, considered them, considered the yellow eyes of the Frenchmen beyond the bars. Who would kill a poem? they chattered. That is, if they could catch it.
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Philip Metres
Negatives and Soundtracks
Jogging to pick up the X-rays of my mouth, the light lances into my eyes. Houses jutting along the road like crooked teeth. And then I see it, the yellow cordon, two cops talking to neighbors. A small group across the street gathers, gaping, silent. One cop swaggers into the alleyway, the walkie-talkie rasping in his belt like a gramophone with an old needle, and drapes the sheet over the crushed body. The cop points three floors up. She signed her name in air, disappeared. I get the X-rays— no toothaches yet, just the slow shading of decay, a ghost of molar capped with gold, roots sunk in gums wearing away. I fast-forward through the paper for a name, a story to wedge between body in the alley and my eye. I find none. So I rewind down the streets again, without negatives. Run past the alley where the body lies. I play, replay the tape I heard that day— a soundtrack to an unfinished movie, three floors above. A crowd gathers around the yellow cordon, like a finish tape
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the winner’s chest snaps. A rotting smell drifts from steam grates. It’s late, and the sun lances into X-rays. It’s midnight, awake now. Rewind, play, and rewind. Why did she dive? Iambic heart beating not you, not you —until you wear a hole right through.
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Adela Najarro
San Francisco
My great-grandmother taught my mother to read using chalk and a black slate in León where adobe brick buildings are white-washed Spaniards and history. We brought with us red and blue macaws, panthers, and crocodiles. Tooling up and down Dolores Street hills, my Papi rode a bicycle delivering Lela’s nacatamales. Back and forth from a clock tower at the end of Market Street, a renovated 1919 streetcar, transplanted from Milan, works tourist dollars. Advertisements from the late sixties posted behind True View Plexi-glass. I can’t read a word of the European Italian glitz, deep blue of the Mediterranean and a Coca-Cola, but there is a warm blanket on a wooden bench and a leather hand hook. Above a Cuban restaurant, where waiters serve black bean hummus and chocolate croissants, hangs the gay pride flag alongside a Direct TV satellite dish. Gabby walks to school, Pokémon cards in his pocket. Sanchez Street. I work in the kitchen with my Lela. Mariposa Avenue, Valencia Street, Camino Real, are added to masa. Homemade tortillas puff into sweetness. I’m not one third Irish, one half German,
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and two parts English with a little Cherokee thrown in, but last night I couldn’t translate the word ‘hinge’ on every door that opens and closes to clouds beyond four walls. An old lady, perhaps Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, something of her own, hurries off the 31 Stockton while my Tía Teresa double parks in front of the mercados on 24th Street para los quesos and the chiles in the backroom. One whiff and the world is not so small.
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Adela Najarro
Redlands, California
I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m simple, like my mother, my grandmother, father. All of them from Nicaragua where time goes back further than covered wagons, Winchester rifles and the prairie plowed into fields of soybeans and sunflowers. Sunken wood barns and tombstones rattle as a six-by-six tractor-trailer rumbles through exit 41a and on past peach cobbler, a shot of Jim Beam Whiskey, and the Stop-N-Go, 7-11, Circle K, whatever name on that one corner, in that one place, where someone calls the intersection of a convenience store and a gas station their town, their home, their grass. Paint or aluminum siding. A kitchen and carpet. Photos of Aunt Edna and Uncle Charlie. That summer Chuck went for a ride on a Harley under redwoods and past cool stream shadows while Julie slept in a Ford stationwagon. Faded blue. Wood paneling peeling open to rust. The back flipped down for her, as little girl, to sleep and Ursa Major poured out sky. * In Nicaragua the colors are electric water in air. The weight of clouds on winged cockroaches and crocodiles in streams. La Virgin de Guadalupe. My cousin, Maria Guadalupe Sanchez, on a bike with Brenda through a suburb of Managua on the handlebars. The streets where Miguel, her brother, with a rifle shooting iguanas 146 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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from a tree in a pickup or Jeep. What’s different? The huge overbearing green of myriad plants inching their way past monkeys and chickens to a patio whitewashed and cool or distance away from grandmother? Actually great-grandmother and her son, the witch doctor who could stop malaria with powder or a gaze into trembling hearts. The known ancient crossing to psychology, biology, chemistry. The workings of ourselves. A railroad blasted through mountain. * I want to dance under the Berbenas. I don’t know the word or correct spelling. V or a B? Just a sound from a time in Nicaragua. A truck lined with palm fronds. A parade and a palladium. Dancing. At three in the morning, it was still warm. Berbenas. An old colonial colonel’s name? A street? A time to celebrate the harvest of bananas, yucca, corn, beans? I don’t know. There was a monkey on a leash, on the roof. The tiles curved from Tía Teresa and Tío Rafael to me being pretty sitting at a table with my first rum and coke. The loss of my virginity was to be a golden icon mined from history where my grandfather was a child hidden under a loose brown skirt and delivered to a convent. Mi abuelita with her eight kids. My aunts and uncles. My mother with us. In college with Philip, a boy standing naked looking out a window, his butt prettier than mine, it was California. There were palm trees. I was correctly 18. I had gone to visit Planned Parenthood. The ladies behind a desk asking questions. Taking notes. With a brown paper bag I waited on grass, in the park, knowing already Highway 80 cuts through Rock Springs, Wyoming, straight to Newark, New Jersey, on the Atlantic Coast. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 147
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Mr. Mustard’s Dance Club: Ladies’ Night
Seventeen, we breezed by the bouncers— Me and Jill in tight T-shirts and Levi’s, flannel shirts wrapped at our small waists. We danced together (never with boys), never drank, even when boys offered to buy. Once, after I refused a beer, I heard one say, “You know, them Asians can do all those bending things.” And I wondered what bending things, what this had to do with taking a sip from a cold bottle I didn’t purchase. Still, we danced to Culture Club, Madonna, Men at Work, Bananarama— music we grew up with, heavy with keyboards and drum machines. Our hairlines grew damp, wisps of baby hair pulled loose from my ponytail. Jill spied a water cooler by the phones and plucked paper cones down for each of us to pour coolness, to pour questions about people who bend.
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Soo Jin Oh
Panoramic Panegyric
The streets tonight smell of sweet potatoes roasted by subway engines rushing under tar and concrete: sidewalk heaved apart by cranejaws and flannel-chested men straddling steel girders. At night the men go home to glow in TVâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fluorescence. They walk their dogs who have waited the yellowing of noon and the blueing of dusk to stretch spindly legs, to lean tender torsos against the gruff bark of trees. And some go home to a grass patchwork stitched along the edges with tulips, heavy and red sudden fists sprouting out of stalks, green fragile green. At night, jackhammers surrender the streets to boys walking, their arms growing posies along the bare waists of girls whose lips are purple anemones, fuchsia orchids blooming like exhibitionists. They are what thrums, what sings and hums within and out, between steel and glass buildings grinding against each other all night long, white sepulchers of empty offices, skyscraper condominiums cradling somnambulists up to the moon. Oh holy is the footstep that revolts against dying, holy the oxygen clamoring up through arteries,
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Soo Jin Oh
the breath pumped out at each thud of heel. Holy too the libations of drunkards, the stuttering blasphemous libations of drunkards who must wend their way home under the haloeing streetlamps, their fingers reaching out towards dimmed shop windows, a touch of gravity before they hurl into the orbits of unarticulated desires, before they stumble into the beds of dawnlights, beds of spouses whose backs have grown cold with waiting, who have gathered the hours into their bellies, nurturing aloneness into an unborn child rioting sadness into anger. These are the beds of nightlights, suns grown superfluous in the larger sunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rising, beds of data-entry processors, word processors, the beds of the ten-minute wink, of lawyers, doctors, financiers: custodians who care for our limbs, our by-laws and common laws, our wedding rites, the dispersal of our wills after our bones have been cleansed and laid under, custodians of ink on paper, genesis of golfclubs and symphony stereosound, genesis of fiberoptics, leather desk accessories, steel pencil trays, white-out and thermos mugs, genesis of the ninety-nine cent burger, cola wars, and lipstick smudges on white cotton napkins. Too, there are the beds of moonlighters, of boy-girl prostitutes, of the taxi-cab driver whose lone companion is the backseat audience, listener of homegrown tales who sighs for the unforgotten wife
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two continents and an ocean across, as well as for the children growing beyond their fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sight, audience of compassion and mercy, audience of the dollar and the tenner, keeper of souls who comes to meet me this dawn.
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Melissa Peters
Steel
I brave it everyday: concrete, glasseyed towers, profit & loss. I’ve scraped my costume together with lipstick, stockings, a quick prayer that someday this will end. At work, men will mouth platitudes: pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. Well-versed women will whisper that I’m wearing the wrong shoes, so I walk slowly in reverie, stretching these last free minutes to the subway station before I admit my time is incorporated. I love my neighborhood, its brick and brownstone, its roads fashioned by the route of a horse. Outside Les Deux Gamins, a film crew sets up for a day’s shooting. The city stays real: there he is, I see him most days as I go my way and he goes his, both of us to work. He walks bent over, his hand stabilizing the knee of his good leg while the other he drags straight and wide. He wears clothes he can get dirty, 152 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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and I wonder if he works in a kitchen, if he works harder than I do. He will still be walking when I take a seat on the train. I’m ashamed I’ve ever berated myself for not being perfect: almost every woman I know hates her body. We refer to supermodels by first name. We fear we’ll never find love. Today, when this man crosses the street, he stumbles and falls. The city stops, every breath in this metropolis stops, but not for long. He is nimble, somehow righting himself alight before speeding traffic. From Sheridan’s Square, pigeons take flight, a loose scrawling “S” written in the sky, their cape of wings flapping as loud as my heart, as if in one fell swoop I’d tried, superhuman, to stop an oncoming train.
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Mary Pinard
Elegy: The Discordant Note for Lynda Hull I’m driving hard, wanting again those winter mornings when we met in your letters, always, it seemed, at the lake shore, with your shattered, glittering Chicago and your voice surreal through the air, the ink. I’ve walked with you there so many times, your words simply taking me. But today I’m en route, traveling the edge of Lake Michigan, north through Gary, thinking this is the thing I must do—make a clear journey toward what I can no longer see to see again—so I slow down a little in this yellow steel town. I used to speed through here on my way back to Chicago for school, windows up, eyes boring ahead, past the gaping blast furnaces lining the shore, trying not to notice those riots of fire. But you always said love the belligerence here, this breech of ochre and bruise, this roaring red labor below the horizon. And the brash hell mouths, their night and day fluxing of limestone with coke and ore. Even the slag’s lush in Gary. The road’s rumble strips vibrate the soles of my feet, stop me from weaving out of my lane, again—I keep wanting to see you in some city, some rented room, your disguises hung from the backs of doors like signs. Once, a vintage dress, black with veils, hanging scrawled with trails of jet beads, but torn too, so much unraveling—someday I’ll get it fixed— this alongside the white lace contours of bones, those thin shells, a china-head doll, all arranged like windowseat altars
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of shadow and translucence, like your poems. Do I hear humming outside—your voice? Or just a whistling of velocities? I crack my window: why drive on? Can’t I want you enough to make you here, at this bridge? This sprawling ribbon of concrete that winds me down to Stony Island Ave., the Southside. Can’t you be the burning blues and browns bruising this sky? It seems to me you wrote your poems with something like this smoke, the lines incising the page: truth scalded. The underside, under-story, always just beneath the patina, this is where you lived. Are you there still? I keep wanting to hear you, to go back to that day we sat together in a white sky—it was that low. You called those cloud ladders, the fog shapes that bore us up into the blur. We seemed to be waiting for something, something that’s still now and far beyond us. That was good, wasn’t it, a good place to be? The light changes, and I continue up Lake Shore Drive looking for your city beach. In your last letter you wrote about the chill season, how you waited and waited for the purple irises to appear, their pale, papery tongues shivering, an utterance. Instead, a fishkill delivered alewives, dense shoals of silver-bellied fish, all that shivering light still resplendent despite spring’s freak cold. You called this the discordant note cutting into you—that splendid echoing in the dead. So I’m finally where you must have seen it— how many times?—light and death swirling in with the surge, out with it.
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Katherine Poltorak
St. Petersburg Subway
A smell of autumn-damp cement, and sweat, and apple tarts, and damp fur coats, some turnip-colored comics pages stamped with the intertwining prints of summer sandals, skin, and rubber boots keep throbbing with the marching mob. Staccato heels tune to the sniffling nylon coats, the subway’s heartbeat brews and bustles like Grieg’s Norwegian Mountain Kings, caught in a blue-gray watercolor sketch of gently rotting apple peel and ink-stained walls. And rusty kiosks decked with cotton tights, and Troika chocolates, and red-gold lacquer spoons keep humming to the rhythm of Alsu. A mother in a dusty knitted hat is reading horoscopes with eyes the shade of slushy snow, and sleek-suit people at the lotto stand exchange prophetic glances as they swear you’ll win. The soldier on a chipping wooden crutch sings gypsy ballads, launching fiery eyes, and blood, and black lace shawls to breathe throughout the mob as rosy, glowing children smoke their first cigar. A woman lost in scarlet blossoms of her wrap sits on an edge behind the fruit stand, eyes molded to the ash berries she picked last week beside the Lembolovo lake. Inside the cement walls, a rusty-haired old man observes the clucking of the coins in slots and rivulets of tweed and fur, as black-veiled, shadowy arms make deals and perfumed lovers reunite on coughing steps. A beggar plays Vivaldi’s “Winter” on the violin, 156 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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and Beba tells me that she saw him play inside the Philharmonic Hall, a year ago. And for a moment the gray cement becomes a gold-lit, velvet-cushioned hall, as coins, and feet, and coughs, and autumn rain keep rhythm so gray, so fervent, and so bruised.
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Susanna Roxman
Troy
When they tell you it’s only a myth, don’t believe them. When they say, oh yes, it does exist, but as a relatively late settlement, some vulgar Hellenistic town shallowly buried in rough ground, an unmade bed under a coverlet, don’t suppose it’s all. Schliemann came to this hill in order to show that his boyhood and Homeric Troy had both been real. His proof of the child was identified with knife blades of silver, spear tips of bronze (their shafts had reverted to earth), with soft gold calmly insisting on feathery diadems like owls. Ironically, the hoard was preheroic. Missing Homer’s tough city, Schliemann found and founded his own. Death, the tall duchess patiently waiting at Naples, seemed trivial once he’d seen that briskly successful businessman becoming a mere negation, a husk, concealing a robust boy.
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Troy turned out to be many-layered, a lavish birthday cake. That level where Schliemann stood face to face with himself at last had been burnt, its rich crunchy texture containing charcoal, blackened bricks, bones. Each Troy is always liable to fall. But don’t suppose this is all. You’ll have to plunge deeper, descend even steeper paths past dark blue strata, millennia, and forget that sleekness of weapons, those conveniences of wealth. You’ll want to plummet gently but unerringly like amber in water down to the first Troy, a slow forgotten village where people kept goats and gathered green walnuts and nothing much ever happened, get back to before the beginning, transcend eras of flaming cities or stupid adulthood.
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Susanna Roxman
Welcome to Elsinore
On the ramparts here you won’t meet your father or even mother, only some fisherman carrying herring, dead in a basket. It’s October with lacquered wild rosehips, perfectly edible where sand and meadow touch, tended without poison which nobody needs. You won’t see that well-behaved family girl, curtseying and obedient, questioning little, in a pink dress till she dissolves in mud. But drowning remains perfectly possible. Moats convey swans from another story and surrealism yields black shiny divers emerging among diverse wreaths of seaweed. At the Sound’s edge anoraked anglers freeze, each line yearning south. Sit down on shingle while sunshine lingers by the castle backdrop, verdigris elongated whorled pointed seashells for fairytale turrets. This wind confuses you, this coast without passion, no Shakespearean dangerous crags. You began here once but decided not to stay.
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Patrick Madden
I Saw a Mountain
Montevideo, Uruguay—if you can accept Mar del Plata, Argentina, as Adam’s apple—is the goatee on the chin of the harelipped, bulbous-nosed, east-facing profile of South America. It sits at the southernmost tip of the country, diagonally northeast across the Rio de la Plata from Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires. Approximately half of Uruguay’s three million people live in Montevideo, spread out in hundreds of barrios along radians of streets and highways that spin off from the downtown like spokes on a half wheel. In the time I have spent in Montevideo, both as a missionary and a husband, I have lived in three spoke-end neighborhoods among people I have grown to know and love as much as any I’ve ever lived among. I am taken with the people and the places of Montevideo; it is as if it were my own discovery, a playground of wonder where I am at once insider and outsider, observer and participant. Whenever I’m in Montevideo, I feel both accepted and somewhat out of place. My height and complexion are an almost giveaway that I’m not from the country and, coupled with my clothes, make it hard for me to blend in with a crowd. And although I speak the language with very few errors, my accent is close (even other Spanish speakers can peg a Uruguayan accent with its zh sounds for ll or y and its unique second-person-familiar vos conjugations), but not quite. Most Uruguayans are descended from the Spanish, but the melting pot is seasoned with people of all provenances, except for the original native Charrua, who were, as were the Eastern tribes in my own country, driven and killed soon after they were discovered. During the midday rush on Avenida 18 de Julio, the city’s main drag, you might be surprised to see blond and even red heads among the sea of dark-haired, well-dressed men and women. The English built Montevideo’s electrical and train systems, and their railroad’s black and yellow bee colors still adorn the uniforms of the football team they founded, Peñarol. Scattered in small enclaves throughout the country are groups of Russian Crab Orchard Review ◆ 161
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immigrants who retain their language, their customs, their style of dress, so that, even in the summer, you sometimes see them, colorful scarfs and skirts that reach the floor, flannel shirts, grizzled beards, and floral suspenders, as they walk about the town pushing carts selling cheese and milk. I once met a family of Irish, four straw-haired young boys with variously missing teeth and freckled faces; “O’ Nay-eel” they pronounced their name, and they couldn’t tell me the first thing about Ireland. Portuguese slave traders brought Africans first to Brazil, then to Uruguay, but South American economies have never been any good under the Europeans’ heavy hand, and blacks in Montevideo have always been officially free since 1813. Every February, to kick off Carnaval, their heavy, frantic drums pierce the night, and their women, bulging in platinum bikinis and high heels, shake and dance while the crowds lining the streets of the Ciudad Vieja cheer. Brazilians, they of mixed African, Portuguese, and Indian stock, often come to Montevideo for the same reason Uruguayans go to Brazil: it’s not as far as the United States, but they say the money’s flowing and the jobs are plentiful. Because of Uruguay’s neutrality in two world wars, it has become a home for Italians, Slovaks, Arabs, Japanese, Germans. A dentist named Adolfo Perez who once worked on my teeth, a tall blond-haired blue-eyed man, lives only a few blocks from the Barrio Judio, several blocks of multicolored two-story tenements, each home a different color than the next, alternating through the rainbow’s hues in what looks like a giant-sized lifesaver roll. When my father learned that I would be living in Uruguay for two years, he told me to let him know when I found “Monty’s Video.” I have not yet found it—not even a Spanish variation, something like Monte Video—and maybe I never will. But the strange name of the city (this, after all, isn’t La Paz or São Paolo or something easy) begs an explanation. There are two stories in wide circulation about the origin of the capital’s name. Both hail back to the earliest Portuguese explorers, whose expeditions “found” Montevideo from right under the Charrua and Guarani Indians who had been living there for centuries. One story says that a Portuguese ship’s navigator was keeping a record of high points on the southern coast of the yet-unexplored lands as the explorers made their way west from the Atlantic and into the Rio de la Plata. As he counted, starting from nobody knows where, his maps showed the sixth such hill as that on the western hook of land overlooking the small port of modern-day 162 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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Montevideo. Because they were traveling from East to West, and because they were writing Roman numerals and speaking Portuguese, the navigator marked his map with the shorthand, “Monte VI de E. O.” That is, “Sixth Mountain from East to West” and only a dropped-e away from the current city’s name. If that story sounds a little improbable, then you may side with most Uruguayans I asked, whose version of the story is simpler. As the Portuguese made their way along Uruguay’s southern coast, the sailor in the crow’s nest saw a faraway hill through the fog. “Monte vidi eu!” he shouted. “I saw a mountain!” Just how or why the crow’s nest shout came to be the city’s name was never explained to me. But what’s undisputed in both these accounts is that the city was named for el Cerro, a strategic hill on the western hook of land that encloses Montevideo’s bay, a hill of fantastic stature in a country of mostly pasture and very little variation in elevation. Carrasco, a spoke-end on the east, with its beaches and fruit stands, strands of pine forests in sand, bridges and shopping malls, is home to the Montevideo rich. They make their money selling drapes and clothing and CDs and no-stick pans on Avenida 8 de Octubre, working the banks and movie theaters on Avenida Uruguay, manning the hospitals and inter-departmental bus terminal on Avenida Italia, selling autos and appliances at the malls: Montevideo Shopping or Portones. People’s homes in Carrasco are wired with burglar alarms, barricaded by eight-foot fences and window bars, guarded by Dobermans and German shepherds, hidden behind palmettos and plantain trees. On the beaches people play sand soccer, sand volleyball, sand paddleball. There are fewer dogs than people in Carrasco, one of the only places in Montevideo that can make this claim. In Colón, where my in-laws live, I walk east from their apartment complex, a Death-Star-like conglomeration of gray four-stories around a central brick tower, to get to Plaza Colón, Club Atlético Olimpia, La Pasiva restaurant, and the center of action. The streetside carritos, gleaming silver boxes on wheels, send smoke signals to the orange and purple sunset. Grilling meat smells fill the air: chorizos, milanesas, hamburguesas, chivitos. Fifteen pesos buys you a milanesa completa on a tortuga roll: a thin fried breaded steak with lettuce, tomato, onion, mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, cheese, bacon, ham, hard-boiled egg slices, peas, corn, pickled cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, and jalapeños, pressed flat between the two halves Crab Orchard Review ◆ 163
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of the roll with a flat iron so it won’t fall out and served in a bag so if it drips the bag will catch it. Teenagers on tricycles cart tape decks and heavy speakers that repeat ad nauseam advertisements for the local stores: “Super Totis: con gran variedad de productos que usted necesita para su hogar-r-r. Cada miercoles recibe un diez por ciento de descuento en frutas y verduras.” With my wife I have often walked west from her parents’ apartment, into the fields and woods, through the high grass and bushes, past the giant ombu tree with an immense hollow among its roots, where, she says, a hobo used to sleep, past the grove of ten-foot-high scrub trees where escaped lunatics from the nearby mental hospital hid out, past the crumbling brick tower and abandoned underground wine cellars, through a line of dense trees and eroded footpaths and horsepaths, to the farmers’ orchards, where Karina and her dogs and her friends came as children to steal fruit in autumn. The streets of Piedras Blancas, in northeast Montevideo, between the Danubio football stadium and the hippodrome, are concrete slabs divided at even intervals and spaced at a perfect distance for the kids who slap a tennis ball with rough-hewn wooden paddles back and forth between themselves all summer long. On the corner of Aparicio Saravia and Belloni, soldiers armed with machine guns guard a staunch-white military cuartel, and they will not answer questions. Just past them, at a tri-intersection nicknamed La Tablada, traveling merchants and junk salesmen gather for the feria on Sundays. They spread out blankets and set up wooden booths, leaving their horses grazing while they drink, shirtless and reclining on the grass, showing their wares. Once a friend of mine saw his own bike, which had been stolen three days earlier, for sale at the feria. He noted it curiously and kept walking. A few blocks in from the feria are the brothels and the hovels. The corners are strewn with dead chickens, red ribbons, and popcorn, the sacrifice meant both to bless and curse, depending on who crosses it. Among the squat, overgrown houses on calle Homero you’ll find several Macumbero gathering places, their windows laced with rivulets of hardened candle wax, their insides laden with sacrificial altars, statues of saints and demons, golden chalices and bowls of popcorn. The apartment where I lived, one of six units linked by a narrow alleyway in the owner’s backyard, was bombarded at all hours by Piedras Blancas’ favorite cumbia music, a painful mismatch of horns and synthesizers with sobbing, sensual lyrics. At Christmastime on my street the people erect a hanging scarecrow Judas every third house or so. During the weeks 164 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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prior, the children have been petitioning, “¿Monedas para Judas?” and they’ve used the money to fill the straw men with fireworks. At the stroke of midnight the Judases are up in flames, the song of frogs falls silent or is buried under the crackling explosions of thousands of fireworks, the darkness flashes bright in machine-gun-quick flashes, the pungent smoke drifts with the wind through the drainage canals and past the high trees, west to the hippodrome, near the corner where the transvestite prostitutes lie in wait, where someone has painted, in white letters outlined in red, an ironic call to revolution: FEDERACION URUGUAYA DE ANARQUISTAS: UNASEN! URUGUAYAN FEDERATION OF ANARCHISTS: UNITE! “Peatones” signs in Montevideo are like limited edition prints, each one seemingly different from the others, as if commissioned of different artists. One peatones sign features two satchel-toting, fedora-topped men who, it was pointed out to me, resemble Jehovah’s Witnesses. Another strikes a familiar motif—that of school children walking hand-in-hand—but the characters’ slant seems off, as if they were about to fall over, and the thing suggests drunken stupor. My favorite sign, the one that inspired me to someday (not yet) form a band named the Peatones, and even suggested the music we might play, shows a single pedestrian: perfectly round, black head, slightly curved, thick lines for arms and legs. He’s leaning forward slightly with one fist in the air and one behind, and seems to be ready to mosh. More than “Please watch for pedestrians,” this one seems to be saying, “Beware.” The joke about walking around town is somebody asks you, “How’d you get here?” ¿En cuál viniste? They mean “In which bus?” En el once, you say, and it’s funny because everybody knows there’s no bus number eleven. I always assumed they meant that each leg looks like a number one; when you put them together it’s an eleven. Although I never became proficient at memorizing the seemingly hundreds of different bus lines and their various routes, I knew the ones I needed most: the 130 and the 148, which took me from Avenida Garzón and Calderón de la Barca to downtown, the 105 or 151 from the corner of Belloni and Carlos Nery to downtown, the 468 or the 2/77 combination from Carrasco to Colón, one hour winding through enough streets to pick up almost everybody, it seemed, just to make a ten kilometer trip as the crow flies. Every Crab Orchard Review ◆ 165
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February 11 each third bus you see is headed to GTA DE LOURDES, usually filled with old women saying the rosary and fanning themselves and jumping to the shady side of the bus whenever anyone gets off and a seat is freed up. Most of the city buses are owned by their drivers, and so each bus has its own special flavor. Most drivers listen to the radio while they’re driving, and that means anything from American and British rock standards (lots of Queen, lots of Guns N’ Roses, lots of Rolling Stones) to old-time tangos by Carlos Gardel. The kids enjoy the new wave of Latin Pop: stuff you hear here nowadays like Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Shakira, and stuff you’ll probably never hear, Auténticos Decadentes, Enanitos Verdes, Pericos. Every bus is modeled after a basic style, though the paint jobs differ to denote one of seven major companies. Behind each driver’s seat is a sheet of Plexiglass meant for protection and advertisements and individualistic expression. On these windows into the drivers’ souls I have seen posters of the Virgin Mary, John Lennon, Che Guevara, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, the Sacred Heart of Jesus; bumper stickers that say no smoking, no spitting, no cursing, no drinking mate, Help Keep Your Montevideo Clean; political stickers for Millor, LaCalle, Ramirez, Tabaré, Sanguinetti (who won the presidency in 1985 and again, after a fiveyear hiatus, in 1995); banners for soccer teams: Naciónal, Peñarol, Danubio, Liverpool, Defensor, River, Boca; smiley faces, marijuana leaves, Garfield, middle fingers, droopy dogs, majestic horses, How’s My Driving? Call 1-800-ANDA-CAGAR. You get on the bus in the front, pay the guarda who’s sitting just inside to the left, you find a spare plastic seat or, like as not, stand holding a metal rail that runs down the center aisle. When your stop approaches you make your way to the back door, hit the button or pull the cord or make a ch-ch sound to advise the driver, then hop off quickly; some drivers never make a complete stop. On the bus, I have seen old women with plastic-knit shopping bags full of vegetables, and groups of schoolchildren wearing identical white tunics with identical blue bows under their chins, and young girls in tank tops and flip-flops carrying towels on their way to the beach, and longhaired young men wearing torn blue jeans, and studious women in white blouses and navy knee-length tight skirts and nametags, and black-cloaked bearded men with stovepipe hats and curls down past their ears. An intracity bus ticket costs only about a dollar, and you can get on and off anywhere along the route 166 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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for the same price. The deal is even better for vendors, minstrels, and mendicants, who, whether by law or only by tradition nobody could say definitively, are allowed to ride a few blocks for free, as long as they’re shouting or playing or passing around the collection plate. Though I have seen out-of-work construction workers with children to feed, ragged women selling plastic bandages for double the price you’d pay in a store, fast-talking con men selling sets of magic markers that will run dry within a few days’ time, panty-hose salesmen who demonstrate the durability of their hose by tying them on the handrails and poking them with shish-kabob spears, and children so dirty you suspect they’ve strategically smeared their faces in mud, I have only paid out pesos to the musicians, one time a pair of Peruvians I knew playing quena and churango and singing, who gave me back my money with interest the next time I saw them by treating me to a home-cooked meal, Peruvian style, which meant lots of spices. Food in Uruguay is well-seasoned, but never picante. A friend of mine once gave a kid some Big Red gum, and even that was too “hot” for the kid’s palate; he had to spit it out and gulp down a soda. Once, at night, another missionary and I were late getting home and decided to catch a bus instead of walking. We stood under the corrugated metal roof of the nearest parada and held out our arms in the customary signal when a bus approached. The driver slowed as if he were going to stop, then opened the door, and shouted “¡Huevos!” (“Eggs!” but more in line with slang “Nuts!” or “Balls!”) before driving off without us. Once a man standing in the aisles, though there were seats to spare, shouted out to no one in particular, “Tengo frio frio frio frio frio. Tengo fria fria fria fria fria.” He held out the first syllable “ten-n-n,” then the rest followed in staccato succession: always five frios or frias in a row, always alternating between being masculine and feminine cold. Once, during a drought in which an entire sector of northern Montevideo had been without water for several days, all the buses that passed were stopped at a makeshift toll booth on Avenida Aparicio Saravia between San Martín and Mendoza. Masked juvenile bandits ran through each bus they stopped, collecting ten pesos apiece from each of the passengers. It took almost two hours for word to spread to all the bus lines so that the buses could be rerouted. Once an elderly, feeble woman tripped on the stairs as she was getting on the bus, spilling her change into the aisle and under several passengers’ Crab Orchard Review ◆ 167
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feet. Immediately three people jumped up to help her, and another young man got on his hands and knees to search for her money. When he couldn’t find the full fare, he reached in his pocket and made up the difference. One afternoon I received a phone call that Graciela Lopez, a woman I had known in Piedras Blancas, was in the nearby Sanatorio Americano. During the four months I had lived in her neighborhood, she had cared for me as if I were her son. She fed me once a week, washed my laundry, baked cakes and cookies, and allowed me to sit inside her family’s home by the fire and watch the World Cup, which, in those days, was in round-the-clock coverage on the television even though Uruguay hadn’t qualified. The details of her condition were scant: a few days earlier she had felt extreme stomach pains, and her doctors felt it best to send her urgente to a better-equipped facility. When I arrived to see her I was escorted to the ICU and entered her room alone. I was unprepared to find her in the state she was in. There were several prone figures in shadow, and I originally looked past her, searching the room for her familiar and cheerful face. She was stripped and covered by a sheet to the waist. Thin, naked breasts flattened against her obtrusive ribs. Her skin was taut and grayish, marked by pocks and bruises, and I was sure I was seeing death. I prayed for her, my ears ringing with the steady rhythm of the machines, my jaw fixed sternly against the pain, then left the room in silence. On my way down the stairs I wept. Sometimes when I imagine heaven, the scene is like this: swords beaten into plowshares, infirmities healed, a view of the water to the horizon, hope where there was none. Graciela Lopez has climbed to the top of el Cerro, one of her daughters arm-in-arm with her, the other daughter chatting feverishly with me and my wife, catching up. On top of the hill is the museum built from the remains of an early Spanish fort, glittering white in the late-afternoon sun, its cannons soldered shut, but still watching over the river bay. They show me where the Graf Spee, a Nazi warship, was scuttled after overstaying its welcome in the neutral waters of Uruguay. As we pass in and out of rooms, they show me the artifacts of war: the uniforms, bayonets, medals, paintings, the relics of their forefathers’ fights for independence. But I am paying only half attention. I am watching Graciela carefully, noting her strong step, asking her how she could have possibly made such a full recovery. “I went to see you,” I tell 168 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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her. “I know,” she says. “I am here because of your prayers, and the prayers of others like you.” As the sun sets, I catch her silhouette against a backdrop of swirling sky, and though the fort’s walls reach a few feet higher, there is nothing above her atop this hill. She looks all around her, soaking it in, smiling, and tells me again the story of the sailor in the crow’s nest: “Monte vidi eu! Monte vidi eu!”
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Carol Spindel
Plot Turnover
When we decided to send our son and daughter to a school opposite the main gate of the Cemetery Montparnasse, I envisioned walking through the cemetery with them in the morning and afternoon, pointing out the graves of famous people like Baudelaire, Man Ray, Sartre, and Alfred Dreyfus. The stone-walled square of the cemetery lay directly between the apartment we had rented for the year and their small elementary school, so that we could easily work our way from Romanticism to Existentialism, detouring through Surrealism and Dada, as we walked to and from school. This fantasy was shattered the second day, when one of the guards spotted us and did not look pleased. The problem was my son’s skateboard. He can walk through holding it flat against his side, the uniformed guard said firmly. Otherwise, not at all. After that, it seemed that at least one kid was always on wheels—skateboard or rollerblades— and so we sought out a new route that passed around the cemetery. Even though my children couldn’t roll through the cemetery, I continued to walk through it when I went to meet them. My children were always starving when school let out and the standard afterschool snack was fresh baguette with chocolate. But the bread from lunch seemed depressingly stale by four o’clock. So I stuffed the jar of chocolate spread in my backpack and ran into a bakery for a fresh baguette on the way. The bench near Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s grave, the only home the couple ever shared, was my favorite spot to throw the snack together. “Bonjour, Simone,” I said as I cut open the bread with my pocketknife. Not that Simone would have understood about mothers hurrying from their writing and fixing a snack on the way. She lived a civilized life I can only imagine—eating out in cafés, no dishes to wash, no babysitters to schedule. Even now she receives flowers, long-stemmed roses, more regularly than I. For one year, when Paris was our home, the cemetery was part of my daily rounds. One guidebook describes Cemetery Montparnasse as 170 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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gloomy, but it is beautiful in the autumn when the sun comes out and turns the leaves on the trees a translucent gold. In addition to the real trees, the granite and marble tombs, placed so closely together, have the feel of a geometric forest, all in angular gray, white, and black. The monuments vary more than our headstones. Most graves are covered with a flat rectangular piece of stone, roughly the size of a coffin. Many have headstones, some with sculpted touches. Some older tombs are surrounded by ironwork fences and one has its own ironwork arbor to support roses. There are many that have built-in planters where small bushes grow. Some of the modern tombs include engravings of the deceased, or even photographs reproduced on smooth ceramic plaques. Then there are the old mausoleums, tiny houses built by wealthy families to house their dead. The mausoleums are small compared to the buildings outside the cemetery walls, little gray bonsai buildings with words cut into them. The writing in the cemetery is of all sorts—ornate old fonts with serifs, crisp modern fonts without. It is the writing that turns the slabs into stone pages, that gives me the sense of walking through a book forest. The cemetery is never empty. Others may simply be walkers from the neighborhood, like me, in search of a shortcut, attracted to the flowerbeds and the calm. But many come to visit the graves. Near the entrance a row of green plastic watering cans and brooms is set out daily. An older man or woman filling a watering can at one of the brass-handled spigots or sweeping the dust off a marble slab is a common sight. On the first of November the French celebrate Toussaint, All Saints’ Day, and the day after, All Souls’ Day, when the summer’s geraniums are replaced by chrysanthemums and graves are cleaned. A French friend who lost her father when she was young tells me, that when she was a girl, the day was never complete without a visit to her father’s grave. Now she goes on vacation during Toussaint and subscribes to a service that places potted chrysanthemums on his tomb. One day in March, as I was cutting through the cemetery on the way to meet the children at school, I came upon a new tomb next to the path. The crisp white marble rectangle was completely covered with flowers, including a lavish wreath of red roses shaped like a heart. Other wreaths were decorated with tri-colored ribbons from the Ministry of Culture. Propped among the elegant floral arrangements was a temporary stone plaque with a name lettered on it. Marguerite Duras. Stilled, I stood at the foot of the white slab, at her feet, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 171
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bedecked with flowers. Duras was not a favorite writer whose work I knew well, but hers was certainly a name I recognized. Perhaps it was presumptuous of me, but I felt we were members of the same species, women who wrote. The worn dirt path threads not only through the walled cemetery, but through all our lives, leading to the same certain destination. I remembered what Simone de Beauvoir said in the little book she wrote about the death of her mother. Well-intentioned readers wrote to reassure her. “Disappearing is not of the least importance,” they said. “Your works will remain.” But she was not consoled. If you love life, Simone says, immortality is no consolation for death. In late April, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, my husband Tom and I went to the cemetery for a guided tour. I had seen the announcement posted next to the main gate. The tour would begin at three o’clock and would cost thirty-five francs. When we arrived, there was already quite a crowd. They were milling around just inside the main entrance; there seemed to be some confusion about the tickets. It turned out that a good number of those who had turned up for the tour had learned about it in a magazine put out by the Mairie or City Hall of Paris, and in this publication the tour had been advertised as free. They were startled when they were asked to buy tickets. The woman who had arrived to give the tour explained that she worked, not for the Mairie but for Parks, Gardens, and Green Spaces and that she had been instructed to give a paid tour. “I can’t do otherwise,” she said. A group of three young women waved their magazine in her face. “Gratuit,” they pointed out. “It is clearly marked!” “A mistake,” she told them, shrugging. “I can’t be responsible for a mistake in a publication put out by some other city office.” She would give her tour as planned, and those who wanted to join it could purchase a ticket. Having planned to pay all along, we bought tickets and waited. But the debate continued. And the group was split nearly in half. Our middle-aged tour guide was a woman who liked things to go smoothly, you could see it in her butter-colored linen pants and black linen blazer, the delicate flowered scarf that pulled the two together, and the thin leather-soled slippers that exactly matched her pants. She pulled her small, serious glasses to the end of her nose and looked through them in distress; her hands trembled as she gave a refund to one woman who grew tired of waiting. 172 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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I wondered if she would offer to give the tour for free in order to end the disturbance, which clearly unsettled her. Instead she announced that the tour must begin and she moved slightly away, followed by those of us who had paid. But the group who hadn’t paid followed, too. “You can’t do this,” she insisted to them, almost pleading. “It’s not right. It’s not fair to those who paid.” “But we expected a free tour. It’s written here. It’s not only the money. It’s the principle of the thing.” There was a chorus of assent. She took out her leather change purse and turned to our group. “Would you mind if I cancel the tour and refund your money?” Everyone agreed that it was the only reasonable solution. I was disappointed, as we had arranged a babysitter and set aside a Sunday afternoon to come. We had been pleasantly wandering through the Flea Market at Porte de Vanves when we had had to abruptly jump into the metro in order to reach the cemetery on time. Our guide wasn’t used to refunding money, and she stumbled over the coins and came up without correct change for everyone. Those who had demanded a free tour left quickly, apparently satisfied. But even after we had our money, we lingered. By this time an hour had passed. There were eight of us who stayed on, reluctant to part. It seemed as if something must happen, and so we waited. After the guide had finally sorted out the refunds and walked away through the gate, her narrow shoulders held very straight, a small round woman materialized on the dusty path near us. “I’m not a real guide,” she said. “But I do know something about the history of the cemetery and I can share my information with you, if you’d like to stay.” We all shifted back and forth, not sure what to do. “It’s free, of course.” She smiled nervously. This woman was short, with a round face, and looked like one of the three good fairies in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the ones with the veils that fasten under their chins. She wore a loose raincoat of an indeterminate beige color, and her hair was pinned away from her round smiling face and covered with a chiffon scarf tied under her chin, 60s style. She reminded me of the smallest fairy, the one who has always been least important until the day of Sleeping Beauty’s baptism, when it suddenly falls on her to mitigate the sentence of the evil sorceress. Once the eight of us had exchanged glances of agreement, she pulled out a stack of note cards covered with tiny writing. She began to speak hesitantly about the founding of the cemetery in 1824. As she Crab Orchard Review ◆ 173
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spoke, she warmed to her subject and, more confidently now, recounted how the windmill used to be a guingette, a dance hall. How one could dance inside the circumference of the little windmill, I wasn’t sure. Did they dance outside, among the tombs? On the terrace, so to speak? But by now she was enjoying her role as lecturer so much that I didn’t want to interrupt. She recounted the various enlargements the cemetery had known, complete with dates and square meters. She explained that it had been the cemetery used by the hospitals of Paris to bury the unclaimed bodies, and that there had been, since its founding, a section set aside for the burial of Jewish dead. It had been the resting place of various religious orders, including that of the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, who had their convent nearby. War veterans who failed to survive their wounds had also been buried at Montparnasse for a time, although it had been difficult for their comrades, who followed the cortèges, to walk such a long distance from the veterans hospital. The victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832 had been buried in a deep quarry here. In 1849, an incident of vandalism in the cemetery had shocked all of Paris. Our guide went on to list many of the famous people who were buried in the cemetery and to tell us a little about each one. She dwelt longest on Dumont d’Urville, who made two perilous voyages, retrieved the Venus de Milo, and explored Antarctica without incident, but was killed along with his wife and young son when a train full of Parisians returning from Versailles one Sunday caught fire. Because the cars had been locked all the passengers died, and they were buried here in the cemetery. “Carbonized,” she exhaled. “And after all he’d been through. Completely carbonisés.” When she had finished her list of famous people and told all her stories, our little group disbanded with a sense of satisfaction. She didn’t offer to take us around to show us the graves—that seemed to be going a bit too far. We stayed to ask her about people who were buried in the cemetery recently, for it was just a few weeks since Marguerite Duras had been buried there. Did you have to be famous? I had also seen other recent graves on my walks through the cemetery. She explained that some families owned their plots in perpetuity and they could continue to inter family members there indefinitely. But there were still plots for sale, too. We were surprised by this fact, because there wasn’t an inch of empty space inside the cemetery walls, but she turned and pointed to a small gold plastic sign on a 174 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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stake stuck into the planter of a tomb. On the sign were engraved the words: Cette concession fait l’objet d’une reprise administrative. Priere de s’addresser au bureau de la conservation. (This plot is in the process of being repossessed. All inquiries should be addressed to the cemetery office.) If three years passed and no family member appeared to claim the plot, the old monument was removed and the space was re-sold. Plot turnover. We were shocked. It seemed especially ironic that the cemetery office was called the bureau de conservation. What exactly were they conserving? She had tried to buy a plot herself, she said, and to move the remains of two family members from a cemetery in the suburbs. She would like to have them nearby, and then she and her mother, the only members of their family remaining, could be buried with them when the time came. The main obstacle was the exorbitant cost of having the remains removed, compacted, transported, and re-interred, and eventually she gave up the idea. We extricated ourselves with many thanks and went to a café at the Place Edgar Quinet just outside the cemetery. It was sunny and we had the luck to inherit a table with a perfect view of the comings and goings. From a sunny café table it is easy to contemplate plot turnover and compacted remains. They seem remote, rather like the fascinating burial customs of ancient peoples. When it was time to start home, we took the path through the cemetery. There on the far side, in a remote path, was our good fairy. “Here’s d’Urville,” she called out, pointing to an obelisk. Near the top of the obelisk was an image, very simply engraved, as if by a child. It showed three people clinging to each other and below them a rectangular wagon with wheels, from which flames pointed up at the three people above. About this time, a friend wrote to ask us a favor. He wondered if we would be willing to visit the grave of a scientist named Sadi Carnot and photograph it for him. Carnot had been instrumental in the development of thermodynamics. Our friend knew only that Carnot was buried in Paris. So I went to the cemetery office myself. In order to look up the records, they informed me, they would need his date of death. I had never heard of Carnot before this, but I Crab Orchard Review ◆ 175
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found him easily in an encyclopedia of science in our local library. He had died in the cholera epidemic of 1832. Armed with this date, I went back to the office. The middle-aged woman behind the desk had broad shoulders, the expression of a drill sergeant, and the blond hair of a girl. For any records before 1836, she informed me implacably, I needed the month and day of death. The month and day? Why not the hour, too, Madame? She looked at me unsympathetically and went back to work. Meanwhile, our friend did some research himself and discovered that Carnot was buried in a Paris suburb. So much for finding him in the neighborhood. But I went back to the cemetery office, curious about what it would cost to buy a plot and how long I could hold onto it. Unfortunately, the only person there was my curt, broad-shouldered friend. She gave me a sheet of printed information. To buy a plot I would need to write to the Conservator. There was a two-year waiting list. The plots were two meters square and were leased for perpetuity. At the interior of the cemetery, they cost about six thousand dollars. But to be placed along a main path, with easy access, the price was nearly double. Within three months of purchasing your plot, you are obligated to construct an underground vault. It can be deep enough for one casket or up to fourteen. As Paris real estate goes, it’s a bargain. And on your two square meters, you can construct whatever you like. A monument to yourself. To art. To poetry. To life. The problem of course is the upkeep, for if your marble crumbles, or your two square meters sprouts weeds, that little gold sign will go up, and if you don’t turn up and remedy the situation, you will find your lease has been taken away in a “reprise administrative.” The cemetery of Montparnasse has a high rate of plot turnover. Not like Père Lachaise, where they are committed to maintaining the cemetery as a funerary sculpture garden. Although Jim Morrison, who is buried at Père Lachaise, has lease problems of his own. His thirty-year lease expires in 2001. The cemetery is considering not renewing, although that’s not Jim’s fault. It’s his visitors; they have a bad habit of trashing the adjacent tombs. I didn’t give up on the tour. On a Tuesday afternoon in May I returned to the cemetery, when again, a guided visit by the city of Paris was posted near the entry. The same woman was there, in a black raincoat this time. This time she clipped a red, white, and 176 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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blue Mairie de Paris pin onto her collar and stood waiting just inside the entrance. The only other member of the group was a rotund grayhaired man in a blue blazer who was already poking fun at himself because he was Breton. A true son of the quarter, he said. Montparnasse was settled by country people from Brittany who arrived at the train station and went no farther; the streets around the cemetery are still lined with little Breton restaurants that sell pancakes—both the sweet crêpes and the heartier whole-grain galettes. The simpleminded Breton country fellow or lass is a stock French character and the butt of many jokes. It was a sunny day, but cool, and it threatened to shower. Our guide took us straight off to stand in front of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. By now I had found Beckett and Brancusi and Ionesco for myself, so I felt a bit impatient and wondered if it had been a good idea to come after all. She told us that the cemetery encompassed eighteen hectares, much smaller than the forty-four hectares of Père Lachaise Cemetery and smaller, also, than the twenty-three hectares of the Luxembourg Gardens. When it was built in 1824 as an alternative to the small parish cemeteries attached to churches throughout Paris, it was only ten hectares. But it was enlarged several times. It was originally just outside the city limits of Paris, but Paris has since expanded. A small round woman approached us, apologizing for being late. She reminded me of our good fairy from the last time. She could have been the good fairy’s sister, a similar round face and coloring, a similar baggy raincoat of some vague beige color, although slightly neater in every way, slightly more proper. Except that I knew the good fairy had no sister. This woman said she had come all the way from the nineteenth arrondissement for the tour. Yes, she acknowledged to the guide with a smile, she was entitled to the reduced fare. “Old age has its advantages,” she said cheerfully. As we moved away from Jean-Paul and Simone, our tour leader reminded us, as if we knew already, that there were no bodies buried in their double tomb, just ashes. “Of course, there is no crematorium here. That would have to be done at Père Lachaise.” As we walked away, she admitted that she had once attended a cremation at Père Lachaise. “Awful. The music. The idea. We are just not accustomed to it.” The other woman had also attended a cremation. “We waited two hours. We had to.” Crab Orchard Review ◆ 177
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“Well, of course,” said our guide primly. “Some bodies take longer.” By this time, we had arrived at the monument of Monsieur Boucicaut, who founded Bon Marché, the oldest and, arguably, the nicest department store in Paris. Our guide touted him as a businessman who was ahead of his time for he gave his personnel paid vacations and built daycare centers. To his customers, he offered a radical new service—the possibility to return an item for a refund. We all admired his realistically sculpted wreath of bronze roses and then we moved on to visit the tomb of one Henri Langlois, who founded the Cinemathéque in Paris. On top of his tomb, a layer of glass covered a collage of black and white scenes from classic French films. “A customer of mine,” our Breton gentlemen let fall. We all looked at him in surprise and waited to hear more. “I was a taxi driver before I retired,” he explained. “And I had him several times in my cab. A real bon vivant,” he said approvingly. We went on to visit the tombs of nineteenth-century sculptors and twentieth-century French film stars whose names meant nothing to me. Our guide also showed us several monuments that had been judged of historic importance and would be preserved. Otherwise, Montparnasse had a reputation for turning over its plots. “In another ten years, it will be mostly filled with these very banal modern graves,” regretted our guide, showing us the monument to the publisher Honoré Champion, which would be preserved and maintained at the city’s expense, partly because of Champion’s service to French literature, mostly because his tomb, which shows Champion seated in his study among his books, was an impressive and unusual sculpture. “But he’ll be the only one of his epoch left here.” She made a wide sweep with her arm that took in the simple granite slabs our generation favored. “At Père Lachaise, they have come to realize that these statues are an art form,” she said in her prim way. “Funerary sculpture. And they are committed to studying and preserving it for the next generation.” But the policy at Montparnasse definitely leaned toward reprise and re-sell. We visited the grave of the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine who came to Paris and joined the cubists and that of the Romanian-born poet Tristan Tzara, who wrote the Dada manifestos, then became a Surrealist. He fought in the Resistance during World War II. After the war his poetry became more compassionate and more lyrical, more human-centered. As we left Tzara’s grave, raindrops began to 178 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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fall. We all opened our umbrellas and followed the guide single file down the narrow path between the graves to the windmill, which stands on a hill, probably because early Parisians threw their garbage there. It was raining hard now and the wind drove the rain right at us. The guide and I took shelter in a mausoleum with a broken door, but the other two refused to enter. “We’ve been invited in by the Balliman family,” she said, reading the names on the back wall. Through the stained glass window, the white windmill turned red and a soft gray-green. As soon as the rain let up, she led us off again briskly, this time to the grave of the smoky-voiced singer Serge Gainsbourg. His large stone slab is always covered with flowers, gifts, and notes wrapped in plastic. That day, there was a teddy bear woven from green plastic strips, a novel sealed in plastic wrap, and like always, whole baggies of used metro tickets. Je t’adore Serge was penned on the backs of the tickets. They are left in homage to a Gainsbourg song about a ticket puncher in a metro station who spends her days punching little holes. These tickets, though, were never punched. Now metro tickets are inserted into automatic turnstiles. My companions stood beside his grave and reminisced about the night he burned a fivehundred-franc note on television to show he didn’t give a damn. To my surprise, because they seem to have nothing in common, it is a gesture all three admire. I try to picture an American singer burning a hundred-dollar bill on a late-night talk show, but can’t. Lying next to Gainsbourg’s gaily decorated tomb there was a dead pigeon, but I didn’t want to mention it. As we left, the others noticed it, too. “Dead,” said our guide in that brisk way of hers. “No, it’s still breathing,” said the good fairy’s sister. She was right. The wet gray breast rose and fell. “Maybe it’s been hit by a car,” suggested our guide. “It would have to be a very fast car,” countered the other. The pigeon had one red leg tucked up, as if dead, but the other leg, which stuck straight up, began to twitch convulsively. “Here’s the end now,” said our guide. The four of us stood and stared down at the bird. A tiny elderly woman wearing a plastic rain bonnet startled us out of our vigil. “There are more of them,” she announced, in an accent that sounded Polish or Russian. “They’re dying in my courtyard, too. And it’s always the same at the end. They’re not hit by cars,” she said slowly and adamantly. “They’re sick.” Crab Orchard Review ◆ 179
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“Ah,” said our guide, “ . . . an epidemic.” The pigeon twitched and lay still. We all exhaled. “There, it’s over,” our guide said with satisfaction. She turned to move on to the next grave. We followed, leaving the lady in the rain bonnet standing over the pigeon. I continued to walk through the cemetery nearly every day that I lived in Paris. Each time I passed the gigantic bird—its feathers made of tiny bits of mirrors—that the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle installed in the cemetery, it seemed to be dancing, one black wire foot in the air. Whenever I caught sight of that bird, glittering among the gray, it seemed that he froze at the sight of me. As if, when no one is there, he dances on his black slab, stomping, swooping, stamping his foot, and laughing through his long beak at death. The temporary plaque for Marguerite Duras was replaced by a new one. I suppose someone had taken it because a printed sheet encased in plastic warned those who take things from her grave for mementos that they’d do better to get their hands dirty by getting a broom and doing her housecleaning for her, or watering her plants. This area is being closely watched, the warning ended. In a bookseller’s stall, I found an old history of Montparnasse, where I learned more about the graveyard vandal of 1849. Each morning when the guards arrived, they found to their horror that body parts, always belonging to women, had been pulled out of graves, tossed about, even mutilated. To catch the perpetrator, they aimed a cannon filled with grapeshot at the place on the wall where there were signs that someone had climbed over. The cannon was hidden under piles of wreaths, but would be set off by a trip wire if anyone climbed the wall. At the stroke of midnight, a soldier was admitted to a nearby hospital with five wounds. He was condemned to only one year in prison and a fine to defray the costs of the damage, because until his bizarre nocturnal visits to the cemetery, his service record had been exemplary. Before the cemetery existed, the roadways were lined with openair dance halls and bars. Outside the gates of Paris, wine was not taxed, so the Parisians came out to the country to drink and dance. When the city decided to open the cemetery, the bar owners worried that the solemn new business would hurt theirs. A poem, published in 1848, played up the juxtaposition:
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C’était au Mont-Parnasse, une folle barrière; La joie est devant vous et la mort derrière. Plein d’ivrognes chantant leur couplet égrillard Le vieux fiacre chemine auprès du corbillard; A côté des tombeaux la guinguette frétille; Près du père qui dort on marchande la fille; car dans ce mauvais lieu, par les hommes hanté, On achète le vin et l’on vend la beauté. A. Esquiros in Fleur du Peuple, 1848 It was at Mont-Parnasse, that strange tollgate Joy before you, death behind waits. Drunkards sing their bawdy verse, The old horse cab passes next to the hearse; Beside the graves, the dance hall vibrates pell-mell; Next to the sleeping father the daughter’s for sale; In this place of ill repute that men haunt, Beauty is sold and wine is bought. In a far corner of the cemetery, a quiet one, Charles Pigeon and his wife are in bed, completely dressed. The guidebook says that he invented the first safe gaslight. They’re not dead. She is resting, and he reads, propped on one elbow, a bedtime activity his invention has made safer. This is a pleasant way to spend eternity, I think, in bed with a book. But I am joking now about death, trying to make it small, like the miniature buildings built to house it. The week before we came to Paris, my grandmother died. She was ninety-two, was sick for one week, and died quietly surrounded by her children. As if she just went to sleep, my mother said. “I hope I go like this,” was the refrain at her funeral. The first time we walked through the cemetery, my eight-year-old daughter said she felt sad there, thinking of her great-grandmother, with whom she had a special bond. Her great-grandmother’s grave is a long way, even from our house in the States. There are no brooms provided and we are not allowed to plant flowers. I would feel uneasy in that cemetery, anyway; it is a sprawling place you have to drive through. If there is no funeral it is deserted. It is the activity that makes Montparnasse such a cheerful place. The paths are always busy with passersby; the elderly people using Crab Orchard Review ◆ 181
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the brooms and watering cans are always there. Mothers picnic discreetly on the benches with their children, especially on Wednesdays and Saturdays when there is a bustling market outside the cemetery walls on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and young teenagers shortcut through the cemetery on their way home from a nearby middle school. Guitar playing is not allowed on the benches, but kissing is, and once spring arrives, the cemetery is full of lovers. And also readers, like me, looking for a spot in the sun. I remained partial to a bench next to Baudelaire’s cenotaph, a very specific word for a funerary monument that is not a tomb. (Baudelaire is buried in the cemetery, but on the other side, with the in-laws he detested.) In the cenotaph he rises, cobra-like, with long, flowing hair, on a column of draperies, and planting his chin on his two fists, deep-set eyes look down on his own shrouded corpse lying at the base of the column. The benches that flank this spot are nearly always in the sun. If you enter a little circle of shrubbery not far away, you will come upon the secluded home of the Montparnasse cats, who roam as freely as Baudelaire would have liked to. They answer to no one. Their two-story green wooden houses outfitted with blankets and their daily food are provided by a benevolent association, made up mostly of people from the neighborhood. The sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne, who dwells on death even more than I do, says that French cemeteries were first placed next to churches so that people would become accustomed to the sight of corpses and accept their own mortality, an idea he approved. Montparnasse Cemetery was created when the small churchyard cemeteries were closed for health reasons. I think Montaigne would be pleased by the students who traipse through every day with their backpacks, the market shoppers with their bags of produce, and the readers on the benches. “Don’t leave the dead too much alone,” says the inscription on one of the graves. Now that I am alert to the little gold reprise signs, I realize that they are everywhere in the cemetery. Even the gray stone mausoleum next to the main entrance has one, tucked into the grillwork on the door. A lichen-spotted statue of a young woman clothed in draperies reclines on the roof of the small building. Although the decorative ironwork of her doorway could use some repairs, her little stone house looks solid to me. But it is a choice spot she occupies, right by the gate and the flowerbeds. In ten years’ time, will Montparnasse be a neighborhood 182 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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cemetery filled with plain rectangular tombs often visited and swept? Or a shrine to the past, peopled by visitors with guidebooks who come to see the quaint monuments and the tombs of the famous? At the moment it preserves a precarious balance: within its stone walls is the sensibility we Americans seek in Paris. We have so few places like this, places that are both historic and ordinary. When I was a child, my mother used to take me to a cemetery, a large rambling “memorial garden,” to catch tadpoles every spring. Since then, I have walked in many cemeteries and I find Montparnasse nearly perfect for my requirements. I like the orderliness of the rules, the sense of enclosure provided by the high stone walls, the feeling of being only one walker among many, and the smell of roasted chicken from the market twice a week. The nattily dressed guards at the gates are important, too. You feel secure, knowing they are there keeping an eye on death and teenagers who might be inclined to break into a run. Among its amenities, Montparnasse Cemetery boasts the only free public bathrooms that I know of in Paris. We no longer live in Paris. Our sojourn there lasted only one year, but in June of the following year, we returned and my children rejoined their classes at their little school across from the main gate of the cemetery. Inside the cemetery’s walls, someone had sowed a new crop of golden placard seeds in the flower pots and reprise signs had sprouted and flourished. The year before, the divisions around the central “rondpoint” of the cemetery had all been designated as historic. Before this, only the windmill had that status. But nothing had been done about the designation until a few days before my arrival in June, when the cemetery and the surrounding monument dealers received a notice that in the future, all monuments put up in the designated divisions would have to be approved by a government office. Perhaps polished granite would be banned from those sections, as it was at Père Lachaise, and new tombs would have to be built of rough granite or of limestone. A young woman in one of the monument businesses that surround the cemetery had no idea what the new designation would mean. “What about families who have already placed their orders?” she asked me rhetorically. “We’re still waiting for a clear directive.” Should I buy a plot, she told me, a vault would cost about $2,000, and that was only for a one-casket affair. Most people, looking ahead, build vaults for two to ten bodies. A plot owner has the right to Crab Orchard Review ◆ 183
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fourteen spaces, but the cost is exorbitant, since the vault has to be dug down, fifty centimeters for each level, and lined with cement. “Would it be mine for perpetuity?” I asked her. She nodded but gave me one of those arched eyebrow looks that mean it’s more complex than it appears. Perpetuity was a notion I couldn’t really comprehend. “Why not just lease the plots for thirty or fifty years? And then give the lessees an option to renew?” “It’s more honest that way,” she replied, nodding in agreement. “When a family buys a plot for perpetuity, they think it really means that. But of course it doesn’t. And most people don’t realize their rights or what the city can do.” She was surprised that I hadn’t heard the story of the man who took the city to court. “He came to check on his plot one day and found someone else buried there. He sued on the grounds he hadn’t been properly notified. And won. They couldn’t move those people, so they gave him another plot. After that they began to put up the little gold signs. “The city doesn’t warn people that they can take their plot back after a certain time if it’s not kept up sufficiently. And you know, there’s quite a bit of leeway there. It’s up to the discretion of the Conservator of the cemetery and the staff to determine whether it’s in good condition. “But these days most new monuments are made of granite and they will last much longer. In order to justify reselling the plots, the city will have to rewrite the rules. Instead of insisting on good condition, they will say something like—if no one has been buried there for a certain period of time.” I asked what happens to the bones when a plot is taken back. “They put all the bodies into one casket, identify it with all the names, and put it into the crypt at Père Lachaise. It’s all done very correctly,” she assured me. “I often get asked these odd questions,” she continued, as if to make me feel at home. “Once, an American came in to ask how he could move Brancusi’s remains to America. Can you imagine? Such arrogance. It’s not as if he doesn’t have relatives. We are in contact with the family of Brancusi. They have no intention of moving him.” I asked about Jim Morrison, whose lease at Père Lachaise expires in 2001. She leaned across her desk. “In the business, rumor has it that he’s not even there. Hasn’t been for years.” “Do you mean to say his family has removed his body secretly?” “The rumors insist he’s not there. Never was.” She moved her 184 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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stapler emphatically two inches to the right. “Of course, if it’s true, they ought to tell people, because all the gravestones nearby are being destroyed.” I asked my mortuary advisor about the mausoleum by the gate. That young woman had been lounging on top for a century now, with a great view of the boulevard and Wednesday and Saturday market days. Maybe I could save her home for her. “Not at Montparnasse. I had a family who wanted to do that, restore the old monument and keep it, but it wasn’t allowed. Although at Père Lachaise, there are certain plots and if you take one you are obligated to keep the monument and maintain it. But at Montparnasse they knock them down.” “What do you think?” I asked her. “Of course I have families waiting to buy plots,” she said apologetically. “But I hate to see the old monuments, especially the mausoleums, just torn down. At Père Lachaise they are much more committed to preservation.” She looked me over appraisingly. “There is a certain person,” she began slowly. “I won’t mention names, but this person made a sculpture for the tomb of a friend. Of course, a lot of people think it is abominable . . .” She was pleased when I let on that I knew she was talking about the huge, gaily-painted ceramic cat that Niki de Saint Phalle made for the grave of a young sculptor. She shrugged. “Even if it is abominable, it is the tomb of someone. But then this person took two other plots just for another sculpture. She treats the cemetery like it’s her gallery. And there are families waiting . . .” For me, Saint Phalle’s bird was the very essence of the cemetery, with its long black beak and glittering body. I loved the way it took me by surprise as I came down the path. “Oh, she says it’s in memory of her husband. But no one’s buried there and there’s no plaque.” My informant has heard that Saint Phalle wants a third plot where she’ll be buried herself. She plans to install a huge head. “Oh, no doubt she’ll get it.” She shook her head in energetic disapproval. “She could very well be buried under the bird. It’s a double space and there isn’t a soul in there.”
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Ruth L. Schwartz
The Swan at Edgewater Park
Isn’t one of your prissy richpeoples’ swans Wouldn’t be at home on some pristine pond Chooses the whole stinking shoreline, candy wrappers, condoms in its tidal fringe Prefers to curve its muscular, slightly grubby neck into the body of a Great Lake, Swilling whatever it is swans swill, Chardonnay of algae with bouquet of crud, While Clevelanders walk by saying Look at that big duck! Beauty isn’t the point here; of course the swan is beautiful, But not like Lorie at 16, when Everything was possible—no More like Lorie at 27 Smoking away her days off in her dirty kitchen, Her kid with asthma watching TV, The boyfriend who doesn’t know yet she’s gonna Leave him, washing his car out back—and He’s a runty little guy, and drinks too much, and It’s not his kid anyway, but he loves her, he Really does, he loves them both— That’s the kind of swan this is.
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Ruth L. Schwartz
Failure
Every day, the sun going down against the industrial skyline, the cellophane windows of warehouses, the puffing laboring pillars of smokestacks, the living trees bare-armed, disguised as dead—the sun going down is still the largest thing we have ever seen, and its unlikely orange-pink still emblazons the horizon like the revelation of the body. It is frightening to be almost 40 and still believe I would die without love, although no more or less so than it was at 16; also, no less true. We fight over whether you love me enough, and my headache all day is a horizon wrapped too tight. Meanwhile, my mother’s 16-year-old son is burning up for love. Because he is half my brother, I half understand his flesh and want to say to him, Adam, there’s no hurry, this need will still consume you fifty years from now. Instead I lie in bed, tending my own flame. With age, we work at wanting no more than what we have, and always fail. The sun going down reminds me we must keep failing, it is the only thing worthy of our bodies.
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Ruth L. Schwartz
Aliens Can See Us Now —Weekly World News headline Right now. At the duckpond. One human per table, while the fountain arcs its narrow streams like a hundred little-boy angels, urinating constantly and gracefully onto tiny floating boats of bread. The air is thick with crumbs, we’re sad, a little envious— watching the ducks in their duck lives, squabbling, murmuring through grasses, rising on the water, flapping, bellowing, incontrovertible. We’re here, the man wearing three hats, reading his newspaper out loud. The woman with an empty cup, sucking for hours at her straw. Big-bellied watchman, handcuffs chiming, eyes above the uniform, above the American flag on his shoulder, pale and soft as a soft-boiled egg. How small the aliens must find us, murmuring and flapping through our human lives. How sweetly we distract them from their cosmic sadness.
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Jan Selving
The Consolation of Coincidence
Someone’s dead but he is singing on a train, a transistor stuck in somebody’s pocket. I sit inside the bad news, watch my face in the windows appear, disappear station to station and John Lennon shot down outside the Dakota and markets glow with fresh fruit. I’m walking inside the mirrors while a priest bags oranges and something purple. There’s a cop on the corner, but I find my own way out of Alphabet City. Broken glass and shopping carts. The man just stands there laughing because he knows my shoes are untied. I’m smiling because he can’t come unless I like it and all has come to this—bent spoons, the whites of his eyes, blue flame and gas, boxspring screaming, and I’m standing at the window watching the ground, the dangling fire escape, his voice pleading. And I’m following him because he seems to know the way with his tool belt and dark glasses approaching me, lost somewhere below Tompkins Square. St. Mark’s. Sixth Avenue. I take the train from Jersey, Mercer St., six blocks. I come all the way from Albuquerque, my room overlooking the mountains, city lights. I’m lying beneath my covers pretending to sleep. I do this all the time— go away—when things get rough. Come back again. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 191
Jan Selving
Ghostsickness
The dead eavesdrop on us, infect us with disembodied longing if we speak their names. Effigy of your old man, you bought Navajo rugs to sell in Manhattan—Yei Figures, Eye Dazzlers, Two Grey Hills, blankets dyed with cochineal, “seconds skins” fading in the gallery windows. You stacked boxes in that huge yellow warehouse after school— Route 1’s Linden Surplus. Your father’s breath steaming dim rooms filled with tarpaulins, impotent grenades. He raised the price of umbrellas when it rained. The day the Exxon tanks exploded, you watched him sweeping the sidewalk clear of glass, his body disintegrating in waves of heat and gas.
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Paula Sergi
Fond du Lac
At the heart of it, an ice rink, chinks of waves stopped dead. A dressing mirror for its own vanity. A pearl, stomped flat by native gods before the French, back when it was a glossy sheet of blue, a basin filled with bass. Ice men of old would cut blocks from Winnebago, store them in the dust of pine shaved down. It might have become a ribbon of water, slender and sexy, overflowing west and south to meet the Mississippi. It might have been the biggest of its kind: freshwater, inland, glacial; might have grown to a great lake, leading somewhere big like Michigan, instead of staying here in town, pinning the city to a map with a name immigrant Germans couldn’t say or understand: End of the lake, foot of the lake, bottom? I grew up thinking underwater— Crab Orchard Review ◆ 193
Paula Sergi
how the pressure of the place would overtake us if we stayed around. Now I’m back to ground zero, where my father’s heart stopped as he romped by the lake with his three small children. I’m hoping for a trail marked with three stones, or a map he carved in a birch. But, no, just a surface mask of ice undercut by current, a scalpel from inside, its own flow lapping low.
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Amar Gaurav Shah
Midsummer in Bombay
Midsummer sun dances like a Nataraja in the sky. The few white blotches on the rain-streaked, grime-stained Flora Fountain gleam with strain. Circling around it, drabness: the old, Victorian buildings filled with ghosts of those who once inhabited them; the coffin-like double-decker buses coughing smoke at every turn, their red skins smeared with an ashy dust; the rotting lemon-rind color of the sky over Victoria Station descending upon millions taking journeys wherever the fingers of rusting rails stretch. All this I embrace, understanding blind love, understanding why poets reach cities with words in their eyes and leave without conquering them, each city always swelling beyond the page whenever suppressed by the weight of an adjective.
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Purvi Shah
Urban Pastoral
My eyes are drawn to the fuchsia tumbler at the edge of the restaurant table, since the remainder of the world is drab, a drafting plane of background hues. Light suffuses through an indiscriminating cornea; we even don ourselves in the uniform of winter, mistaking mourning for city chic: suits of charcoal black, shirts of ash blue. Behind the cages of storefronts, prepackaged tones greet us, manufacturing a uniformity to fashion, the fallout an erosion to the sensitive business of rods and cones, workers foiled by collective bargaining. In this market we submit to the moment, consuming pastels, the catalysts of calmed nerves although the pallid shades twitch of hospital walls. Soon the city will be incapable of reflecting the difference between blue and green: our vocabulary will constrict to proper names for improper perceptions. The world needs a rupture in color, the shock of atomic tangerine spiky 196 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review
Purvi Shah
hair, the longings of loves written in wisteria, the bloom of a fire tree, the sporadic seizures of spectral delight.
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Virgil Suárez
Havana Blue
This city will always need work, hands upon it, calloused, a sheet of sandpaper to scratch its own back, what my mother calls el desrumbe, flecks of paint everywhere, a riddle for the ashen birds. This city will always need old men, children in uniform, a knot of banyan tendrils at the park, a white-wash glare, broken glass, windows agape like the mouths of its citizens. Music fills empty spaces, dead hours blue with boredom. Mojito rum scents hallways, porticos, a bricolage of grid-iron. The sea keeps this secret of blanched sky, birds soar for morsels. A litany of rumors, a clatter of jackhammers in the moonlight. Slackened days, an ebb, a tug of plunder, what the carpenter knows of wood, a termite’s solemnity in dark crevices, pockets of light and shadows. This city will always stand erect, no matter its conquered history. A man can either aim for the moon, or canoe across its bay to cast empty nets. Questions are for the restless, answers come to those drowning.
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Margaret C. Szumowski
The Knife Addis Ababa, 1974–75 Itifewerk kissed my feet on the worst day of my life. We’d given her a little money. We liked her bright boy. Ethiopia’s beauty cut our hearts with its knife. The country gave a sudden lurch, trembled with strife. Her boy sat on our step, whittling a propeller toy, and Itifewerk kissed my feet on the worst day of my life. Her beautiful boy. But she was not a wife. Itifewerk prayed, walked to Kolubi, barefoot and holy. Her beauty and faith cut my heart with its knife. Seventy men shot in our neighborhood, our street riven by soldiers. Nothing could serve as a decoy. Itifewerk kissed my feet on the worst day of her life. We wanted Addis Ababa to be filled with life and donkeys and eucalyptus, the usual small boys. Ethiopia’s beauty cut my heart with its bitter knife. Where were the husbands? The children? Who could be a wife? Exhausted and feeble, we saw everything destroyed. Itifewerk kissed my feet on the worst day of our lives. Addis Ababa, new flower. Shredded by its own sharp knives.
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Maria Terrone
To Hold This Splendor
Last day in Venice: already the future tense rides these ripples. I see myself drifting in a trance back home tomorrow, a woman who searches mirrors for La Serenissima. I’ll touch the face there, as if blind, but the glass will say nothing. Insomnia will pull me down to my gated garden, where I’ll pace in the jaundiced haze of anti-crime lamps, the latticed metal fence dragging its shadowed chain. In tomorrow’s light, I won’t see flames like cats’ eyes at palazzi windows or the raised Easter chalice that pressed all eyelids closed. Maybe it will have rained, so the moon drowns in a dozen piddling lagoons, and beads of stagnant water cloud the bloodshot red azaleas. In a few hours, night’s gloved hand will lower a veil over the face of this arabesque city, and the last traces of silver will dull, then blacken. Already I can see my photo album— memory’s reliquary stored in a felt sack, exposed for viewing on cold dark 200 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Maria Terrone
days. But I’m still here, San Giorgio’s pillars float so close, I can almost hold their splendor in my hands, and I’m like a cup once blighted by a harsh indifferent air, dipped now in light.
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Maria Terrone
My Brother Listens to His Police Scanner
Trapped voices escape from Bob’s earphones. Just down from Vermont, he rests on the guestroom sofa, plugged into heart attacks and drug busts, drunk drivers, domestic brawls, an unbalanced man on the ledge of the Triboro Bridge. For hours, he eavesdrops on the city’s conversation, then calls, There’s a hold-up in progress almost next door, yanking out the jack so that I too can be tuned to the local frequency, get to know my neighbors. The dispatcher’s scratchy call for back-up arrives in the sun-filled room like a gust of dead leaves, air crackling as if a fire drew near. But when I glance at the garden below, the groomed trees of late summer seem fearless, their deep, even breath like the speech of yogic masters. In the north country, leaves like spent tongues have already begun to fall, whole forests practicing for their long silence.
202 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
J. C. Todd
At the Polish-American Festival, Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia August, 1986 Red and white everywhere, Lech’s name like a prayer at novena, recited over and over as though to stack it up to heaven. And the music—a bright horn, off-key, an accordion winging through melody, cleated shoes, their crisp percussion tapping time. Swollen from an afternoon of non-stop polka, our hot heels flatten the stubble of day into dusk, and still we cannot quit dancing for Poland. On the river, a gaff rig swivels to its farthest reach above a girl in a red and white halter who weights the gunnel until the wood hull heels. No, I hear her cry as she dips below a slash of boom, dips and leaps leeward. She’s saved her boat from tipping under. Like a hawk, it comes about, homing toward the bank’s green haze. Wheeling and lifting on thermals off-shore, a box kite yanks at its taut tether. I shift my bulk to the riverward hip, and we high-step into the spin.
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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
I Used to Own This Town
This place used to be my town . . . even when the river rose up from its own bed, taking up residence with us, hiding under our beds and dining tables, in kitchens, bathrooms, and the town’s pots and pans went sailing past us like speed boats in the rain; and we children splashed about while our Mamas wept for mattresses and pictures and all those memories, floating away. In the dry season, we ran in between houses, ponytails and flat chests, panties or just bikinis, bare feet and nappy hair, turning red from the dust and heat. Then all the boys in shorts, would dash with us in Auntie Vic’s big, black tub until one day, I figured out how to make her son, Mikey, breathe under the tub full of water. All I wanted was to see how a boy can breathe underwater, and Mama comes with rattan, giving me such a whipping . . . Slip Way, loud Accra bars where Ghana High Life Beat ran away with the night while we slept. Slip Way was my town—where you could slip away, sit beside the river and watch giant crabs and gbuga fish swim around you. Up Crown Hill, no one guessed we were hiding beneath that hill. Monrovia rushed away without us. Did Monrovia know we owned the river down there? Where the town humps like a weary camel, we owned the hill, the sloping, hanging rocks, clinging on tightly to the hill; we owned the river, the fish and the kiss-meat shells.
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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
The sun returned home at dusk, and we children were running all over the place, hollering, and our Mamas couldn’t tell their own voices calling us home—singing and laughing at how we could scare a Mama out of her breath. And all the fathers coming home, sweaty, oily faces, rough concrete hands. At night, Yana Boys came home too, from Waterside market places— The bursting sewage coming back to town, the smell of fish . . . we owned all the dust and the rocky hill and all that poverty . . . So much laughing, the giving and the taking . . . with everybody into everybody, into everybody, into everybody’s business. When the moon came out at night, we ran to the street, giggling. One long, crooked line, marching, as the moon followed us.
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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
What the Land Carver Said From the Sky
From the sky I took this city and chopped it up into pieces. This for you, this for you, this for you. As for you, I give you the inner part, where railroads slice up pieces of street and town. Where the town crunches on its knees because bullets have the right of way. The train hoots, but I say the train cannot go by on its tracks until the bullets pass. And you who work so hard, pushing up into the jungle part— after the factories arrived, after the sky-scrapers began to blossom on sharp needles into sky, after parking lots clogged up air passages in the ground—I ask you, ask you again, why did you leave us here with your city? After your men arrived with their bags of junk that killed my brother and sent the others to jail. And then you sent these bullets for reinvestment? Why did you move away from the lot I carved up for you?
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Gary J. Whitehead
Ginsberg Dying
Somewhere on the East Side a plastic bag hooked on the gate of a fence fluttered like a wounded birdâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a Food Emporium shopping bag that only a day or so ago bulged with cereal and beans, bananas ripe enough to eat, artichokes three-for-a-dollar. Somehow, it found its way here and spread like a sail over this chainlink fence, catching the wind blowing off the East River, and releasing out of its flapping the language of a bag. Many people had hurried past, hearing it but not really hearing it, judging it because of what it was, or loving it because it held the wind and learned the wind and spoke the wind in the language only a caught bag could make. When its strap finally broke, there was no relief
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Gary J. Whitehead
in the silence as it ballooned above the buildings and circled toward New Jerseyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;no, there was no relief, and it tacked toward no one place in particular.
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Crystal Williams
Parable of Divas: Aretha Franklin & Diana Ross Back in the day Ree Ree & Miss D were sweet meat, ours to pick over like vultures. We were Detroiters, after all, it was duty to learn from our lost: Ree Ree’s house had an untended yard. D’s flat-out denials. Detroit had given her nothing, she’d return the favor. We sucked our teeth, hurumphed: they’re trifling, look, see, fortune has knocked & the hussies have gained amnesia. We were too young to know survival, song, is enough; combined they are testimony in a city so Black. We thought, no. Tend yard, offer back. Savor the sweet stuff of our city. & yet we, too, moved, forgot the chance gardeners & thankless hussies of youth, became them, in varying degrees, in spite of ourselves. It was unavoidable. Odd, how I remember those rumors, how it was so clear, even then, that what you give is rarely what is taken. Aretha & Diana’s contradictions readied me: from respectable people: damning affronts. From damnable people: beauty. I have survived—no less culpable, but no longer believe in any whole thing. Something has been lost. Forever. Nothing, it seems, is so sweet as not to be sour, somehow, some way. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 209
Terry Wolverton
City of Salt A ghostly city with its own network of four-lane highways lies deep beneath the industrial heart of Detroit, its crystalline walls glittering and gleaming in the flickering light. It is a world of no night or day. It is a world of salt. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Patricia Zacharias, The Detroit News Once this was the sea. Woodward Avenue was brine; Gratiot nothing but the pull of tide. No trolleys or factories, no maple trees. Four million years ago an ocean died, blood evaporated. Salt is its bones, interred by glacier. Marie saunters over those bones; they crunch beneath her worn heels as she stares into rock-hard eyes of passing men. Some look back; she stands unmoving as a pillar. Twelve hundred feet below, ropes lower mules down the shaft; they stay in the salt mines until they die. Marie turns up her collar; fine snow sprinkles the sidewalk, reeks of the sea.
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S. L. Wisenberg
Plain Scared, or: There Is No Such Thing as Negative Space, the Art Teacher Said
In a college art class I learned that negative space was the nothing behind the figure you were looking at. But years later another teacher told me that this was not so. There is always something there, he said. If you look, you will see it. Kenophobia is the fear of empty rooms. Fear of empty places. Agoraphobia is the fear of open places. But it is not the agora, the marketplace, that frightens me. I am not afraid to leave the house. I am afraid to leave the city. To be more precise—to venture from the SMSA (Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area). I live on the North Side of Chicago. I find the word “kenophobia” in a book in the main library of Evanston. About twenty years ago, I lived in a dorm room in Evanston. The room was empty when I arrived and empty when I left. I remember one June I kept a university library book almost until the minute the taxi came to take me to the airport. I wanted to keep, as long as possible, some connection with the place I was leaving empty. I am afraid of being erased. One night in a lover’s apartment, after he told me he didn’t want to see me any more, I left this note in his desk: I was here. I was once a part of your life. He has since moved to a condo. I do not know what became of the desk. We are all afraid of being erased. Our names in water writ. Of the earth disappearing. We are small and the night looms. The night ends. The prairie goes on forever. A sameness, for the uninitiated, the way all the seasons in Miami seem alike to newcomers. I am uninitiated. We all fear the blank page, the blank mind dry of thought. In and around Chicago, experts are replanting the prairie. I think this involves both public and private funds. I like reading about such things. I don’t mind walking through these prairies if they are small Crab Orchard Review ◆ 211
S. L. Wisenberg
and surrounded by city. It’s the big areas I don’t like; I don’t like to hike. I like to walk through cities, looking in store windows. I grew up in Texas, came to the Midwest at 18. I grew up with ranch houses and sidewalks. I loved taking the bus downtown and walking among abandoned railroad cars, buying old records in a shabby pawnshop. I’d eat lunch at Woolworth’s and buy make-up at Neiman-Marcus. In my 20s I moved from Illinois to Iowa to Florida back to Illinois. In Iowa I liked the pale green bowls of hills along the highway. I admired them from behind the windows of cars. The hills looked like paintings. In Miami in the newspaper office where I worked, we worshipped the sun from afar. During particularly dramatic sunsets, we reporters would stand near our desks, looking through the windows closest to us, facing west, waiting, watching. My only forays into nature are very tame—residencies at artists’ colonies. I have to pack along piles of little white tablets made of cortisone. When my asthma’s bad I take the pills for eight or nine days in a row. I’m allergic to nature. Ragweed, grasses, mold, spores, hay, milkweed—things I can name and things I can’t name. The first artists’ colony I went to had once been Edna St. Vincent Millay’s retreat a few hours from Manhattan—strawberry farm, hills, pond, trees. At Millay, I learned what foxglove was, and phlox, learned how to spot jack-in-the-pulpit and lady-slipper, all veins and sex. The colony’s assistant director told me about a New York artist who had come to the colony and had walked around the grounds a while. Then he’d fled inside and reported that he’d seen an animal. What was it? she’d asked. He didn’t know. He couldn’t tell whether it was a squirrel or a deer. During my residency, there were two painters who gushed over the landscape. They tried to match the colors of nature with the colors of paint. Cerulean Blue? they would ask each other, pointing at the sky. Havannah Lake? It is land. It is only land. The assistant told me that the pioneers from the East feared the flat open land of the West. For some of them, the horizon was too large. They couldn’t see themselves in it. They were diminished. Some Easterners returned. Some carved themselves into the Western landscape. 212 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
S. L. Wisenberg ◆◆◆
I am not from the East but I understand those Easterners. I don’t like limitless horizons. I don’t embrace endless fields. I like nature with borders. The plains scare me. I am plain scared. I am terrified of the universe that has no end. I am afraid to step behind the curtain, ask, What is the system behind this solar system? And behind that. There is no negative space, only positive space having a bad day. Franz Kafka was born in a city and was buried there. In 1912 he wrote: Ever since childhood, there have been times when I was almost unhappy about my inability to appreciate flowers. This seems to be related in some way to my inability to appreciate music. I like flowers. A flowerbed is not the same as a field. Which life depends on. Wildlands are beautiful, they say. They must be saved. There is music in the prairie, they say. Kafka is less foreign to me than Wendell Berry. I feel closer to Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Moscow of the bureaucratic 1920s, than Larry McMurtry’s Texas. I find myself inside books by writers who write in fast, urgent sentences with no time for landscape. Writers of closeup conversations—internal and external—writers of the life of streets, cafes, stores, restaurants. Writers who rent. But there are others, so many others; I am not always curled up with my own kind. But I skip the parts, all the parts, about nature. When I was younger, my friends and I would find books with sex in them. We would read those parts aloud, skip everything else. Therefore, nature is the opposite of sex. I know two women in Western Michigan who like to read farm novels. One of them has tiny plastic cows and horses super-glued to her dashboard. I don’t think I’ve ever read a farm novel, though I imagine myself finding pleasure in following the slow quiet rhythms of crops pushing their way skyward, in descriptions of the dirt and sweat and dampness of stables, the lowing and groaning. Pure, sweet tiredness after you latch the door, blow out the lantern. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 213
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I was at the late Kroch’s and Brentano’s bookstore on South Wabash Avenue. A street with the same name as a river, believed to be taken from the Miami Indian word for “gleaming white.” At the bookstore I picked up a book, A River Runs Through It. A sleeper of a book reissued, glamorized by Hollywood. It is my friend A.’s favorite book. I never talk to A. anymore because he met his exgirlfriend through me. Somehow that is a problem though we were never lovers. These are the sorts of things I write about—things that happen indoors. I like A.’s writing, respect his judgment. But I didn’t buy the book. I was afraid I would not enter it, afraid of some flatness of surface, nothing to hold onto. Like being afraid to enter into a conversation with a person who has a difficult accent or an unfathomable expression; scratch and scratch and still there may be nothing there. (But so many other people liked the book. A. loved it, and he’s from Manhattan. He likes to fish.) Or like being afraid of sex, afraid to enter its raw territory, afraid I will find myself in the middle of it, not want to be there, and feel alone, terribly alone, too aware of my surroundings. Many years ago I had an internship in Downstate Illinois at the Quincy Herald-Whig. I made friends with a young reporter there from a smaller town. She told me, All cities are alike. She didn’t see the point in going to more than one of them. I use free address labels from the Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy. I am not a member. Over the years I’ve joined the National Tr ust for Historic Preservation and the Chicago Architecture Foundation. I used to love the before and after spreads in magazines on restored opera houses, movie theaters saved from the wrecking ball and transformed into quaint shopping malls. I loved reading about the resurrection of inner cities, led by young urban pioneers, before “yuppie” was a bad word, or maybe even a word at all. In Chicago once, I met a lawyer who worked for the National Trust. Soul mate, I thought. She said, I’m really an environmentalist, I don’t really have a feeling for architecture. I was appalled. This was hard for me to understand. I told her over and over: You must 214 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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see the Victorian Gothic apartments at Chicago and Wabash. The building is in danger. It is beautiful. It must be saved. They say you’ll see everybody you know if you stand long enough at the corner of State and Madison. I see Louis, that is all that matters. I am talking about a building. I am talking about Carson Pirie Scott designed by Louis Sullivan. The green and rust filigree ironwork. The design inspired by organic shapes, the same energy of nature that animated Whitman. This ersatz vegetation fills my heart, the way that Sullivan’s first view of a suspension bridge shook him up as a boy. An exhilaration. The same feeling I get from walking down a certain street in my neighborhood, Roscoe—the pedestrian scale of the two-flats and three-flats, the undulation of the brick fronts, the Italianate eyebrows on windows, decorative carvings on graystones—the way someone must react to the undulations of corn, clouds, furrows. Or the straight vastness of the Great Plains with their wheat, earth, sand, clay—whatever is on them, in them. I liked Charlotte’s Web—and it appears to have been a farm novel. I fear the Other. I am afraid nothing is out there but God and landscape, and he doesn’t exist and land can’t talk. I don’t know the language of it. I like crowded civic and political events during which everyone believes something important is happening. We We We We
city folks go to therapy. fantasize about strangers on the el. fool ourselves into thinking we have a shared destination. fool ourselves into thinking we don’t.
This is the secret, the secret I have always known: that the bare open plain is my heart itself, my heart without connection; that the bare cinderblock room is my soul, my soul without connection— the place I fear I will end up when the fear of loss of connection overrides everything else. I long to receive this benediction: May you see that something is always there, have hope for the heart to rise up for, come to a feeling of settlement, find a light way of walking on the earth.
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Masha Zager
Disappearing DUMBO
The smallest beach in New York City is under the Manhattan Bridge, on the Brooklyn side. You can’t reach it without climbing over an iron fence into a weedy lot and jumping from the seawall onto a slimy heap of bricks. A significant portion of the beach is taken up by a tire that was once attached to a very large truck. The bridge overhead blocks the sun, and the water is the East River, a brackish, polluted tidal wash. But still it is, astonishingly, a sandy beach lapped by waves, with a view of the lower Manhattan skyline. I have never taken the leap from the seawall (nor, I suspect, has anyone else). Instead, standing in the shadow of the bridge, listening to the trucks rumbling overhead, I contemplate Wall Street across the river and the beach below, and feel that I am inside the beating heart of the city and at the same time at its furthest, most forgotten reaches. This peculiar feeling of under-the-bridgeness extends a good way from the bridge itself, so that the neighborhood all around it is known as Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass—DUMBO. The name DUMBO was coined years ago by New York City’s real estate industry as a value-enhancing ploy in the manner of SoHo, NoHo, and TriBeCa. It didn’t succeed in enhancing any values (or not for a while, anyway), but in spite of, or perhaps because of, its silliness, it stuck. The boundaries are quite clear. Even though the offramp from the Manhattan Bridge is visible and, unfortunately, audible from my bedroom window, my apartment is not in DUMBO. I live in a normal apartment complex with New York-style amenities like doormen and dry cleaners and grocery stores—amenities that you still won’t find in DUMBO. Between my apartment and DUMBO lies the Brooklyn Bridge onramp and the no-man’s-land of the Watchtower. The Watchtower is a complex of squat, ugly buildings, joined by overhead walkways, where the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious sect, produce their ubiquitous publications. The watchtower itself, which is disappointingly small and looks like a child’s drawing of a castle 216 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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turret, perches awkwardly on the roof of one building. Another building features a green sign admonishing us to “READ GOD’S WORD THE HOLY BIBLE DAILY.” A third displays in blinking lights what my brother refers to as “God’s Time and Temperature.” The Watchtower is a hive of activity. Young Witnesses arrive from all over the country—maybe from all over the world—to work there for a year or two, and they can be seen going in and out of the buildings all day. There is also a hotel where their families can stay when they visit from Illinois or Virginia. The Witnesses are handsome, well-groomed, well-mannered and impeccably clean, and they wear business clothes and carry briefcases. These characteristics distinguish them from the normal-apartment dwellers to the south of them and even more from the DUMBOites to their north. For seventeen years, even before it acquired its name, DUMBO has been my preferred walking area, especially for the solitary, non-directed sort of walk that is useful for clearing the head and shaking loose any odd ideas or perceptions that have gotten stuck in the cracks. Once past the bridge entrance and the Watchtower, I can slow to a stroll and wander through the narrow cobbled streets, looking at buildings and the waterfront. (Actually, only some of the streets are cobbled, and only because they’ve been neglected so long the asphalt is nearly gone. You can see the tracks down the middle, from the days when trolley cars crossed the bridges.) The buildings, which date from the turn of the last century, are small and rosy brick or concrete-faced. They were built as warehouses and factories. Their architecture is undistinguished; no one would include any of them in a coffee-table book or television special or architectural tour of New York. But their proportions are harmonious, both individually and as a group, they are richly colored, and they sport whimsical architectural details like rosettes and lions’ heads and window arches. Some are decorated with graffiti (“Sad . . . not bored,” reads one enigmatic message) or odd patches of color, but these unauthorized additions don’t seem as threatening as they would in a well-kept neighborhood. My favorite building, the one I wander past most often, is a long, low brick warehouse, decorated with stone five-pointed stars, whose semicircular windows and doorways are covered by metal shutters. The window archways, some of them painted blue and orange, give the impression of eyebrows over closed eyes. The blind Crab Orchard Review ◆ 217
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windows overlook an empty street in front and a little waterfront park in back. Weeds sprout in the doorways. For years, the only living creature I saw go in or out was a cat. What draws me to the building is its scent—a pungent, peppery, intriguing smell that does not grow or fade with the years. Spices were stored there once, and I always suspected that if I could look inside I would see great moldering vats of peppercorns, thyme, oregano, marjoram. The empty lots are strewn with alluring junk. Years ago, when my daughter was ten or eleven and still considered herself an artist, she announced that she wanted to make a junk sculpture. We wheeled a shopping cart to DUMBO and spent an afternoon picking through the lots, retrieving colorful and oddly-shaped industrial waste. We found spaghetti-messes of electrical wire, pieces of what looked like switchboards, bits of machinery, lengths of pipe, oddments we couldn’t identify at all. It was a peak mother-daughter experience—even better than our wildflower-picking walks in the country—and much better than shopping for clothes, which at that age was impossible. We carted our treasures home and dumped them into the bathtub with bleach to remove whatever germs they had picked up outdoors. When we needed the bathtub again I transferred them to a large pail, and there they sat for weeks, waiting for inspiration. Eventually we realized that the pile of junk in the pail was the junk sculpture. DUMBO isn’t all ruins. Probably half the buildings are in good repair and active use, most as the warehouses and light manufacturing plants they were meant to be. Others are offices for government agencies and not-for-profit social service agencies that don’t need to be located near anything in particular. Two or three seem to be apartment buildings. Many old buildings have been carved into studios and rented to artists and craftspeople, who are attracted by the low rents, high ceilings and good light. One artist building has an array of thirty-one separately wired buzzers and intercoms beside its front door. Some of the artists live in their studios, in varying degrees of legality. Six or seven years ago, after my children were in college, my companion and I looked at a live-work studio in one of the quasi-legal buildings. It was enormous—plenty of room for my companion’s woodshop, plenty of living space (though I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted sawdust in the dinner), acres of windows, high ceilings. The tenant who was leaving had added fixtures to make the living space habitable, and he was willing to leave them in place for a reasonable fee. The rent was ridiculously low. We would have had a better living 218 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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space and a workspace for less than the cost of our apartment. And yet . . . we didn’t take it. It wasn’t just the doorman-and-drycleaner issue, either. In the course of the hour or two we spent with the tenant, we realized that most of his spare time and energy went into maintaining his right to live in the studio. He and his fellow artists were waging wars against the landlord, the City, and the State. They made regular pilgrimages to Albany to lobby the State Legislature. They sneaked outdoors in the chilly pre-dawn hours to take down “No Parking” signs which served only to make their lives difficult. (The signs always reappeared in a matter of weeks.) They took the landlord to court every year or so, evidently as a matter of principle. Loft living seemed to be a full-time occupation, and we decided, with a tinge of regret, that it wasn’t an occupation we would choose. Despite the obstacles, the artists have thrived and multiplied. They have made efforts to show their work locally, first in the waterfront park, then in the unfinished first-floor retail space of one of the larger buildings (dirt floor and exposed pipes adding charm to the sculptures), and today in a respectable gallery. For the last few years they have organized an annual “open studio” day when they show their work in their studios or in ad hoc galleries. Much of the work is self-indulgent, heavy on righteousness and irony, but some of it is fresh and wonderful, and it’s exhilarating to see all that creative energy set loose. The first open studio day culminated in a “paint-in” where a dozen or so artists in a large room painted nude models—some were painting the models, others were painting portraits of the models—while an audience watched, drank beer and cheered them on. The paint-in reminded me of the 1960s (before most of the artists were born) and made me both nostalgic for them and very, very glad they were over. The only open space in DUMBO is the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park. Despite its long name, it isn’t much more than an acre. It’s a scruffy patch of grass with a boardwalk, a few benches and picnic tables and some shrubbery thrown in as an afterthought. There’s a fine view of three bridges—Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg—and of the skyline and garbage barges and tugboats and pleasure boats and tourist boats and police boats and miscellaneous boats. Some days you get a sea breeze. The last time I was there, someone (not the Parks Department) had planted a row of grey-green lacy Artemisia at the back of the park, near the spice warehouse, and fenced it off with twelve-inch pickets painted in bright colors. The park is too small to sustain a social scene, but on Crab Orchard Review ◆ 219
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sunny days you see young lovers lying on the grass reading books, parents watching their children climb the sculptures, wistful elders sitting on benches. The feeling of the park is peaceful and comfortable, like a backyard. People don’t go there to be seen or to engage in the complex jockeying for status and power for which New Yorkers are famous. This is probably the only public place in New York where I wouldn’t mind falling asleep. Recently, four swatches of green paint appeared on the sloping roof of the Clock Tower. The Clock Tower is a beautiful concrete-faced loft building topped by a graceful clock tower. The “clocks,” one on each side of the tower, are four round, radial-paned windows with cast-iron clock hands attached to a mechanism which, though less reliable than God’s Time a few blocks away, sometimes works. Eventually the entire roof was painted in the most bilious of the four greens, and the building, which for years had housed government offices upstairs and the dirt-floored art gallery on the ground floor, became a residential cooperative. The apartment whose living room windows are the clock faces was reputed to sell for several million dollars, and the other apartments for lower but comparable amounts. This was new for DUMBO. The New York Times began to run articles about the developer who had renovated the Clock Tower and bought most of the neighboring buildings. Apparently his modus operandi is to follow the artists around New York, buying up their studios and moving rich people into them. Artists generate hipness, a commodity the rich are willing to pay for. Unfortunately, they don’t pay the artists, they pay the real estate developer. And once the artists are gone, the formerly hip neighborhood becomes just another place to buy thousand-dollar jackets and five-thousand-dollar couches. The developer had great plans for the area. The comfortable little waterfront park would be spiffed up and the boardwalk become an esplanade. A hotel designed by a famous European architect and resembling a parking garage would rise on landfill at one end of the park. Upscale housing would be built and movie theaters, high-class stores and recreational facilities would serve the neighborhood and draw middle-class shoppers from all over Brooklyn. But it now appears that the developer was too optimistic, and has scaled back his plans. Mercifully, the hotel seems to have been taken off the table. An alternate plan is being proposed for the waterfront park. But more construction is going on now than in the 220 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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last seventeen years taken together. A few buildings have been torn down. Many more are being gutted and renovated. The place is full of construction workers and construction dumpsters and construction dust. Signs advertise retail and office space for rent. The spice warehouse, part of which was recently taken over for a Parks Department office, is the subject of fervid speculation. “They all want it,” I was told by a ponytailed Hispanic kid taking a smoke break from his lawnmowing detail. “All the developers—for retail, condos, offices. People come here taking pictures all the time. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, everyone.” The end of DUMBO as I know it is in sight, and I’m heartsick about it. Now, this development has to be good for the city: no sane person would argue that letting buildings collapse and young families drift to the exurbs is better than saving the buildings and creating a vibrant new neighborhood. And it’s good for me personally, too. I don’t mean to be coy about this. I intend to shop in the new stores, patronize the new movie theater, visit the refurbished park. I even understand the developer’s urge. The first few times I walked through DUMBO, seventeen years ago, I saw nothing but potential. I saw the buildings restored, I saw traffic and bustle in the streets, I saw awnings and potted trees at the doorways instead of weeds and handpainted signs on metal doors. If I’d had money I would have bought up the whole area right then and brought in the architects and builders the next day. Only after five or ten visits did the potential stop intruding on my vision and allow me to see the actual neighborhood in all its vitality and disorder. Then why am I so sad about the end of DUMBO? If I were an artist packing up my canvases and wondering which neighborhood to discover next, I’d have a right to be angry. But I’m not being dispossessed. I’ll never paint a picture. I’ll never live in a loft. I’m not an urban guerrilla. All I stand to lose are my walks—or rather, the scenery on my walks, since the renovations won’t diminish their exercise value. Some of the reasons for my sadness, I confess, make me a little uneasy. In the late eighteenth century, the British gentry developed a taste for the picturesque. Wildness and disrepair were elevated to aesthetic principles. People constructed fake ruins on their properties for the sake of romantic views during their evening strolls. Jane Austen took delight in skewering these pretensions, like so many Crab Orchard Review ◆ 221
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others. When Edward Ferrars, the level-headed young man in Sense and Sensibility, protests, “I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. . . . I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. . . . a troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world,” the sensitive heroine, Marianne, cringes in embarrassment and wonders what on earth her sister sees in this fellow. I feel myself becoming a Marianne, and I don’t like it. Dabbling in nostalgia on the cheap is a favorite New York pastime, most evident today in the handwringing over the Disneyfication of Times Square, in which I also participate with enthusiasm (the handwringing, not the Disneyfication—I avoided Times Square when it was full of peep shows and dangerous characters, and I avoid it equally today now that it’s a wholesome tourist attraction, but I’m much more upset about it being a wholesome tourist attraction). Then there’s the element of secrecy. This is another common New York trait. Everything in this city is so public—so photographed, filmed, written about, praised in song and verse, vilified on late-night television, gossiped about—that New Yorkers prize any little corner of it they don’t have to share with the rest of the world. DUMBO was not unknown to the mass media. I’ve recognized favorite streetscapes in movies like Scent of a Woman and Once Upon a Time in America. But the area remains anonymous in these scenes, unlike the way that, say, the Empire State Building always plays itself in movies. Most outsiders and even many New Yorkers had never seen or heard about it. I valued DUMBO’s hiddenness, and find I am giving it up with extremely poor grace. In fact, I never would have thought to write about it, and thus expose it to public view, if the developers hadn’t done that already. But I’m faced with the uncomfortable fact that these streets were never mine to hide. What I can mourn with a clear conscience is the loss of variety. Just as agribusiness has made food taste alike and the automobile has turned rural America into a long strip mall—and just as the burgeoning human population seems to have crowded out all animal life except rats, pigeons and cockroaches—the New York streetscape has been homogenized by modern retailing. When I moved to the city in the mid-seventies, every neighborhood had a distinct look. You nad no problem figuring out where you were in the city. Dress codes, cultural attitudes, stores, architecture varied wildly almost from block to block. A quarter century later we are far more uniform. The Mom-and-Pop stores are going or gone, chain stores are ascendant, 222 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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and every neighborhood looks just like the one you live in. Quality may have improved—you do get better coffee at Starbuck’s—but at the cost of spontaneity, visual interest, adventure. Why leave your own neighborhood if you aren’t going to see anything new? I’m waiting for the pendulum to swing back. Someday it will. Just when it seemed you couldn’t find any beer but Budweiser and Heineken, the microbreweries arrived on the scene, and now my local deli carries dozens of beers, many of them actually distinguishable from one another. Maybe—I hope—while the developers turn their attention to cleaning up DUMBO, they will neglect other neighborhoods whose residents and businesspeople, going about their daily lives, are adding quirks and oddities and unplanned bits of scenery, roughing the smooth edges left by the corporate planners, and raising the level of disorder to whatever it takes to keep us from going crazy.
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Book Reviews
Honig, Lucy. The Truly Needy and Other Stories. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. 205 pages. $22.50. In “No Friends, All Strangers,” the first story in Lucy Honig’s The Truly Needy and Other Stories, the narrator says, “. . . if I concentrate on a person I can feel what he feels. . . . Like a guy who’s reading the racing pages, his whole self is in it, I can feel his gambling greed like it was in my own bones.” This observation is a preview of the way Honig carefully depicts human nature in her collection—a collection where the characters often continue to remain strangers to one another by failing to overcome the assumptions they make based upon class and ethnic backgrounds. The narrator of “No Friends, All Strangers” works as a shampooer in a hair salon. When a has-been screenwriter comes in one day for a haircut, the narrator is unimpressed with his brushes with the rich and famous. She tells him bluntly that she did not like one of his movies and turns him down when he offers to introduce her to Warren Beatty. She says to him, “I fill up on people I don’t know, before I ever get to friends.” Though we never see her befriend anyone in the story, by the end there is a hopeful note about the possibility of people coming together. In the last scene, her subway train gets delayed and she starts singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” Eventually, several other stranded subway passengers join in: “We sang the chorus, somebody else started in to hum it, too, followed by a couple more while [a woman’s strong contralto] kept up the lead. Then I knew that nothing bad would ever happen in this train, and together we were all so brave!” The protagonist of the title story is a middle-aged woman named Rita, who directs a faltering social services agency. Rita, a veteran of ’60s protests, questions where the idealism she and her friends once shared has disappeared to. One day while sorting through a box of donated clothes at work, she decides to keep a cashmere sweater for herself. Later she realizes that the sweater previously belonged to one of her agency’s wealthy board members. Rita feels 224 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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she deserves the sweater since it is the type of extravagance her past ‘radical’ friends who went into the private sector now possess, but one that she has never known. She finds herself questioning her many years of charity work when a homeless woman, Deirdre, starts going through a dumpster outside Rita’s apartment at night. Rita starts collecting cans and giving them to Deirdre to encourage her to look for recyclables somwhere else. Rita eventually starts giving Deirdre food and telling her about problems at the agency. The more Rita talks to Deirdre, the more Rita realizes how detached she’s become from the problems she once hoped to solve: “‘I don’t know, Dee, sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it, carrying on the struggle these days when hardly anyone cares. It’s so goddamn lonely.’ ” Though Rita eventually gives the cashmere sweater to Deirdre, there is never more than a passing connection between the two of them. By the end of the story, Rita still can’t tell one homeless person digging through the dumpster in the alley from another. In “Refuge,” one of the most powerful pieces in this collection, Savvy, a twenty-something Cambodian refugee, chooses to run away from her family and live on the streets rather than follow through with an arranged marriage. Following a bridal shower, Savvy finds herself panicking on the train ride home: “Though it had been true all along, suddenly I knew it: I had nowhere of my own.” She looks at the lingerie and other gifts and thinks, “. . . they were the first things in my American life that demanded a privacy of my own self.” Honig moves skillfully from Savvy’s days as a young girl in Cambodia during “Pol Pot time,” to her life as an American officeworker, to her struggles to survive on the streets. Savvy’s reasons for running away seem as complicated as the life that has forced her to adapt to its changing circumstances. She sees “nowhere of [her] own” in the future arranged for her, but the freedom she leaves everything behind to find is an uncaring and impersonal place to be. Honig offers no easy answers to the many social injustices she portrays in The Truly Needy and Other Stories. While the political nature of these stories could lead to a lesser author creating wooden characters and didactic plots, Honig creates a depth in her characters which takes them well beyond the roles of figureheads for their allotted class or ethnicity, and she allows their stories to move in unexpected directions. —Reviewed by John Wallace
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Book Reviews
Addonizio, Kim. Tell Me. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2000. 96 pages. $12.50. In Tell Me, a book of startling range and clarity, the speaker of Kim Addonizio’s poems possesses an ability to speak with authority on everything from the heavens to the garbage dump. Addonizio focuses without pretense on barroom drunks, dying salmon, angels, and par ting lovers; her poems establish relationships, an interconnectedness among all these things. This sweeping consciousness seems to overwhelm the speaker at times. In the book’s first poem, “The Numbers,” she admits not knowing “how God can bear / seeing everything at once.” Similarly, in “Quantum,” which appears a few poems later, Addonizio writes: You know how hard it is sometimes just to walk on the streets downtown, how everything enters you the way the scientists describe it—photons streaming through bodies, caroming off the air, the impenetrable brick of buildings an illusion—sometimes you can feel how porous you are, how permeable, and the man lurching in circles on the sidewalk, cutting the space around him with a tin can and saying Uhh! Uhhhh! Uhh! over and over is part of it, and the one in gold chains leaning against the glass of the luggage store is, and the one who steps toward you from his doorway, meaning to ask something apparently simple, like What’s the time, something you know you can no longer answer . . . The poem’s closing image, that of eating a grocery store apple while looking out “at the immense and meaningless blue,” suggests an allusion to the forbidden fruit of Genesis. Images of eating and drinking occur frequently in the collection, not only as depictions of people gaining sustenance or getting drunk, but also as sacred rituals of imbibing, even when these rituals are solitary moments in the din of everyday life. In “Glass,” the speaker wants “to pour / the words burning into you.” Throughout Tell Me, the drinking often seems to be an attempt to satisfy an unquenchable thirst, as in the poems that depict a literal love affair with alcohol, such as “Affair” and “The Divorcée and Gin,” or as in the following lines from “Blue Door”: 226 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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Nothing I’ll say will make you stay with me, nothing erase how you’ll turn toward me, offering the wooden spoon so that I get up, and come to you, and taste that salt on my tongue. The poems in Tell Me move in startling and delightful ways. For example, in “Glass” we see “someone sitting alone and absolutely absorbed / by whatever he’s seeing in the glass in front of him.” After offering that this drinker might be “some . . . lost / angel who recklessly threw it all over,” the speaker commands us, “Forget that loser.” In “Beginning With His Body and Ending in a Small Town,” the speaker recalls an intimate catalogue of her lover’s body parts, then says: . . . I’m still seeing his face the night it closed to me forever like a failed business, iron grillwork across the door, dirty windows, trash scattered over the floor and the fixtures taken out, I turned away and stumbled down the street, the one bar was open, the saddest bar in the world . . . Kim Addonizio clearly knows how to work a turn. Other poems to note are the sonnet “Therapy” and the pantoums “A Childhood,” “Spill,” and “The Revered Poet,” in which she uses the form’s repetitions to talk about revision and change. Tell Me demands, moreover, active participation from its reader. From the imperative title poem to the postmodern “Collapsing Poem,” in which speaker/writer and reader cross over the barrier of words and become actors in the poem—“. . . that’s why this poem won’t get finished unless / you drag me from it . . .”—, the collection insists that its audience not merely engage in reading a book of poems, but actively, intellectually involve itself in experiencing Addonizio’s poetic world. This involvement is both entertaining and enlightening. —Reviewed by Amy Kucharik
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Belieu, Erin. One Above & One Below. Port Townsend , WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000. 85 pages. $14.00. Erin Belieu establishes the self-assured eventfulness that characterizes her second book of poems, One Above & One Below, from the opening lines: “Just as I’ve got him / going down, his soul tidy / as a presbyterian, the clean / bubble rising from his tongue . . .” This image of a drowning man gives way to an invocation of a muse who is equated with “the gorgeous dykes / who rule my health club locker room,” a transformation typical of Belieu’s idiosyncratic yet accessible approach to the contemporary lyric. She deftly juxtaposes different realities without ever leaving the languages of the places we live in. These are poems about our lives—female and male, rural and urban—which use wide-ranging points of view to critically examine and question our emotional underpinnings. Belieu’s talent for moving between these different perspectives allows her to explore uncomfortable truths. In “Wayward Girl,” the third-person speaker observes a pregnant teenager in “the Dairy Barn parking lot”: It is late summer and a dribble of ice cream spots her maternity dress where a pattern of washed-out daffodils wants to decorate her belly. The omniscient narrator relies upon the palpable rendering of details— “in the back of a candy-red Corvair, / on the coat pile in any blue suburban bedroom / as the party music drifts down the hallway”—but this lyrical description serves rather than overwhelms its subject. A later poem in the collection, “There You Are,” relies on the second-person point of view to position the reader in its uncomfortable situation. The poem describes a meal where “You’ve been listening / to your dinner lose / its head . . .” as the waiter, “Your cripple,” plays “La Marseillaise” and then “When the Saints Go Marching In” from his nose. The epigraph sets the poem in “Togo, West Africa,” but Belieu goes beyond merely portraying this subject as exotic. The reader could be anywhere where courtesy and brutality co-exist: “A terrible / gift is a gift in a terrible / world.” Similarly, Belieu is never pat or predictable with her recurring erotic themes. She’s as comfortable evoking the conviction of a 228 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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wolfhound in heat (“News of the War”) as she is the residual passions of a middle-aged professor (“The Real Lives of Lovers”). In the stunning “Choose Your Garden” (chosen by Rita Dove to appear in The Best American Poetry 2000), she exposes the power issues underlying eroticism. The poem’s speaker, seeking peace and relaxation, tells how she chose to visit a Japanese garden over the “hardly mastered urges” of a Victorian garden. Looking deep below the surface of aesthetic expectations, she found “a slaughter / of camellias” and other ominous garden features which led to the revelation of a “teahouse . . . where even now . . . a woman sinks down / on all fours, having loosened the knot / at the waist of her robe.” When you expect unmediated beauty, Belieu delivers emotional complexity. In this way, her poems are true to life—true to the many subjects she culls from her keen awareness of multiple geographies: the Great Plains, Paris, the second circle of Dante’s Inferno (“Francesca’s Complaint”). Erin Belieu is no stranger to recognition for her poems. Her first book, Infanta, was selected for the National Poetry Series in 1995. But, more importantly, her work transcends the expectations of trained literary sensibilities and speaks to all of us. —Reviewed by Douglas Haynes
Hamer, Forrest. Middle Ear. Berkeley, CA: The Roundhouse Press, 2000. 53 pages. $12.50. Forrest Hamer’s second book, Middle Ear, delves into the understanding that things aren’t always what they appear to be. Specifically, what we hear—or believe we hear—is not always what’s going on. For Hamer, sound is relative; indicative of the truths behind all we perceive. Listening becomes an interpretive act where the sense of hearing is only a starting point toward the idea of communication. Middle Ear is a meditation, an attempt to understand the beginning of living—and more importantly, the middle of living—and how all that is perceived, all that is experienced comes together (or apart) with observation. Though the perspective often seems to be one of this ‘middle’ life, the collection ranges from childhood memories (“Twelve”) to meditations on visits home (“Annual Visit from the Quiet, Unmarried Son”). Regardless of time or place, the poems seek to reconcile the self with the outer world, implementing 20/20 hindsight. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 229
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The first section of the book, “Crossroads,” begins with the poem “Arrival,” a mediation on living through listening: They say Robert Johnson couldn’t play that guitar one lick until he gave his soul away, and that his voice near itched. ........................................... They say before he was cursed to live on his belly, give up the terrible wings, Lucifer was loved. They say that night he became a black man offering vision, a faithful woman, then fame, and each time Johnson refused. . . . Through the folk-experience of Robert Johnson, Hamer’s poems become their own 21st century mythology, rooted in misperception and the blues. This theme is upheld through each section of the book, mirroring Robert Johnson’s own progressions of desire and achievement, and finally, inevitable decline. “Bargain,” the second section of the book, focuses on history. Through this recognition of the past, the poems document the accomplishment that survives in the present. “Goldsboro Narratives,” a series of vignettes in this section centering on childhood, are executed with crafted sound and consideration. The raw truth of the memories is almost journalistic. There is no glossing, no dumbing down of the facts: a testament to the understanding attained later in life. “Goldsboro Narrative #4: My father’s Viet Nam tour near over” is an example of the clarity of memory: The young dead soldier was younger than they thought: the 14-year-old passed himself as seventeen, forged a father’s signature. In the Army no more than months, he was killed early the week before a cease-fire. The boy was someone-I-somewhat-knew’s older brother and someone-my-motherhad-taught’s son, and, lying in the standard Army casket, an American flag draped over the unopened half, 230 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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the boy didn’t look like anyone anybody would know . . . These narratives, like many of the poems in the book, seek to find truth through paying close attention to what is. Regardless that the “boy was someone-I-somewhat-knew’s / older brother,” the narrator of these poems recognizes the underlying facts, simply by acknowledging them. It is not clear whether or not these absolute truths were understood at the time, but the poems show they are now. The final section, “The Tuning,” seeks to resolve the past—the sacrifice and gain—with the present. Like a craftsman who has created an instrument, the final section allows Hamer to hear the understanding he has created, adjusting the poems in the book as if they were sliding scales. The poem, “Instrument,” illustrates Hamer’s resolution: Each note has its noise—approximations, clack Each finger keens against slack wire. And each noise notes this memory: Loneliest in things: wrested triumph,
Next and necessary loss.
The book concludes with the lyrical clarity of the final section, the necessary understanding of present perception being the result of experience. All of the histories and memories, misappropriations and purity conveyed in the previous sections are finalized through the truth of it all. In the end, Middle Ear becomes a collection in which each poem is a memory, each memory a part of the mythology of living. And Hamer gives all of it to us; but we still have to listen to hear it. —Reviewed by Adrian Harris
Laux, Dorianne. Smoke. Rochester N.Y: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2000. 72 pages. $12.50. In her third collection of poems, Smoke, Dorianne Laux wrings the longing out of the Tzigane saying she’s chosen as an epigraph: Crab Orchard Review ◆ 231
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“To want the world is fire; to obtain it, smoke.” Smoke stares relentlessly into the face of loss and finds memories of lovemaking and humor emerging from behind the thick veil death has laid down on the poet’s heart. At times, the poems seem addicted to detail, an attempt to fill the emptiness. In these spots, the poems are heavy; but Laux carries them with strong narratives and a rare ability to stack image upon image. One after another she lets the images speak, as in “Last Words”: “a lover slipped from my life / the way a rope slithers from your grip, the ocean / folding over it, your fingers stripped of flesh.” The sections of the book, “Smoke” and “Fire,” serve as a frame. They are two sides of a koan Laux is struggling with throughout: life/death, separation/union, pleasure/pain. What hinges these sections is the longing lingering relentlessly against the mystery that falls between them. We breathe in this longing in the title poem: Then you pull it in again, the vein colored smoke, and blow it up toward the ceiling you can’t see where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold, like the ghost the night will become. After surrounding us with loss, Laux embraces life again and gives us experiences of union. The poem “Prayer” is literal and figurative lovemaking. It is an intimate plea appealing to Jesus to embrace the romance with Mary Magdalene. On a deeper level, the woman in the poem comes to represent the world as it is—with pots and chairs to be fixed, and “her eyes fierce and complicated as the truth.” It seems for Laux, if there is something to transcend to, it is not by way of renouncing the world: “Sweet Jesus, let her save you, let her take / your hands and hold them to her breasts / slip the sandals from your feet, lay your body down.” There seems to be no distance between the profound and profane. Love is attention to detail—everything in and around is what has created us. Again and again, the world and individual merge as they do in “The Shipfitter’s Wife”: Then I’d open his clothes and take the whole day inside me—the ship’s gray sides, the miles of copper pipe, 232 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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the voice of the foreman clanging off the hull’s silver ribs. What is holy? This challenge floats unspoken behind the poems, and Laux answers it throughout, working against expectations and reaching for reverence in the most naked details. In her poem “The Word,” Laux speaks directly: “you called it screwing, what we did nights.” Each stacked image takes the reader through nuances of meaning: “Corks easing up through / the wet necks of wine bottles. A silver lid / sealed tight on a jar of skinned prunes.” In the section “Fire,” the poem “Pearl” is an unforgettable requiem to Janis Joplin. Laux describes Joplin as “nothing much, plain-faced,” but by the end of the poem you feel like you’ve met a honky-tonk version of Joan of Arc—a woman scorched and made by her circumstance. Laux shows us Joplin’s comet trail, how she tore out of oblivion to give us life: “wailing like giving birth, like being eaten alive / from the inside or crooning like the first child / abandoned by God.” The poem seeks to touch the deepest pain, and Laux transforms the story of Joplin’s life into a dedication that burns as Janis did when she “burned herself up for us”: That child, that girl, that rawboned woman, stranded in a storm on a blackened stage like a house on fire. In the last poem, “Life is Beautiful,” Laux props herself in front of life’s abundant, beautifully gruesome paradox, drawing it in detail: Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Her willingness to focus on the beauty in life that we usually view as ugly—and her ability to render it in celebration—make Smoke a journey worth taking. —Reviewed by Melinda Yeomans
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Wachtel, Chuck. What Happens to Me. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 2000. 128 pages. $13.00. Chuck Wachtel’s latest book, What Happens to Me, is another example of his continuing search for the lyric inherent in both demotic experience and demotic language. Wachtel has previously published two novels, a collection of short stories and novellas, and a collection of poems. What Happens to Me demonstrates the eclectic talents of this writer through the collection’s varied forms. The poems, prose poems, and short fiction interspersed throughout the book challenge the reader to see the fluid connections between thought and expression in Wachtel’s work. The title Wachtel gives to the first of the three sections of his book is telling: “Hand on His Chest / Actually, His Shirt.” For Wachtel, the act of observing seems at least as active and complex as the act of writing. Implicit in much of this collection is this guiding principle: that while “what happens to me” may be altered by memory, produced by dream, or entailed by chance, the recording of these real or imagined experiences and associations—the creations and prevarications of reality—is the generator of lyricism, not only the work of the poet. This principle proves to be a much more powerful source of the beautiful than the noisier equipage of some poems and stories. With little of the linguistic flash or flat-line Anglicisms that seem so prevalent today, Wachtel makes language that surprises and delights. The title of the poem “Entangled in Life” comes from an epigraph by Kafka that Wachtel uses to suggest the superficiality that unites a set of seemingly unconnected observations. In the visually and sonically compact tercet, “the mail truck double-parked / in front of the square / brick three-story building,” Wachtel portrays a scene with an account that bubbles with unobtrusive alliteration, rhythm, and slant rhyme. He ends this section of the poem with “the three / satellite dishes, even-spaced / in a row on the front lawn.” In these lines, we see in the upward-facing parabolic dishes an image of rising and ascension that will often recur in the collection. In the poem “Archaeology,” he transforms a funny and affectionate meditation on a much chewed-on plunger (which includes what sort of animal did it, and where) into, by some syntactic circuitousness, a love lyric:
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. . . —is this too specific, too unto itself to bear the kind of weight that in song, and in memory, will help me stay here, in this house, and in all this time, all this time, with you? The short fictions that are interspersed with the poems often read more like poems than stories. There is much poetry in the fictions and much detail and event in the poems, although there is seldom a feeling of sentiment or automatic wistfulness. The fictions are often about the nature of fictions and stories, which can be a deadly and schematic program; but, again, Wachtel’s ideas themselves seem to encourage a technique that precludes boredom. “On Fate,” a story of mistaken identities, begins with the narrator receiving several phone calls at home for the Roy Campanella Scholarship Foundation. This occurence and the memory of his father reading a news story about the arrest of Roy Campanella’s son leads the narrator to call one of the students, a high school girl who had left a message on his answering machine. The girl tells the narrator a story of how her English teacher won over three thousand dollars in the lottery, and, with her winnings, took a trip to London. The teacher told her class about sitting next to an unpleasant-looking woman on a ferry to Kew Gardens, an event that taught the teacher “‘the expressions people held on their faces didn’t always mean the same things they did here, in the United States.’” The girl tells the narrator her teacher “‘discovered that different accents aren’t just in the words’”: “She said, this is why it all happened. And we’re like, what happened? And she said, so she could tell us about the discovery she made on the trip she took with the money she won in the lottery.” In What Happens to Me, Chuck Wachtel gives us his accounts of the world seen, unseen, dreamed and invented, in words that are engaging but unsentimental, challenging and yet still affecting and bright. —Reviewed by Fred Von Drasek Crab Orchard Review ◆ 235
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Bosselaar, Laure-Anne, editor. Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2000. 265 pages. $16.95. In the introduction of Urban Nature, Emily Hiestand describes the city as “a place on a continuum with fields and cedar forests and tundras, a place with its own authentic nature.” Her sentiment, that the city is in fact a separate and undeniable human rendition of nature, is echoed by the poem “Advice” by Czeslaw Milosz, which precedes the anthology: “We created a second Nature in the image of the first / so as not to believe we live in paradise.” As Milosz states, through urbanization we have created a “second Nature” for ourselves, and several of the poets in the anthology seem to share his vision and explore not only the myriad of life within the confines of the “second Nature,” but the way in which these varied examples of life all interact. The collection is divided into five sections, each examining the nuances of the urban landscape, but more accurately, exploring the way in which the larger urban creation and wildlife—however wildlife can be defined—co-exist. The first section, “Cityscape,” begins with the poem “Nature Poetry,” by Meg Kearney: Bill hated the separation implied by the term. “What’s this?” he’d ask, gesturing toward what lay beyond our classroom window. From “NAC” 6–303 in Harlem, Manhattan blinked and glowed like a floor of stalagmite, lit by its own desire to exist. . . . The poem, like the collection itself, is an address to our conception of nature and of wildlife in the landscape of the city. The most difficult thing to ascertain is where the nature and the city each begin and end. Many of the poems in the anthology revolve around the concept of creating or re-creating our definition of nature. They are not the rolling pastoral poems of people living in the country or suburbs, with green lawns and backyard gardens. The poems take place in the midst of the concrete, in alleys, in polluted rivers. Linda Hogan’s poem, “Potholes,” depicts an eco-system developing at night around a rain-filled pothole: 236 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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The potholes are full of light and stars, the moon’s many faces. Mice drink there in the streets. The skunks of night drift by. They swallow the moon. While the expected assortment of city wildlife—dogs, squirrels, pigeons, mice, cockroaches—appear frequently in the poems, it is the wildlife redefined as urban that makes this collection successful. Turkeys, armadillos, and monkeys can be part of this menagerie; even airplanes imagined as flying dragons can recast our concept of what “wildlife” might be found if we chose to see it. But, at its best, the collection also challenges us to do more than simply open our eyes to these possibilities. Gail White’s poem, “Dead Armadillos,” is an example of this: There is no Save the Armadillo Society. The Sierra Club and Greenpeace take no interest. There are too damned many armadillos, and beauty, like money, is worth more when it’s scarce. Give us time. Let enough of them try to cross the road. When we’re down to the last half dozen, we’ll see them with the eyes of God. The poems’ approaches to these possibilities vary widely—from the sensual grotesqueries of C. K. Williams’ “Bone,” with “tiny creatures still gnawing at the shreds of / decomposing meat” to the meditation of Mary Oliver’s “Swans on the River Ayr,” which are seen as “ailing spirits clipped to live in cities”; from Martín Espada’s “My Cockroach Lover” to Derek Walcott’s “XLII” from Midsummer, where Michigan Avenue transforms in the poet’s mind into “a snow slope with pines / as shaggy as the manes of barbarian ponies”—this collection redefines our concept of nature and the places we find ourselves in it. And it is the ability to foster re-envisioning—of city, of nature, of our place within it all—that is this collection’s greatest attribute. —Reviewed by Adrian Harris
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Realuyo, Bino A., editor. The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City. New York, NY: The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1999. 472 pages. $19.95. What do a toy Yellow Cab, a Statue of Liberty snow globe, and a plastic Godzilla have in common? Aside from being tchotchkas, they all are on the cover of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City, a collection of poetry, fiction, essays and art by more than sixty artists and writers. In his attempt to write an introduction to the anthology (a piece entitled, “Not a Travel Essay, but an Attempt to Write an Introduction Fusing Landscape, Musings and Cyberescapisms—”), editor Bino A. Realuyo writes from Cuernavaca, Mexico: Unlike humid New York City, there is air here, in this city famous for its eternal spring, where mosquitoes outnumber the rumormongers in the plaza. The book is in between both seasons, or perhaps it is both. It is an anthology of heat and shadow. A melange of anger, and the lack of it. Of truth and disguise. It will be an out-of-synch drag queen. A New York one, glittering just the same. There are many places that glitter in this anthology. Lan Samantha Chang’s “San” is the story of a daughter whose immigrant father walks away from his family with his daughter’s “gaudy” red flower-patterned umbrella. “San” takes its title from a word in Mandarin which means both “umbrella” and “to fall apart.” The daughter tells us that, according to superstition, this is what will happen to your life if you take an umbrella “without paying for it.” Pico Iyer’s essay “New York: A City in Black and White” likens the city to everything from the black and white of the editorial pages of the New Yorker, “from which all color has been tactfully removed,” to the arty squalor of the film school projects of Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. New York is “a cultural pawnshop cluttered with bric-a-brac; a reality so exaggerated that it becomes a kind of surreality.” Jean Fong Kwok’s story “Disguises” illustrates how culture and language can alter the perception of reality when the protagonist calls on the goddess of her necklace to protect her from a pale blue-eyed mugger on a New York subway. The amulet is the only part of her mother that she could bring from her homeland. 238 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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The gallery of visual art included in this anthology displays a fusion of cultures, exploring the world of the artists’ lineage in an attempt to reconcile that world with the artists’ own. Chanika Svetvilas’ “My English” uses a variety of printed media—like a state lottery ticket and a school textbook—to create a satire on the information age. Arlan Huang’s “100 Smooth Stones for Grandfather” etches hand blown glass with Chinese characters to link back to his grandfather’s stories of his youth in China. The poem “Woolworth’s” by Sung Rno captures the longing felt in this place between cultures, an experience that ultimately transcends any particular culture: At last, finally, we see the frontier that lies ahead for what it is, the air calling itself to us here, now, thereafter—a descending order of angels, storebought coupons pasted to the greased combs of our heads. In the back of your mouth caramel sticks to your teeth, settles into a permanence, cold, it feels metallic, altarlike, and the music from the electric carousel drowns your ears in cotton candy. This being your Sunday dream come true, what you’ve been saving for . . . This collection distinguishes between keepsakes and trinkets— invaluable reminders of the past versus cheap tokens of place. In these moments of placement and displacement, the artists—either emigrants bridging homeland and colony, or descendants of immigrants negotiating contrasting identities—are all as Amitava Kumar describes in the poem “India Day Parade on Madison Avenue”: “citizens of General Electric.” The work included in this anthology questions how much place can imprint identity, how landscape can influence character, and how a sense of place connects with a sense of self and a sense of connection to community. Through an exploration of cultural, psychological, philosophical, physiological, and geographical terrain, The NuyorAsian Anthology explores an American array of emotion or the lack of it; of truth or the evasion of it. —Reviewed by Terri Fletcher
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Contributors’ Notes
Opal Palmer Adisa writes what writes her. Author of the forthcoming novel No Regrets, she lives constantly with characters in her head who nag at her. Her other recent works are It Begins with Tears, a novel, and Leaf-of-Life, a poetry collection. William Allen is the author of The Man on the Moon (Persea Books) and Sevastopol:On Photographs of War (Xenos Books). He is a poet, teacher, and visual artist. His work can be visited online at <www.ekphrases.com>. Elizabeth Alexander’s third collection of poems, Antebellum Dream Book, is forthcoming in Fall 2001 from Graywolf Press. She teaches in the African-American Studies Department at Yale University. José Manuel Arango lives in retirement outside Medellín, Colombia, with plenty of time for his grandchildren. His books include Este lugar de la noche, Signos, Cantiga, and Poemas. Tina Barr’s poems about Cairo have appeared in Chelsea, and boundary 2. Others are forthcoming in the Southern Review. She teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis. Dorothy Barresi is the author of All of the Above and The PostRapture Diner. Her poems and essay/reviews appear in numerous literary journals, and she has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She chairs the creative writing program at California State University, Northridge, where she is Professor of English. She lives in Los Angeles. Jan Beatty’s first book, Mad River, won the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her new collection of poems, Boneshaker, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in Spring 2002. Earl S. Braggs is UC Foundation Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is the author of Hat 240 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
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Dancer Blue, the 1992 Anhinga Poetry Prize winner; Walking Back from Woodstock; and House on Fontanka. Geoffrey Brock’s poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, and Poetry. A volume of his translations of Cesare Pavese’s poetry is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. Eleanor M. Brown is a freelance writer specializing in website content. Her fiction has appeared in Clean Sheets Erotica Magazine and Zaftig: Well-Rounded Erotica (Cleis Press). Victoria Chang is a poet living in San Francisco, California. She was educated at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford University. She won a Hopwood Award at Michigan and has published poetry in the Cream City Review, Allegheny Review, and Hawaii Review. Isabel Cole, a native of New York, lives in Berlin, Germany. Her translations have appeared in the Edinburgh Review and the online journal Archipelago. Stephen Cramer’s poems and essays have most recently appeared in the Journal, High Plains Literary Review, Brilliant Corners, and Confrontation. He lives in New York City. Sharon Dilworth is the author of two collections of short stories, The Long White and Women Drinking Benedictine. She lives in Pittsburgh. Cornelius Eady’s most recent book is Brutal Imagination (G. P. Putnam’s Sons). He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Eden Elieff has published fiction and nonfiction in Quarter After Eight, Mississippi Review, Mid-American Review, and Sycamore Review, which nominated her work for a Pushcart Prize. Amina Lolita Gautier is a native of Brooklyn, New York of PuertoCrab Orchard Review ◆ 241
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Rican and African-American heritage. She is currently earning her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her fiction has appeared in the Iconoclast and is forthcoming in African Voices, B&A: New Fiction, and Timber Creek Review. Valentina Gnup’s poems have appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, Nimrod, Charlotte Poetry Review, Blue Collar Review and elsewhere. She has a chapbook, A Certain Piece of Sky (Mille Grazie Press). She is in the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program and is the assistant editor of SOLO. Jeffrey Greene is the author of two books of poetry, American Spirituals and To the Left of the Worshiper, and a memoir, French Spirits, forthcoming from Morrow/HarperCollins. Anthony Grooms came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and has written fiction and poetry about the period. Having family in Birmingham, Alabama, he has used that city as a setting for much of his writing. He is the author of Trouble No More: Stories (LaQuesta Press), Ice Poems (Poetry Atlanta Press), and Bombingham, due from Free Press in Fall 2001. Dolores Hayden’s poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, Southwest Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is also the author of The Power of Place (MIT Press) and Playing House (Robert L. Barth). Kate Lynn Hibbard earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. She has won the Miriam McFall Starlin Poetry Prize, the SASE Summer Poetry Contest, and a McKnight Artist Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Seattle Review, Water~Stone, and Many Mountains Moving. She teaches at various colleges and universities in the Twin Cities. Robin Jacobson has lived all her life in and around East and West coast cities. Co-founder of the Stephen Eisen Memorial Youth Prizes in Poetry and Fiction, she teaches creative writing privately, and through California Poets in the Schools and the Poets & Writers’ Senior Project. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Montserrat Review, Poets On, Atlanta Review, Poetry Flash, Earth’s Daughters, Hard 242 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Contributors’ Notes
Love: Writings on Violence & Intimacy, and Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure. A former writer-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, she is the author of Eye Drops, winner of the Power of Poetry Chapbook Competition from Ruah. Joy Katz’s poems, essays, and reviews appear in Southwest Review, Antioch Review, Parnassus, Pleiades, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and is on staff at Business Week Magazine. Irmgard Keun, see page 121. Ruth Ellen Kocher’s poems have appeared in African American Review, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her first collection of poetry, Desdemona’s Fire, won the Naomi Long Madgett Award from Lotus Press. Her forthcoming collection, When the Moon Knows Your Wandering, won the Green Rose Prize in Poetry and will be published by New Issues Press. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Karen Kovacik teaches poetry, writing and literature at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Her first collection of poems, Beyond the Velvet Curtain, was published by Kent State University Press. Her heart belongs to Warsaw. Leonard Kress is the author of Sappho’s Apples (HarrowGate Press) and has recent work in Beloit Poetry Review, North American Review, and Crab Orchard Review. He teaches Art History and Religion at Owens College in northwest Ohio. Jeffrey Levine’s first book, Mortal, Everlasting, won the 2000 Transcontinental Poetry Award. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in the Journal, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Poetry International, Quarterly West, Barrow Street, Many Mountains Moving, Notre Dame Review, New Orleans Review, 5 A.M., Mississippi Review, and Kestrel, which awarded him their 2000 poetry prize for a group of poems. He is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Tupelo Press, a non-profit literary press located in Dorset, Vermont. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 243
Contributors’ Notes
Jeffrey Loo has a chapbook from Ashland Poetry Press, Strangers in a Homeland, and has recently published poems and a story in Many Mountains Moving; his poems have also appeared in Inkwell Magazine, Crossconnect, Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places: An Anthology, Green Mountain Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. He teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia. Patrick Madden lives with his wife and two children in Athens, Ohio, where he is a Ph.D. student in English at Ohio University. His latest trip to Montevideo produced interviews with Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and with several participants in the world’s largest mass prison escape. Shahé Mankerian won the Henri Coulette Memorial Award in 1999 from the Academy of American Poets. He was recently published in the bilingual Armenian-American anthology, Birthmark. He received his Master of Arts in English from California State University, Los Angeles. Currently, he teaches 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Armenian students about the virtues of becoming rebels, subtly. Anna Meek’s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, Connecticut Poetry Review, and in the anthology Prairie Volcano. In 1999, her manuscript Acts of Contortion was selected as a finalist for the National Poetry Series; currently, it is a finalist for the 2001 Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes. She works as a freelance writer and as a professional violinist in Minneapolis. Philip Metres’ poems and translations of Russian poets have appeared in Artful Dodge, Crab Orchard Review, Field, Frank, Glas, Luna, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Orleans Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Ploughshares, Spoon River Poetry Review, Willow Springs, and in the anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (Zephyr Press). He is currently a graduate student in English at Indiana University. Adela Najarro is completing a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at Western Michigan University. Her poems have appeared in the Guild, Cimarron Review, and Idiom. Originally from San Francisco, she moved to the Midwest to see what this snow thing is all about.
244 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Contributors’ Notes
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the chapbook Fishbone, the winner of the Snail’s Pace Press Award. She completed an MFA at Ohio State University, and her poems and essays are forthcoming in Quarterly West and Mid-American Review. Soo Jin Oh is a writer living in Astoria, New York. Her work has appeared in Sojourner, Hanging Loose, and Writing Away Here, an anthology of Korean-American writers. Melissa Peters lives in New York City. Her poems have recently appeared in Double Take, Poetry Northwest, LIT, and Poet Lore. Mary Pinard teaches writing and literature at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, and Nebraska Review. In 1998, she won the Emily Dickinson Poetry Contest. In 1999, she was awarded the Nebraska Review Poetry Prize. She was born and raised in Seattle. Katherine Poltorak is from St. Petersburg, Russia, and now resides in Dallas, Texas. Nicole Louise Reid has work appearing in the Chattahoochee Review, New York Stories, and New Orleans Review. Chapters of her novel, In the Breeze of Passing Things, are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Washington Square, American Literary Review, Willow Springs, and Yemassee. Her fiction and poetry have won awards from the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Short Story Competition, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Society, and George Mason University, where she will receive her MFA in May 2001. Not Willing to Whisper, her anthology of stories about redheads, is due out from Red Hen Press in 2002. Susanna Roxman was born in Stockholm, has Scottish roots, and writes in English. Her most recent poetry collection, Broken Angels (Dionysia Press, Edinburgh), won the Arts Award of the City of Lund, Sweden. Her poems have have appeared in the Fiddlehead, Grain, Oxford Magazine, Rhino, Roanoke Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Wascana Review, and Windsor Review.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 245
Contributors’ Notes
Natasha Sajé’s first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was later awarded the Towson University Prize for Literature. Her honors include the Bannister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College, the Robert Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the states of Maryland, Utah, and from the city of Baltimore. She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she administers the Weeks Poetry Series. She also teaches in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program. Ruth L. Schwartz’s two books of poetry are Accordion Breathing and Dancing (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Singular Bodies, forthcoming from Anhinga Press. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and the Astraea Foundation. She has twice won the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod. She teaches at California State University, Fresno. Jan Selving’s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Antioch Review, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology. She resides in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and teaches in the English Department at East Stroudsburg University. Paula Sergi is co-editor of Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation (University of Iowa Press). Her poems have appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Primavera, Crania, Rattle, and elsewhere. A recent graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program, she teaches poetry at Ripon College. She is a recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Artist Fellowship Award for 2001. Amar Gaurav Shah recently received his Masters in English from the University of Delaware. His work has appeared in the AsianPacific American Journal, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and elsewhere. He is currently at work on a novel about Bombay. Purvi Shah was born in Ahmedabad, India, but has lived in gritty New York City for the past six years. She serves as a poetry editor for the Asian-Pacific American Journal. Her work has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Brooklyn Review, Descant, and Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, which won an American Book Award in 1997. 246 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Contributors’ Notes
John Oliver Simon was recently awarded an National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for 2001. Red Dragonfly Press has published a letterpress chapbook of his translations of the Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas, Velocities of the Possible. In Fall 2001, Creative Arts will publish Caminante, his series of 131 octaves from the roads down through Latin America. Carol Spindel is the author of two books of nonfiction: In the Shadow of the Sacred Grove (Vintage Books), named a New York Times Notable Book for 1989; and Dancing at Halftime: Sports and the Controversy over American Indian Mascots (New York University Press). She teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Virgil Suárez is the recipient of a 2001 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His new book, Palm Crows, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press. He divides his time between Miami and Tallahassee, where he lives with his family. Margaret C. Szumowski’s book of poems, I Want This World, will appear in April 2001 from Tupelo Press. She has been a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, and a teacher in Texas, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. She is Assistant Professor of English at Springfield Technical Community College. She has two children, Anna and David. Maria Terrone’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Hudson Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, and Poet Lore. She is a recipient of the Allen Tate Memorial Award from Wind. Her work will be featured in Cutting the Bread: Italian American Women Write About Food, forthcoming from The Feminist Press. She is director of public relations for Hunter College in New York City. J. C. Todd’s poems appear in Atlanta Review, Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is a contributing editor for The Drunken Boat. A second edition of her chapbook Nightshade was published last year by Pine Press. She has received a poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 247
Contributors’ Notes
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (New Issues Press). Her poetry has been anthologized in Echoes Across the Valley: Poets of Africa (East African Educ. Publ., Nairobi, Kenya). Her work has also appeared in Crab Orchard Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She is working on a second book of poems and a memoir. She teaches creative writing and African literature at Western Michigan University, where she is completing work on a Ph.D. In 1991 during the Liberian civil war, she immigrated with her husband and small children to the United States. Gary J. Whitehead’s first full-length collection of poems is forthcoming from Salmon Publishing. He has previously published two chapbooks, both winners of national competitions. Crystal Williams is the author of Kin. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ms. Magazine, Callaloo, Rosebud, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. She teaches at Reed College. S. L. Wisenberg is the author of the short story collection, The Sweetheart Is In, and of the forthcoming essay collection, Sleepless Jews. She is happy to live in Chicago after sojourns in Houston, Paris, Iowa City, Miami, and Provincetown. Terry Wolverton is the author of Bailey’s Beads, a novel, and two collections of poetry, Black Slip and Mystery Bruise. Her memoir, Insurgent Muse, will be published in Fall 2001 by City Lights Books. Carson H. Wu has been a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in Fiction and a Santa Fe Writer’s Project Award. His stories appear in Confrontation, International Quarterly, and Mississippi Review’s on-line edition. Masha Zager is a freelance writer and editor living in New York City.
248 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Title Index After the Quake, 1886 (ptry). Anthony Grooms After Your Transplant (ptry). Marjorie Maddox Alex Lives in Prague (fctn). Sharon Dilworth Aliens Can See Us Now (ptry). Ruth L. Schwartz Another Old Program for Reaching Heaven (ptry). Robert Grunst Aracely (fctn). Isabel De La Peña Assumption into Heaven: Mary’s Heart in the Guinness Book of World Records, The (ptry). Julianna Baggott At Sea Domingo Learned to Steady His Hand (ptry). Oliver de la Paz At the Polish-American Festival, Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia (ptry). J. C. Todd ballplayer (ptry). Evie Shockley Blanket (ptry). Stephen Cramer Blue Paris (ptry). Karen Kovacik Bombingham: Excerpts from the Novel (fctn). Anthony Grooms Bonnard’s Almond Tree (ptry). David Hassler Books (ptry). Shahé Mankerian Church of St. James, Warsaw, Ochota District / W kosåciele SÅw. Jakuba, Warszawa Ochota (ptry). Karen Kovacik City of Salt (ptry). Terry Wolverton City of Fire (ptry). Valentina Gnup City (Medellín) (ptry/trans). José Manuel Arango/John Oliver Simon Ciudad (ptry). José Manuel Arango Club Las Palmas (ptry). David Dominguez Consolation of Coincidence, The (ptry). Jan Selving Crédit Egyptien (ptry). Jeffrey Levine Dateline: Everywhere (fctn). Eleanor M. Brown Dead Man Rides Subway (ptry). Cornelius Eady Disappearing DUMBO. Masha Zager Diving Lesson (ptry). Mary Pinard Domingo’s Advice for Fidelito (ptry). Oliver de la Paz Eating the Zoo (ptry). Anna Meek Educating the Son (ptry). Shahé Mankerian El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles (ptry). Dorothy Barresi Elegy in Waiting (ptry). Elton Glaser Elegy: The Dicordant Note (ptry). Mary Pinard
6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2): 6(1):
94 163 7 190 112
6(1): 13 6(1): 30 6(1): 46 6(2): 203 6(1): 6(2): 6(2): 6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2):
173 60 106 74 118 138 108
6(2): 210 6(2): 64 6(2): 45 6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2): 6(2): 6(2): 6(2): 6(1): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2): 6(2):
44 51 191 112 1 63 216 166 45 140 136 51
6(1): 108 6(2): 154
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 249
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Error Lurks in Such a Certainty, An (ptry). Dara Wier Etats des lieux(ptry). Jules Supervielle Fable (ptry/trans). Juan Carlos Galeano/Delia M. Poey and Virgil Suárez Fábula (ptry). Juan Carlos Galeano Failure (ptry). Ruth L. Schwartz Firewall, The (fctn). Elizabeth Wetmore Fond du Lac (ptry). Paula Sergi Foreshortening (ptry). Melissa Stein From the Indianapolis City Directory, 1916: A Tally (ptry). Karen Kovacik Game (ptry/trans). Juan Carlos Galeano/Delia M. Poey and Virgil Suárez Garage Museum (ptry). Kevin Stein Garden, The (ptry). Margaret Shipley Ghostsickness (ptry). Jan Selving Ginsberg Dying (ptry). Gary J. Whitehead Going Deep for Jesus (ptry). Jan Beatty Havana Blue (ptry). Virgil Suárez Homage to Mister Berryman (ptry). Clare Rossini How Many Times (fctn). Eduardo Moncada I Saw a Mountain. Patrick Madden I Used to Own This Town (ptry). Patricia Jabbeh Wesley I Walk to Work This Early Morning and Begin to Feel Anything Is Possible (ptry). David Dominguez If You Could Lick My Heart (ptry). Susan Rich In the Kingdom of My Palm (ptry). Jeff Friedman India of Postcards, The (ptry). Vandana Khanna Infusion (ptry). Tina Barr Interstate 81 (ptry). Ruth Ellen Kocher Inventory (ptry/trans). Jules Supervielle/Geoffrey Gardner Jezebel Above the City (ptry). Ruth Ellen Kocher Juego (ptry). Juan Carlos Galeano Knife, The (ptry). Margaret C. Szumowski lagos (ptry). Opal Palmer Adisa Last Summer Job, The (ptry). Maria Terrone Late Fall and the Big City: An Excerpt from The Rayon Girl (fctn/trans). Irmgard Keun/Isabel Cole Learning Ambahan (ptry). Luisa Igloria Les fleurs du papier de ta chambre (ptry). Jules Supervielle london (ptry). Opal Palmer Adisa Love Along a Brainstem (ptry). Dara Wier Marble Steps (ptry). Natasha Sajé Marking the Dust I (ptry). Allison Funk Marking the Dust II (ptry). Allison Funk
250 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
6(1): 231 6(1): 218 6(1): 105 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(2):
104 189 142 193 213 107
6(1): 107 6(1): 210 6(1): 172 6(2): 192 6(2): 207 6(2): 53 6(2): 198 6(1): 170 6(1): 55 6(2): 161 6(2): 204 6(1): 53 6(1): 169 6(1): 112 6(1): 156 6(2): 50 6(2): 101 6(1): 219 6(2): 102 6(1): 106 6(2): 199 6(2): 37 6(1): 224 6(2): 115 6(1): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(1):
154 220 33 230 186 100 102
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Matter (ptry). Mary Pinard Midsummer in Bombay (ptry). Amar Gaurav Shah Milliner’s Proposals, The (ptry). Dolores Hayden Miscarriage (ptry). Julia Lisella Misoka-Soba (fctn). Lee Ann Roripaugh Motherland. Jane Satterfield Mother-in-Law’s Tongue (ptry). Lynne Kuderko Mr. Mustard’s Dance Club: Ladies’ Night (ptry). Aimee Nezhukumatathil Mushrooms (ptry). Chad Davidson My Brother Listens to His Police Scanner (ptry). Maria Terrone My Grandfather on Roosevelt Island (ptry). Joanne Diaz Negatives and Soundtracks (ptry). Philip Metres XIX. Plumber in Crawl Space Under New York City Skyline (ptry). Greg Williamson Opening the Hudson (ptry). Vanessa Stauffer Original Sun Recording, The (ptry). Fleda Brown Palabras (fctn). Amina Lolita Gautier Panoramic Panegyric (ptry). Soo Jin Oh Pantsing Bobby Freeman in Fifth Grade (ptry). William Trowbridge The Paper Flowers in Your Room (ptry/trans). Jules Supervielle/Geoffrey Gardner Parable of Divas: Aretha Franklin & Diana Ross (ptry). Crystal Williams paris (ptry). Opal Palmer Adisa Pastoral (ptry). Ruth Ellen Kocher Pear, The (ptry). Chad Davidson Places Family Takes You, The (fctn). Carson H. Wu Plain Scared, or : There Is No Such Thing as Negative Space, the Art Teacher Said. S.L. Wisenberg Plot Turnover. Carol Spindel Plums (ptry). Vandana Khanna Police Work (fctn). Eden Elieff Porches (ptry). Alison Stine Portrait of Girl w/Flowers, MacDougal Street (ptry). Cornelius Eady Power Failure (ptry). Kate Lynn Hibbard Preparing the Sacraments (ptry). Melanie Figg Prinsengracht 263 (ptry). Steven Cramer Prodigy (ptry). William Trowbridge Pumpkin Seeds (ptry). Susan Firer Pushkin Café (ptry). William Allen Reading Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters (ptry). Linda Casebeer
6(1): 6(2): 6(2): 6(1): 6(1): 6(1): 6(1): 6(2):
167 195 96 162 67 197 160 148
6(1): 41 6(2): 202 6(1): 49 6(2): 142 6(1): 233 6(1): 208 6(1): 35 6(2): 66 6(2): 149 6(1): 229 6(1): 221 6(2): 209 6(2): 6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2):
35 104 43 126 211
6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(2):
170 157 21 215 62
6(2): 6(1): 6(1): 6(1): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1):
98 95 39 228 96 40 38
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 251
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Redlands, California (ptry). Adela Najarro Respite (ptry). Ellen Bass returning, the (ptry). Jeffrey Loo Revival (ptry). Carol Guess Rockefeller Plaza, December 24th (ptry). Robin Jacobson Rooms People Live In (fctn). Susan Tekulve Ropes (ptry). David Hernandez Salvaged Wood (ptry). Barry Silesky San Francisco (ptry). Adela Najarro Seen from My Window in San Francisco (ptry). Aliki Barnstone Separated City (ptry). Earl S. Braggs Shaking Hands with Nixon (ptry). Fleda Brown Shimmy Twins (fctn). Nicole Louise Reed Skeleton of Color, A (ptry). Victoria Chang Snow White in Exile (ptry). Susan Thomas Song (fctn). Mary Yukari Waters St. Petersburg Subway (ptry). Katherine Poltorak Steel (ptry). Melissa Peters Still Life With Saints (fctn). Siobhan Fallon Stupid (ptry). Mark Kraushaar Summary (ptry). Jennifer Grotz Swan at Edgewater Park, The (ptry). Ruth L. Schwartz Swarm to Glory (fctn). Garnett Kilberg Cohen Talking to the Big Guys. Denise Shekerjian Theresa in Ecstasy (ptry). Deborah DeNicola Thin Gold Chain (ptry). Jeffrey Greene Thinking of Genesis While Watching the Oscars (ptry). Kevin Stein To Hold This Splendor (ptry). Maria Terrone Top (ptry). Carol Guess Transit Gloria Mundi (ptry). Geoffrey Brock Translations from the Natural World (ptry). Dennis Hinrichsen Treptower Park, East Berlin (ptry). William Allen Troy (ptry). Susanna Roxman True Religion (ptry). Tina Barr Turnpike Music (ptry). Audrey Petty XII. Holiday Mall with LONG FENCE. (ptry). Greg Williamson 24th and Mission (ptry). Joy Katz Urban Pastoral (ptry). Purvi Shah Visit to the Polish Writers’ Union, Krakow (ptry). Leonard Kress Visitor (ptry). Elizabeth Alexander Wallula Junction. James McKean
252 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(1): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1):
146 34 114 116 99 121 120 175 144 32
6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2): 6(1): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2): 6(1): 6(1): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(1): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1):
55 36 122 59 226 133 156 152 18 158 110 188 1 234 47 90 212
6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2): 6(2): 6(1): 6(1):
200 115 57 152 39 158 48 165 232
6(2): 100 6(2): 196 6(2): 110 6(2): 42 6(1): 180
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Wash Me Away (fctn). Paula Redes Sidore Weighing the Dead (ptry). Melanie Figg Welcome to Elsinore (ptry). Susanna Roxman What the Land Carver Said From the Sky (ptry). Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Wigs and Tanning (ptry). Bruce Snider Woman and Husband (ptry). Andrea Hollander Budy
6(1): 6(1): 6(2): 6(2):
81 94 160 206
6(1): 178 6(1): 37
Author Index Adisa, Opal Palmer. lagos (ptry) london (ptry) paris (ptry) Allen, William. Pushkin Café (ptry) Treptower Park, East Berlin (ptry) Alexander, Elizabeth. Visitor (ptry) Arango, José Manuel (translated by John Oliver Simon). Ciudad (ptry) City (Medellín) (ptry/trans) Baggott, Julianna. The Assumption into Heaven: Mary’s Heart in the Guinness Book of World Records (ptry) Barnstone, Aliki. Seen from My Window in San Francisco (ptry) Barr, Tina. Infusion (ptry) True Religion (ptry) Barresi, Dorothy. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles (ptry) Bass, Ellen. Respite (ptry) Beatty, Jan. Going Deep for Jesus (ptry) Braggs, Earl S. Separated City (ptry) Brock, Geoffrey. Transit Gloria Mundi (ptry) Brown, Eleanor M. Dateline: Everywhere (fctn)
6(2): 37 6(2): 33 6(2): 35 6(2): 40 6(2): 39 6(2): 42 6(2): 44 6(2): 45 6(1): 30
6(1): 32 6(2): 50 6(2): 48 6(2): 51 6(1): 34 6(2): 53 6(2): 55 6(1): 57 6(2):
1
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 253
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Brown, Fleda. The Original Sun Recording (ptry) Shaking Hands with Nixon (ptry) Budy, Andrea Hollander. Woman and Husband Casebeer, Linda. Reading Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters (ptry) Chang, Victoria. A Skeleton of Color (ptry) Cohen, Garnett Kilberg. Swarm to Glory (fctn) Cramer, Stephen. Blanket (ptry) Cramer, Steven. Prinsengracht 263 (ptry) Davidson, Chad. Mushrooms (ptry) The Pear (ptry) de la Paz, Oliver. Domingo’s Advice for Fidelito (ptry) At Sea Domingo Learned to Steady His Hand (ptry) De La Peña, Isabel. Aracely (fctn) DeNicola, Deborah. Theresa in Ecstasy (ptry) Diaz, Joanne. My Grandfather on Roosevelt Island (ptry) Dilworth, Sharon. Alex Lives in Prague (fctn) Dominguez, David. Club Las Palmas (ptry) I Walk to Work This Early Morning and Begin to Feel Anything Is Possible (ptry) Eady, Cornelius. Dead Man Rides Subway (ptry) Portrait of Girl w/Flowers, MacDougal Street (ptry) Elieff, Eden. Police Work (fctn) Fallon, Siobhan. Still Life with Saints (fctn) Figg, Melanie. Preparing the Sacraments (ptry) Weighing the Dead (ptry) Firer, Susan. Pumpkin Seeds (ptry)
254 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
6(1): 35 6(1): 36 6(1): 37 6(1): 38 6(2): 59 6(1):
1
6(2): 60 6(1): 39 6(1): 41 6(1): 43 6(1): 45 6(1): 46 6(1): 13 6(1): 47 6(1): 49 6(2):
7
6(1): 51 6(1): 53
6(2): 63 6(2): 62 6(2): 21 6(1): 18 6(1): 95 6(1): 94 6(1): 96
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Friedman, Jeff. In the Kingdom of My Palm (ptry) Funk, Allison. Marking the Dust I (ptry) Marking the Dust II (ptry) Galeano, Juan Carlos (translated by Delia M. Poey and Virgil Suárez). Fabula (ptry) Fable (ptry/trans) Juego (ptry) Game (ptry/trans) Gautier, Amina Lolita. Palabras (fctn) Glaser, Elton. Elegy in Waiting (ptry) Gnup, Valentina. City of Fire (ptry) Greene, Jeffrey. Thin Gold Chain (ptry) Grooms, Anthony. After the Quake, 1886 (ptry) Bombingham: Excerpts from the Novel (fctn) Grotz, Jennifer. Summary (ptry) Grunst, Robert. Another Old Program for Reaching Heaven (ptry) Guess, Carol. Revival (ptry) Top (ptry) Hassler, David. Bonnard’s Almond Tree (ptry) Hayden, Dolores. The Milliner’s Proposals (ptry) Hernandez, David. Ropes (ptry) Hibbard, Kate Lynn. Power Failure (ptry) Hinrichsen, Dennis. Translations from the Natural World (ptry) Igloria, Luisa. Learning Ambahan (ptry) Jacobson, Robin. Rockefeller Plaza, December 24th (ptry) Katz, Joy. 24th and Mission (ptry)
6(1): 98 6(1): 100 6(1): 102
6(1): 104 6(1): 105 6(1): 106 6(1): 107 6(2): 66 6(1): 108 6(2): 64 6(2): 90 6(2): 94 6(2): 74 6(1): 110 6(1): 112 6(1): 116 6(1): 115 6(1): 118 6(2): 96 6(1): 120 6(2): 98 6(1): 152 6(1): 154 6(2): 99 6(2): 100
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 255
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Keun, Irmgard. (translated by Isabel Cole). Late Fall and the Big City: An Excerpt from The Rayon Girl (fctn) Khanna, Vandana. The India of Postcards (ptry) Plums (ptry) Kocher, Ruth Ellen. Interstate 81 (ptry) Jezebel Above the City (ptry) Pastoral (ptry) Kovacik, Karen. Blue Paris (ptry) Church of St. James, Warsaw, Ochota District / W kosåciele SÅw. Jakuba, Warszawa Ochota (ptry) From the Indianapolis City Directory, 1916: A Tally (ptry) Kraushaar, Mark. Stupid (ptry) Kress, Leonard. Visit to the Polish Writers’ Union, Krakow (ptry) Kuderko, Lynne. Mother-in-Law’s Tongue (ptry) Levine, Jeffrey. Crédit Egyptien (ptry) Lisella, Julia. Miscarriage (ptry) Loo, Jeffrey. the returning (ptry) Madden, Patrick. I Saw a Mountain Maddox, Marjorie. After Your Transplant (ptry) Mankerian, Shahé. Books (ptry) Educating the Son (ptry) McKean, James. Wallula Junction Meek, Anna. Eating the Zoo (ptry) Metres, Philip. Negatives and Soundtracks (ptry) Moncada, Eduardo. How Many Times (fctn) Najarro, Adela. Redlands, California (ptry) San Francisco (ptry)
256 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
6(2): 115
6(1): 156 6(1): 157 6(2): 101 6(2): 102 6(2): 104 6(2): 106 6(2): 108 6(2): 107 6(1): 158 6(2): 110 6(1): 160 6(2): 112 6(1): 162 6(2): 114 6(2): 161 6(1): 163 6(2): 138 6(2): 136 6(1): 180 6(2): 140 6(2): 142 6(1): 55 6(2): 146 6(2): 144
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. Mr. Mustard’s Dance Club: Ladies’ Night (ptry) Oh, Soo Jin. Panoramic Panegyric (ptry) Peters, Melissa. Steel (ptry) Petty, Audrey. Turnpike Music (ptry) Pinard, Mary. Diving Lesson (ptry) Elegy: The Discordant Note (ptry) Matter (ptry) Poltorak, Katherine. St. Petersburg Subway (ptry) Reid, Nicole Louise. Shimmy Twins (fctn) Rich, Susan. If You Could Lick My Heart (ptry) Roripaugh, Lee Ann. Misoka-Soba (fctn) Rossini, Clare. Homage to Mister Berryman (ptry) Roxman, Susanna. Troy (ptry) Welcome to Elsinore (ptry) Sajé, Natasha. Marble Steps (ptry) Satterfield, Jane. Motherland Schwartz, Ruth L. Aliens Can See Us Now (ptry) Failure (ptry) The Swan at Edgewater Park (ptry) Selving, Jan. The Consolation of Coincidence (ptry) Ghostsickness (ptry) Sergi, Paula. Fond du Lac (ptry) Shah, Amar Gaurav. Midsummer in Bombay (ptry) Shah, Purvi. Urban Pastoral (ptry) Shekerjian, Denise. Talking to the Big Guys
6(2): 148 6(2): 149 6(2): 152 6(1): 165 6(1): 166 6(2): 154 6(1): 167 6(2): 156 6(2): 122 6(1): 169 6(1): 67 6(1): 170 6(2): 158 6(2): 160 6(2): 186 6(1): 197 6(2): 190 6(2): 189 6(2): 188 6(2): 191 6(2): 192 6(2): 193 6(2): 195 6(2): 196 6(1): 234
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 257
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Shipley, Margaret. The Garden (ptry) Shockley, Evie. ballplayer (ptry) Sidore, Paula Redes. Wash Me Away (fctn) Silesky, Barry. Salvaged Wood (ptry) Snider, Bruce. Wigs and Tanning (ptry) Spindel, Carol. Plot Turnover Stauffer, Vanessa. Opening the Hudson (ptry) Stein, Kevin. Garage Museum (ptry) Thinking of Genesis While Watching the Oscars (ptry) Stein, Melissa. Foreshortening (ptry) Stine, Alison. Porches (ptry) Suárez, Virgil. Havana Blue (ptry) Supervielle, Jules (translated by Geoffrey Gardner). Etats des lieux (ptry) Inventory (ptry/trans) Les fleurs du papier de ta chambre (ptry) The Paper Flowers in Your Room (ptry/trans) Szumowski, Margaret C. The Knife (ptry) Tekulve, Susan. Rooms People Live In (fctn) Terrone, Maria. The Last Summer Job (ptry) My Brother Listens to His Police Scanner (ptry) To Hold This Splendor (ptry) Thomas, Susan. Snow White in Exile(ptry) Todd, J. C. At the Polish-American Festival, Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia (ptry) Trowbridge, William. Pantsing Bobby Freeman in Fifth Grade (ptry) Prodigy (ptry)
258 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
6(1): 172 6(1): 173 6(1): 81 6(1): 175 6(1): 178 6(2): 170 6(1): 208 6(1): 210 6(1): 212 6(1): 213 6(1): 215 6(1): 198 6(1): 218 6(1): 219 6(1): 220 6(1): 221 6(2): 199 6(1): 121 6(1): 224 6(2): 202 6(2): 200 6(1): 226 6(2): 203
6(1): 229 6(1): 228
INDEX TO VOLUME SIX — 2000/2001 Waters, Mary Yukari. Song (fctn) Wesley, Patricia Jabbeh. I Used to Own This Town (ptry) What the Land Carver Said From the Sky (ptry) Wetmore, Elizabeth. The Firewall (fctn) Whitehead, Gary J. Ginsberg Dying (ptry) Wier, Dara. An Error Lurks in Such a Certainty (ptry) Love Along a Brainstem (ptry) Williams, Crystal. Parable of Divas: Aretha Franklin & Diana Ross (ptry) Williamson, Greg. XII. Holiday Mall with LONG FENCE (ptry) XIX. Plumber in Crawl Space Under New York City Skyline (ptry) Wisenberg, S. L. Plain Scared, or: There Is No Such Thing as Negative Space, the Art Teacher Said Wolverton, Terry. City of Salt (ptry) Wu, Carson H. The Places Family Takes You (fctn) Zager, Masha. Disappearing DUMBO
6(1): 133 6(2): 204 6(2): 206 6(1): 142 6(2): 207 6(1): 231 6(1): 230 6(2): 209 6(1): 232 6(1): 233
6(2): 211
6(2): 210 6(2): 126 6(2): 216
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 259
INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2001
All Saints: New and Selected Poems by Brenda Marie Osbey. reviewed by Jon Tribble And Her Soul Out Of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis. reviewed by Maria McLeod Blues Narratives by Sterling D. Plumpp. reviewed by Jon Tribble Born Southern and Restless by Kat Meads. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan edited by Suzanne Kamata. reviewed by Betsy Taylor Cabato Sentora by Ray Gonzalez. reviewed by Jon Tribble Chick-Lit 2: (No Chic Vics) edited by Cris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell, and Elizabeth Sheffield. reviewed by Beth Lordan Crossing the Snow Bridge by Fatima Lim-Wilson. reviewed by Paul Guest The Dance House by Joseph Marshall III. reviewed by James Gill Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand by Steven V. Cramer. reviewed by Josh Bell Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland. reviewed by Cynthia Roth Dry Rain by Pete Fromm. reviewed by Greg Schwipps Fire From the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru edited and translated by Susan E. Benner & Kathy S. Leonard. reviewed by Jenni Williams Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-95) by Amiri Baraka. reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox Galileo’s Banquet by Ned Balbo. reviewed by Melanie Jordan Rack Hammerlock by Tim Seibles. reviewed by Adrian Harris The Hour Between Dog & Wolf by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr It’s Only Rock and Roll: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Short Stories edited by Janice Eidus and John Kastan. reviewed by Alberta Skaggs
260 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
4(1): 240 5(1): 250 5(2): 232 3(1): 247 3(2): 264
4(2): 261 3(1): 245
3(2): 267 4(2): 258 3(1): 242 4(1): 239 3(1): 244 4(2): 264
3(1): 239 5(1): 249 5(1): 256 3(1): 241 5(2): 234
INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2001 Living On the Edge: Fiction by Peace Corps Writers edited by John Coyne. reviewed by Chris Kelsey Lost Wax by Heather Ramsdell. reviewed by Paul Guest Middle Ear by Forrest Hamer. reviewed by Adrian Harris Misterioso by Sascha Feinstein. reviewed by Adrian Harris Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes. reviewed by Adrian Harris Naked by Shuntaro Tanikawa. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Near Breathing, A Memoir of Difficult Birth by Kathryn Rhett. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Never Be the Horse by Beckian Fritz Goldberg. reviewed by Melanie Jordan Rack Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam edited by Linh Dinh. reviewed by Joey Hale The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City edited by Bino A. Realuyo. reviewed by Terri Fletcher Ocean Avenue by Malena Mörling. reviewed by Ruth Ann Daugherty Of Flesh & Spirit by Wang Ping. reviewed by Paul Guest One Above & One Below by Erin Belieu. reviewed by Douglas Haynes Prospero’s Mirror: A Translator’s Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction edited by Ilan Stavans. reviewed by Michael McGregor The Secret History of Water by Silvia Curbelo. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Selfwolf by Mark Halliday. reviewed by Cynthia Roth Smoke by Dorianne Laux. reviewed by Melinda Yeomans So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks by Rigoberto González. reviewed by Adrian Harris The Stars, The Earth, The River by Le Minh Khue (translated by Bac Hoai Tran and Dana Sachs; edited by Wayne Karlin). reviewed by Vicky Kepple
5(1): 258
4(1): 242 6(2): 229 5(2): 227 5(2): 229 3(2): 266 3(1): 248 6(1): 266 3(2): 263
6(2): 238
5(1): 254 3(2): 270 6(2): 228 4(2): 266
4(2): 259 6(1): 272 6(2): 233 6(2): 224
3(2): 261
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 261
INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2001 Tell Me by Kim Addonizio. reviewed by Amy Kucharik The Truly Needy and Other Stories by Lucy Honig. reviewed by John Wallace Turn Thanks by Lorna Goodison. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Turtle Pictures by Ray Gonzalez. reviewed by Jen Neely Under the Red Flag by Ha Jin. reviewed by Katherine Riegel Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. reviewed by Adrian Harris Vereda Tropical by Ricardo Pau-Llosa. reviewed by Terri Fletcher Walking Back from Woodstock by Earl S. Braggs. reviewed by Terry Olson What Happens to Me by Chuck Wachtel. reviewed by Fred Von Drasek The Women Carry River Water by Nguyen Quang Thieu (translated by Martha Collins). reviewed by Terry Olson You Come Singing by Virgil Suárez. reviewed by Adrian Harris
6(2): 227 6(2): 224 5(1): 252 6(1): 268 3(2): 260 6(2): 236
5(2): 230 4(1): 237 6(2): 234 3(2): 268
4(2): 263
Book Review Policy Crab Orchard Review’s staff considers for review collections and anthologies of poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction published by small independent and university presses. Please send titles for review consideration to: Jon Tribble, Book Review Editor, Crab Orchard Review, Department of English, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901-4503. All reviews are written by Crab Orchard Review staff. In the past three years, the following presses have had titles reviewed in Crab Orchard Review’s pages: Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, FL The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, New York, NY BOA Editions, Rochester, NY Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA Cleveland State University Press, Cleveland, OH Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA
262 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2001 Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT David R. Godine, Boston, MA Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA FC2, Normal, IL Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, NY Littoral Books, Los Angeles, CA Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA Lumen Editions/Brookline Books, Cambridge, MA Lyons & Burford, New York, NY Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN New Issues Press, Kalamazoo, MI Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH Red Crane Books, Santa Fe, NM The Roundhouse Press, Berkeley, CA Seven Stories Press, New York, NY Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA Tia Chucha Press, Chicago, IL University of Akron Press, Akron, OH University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Washington, DC
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 263
Announcements Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press are pleased to announce the 2001 Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition selections. Our final judge, Maura Stanton, selected Joy Katz’s Fabulae as the first prize winner. Ms. Stanton selected Susan Aizenberg’s Muse as the second prize winner. Both collections will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in April 2002. We want to thank all of the poets who entered manuscripts in our Crab Orchard Award Series 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 Award Series in Poetry 1999 & 2000 titles:
Series Editor, Jon Tribble
The Star-Spangled Banner Poems by Denise Duhamel
“[S]o overwhelming is her relish for life that embarrassment, or titillation when the subject is sexual, just doesn’t stand a chance.”—Booklist 64 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2259-5 $12.95 paper
In Search of the Great Dead Poems by Richard Cecil
“[T]he technical skill and humor on display in this collection make it likely that Cecil’s poems will be read long after he joins that ever-longer roll call of poets who have passed on. . . . [A] remarkable book.”—Quarterly West 96 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2259-5 $12.95 paper
CROSSROADS AND UNHOLY WATER Poems by Marilene Phipps
“[T]his collection embraces awe and woe through curses and praise that unearth a meeting place for the unspeakable as well as culminant beauty— a book of acknowledgment and ritual.”—Yusef Komunyakaa 71 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2306-0 $12.95 paper
WINTER AMNESTIES Poems by Elton Glaser
“Elton Glaser’s poems are classic in the best sense of the word: he achieves stateliness without stuffiness and form without confinement. ”—Lucia Perillo 77 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2305-2 $12.95 paper
Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from
For more information on the Crab Orchard Award 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
NEW TITLES For 2001 in the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry MISERY PREFIGURED Poems by J. Allyn Rosser
“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 96 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2383-4, $12.95 pb
THIS COUNTRY OF MOTHERS Poems by Julianna Baggott
“Against a backdrop of family stories, 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. . . . This Country of Mothers announces a poet of substantial powers.”—Rodney Jones 88 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2381-8, $12.95 pb
NAMES ABOVE HOUSES Poems by Oliver de la Paz
“Oliver de la Paz has created a unique work: a novella in the form of a sequence of prose poems; a lucidly inventive allegory of migration, exile, and belonging. With grace and elegance, he evokes the magical, myth-making culture of his Philippines and brings it to a very real California . . . Oliver de la Paz has the strength and wisdom to step lightly with the heaviest burdens. He is stunningly good. ”—Rodney Jones 96 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2382-6, $12.95 pb
Copublished with Crab Orchard Review
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 Award Series In Poetry — FIRST BOOK AWARD
TRAIN TO AGRA
“Poised around a train ride to the Taj Mahal, Khanna’s poems track a layered and joyful personal journey amidst great fluctuations of our times– immigration, travel. I admire the vitality of her narrative space, movement between India and America, which she fills with ardent particulars: Hindi films, transcontinental plane trips, control towers, old rivers, gods, mantras, and myths.”—Reetika Vazirani, author of White Elephants Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from
Forthcoming in September 2001
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 In Every Seam and Soul Train 64 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2405-9 $12.95 paper
For more information on the Crab Orchard Award 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