Crab Orchard Review Vol 7 No 1 F/W 2001

In this volume:

Elton Glaser

Aimee Parkison

Susan Aizenberg

Lisa Glatt

Emmy Perez

Dick Allen

Mark Halliday

Joanna Smith Rakoff

Chi-Wai Au

Twyla Hansen

Sally Read

Jedd Beaudoin

Ann Hudson

Kathryn Rhett

Robin Behn

Ellen Hunnicutt

Jack Ridl

David Bond

Gray Jacobik

Bill Roorbach

Kathryn Stripling Byer

Nicole Johnson

Maxine Scates

Liam Callanan

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Rebecca Seiferle

Wanda Coleman

Deborah Landau

Patty Seyburn

Jennifer Davis

Joseph O. Legaspi

Cathy Song

Danusha Laméris de Garza

Ada Limón

James Tate

Camille Dungy

Moira Linehan

Judith Taylor

Steven Frattali

James Lott

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Brendan Galvin

Maria McLeod

Tony Whedon

Nola Garrett

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Baron Wormser

Mary Jo Firth Gillett

Leslie Adrienne Miller

Agica Zivaljevic

$6.00

ISSN 1083-5571

Volume 7, Number 1 Fall/Winter 2001

Faith Adiele

Crab Orchard Review $6.00us Vol. 7 No. 1

Including Our 2001 Fiction & Nonfiction Prize Winners

,77108-DFFHBh:Q;m

Fern Logan is Associate Professor of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Crab Orchard Review

Cover Art: Four photographs

by Fern Logan © 2001

A B ORCH A R R C D •

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REVIEW

C RAB •

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REVIEW A JOURNAL OF CREATIVE WORKS

VOL. 7 NO. 1

“Hidden everywhere, a myriad leather seed-cases lie in wait . . .”

—“Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” Thomas Kinsella Editor & Poetry Editor Allison Joseph

Founding Editor Richard Peterson

Prose Editor Carolyn Alessio

Managing Editor Jon Tribble

Editorial Interns Timothy W. Bubenik Douglas Haynes Brett Griffiths-Holloway Brenda King Emily Pruitt Krista Vondras Jamie Wild Kari Wilson

Assistant Editors Mark Borrelli Elizabeth Kershner Amy Kucharik Fred Von Drasek John Wallace Brad Younkin

Special Projects Assistant Adrian Matejka Book Review Editor Jon Tribble

Fall/Winter 2001 ISSN 1083-5571

Board of Advisors Ellen Gilchrist Charles Johnson Rodney Jones Thomas Kinsella Richard Russo

The Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale

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

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C RAB

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REVIEW

FALL/WINTER 2001

VOLUME 7, NUMBER 1

FICTION AND PROSE Jedd Beaudoin

Slipping

1

Liam Callanan

This Last Thing

8

Wanda Coleman

Bride of Horus

18

Jennifer Davis

Occupying Hotel Santa Teresa

53

Ellen Hunnicutt

The Lands of the Nobles

59

James Lott

My Redemption and Why It Took

101

Aimee Parkison

The Upstairs Album

116

Agica Zivaljevic

The Dressing Gown

130

Faith Adiele

Passing through Bandit Territory

157

Steven Frattali

Junk

169

Kathryn Rhett

The Big Timeout

176

Bill Roorbach

“You Have Given This Boy Life”

212

Book Reviews

Recent Titles by Neeli Cherkovski, Carter Revard, Elizabeth Dodd, David Lee, Jack Micheline, Jane Satterfield, and Anthologies of Poems from Nigeria and Writing from Michigan

225

POETRY Susan Aizenberg

Ode Florigraphy

24 26

Dick Allen

On Roark’s Farm Sunday

28 30

Chi-Wai Au

Monsoon Last Days at the Miriwa Restaurant Narcissus at the River

31 33 34

Robin Behn

To Brain on Brain’s Last Day Interlude: Still Still

35 37

David Bond

It Falls to Me

39

Kathryn Stripling Byer Unanswerable Her Porch

41 42

Danusha Laméris de Garza

What If Mary Ode to Billy

43 44

Camille Dungy

Cleaning

46

Brendan Galvin

A Driver’s Guide to Ireland For the Raven’s Return The Day Before

47 49 51

Nola Garrett

Aubade

75

Mary Jo Firth Gillett

Snowflake Obsidian

76

Elton Glaser

By the Waters of Babylon The Coefficient of Drag

78 80

Lisa Glatt

Apartment 413

82

Mark Halliday

Sheepdip River Vision

83

Twyla Hansen

Scar White Lie

85 87

Ann Hudson

Mare Tranquilitatis The Mobile Maker

89 91

Gray Jacobik

How to Paint Water

93

Nicole Johnson

Bloom

95

Jesse Lee Kercheval

What Max, Age Two, Remembers about Spain When the dead come back,

96

Deborah Landau

Dusk on Mulholland Drive After a Trip to the Fertility Clinic

136 139

Joseph O. Legaspi

Childhood Elegy

140

Ada Limรณn

Algebra

141

Moira Linehan

Dear Joe Back

142 144

Maria McLeod

Midwest Cash

145

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Sal

147

98

Leslie Adrienne Miller

Trading Love Stories in Installments, Ruined Amphitheater, Provence

150

Emmy Pérez

I Am Looking After Revolution

152 154

Joanna Smith Rakoff

The Appeal of Prophecy

155

Sally Read

Winter Light (After Chemotherapy)

184

Jack Ridl

Waiting with William Stafford in an Oregon Airport

186

Maxine Scates

The River

188

Rebecca Seiferle

Internal Clock

190

Patty Seyburn

Red Level

192

Cathy Song

Living Proof

194

James Tate

The Nimbus For the Love of Veronica The Fragrant Cloud

199 200 201

Judith Taylor

Legacy

202

Lyrae Van CliefStefanon

Magnificat Hum Bop: A Whistling Woman

204 205 206

Tony Whedon

White Cirrus Elegy for Europe

207 208

Baron Wormser

The Summer I Thought the World Was Going to End (1959)

210

Contributors’ Notes

241

A Note on Our Cover The four photographs on the cover of this issue are the work of Fern Logan, Associate Professor of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Announcements

We would like to congratulate past contributors Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Kevin Stein, and Colleen J. McElroy.

Ricardo Cortez Cruz’s story “Black Mafia Life,” which appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 5, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 2000), and Kevin Stein’s poem “Garage Museum,” which appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 6, Number 1 (Fall/Winter 2000), were selected for 2001 Illinois Arts Literary Awards.

Colleen J. McElroy’s poem “Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith,” which appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 5, Number 1, was selected by Robert Hass for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2001, edited by David Lehman.

This issue of Crab Orchard Review marks the first issue published since the retirement of our founding Editor, Richard Peterson. All of us at Crab Orchard Review would like to thank him for his leadership and dedication to this project, without which there would be no Crab Orchard Review.

The 2001 Jack Dyer Fiction Prize & John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize

We are pleased to announce the winners and finalists of the Fifth Annual Jack Dyer Fiction Prize and John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize.

In fiction, the winning entry was “The Upstairs Album” by Aimee Parkison of Ithaca, New York. Finalists in fiction were “Shade” by Phil Condon and “Dependents” by Jeb Livingood. The final judge in fiction was Carolyn Alessio.

In literary nonfiction, the winning entry was “Passing through Bandit Territory” by Faith Adiele of Iowa City, Iowa. Finalists in literary nonfiction were “Things to Do” by Marci Brown, and “The Village Idiot” by Lee Zacharias. The final judge in literary nonfiction was Richard Peterson.

Both winners will receive $1000 and their works are published in this issue. Congratulations to the winners and finalists, and thanks to all the entrants for their interest in Crab Orchard Review.

Please note the details of the 2002 Jack Dyer Fiction Prize and John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize in the back of this issue of Crab Orchard Review.

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>.

Jedd Beaudoin

Slipping

Frank dreams that something he cannot see is chasing him through the cornfield at the edge of his father’s land—some tall and black and anonymous figure hurling a wide shadow across his own; the figure’s footfalls shake the sodden earth behind him. He slows without wanting to and the thing catches up to him as he reaches the corner of the field where the corn stalks narrow and where sunlight falls in golden and pink prisms of early autumn light. At the edge of the field, he feels the thing’s cold, metallic grasp and he squirms away, falls to the ground, feels drops of recently fallen rain spatter from the soil. Suddenly he wakes and searches for focus in the room.

He holds very still in the bed, the bed he slept in as a boy, and wonders whether or not he should close his eyes and risk falling back into the same dream. He has had the dream every night for a week, since his father died, and because of that, because of the way the dream seeps into all his other dreams, he decides not to close his eyes. He looks around the room and, inexplicably, thinks of a neighbor boy who died before either of them had turned five. He struggles for a moment to bring back something else and when nothing comes, when it seems he can retrieve nothing more—nothing, anyway, that might soothe him back to sleep—he tells himself that that is the trouble with memory: it retreats without kindness, and returns without it as well.

He swings his legs from the bed, a bed more suited to a boy than a man, and steps only on the tips and heels of his feet to protect them from the cold floor. He searches for something to guide his way across the room, but sees nothing. Only a faint beam teases its way into the room from the yard light below, but that will not be enough to let him see his way. By memory, he creeps slowly toward the window, over the empty rooms below, edging his feet over the boards, tentatively, as though he has not yet well-enough recorded the room.

He moves along without trouble until he strikes his shin on the edge of a chair that sits only inches from the window, only far enough away Crab Orchard Review ◆ 1

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from the glass that it has remained out of the feeble light.

He swallows his words. No reason getting upset about something like that, he can hear his father say. It’s a goddamned chair, for Christ’s sake. He pauses, lets the sound of his father’s voice fade and there, at the window, a cool stream of air eases through the screen outside the opened sash; the breeze bathes his skin as he stands there, his body barely touched by the light.

Although the Michigan nights are cooler than he remembers them, and although they have been colder during the last late-August week than he remembers them being when he lived with his parents, since coming here he has slept with the windows open and the cool air in the room has felt good to him at night. On a few nights he has opened his eyes to the sound of a car speeding down the road—the boy who lives at the end of the road, he thinks, speeding home after a night in one of the nearby towns—but there has been no other noise. Perhaps the boy left his girlfriend or friends at their own homes too late and had to drive home fast. Frank believes he heard a certain urgency in the boy’s driving, that the boy drove as though he needed to get home before light or responsibility got the better of him and made him regret himself.

But even with the noise of the car, Frank saw no light, and now, as he stands at the window and looks down at the yard below, there is only the narrow strip of yard light, barely enough to illuminate the area. The barn and the milk house and the machine shed all remain in the shadows, each building as empty as the rooms below.

There is nothing more to protect down there, he thinks, no reason for the yard to be well-lit, no reason to frighten anyone away.

By the end of the week the house would be empty and someone else would take over, maybe rent out the house, although by then he would be gone. He has left the farm before, each time knowing that sooner or later he would leave for the last time. When his mother died and his father’s health became more fragile, and when the cows had been sold off and then a larger portion of the land, he came to believe that it would not be long. Slowly, certain things about the place—the detailed particulars, as his father called them—had begun to recede in his memory, though some stayed long after he needed them to.

He remembers walking into the Strohl Inn, late one Friday night, not long after he and Walter Thoune exhausted the last of their six packs; they had parked near Thompson’s gravel pit and drank and pissed and talked about conquests they never had. In the bar, beneath 2 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Jedd Beaudoin

the mounted heads of deer and beneath stuffed squirrels and raccoons—examples of what Mr. Strohl did with his taxidermy business, the third business he owned in the same building, the taxidermy business being housed there beside the ice cream parlor and bar—sat his father, who turned to look at him.

“You still gonna get up and pull tits in the morning?”

“It’s not so late,” he said.

“Yeah? You’re a man now, huh?” his father muttered. “We’ll see.” His father turned back to the beer and peanuts before him on the bar, back to the men who sat next to him. The men, Frank noticed, all looked the same past the age of twenty-five: all of them had the same sunken eyes and cracked and dirty hands. They all smelled of sweat and oil and grease and they never had anything new to say.

“I left for ten years,” he’d once told a friend, “and picked up right in the middle of my last conversation. It’s a goddamned Larry McMurtry novel.”

The price of milk, the price of gas, the goddamned Illinois hunters who couldn’t find their goddamned asses with a goddamned map and goddamned flashlight; the words had long been catalogued in his mind, he knew they were among the things he could never rid himself of, even if he tried. He remembered these conversations as he remembered Glenn Peters, who was just twenty-four when he died in his barn—the barrel of his gun snug in his mouth, a week after he learned that he had cancer. He was the age at which so many others died, though they seemed fully alive, hinging everything on tractors and barstools and thinking about what overtime would buy them or what jobs they could trade for credit at Anderson’s Electric.

He remembers the conversations as he remembers the design and smell of the bar, but the faces and names of the men who had come to drink and work with his father had begun to leave him.

Now he hears only the vaguest intonations of their voices or catches glimpses of them in memories that come to him when he wants least to have them, times when he is trying to remember something else. He remembers the way they drank and cursed while picking stones, or the deep scrapes that they carried on their arms from bailing hay, but little else; he does not remember whether or not they were kind or whether or not they had families of their own. He remembers the smokers that his father had held in the barn, the time that his father had him fight Tom Wilkinson and how the voice of Tom’s father and the voice of his own had risen in the summer Crab Orchard Review ◆ 3

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air. He remembers those things he least wants to when it seems he has moved farthest away from those men, from the farm. And each time when he remembers, he tries to move quickly from its grasp, to something else, though he rarely can. When he remembers riding in his grandfather’s Ford, he remembers only the dusty smell of the interior and the heat that bored its way through the windows, falling on him, suffocating him, while the old man drove at a cool pace down some anonymous country road; he rarely remembers anything more of the old man’s face than his hooked and crooked nose.

He moves forward and places his head against the cool glass.

He breathes deeply for a moment, taking the cool air greedily into his lungs, hoping the air will somehow prepare him for sleep again after his dream.

He exhales slowly and stares down at the yard, and by the thin stream of light he is reminded again of his father, his mother, his past.

When he was barely in high school, when he could not yet drive, he often wanted nothing more on a summer day than to be in town.

One summer day, after he’d helped his father with morning chores, he went back into the house. His mother’s purse sat near the table though she had left early that morning to look in on a sick neighbor.

He stared at the purse’s straps and its narrow, boxed dimensions.

The silver clasp opened easily and he pulled back either side of the purse to reveal the contents: a makeup compact, her driver’s license, some crumpled tissues, and a small fold of slightly wrinkled bills.

He had reached into the purse then, peeled away two twenties from the fold, and shoved them clumsily into his front pants pocket. He felt only a short moment of panic, then nothing else. He did nothing to betray himself, not even a few days later when his mother had come home early from shopping at Willdman’s, when she’d come into the barn and announced that when she had checked her purse she’d discovered that she was missing forty dollars. Did he know what happened to the money? He was sure that he didn’t. Had she simply lost her mind? He didn’t think so. Maybe the money would turn up. But it didn’t. Not until days later, when he’d gone into town on his bike and had returned with a few more comics than he should have, did it seem clear to anyone where the money had gone. Where did he get all the money for all those comic books? He’d saved it.

Really? For how long? He didn’t know.

Soon he was emptying his pockets before his mother and father and the few crumpled bills rested on the table. He went to his room 4 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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that night without supper and, later, when he was sure that both his parents were in bed, he slipped out of his room, down the stairs, out of the house. He crept from the edge of the front yard, past Shep, and onto the road that led to town, past the cemetery he’d often been afraid to pass, even in the light of day. He’d once told his father that he’d seen figures moving around in there at night, though his father had assured him they were only deer. He did not look at the cemetery then, and soon he was halfway into town without any thought of turning back.

He thinks now of how he spent the night curled under the rusted and narrow train bridge in town, how he’d slept with only his clothes covering him, how he had been frightened but not cold. He thinks too of his father driving to town the next morning to pick him up and then, suddenly, it is all gone. He tries to think of what his father said, how his father found him in town, but he cannot. Instead, he moves away from the window as sprinkles of rain surprise their way through the screen.

He shivers a little, then steps farther away and turns his back on the thin stream of light. He hears drops of rain touch the floor behind him as he shuffles through the darkened room, toward the bed.

This time he moves perfectly in the darkness, moves around the chair, to the bed where he carefully sits. Still working from memory in the dark, he takes his cigarettes and ashtray from the nightstand, shakes one from the pack and lights it. The flame from the lighter briefly brings the details of the room into view: the trains on the wallpaper, the 1974 Green Bay Packer poster that he will leave behind, his shirt across the back of the chair. When the flame snaps out, so do the details of the room, and when he is in the dark, he sits back in the bed and rests his head against the headboard.

There, the cold of the room and the headboard make him flinch for a second and think of winter. For a moment he thinks of driving the old man to Marquette in December only a few weeks after the old man had burned his hands so badly that he could never fully bend the left one again. Their car and the other cars on the narrow roads north of Escanaba had looked like moving igloos.

“Be careful,” his father had said. “Ease is key. You can’t force yourself on a road like this.”

The old man’s words had merely been advice and later, when they could not see to leave the city—even in the early afternoon— they had rented a hotel room. In the morning Frank had slid down one of the towering snowbanks at the edge of the parking lot. His Crab Orchard Review ◆ 5

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father had laughed with him and later, on the way home, they had stopped for lunch. Then it is all quickly gone.

He closes his eyes for a moment, takes a drag from his cigarette, and as he exhales, he tries to remember how his father found him in town the morning after he’d slept under the bridge. It rubs on him now and he wants it to push through, come to the front of his mind.

He searches for the moment when his father found him, but instead he hears only the high and irritating timbre of a former classmate’s voice: Gonna wear your shitkickers everywhere you go? the boy says. He smiles for a moment, then shakes the voice. It is nothing like his father’s voice and nothing like his mother’s. Her words were like open valleys of speech to him, like light on an open and ripened field, they were soothing and they countered the driving wedges of his father’s words, but he can no longer hear the exact sounds, no matter how hard he tries to retrieve them.

Frustrated, he closes his eyes and takes several more drags, but it is no use. He cannot retrieve anything more.

He rolls the last of the ashes from the cigarette into the ashtray and puts the ashtray back onto the nightstand. The room is even darker without the cigarette glow, and for a moment he thinks of reaching into the air, pulling on the long cord that dangles only inches above his bed, to bring incandescence into the room. He decides, instead, that he will sleep, and he eases himself down into the bed so that his back is flat on the mattress, so that his arms are tucked tightly at his sides.

Outside, the rain quickens and he hears a low rumble of thunder to the west of the house. He opens his eyes, hoping that he will see lightning, hear thunder, but nothing more comes. He closes his eyes again and finds that he is still trying to remember his mother’s voice, the completeness of her laugh, and that it seems to have moved even farther away. He feels like a child standing on a step stool, reaching for something forbidden high above him, hidden on a shelf. He closes his eyes tighter as though that will bring her back more quickly, but nothing comes. He waits there like that, in the dark, his eyes tightly closed, hoping something more about her will appear, but instead his father and people he knew in college and as a child circle before his eyes.

His mother moves farther away now and he wonders how long it’s been since he last heard her voice. Ten years? Fifteen?

His thoughts quicken and soon he sees his father, the two of them coming back from town. Because he stole the money, because 6 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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he ran away, his father is displeased with him. As usual, the old man’s face sags.

He hears his father’s words clearly. He cannot tune them out.

They go on and on until he is certain that he has heard all of the man’s disappointment, and all of the disappointment his mother must surely have felt as well. He is certain that he said something to his father that day because he remembers that they fought—with more than words by the end—but he does not remember what. He does not try.

He opens his eyes and stares into the dark. This is it, he thinks.

No more of this after tomorrow. His thoughts are blurred now. When he closes his eyes he finally hears some hint of his mother’s voice; it nibbles on him like the hands of the thing behind him in the dream.

Before long her face comes into focus, then disappears. He searches for it, chases it, just as the thing in his dream chases him, but it is always too far ahead and soon he is too tired, soon he is asleep.

In the dream he is in the cornfield again, the cornfield at the edge of his father’s land, and the thing is chasing him. He can feel his legs tire and he knows that in the dream he is young. The shadow begins to move behind him and shake the ground. He feels something growing then inside him and he knows that it is laughter. He feels the shadow reach for him; it touches him but he does not pull away.

He turns as far as he can into the shadow’s grasp and he sees that the shadow is his father, catching him now. His father pulls him close, lifts him up by the narrow straps of his overalls; soon he is up, high above his father’s head and all the while he is laughing.

The old man’s face does not sag but is bright and lifted, and the voice he laughs in seems barely his own. Frank keeps laughing. He does not stop, even when his father puts him on the ground and wrestles him down.

The earth is wet beneath him, but he does not worry.

When he wakes from the dream, his ribs hurt. He absently rubs his sides and tries to soothe the ache, and he sees that it is light. He turns away from the morning light, waits for sleep and the dream.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 7

Liam Callanan

This Last Thing

For weeks after Martin died, I was short of breath. None of the grief books friends had pressed into my hands—always surreptitiously, like they were palming a bribe—had anything to say about it.

To Brandy, a friend of Martin’s whom I’d inherited along with everything else, the answer was simple. “Open some damn windows, Daniel,” she said, pushing past me into the apartment. She’d come to help me clean out his clothes, although it wasn’t his clothes I needed help with. There were other things.

As for the windows, I hadn’t opened a window for the same reason I’d put off cleaning out Martin’s effects. His sickness, death, and this— whatever it was, afterlife—had all been a story of attrition. I kept losing more and more of him: then he died: then his body disappeared into a casket into the ground: now his clothes would disappear with Brandy.

And opening the windows—that would mean erasing those places in the apartment where you could still smell him. The smell of his sweaters, shirts, jeans, things I’d folded away clean. The smell of his cologne.

His favorite toothbrush—back when we were still brushing his teeth— even that had a smell. And in certain corners of the house, down low perhaps, behind the couch or the bedroom door, on the floor behind the beloved TV, I imagined I could smell the underlying scent of Martin himself—just a hint, not unpleasant, but distinct.

Martin always said Brandy had the personality of a track pistol— loud, harmless, and she got things started—but he could bear her better than I ever could. Still, after the fog of the last weeks, I was relieved to sit, almost in a stupor, and watch her work with unexpected tact through Martin’s clothes and effects, sorting out what to keep and what to donate. There was nothing, really, to keep.

Pictures, jewelry. Then she dove into my closet, my clothes, and went through the same culling process. “I thought gay men knew how to dress,” she shouted from the recesses of the closet. I was sitting on the bed, thinking and not thinking my way through a box of old photos she’d hauled out. “What in God’s name is this?” she 8 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Liam Callanan

said, emerging with Martin’s Official Wisconsin Cheesehead hat.

“When you’ve said Wisconsin, you’ve said it all,” I said. Martin always sang this; he went to school there and apparently this was some sort of fight song. He loved football. He loved cheesy. Brandy started a new Hefty bag of donations and threw the hat in. A sharp corner of the cheese wedge strained through the plastic accusingly. Martin, I thought, I’m going to keep that? “Hey,” I finally said in listless protest. “Who do you think you are, going through a man’s closet? Is nothing sacred?”

Brandy reemerged frowning. She was holding a brown shoebox in one hand, its lid in her other. The balloon was inside. I knew it, though I couldn’t see it. Brandy sat down next to me on the bed, quietly, held the box in her lap and waited for me to say something. She was a kind of idiot savant of tact: grace and propriety could come over her in a rush and leave just as quickly. But during her moments of calm, she was brilliant, and you wanted to collapse into her, as I did then.

Instead, I took the box from her, looked down into it. The balloon was a dull red, twisted and clothespinned at the throat, and weakly held about an eggful of air.

“This,” I began, and stopped. “Eudora Welty,” I tried and swallowed. “His last breath,” I finally said. Brandy pulled at the box. “No,” I said. “Not ‘donate.’”

“Daniel, no,” she said softly. “No, no, of course not. I thought you—I had no idea you—I had no idea Martin—when did you—?”

“His last breath,” I repeated. How to do this? “As you know, or I don’t know, maybe you didn’t know, he was a huge Eudora Welty fan.”

I looked at her carefully. “Remember that funny reading group he was in? The one at the library with all the old ladies? Well, just before he got sick, really sick, and couldn’t go anymore, they’d finished some collection of Welty short stories. I think it was their third time through.

He was always pushing her. They’d push Patricia Cornwell, he’d fire back with Welty. So, in one of these stories, one of the characters dies, and his wife saves his last breath in a little toy balloon.” Brandy was smiling with teeth bared; grace had fled. “Don’t you remember how he was? He loved this idea. It was so out there, so weird, but so not, you know? Toward the end—of everything—he’d seized on this idea. He made me go out, buy balloons. We even—practiced. This balloon versus that balloon. It was silly, it was pathetic—it was heartbreaking. I—of course I did what he asked.”

And what he was asking was not to die alone. And asking me to capture his last breath meant asking me to stay by his side, to the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 9

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last, to count down the minutes and the hours, ever-vigilant that this breath—or this one—or tonight’s or tomorrow’s—might be the last. For a few days, I panicked over the practical aspects: how could I be sure which breath was the last breath? How would I know when Martin was really, and finally, dying? But at the end, hardened with the wisdom the dying grant constant companions, I knew. I knew Martin would make it through the night, see the morning, and then— after lunch, definitely before dinner, I knew it was time for him to die. And he did.

I looked at Brandy. All this talk of breath had her holding hers, so I told her the short version. “And so I caught his last breath in the balloon.”

Brandy was standing now, staring. Out of her depth and looking it, hair frizzed and floating above her. “Ta-ta,” she said hesitantly, not as goodbye, more because she couldn’t find words to form.

“Ta-ta,” I repeated emphatically as if agreeing. “The problem now is—” but Brandy was already nodding, so I stopped. She said nothing, so I finished: “What to do.”

“Did he say?” Brandy asked.

“He did not,” I answered. “He wasn’t all that lucid when he started on this bent, and things only got worse. All I was certain of was, I had to catch his last breath.”

“Which you did.”

“Which I did.”

“But the shoebox,” Brandy said, and I sighed. But what? “We could get an urn,” she continued, but shook her head. “Do you— does it—?” She stopped, started again. “I suppose the freezer’s out of the question?”

I looked at the balloon.

“I mean, to preserve—I mean—Daniel, this is just so weird.

Martin’s last breath, he’s, he’s in there. It’s not like some dead— ashes. I mean, that’s him in there. That’s his molecules or whatever.

This is so freaky.” She looked in the box. “And kinda cool.”

“The only balloon of its kind in Pasadena,” I said.

She looked up, horrified, and then smiled quickly. “Good. This is good. You still have your sense of humor,” she said. “So, here we are. I suppose we could bury it. How about at sea? I have a friend in Manhattan Beach with a two-man kayak.” Then came hot-air balloon rides. Hikes up Mt. Whitney. She knew someone who taught middleschool science and could get us some liquid hydrogen. “Or,” she 10 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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concluded sagely, “we could see Wiggy.”

Wiggy. I went to search my mental Brandy files, but they were too vast, too chaotic, too Brandy. “Wiggy?”

“My shaman,” she answered confidentially.

I almost started shouting. “Please, Brandy, please. This is one of the reasons Martin and I hauled all the way east to tight-ass Pasadena. No L.A. foolishness like—like shamans.” Brandy turned away, hurt. “Brandy,” I said, extending a hand. Now I was consoling her: like I said, she’s a kind of genius. “Brandy—I’m sorry, but—a shaman? You’re Jewish. This is Los Angeles, but Jewish is Jewish.”

“A Jew can’t have a shaman?” she said, not meeting my gaze.

“Brandy: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’? The Ten Commandments? Moses?” Finally, Brandy perked up.

“Wiggy looks just like him,” she said, and pulled out her keys.

The shaman, of course, lived—worked? shamed?—in Santa Monica, right off the Third Street promenade. We made our way slowly south out of Pasadena, through the heart of Los Angeles, and then it was a straight, smoggy shot out to the beach. Brandy’s Dodge Charger didn’t have air conditioning—or working doors, which meant we had to slither in through the windows.

Brandy worked as an assistant something-or-other at Warner Brothers’ private museum—a suspicious project at best, from what I could understand. No visitors were allowed in the museum, no one cooperated with the museum staff, and their space on the Burbank lot kept getting smaller and smaller. Executives “borrowed” pieces like the Maltese Falcon and never returned them. In the face of this, Brandy and staff had a charge to collect and preserve as much Warner Brothers memorabilia as they could. Brandy took this charge—and any slights to the museum—quite personally. The result was that she stole a lot of Warner Brothers’ property. “For safekeeping,” she’d explained more than once.

Today, for example, she informed me that the car we were driving in was none other than the General Lee. I looked down at the shoebox. I hope you’re getting this, Martin. And by the way, here’s reason 105 why I miss you: you could whisper close and tell me what the hell the “General Lee” is.

“The General Lee,” she said, as if the rank would cinch it.

I stared at Martin’s last breath, in a balloon, in a shoebox, on my lap. On our way to see the shaman.

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Brandy wanted an answer.

“I give up,” I said. “Ken Burns? That interminable Civil War series?”

“Please, Daniel—the Duke Boys? Boss Hogg? Daisy Duke?”

Ah yes, the Duke Boys. Where were they now? “This is the car from the Dukes of Hazzard ?” I asked. “You just drove it off the lot?”

“This is the last remaining stunt double—out of 300—and yes, I just drove it off. They were about to demolish it in a new episode of E.R., without even acknowledging its history.”

“Somebody will be pissed,” I said.

“Historians will forgive me,” she said crisply, and outlined her plan to return the car to the studio when wiser heads had reclaimed control.

“Like the return of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain,” I said.

“You’re so funny,” she said, perhaps to herself, and tooted the horn, which disappointingly squeaked instead of playing “Dixie.”

“Yee-ha!” she shouted, spying a parking place on the street.

“We don’t have to call first?” I asked. “The shaman’s always open?”

Brandy giggled. “Daniel,” she said. “You are so—Pasadena. It’s cute.” I told her I felt kind of ill, and I did. Martin’s box weighed more, was warmer than when we started. It was like we’d traveled to one of the heavier planets.

“Sick,” I explained. “Queasy.”

“Consider it done,” Brandy chirped, cutting the General off.

“Wiggy does that kinda thing, too. I tell you, he cured this woman of cancer,” she said. “We’ll probably be able to get some sort of package deal.”

Wiggy didn’t look so certain when he cracked open the door. In fact, he looked upset. Occupied. A Cher-like woman lounged in a large papa-san chair that was visible in the room behind.

“Shaman Wiggy,” Brandy pleaded, shooting glances at Cher.

Probably thought it was Cher. I took another look. Maybe it was.

“This is major big,” Brandy said again, ratcheting up. “We’re talking life and death and the Journey of Souls,” she said, and you could hear the capitalization, or, at least, Wiggy could: he opened up.

There was no place to sit. The walls were painted brown, shoppingbag brown, and the ceiling, white. It made you look up, straight up, which I guess is what you’re going for in a shaman’s apartment.

“When you turn out the lights, it’s a sky full of stars,” Brandy 12 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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whispered to me, twinkling a bit herself. “So cool,” she added, smiling with half-closed eyes.

Wiggy sat like a trained bear on a footstool next to Cher. He looked like Jerry Garcia. Or Ben & Jerry. Or my aging hippie mailman who still delivers mail for Martin, even though I’ve asked him not to: gray beard, smoked glasses, serape, huarache sandals, these short pants—knickers? Culottes? Old Navy. I looked down to Martin’s balloon for confirmation; Wiggy caught me.

“What’s in the box, bro?” he said, and then coughed lightly.

Cher frowned like she didn’t do shoeboxes. She was very tall. She had it going on, really: the height, the hair, the eyes. Maybe it was Cher. She walked toward the kitchen. Small apartment. The ache in me just grew and grew. Martin would have loved this. Loved it. He wrote scripts for what he called “insomnia television”—that 12-5 a.m. stretch that belonged to infomercials and Peter Falk and other stars who, every time you saw them, made you think: are they dead?

But Martin would have had this Brandy adventure on the air pronto.

Saturday night movie showcase. Beach Shaman Shootout.

“Friend,” Wiggy asked again and pointed. “In the box?”

Brandy looked at me, saw I wasn’t going to respond—what? he’s a shaman, my eyes told her, let him figure it out—and spoke up herself. “Daniel’s lover died,” she said, eyebrows raised. Wiggy nodded expertly. “And now he has a problem,” she said, and now I did.

Brandy explained what was in the box, and Wiggy’s eyes went a littler wider. So did mine. Even Cher glided in from the kitchen.

“How’d it work?” Cher said—she had the smoky dark voice, too.

“Yeah, like, how’d you do that?” Wiggy asked. “Very cool, if you don’t mind my saying.”

Brandy looked at me.

“Uh,” I said, and stopped. That seemed like enough. And there’s no way I could have told them, told them everything.

“He just caught it,” Brandy said, flip.

Wiggy nodded curtly, a professional. “So now—?” he began.

“Exactly,” Brandy said.

“Shit,” Cher said, frowning, which disappointed me. Cher would have known what to do. Wiggy coughed his little cough.

“So we have a spirit that needs release,” Wiggy said.

“Oh I don’t think so,” I said, bitchily, out of nowhere. I’d planned to play strong silent fag for this whole shaman scene, and suddenly I’d blown it. I tried going back to mute. Brandy looked at me, goofy Crab Orchard Review ◆ 13

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eyes ready to cry. I was touched, and jealous; her tears came so effortlessly. “Listen, um, Wiggy, shaman,” I said, stumbling, inventing. “The thing is, why would he have wanted me to save it if I was only to release it?”

No one said anything.

Then Wiggy pointed at me and looked around for support. “That is so beautiful, man,” he finally said, shaking his head, and snagged a set of keys from the floor. “Let’s go,” he added, serious, eyes wide.

“Cher-babe!” he shouted into the kitchen. No way. I looked at Brandy. She looked at the box. Cher returned silently, picked up a purse the size of my palm from the papa-san chair, and strode out, wordlessly, ahead of us all.

The car was a big hit. “Get dem Duke Boys!” Wiggy shouted in a gleeful approximation of a Southern sheriff. Cher grimaced appreciatively.

“Where to?” Brandy said. Wiggy went over and patted the hood.

“Mucho cool-o,” he said and gave a little whoop. Passers-by looked at him, he fed off it—obviously his stock in trade. He looked at Cher. “Remember Daisy Duke?” He waggled his moneymaker.

Cher nodded, then started walking to the ocean. “Yes,” he said to the car, and then, to us, “Vamanos. Let’s go. Beach. La Playa.”

We started walking and Wiggy fell in step with me. “This is so perfect, really—this is why I got this place. The proximity to the beach is perfect, let alone the astral juncture that’s right beneath the GTE building.” I nodded. I felt foolish carrying the box, which was heavy again, and hotter now, still hotter in the sun. I’m sorry, Martin, I thought, because that’s when I knew how this would turn out. I screwed up. I’m really, really sorry, I thought, and remembered thinking the exact same thing, the same words, as Martin died. Wiggy dropped back with Brandy.

At the light, I found myself beside Cher. “Sorry,” I said, because the word was fresh in my mind, and because, well, the moment seemed right. She just nodded, not looking at me. She was pretty damn close, I will say that. “Sorry,” I said again, realizing that something about her was making me say that. “Sorry about Sonny, I mean,” I said automatically, and almost burst out laughing, and almost burst out crying.

She stopped. That is to say, we were stopped, standing there, but now everything stopped and she turned to face me, long and full. I realized, that, if I’d ever known Cher, face-to-face, really known her, 14 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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why-not-stop-by-Thursday? known her, I’d have known right then if that was Cher. But Jesus. She looked at me. She pointed at the box.

“Martin,” I said, and my legs turned to what, wind? They were no longer there, not holding me up, my body was twisting and alive at the sound of his name, his name, I hadn’t even said his name aloud for how long now? So long. Since the very last time. “Martin,” I said again, to myself, in my mind, but it wasn’t the same; but I had the memory of saying it aloud all the same, the syllables, letters, spilling out across my lips into human air, where humans heard them, and a man named Martin, a man I loved, might have answered and smiled, and breathed, and come across the room with a kiss.

“I’m sorry,” Cher said, ready to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and the walk signal flashed. Wiggy and Brandy had caught up.

“Let’s not miss the light,” Wiggy said, and we all crossed together and went down to the sea.

We walked up the beach a bit toward Malibu, away from the pier, and found a place free of trash and kelp. It was early fall, midweek, late afternoon. The day had been warm, but not hot, and the beach was deserted. A jogger, some dogs. A little clutch of kids danced at the edge of the water while their mother watched.

Brandy talked until Wiggy shut her up, somewhat gently. Then we all sat there for awhile and let the sun go down in silence. It had been a smoggy day, so the sunset was beautiful, blood orange and oily.

Maybe Wiggy was a shaman.

Maybe that was Cher.

Maybe Brandy really cared.

Maybe Martin knew, knew that I had killed him.

“Daniel,” Wiggy said very softly. I listened to the wind. “Are you ready?” I was already crying. Maybe I’d been crying this whole time, the whole walk down, but you think I would have noticed. I hadn’t much cried before. Not for months. Everybody said—I know they said, because Brandy told me—“Why didn’t he cry? Why didn’t he cry at the funeral?” She said some people thought I was being strong, but I think she made that up. People thought I was being a cold bastard.

I shook my head and looked at Wiggy. I’m not ready, Wiggy, I thought. You lose someone—most of him, by degrees: first his T-cells, then his flesh and muscle, his will, later his laugh and smile. Then you throw out his clothes and his stuff and his cheese hat, and then you Crab Orchard Review ◆ 15

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come down to the beach—and what’s left, then, what’s left? I looked at the box a little more.

“Sorry,” I said again, this time to the box.

“I know,” Brandy said.

“Shut up,” Cher said.

“Hey, hey,” Wiggy said quietly. “Daniel,” Wiggy said again.

Brandy was about to say something, but Wiggy stayed her with a hand, eyes locked on mine.

I looked back, I looked at the box. I took a breath. And another.

And then a deep, long one, the one you take before beginning, before going under, before the wave crashes over you. Deep and low, so I filled with air, so my chest filled and my mind filled with Martin, his chest, meager then—that chest I’d loved, caressed, washed and dressed—that chest swelled to bursting with its last breath, the breath that wouldn’t, couldn’t come out, because my hand was firmly clamped over his lips.

“Don’t fight, Martin,” I said then, and now, aloud. “Don’t fight.”

He had days, hours. The doctors had been saying this for months, weeks. Days, hours. How can that be, I’d screamed, at first when he was out of earshot and later, when he wasn’t. We brought him home to die, I’d said, you said we could, and now he isn’t, he isn’t dying, he’s suffering and suffering and we’re all—I’m all—suffering with him. When?

The next morning, I knew when. After lunch, in the light he’d loved, at the time he’d loved—one o’clock, “the civilized hour,” he’d always said, the hour he began to write every day. That was the time. I got out the balloon and held it before him like a toy. He looked at me without tears, without a smile, without, I thought, recognition. Just a blank stare, and I knew then, I knew he wanted me to capture his last breath, right then. I smoothed his hair away from his face, tucked the tendrils of what gray remained behind his ears—so softly, so gently I did this. I drew my hand along his cheek, felt the rough skin, the beard—I should have shaved him this morning, I thought, but no, it felt good rough and stubborn. Easier to grip.

I bent to kiss him, and a little puff of air greeted me. His lips did not close to meet mine, but lay there, chapped and still.

“O” he said, or something said, in a puff. I looked at him, his eyes. “O” came the sound again. Of course I knew what was he was saying. I shook my head. “Relax, Martin,” I said softly. How many times had he told me that? “Relax,” I said, unable to see if he took 16 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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account of this word, of me. I drew my hand across his cheek once more. Still warm, still alive. “Martin,” I said.

“O,” he said again, and puffed. “No.” “No,” I hushed and clamped. With one hand I held his mouth, pinched shut his nostrils. “Relax,” I said. “I’m not going to let go,” I continued, comfortingly. “I won’t let the air escape, I won’t.” He resisted, tenderly. I pushed back, held on and on, into him losing consciousness and me regaining mine. Then he stopped, and later, I stopped. Hand still over his mouth, I reached around for the balloon, and, in a single motion, switched hands, and held the balloon in place, its mouth in his, its throat pinched gently between my fingers.

It lay limp.

“Martin,” I called. I didn’t know what I’d done. “Martin,” I said again, “this last thing.” Nothing. I fell on his chest, and the balloon stirred.

“Daniel,” Wiggy said. I looked up. Cher was crying. Brandy, too. Wiggy had these eyes. “Daniel,” he said again, softer still. I opened the box, and took the balloon out. I saved you, Martin. I saved your life. I held the balloon between my fingers like a prayer, brought it to my lips. You were suffering, Martin. You were dying.

But you wouldn’t die, not until— I looked at Brandy. I closed my eyes. Undid the clothespin.

Puff.

A whiff of Martin, the touch of wet, chapped lips, the taste of a kiss, the brush of a hand, a scent, like death, but only that, a breath.

Then a roar from the wind and the sea, and then nothing, not a whisper, not a sound.

I kept my eyes shut against the silence, against the stares. The balloon was still against my lips; I breathed deeply and the balloon licked at my chin. I held my breath and waited for someone—Wiggy, Cher, Brandy—Martin—to shout or seize or shake me. Nothing.

I exhaled in a gust. I felt the balloon rise up, so I blew again, fingers firmly on the throat. I blew again, and the balloon sprang to life within my hands. Again, and bigger. Again and again, bigger and bigger, until the balloon swelled like my heart past breaking and I had no more air to breathe.

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Wanda Coleman

Bride of Horus

When MarySue was born, the relatives gathered reluctantly to pay their respects. They sensed something suspect, but deferred to custom. Mother kept secret the fact that she was born with an extra eye. It was a tiny malformed beige shell of an eye imbedded in the crown of her scalp. Fortunately, it never opened and there seemed to be no eyeball underneath; only that disturbing appearance—the almond-shaped lid, the size of an almond nut or large coffee bean with suggested lash. It was two dimensional, as if carved from the wall of an Egyptian tomb, her mother once observed as she worried.

What could it mean?

MarySue remembered the future as if it were the past, and had trouble getting through the present because of constant flashforwards and flashbacks. Her mind was truly cinematic. She saw her dying and was not afraid of it. She felt somewhat liberated by the knowledge that life did have an end. Death would violently take her while she slept.

What troubled her were all the things taking place between that then and this now. Particularly the lovers. As a child imagining her adulthood, she had only planned on one man’s possession. Now she saw hundreds of them—all shapes, races, sizes, textures of facial skin and—oy—the stinks! from toejam to rancid after-shave colognes.

When she was a teenager, the visions of lovers made her spin in her bed, dizzy from the immensity of so much masculine flesh—a plethora of lips parting as if to engulf her. It was positively Romanesque.

Her thighs bouncing and giggling uncontrollably on a ceaseless stream of bodily rhythms. All of this came upon her unpredictably at waking moments, like during gym class, causing her to groan, sweat and become faint. Those who observed her in this state thought of her as sensitive and needy, and rushed to her aid with glasses of cold tonic water, tablespoons of warm red wine or aspirin and Seven-Up (Aunt Auntie’s remedy). She avoided embarrassment by pretending that these symptoms were somehow related to her menstrual cycle.

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primarily in visions while attempting to do homework. She would see herself spread-eagle on sand dunes, in romantic glades, on haystacks, in the back seats of myriad automobiles—from the toredown to the luxurious—even feel herself floating as if actually at sea, the mattress taking on the properties of a yacht during squall or wind-flummoxed dirigible. At other times she was being ravished against the warm sudsy enamel of sunken bathtubs or against the furs of some long-dead jungle cat or California bear. Too, she heard herself emitting startling animal-like sounds, occasionally laughing uproariously, sometimes grunting with pain.

But worst were those episodes that occurred when she was in the middle of doing something she enjoyed, like playing cards or table sports with friends, dining at an upscale restaurant, couching around the television set during family viewing hours. Certainly, she had seen such things before, and it was a matter of practice and patience in order to ride through the moment without arousing the ire or interest of others. MarySue prided herself on self-control and never let anyone know there was anything wrong beyond whimsy and distraction.

The serious trouble began when she reached her mid-twenties.

She dreaded beauticians. The eye on the top of her head began to itch and wiggle on its own as if attempting to open. She worried about this because she didn’t want to lose the patch of hair that covered it and became obsessed with finding a hairstyle that would keep anyone of any height from peering down into her scalp and detecting that eye.

Sometimes she parted her scalp carefully and examined the site. Every twenty-eight days it became extremely tender, sensitive and pink around the edges. Sometimes, in the middle of having sex she could feel it wiggling as if it too experienced pleasure independent of her will. She was terrified that a lover might find it accidentally, so she always managed to maneuver things so that they happened in the position she preferred. One time, during a medical examination, the doctor’s assistant noticed it, but shrugged it off as an old scar resultant from hard playing during preadolescence.

Whenever there was a lunar eclipse the flat eye burned uncomfortably and no salve could relieve it. The burn interfered with her thoughts and on those days she was marginally able to function on the job. When she got home she’d be so drained she’d collapse and nap for an hour before resuming domestic matters.

Whenever there was a solar eclipse, the eye took on a coolness that Crab Orchard Review ◆ 19

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radiated down the back of her neck and tickled her shoulder blades, sometimes causing her to laugh at the wrong moments. For example, she would never forget the time she was starring in her high-school play. It was for the mid-morning assembly. Shakespeare of course.

MarySue had memorized Marc Antony’s speech. She had gotten the part because there weren’t enough boys. She even wore a fake mustache, her kinky hair pressed and pulled back off her scalp into a warrior’s ponytail. She was in the middle of summoning friends, Romans and countrymen when she felt that coolness, and recalled the morning weather reports filled with news of the sun’s pending disappearance and information on how to look at it responsibly to prevent eye damage. Suddenly, she was laughing uproariously, dispelling the somber theatricality of the moment, causing her fellow student actors to likewise laugh—as if it had suddenly occurred to them how silly they all looked emoting Shakespeare, young colored thespians who, in the going racist climate, would never go on to have careers either in Hollywood or on Broadway—no matter how brilliant their articulation.

MarySue often wondered if her third eye problem was somehow related to the infamous burning of the library of Alexandria in 48 B. C., during Caesar’s war against Ptolemy III. There was a fire beneath it she felt frying her brain whenever she read great literature. The knowing seemed to bypass the center of her normal understanding and go straight to her memory. At those moments she was beset by visions of cedar-hued men in white robes desperately scampering about, fruitlessly attempting to protect scrolls of flaming papyri.

A crested falcon, the sun and moon in his eyes, would soar up from the flames, the span of its multicolored wings leaving her breathless with flight. This occurred on her twenty-sixth birthday.

She knew this was a visitation from Horus and wondered at its meaning. While the fryings of her brain recurred, Horus never reappeared. This left her feeling blessed yet disappointed. In an effort to decipher that moment, she studied psychoanalysis and related dream literature on her own.

Perhaps that falcon represented the one true love of her life.

Perhaps he was on her horizon. Perhaps the vision did not recur because Horus had taken possession of a human form. He would come to her not as a winged beast but as a man.These thoughts became the daydreams that preoccupied her. She could not look at a man without wondering if he were Horus in disguise—the regal head, 20 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the piercing gaze, the wind off the Nile. She feared yet hoped—for a love that would burn through her like fire.

Thus she began a search for Horus the uninitiated regarded as promiscuity.

During this flesh ituri, MarySue learned the shapes of men, where the tailbone ends and how many muscles it takes to maintain an erection.

There were those who came from money and those who were made of trials. There were soldiers, wastrels, revolutionaries and murderers.

These choices seemed made at random to the casual observer. But in actuality, MarySue had very strict criteria; first of which was that he could not fear her. She required a straight gaze and firm grasp, a well-shaped neck, clearly defined jaw and massive thighs. She was partial to facial hair and scars. In terms of his character, there were many variables. She had a preference for men who were unafraid of dirt. Above all, he had to be indifferent to dying—stoic or exhibit bravado in the face of it, given cultural bent.

She always began her relationships with the highest hopes and usually ended them by revealing her secret, her third eye. Invariably, the men were frightened of it to one extent or another and, if not fleeing on the spot, eventually found a way out—either by provoking an argument or simply becoming inaccessible. Thus her lovelife became an exercise in fleeting, often violent collapses. Remembering each loss became an exercise that literally strained her brain, causing the secret eye periodic grand mal spasms, during which she assumed the fetal position, speaking in tongues until they passed.

In pursuit of either a cure or demise, MarySue decided to give up her search and retire to the beachside community of Venice Beach, California. Unable to find a suitable rental or anyone who would rent to a Negro, she remained in her roach-ridden ghetto apartment during weekdays but spent Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings walking the boardwalk, taking in the vendors, the tourists, the gulls, the cerulean sky. The sun darkened her already dark complexion, lightened her kinky hair and the spasms ceased.

It was then that she began to have visions of herself imprisoned in a seraglio that was half Mexico City jail and half artist’s loft.

There, she knew, she was the thousand wives of Horus. She would spend her days reciting and writing elegiac verse, giving repeated birth to an empire of children, dying during some births, living to a venerated cronehood or growing fat on figs and dates to succumb to stroke during autumn’s heat. Rarely, in a fit of cruelty, Horus would Crab Orchard Review ◆ 21

Wanda Coleman

take one wife and with sharp talons rend her to death. Or he would pluck his favorite from the fold, lift her between his wings and fly her above the ancient world. MarySue would abandon the common for the grand, wear names exotic to her ears like Baphotep, Hamah or Zora. Her secret eye would see all and glory in it.

A decade or so passed. MarySue found existence intolerable yet managed to weather the loneliness, holding her breath for long periods of time, unable to sleep, beset by dreams and visions, going backward when she thought she was going forward. Taking it one confusion at a time, wading the fog through which she stumbled guideless and guileless. Then, one day, she found herself seated in a shine booth.

While having her car washed, she had decided on a sprucing. She looked down to find a swarthy-skinned man with sleek, muscular olive arms and thick sable hair kneeling over her cowgirl boots. He looked up and smiled. His sensual face and black eyes drew her. He was half Mexican, half gladiator. She watched as he applied globs of black polish and brushed them into the cowhide with swirl-like motions.

Then he began to massage her feet through the leather. She flushed, amazed by the intense movements of his hands, shocked that he was having sex with her, that she was being raped, very casually and effectively. Every metatarsal and phalange glowed orgasmic. She nearly swooned when he began the polish process. At the climax, he applied a gloss, then struck a match. She watched as her booted feet were momentarily engulfed in flame. He charged her half the usual price. The result was a shine that lasted six months.

There were other residuals. All visions ceased, as did the itchings and wigglings of the secret eye. MarySue changed her name to Devorah.

She was able to find a new apartment from which she could see the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Park Observatory on a smogless day.

She left her job as a grocery checkout clerk and found union work as an administrative assistant and part-time script reader for a major film studio. While waiting in line at the bank to make a deposit one afternoon, she recognized the man from the shine booth. He spotted her, smiled, and waited outside, idly smoking, flicking cigarette ash against the stone steps while she finished her business. When she joined him minutes later, it was with glazed eyes, flaming cheeks and palpitations. He escorted her across the street to a bistro and explained his transformation over hot spinach salads. But no matter how many lies he told her, she knew the truthâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;this was her Horus in the flesh at last, the charmer and the brute in one. Que buena.

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Wanda Coleman

They married. In her new life, Devorah abandoned all imaginings.

She became the consummate hausfrau, nurturing potted plants and mastering the preparation of gourmet coffee. She spoke proper English with smatterings of the Spanish Horus taught her. His earthly name was Jorge, although he preferred to be called George. Whenever they kissed she heard the flash of wings and the falcon’s cry. It took hours to recover from lovemaking, and maintaining her work schedule became a burden of delight. Through her connections in The Biz, Jorge joined the technician’s union and found lucrative work as a lighting engineer. They spent vacation time and days off at their favorite adult funspot, the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. There were new friends galore once they joined a new religious cult that claimed ties dating back to King Menes and the kingdom of Upper Egypt.

Occasionally her secret eye tingled, but only slightly more so than the ordinary tinglings of a scalp.

When she awoke each morning, she looked at the falcon-turnedman sleeping one blanket over and felt a strange mix of dread and excitement. She knew that with her surrender there might be moments ahead when he’d sooner rend as ravish her. She knew that at those moments it would take everything womanly within her to survive—duty, endurance, the strength of a thousand loves. Which— as destiny sometimes dictated—it took to succor any man who thought of himself as a God.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 23

Susan Aizenberg

Ode for Aaron, at seventeen Insensible as a river stone to the chill currents that ferry it above the water’s roughly turning bed, you drift, slack-jawed, along the needle’s curving stream, legal narcotics closing the bright circuit of your blood.

Alone in the waiting room’s submarine light, two achromatic landscapes and the placid thrum of Muzak for company, I check the time too often, try to forget what I’ve read— how some believe that anaesthesia steals the soul. Without esthetic, it means you can’t feel and won’t recall whatever dreams abrade your false sleep. My friend D. says, Life’s trouble.

Children make us bigger targets for God’s malice. I fear my own unquiet dreams of those lost to accident or fate: the overdosed and near-drowned, the scalded, their nodding heads like great, dumb peonies. Those who don’t recognize their names anymore, who’ve forgotten how to grasp a fork. I fear the terrible bland prose of the waiver I’ve just signed: I disavow any right to damages. Rare side effects may include a slowed heart rate, a drop in blood pressure, coma, and death. I shake my head no to the blonde receptionist’s sour coffee, no to these wild imaginings I’ve conjured from what I know is nothing, or close.

The nurse arrives: you’ll wake up soon.

As if they were the final moments in some rare, mesmeric film, its end 24 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Susan Aizenberg

impossible to guess, I watch each lucky minute round the clock.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 25

Susan Aizenberg

Florigraphy for Erin and Jeremy Because it is your wedding day, we surround you and ourselves with custom’s fragrant alphabet, this dazzling floral lexicon of our good wishes blossoming among pews, signifying faithfulness and long life, love everlasting, from each pinned lapel, each tussie mussie chorusing from our hands, the natural voices of peonies and baby’s breath, sweet William, so beloved by the Victorians, each animate bloom herald of our best ambitions. But we who spend our days crafting what we can of plainer language must hedge our bets against what’s perishable, and so I offer you this small bouquet, less brightly hued but, with luck, 26 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Susan Aizenberg

more lasting, a botany of words to fix my fondest hopes— Violet for love, life’s sweetness.

For passion, the Rose.

Marjorum for joy, ivy for friendship.

Eglantine, the poet’s flower.

This prayer that your lives together Will flourish, brilliant As this chapel’s hothouse vocabulary, Your love last as long As the ineluctable made music Of our words to name them.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 27

Dick Allen

On Roark’s Farm

The day too beautiful to waste, the trailing arbutus just under the snow, we walked the rickrack cowpath by the old stone fence —how long ago?

Long, long ago. Cardinals and early robins fled our loud approach.

I think we sang; I think we must have said —oh, nothing much.

The tattered fires that dance throughout our bodies danced higher then.

We skipped and whistled underneath the trees —and kissed and ran.

We found some yellow coltsfoot in an underweave of mold and bark; you made my fingers brush the cloven leaves —leapt from the dark.

In the brief space of a meadow you stretched up to grab the sun.

You peeled it, halved it, gave me it to sip —that moment’s gone.

But I undressed you, then I dressed you in the wind until you felt it negligee about you, how it swirled and thinned —when you reached out.

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Dick Allen

Long, long ago—the day high-lofted kites watched over us.

They rose up from the valley and their gangling flight —was rapturous.

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Dick Allen

Sunday Race Point Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts Benign, the seal’s head bobbed among the waves and at first we thought it the disembodied head of a large dead dog, a Labrador retriever or rottweiler, maybe. It disappeared, but a few minutes later it was floating again, less than a stone’s throw from shore, ugly, bobbing, calming regarding us as if What were we? How did we come to be here?, the huge black nostrils flaring as it turned ponderously, absent-mindedly, nothing of its shoulderless trunk appearing before us. A few strokes out and I believe I could have reached it if I dared, despite the broaching tides, this part of the shoreline rougher and deeper than others. It sank again and for a long time all we did was stare at the dark shapes of floating seaweed clumps, shadows in the wave troughs where the wind arose and abruptly died. . . . Until, there, just beyond where the waves crested, in that back and forth jelly-like tipping and sliding seasick motion, the seal’s head once more broke the surface, higher than us now, looking down upon us now upon our small towels, who were kneeling, looking up into the huge brown eyes of what we’d almost worshipped.

30 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Chi-Wai Au

Monsoon

Over the low, two- and threestory tenement buildings, the thunder clouds break open, opaque as the whitepink flesh of lychee fruit.

My mother stands upstairs inside the old house, eyes fixed on the busy street while taxis scuttle back and forth caught in sudden rain.

After ten years, how much smaller and worn the neighborhood looks, the local theater’s neon sign streaked with dirt, the smog and noise of Taipei coming down to rest in narrow lanes and alleyways; soon, the gutters flood with all manner of debris, thin, grimy rivulets running out like ink, the swift strokes of water blurring the sidewalk’s outline into other faded things: the family photo on the wall bleached by sunlight, a crack inching down the glass like a long, white hair.

In mid-summer, thick paws of air drag a black-green shirt of moss across the ledge of the balcony; large, stray moths flutter up Crab Orchard Review ◆ 31

Chi-Wai Au

to the ceiling, burrowing into the gray folds of the afternoon.

Tired at last, my mother turns back to sit down on the edge of her bed, the warm wind settling, then blowing again, searching for a place among her piled, cramped suitcases of memory.

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Chi-Wai Au

Last Days at the Miriwa Restaurant

Around midnight, the lights in the parking lot twitch like tired eyes.

From the kitchenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s glowing heat, my father emerges with his apron crushed like a white flower in his hand.

Ah-Tim follows him through the back door, dishwater dripping from his shoes.

They sit down on the steps with a slow, deep breath.

It is so quiet now; the wind lifts the smell of smoke from their necks, and they talk and loosen their damp shirts in the cool air, drink to the dark face of a moon.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 33

Chi-Wai Au

Narcissus at the River

Fragile ghost, he appears in the margin of the picture dimly focused under a lamppost’s flickering light.

It’s late November, and the park in early evening gathers its usual silence over narrow pathways slick with moss and yellow leaf-rot.

A light rain has been falling through the tall, shaggy firs and he stands gazing at the stillness of water just beyond him as if some answer for solitude might be drawn out of the cold depth.

In thickening calm, his thoughts drown like networks of roots at the edge that arch and twist through mud and go no further . . .

A moon’s pale fin floats on the black surface but all along nothing shifts except the wind and distant city traffic stretched like a dazzling chain across the highway.

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Robin Behn

To Brain on Brain’s Last Day

Svelte sphere, smelling, smelting, fear; fusing what you used to do—fish/flash— with what’s relentlessly near, which is the same as “here” which is the same as “ear” and “mere”: Dear one, listen here: It’s just the glow of words boiled down to sound: a you crooning to a you in some chosen ground.

At tunnel’s, barrel’s, end, not light but this: rivers and dendrites tuned and twanged, sweetly, thickly blissed and glissed . . .

Meanwhile, certain maps collapse.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 35

Robin Behn

But now, at last, let the band begin.

You, if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re ready, fall right in.

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Robin Behn

Interlude: Still Still

Inside the hole, where it’s yellow, the boy has dropped a quarter so that the guitar rattles when he shakes it by the neck.

Knocks, scrapes, scars.

So this is what music is.

The wooden body is no longer bigger than his body.

The strings, which, when he strums them, go on forever are forever wound around small pegs that creak like the ones they wrap the ropes around, there being an absence of able-bodied mourners to lower, with the softer machines of their bodies, the coffin down.

It was a cold day.

The boy had not been born yet, but stood among us warm in his round place.

Then, from the distance, the bagpiper who’d been found

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 37

Robin Behn

in the yellow pages extracted the horizon note like a red needle from the sky.

And so it was not with nothing human our friend was lowered.

This is what music is.

But how did it sound to the boy, the bladder of cries squeezed through the slit throat when there had not been anything yet to cry about?

The solace of music is not that we recognize it.

It is that the hearing comes from before and is wound around after. Between, our bad singing a stranger dozed, then bulldozed, too.

At home, in its case, the guitar was hunkered inside the dark into which music goes, and the more particular dark from which music comes was inside of it.

The sound hole swallowed and passed back buckets of silence until the inner and outer dark had the same yellow smell.

This, while the song the boy would pay for waited, still still.

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

David Bond

It Falls to Me

It falls to me as these things do, not with sudden veil-rending, but slowly, inevitably, in a blink of incident light that drags the new snow like a lick of prairie flame, in the stretch of screen a dimpled arrow beckons now across my laptopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worded window, and in that single moment just lost: the open hotel door, the night shift maid defiant in a bleached vanilla uniform bows before her friend Anna, Anna, maligned bed-maker, duenna of all filthy bathrooms, sprawled royally in the sham Baroque wingchair, head banked back in sleep, arms languidly draped on her large exhausted inertia, and I watch those other dark hands quick as the muted discontent she chatters, knead bare workworn feet

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 39

David Bond

like living bread, with what we could call passion, a kind of rough grace in the rippled strokes, the perfect polished nails, rondure of ankle, sweep of arch, the strong touch unburdening selfness into such a tender conjunction, such a difficult language.

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

Kathryn Stripling Byer

Unanswerable

When I am gone from this house will a coil of my silver hair navigate stairwells and empty rooms when thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enough wind to find it, enough light to shine on my almost gone presence?

And if there should be such a shimmering, who would be here to see it?

To notice my cups with their coffee stains still in the bottom, the clothesline that once held my wet garments up to the sun, to acknowledge my archive of letters and check stubs, and lift to their noses my soap dish still caked with what welcomed my flesh back to life every morning?

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 41

Kathryn Stripling Byer

Her Porch

Here she would pour out her hair from her Sunday hat and sit rocking the sermon away, looking deep into shade beyond fingerleaf ferns and mimosa leaves, wanting none of us near for a little while.

Bread in the oven could wait, the blackberry pies baked on Saturday night, lying under a clean linen cloth.

We would all of us wait, with our hungers she knew only too well: through how many prayers has she listened to each of them grumbling, the stomachs sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d feed when the service was over?

Whatever she saw in the shadows those mornings when she shooed us out to her garden to deadhead the roses and sticky petunias, my cousins and I became lost in it, making our way through her jungle of tame floribunda while she sat at last in the peace of this empty house, quietly forgetting our names.

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

Danusha Laméris de Garza

What If Mary

What if Mary in her cloak of night and stars appeared before me palms pressed together like a pair of birds, head bent, that look of sad devotion on her face.

I have seen her wrinkled in the skin of a walnut tree have kept a stone that bears her countenance, dark, burnished, in my pocket, held it in my fist.

What if she spilled down into the silent air a finger poised over her lips, said, “Do not call me by my name for it means ‘bitterness’ and I am weary of that taste.

Call me Rosa, that I may be sweet but fringed with thorns once more robed in red.

Then go. Tell them I am through with birthing gods.”

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 43

Danusha LamĂŠris de Garza

Ode to Billy

Oh, Billy Collins, at last to be alone with you.

My husband lies asleep beside me, his fever hovering just above a hundred.

I have been dutiful to him, have brought him saltine crackers, chicken soup, and seven-up.

Meanwhile, you are in Canada, floating in a solitary raft watching clouds, one-by-one trace their imaginary, feathered lives against the sky.

By the light of a single lamp, I am reading how relieved you are not to be touring Italy this summer as the rain falls so steadily it is almost conversation, the heavy drops, the sound of guests clinking their raised glasses to you, Billy Collins, and the way you would describe a night like this, narrating from above the world the way that pilots flying for West Indies Air speak, soothingly, the whole three hour flight from Florida

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Danusha LamĂŠris de Garza

indicating Andros, once again, as the largest island in the chain of the Bahamas as though pleasantly surprised it was still there.

But this last poem of yours has put me over the edge.

It is not the pilot talking nor the spotty islands, so familiar, down below.

It is a low volcanic rumbling underneath the waves, the still-soft earth, wondering what it might be like to wear a crown of birds, a collar of sand.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 45

Camille Dungy

Cleaning

I learned regret in my mother’s kitchen, a jar of tomatoes, river-mud brown and a generation old, lumping down the drain. I was home and useless, could do nothing against my mother’s failing health but slip through the house and organize her past. Against pain I discarded what I could not understand. Removing a jar from the back of the cupboard, mason glass thickness slick against the smoothness of my palms, I believed only in wasted space. I had never known a woman to fight frost, fungus, worms for the promise of a winter meal. I had never known my grandmother’s mother, had never known what it was to have and then lose the company of a woman who, seeing her namesake, child of her child, grown and gliding into marriage, gifted the fruit of her garden, a strike against the cobbling cruelty of want and an offering of purist love. Opening the jar, I believed only in certain kinds of purity. I did not understand the moldering effect, the twisted grip of years spent packing and unpacking a lifetime’s cupboards, moving further each year from the known comfort of a grandmother’s garden, her rows always neat, the harvest of color a richness for a child and a certainty for a girl to carry through her days. I did not understand anything but the absurdity of a date so far past. Understanding only what is fatal to the body, I did not understand, until my hand spilled out a legacy, what is fatal to the heart.

46 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Brendan Galvin

A Driver’s Guide to Ireland

When you set out from Shannon keep left, but not so left you’re in the ditch that’s waiting everywhere, stocked with magpies whose iridescences and drawn-out tails are meant to distract you from potholes more numerous than they are. Keep thinking about keeping left, but not left enough to threaten that woman up ahead on her motorbike, herding cows the length of Limerick, it will seem, before she turns them out in a field and sends you with a wave on your way. Don’t be distracting yourself with translating roadsigns: Easky, the fishing place; Loughrea, the red lake. Eleven weathers in an hour and the lengthy summer evenings in those latitudes may color certain stones with peach striations, or shift a mountain now and again between cornflower and iris, cedar and anthracite— eyes on the road, and beware the flux of landscapes. No mulling which green is sea-green, either: those mallard tones over there?

The pine, the cobalt? Nor is there brown, but bracken, grouse, peat, bronze—and cloudcreep fluctuating

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 47

Brendan Galvin

anywhere from salmon to crowberry.

In Mayo, should you find yourself the last car in a local funeral, behind the hearse and rented buses, stay on. After the obsequies someone will put you right who’s never been wherever you think you’re going. In West Cork famous trees sometimes arise from the middle of the road.

Remember to keep left as the way parts around them, and remember that in Ireland all maps are cartographer’s surprises, gifts of sidetracking where any mile can take an hour and any roadside smiler may be only estimating.

Those uniformed men, thumbing the roads in the morning, are the army going to work, and can be reasonably hired by the division for movie battles.

As to the rumors about Yanks being kidnapped out of pubs, taken to safe houses and told stories for hours before their release, in Donegal you must jot down the Irish names on signposts, or be content to return to the same bog-misted crossroad until one of the approximate population appears.

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Brendan Galvin

For the Raven’s Return

I keep checking out the North Pamet crows for the Great Corvid who may slip into town and wear that whole flock for his cloak.

I’ll know him by his diamond-shaped tail and the way he flies upside down, aerialist above winter, the envy of grounded herons puffed up against that gulag weather.

Raffish and disreputable, those old mariners who lurch on the slippery cobbles in my sleep understand and speak all sixty-four variations of the quork to companion ravens riding their shoulders.

That’s how they keep those eyebright hunters sitting there, ruffed out in blue-green and warbling to themselves for an hour at a time like introspective drunks.

Korax the Croaker should be welcomed this way, those sailors tell me: Out of everything eastbound from Long Gone, bears on the beltway, that moose on the library lawn, cougars, coyotes, fishers, it’s you we need most, whom no supervisor asks, Why did you do it this way and not that way? Why were you there yesterday when you should have been here?

From gilded perches in the capitols, our representatives sing the lobbyists’ tunes. Bring your reclusive talents and replenish us with all you have learned in exile, Croaker, for the steeple-crowned hats that ratified your old-world repute and drove you out of here Crab Orchard Review ◆ 49

Brendan Galvin

have gone west themselves, and the roadkills multiply, tributes and honoraria for you: full moon raccoons, skunk courtships thwarted by our Interstates in the first week of February.

Make of these trees taking our cornfields back your great hall again. Dumpsters multiply for you across the land; inside the hollow steeples of churches, the cell phone towers grow taller, reaching for that year when no one will stand in silence alone without punching the numbers in, when no one will hanker to crack their wings and fly around cronking.

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Brendan Galvin

The Day Before

Greeny gray-brown warblers this morning, flocking through, too iffy to identify, and gulls on the fish-house roofs looking into it: something is up and the birds know it. The states on our screens look flimsy.

South of here, waves are climbing each other, out of order, anxious to come ashore and escape that hothouse bloom, that last lethal flower of summer, tropical yellow and red on the tube, rootless; where stamens and pistils should be, a silence like a mind thirty miles wide driving the chaos around it.

I look at these pines, wondering which I should ask for allegiance as they bow and flex, corkscrew and curtsy to survive, their needles on the skylight pointing the wind’s indecisions. What lie can I tell this garden? That the canoe I just put away is only a peapod it might approximate next year? It’s over.

Picking the last heavily-knuckled pole beans, and the squash striped like beach umbrellas, all I had hoped to keep thriving another month, I remember Carol and Edna, those storms companionably named like girls who taped our initials to their thighs, whose tans immortalized us, then left us soaked inside and out, the heels of our perceptions in the air. Tomorrow means November Crab Orchard Review ◆ 51

Brendan Galvin

two months early. Someone will swear he saw an Adirondack chair flying back to its mountains. The yacht Valhalla leaning to starboard in Atwood Lane, a robed court of cormorants presiding over a thicket of lopped yardarms and masts, the roots of things will be revealed. Shook up and shaken out like loose change in that bilious light, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll see the harbor through places we never saw the harbor before.

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Jennifer Davis

Occupying Hotel Santa Teresa

Quarto Um

Paulo, the self-appointed spokesman who knows enough English to impress the others, who has stuffed a houseful of antiques into one room, who speaks devotedly of going to or coming from a mother I never see, pulls me aside and hands me extra towels and a small bag of coconut candies my first week at the hotel. He is paunchy, balding, squat, grinning. I want to find him harmless. He drapes an arm around me, explains that the hotel is full of divorced and divorcing men who cannot afford to go anywhere else, then offers me a tour. This shower. This room to buy beer and guarana. This pool. Watch for beautiful bicho. Very dangerous. He points to a caterpillar, rainforest green tipped in fleshy red, nesting on the sidewalk; at least thirty of them stretch like crayoned exclamation points across the patio. Someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daughter huddles near the entrance of the hotel, stoking a crimson underbelly of one with a trunkless Barbie doll leg. Paulo caresses her sharp, tan shoulder when passing, teasing an O from her lips and a blossom of giggles.

She is shirtless, a bikini stained green by the algae-covered hotel pool pinched between the globe of her rear, and if I cover her with my sarong, as I wish to do, she will throw her laughter and the fabric to the heat of the day, scattering long-limbed and bared to the patio, still wearing only a hint of cloth and the shade of the mangueira trees. Paulo gestures to the receptionist/janitor/cook grinning behind her. This Alexandre. Alexandre waves from behind the check-in counter, pumping his pudgy hands against air until we turn down the hall. This room of Joaquim. Paulo points to the fourth hotel room, its door open, its dark occupant on the bed, resting the length of the day on his elbows. The room is a closet. Paulo leans in, pressing his arm tighter around me. Be careful Joaquim.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 53

Jennifer Davis

Quarto Dois Eduardo calls himself Ed and the men call him filho da puta and I call him nothing, only smile and pass quickly. The doors to his office hunch wing-like against antiquated, stained walls, and there he sits, his office, his desk perched perfectly around full, thrusting staunch as if he were inserted divinely, and indeed. Ed owns Hotel Santa Teresa, or at least I spoke with him about moving in, and he wears skin like mine, so I ashamedly appeal to his paleness, his familiarity, blinking fair eyes and flashing freckled throat. But poor is poor in a country such as this, and so I hand him 450 reais, and he blares white teeth, scribbles me into his book, hands me a pink receipt I cannot read, and looks down without waiting for me to retreat. As I walk out, Joaquim, a sunken shadow on the lounge couch, shakes the wall of his newspaper, and I hope this gesture is for me and do not feel so alone.

Quarto Três I understand from Paulo that Renato, his sidekick, is opening a juice bar in Santa Teresa, which will be the first, a brilliant idea, a sure success, but when I ask when, Paulo says soon without conferring with Renato, and Renato grins, grins some more, and gets another beer out of his cooler. Linda, Renato offers. He waits for me to respond. I’ve learned to dimple and look down at whichever flip-flopped feet are in front of me. Paulo wraps an arm around my waist, his fingers humming appreciation against my hip, and translates. Renato says you very beautiful. Because of this offering, I am expected to sit, and so Paulo positions me on the bench next to Renato, who wears the sheen of the drunk on his lips and eyes. Renato points to his chest, bared to the sun like all the other men, says Renato Perriera. The name jerks off my tongue when I try. Nah, Renato Perriera. He cups my chin, tugging my lips open, reaches into my mouth with one dirty finger and strokes my tongue. His breath smells of beer and pepper and doce de leite and pushes against my throat. Feel your language, Paulo urges from behind me, coaxing me to cough up my r’s like a secret I am keeping. I feel nothing but the taste of Renato’s breath licking. After a few more tries Renato shrugs, grabs a beer and lopes down to the pool, his long body dusty and smoky and sunburnt like a burning cigarette.

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Jennifer Davis

Quarto Quatro Newspaper reading Joaquim, a tall, youngish man with black woeful eyes and pock-marked cheeks, knocks whispery on my door some mornings, and then stands in the doorway smiling, usually with a gift, but never enters. The first morning he brought me a photograph of Centro. Uma lembrança. The next day a flower I did not have a name for, already wilting. A few days later a small framed picture of a dark woman, an older, happier version of himself. When I reached for it he jerked it away, and then held it up so I could see it but not touch it. Mãe. Minha mãe. He pointed to his chest, folded his hand against his head like he was sleeping, then left. From what I can gather from Paulo, Joaquim is under house arrest, and the management gives him the smallest room in the hotel because he can’t complain, can’t leave. When I ask Paulo what Joaquim did, Paulo says something. When I ask again, Paulo says something bad.

When I try to imagine, I look to Joaquim’s eyes, eyes so dark there is nothing inscribed.

Quarto Cinco German Alfred, lovely golden Alfred, has found his way to the hotel via two Brazilian ex-wives. His pink blondeness looks foreign to me against the burlap earthiness of late summer Rio. Alfred disappears for days at a time, and then I’ll see him in the parking lot covering his cobalt motorcycle with a plastic canvas. I do not know if he speaks English because he has never spoken to me. I tell Paulo I dream of riding the hilly brick streets of Santa Teresa on Alfred’s motorcycle, of cruising alongside the San Francisco style bonde Dois Irmãos with its flesh load of favela boys hanging from the handrails for free. The next morning Paulo knocks on my door, an awkward, oversized helmet in his hand, and leads me to the patio where Alfred waits, long legs linked over his motorcycle. Giddy and clunky in my excitement I forget to be embarrassed as I poke my arms around Alfred’s foreign waist. We ride past the bonde, through the Saturday morning markets of fresh fish and vegetables, the air heavy with mango and the billboard calls of the merchants; the smaller boys chase us down avenues, barefoot, smiling, faces smeared with dirt and papaya stolen from vendors. We twist up the side of Santa Teresa until there is nothing but green and green and Crab Orchard Review ◆ 55

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the open, paternal arms of the statue Cristo Redentor of neighboring Corcovado. Alfred stops at an overview, turns off the motorcycle, helps me remove my helmet to a vista of rust-colored hovels, thousands stacked upon thousands against the fluid blue of sky, a massive coral reef afloat in nothing. We sit in silence for some time until Alfred points to the base of the cliff. Here, he says in a jerking, German accent so different than the looping twirl of Portuguese, here is where Paulo says police sometimes find the bodies. He cranks the motorcycle; we put on our helmets and make our way back to the hotel.

Quarto Seis Alexandre, the receptionist/janitor/cook is an idiota, or so the men call him. He is smooth and plump like a ripe mango and never removes the smile from his face. The other men scream at him for their beers and call him names, but I always dimple and shyly look at his flip-flopped feet and tip him one real, which is the cost of the beer, and so although he grins at everyone, I think he likes me. He gives me two pieces of pão francês, picks the ants out of my sugar with lumpy fingers at breakfast, and leaves two rolls of toilet paper on my pillow when he cleans. On Sunday afternoons he pulls a wooden chair to the lobby TV, stands on it delicately, perched like a papagaio, and rigs the antennae so I can watch Dirty Harry or My Fair Lady or Kramer vs. Kramer dubbed in Portuguese.

Quarto Sete Philipe, the aspiring vocalist, moves like he owns water for bones, his bare, soft-soled feet drip drip dripping into a room until he fills it and I dream of swimming in him. He sits alone at breakfast, always at the table next to the cleanest window, and devotes two cups of café com leite to admiring the towering Cristo Redentor while teasing a rhythm from the wooden table with the rolling wave of his knuckles. Alexandre knows to bring Philipe his pão francês only after this moment has ended, and Philipe breaks the fresh bread, sinks it into salted butter, bringing it to lips the color of papaya and sunburn with hypnotic fingers. The other men don’t trust Philipe because he is not man enough. I do not trust him because the flow of his whiskey-toned shoulders, abdomen, flanks, fingers intoxicates 56 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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me into movement, and at night when he practices, when he sings Marisa Monte, desilusão, desilusão, danço eu dança você, no dança da solidão . . . his voice laps into my small room, and although we have never spoken, my arms twist above me in the breath of the night, my thighs brushing together until my flesh sings a response, and I dance with him.

Quarto Oito Luis, the handyman, knows my kind, and wears the burden of me in his eyes when I pass. Although I have taught my mother to ask for me in Portuguese when she calls the hotel, if Luis answers the lobby telephone he puts her on hold and never returns. Luis has adolescent sons who ride the city bus to Hotel Santa Teresa after school. They arrive with their blue public school uniform T-shirts wrapped turban style around their heads in favela gang fashion. And every day Luis, bent, dented, yells at them until they flip their chins and roll their eyes, but unwind the T-shirts and stuff them in backpacks. He hands his boys tools to fix the showers, toilets, sinks, locks, chairs, everything else terminally broken in the hotel, and they drag feet and grumble insults but follow Luis, his eyes flashing to me as if all were my fault.

Quarto Nove Only João cries. Desperately young, slight João. This is his first divorce, and the festive air of the men who are here for the fourth or fifth time has mocked him into desperation. He needs touch, or maybe I do, and so I allow him to pull me away from the hotel, to press me onto a broken bench under a mangueira tree beside the road bending towards us, to stroke my hand, my arm, my shoulder in mourning. Ahhhh meu amor, minha bonitinha, he sways, his unkempt hair singeing the edges of his face. He has forgotten himself, lost in the hiccupping lights of Centro he watches from his open window each evening. So young, so young, yet his brown eyes have settled into pools of mud, dull and flat, his skull sucking shadows from his face. He looks at me for a response to his touch, rubs the feeling from the flesh of my arm, places his lips against the palm of my hand until I am embarrassed. Por que, por que . . . agora eu não tenho ninguém. He drops my palm to show me that his are empty.

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Quarto Dez And then there is me, tucked back near the courtyard in a room smaller than everyone’s but Joaquim’s, because he is no one, a tale to make us all feel better about who we are, a prisoner in so many ways why bother counting them. And why am I here? A reason I recreate as often as I recreate the men who recreate me, who stare at my sheer body, covered breasts to knees in a flowered sarong, my skin mapless and blank, exotic in bleached perfection. They sometimes label me American or French or Australian or British, but always other, and somehow better for it. Our fantasies are a fair trade, I suspect, if anything is fair in a world where men with paler flesh leave the doors of their offices open to show what could be.

For boys who follow the trail of their father, his tools whipping against his flanks, their eyes whipping against me and the world, already their newly man bodies wrapped in the colors of war. For men who endure the same day repeatedly—knotty, fleshy lips chewing on mangos dropped to their feet from the patio mangueira trees with sighs of grátis, as if God does give some care for free, although everyone knows they paid a lifetime for a pulpy bite, and I, only the price of a plane ticket.

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The Lands of the Nobles

When they reach the outskirts of Meppel, Gloria wishes Mina would forget about visiting her girlfriend in the suburbs and drive on into the town. There’s a church she wants to look at, one of those good gray Protestant clusters of squat towers, seized from the Catholics long ago when all the Papist crosses were knocked off. She has it on a picture postcard with the caption Groeten Uit Meppel! In the picture there’s a canal with a drawbridge just before the church.

Because of the photographer’s angle, the tower of the church appears to sit atop the bridge. It’s one of those ultramodern Dutch bridges that lifts or swings open and shut so swiftly—Hollanders are very advanced with everything concerning water—that they often come close to catching little boats in their teeth. Are they called drawbridges whether they lift or swing? The little boats mostly belong to German tourists. Germans, everyone in Holland will tell you, have lots of money and no water for boats back in Germany.

During the war the Dutch hated the Germans but that’s all over with—something else everyone tells you.

“There’s a road sign for Stap . . . horst,” says Chicago-born Gloria, rhyming it with “strap,” hoping this will somehow move them along.

“It is pronounced staaahp-horst,” Mina corrects, derision edging her voice.

Gloria doesn’t care all that much for churches and architecture, it’s just that she has the picture postcard. She finds it satisfying to match up a picture with the real thing. It gives her the feeling she’s really been somewhere. Like this photograph with its optical illusion, a very old church sitting atop a very new bridge. If she actually saw it, all sorts of things might come clear. Whoosh. Into focus. Things like why the Dutch spread chocolate paste on their bread, and even a clear explanation of World War II, which it seems to her she can almost remember. Along with the divorce thing. With divorce, you get disconnected. Actually all three of them are divorced and fortyish, even the girlfriend they are trying to find.

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Gloria has been in Holland several times with Mina. “You don’t have the slightest notion where your girlfriend’s house is,” she accuses.

Before answering, Mina swings their rented car into a street that seems much too narrow for it. There is a bakery on the corner.

A customer, a woman in a stylish fitted coat, carrying a loaf of bread and about to step into the street, is startled and draws back into the doorway. Then Mina cries, “House!” Aggrieved. Having made the treacherous turn, she is once again free to talk—howl, thinks Gloria.

Mina has come home to attend to the re-burial of her father. It is a complicated matter. In fact, she never cared for the man. She is trying to cover this lapse of emotional ardor by being aggrieved by everything else that comes within her range. She shoots perilously down the street, wavering between the center line and a bicycle path that has now appeared. “You know Dutch people cannot afford houses like Americans! You know there is not room! You know house can only be had by the rich! House! Ha! You are making fun of me!”

“I believe you are the one who said house,” Gloria retaliates.

Then she reconsiders. “You say house. You say it all the time.” It’s summer and Gloria thinks this burial business is a helluva waste of good vacation time, but Mina is her best friend.

Mina is annoyed because she cannot find her friend’s address— house or otherwise. Gloria is annoyed because Mina won’t admit it and has decided to make everything Gloria’s fault. With a best friend, hegemony can get very complex. Mina has lived in Chicago for fifteen years and speaks pretty good English, as good as you can when you don’t learn until adulthood. But she still knows perfectly well how Americans use “house.” You can live in a loft over a printing company in an industrial district like Gloria did with her ex-husband and still call it your house. Now Gloria lives in the same apartment building as Mina in a regular apartment neighborhood, and they both say house as often as not, instead of apartment.

They work for the same company. Community Newspapers.

Actually, they work on the Southside Shopper. Gloria writes ads.

For Rent 2 BR 1.5 BA. ALL APLS. INCL. AVAIL. 3/1. Mina with her perilous command of English works in accounting. She’s very good with numbers. Community Newspapers doesn’t pay a lot but it’s a pretty nice office, on Wacker Drive, and their jobs are secure. They think about that, as divorced women do, when they’re not busy being terribly annoyed with each other as they are now.

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once again to maneuver around fifteen or twenty bicycles, all black, several carrying middle-aged women with headscarves tied on in what Gloria calls nineteen-forty style, women apparently going out to work or shop, she now comes to a stop at an intersection, ponders whether to turn left or right, and decides she is freed up to speak again.

“You think I forget the address of the house of my best friend from childhood?” She seems to have forgotten the “house” controversy and slipped back into American English. When you’ve lived in Chicago so long and work on Wacker Drive, it’s bound to happen.

“I would never think such a thing!” Gloria replies and sees the irony of her words slide right past Mina, like a woman in a headscarf riding a black bicycle and going out to work or shop sliding past the rented car.

Riding along beside Mina, Gloria should have a map to navigate.

Unfortunately, all she has is a guidebook. Funlovers’ Guide to Holland! Somebody left it in the rented car and it’s in English. One heading says: Unique places to eat, drink and be royally entertained in Europe’s liveliest nation!

Always before when Gloria has come to Holland with Mina it’s been really just a vacation. They were en route to someplace else— Paris or Milan or maybe Madrid—but they’d tool through Holland to see a few of Mina’s relatives. Gloria would sit politely with a cup of tea while Mina rattled on in Dutch with her aunts and uncles and cousins, then they’d be on their way. All the relatives seemed to live around Utrecht. None ever lived up here in the north where they are both—and Mina should just admit it—totally lost. And none ever had to be reburied before. Gloria wanted to get a map but Mina was sure they wouldn’t need one. Gloria doesn’t know why the guy was buried way up here. She knows he was a drunk and Mina’s parents were separated— not divorced—because of the Catholic Church. The mother died years ago, she’s never mentioned. And Mina’s been a free thinker for years.

“Free Tinker,” she calls it, still struggling with the “th’s.” Gloria makes her practice saying these-three-seen-through-the-trees-are-thirsty, but it doesn’t seem to help.

Their ultimate vacation destination this time is Barcelona, if the cemetery business ever gets settled, along with the Meppel-area girlfriend from Mina’s childhood. It occurs to Gloria that if this woman was a friend from childhood, she must have grown up to the south of here and perhaps moved to Meppel with a husband. If so, now that she’s divorced, why doesn’t she move back? Gloria wonders Crab Orchard Review ◆ 61

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this and immediately knows why. Living space is so tight in Holland.

If your space is even halfway decent you hang onto it. Then she can’t help thinking of Mina’s father and adding, And if you die, they’ll take it from you forcibly.

The towns of Holland all look alike at first, tall narrow houses pressed together and rising more stories than you expect, solemn unsmiling windows with modest lace half-curtains on the ground floor, steep red roofs. And water of course, canals everywhere, so many they look off-hand, not anything anyone planned, as if they came of their own volition and intend to do as they wish, although everything in Holland was made by people, reclaimed from the sea, and everything is now regulated. At first, it all looks alike, but only at first. Gloria has learned to be sharp-eyed. There’s more here if you look closely. Sometimes there are houses with big brassy doorknobs with small, rather cunning-looking windows beside them, and sedately lettered name plates in tiny squares of front yard. These are wealthy people. Mina’s relatives, the ones who speak English, always get around to saying, “Any Hollander who emigrated to the States and made a success could have made a success in Holland.” They get around to saying it every time Gloria and Mina visit. When they say it, Gloria suspects they are thinking of the rich Hollanders with the big brassy doorknobs, although none of Mina’s relatives is rich.

After these visits, Mina apologizes. “They have to say that, for the appearance.” And Gloria nods. She knows she and Mina come across to these people as rich Americans, when they are only two office workers who like to save up for vacations.

Riding by, you can read every letter on every sign and nameplate because the streets are so narrow, and there’s no space to set anything back from the road.

Unbelievable, these small houses with their small rooms. Gloria has been in enough of the homes—apartments! row houses! complexes! whatever!—of the aunts and uncles and cousins to know. Some of them have toilet rooms so tiny your breath catches in your throat when you go in and close the door, like you’re in a casket or one of those medieval torture boxes. And those narrow staircases, twisting and turning, up, up, up, so they use only the littlest bit of space. Luckily, no one gets fat here. That’s because they all ride bicycles. A fat person couldn’t squeeze up those narrow stairways or into those tiny toilets.

It’s because of smallness Mina must now deal with her father.

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grave to another. Give up the ghost, thinks Gloria. It’s because of the Catholics. He has to rot in the grave for the degradation of it.

Holland gives him ten years for this. Then it’s cremation. Like it or not. Ready or not, thinks Gloria. Is it the whole country or just this cemetery? All churches or just the Roman Catholic? Are there Methodists and Baptists here, and, if so, do they also want you to rot for a while before you are cremated? Then there’s the question of what’s public and what’s private. She’s tried asking Mina but the questions and the answers get too complicated for both of them.

You can translate words and still miss the concept. The time period in the grave—and Gloria’s pretty sure about this part—is ten years.

Then the oldest son is supposed to come, but Mina is an only child so it’s her party.

Between towns, the picturesque old buildings disappear but there is still no space. Gloria rephrases it. There is no “between towns.” The space has all been filled by new housing, surreal-looking complexes that resemble puzzle boxes with their maze of streets and alleys, as if a child had pulled all the boxes of a set apart, scrambled them on the living room carpet, and then abandoned them.

You can’t tell the front of a building from the back. Everything’s paved except for the postage stamp flower gardens, which may be front yards or back yards. Who could tell which? Do children get confused going and coming from school? Do drunken husbands— full of Holland’s famous jenever—blunder into the wrong houses?

Not to mention the mailman.

Mina wheels in and out of the mazes like a crazed, oversized Dutch mouse. To punish Gloria, she has decided not to tell her the girlfriend’s address. So it does Gloria no good to watch for street signs and numbers. There seems to be a street sign at every corner.

But of course there would be. That’s for the confused children and the drunken husbands. Not to mention the mailman. So Gloria is left to look out at the new housing with complete innocence or peruse the guidebook. In this marvelous restaurant, the eggs, pasta, and miscellaneous category ranges from mushrooms on toast to chicken pastries. She can’t get a grip on “mushrooms on toast.” Something like cream of mushroom soup in a sort of a la king? Sautéed mushrooms dumped in a greasy pile on the toast? Buttered toast?

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than Mina and Gloria—at least that’s what Gloria wants to think.

But maybe not. None of them is fat. That’s the first rule if you want to stay looking young, don’t add pounds. Gloria and Mina work out regularly, but they aren’t bony.

“This wicker furniture is very expensive,” says Anna in fairly good English. It’s painted white. The settee and chairs look like some American’s Florida room, but Mina is impressed and fingers the bluish flowered pads that cover the backs and seats. Gloria is skeptical. Wicker? Come on, now. There’s a small balcony off Anna’s living room, green plants clustered all over it. Gloria’s been in Holland often enough to know this is a humiliation. Every Hollander wants a bona fide garden, at ground level with real dirt and not just pots. Even if it’s only four feet square. Well, thinks Gloria, trying to convert four feet square to meters in her head. Still. . . . Making do with a balcony is second rate. “Hardly anyone has the money to buy wicker,” Anna says, running a hand over her settee.

“Wicker,” says Gloria, trying for a non-committal tone. She has taken a dislike to Anna because of her pridefulness and wants Anna to know she knows the furniture is not expensive, that it’s just a dodge to compensate for the missing garden. Gloria is pretty sure she got all of that into her careful enunciation of the single word, wicker. It feels powerful, having total mastery of English, all of the nuances, in the presence of two women who do not.

As if to get even, Anna immediately lapses into a rapid stream of Dutch. No matter how she’s tried, Gloria can’t get the hang of the language. They even use letters and sounds that don’t occur in English, and it’s so guttural, like having a bad cold all the time. But they’re talking about the burial, she gets that much. Ten years to satisfy the Catholic mandate. Then you can be taken up and cremated, the precious space that is your grave given to someone else. Somebody will say a prayer and Mina is supposed to be there, and so she will be. Tradition won out over free thinking.

The rattle of speech stops long enough for Anna to bring tea. It comes with milk and sugar in it. No one asks your preferences. No Dutch hostess would expect a guest to lift a hand to fuss with milk and sugar.

As Gloria sips her tea—actually, there’s very little milk or sugar, Anna seems frugal straight through—Anna’s voice, still in Dutch, drops a note or two. Gloria sees Mina look over her way with an odd sideways glance, and Gloria gets it. Anna’s ex-husband has 64 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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started coming around to sleep with her, and Anna’s glad. You’re bound to pick up some Dutch, but Gloria isn’t sure this situation with the ex is anything for Anna to brag about. Gloria was born and raised in Chicago. If her ex tried it she’d throw him out. Mina sends Gloria another sideways glance but also sees it’s too late. Mina knows Gloria knows, and Anna sees Mina seeing Gloria knowing.

Everybody now knows, and Anna’s glad about that too. She gives Gloria a coy smile.

Anna now serves them each a small piece of cake. Really, really small. Frugal Anna. Then it occurs to Gloria maybe Anna really is poor and isn’t just pretending to it because she’s a niggardly pennypincher. Immediately she feels guilty for her hostility toward this bony woman who enjoys her ex-husband popping in for sex. It’s just that no one is really poor in Holland. It’s a welfare state, for heaven’s sake, cradle to the grave. Grave? Yes . . . well.

As the Dutch rattles on around her, Gloria discovers she can see through the window and beyond the green plants down into a little square of street. An old man has come out of his apartment on the ground floor across the street. He’s hanging onto his neat fence—it’s the kind Americans put around horse farms, horizontal boards and uprights painted a brilliant white, which looks a bit strange used to enclose such a tiny garden—and he is coughing. It’s a god-a-mighty cough. He’s probably a lifelong devotee of those harsh European cigarettes, thinks Gloria, who gave up cigarettes five or six years ago but still misses them.

“Did you tell Anna you liked the cake?” Mina urges.

“It’s very nice cake,” says Gloria dutifully, wondering how this brief exchange has somehow given Mina an upper hand. “Very, very delicious!” Gloria is trying to remind herself she and Mina are really very good friends, but actually all she wants to do is watch the man cough.

Anna decides to say, “Any Hollander who is a success in America would have been a success in Holland also.”

Gloria and Mina both nod. “You bet,” says Gloria.

Mina knows Gloria is being malicious and looks at her sharply.

“Your father was Catholic,” says Anna to Mina, in English now.

Somehow it’s an accusation, a postscript to the anti-emigrant pronouncement. It’s because Gloria and Mina have come from America. Never mind childhood friendship. These two have to be put in their place, constantly.

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“But I am not,” says Mina. “I am not Catholic. I am agnostic. A Free Tinker.”

Anna considers this. “I thought all of the Catholics were in the south of Holland. That is where they have Carnival.” Anna’s disdain for Catholics is a large, sour smell in the room. She seems energized by it. At last, something has raised her above these two Americans, at least one of whom has Catholic connections. If it were possible, she would probably climb the steeple of one of the gray squat churches and knock off a Papist cross as her Protestant ancestors did. If there were any Papist crosses left. It’s all in the way she says Carnival, spitting the word out.

“Not all Catholics are in the south,” says Mina, in a mild high voice. Anna’s arrow has missed its mark. The fact is, Mina doesn’t give a damn about religion. She’s always telling Gloria that. I-don’t-give-adamn-about-religion. She’s been saying it a lot lately in connection with this digging up the bones for cremation which could have been performed in the first place. Could-have-been-cremated-in-the-firstplace. Along with, Who-da-hell-does-dat-piece-of-land-belong-toanyway? Back in Chicago, Mina’s English is sometimes astonishing.

She is beyond being injured by Anna’s anti-Catholicism.

Anna sighs, eats her tiny slice of cake. The cake has no frosting but it’s filled with bits of things, those little yellow raisins Gloria can never think of the name of. Savannahs? Samanthas? No, Sultanas. She and Mina are always bumping into them in Europe, usually in England. They pick them out and lay them on the side of the plate, when no one’s around to watch. No hostess.

Anna sighs once more and they both see her pondering her options.

She hasn’t many. She’s offered up her wicker and her sex life. She’s tried to slander their religion. It’s hard to win against Americans. A look passes between Gloria and Mina. They can agree on this one.

They’re sorry they look rich and successful to Hollanders. God, they aren’t rich. They save up all year to afford the tourist-class hotels of Europe. Two divorced women who work on the Southside Shopper.

For Rent 2 BR 1.5 BA. ALL APPLS. INCL. AVAIL. 3/1. And Mina calculating customers’ bills. How much can you make of that?

But Anna has one more trick up her sleeve, the sleeve of her bony arm. She fires what will be her final volley. And it’s a big one.

“Do you want to see the lands of the nobles?” she asks.

Gloria lays down her fork. Anna is speaking English but surely something has been lost in the translation. “What’s that?”

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Anna pauses for a moment to touch a China knickknack on an end table, something with a windmill painted on it—everything in Holland has a windmill painted on it—and pretends to wipe away a bit of dust.

She’s letting it sink in, savoring the moment. “The lands of the nobles!”

She smiles. It’s a wide, wild smile that shows large teeth with a gap in front. There’s no mistake. She did indeed say what she said.

Mina looks amazed. “I never saw that myself!”

“Wide open lands!” Anna is warming to her subject, seeing she finally has their full attention, seeing she’s finally one-upping them.

“With no fences!” The smile grows wider and wilder. She even manages to look less bony than before. “That is for the hunting! If you walk or if you ride a horse, either way the hunter does not want a fence!”

Gloria has to look away. She knows right off it’s going to be a fraud, a colossal fraud. She doesn’t want Anna to see the smile she feels curling her lips. Anyone can see there’s scarcely room for a bug to spit in this whole country. Wide open lands. Ha! That’s worse than buying wicker lawn furniture for your living room and trying to pass it off as expensive.

“You have a car,” says Anna, who watched them arrive, “and I will drive it.”

Mina nods agreement, all enthusiasm now.

Gloria wonders what Anna’s driving will do to the insurance from the car rental place, and if she even has a driver’s license.

Mina usually worries about these business matters, but this is her friend from childhood. Is that where all this trust is coming from?

Does Mina really believe this crazy story about the nobles of Holland? But Gloria’s outnumbered so she doesn’t protest. Well, okay, she’s also curious.

They put Gloria in the backseat. Anna and Mina chatter in loud high-pitched Dutch in front. Anna drives them through the puzzle-box suburbs, then through Meppel in no time at all, although Gloria doesn’t spot the church on the postcard. Anna dips in and out of traffic, dodging bicycles, shooting forward like an Indy racer at every opportunity.

So okay, she probably is an experienced driver, maybe her ex just got the car in the settlement when they divorced.

In what seems only minutes, they are on a highway. Gloria peers into the front seat at the speedometer, trying to translate kilometers into miles. They’re going something over ninety miles an hour. Of course everyone here drives fast, that’s nothing to hold against Anna, but when countries are so small, why are these people in such a Crab Orchard Review ◆ 67

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hurry? To this question, the natives respond, You build cars to go fast, then you drive slow.

Anna glances into the rearview mirror and catches Gloria looking, and grins wickedly. “Is this too fast for you?”

“Not at all,” Gloria answers coolly, because the question seemed such a challenge.

Gloria has lost all sense of direction. They might be going north, but it could also be east. The sun’s behind a cloud. There’s never much sun in Holland anyway, certainly never enough to help you with directions. According to Mina, people here still sometimes get rickets unless they take vitamin supplements. It’s because of the lack of sunshine.

They turn onto a side road, then another, and suddenly they are in the middle of nowhere. Ha! They’re back in Illinois. Drive out of Chicago and there you have it. Everything flat. Farms. Fallow. Is that the word? No, pasture. Well, maybe fallow. Gloria is a city girl.

She takes a second look and, city girl or country, it’s like nothing she’s ever seen. Empty land. Set-aside land. No buildings. No people.

Maybe something like alfalfa greening up here and there in these silent acres. Another turn and it’s a gravel road. Nothing’s paved in any direction, in this country that paves everything. And all of the signs have disappeared, in this country that practically makes a national pastime out of erecting street signs at every corner. All this empty space makes your breath catch in your throat.

There are only trees, here and there, sometimes in a line along the road. God, the trees are so large and thick they must be hundreds of years old. And Anna’s right, not a fence, not a one! Gloria thinks of the old man coughing and hanging onto his board fence around his four feet of dirt as if he owned a Texas horse ranch.

Then they come to the corner of two gravel roads. There’s not a person in sight but there is a cottage, old as the trees probably, that dark red brick that is almost purple. But a bright red tile roof.

“The house of the keeper!” Anna trumpets.

Gamekeeper, of course! Gloria adds silently. They’ve driven right into the middle of that BBC mini-series Lady Chatterly’s Lover, where all the film is that grainy brownish color. Gloria wouldn’t be surprised if a sexy-looking man in corduroy pants and high boots, with thick curly hair falling into his eyes, came walking out of the cottage carrying an old-fashioned gun over his shoulder.

“Now watch for the big house!” Anna commands.

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And Gloria sees it. Down yet another gravel road, so far in the distance it takes a minute to focus. Then they’re closer, they’re coming to it, Anna is slowing so they can take it in. A manor house?

Yes, that must be it. A manor house. Far, far from the road but close enough now to see. Not a chateau like the French, not a castle. Now Gloria knows what manor house means. All you have to do is look and you know. Narrow high windows, double front doors, gravel paths then paving stones. Paving stones? No, flagstones. Nothing showy. That means real money. Gloria read that somewhere, Nothing showy means real money. It was in an article about Jackie Kennedy’s sister in People Magazine. And there’s more to see. Of all things, living room furniture sitting outside on the flagstone terrace. To catch the summer weather? Even if there is no sun? An overstuffed couch and two overstuffed chairs, for god’s sake. Gloria knows she’s about to think something, it’s right there on the tip. . . . And then she thinks it. Those pictures of World War II. From her history book in high school. Of Eisenhower before he was president and everything in Europe bombed out. Pictures of conferences of the Allied leaders meeting mid-war someplace in Europe to plan strategy. She can remember this one picture plain as day. Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin. Roosevelt in his cape and smiling with that cigarette holder clenched between his teeth. She remembers because the history teacher, Mrs. Canby, explained how everybody smoked then, and how Roosevelt wore the cape draped around him and got his picture taken sitting down because he was crippled and couldn’t walk and a lot of people never even knew it. And he was president, for god’s sake. Then Mrs. Canby explained how so many of those things have changed today, and all for the better. She never knew how many of her students were smoking in the parking lot over lunch hour. Gloria isn’t likely to forget that.

Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. In this picture she remembers so well, you can see they’re sitting out under the trees on upholstered furniture and you think without thinking that people carried it out there to take pictures because they were important men. But now Gloria sees the way it really was and still is. The furniture was there all the time, before the Allied leaders got there. The rich—really rich—have servants to carry the furniture in and out, morning and night—oftener if it rains, no doubt—because they can. To make themselves comfortable and because they can. Who would have thought people did that! And Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin Crab Orchard Review ◆ 69

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sat on those couches and chairs, in this country or another like it, in front of this manor house or another like it. They sat and divided up the world and planned life for everybody. Those three men. You can’t miss it! Looking at the faraway couch on the terrace of the faraway house, for an instant Gloria almost thinks she recognizes the pattern in the upholstery. From that photograph in the history book. That’s how real it seems. It’s as if somebody meant to hide all this by putting it off in this secret place, but now she knows how the world is made.

There’s a man with a cap and high boots raking in the distance, in the piece of lawn where the gravel path meets the terrace, but otherwise there’s still no one around—in this crowded country!

In the front seat, Mina and Anna have exhausted their interest in manor houses and resumed chattering in Dutch. They have forgotten her completely. They’re back to Anna’s ex-husband. He has girlfriends, young ones, but he still comes back to Anna. Anna credits her prowess at sex. They think Gloria doesn’t know any Dutch. There’s a helluva difference between not knowing any and knowing a little. Positions. The positions for sex. Then Gloria loses the thread of the conversation.

There are more manor houses, but they do nothing to diminish the first one. They serve to confirm it. Except there can’t really be any nobles. Gloria’s still waiting for the punch line.

As if on cue, Mina turns. “Not really nobles,” she explains, having now gotten the full story from Anna. “No more. Now. . . .”

Her brow creases. “Some families that used to be nobles now make chocolate, or maybe import coffee. It is complicated.”

But Gloria gets it, all in a flash. “The nobles of old are today’s very, very rich businessmen.” Of course. They are the captains of industry. They’re head and shoulders above those guys with the brass doorknobs and nameplates in the yard. Nobility meant money and the land never changed hands when the professions changed, just the titles. Or lack of. That’s Dutch efficiency for you.

“Very, very rich!” Mina confirms with a smile. “You got it.”

“But in England the nobles got poor,” Gloria offers.

“Not here,” says Mina. “Here they know business.”

And just when Gloria feels it’s all been sorted out, the siren starts up behind them. She should have caught on right away. Now she does. They are on private property, which is why there are no signs and nothing is paved, and being here is an illegal act.

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It’s a yellow Jeep-type vehicle behind them. It doesn’t make you think police, but that’s who they are.

Anna doesn’t pull over. She stops in the middle of the unpaved road.

It’s not exactly Andy Griffith and Barney from Mayberry who get out of the Jeep. There are two of them, young giants. Gloria thinks for one swift moment of the Dutch speed skaters in the Olympics, those men with the powerful arms and legs who look straight ahead with no expression on their faces, then swing out when you least expect it to pass Norway. But these guys with their khaki uniforms and shiny black boots have guns, serious guns. A submachine gun is cradled in the arm of the first man. It’s pointed straight ahead, straight at them. The second man has a gun in a holster strapped around his waist, his hand is on the butt of the gun. They’ve parked the Jeep behind the car as if to cut off escape. Now they come forward and surround the car. Can two men surround a car?

Gloria knows—knows it backwards and forwards—that the first rule for anyone traveling abroad is to stay out of foreign jails. They can be awful, and no one can help you, not an American consul, an American ambassador, not even the President of the United States.

And how the hell do they know what Anna has on her person? In her purse? She could have cocaine, or worse. The Dutch can be very lax about such things, including pornography, prostitution, and euthanasia. You read it all the time. Still, any guidebook will tell you drug offenses are the worst kind in foreign countries, the quickest to land you in foreign jails. They can keep you for life. You don’t need a lawyer to tell you that. Even if you just work on the Southside Shopper, you still watch TV and read the newspaper. You hear what’s going on. There isn’t any habeas corpus in foreign countries. Gloria’s practically certain that’s the core of the matter.

And what will they make of Mina, who is a naturalized citizen of the United States? Unfortunately, more often than not Mina says, “I am a natural citizen of America,” so it comes out the opposite of what she means and strongly suggests she’s trying to lie.

At least Anna is Dutch. She is now opening her purse and pulling out what appears to be a driver’s license and handing it to the man with the machine gun, who is leaning into the car’s open window.

The second man, on Mina’s side, still has his hand on his gun. Anna has all the privileges of citizenship, whatever they might be. Maybe they’ll let Anna off with a fine.

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But Gloria cannot concentrate long on this part of the problem.

Just as an explosion of Dutch—male, this time—breaks over them, she starts remembering stories about people who attack trains in Holland, over some political issue. Holland was once a colonial power and some people are still unhappy about that. Or was it guest workers? Or arguments about crop subsidies? She remembers the trains, for certain. She’s pretty sure a heroin ring was mentioned as well. And someone bombed an apartment house just outside Amsterdam. There has been widespread violence among these peaceable folk. She knows this because when they flew into Amsterdam she asked why there were guards all over the airport with submachine guns, just like this policeman has. Or rather, she had Mina ask then translate. When Mina finished explaining, she said something that sounded like vi-o-len-ce. Now Gloria understands why she put the extra syllable on, for emphasis. These guys aren’t interested in parking tickets or broken taillights, not to mention speed limits and failure to yield. They mean business.

The stream of Dutch is mighty now. Both men are talking. A great wind of masculine voices threatens to blow them all away, to blow over the little car.

Maybe Anna keeps drugs for her ex-husband and that’s why he comes back, to hell with sex and positions. She can imagine Anna saying, “I-carry-it-with-me-at-all-times. Just in case.” How would the Dutch say “just in case”? They’d think of something.

The men are frowning, the man with the machine gun is waving it, everyone is pointing at everyone else. The men pause to draw breath, and the two women start. Their voices are higher, their Dutch is shrill and sharp. Anna grips the steering wheel, her adam’s apple quivers and jumps. Mina leans forward and looks left, to talk to the man with the machine gun. Shout, really. To see past Anna, she must hunch her shoulders and Gloria thinks, My lord, that is how she will look when she is old!

On it goes. Shouting, by turns and in unison, sometimes in harmony. It is never going to stop. They will sit here in the rented car forever. Lord, are they going to run up a bill at Hertz! Of course Gloria and Mina will be in jail, probably a prison where you only get a bucket to go in, and poor frugal Anna will have to pay Hertz.

They’ll probably let Anna out on bail. She’s a citizen, for heaven’s sake. On and on and on and on and on.

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accent, a lot of words seem to work in both languages. Espionage?

Oh god, not that! Robbery. Or maybe the guy with the machine gun only knows six English words and he intends to use all of them.

Crimin—aaal? That one’s a question. Arrested and imprisoned!

That’s straight-out English, and Gloria suspects it’s for her benefit.

The man with the machine gun pauses, for effect no doubt.

And Anna takes over. New York, she says, smoothly, pridefully, interjecting it into her stream of Dutch. She could be saying, “Hardly anyone can afford to buy wicker.” She produces an angular smile. No, it’s worse than that. It’s haughty! Gloria wants to sink into the seat, to disappear into it. Haughty, for god’s sake! To those two gorillas!

But the man with the machine gun seems to be buying it! For the first time, he lowers the gun.

“Ja! New York!” Mina cries. It seems an important bit of news she’s nearly forgotten to pass along, and now Anna’s reminded her of it. The hand of the other man slides off the butt of his gun and hangs at his side a little foolishly.

“Holland!” cries Mina. “Beautiful, beautiful Holland!” She probably doesn’t realize she’s slipped back into English.

And suddenly it’s over! They all fall silent, they turn as one and study Gloria. Oh god, here it comes. But then she sees the men are smiling, smiling at her, and they are tipping their policeman hats, giving her little salutes. Bowing to her even! Then they are back in their little Jeepster, turning it around, and disappearing down the unpaved road the way they came, in a cloud of dust. The countryside seems twice as empty and silent with them gone.

“They went away!” says Gloria. “Son-uv-a-silly-goat!” Surprise brought those words out. She sounds like her grandmother whose language often teeters on the edge of profanity, and she knows exactly how foolish she sounds. Her voice is high, raw and frightened. “What did you tell them?” She’s almost afraid to hear the answer. “What the hell did you tell them!”

Both women look back at her over their shoulders. Mina is so pleased she tries to be nonchalant. It will make the praise that comes later more delicious. She even shrugs. “Anna said you are a writer from America. Gloria, that is the truth! You write all those ads.”

Anna is less able to conceal her triumph. “A reporter from the New York Times!” She smiles and the big teeth with the gap are back.

But Mina reclaims the story. “She said you are researching a travel article you are going to write about the beauties of Holland.

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The Dutch government asked you to come to make a good story about the country since now there are so many bad stories.”

Anna is so pleased with all of it she laughs out loud.

But Mina reminds, “This is private land and it is not so good for two Americans to get in a foreign jail. Go now, Anna, quickly.”

“Soon!” cries Anna. “We go soon! But all of this has made me . . .”

“Nervous?” Mina suggests.

“Yes, nervous. Then I have to—” Anna piles out of the car and, right there in the middle of the road that runs through the vast empty space where only a distant gardener is raking on the private land of the nobles who have all become rich captains of industry, she squats, drawing down her drawers, and pees a yellow stream that splatters over the gravel and soaks into the earth, into this forbidden soil.

There’s a great sense of camaraderie now. It’s even in the mild smell of Anna’s effusion that reaches out to them. Somehow, Gloria and Mina have both climbed out of the car and are bent slightly at the waist, alert and intense, as if helping Anna pee.

“That is better!” Anna concludes, rising and drawing up her drawers. They’re white cotton, bleached white as snow. “Much better.”

She smiles as she watches the last of the yellow stream disappear.

Soon they are returning down the gravel road. The manor houses fly by, then the cottage of the gamekeeper, the lines of ancient trees.

Anna is hurrying. The car bounces along, hitting every pothole.

As they turn onto the first paved road with the first road sign, Mina cries, “We need beer!”

“Beer is not far!” Anna assures her.

Gloria wishes she could go back to the puzzle-box apartment and admire the wicker. She wishes she knew enough Dutch to discuss the sex positions in a knowledgeable way, since somehow conversations like that are possible in Dutch. She wishes she had the money to get Anna an apartment on the ground floor with a bona fide garden and a horse-farm fence.

The first line of row houses appears, snuggled tightly together, with their lace half-curtains and their tiny gardens. “Beer and more!” cries Gloria. “I’ll buy. Sausages, apple tart, whatever you want!”

It’s the least she can do, the very least, and frugal bony Anna with her silver tongue needs a square meal.

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Nola Garrett

Aubade

First light. The murmur of thunder wakes me.

I watch you sleep, breathe. Your left hand trembles.

Good dreams or bad? (You claim you do not dream.)

You turn your back to me. Shift your pillow.

You sleep, breathe. Your left hand trembles.

The rain begins in green and yellow light.

You shift your pillow, turn back to me.

I wish I were the horse you ride into a dream.

The rain begins in green and yellow light.

You curl your arm around my graying head.

I am the horse you ride into a dream, where every field we enter seems to overwhelm.

You brush your fingers through my graying hair.

Good dreams or bad, you claim we do not dream when every field we enter leads to another realm: fused light. A murmur of thunder wakes us.

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Mary Jo Firth Gillett

Snowflake Obsidian

I’m drunk on slowness— the pause of a fiddlehead fern as it prepares to uncurl, the intake of breath a moment before the word, the gathering of air and skill, luck and intent to capture the iced window’s feathery moment as our aviary hearts race toward a much warmer convergence of mis-matched pieces wrapped in newsprint— crystal bowl, stinky fishhead— and who cares which of us is which? a melding, like the black polished rock with translucent white spots.

I must love you slowly, in caesura, because Kundera is right, the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

I love you the way I love graffiti, our past tense— there is a tenseness to it— haunting us like an amputee’s phantom pain whenever the undertow, underworld submarine captain in us shouts Dive! Dive! into the abyss.

For love makes us beggar and barbarian, no more refined than the shaggy lapdog across the street straining at his leash, pulled by a heady concoction of reasons 76 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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beyond reason, your unsteady hand on my skin, the field of spreading fire what I silo in this world of hitman and mannequin, hovel and cathedral.

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Elton Glaser

By the Waters of Babylon

Under the live oaks, they’re pitching camp At the World Congress of Excitable Ministry, Each claiming a different day for the earth To burn, decibel levels like a flashfire Crinkling the eardrums. Preachers immerse themselves In a shiver of wet ecstasy, their bad news traveling At the speed of spit, bluster around the edges, typhoon On a dead collision course with the wicked.

By the slow waters, near the rooted shore, The cows look up from their long grass As if to listen, their lazy tails asleep, their dark eyes Already doused with boredom of the cud and barn.

The sun’s starching out a sky as stiff as Byzantine saints in a glaze of clay, the day so flat No one can see through more than two dimensions.

That’s no incense from sandalwood, but hickory smoking From the hocks and ribs, seasoned with a little Gutter guitar for the cheap seats. They can Quote you the quotas of heaven, the open door Policies of hell, and pour salt on all the sweet evils— Lap dancing in the Blue Goose Lounge; loose shadows Buttering the multiplex; the sultry torments of rum.

They can work their words to a froth, finding Asters in disaster and rape in paradise, their tongues A swarm of syllables in the windy tents, voices Calling for the sick and crippled, the sore at heart, Before the backstory of the script, the bottom line: Send us your innocents, the daughters and the dollars.

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And the day steams up like beer over brimstone.

And the river slides down its dirty banks.

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Elton Glaser

The Coefficient of Drag

At dusk, above your head, the gnats Hang and wrangle, and ants across the patio Shoulder their slow burdens back home.

Idly begun and idly ended: another day Gone up in thin smoke, a sacrifice To the gods of gassy prose and inconsequence.

The sacred and the propane, you once joked, Firing up the barbecue, waving your long fork Like Pope Bubba the First, baptized in beer.

Now your glass cools and rattles With cracked ice over mint, that sweet weed, And sour mash enough to sterilize the soul.

A man raised with chickens, you used to say, Can stand anything, and knows how little Dignity it takes to drag this life around.

From the house next door, a piano plays Through the open window, stubborn and strict, Six Elegies by Busoni for the swoon-impaired.

Such scruples of music in the late afternoon, The lines narrow and cross-grained, in ornery angles.

They fit the bitter way you feel.

Black summer, so hot and dry the wind Reeks of death and estrus; and then Rain steaming on the flagstones, sending up

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Signals of distress. And what can you do When even the water doesn’t know If it’s rising or falling, vapor or wet?

Scorch of babybacks in a blue lick.

Sun below the pine boughs, scrape and curtsy Where the birds ride them with a hard spur.

And the moon, you want to say, just look at it: A face overdone by some undertaker’s drudge, Dropout from the Lunar School of Cosmetology.

And night so soon it scares the shadows, So foreign it talks to you in tongues. And stars As far away as the secret names of sleep.

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Lisa Glatt

Apartment 413

From his window he could see inside my kitchen and later, after his hand met my thighs and buttons, he admitted watching me in the mornings, measuring my coffee grounds or flipping eggs, and in the evenings too when I dipped a tea bag in a cup of hot water or knelt weeping on the kitchen tile.

When he ventured over I sobbed on the couch, admitting my mother was six weeks dead and I was full of holes. He’d been sober three months and was proud of who he was becoming, short haired and polite in a plaid shirt and khaki pants. A young man with a bicycle and a bag full of cashews. He talked about his days of drinking with bravado and nostalgia. I needed to show him where she slept, which room, the exact spot her body lay. I needed to tell him it was her kitchen he was watching, that I was her daughter, and now I was no one’s daughter. I needed to tell him how grief sat at the bottom of every cup of tea, and that morning on the balcony, a pigeon wore her face.

Weeks later I didn’t like him enough to repeat such acts. I should have predicted it, how my neighbor crashed and howled, how he turned to tequila and late night phone calls, threats and bloody doodles pushed under my front door. Still, I remember waking in the middle of the night, moving down the hall in her robe and pink slippers. I remember knocking on apartment 413. I remember him disheveled and hopeful, opening the door, inviting me into his tiny studio. On his thin bed with nothing to say, I clutched his shoulder.

The room smelled like sweat and cinnamon. “I watch you from here,” he said, getting up, wrapping the sheet around his naked back. He stood at the window then, pointing to the kitchen across the way, sketching my silhouette or hers in the air.

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Mark Halliday

Sheepdip River Vision

On the streets of evening, couples move buoyantly in and toward semi-conscious celebration of being twenty-six or thirty-two; she leans on his arm and her hair is so clean! They will dine at Primavera which is expensive, but hey . . .

To see them with the eyes of Weldon Kees is pointless I’m afraid. I am fifty-five. I can see us all floating on a sea of time that turns out to be a rapid river but this is trite and I am no marble-eyed visionary but there is the itch, that itch that has seemed since 1970 to be at the heart of “me”— the itch to have a cool sharpdeep thing to say . . .

These couples in Suburban Square don’t need my best sharpdeeps— really they don’t—not if I’m only doing O-sea-of-time-thou-art-a-swift-river.

They’ve got that inebriating hypothesis called love pulsing faintly or fulsomely around their warm heads making time into a royal blue or scarlet blossoming for quite some while until it isn’t.

“Young people, ending is everything!

Primavera will close! You shall stare separately into the dark deadness of parking lots!”

Their hair is clean, their eyes brightly mingle, they’re bound to ignore the aging turkey on the roof.

Long and long have I been haunted by Dylan Thomas’s line “The owls were bearing the farm away”; long haunted, long, I was sharpdeep enough by 1970 to be haunted by the line Crab Orchard Review ◆ 83

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and my fate is just to quietly know better and better why that line is haunting without making a useful tool of my knowing.

O the sheepdogs of mutability are nudging my sharpdeeps to sleepâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; yeah the Big One and just some human sleep.

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Twyla Hansen

Scar

the one on mother’s chest, noun that taught me scar, raised stripe where a breast had been, verb that meant something to fear, that meant finding a lump in your breast, waking after surgery with parts missing, adjective that whispered shame and embarrassment, my mother standing before me in that upstairs bedroom pointing, saying scar, and I, maybe eight, not understanding bedroom where I snooped in dresser drawers, my father’s rolled-up Sunday socks, the woven-silk folded white scarf I never saw him wear, the small wicker basket with the oversized coins, silver dollars big as my fist, the worn paper currency that might as well have been foreign, all foreign to me, his Masonic tie clasp and matching cuff links, the society’s secrets safe, then, buried with him wearing his one good suit and the leather white apron place where I learned parents kept secrets from their children, the walk-in closet reeking of mothballs, the navy-blue dress mother wore in their marriage photo, some days when father was in the fields, mother downstairs or in the garden or brooderhouse, I’d steal into that closet to slip the slimness over my head, zip the bodice, prance in front of a mirror, at their vanity dab on a little Evening in Paris, slender bottle blue exotic and unknown careful not to apply too much so she wouldn’t wonder, and if she asked I’d say just playing Crab Orchard Review ◆ 85

Twyla Hansen

or some other fib, bedroom filled with the bare essentials they’d owned since their wedding or before, the Depression, my father the bachelor farmer caring for his mother, my mother the impoverished teenager, the difference in their ages melting away, first one son, then another, and another, at last the girl they’d wished for child to care for them in their old age, my father teased, maybe, his blue eyes twinkling, mother serious, her life not easy, now showing this scar, this nightmare, to her only daughter, not explaining, leaving me to wonder much later, recalling that scar, phoning her to learn, once and for all, was it malignant—the lump? Benign.

But her breast was gone. And so I learned many things to be uncontrolled—lives in poverty, bodies in the hands of practitioners, secrets that small hands attempt to pry apart

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Twyla Hansen

White Lie

It must have been summer, breeze fluttering the curtains, old beds made up out on the screened-in porch. Long ago, yet I remember my first one plain as day: No. Not out of fear, really, but embarrassment. My mother’s face flushed, asking Did you come out here? I was supposed to be napping after lunch, my father always did, except for this quick chance on the fold-down divan, father in his work clothes, mother on top, while outdoors cottonwood leaves moved in their rubbery dance.

What could’ve I said? Not guessing until much later what they were up to, laughing out loud at this one: Why don’t Methodists make love standing up?

Oh the things we talk about when we can’t talk about certain things: weather, the price of cattle, the twister in ’59 that took out the neighbor’s barn.

I couldn’t sleep, must have heard, peeked, father’s hands busy on her backside. Father, who, wanting the facts from my brothers, would say, Now don’t tell a story, meaning don’t tell a lie. We were all meat and potatoes, taking great effort to conceal all passion. Yet I was safe that day under the tent of pretense, the one where things don’t exist if they’re not discussed.

No, I said. I smelled rain and went outside, I said. That fall, our banker having loaned us even more on the promise

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Twyla Hansen

of record yields, we’d watch the red afternoon sky for missiles from Cuba. We believed our teacher when she said no one will get hurt beneath their desk. Nothing to fear in God or government policy. Put enough sugar on rhubarb, you make it edible. Because it too closely resembles dancing. And that’s the gospel truth.

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Ann Hudson

Mare Tranquilitatis for Liz The auction is a disappointment, just tables of mismatched dishes, plastic dolls, battered veneer dinettes, so we drive west into the Blue Ridge, past the ranger who, in exchange for ten bucks, hands us a map of the parkway and tells us to enjoy our evening. It’s more than we intended to spend, but less than we would have at the auction, and anyway, the national forest is a much surer bet, a safe bid.

Better to cool off up here, cruising the backbone of the east.

A late afternoon moon has risen, chalky and discreet, over the pines.

I read somewhere that the moon has drifted three feet, nine inches farther from the earth since Neil Armstrong walked on it thirty years ago, his footsteps still settled in the dusty Sea of Tranquility. Down here a walk doesn’t get nearly as much attention. We’re singing along to the radio in crooked but good-hearted harmony when a bear cub tumbles out of the forest near the road, sits up as surprised as we are, turns, and scrambles back into its haven of shade.

A bear! We can hardly believe our luck, for that’s what we call it, the glimpse of that dark animal Crab Orchard Review ◆ 89

Ann Hudson

we used to cradle for comfort in our arms spilling out from the green shore of the woods.

As if we’ve seen something we shouldn’t have, as if we somehow caught a glimpse of the far side of the moon and found the backside of a stage set, scaffolding propping up a scrim that appears opaque when sunlit from the front. Bears shouldn’t just materialize by the roadside— they should keep their cautious distance.

We drive in silence down the shadowed side of the mountain. It’s dark by the time we get to town, the black sky grizzled with stars.

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Ann Hudson

The Mobile Maker

Late afternoon sun lights it as if from inside, glowing it rose, glowing it apricot, glowing it bronze.

Picture a woman chasing sandpipers along the tideline.

It glows like a train of thought, like a lighthouse at the bottom of the sea.

In the empty room, the mobile twirls slowly, like a girl who watches the silhouette of her dress in the reflection of a shop window, it moves like a woman who, putting away a clean glass, pauses to watch her hand, which though it is not pretty, is a hand she loves. The mobile moves quietly and with great, dark joy in the room, in the room with light lowering down the walls like water draining from a glass.

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Ann Hudson

Nothing makes him look from the creature in a slow spin before him, cream swirling in coffee, sandpipers skimming the waves.

Nothing could be more remarkable, not the scraps of skin discarded on the tile, not the red, muscular heap on the floor, bright as a lollipop, fibrous muscles, organs, the white spine.

The sandpipers startle, and a long rope of birds rises over the water, the mobile gone at last.

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Gray Jacobik

How to Paint Water

Begin with still water, sailboats stirring in indolent circles, a burnished pool with darters glinting among ambered stones, reflections that zigzag like veins of gold running through quartz.

Remember, you know this element, know rain, bath, tear. Try a wet sidewalk brilliant with the blurry reflections of houses and sky.

Keep your strokes fresh and clear, build up slowly from thin dilute layers to thicker applications, then paint juicily to capture the depths.

Move on to rivers, to a red kayak passing against gold willows, fly fishermen casting at dawn.

Like children who hide outdoors, cool and warm tones will step out of shadows. Widen your gaze, deepen your breath. Look for those touches of light that spell liquidity. If you are looking down on a swanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nest at the edge of reeds, foreshorten what you see from above, let the marge of swamp recede, cast shadows at right angles on the streaked, darker water. Trail subtle current lines across the reflections; roll the brush in your fingers, let caprice and accident suggest the living flow.

As in lovemaking and cooking, exquisite luminosity comes from audacious touches.

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At midday light’s a ghost dancing on salt. At sunset the warm tinted ground will show through the glaze you drag or swirl across the surface.

Outlines will be broken, colors muted, values darker, clouds an avalanche of tumbling light.

For the intense confrontation, the infinite expanse, paint sea and sky; waves battering rocks, the roils and plunges of storms. Break and stipple crests to suggest passion, to make sea spray fly.

Streak in the invisible that rushes down to the essential aquamarine. As you use your thumb to smear the shades that come between wave and trough, listen for the grate of sea on shore, the hiss and sizzle as a fan of wave splays itself on sand.

Let the tide coax you toward sensations of splendor and immensity, an opening up at the core, light and value and tone washing over you, perspectives you’ve only begun to see.

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Bloom

For months I wore my body like something I stepped into.

The backs of my knees, my nipples, the swoop where the underside of my arm hits breast all took on the starched texture of taffeta.

The only reason I knew I existed was by the rustling I made when I walked.

By summer, I had lost all sense of touch.

Evenings I threw the screen doors open, let whatever I could entice whirr into my room.

I strung lights over the bed, waited for the air around me to shiver with flight.

I memorized the nocturnal habits of damselflies, cicadas, digger wasps: which membranes trembled to make each sound, which ones hung by forelegs, who preyed on what.

Once, I kept so still a pair of gypsy moths mated on my knuckles.

Antennae swaying, their feathery heads turned away from each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; The jilted one crawled into my left ear, kept me turning on the hinge of sleep.

That night, I dreamed a lover pressed a trail of kisses along the inside of my arms.

Each place his lips landed sent up a rose; each rose, surprising heat.

When I woke, you must believe this, I had the blooms as proof.

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What Max, Age Two, Remembers about Spain

The Cave. Also, Big Churches. But mostly The Cave.

The boy also named Max, also waiting to see the cave.

The other Max’s father joking (in German) that maybe there were cave pigs.

There were no pigs. There was a bat. (in 1905, a farmer looking for guano for fertilizer discovered the cave and so found something richer than bat dung—tourists) The old man who owns the cave, who unlocked the iron door, who let the Maxes in, who lit the lantern so we could see, who locked the door behind us.

The drawings on the walls—deer, mountains, a (pregnant) horse, more deer.

Black and red and yellow.

(Also calendars, black hash marks on the wall like those made by prisoners counting down their days) In the deepest cave, a big sea fish (though the Mediterranean is fifty kilometers away across the jagged peaks of the Serrania de Ronda) and inside the big fish, a small fish, then a smaller fish,

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then the smallest fish of all.

That’s me, says Max, pointing to the smallest one.

(Max a fish inside his father’s arms, inside a cave, inside a mountain in the south of Spain, on the earth, in our solar system, in a galaxy some astronomer with a sense of metaphor named the Milky Way. That day in Spain, a hash mark on a dark cave wall, a sooty moment on the calendar where we stood bathed in lantern light in that infinite balloon of time we insist on calling now.)

In the cave, Max says, even day is night.

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When the dead come back,

only their hands have substance. They use them to brush the hair back from your forehead, to pluck at your coat sleeve. They are as they were when you knew them.

Grandmother hands, thin skin over aching bones; Mother hands, spoon in one—stirring canned soup, lit Winston in the other.

Teacher hands, one finger pointing to the very spot in this poem where the language falls flat.

The rest of their bodies do not appear— I don’t know why but it’s true. There are never toes, heels hard with callouses or hair in need of a perm, curl, or comb. No lips pressing ours.

No scent of cigarettes, coffee, Bourbon, fresh fish, White Shoulders eau de cologne.

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But if you need a hand, they can give it.

Once at my elbow steadying me on the ice, once a sharp slap on my cheek when I’d been crying so hard and long I made myself sick, once a hard pinch on my upper arm when I was being mean to my only sister.

A slap, a pinch, because sometimes I need calling back to myself, to my duties in life to those—son, sister, student— who count on my hands. Sometimes a hand holding me up because in this life there is so much falling.

Understand, the dead are not angels. Angels are God’s messengers who take human form only to bring the kind of news no human wants to hear.

They put on flesh like rented ball gowns.

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late & exhausted.

They don’t want to get up— put on even this small measure of their old cold skin, but, for you, they do. Think about it.

Be at least as kind as the dead are.

Touch someone sad on the shoulder.

Touch someone the way you would like to be touched.

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My Redemption and Why It Took

In

the East Tennessee town where I grew up, religious revivals occurred regularly, but I never attended one until I was 11, the age I got redeemed. My parents, more respectable than fervent, took me weekly to the 11:00 service at St. James’s Episcopal Church, a gray brick building with red double doors in the front. Our rector, the Reverend Dr. Wilson Potts, led the service deliberately and unemotionally, and, though he once condemned from his pulpit the local movement to open movie theaters on Sunday, he generally indicated to his congregation that the world was pretty good and that our religion was personal and something we ought to keep to ourselves. Dr. Potts parted his white hair in the middle and wore a gown and surplice, and he spoke with such a deep serious voice that it was easy to think that what he said was true.

Our house was at the edge of town on a bluff overlooking the river: it was a desirable place to live because it was upstream from the town, and the water, though often red with dirt, was fresh and sweet-smelling, not having yet rolled past the chemical plant which spewed its waste into it and killed the fish and vegetation. (“It smells like money to me,” everyone who lived downriver from town had learned to say, but those of us who lived where the water had not yet been polluted knew how favored we were.)

Safely on the opposite side of the river from me and my parents was Hadley’s Port, named years earlier for a town father and since gone into a decline. Though from our overlook we could see little more than the leafy tall trees which grew along the riverbank and back for several hundred feet, in the winter the tops of the little unpainted houses showed themselves, and we could imagine, looking across from our height and distance, the dirt yards with washtubs and forlorn skinny dogs, the men in undershirts who beat their wives and children, the knifings on Saturday nights. It was a place no one went who didn’t have to, and everyone, at least the people who didn’t live there, called it “Poortown.”

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It was in Poortown that Brother Andy Mitchell set up the tent for his one week Crusade in the fall of 1949. And because he chose a spot near the river where the trees were not so thick, we could see from our house the center pole and a good portion of the brown canvas before it disappeared down into leaves which had barely begun to turn from green to more interesting colors.

“It’s on John Barker’s land,” Father told Mother one afternoon when he came home from work. “I heard today that he rented it to them for $25.”

“Can’t something be done?” Mother asked.

“It’s not as though it’s going to really bother us,” Father said.

“They’re going to have loudspeakers, but they’ll be turned towards Poortown. Everything will face that way, and we won’t have to hear a word of it.”

“Thank God,” Mother said. And then, seeing I was listening, she corrected herself: “Thank goodness,” she said.

The week before the Crusade, Mother took me with her to visit her father, my grandfather. His office was on Main Street, on the second floor above Kress’s Five and Dime. In the store window a clerk was arranging Halloween costumes and masks, and Mother and I stopped to watch before entering the side door which led to the stairs. The clerk, a young woman who seemed weary of what she was doing, laid masks— ghosts, Snow Whites, witches, monsters with nails in their heads— along a shelf with the costumes hanging on hooks below them, but she was making no effort to match mask and costume, so that a ghost head sat above a blue dress with white apron, and a princess’s face with red cheeks and round empty eyes hung above a skeleton. Mother rapped on the window and pointed when she got the clerk’s attention, but the young woman just shrugged and kept on mismatching.

In the corner, stuck to the window with tape, was a picture of Brother Andy Mitchell, his hair dark and slicked back. It was difficult to imagine him as a minister, but underneath his picture and his name were the words HEAR! SEE! BELIEVE! and then, in smaller print, the announcement that Brother Mitchell was indeed a Preacher of Redemption and that he could be heard daily from October 7 to 12 at 3:00 and 7:00 at Barker’s Field. At the very bottom of the placard were the words, “Repent and accept! Jesus is alive!”

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on the couch in the waiting room. On one wall was a book case, with glass doors which could be lifted up, filled with Grandfather’s law books. On the other wall were two pictures: one of a bearded man, and the other of someone I had when I was younger assumed was his wife—a white haired, solemn woman. When I had asked Mother about them, though, she had identified them for me as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the father of our country.

Grandfather subscribed to LIFE Magazine, and the current issue was on the table next to the couch. The stories were interesting for this week: the Toni Twins from Iowa had won a trip to Sweden, a ship had burned in Lake Ontario, two Nature Boys—they looked rough and were dressed like cavemen—had invaded a wedding reception in California.

Even though a friend had arranged it as a joke, the bride had cried and cried, and the pictures made me feel sorry for her and the kind of married life she would probably have with such a bad start.

Most interesting, though, was an article about rats taken from their mothers’ wombs and raised in a germ-free atmosphere. There was a picture of a man in a diving suit with a glass window at his face holding in his rubber-gloved hand a newborn rat. “Nowhere in nature is germ-free life possible,” the text read. I thought it would be wonderful to be raised in a room where you couldn’t catch anything. It seemed to me that it was very kind of the scientists to do that, but then I read that they wanted the germ-free atmosphere so they could inject rats with specific diseases to see what would happen.

When Fred Lester came in, he acted as if he had caught me doing something he would never do. “Reading a magazine?” he said.

The way he said it made me want to deny that that was what I was doing, but I couldn’t, of course, so I just laid it down open on the couch as if his coming in was for my benefit.

Fred worked as a janitor for my grandfather, and for other people who had offices and stores on Main Street, but he seemed not to suffer much from having to make his living that way. Though he always wore overalls and smelled sweaty, he had been one of the first people in our town to buy a new car—a black 1948 Ford—after the war. “He must have independent means,” Father said once, and winked at Mother as if the two of them knew something. I had always liked Fred because he was different from the other people I knew and lived with, and I always found myself in his presence wanting to do something to impress him.

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but Fred ever referred to Grandfather as “Grandpa,” though he was always careful to call him “Mr. Franklin” to his face.

I told him that Mother and Grandfather were talking.

“What sort of meanness you been into lately?” he said.

I tried to think of something mean enough to satisfy him, but couldn’t. “I’ve been doing some things,” I said.

“I bet,” he said.

He sat next to me on the sofa, leaned back, and placed one foot on the toe of the other, then let it flop back and forth as if his ankle were broken.

“You’re like me,” he said. “We both got a lot of good things going. Neither of us needs anything.”

I agreed that there wasn’t much I needed.

“You going to that Crusade?” he said. “The one in Poortown?”

I said I didn’t think my family would let me go.

“Well, now there,” he said. “You got yourself a problem. You ought to go: you owe it to yourself to go. Them things are more like circuses than anything, if you know how to take them. But of course you owe it to your mommy and daddy, and to Grandpa, to do what they want.”

He seemed to expect a reply, so I said, “I do what I want.”

“Sure you do,” he said. After a pause, he added, like something he had just thought of, “We owe it to ourselves to do what we want, so long as no one else knows. That’s life!” He stared at me so intently that I had to look away. “I’ll be going Saturday afternoon,” he said.

“I’ll be rowing over on the river, and I wouldn’t mind taking an extra. You don’t have to if you’re scared.”

I told him I wasn’t scared, and he said, “We’ll see.”

Mother stood at the door: “Come on in, son. Your grandfather wants to talk to you.” She looked at Fred as if he were only one more part of the room.

“I’ll be rowing across,” Fred repeated, just after Mother turned back into Grandfather’s office. “If you ain’t afraid.”

Grandfather sat upright behind his desk, and, as he always did, he propped his elbows on his desk and pushed the tips of his fingers together. In the heat of the room his cheeks were very pink, making him look healthy and younger than he really was.

“Your mother’s been telling me about you,” he said. “About your scholastic successes. She tells me you’ve done very well this session.

She tells me that you have made all A’s.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

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Grandfather pulled open the middle drawer of his desk and took out a roll of coins in a green wrapper. He removed six dimes and laid them end to end in front of him, then leaned back in his chair and watched me.

“I believe I promised you ten cents for each A,” he said. “ And here it all is. Of course, learning is its own reward—we can never know too much, can we?—but young boys need something more, an added incentive. So you should not feel bad taking the money.

Your mother and father can help you decide how to spend it, along with whatever else you get from me by the end of the school year.”

He waited until I said, “Thank you,” then told me I could pick the money up. When I had trouble doing that, he said that I should think about not biting my fingernails. “Money won’t leap into your pocket,” he said. “If it presents itself, you’ve at least got to be able to use a little manual—a little digital—dexterity.” He demonstrated by picking up the coins, then shook them in the palm of his hand as if thinking about pocketing them, finally holding them out for me to take.

When we left Grandfather’s office, Fred was still in the reception room, but he had the air of someone who didn’t have anything else to do and therefore enjoyed being kept waiting. He half-stood as we passed him, and Mother nodded as she led me by the hand through the door, then down the stairs to the street. In the Kress’s window, someone had straightened out the Halloween costumes so they were what they were intended to be, but Brother Mitchell’s picture was still taped to the glass.

Fred’s boat was pulled up on the shore just enough to keep it from washing downriver, and the rope from the bow was looped around a tree stump. Fred himself was sitting on the bank, and though he seemed surprised to see me, he stood up immediately and grinned as I walked towards him. He had been drinking and he saluted me with the nearly empty bottle, touching the neck of it against his forehead.

“So you did come,” he said. “You must’ve got permission.”

“I didn’t need to,” I said. “ I just decided on my own. Nobody knows I came.”

Fred seemed to approve of what I’d said, and he told me to get in and sit in the far seat. Because I had never been in a rowboat, I sat facing the opposite shore. Fred pushed us off, hopping in just as the current caught us, and as the boat swung in a half circle, I found Crab Orchard Review ◆ 105

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myself looking at the shore we were leaving. I swiveled around so I could watch Fred and see where he was taking me. As he rowed, he lifted the oars and let the boat drift, then corrected the direction as if he and the river were playing a game. Under Fred’s seat was a tool box with more bottles in it. I shut my eyes and pretended we were heading for somewhere I was meant to go and even when he said, “If I drop these oars we’ll float all the way to Knoxville,” I wasn’t scared.

“You’ve not ever seen anything like this,” he said as we got out of the boat on the opposite shore. “Anything can happen. I’ve sold more stuff at revivals than anywhere else. Picked up more stuff too. Know what I mean?” Before I could answer, he had tied up the boat and was walking into the trees, so that I had to run not to be left behind.

Because we approached from the river, we entered a clearing at the back of the tent—a huge brown canvas one which looked, in fact, like a circus tent—and when we circled to the front, there were lights which had been turned on even though it was mid-afternoon, and there were several placards displaying the picture of Brother Mitchell. At the entrance to the tent was a tall thin sign, on the left of which were a large ear, an eye, and a Valentine heart with a cross rising from the top of it. On the right were the words, HEAR! SEE! BELIEVE! The people standing and talking in front of the tent were poorly dressed, but enough of them were smiling to make me think that what would happen would be pleasant.

Inside, though, the tent was dark and smelled musty. Though it was only about half full, Fred took a seat at the back and told me that from there we could see everything better. At the far end of the tent was a high wooden platform, which was lighted up by three spotlights and which had a single set of wooden steps leading up to it. On the platform were several seats, but only two people, both men, were sitting there. One, who seemed oblivious to us, was hitting the strings of a guitar and putting his ear down to it. The other, an older man whom I recognized immediately as Brother Mitchell, stared out at us as if he were looking for someone: I was glad I was at the back of the tent, hidden in the half-light.

At the edge of the platform was a square wooden speaker’s stand.

Fred had immediately begun talking to a woman sitting next to him, and I heard her tell him that the stand was Brother Mitchell’s own pulpit which he took with him everywhere he went and which he had to have to preach the Lord’s word. In front of the pulpit was a 106 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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microphone. Attached to poles at either end of the platform were two large gray metal objects, which puzzled me so much that I asked Fred about them.

“They’re loudspeakers,” he said. “Brother Mitchell only uses the latest equipment to spread the word.” His breath in my face was sour with whiskey, but he showed no other signs of drinking. “This boy don’t know much,” he said to the woman on the other side of him. “I thought it my duty to let him hear about Jesus. No one else would do that for him.”

The woman leaned forward to look at me—a long stare as if she were examining something that couldn’t talk back—then told Fred that he was a good man obviously led by the spirit and she wished now she had brought someone, like her niece who was interested only in one boy after another and never gave Jesus a thought. Fred brought his arm up to rest along the back of her chair as he turned to her to whisper something which made her gasp, then laugh and cover her mouth with her hand. I wondered why she hadn’t noticed the smell of whiskey, but then I realized that maybe she had.

Two women joined the men on the platform, and the four of them stood conferring for a minute as if the rest of us weren’t there.

Then they walked up and stood in front of the microphone. Brother Mitchell tapped the microphone with his hand, and we all heard the sound, magnified, coming out of the gray horns.

Leaning forward, Brother Mitchell told us that he and his family were happy to be here in the service the Lord (and they all smiled, though more at one another than at us) and that he wanted us to join in the first hymn since he was sure we all knew the words. Then the younger man played a chord on his guitar, and the four of them started singing about the blood that ran down from the cross and washed me free of every taint, and everyone around us stood up and sang with them. The woman next to Fred pushed her body forward against the chair in front of her and tilted her face up as if she saw something at the top of the tent. Fred began clapping his hands in rhythm—as did several other people—and he was singing too, but he seemed to be singing different words; his voice was too low, however, for me to hear him clearly. Since I had never heard the song, I tried silently opening and closing my mouth, but then I realized no one expected anything in particular from me, so I just listened. The words were ones I had heard in church before—Jesus, of course, and blood of the lamb, and hanging on the cross for sinful Crab Orchard Review ◆ 107

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man—but the music made the images appear and disappear in such strange ways that I couldn’t anticipate what I would hear next.

The song ended, and everyone in the tent, except the four people on the stage, sat down. Then the four of them began singing by themselves, without any warning, as if they had decided independently even of one another to do it.

The new song said that Jesus is a balm to the wounded heart that turns all sorrows into joy, but the music—eerie and nasal— didn’t sound joyful to me. The voices, high then low, seemed to repeat each other, then join together like one sound, then stray apart as if searching for different notes, then merge again. It was like overhearing a conversation which threatened to go off in different directions but which somehow kept bringing itself back together.

They sang several songs: about Jesus taking me by the hand and leading me to where my sainted mother dwells, about not to delay when the lamb is waiting patiently, about where would I be when the blessed souls walk the streets of glory. The words were like pictures of specific things, painted in bright colors, so vivid that everything in the music— the streets of gold, the many mansions, the hands held out to me— began to seem more real as I listened than anything I could imagine or remember, and I was frightened only for a moment when I tried to picture something outside the songs—my own house and my parents inside it—and couldn’t. Fred, though, poked me in the side every few minutes, and each time I looked at him he pushed his tongue into his cheek like a wad of tobacco.

“Ain’t this something,” he whispered once. “Ain’t this just purely some thing.”

Finally, Brother Mitchell, like someone who had found what he had been looking for and was satisfied with it, nodded to the other three, who went to the back of the platform and sat down. Facing us by himself, Brother Mitchell told us who he was and introduced the others as his wife and their daughter and her husband, but he said that what was important was not who they were but that they were there to tell us about the Lord. He said that it was the love of Jesus we had been singing about, the sweet love of Jesus which heals the lame of body and soul, which sets us on our feet and leads us to the river of abundant life. He paused, as if he had forgotten what he wanted to say next, then leaned forward and whispered into the microphone, “Amen! Amen!” very rapidly. Before we had absorbed that, he shouted—surprisingly—the same word: “Amen!”

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The moment the word died, Fred moaned, in a voice just loud enough to carry, “Oh yes! Amen!” and Brother Mitchell snapped his head up and looked towards us. Because of the darkness he could not have been able to see us clearly, but Fred threw his head back and closed his eyes anyway: he had a half smile on his face, and he silently mouthed the words twice again, “Amen. Amen.” Brother Mitchell appeared to have seen enough to be convinced.

He began speaking behind the pulpit. He first told us that we were sinners everyone, but that he judged not that he be not judged for none had sinned like him. He said that he was here to confess all his past sins to anyone who wanted to hear, that he had drunk and gambled and fornicated and even stolen and had made the lives of his wife and daughter a hell on earth. (All the while Brother Mitchell was confessing, Fred repeated, “Yes, Lord!” over and over, so quietly that only I, and maybe the woman on the other side, could hear.)

But then, Brother Mitchell said, he had found himself alone in a dreary room one night and when he couldn’t remember how he got there and where he was, he had started crying, and he had cried until his hand fell on a Bible, the written word of God, which someone had left on the bedside table. He said that he had opened the Bible without even thinking where to, and there, like a miracle from God Almighty, was the seventh chapter of John telling him how the Holy Spirit flows all over the world like streams of living water. He said that at that very moment he had felt himself washing in those waters, diving and swimming, liked a blessed creature of the deep, in the pure clean water of the Spirit.

He began then to move about the platform, his words rising and falling, sometimes coming through the large gray speakers, sometimes coming directly from his mouth as he stood at the edge of the stage almost in the shadow and called to us as though we were all very far away.

“I thought I was free!” he shouted. “I thought! But no one is free!

No one is cleansed from the ashes of death until the water of the river of life takes them under! No one has life and has it more abundantly until they’ve drowned in the water of the spirit. The world out there”—he pointed towards the exit to the tent—“is a desert until redeemed by Jesus! It passes away without Him! Even now! Even now it dries to sand without the redeeming love of the Son of God!” He preached for a long time, and it was unlike any sermon I had ever heard. He told us nothing specific about being good, as Dr. Crab Orchard Review ◆ 109

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Potts would have done. Instead, he talked about the world dry and dead and corrupt in the dust of its own decay, and the transforming power of Jesus and the waters of the Spirit which could wash us all cleaner and happier than any rains we could imagine. He told stories about crippled people walking and the dead rising and shouting Hallelujah! with the stench of the grave still clinging to their shrouds. He described the freshly redeemed world in concrete terms which recalled the songs: mansions on green hills, walks along streets of gold, being taken by the hand, being caught up and held tightly in the everlasting arms. Again and again, he described how it was to be submerged in the spirit and swept along through life and into an afterlife which glowed like the smiles of burning seraphim and cherubim without number.

“Only through the river is life!” Brother Mitchell called to us, and his voice was like someone’s who had no doubt he knew what everyone else ought to know. “This side of the banks of the river of redemption the land is parched in the heat of the sun! This side of the banks of the river of life there is only dryness of bone and poison in the air! Only through the river of the Spirit are we free from the pestilence of sin! Free from the germ which destroys the soul!”

During the sermon, Fred had grown quiet, except for breathing and clearing his throat, though he continued every now and then to nudge me in the side as if the two of us alone were sharing something funny. I tried to grin or nod to show I was getting the right kind of enjoyment out of what Fred had brought me to. But the truth is I had begun to feel that it was Brother Mitchell, not Fred, I wanted to attend to. Brother Mitchell was describing things which were better than I had known or imagined before and I thought if what he was saying was true then he would surely tell me what I had to do to get in on it, and I didn’t want Fred to distract me from hearing that.

Brother Mitchell told us finally that all we had to do was heed the call and accept the redeeming love of Jesus which was summoning us over the years of time.

“Can’t you do that?” he pleaded. “He is waiting! He is waiting!

But He can’t wait forever! Don’t delay until the calling fades from your ears like something that never was! Come and be washed in the flowing river, the pure waters of the Holy Spirit! Come and accept what is freely given! Come accept! Come now! Come now!”

The three members of Brother Mitchell’s family stood up and hurried to the front of the stage as if they were coming to be washed.

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The son-in-law began playing the guitar, at first softly, then louder, and the three of them began singing another song: “Come now,” they sang. “The Lord is standing on the shore. The Lord is calling, ‘Weep no more!’”

People in the tent began standing up, at first as if they were doubtful about what was being asked of them, but then more boldly, singing and holding on to one another. Here and there in twos and threes they started moving towards the platform where clearly they expected something to happen which they wanted to be part of.

“Ain’t this something?” Fred said out loud. Then he repeated, more loudly still, above the sound of the music and the chairs scraping and the people singing, and murmuring to each other, “Ain’t this all just something?”

Fred placed his hand on my shoulder and gave it a shake, and I pulled away and stepped out into the aisle to join the others.

“Hey!” Fred called, and when I looked back he motioned for me to return. “You little piss-ant! You sure you know what you’re doing? You better know what you’re doing!”

As he leaned towards me, the face of the woman seemed to rise out of the back of his head, and though she seemed to be smiling, there was nothing in her look to encourage me back to my seat.

I started moving down the aisle.

Now, all around me, people were embracing one another and crying. A woman had fallen in the aisle near the front and was calling over and over again, “Jesus! Sweet Jesus!” while some knelt around her and others stood, circling her, hands joined, and swayed and hummed in the darkness.

The Mitchell family came down from the platform and began holding out their arms as if greeting members of their family who had been away on a trip. For a moment, away from Fred, I was frightened and started to turn back, but then a man grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into a clear place at the very foot of the platform. He was skinny but his grip was strong, and he said, “Here you are, boy. Here’s where you need to be.” He disappeared back into the darkness, and another hand grasped my elbow and held tight.

Though he stood between me and the light of the stage so that his face was shadowed, I knew the man holding me now was Brother Mitchell.

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first man had told me. “You’re in the arms of Jesus. You never have to go back. All of us been waiting for you.” And the crowd seemed to pull back into a semicircle, leaving me alone with Brother Mitchell.

He stared at me hard, and as he did, I felt myself being pulled under water. It was very calm, very deep and calm and dark, and my arms and legs moved only with the greatest effort. It was like dreams I had had in which my body couldn’t unstick itself from where it was, but the sensation had nothing of the panic of nightmare. In Brother Mitchell’s grasp, I was like something rooted to the bottom of a river, or a sea, something without any will or desire to move on its own.

“Tell me your name,” he said.

“Sammy,” I said.

“No,” he said, and he tightened his grip as if he thought I might run away. “No. Your real name!”

“Samuel,” I said. “Samuel James Felton.”

“Oh, Samuel, you are marked,” he whispered. “Oh, Samuel, you are one of us, one cleansed, one free of every stain, of every germ which sickens the spirit. You are redeemed by the power and love of Jesus. You are whole!”

He pulled me forward so that my ear was at his mouth. “You never have to be afraid again,” I heard him say.

Then he let me go, and I fell back into the crowd and watched him as he took someone else—a woman so old that she had surely been redeemed long ago—and spoke to her, his mouth close to her ear. Then she fell back, as I had done, and Brother Mitchell passed on to another, then another.

And then it was over.

Brother Mitchell disappeared through a flap in the tent behind the platform, and his son-in-law said through the microphone that we all now had an opportunity to support Brother Mitchell and his mission to spread the word of the Lord, and when everyone turned to leave, there were two men at the back of the tent with cardboard boxes into which people began putting money as if they were paying to get out. Before I understood that the revival service was over, Fred was beside me, shoving me forward up the aisle.

“I don’t want to go,” I said, and I tried to turn back to the platform. I imagined Brother Mitchell and his family taking me in, circling around me, warm and loving, protecting me from the dangers I had only now recognized. “He said I never have to go back,” I said.

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tent opening, ignoring the two men and their boxes. “Of course you got to go back. What do you think all that was? Nothing! Nothing that means a damn thing!”

“I got redeemed,” I said.

“Redeemed!” he spat. “Redeemed, my ass!”

At first the light outside confused me, but by the time we reached the river, I had become aware of the world I had reentered: the brown water, the soft dirt under my feet, the yellowing leaves of the maple trees along the bank. Nothing, though, felt familiar, and I began to wonder what being redeemed out here, outside Brother Mitchell’s tent, was going to feel like.

Several men were standing at the boat, but Fred pushed through them.

“Wait here,” he said to them. “I got to deliver this boy back where he belongs.”

He pushed me into the boat, then shoved us out into the water before I had time to sit down. I fell back but caught myself and sat down hard on the seat, this time, as we turned into the river, facing the shore we were heading for. Looking up, I could see my house at the top of the bluff: white, with its windows struck yellow in the afternoon sunlight.

“You forget that stuff back there,” Fred whispered, as if there might be someone else listening. He began rowing straight through the current. “What that man said—what happened—didn’t mean nothing! It wasn’t nothing real!”

But I thought different.

“It was real,” I said. “I was picked out.”

“You wasn’t picked out! We went for a joke. It was just something to laugh at.”

“I’m not laughing,” I said.

Fred looked at me as if, for the first time, he thought I might be someone he needed to reason with.

“Listen,” he said. The rowing was making him breathe hard so that his words came at me in little spurts. “That preacher, he just made it all up. About how he used to do, how he used to be. I know he just made it up. And all that other stuff. It didn’t mean nothing!

Stupid as shit! Who needs it? I don’t. You don’t either.”

It seemed to me that maybe Fred did need it, but I couldn’t think how to say that, being so freshly redeemed myself.

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“You don’t know what it meant,” I said instead.

“I know and I’m telling you,” he said, his eyes dark and hard like tiny stones. “It didn’t mean a thing!”

“It did so!” I said. “Why do you keep saying it didn’t?”

Fred stopped rowing for a second, then caught himself as the boat began to turn down river.

“Somebody’s got to,” he said.

Fred didn’t say anything else, but while he rowed, he looked at me, deliberately and steadily, as if silence and staring might be enough to make me recant.

When I felt the boat touch shore, I stood up, and then, as Fred leaned away from me, stepped over his seat and jumped off the bow.

I landed short, though, and my feet sank into the mud and made undignified slurping sounds as I stepped up onto firmer earth.

Fred got out of the boat to pull it around in the right direction.

He almost slipped into the river as the water covered his shoes, but he caught himself against the rim of the boat, then turned to look at me before he climbed back in.

“What’d he say to you anyway?” he asked.

“He said I was marked. He said I was one of them.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t have to be afraid. Ever.”

“What’d you say?”

“Just my name.”

“Your name?”

“Yes, my name.”

“He knows your name?” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what I’d said. “Well, you really done it!”

“What do you mean?”

For a second, Fred’s features, like the eyes and nose and mouth of a mask, threatened to detach themselves from his real face. Then there was a flicker, a shadowing back into place so that he looked the same as he always had.

“He won’t ever forget it,” he said.

He began pulling against the oars, and the boat started moving away from me when he added, “And I don’t mean that old fart Mitchell!”

“Who do you mean?” I said.

But Fred seemed to be finished with me, and as he rowed he kept his eyes down as if there was something at the bottom of the boat which demanded his attention.

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“Who won’t forget my name?” I said. “Tell me who you mean!”

I looked down then and saw that I was standing next to a circle of river stones inside which someone, some trespasser who obviously didn’t care what my grandfather or parents thought, had had a fire.

I bent over and scooped up a handful of damp ashes and clasped them into a ball, then stepped to the shore and waded out into the river until I felt the current pulling at my legs. I threw the clump of ashes as hard as I could and watched as they broke apart and fell towards the water.

Only then did a realization, clear as the air, come to me.

“You meant it to happen, didn’t you?” I yelled, but Fred didn’t look up. “You meant me to get redeemed, didn’t you? You son of a bitch!”

I almost lost my balance then, but caught myself before I fell.

Braced against the river, I watched as Fred pulled his boat up on the opposite shore, heaved his tool box up and over onto dry ground, then stepped into the ragged gathering of waiting men to begin handing out bottles like someone sharing gifts with his friends.

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The Upstairs Album

Frances slept in the upstairs, her room smelling of fried chicken.

She had grown accustomed to the ease of her fingers slipping through raw meat and the soft assurance that as long as she stayed in her room there would always be plenty of feathers in her pillows.

She was the first one. She was skinny and she was hungry and her body was covered in fine, black hairs. She was sixteen, and so were the twins, her cousins, Sheri and Brandi.

Frances wanted to escape the house in Alabama. She had lived with her grandmother for two years, helping with the household chores ever since her parents’ divorce.

The twins had arrived only a week ago. They had ridden in the back of their father’s blue pickup. Everything they owned fit in four cardboard boxes. Frances had watched from her bedroom window as the twins’ father quickly unloaded the boxes, waved to the twins, and drove away. She wanted to go with him, but it was too late.

At first, the twins ignored Frances. They arranged the upstairs furniture so the beds faced different walls. Linen sheets and tattered blankets were strung from the ceiling to form three small rooms and a center where Frances’s large gray dog, Charleston, often stretched out on a tiny yellow sofa.

Sheri covered her wall with photos of Brandi placing lighted candles inside of a carved pumpkin, pretending to pray in front of a famous cathedral, leaning over a fountain, and twirling in a white dress. Brandi hung her collection of antique mirrors framed in shapes of leaves.

Around her window, Frances had pasted a collage of ocean photos: houses on the shore, couples running through the beaches, and stretches of pink, teal, and gray water touching sky. She often studied one portrait of a woman digging into the sand with her toenails while her hands held a white starfish up to a crescent moon.

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with the irises hidden under the lids. On the woman’s skin and in her hair, pale sand shimmered like rain.

By nightfall, beyond her window, Frances heard dry grasses tangling on the wind and the hush of hens roosting on the low roofs.

She imagined men laughing in the rooms beneath hers and her grandmother turning in her small cot, her bones popping in their sockets like wood on fire.

Frances closed her eyes and then opened them to look at the pale woman bathing in the darkness, her skin dazzling the light on the ocean.

Frances plucked and twirled the curly hairs on her arms. She listened to the silence of the hairs turning until she heard other sounds.

The mirrors had been darkened for hours when Sheri began to cry out, as if from a dream. Frances rose to discover what had happened. She brushed past the blankets hanging from the ceiling, entering Brandi’s room in silence. She found the twins in Brandi’s bed, asleep in each other’s arms.

In the morning, Frances saw the twins standing together outside Brandi’s room. Brandi smiled and waved gently with her fingertips.

The blankets hanging from the ceiling were pulled apart like curtains opening onto a mirrored stage where Sheri stood still, moving only her head first to look at her sister and then to look up at the pink globe on the ceiling.

Because the twins were blondes, Frances, with her black hair, automatically became the dark one when she found herself near them. On the bed behind them was a black album Frances took for a secret journal. She was still getting used to living in the midst of the twins, their perfumed hair falling around their heads like the soft metal wound around their wrists and ankles. She hesitated to disturb their privacy. But the twins’ voices clanged together with the bracelets sliding over their arms. The scream in the night came back to Frances as she stared at the black album on Brandi’s unmade bed. Around the album, the sheets were tangled and molded by the shock of two bodies sliding apart.

From the yellow sofa, Charleston looked Frances straight in the eye as the twins slipped past him. Frances looked away from her giant dog and suddenly felt the shame of her long body towering over the twins.

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bone jutting out of Sheri’s skin. Sheri looked at Frances strangely, and Frances realized that perhaps no one besides Brandi had ever reached out to touch Sheri’s arms before.

“Did you?” Sheri asked. She began to pull away, but Frances held on tighter to her arm.

“Nothing,” Brandi said.

“She’s just skin and bones,” Frances said, finally letting go of Sheri.

The twins ran down the narrow staircase. Brandi moved as easily as bubbles blown out of the hole at the end of a plastic wand. Frances heard their small feet tapping softer and softer.

Charleston yawned, a rumbling that could have come from the pit of Frances’s own stomach. When she turned around, his head was bowed down to her legs and in his teeth was the black album.

When she opened the album, she expected to find a secret account of what the twins thought of her and her dog, but it held only photographs of the twins from a long time ago. She turned over the faint impressions of two identical faces and of two girls wearing the same polka-dotted dresses. All the photos of the twins before they could walk showed the sisters once looked exactly alike. For a moment, Frances rested her face in her hands. She knew that now no one outside of the family would believe Sheri and Brandi were sisters or even the same age. Ever since they moved into the house, Sheri had begun to say, “We were once twins.” Frances wondered if Sheri had any other way to explain why she no longer looked like her sister.

The twins no longer wore the same clothes, nor did they have identical faces unless they were walking under different light. Sheri’s features had become cynical, so hollow and severe that many times Frances thought her eyes were set more in a skull than in a face.

The starved look and the black shawls Sheri wore made her appear much older than she was, while Brandi twirled around the house like a young girl in white and yellow dresses.

On the last photograph in the album, Frances saw a woman’s finger looming large in the frame, as if the twins’ mother had accidentally touched the lens just before she snapped the shot.

Frances put her own finger over the one in the photo. The two fingers were exactly the same size.

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Sheri and Brandi apart. But that was the last time she could have mistaken one twin for the other.

Frances closed the album on the two sisters with the same face, wondering if the album could reveal why time had worked so quickly on one sister while leaving the other unscathed.

In the kitchen, Brandi said, “Hey, Frances, would you get that jar off the high shelf ? Thanks.”

Frances handed her the jar of pickled okra.

“Now,” Brandi asked, “would you open it?”

As Frances turned the lid, she glanced at the corner where Sheri was sorting silverware in a tray. Over the sink, Frances’s grandmother was deboning a chicken.

Frances handed the open jar back to Brandi.

“Hey, Sheri,” Brandi said, “isn’t it nice to have Frances in the kitchen? With her around, we don’t even need a man to do the strong stuff.”

“Thanks, Frances,” Sheri said without looking at either of them.

She was getting careless with the silverware, slinging it into the tray. Frances knew that the clink of the knives made her grandmother nervous. Frances’s grandmother, a tall, stout woman given to fits of anger, began dropping wooden spoons and whole pieces of raw chicken onto the kitchen floor.

“Trust me never to eat again,” Sheri said, her eyes moving from the floor to the grill.

“You want to exorcise the living ghost of Jesus from this ragged body?” Frances’s grandmother asked Sheri as she reached for a floppy piece of chicken as loose as the skin on her arms. She ran it under the faucet and flung it onto the hissing grill.

“I won’t have one of my girls starving in my kitchen,” the old woman often said, as if she suspected Sheri’s gaunt figure would reflect badly on her cooking. “What will people say when they see the bones on that girl popping out? I won’t have Sheri tainting the food. Over my dead body, I won’t have her mixing death with everything I do to keep you girls alive.”

Sheri suddenly emptied the silverware onto the floor, as if she couldn’t bear the old woman’s words any longer. “I can’t eat any of this,” Sheri shouted. “You can’t make me. I know things about your precious granddaughter and her creepy dog that would make you want to die.”

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Frances was afraid of what Sheri might say.

“Honey,” Frances’s grandmother said more gently, “what can I do to convince you?”

“Leave me the hell alone,” Sheri said.

“Do something,” Frances said to her grandmother.

“There’s nothing to do,” the old woman whispered, looking out the window where the hens scratched through dirt in the backyard.

“I want out of this damn kitchen,” Sheri said. She reached for the vat of hot grease. Then she smiled at Frances’s grandmother and hurled the grease into the air. It splattered the wall behind the long table where the girls usually had their dinner.

Frances’s grandmother looked at Sheri in disbelief. Frances reached out to touch Sheri’s face. She put her hands in Sheri’s hair to steady Sheri from her grandmother’s wrath. A gob of brittle strands broke away on Frances’s fingers. The grease was burning whole sections of the blue wall away, leaving a bed of naked hollows that seemed as random as a sore.

“Get your paws off my sister,” Brandi said.

Frances saw her own hands as large and steady as those of a man who worked out in the fields. She had always seen her hands as masculine. She had even been proud of their strength. But until that time, she had known nothing wrong with that type of hands, even when they finished off a woman’s arms.

In August, when Frances’s grandmother converted the house into a bed-and-breakfast, she had it painted a pale, liquid green Frances associated with the ocean before a storm. Even though it had only four rooms for guests, the bed-and-breakfast became famous throughout the town for the quality of its dining. But secretly, Frances was always hungry, and the hunger terrified her. She knew that the more the customers ordered, the less her grandmother would feed her and the twins.

Country-fried chicken was the only dish ever served. At noon the house held men’s laughing voices echoing off every wall.

Because of the way the chicken was prepared, grease coated the walls with a clear film that would not wash away. Frances blamed the grease for the glasses of ice water that slipped through the customers’ hands. She spent her afternoons on the floor, mopping up shards of ice and glass.

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glanced off Brandi’s painted fingernails while she placed two baskets of biscuits onto a table where four men were seated. She poured ice and water out of a carafe and into tall glasses.

Leaning against a greasy wall, Frances allowed herself a glass of water. Her body and her clothes were always greasy, drenched in sweat. She drank the water down and poured herself another glass while Brandi waited on the tables.

Frances was able to slack off in the dining room because she was officially the one who slaughtered the chickens. Sheri was the one who cleaned the bodies, and Brandi was the one who placed the baskets of fried legs, thighs, and breasts in front of customers at the tables draped in red cloth.

Once, when the men were busy eating, holding chicken and biscuits and glasses, they complained of having no free hands. Brandi unfolded the cloth napkins away from the silverware that would not be used and placed the napkins around the men’s necks as they looked up at her appreciatively and scooted away from the table.

Many times before, Brandi had been warned by Frances’s grandmother not to cause confusion among the guests by mentioning that Sheri was her identical twin. But Brandi couldn’t resist telling stories about herself and her sister. She was a sixteen-year-old girl who waited on ravenous men. She innocently brushed crumbs off strangers’ shoulders, looked at the men with clear, steady eyes of no particular color, and seemed to take for granted the extraordinary sleekness and pale color of her long hair as she talked about Sheri.

Frances always dreaded the moment when the men asked to see Sheri, perhaps wondering if Sheri were as beautiful as her sister.

Sheri was terrifying to strangers, so she kept herself hidden in the kitchen unless someone called for her by name. Whenever a man asked Brandi to introduce her twin, Brandi carelessly touched his hand as she reached for his empty glass. Before the two hands separated, Sheri stepped out of the kitchen doors with her lusterless hair pulled back into a bun twisting the skin on her forehead away from her skull.

When the customers first saw Sheri, they dropped the chicken back onto their plates. One man even spilled his glass of water. Sheri was soaking wet, and loose feathers clung to her arms. Frances could make out every bone and thought what a perfect model Sheri would make for an anatomy class to study the human skeleton as it surfaced on a living body.

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Frances wondered if Sheri knew why the men who loved her sister despised her. Sheri ground her teeth at the men, and her displeasure was so undisguised that a man broke the silence by saying, “Excuse me for living and for trying to eat my lunch in peace.”

Brandi motioned for the men to go on eating, but they couldn’t ignore Sheri. Sheri did not move nor did she look away. A fat man put a finger into his mouth, slowly pulled out a long, thin bone, and waved it at her with a smile. “Waitress,” he said, “check.” He and the rest of the men rose from their tables.

“Your grandmother’s going to kill us,” Brandi said.

Frances nodded.

Sheri ran out of the house.

Frances followed Sheri to the backyard. Sheri chased the hens, but she could not catch them. When Frances saw what Sheri was doing, she wanted to help. Once Frances touched the birds, they did not fight or even move. One by one, she caught them and handed them to Sheri, who tossed them high into the air. Frances looked on in amazement, thinking what strength Sheri still had left to be able to throw living birds so far. They landed on the low tree limbs. They did not fly away or attempt to come down. Instead, they clung to the branches and stared below them.

“Why does it take them forever to come down?” Sheri asked as she looked up at the trees.

“Got me,” Frances said, her arms feeling tired, muscled, sore.

“Everything takes so long.”

“I know,” Frances said, wondering why Sheri avoided looking at her.

“She touched his hand forever,” Sheri said.

“I know.”

“What’s going to happen to us?” Sheri asked. The birds moved their heads from side to side.

Frances thought there was something strange about time and hunger—that the hungrier people became, the faster they aged, but the slower time went by.

These were the exact words she wanted to say to Sheri. Instead, she said, “Whatever.”

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on either end so they could watch each other eating. Frances sat on the long side, studying the grease-scarred wall.

In front of Frances, in red baskets and white paper, the food the customers had not eaten was splayed out in narrow rows. She was starving, but she sat patiently with only her eyes moving over what food she wanted. Brandi reached for the basket of chicken, and Frances remained calm, thinking that no matter what had happened in the past, there had always been some chicken left for her. She closed her eyes, knowing that Brandi would take the best portion for herself and leave the rest for her sister. Brandi chose the breast, then slowly passed the basket to Frances, who hastily grabbed the legs and left Sheri with the wings.

Sheri began to eat slowly, stripping the wings clean by sucking on the bones. Frances tried not to stare at Sheri as she ate. To divert her attention from the twins, Frances searched the blue wall marred by grease for patterns the way other people searched clouds. She saw hands reaching for hands, women’s heads with their long hair in disarray, and hands reaching through the hair. The moment she found a panther leaping, she looked down and realized there was no more food on her plate.

“You can have mine,” Sheri said, holding her plate out to Frances.

“Sure you don’t want it?” Frances asked.

“No, you take it,” Sheri said, looking at Frances’s outstretched arms. “I’m not hungry.”

“You never are, are you, Sheri?” Frances asked, while gnawing on a wing.

“For God’s sakes, Frances,” Brandi said. She rolled her eyes at her sister.

Frances knew when to be quiet. She let her eyes wander over stains on the wall. The panther was in the left, upper corner. Below the panther were a tall bird with its neck bent as if drinking, three moons, a witch’s skull, a bridge over water, and a black bird landing on a child’s hand.

The window behind Sheri was open, and through the screen Frances heard the dark sound of the hens roosting in the backyard, the muffled disturbance she often mistook for the hush of falling leaves, wind through the grasses, or a tug on a long skirt. Just when the light had no color, the birds lined themselves up in neat rows along the fence tops and the low roofs, but in the morning they would scramble for the last pieces of filthy corn and then peck at each other’s eyes.

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“What are you looking at, Miss?” Brandi asked, running a paper napkin from one corner of her mouth to the other.

“For a minute,” Frances said, quickly making up a lie, “I thought there was someone out there. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” Sheri said.

A pile of bones, gray and jagged, lingered on the plate before Frances. Her eyes searched the wall. A tall man’s dancing shadow . . .

Jezebel; waves on the ocean and fingers caught in a woman’s hair . . .

Jack-o’-lantern; the face of a child in prayer . . . Another cigarette thrown down; a leaf on the wind . . . Two sisters and a panther leaping.

Balls of Sheri’s hair rolled along the floor like tumbleweeds barreling down Baker’s Road. Brandi kicked her sister’s hair away from her toes.

Living with the twins, Frances had learned to hate the thick, coiled strands of her own hair. She took the loss of Sheri’s light hair particularly hard. What a shame, she thought, that she could not pick Sheri’s hair up off the floor and sew it back onto Sheri’s head, or maybe even onto her own.

Trying to disguise the bald spots on her head, Sheri wove the bottom layer of her hair onto the top of her scalp.

Brandi sighed as she ran her fingers through her own hair, which was so light and so fine that it separated into translucent strands glistening like mayfly wings beating in the moonlight.

When Brandi turned off the lights, Frances sat on her own bed beside the wall covered with pictures of the ocean and the open window taking in country breezes. She took off the screen, and Charleston leapt from the fence to the chicken coop to the low roof and from the high roof into Frances’s room. He settled into her bed as if it were a place he belonged. When she held him under the covers and whispered secrets into his ears, he lay beside her like a young man who could close his eyes and not be afraid of her leaving.

Touching her fingers to his mouth, Frances told him about houses on the ocean shore where shark teeth would be strung together and hung above doors for wind chimes. “You and I will wade out into the water, and there will be beaches where there once were only fields. I’ll catch more fish than you and I both can eat, so we’ll never be hungry.”

Frances put her lips to his ears while she studied the portrait of the woman holding a starfish in the moonlight. Then she turned away from Charleston and reached for a package of matches on the 124 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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windowsill. She struck the first match, and the warm light picked up the blue in Charleston’s eyes. With the second match, she began to singe the hairs off her arms.

She heard Sheri call out, “Fire! That’s brilliant, Frances. Burn it all down.”

Then the night was quiet again, except for a soft murmuring from Brandi’s room. Frances wondered what the twins said to each other when the mirrors went dark. She walked into Brandi’s room and found Sheri in the shadows of her sister’s arms. Frances heard the muffled sounds of Sheri screaming into a pillow as she ran her hands up Brandi’s shoulders to the face that used to resemble her own.

“Go back to bed, Frances,” Brandi said. She had her hand on Sheri’s balding head.

Frances left Brandi’s room and went back to Charleston, who waited for her in her own bed. He lay very still as she whispered, more still than any human would ever lie next to her, almost as if he were afraid to breathe and the biggest secret was just the sound of her voice as she asked him, “Charleston, what are we going to do now?”

Frances’s grandmother had a face a young girl could get lost in.

Her wrinkles were etched so deeply that Frances wanted to run a finger through the lines to see where they would take her. Without risking a finger, she guessed all creases led to the mouth.

“I’m not blind, even if you think I’m an old woman,” Frances’s grandmother said, pounding the ruined kitchen wall with her fist.

“I don’t,” Frances said as she sat down at the table and put her face into her hands.

“I see how things are going with you three.”

“What do you mean?”

“Honey, I’m trying to save you. Stop following those girls around, even if it’s just with your eyes.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“They come from evil, and now they’re getting nervous.”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

“I didn’t want to tell you, but now I don’t have a choice, do I?” “I’m listening.”

“Now that they look nothing alike, their parents can’t stand them, what with Brandi more perfect than they ever hoped a child could be and Sheri worse than they ever imagined.”

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“She just needs to eat. She’ll be all right.”

“She has been beyond that for ages. A long time ago their mother walked into a room with a ribbon for Brandi’s hair. But Sheri was the one standing at the window. Was it my place to tell her? How could I know what would happen? When Sheri turned around, their mother screamed, ‘Brandi, what have you done to yourself!’”

“I don’t want to hear anymore.”

“Then she put her fingers into her mouth and bawled out loud.

Ten years ago, the first time she realized she would have to give up both daughters to pay for what she had done.”

“Who put that idea into her head?” Frances asked. She had no idea what her grandmother was trying to tell her. She only knew that something terrible had happened to the twins a long time ago, and she suspected that her grandmother had played a part in it.

“She couldn’t afford to feed and clothe two girls, so she almost let Sheri drown once.” Her grandmother swallowed hard.

“Where did you hear that?” Frances asked, alarmed by the serious expression on her grandmother’s face.

“This was when the twins were still little things, both still perfect. Early autumn. She was alone at her husband’s farm.”

“What was their mother’s name?”

“Don’t recall. But she filled a tub on the porch with water, poured in a sack of apples, and plucked her girls down inside.”

“You mean they were bobbing for apples?” Frances began to suspect that her grandmother was making up the twins’ story as she went along.

She smiled at the old woman, no longer frightened by her words.

Her grandmother nodded her head, as if acknowledging the smile. “A heavy one sank to the bottom of the tub, and Sheri put her head down under the water to retrieve it. After she had been under for a long time, Brandi began to whimper, and their mother went inside to pour herself another coffee.”

“Stop it.” Frances slapped her hand on the table, tired of what she assumed were ugly lies. But her grandmother kept talking.

“I was there the whole time, hiding, ready to save Sheri if it came to that.”

“Did it?”

“Hush, why don’t you? No more questions.” Her grandmother reached out and smacked her on the arm.

“Okay,” Frances whispered, touching the red outline her grandmother’s palm had left behind.

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“Halfway out the door, the twins’ mother was ready to pull one lifeless child out of the water and to hush the other’s screams. But things didn’t turn out the way she thought.”

“It could have been an accident,” Frances whispered, realizing that every time her grandmother had told her an awful story there had always been some small truth in her grandmother’s words.

“Halfway out the door, she dropped her coffee onto the cement steps. Brandi was pulling her sister’s head out of the water with her teeth. . . . And you don’t believe a word I’ve said.”

“How could I?” Frances asked, laughing under her breath.

“Well, I’ll prove it. Look for a half-circle scar on Sheri’s forehead.

You have to get close now that Brandi’s teeth marks are faded white.”

“I’ll never get that close.”

“Don’t be so sure about anything. You just keep looking, and maybe you’ll see what I’ve seen.”

By the end of summer, Sheri had become nothing more than a vision hinting of Brandi’s eventual demise. When the two walked with their groceries along Baker’s Road, they moved more like mother and daughter than sister and sister. Frances saw them moving beyond her.

She thought Sheri appeared to be the much older woman, hunched over, but refusing to let the younger carry the groceries along the way.

Frances and Charleston caught up with the twins easily because Sheri had to stop on the roadside to rest, her breath coming fast and shallow. Brandi put her arms around her sister. But by then, Sheri was just a frail thing, bones with the hair that was still attached as colorless and brittle as the autumn grasses breaking off in the wind.

Sheri stood still, leaning against Brandi.

Nervous that the twins were falling too far behind, Frances walked back to them. Sheri smiled pleasantly as one grateful to be momentarily held by her sister. Both of them clung to each other, their arms laced together.

“Come on,” Brandi said, “we’re too young to be this tired.”

Frances put her arm around Sheri’s shoulders. The three walked back to the house, where in the kitchen, chicken sputtered on the grill, sounding like rain.

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plate and let her eyes scale the wall as her teeth picked the bones clean. Trees. A tall man’s dancing shadow. Fingers caught in a woman’s hair. A naked girl rising out of the water.

Sheri fell asleep at the table. Brandi reached out as if to shake her sister awake but picked up a tiny folded napkin instead. She ran the napkin over the corners of her mouth, rose from the table, then left the kitchen with some food still on her plate.

When Frances reached out for Brandi’s plate, Sheri did not stir.

Frances touched her shoulder, and she did not open her eyes.

Sheri was still asleep when Frances picked her up and held her in her arms, carrying her up the narrow staircase, imagining Sheri looked like a fragile bride dressed in black.

On her bed, Frances put Sheri down carefully so as not to jar her bones. Then Frances looked at her own arms and the hairs, which had grown back longer and just as curly, but now darker and coarse.

To awaken Sheri, Frances opened the window. The wind that blew through the grasses came inside to lift Sheri’s hair away from her skull.

Her clothes were so loose that they began to slip off her body. Frances removed Sheri’s black shawl and the dress that was too large for her shoulders. She planned to mend the dress to a smaller size.

Frances looked away from Sheri’s nakedness, the shriveled, emaciated body. Out the window, Frances saw the shadows of hens roosting on the low roofs. She thought how the inside of a woman looked the same as a dead bird that had been bled, plucked, and carved into long pieces.

Gazing above the photos of houses on the shores and couples running through the beaches, she studied the portrait of the woman digging into the sand with her toenails. Frances began talking about the ocean then grew quiet, thinking wonderful and terrifying thoughts.

She suddenly felt that once she reached the night shores, she would not be a girl much longer, nor would she ever become a woman.

“Charleston and I will take you with us,” she whispered as she smoothed Sheri’s hair, which came off in her hands. “You won’t have to do anything but just lie back on the tip of our sailboat.”

Brandi walked into the room.

“What’s happened to her?” Brandi asked, holding her arms out to Sheri, who was still sleeping in Frances’s arms.

“Nothing,” Frances whispered.

“Not again,” Brandi said as she reached out to take Sheri away.

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She lost her grip as she lifted Sheri into the air. Sheri’s head fell back hard. Frances noticed a light scar as Brandi caught her sister, the white arch of a crescent moon on top of Sheri’s forehead.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Brandi said.

“What?” Frances asked.

“Now you’ve got her confused,” Brandi said, her tearlit eyes gazing out the window. “Now she probably thinks the winds tearing through the grasses are waves on the ocean. For God’s sakes, Frances.”

Sheri’s eyes began to open, but by then her irises had already rolled back into her skull. Where her eyes used to be were only vacant spaces picking up flecks of moonlight.

Brandi whispered over the moonlight in her sister’s open eyes, “Don’t believe a word she says. We’re nowhere near the water.”

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Agica Zivaljevic

The Dressing Gown

One day towards the end of the summer a young soldier was walking along a dusty country road. The hot south wind ruffled the wheat nearby and from a distance it looked as if the golden rows were chasing one another. These were the lowlands of Yugoslavia and the melancholy rose from the fields like a fine mist and fell onto the red roofs of small one-story houses with stork nests on their chimneys.

Marshal Tito Street lay deserted and looked like any other main street on Sunday, in any small provincial town such as the town of Vrbica. The only sound came from the coppersmith in the gypsy camp on the outskirts of town. The gypsy coppersmith made bread tins, cauldrons and kettles. He sold his wares and mended broken pots and pans. Every morning since the gypsy tents had sprung up by the river, the soldier could hear the gypsyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s song: We repair old umbrellas, Mend pots and pans, Shoe horses, We repair . . .

The soldier had an afternoon off from his job as librarian at the Yugoslav Army Cultural Center where he had been appointed after six months of his one-year Compulsory Military Service. The soldier had previously trained in an infantry regiment during the winter months. Once, after a long march in the snow-covered fields, he developed a high fever. At dusk the order came to dig a shelter in the frozen ground. The soldier spent the night in that hole listening to the wind and other sounds he would never forget. The temperature fell below zero. Feverish, he hallucinated and bounced and jolted in his sleep, trying to push away the face of an old woman with long, white hair blowing cold air on him. The next morning his comrades carried him back to the barracks through the new snowfall. Redhot, with his teeth chattering, he watched the snowflakes twirl above 130 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

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him like long strands of hair.

That same winter, the soldier was assigned to work as a night guard in the long drafty corridor of the main building. He kept himself awake by walking back and forth the same two hundred yards. One night, he noticed that the door of the officer on duty was ajar. The room had a single bed and an ironing board. The soldier plugged in the iron and ironed his legs and arms to get warm. Only his back stayed icy. Then, he stretched out on the bed on the rough military blanket and ironed his chest, all while listening for the squeaking of the double entrance door and his supervisor’s steps.

He shared this story with his bunk bed roommate Rajko. They laughed briefly, but then Rajko became serious.

“Listen to what happened to me one night. I had been assigned to an outside patrol. It was a clear night, snow white as a bare ass, stars blinking. The cold nipped at my nose and toes. Suddenly, something pushed hard against my back, tossing my cap to the ground. I turned to curse the stupid idiot and take a swing at him.

There was nobody there. So I did the only reasonable thing one could do. I climbed the nearest tree and yelled: ‘Come and get me, motherfucker!’”

In the summer, the soldier was transferred. He was relieved to sit behind the circulation desk in a sunny room on the second floor of the library. He did not have many books or many patrons. Most of the library’s collection were military books about war games, military discipline, or biographies of famous military leaders. He tried to keep track of borrowed material, but soon realized that he was not authorized to chase sergeants or lieutenants and discourage them from reading by inquiring about past due material.

One evening the soldier received a call from Colonel Pavkovic, a man who had been promoted in rank after failing to evacuate from a tank due to his obesity.

“Soldier, this is an urgent matter. Send the sergeant on duty to the common room immediately. He should find my briefcase on the floor.

I forgot to bring it home with me. Do not open it. I repeat, do not open it. I have some classified documents in it. Highly confidential papers.

They mustn’t fall into the hands of the enemy. Keep the briefcase in my closet until I come in tomorrow morning. Under no circumstances are you to open the briefcase. Understood? Good.”

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opened the briefcase only to find it full to the brim with rolls of toilet paper.

The next day, the rumors spread quickly about the petty thief colonel. What was his motive? Perhaps it was the shortage of toilet paper at the stores. Goods disappeared from the shelves from one day to the next. Another day it had been toothpaste, though it made its comeback in less than a week, with the price more than double.

Of course, the military always had plenty of reserves. After all, they all lived under the credo: “We live as if peace will last forever, but we’re ready if war breaks out tomorrow.” But then, how could they be sure that the colonel wasn’t playing a joke at their expense? Maybe he was testing their loyalty? Could it be that he was working for military intelligence? The next morning his friend Petar handed the briefcase to Colonel Pavkovic, keeping his face as solemn as during the raising of the flag.

“Good,” Colonel Pavkovic said. “It wasn’t that difficult, was it?”

The library had a hardwood floor, and the soldier liked to pace alongside the tall half-empty bookshelves that stood like a wall.

His brisk walk and hands crossed behind his back gave him the appearance of a general in a time of great distress.

He occupied himself studying for his civilian job as a literature teacher. On breaks he sketched the body of his wife, who had just given birth to their first child, or he entertained himself remembering his childhood. Once a week he wrote a love letter to his wife who was waiting for him in another city.

“My dearest love, my violet,” he would begin. He wrote in ink on translucent typing paper he found in the drawers. Sometimes he used the back side of letter pages to jot down quick notes and poems, or to outline his wife’s mouth or her breasts. But lately, he had put aside writing letters. He was worried about the money he made teaching back home. With shortages, high rent, and a baby now, what kind of existence could they have? He perceived his whole life as a battle.

One of his favorite games as a boy had been to imagine his own country. As a ten-year-old, he ran his country in perfect order. He resisted spending his allowance on candies and toys, but instead, kept his dinars in the treasury hidden in the hole in his bedroom wall. When his mother discovered the damage in the wall, there were some grave consequences for his bottom, executed with a 132 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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willow rod. Ever since, he had mastered the art of storing up something for future use.

Now that he was a grown man, he found he liked the routine of the soldier’s life. The days were predictable, the orders clear. He knew what he was supposed to do, and that was comforting to him. He didn’t have to guess anybody’s expectations and fall short of fulfilling them. The little inconveniences of getting up at six every morning, running in the dark around the military barracks, and eating the same breakfast of weak tea and hard peasant bread smeared with apricot jam, were little sacrifices that would later give him a clear conscience. It was as if he followed the rules of some secret religion in which small offers of everyday suffering protected him from getting into bigger difficulties.

He felt safe in the big courtyard of the barracks.

That Sunday afternoon the soldier stepped cautiously out of the military headquarters, as if his legs might fail him. Every time he went out past the iron gate, he felt like a convalescent after a long stay in the hospital, restoring his connection with the world.

Anything could happen now, he thought, sweating in his coarse olive uniform. He carried a small bag with his notebook, pencil, and an apple.

He passed by long rows of identical houses, yards hidden by tall fences. A few old men and women were sitting in the shade on the public benches placed strategically for people-watching. Behind them was a levee, and behind the embankment was a wide river, calm and murky, with sandy beaches. The old people smiled when they eyed his uniform, the red partisan star on his cap, and his black leather shoes that had lost their shine from all the dust. A couple of lazy cats bathed in the September sun. A flock of geese flew over their heads, honking with longing.

The wonderful smell of a wood stove burning and fresh bread filled his nostrils. The soldier stopped in front of the bakery. He went in and bought one lepinja, a kind of thick pocket bread, for five thousand dinars. The baker cut it open and put a dollop of salted fresh cream in the bread’s hot hollow middle. He was about to take his first bite when he noticed the smoke coming out of the street-facing window of the yellow house at the end of the block.

The soldier sped up at first, then stopped and looked around him. There was nobody anywhere. His stomach growled. He heard the bear-tamer’s drums from the gypsy camp followed by a bear’s Crab Orchard Review ◆ 133

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roar and then children screaming. It seemed that everybody had left to see Misha Bear’s dance.

Thin bluish smoke poured out of the window continuously. The soldier shouted, “People! Anybody home?!”

He wrapped the bread in its greasy paper, then dropped it down on the sidewalk along with his shoulder bag. He rubbed his hands against each other and then spat between his palms. He jumped on the window ledge, pushed one shutter all the way out and stepped down into the house. Again, he cried out, “Anybody home?” He couldn’t see at first. But when his eyes got used to the darkness, he made out a long, black shape on the bed. He flinched, and took one step back, knocking down a tall vase filled with ornamental grass.

He quickly put the vase back up, then realized that he had simply been startled by a dressing gown spread out on the double bed. It was a woman’s dressing gown, made of satin, with a fashionable pattern of red roses on a black background. The room was very plain. It had a bed, a crocheted bed cover, a wedding portrait of a dark-haired couple on the wall above the bed, armoire, lace curtains adorned with a butterfly pin made out of panty hose, and that dressing gown laid down meticulously, its sash tied up neatly around the waist.

The soldier advanced to the small corridor and entered the kitchen. His eyes were watery and burning because of the smoke coming from the large blue pot on the stove. He turned off the burner with his left hand, then tried to move the pot with his right hand. It wouldn’t budge. The bottom was glued to the red hot coil. The soup that had boiled over had made a yellow crust. He had to use force.

After a couple of strong shakes, he managed to push the pot onto the other burner. He opened the kitchen windows wide to let out the stench of burned food and melted enamel, and saw a woman from the house next door take the dry clothes off the clothesline in her backyard. The soldier looked around the kitchen again, taking notice of the scarcity of furniture and how every surface was spotless except the pot that was still smoking a little. His eyes caught the knitting on the kitchen table and two coffee cups and a coffeepot rinsed and left to dry on a checkered kitchen towel.

The soldier unlatched the door and went out. Over the fence he met the eyes of the woman next door and tried to explain briefly what happened, how he had to jump in through the open bedroom window, that nobody was at home and the dinner was burning— somebody having forgotten to turn the stove off or was late to do it 134 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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on time—but he happened to pass by and took care of the problem; he was stationed in the military headquarters nearby. He then assumed the rigid position and saluted, “Service to the people!”

He turned on his heels and left. The woman, caught with a clothespin between her teeth, stared after him unsure whether to believe him.

Back on the street, the soldier arrived just in time to retrieve his bag and greasy parcel that was about to be inspected by a street cat. He unwrapped the paper and gave a small piece of bread to the cat. Then he took a large bite and smiled, “Still warm.” He climbed the embankment and sat on the grass to finish his meal. The river sparkled in the late afternoon light. A barge in tow slowly moved through the water. The barefoot gypsy children ran along the river banks, waving to the ship. A few women collected firewood. Their long red skirts contrasted with the tattered gray tents from their camp.

That evening during a supper of red beans, salt pork and pickles, the soldier kept turning the afternoon event over in his head. He wondered whether the pot was ruined beyond repair and regretted not having the common sense to soak the pot before leaving the house. But again, the talk of the town was that the gypsy coppersmith worked like a sorcerer.

The night had fallen. From the window of the library the soldier could see the campfire in the distance, and hear laughter and tambourine music. The gypsies rose, put their hands above their heads and started dancing. One woman began to sing: I traveled On the long dusty road And I met a merry gypsy On that long and dusty Road.

“My dearest, my beloved,” the soldier wrote.

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Deborah Landau

Dusk on Mulholland Drive I was in France and met someone else.

I have a whole new life.

Anything could happen.

—postcard from a friend 1.

Each year I grow smaller, shed selves like those Russian dolls hardening into the singular glazed mannequin wife.

Dusk on Mulholland Drive, fire roads spike into the burntbrown hills and I’m winding home along the spine of the city as the thousand thousand lights click on Ventura Boulevard strung out below like a fractured bone— this city is fat with gas stations and tract homes, where someone’s shaking a tablecloth, scraping dishes, clipping a child’s moony fingernails— where a radio’s on so the dog won’t be lonely where couples sleep, wrapped in the marriage bed, that thick gauze bandage.

Once evening was a clear glass bowl empty of everything.

Once I was sixteen girls in sixteen cities, all of them possible.

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2. “Making Friends” according to Berlitz’s French for Travelers (“Comment se faire des amis”) Do you mind if I sit here?

Can I get you a drink?

Are you free this evening?

Why are you laughing?

Is my French that bad?

Would you like to go dancing?

Shall we go to the cinema?

Shall we go for a drive?

I’ll pick you up at your hotel.

Thank you, it’s been a wonderful evening.

May I take you home?

Can I see you again tomorrow?

3. Work In line at the campus café, my student, taller than I’d realized, leans in from behind— his beat-up leather jacket brushing the back of my neck.

Later, he sits in the front row of my classroom, points to a sexual reference in Song of Myself I’d somehow missed.

I imagine the bulk of him undressed—sudden rush, the body interrupting to say I’m here.

After class, distracted, I walk into the men’s room.

4. Evening Commute It’s dark. The Santa Ana winds are sweeping the canyon.

The season’s turning back upon itself and I am tired of restless heat.

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Deborah Landau

quai st michel, rue saint jacques . . . there are streets that lead out of here.

5. Home But when I get home he’s in the green armchair in the corner reading, his forehead a complex map, his gaze fixed on the page, sharp and exacting, that watch we bought together years ago.

There’s a look on his face he doesn’t wear with me and I feel like I’m cruising a stranger admiring the slope of his shoulders, the smooth flesh on the side of his neck.

All day I’ve flirted with another kind of life then circled back to look so closely he’s become strange again as any man— the way you say the same word over and over until it changes, becomes unbound sound set loose from its bedded groove.

Do you mind if I sit here?

Are you free this evening?

May I take you home?

He doesn’t see me so doesn’t look up but stays, cupping his book in the circle of light from the standing lamp.

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After a Trip to the Fertility Clinic

The needle feeding at my arm like a hummingbird, doctors unlock what I can’t speak of as I stray, hollow as a wishing well.

At home, that grandfather clock wipes the air immaculate, and even the books have shut themselves against further disturbance.

The walls shrink me to the shape of my mother.

She will not forgive this.

False daughter, I’m dwarfed, petty with emptiness, and the heart’s a sick house where I kneel to undo her sharp hooks.

Am odd, misshapen.

There’s nothing new to make.

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Joseph O. Legaspi

Childhood Elegy

If our angels hover above us, they will see a darkening cornfield, the spectral traces of lightning bugs, and two brothers lying among the stalks.

We come because sometimes it is hard to live.

The cornstalks, limp under the tropical sun, revive in the cool of twilight.

The angels will know we have been here for hours.

They will land and rest their feathers around us and whisper soothing names of winged things: finch, monarch, whippoorwill, ptarmigan, Daedalus, Icarus, Gabriel . . .

The angels will bend down and touch their faces onto ours and borrow our eyes: Earlier, a horse slipped, breaking its leg.

A boy stood beside his younger brother.

Their father came into the stable, carrying a gun.

Quails flitted out of a bamboo tree; the boy traced the trail that had led him here, the field tilled by the dead horse, where his brother laid down, dust on his cheeks.

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Ada LimĂłn

Algebra

It was the spring I started learning algebra and began imagining everyone naked. Undressing crossing guards and bus boys as I sat in traffic, in school, anywhere.

Clamped down in metal chairs, saying, algebra, Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only x+y=z, my body trying to quiet itself, aware of every finger that passed paper, of every pubescent jawbone. My mouth was full of those words, hypotenuse, parabola, the vibrations in my bones, behind my zipper, building with every consonant and vowel.

My head so full of numbers, the angles of x and y, that when my mother picked me up, it was all I could do to look out the window.

What happens to the original four when it is squared and turned into sixteen?

I thought, noticing a man standing at the bus stop. I concentrated, imagined what his chest felt like, the unknown tongue, the smell, the pulpy flesh that would take over. The inertia of two bodies hurtling like the cars that passed between us, until he looked away, flushed. This man now stripped shy and naked underneath the rectangular sign.

Then I divided the body, the hair on his thighs, counted the toes, the fingers, and when he looked again and saw that the light had not changed, I though how the sixteen had absorbed the four, swallowed and transformed it.

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Moira Linehan

Dear Joe

A brother and a sister have begun writing to each other. There remains between them a winter landscape, years of not speaking.

When the sister walks out into the white world of a letter, she does not stay for long.

In the past, she was not able to count on him.

Have you ever tried, he asks in one letter, to paint smoke pouring out of a stack? You really canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, he answers himself. But you can paint something that looks like smoke pouring out of a stack.

She wants their letters to be more than something that looks like letters. She has hung his paintings in her home: abandoned ice house on a river; pale stucco building in watery Venice, with laundry in its windows; gray-blue barn doors in a summer light. Beaver ponds are my newest favorite thing. They are very beautiful to the eye, he writes back when she asks why.

Dead trees in black water. The sister does not know what makes dead trees in black water beautiful.

She wishes he would see her as beautiful.

Beavers perform an ancient duty under and above water, the brother writes. They must build dams. Only once has the sister seen beavers at work. That was years ago.

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from their bodies when they climbed out onto land.

In her memory, their legs are too short for their heavy, wet bodies. All these years the sister has pictured their lumbering on land to remember their grace. Maybe beavers aren’t busy at all, the brother muses at the end of his last letter. Maybe beavers are the complete opposite of busy.

This brother who writes about beavers is not the brother she has been picturing all these years. It is her turn to write back.

She does not want the letters to stop, but there is nothing more she can say about beavers. She stares at the blank page.

Maybe it’s not that they won’t surrender, he decides, but that they have. All her life she has faced the white world of a blank page and filled it. Always the impossible words have come, so once more she begins. Dear Joe—

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Moira Linehan

Back

This, after all, is how I came back, back into place in this world, all suckle and juice— plum, tomato, chilled wine, even plain water dribbling down my chin. How long was I gone in my grief ? Almost too long, but back now in time. Find me. Follow me. I’ve a tale of passage through. This roadside barrier— barbed wire fence, brambles and briars— mirror of where I long was: tangled in vines twisting and twisted around vast trunks, climbing up from the soil, down from branches; vines thick as clothesline, thin as fiber.

I’m here to report no one comes back except by desire, that sinuous pleasure snaking along each limb, leading you forward and back as you reach for ripe peach, dark grapes.

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Maria McLeod

Midwest Cash In Memory of Lucia Cristaudo We bought our wedding rings at Midwest Cash, trying them on between the pistol display and the antique silver candlesticks.

Married just two weeks, we’d become conscious of our naked hands.

We had told the judge not to read the lines about the exchange of rings, embarrassed we weren’t more prepared.

Prior to taking vows, we had peddled our bikes some 800 miles, upriver along the St. Croix, weaving the WisconsinMinnesota border like midwestern runaways going against their parents’ wishes instead of the people we were: out-of-work college English instructors seizing a moment of unemployment to regain our youths.

We waited in the echoing courthouse hallway with nervous mothers and tattooed sons, sullen and bored boys wearing giant-legged pants and fat men’s T-shirts, feigning indifference to juvenile court.

We feared our clasped hands and blushing faces gave us away as innocents. Wanting to better fit in, my groom drew my attention to his pilfered, flower-garden boutonniére.

In my ear, he whispered, “I’ve heard they allow conjugal visits here in Duluth.” Then the bailiff called our names, squeezing us in between a harassment case and teenage drug abuse.

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Maria McLeod

We said “I do” between a stuffed Bald Eagle and a row of mug shots—Minnesota’s most-wanted delinquents—while two women, legal clerks we’d only just met, cried and snapped our pictures.

Two weeks before, we’d stuffed everything we owned, minus bikes and camping gear, in a rented storage unit in Southern Illinois.

We were still without a permanent address when we walked out into the pawn shop parking lot and slipped on our rings, promising each other not to tell our ceremonious relatives the truth of their origin. We shined our bands on our bike shorts, partners in devious behavior, thrilled that for just under 100 bucks we could adorn ourselves with the same symbols of love that had, with any luck, once donned the fingers of small-time villains.

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Orlando Ricardo Menes

Sal

When butter burns I remember sundowns of grilled cheese sandwiches, newspaper doilies; corn chips gone soggy, larders in the rain, Sal’s grandmother’s kitchen, a greenhouse where wire-caged orchids—wildpines, epidendrums— dangled from broken windows, centipede vines crept cupboards gemmed with taffy-glass snails, cerulean whorls. Hot days asphalt smoked like grease, Granny Mae ladled grape Kool-Aid from a hog pail, smothered sweetie pies, honey chiles in molasses, chuckled when I said beach as bitch, dessert as desert, that frito-bandito talk Miss Jones called uglier than spit on dirt: I, the only Spanish boy in Goulds, La Sagüesera, Cuban town, world away from swamps dredged for ranch homes, groves of alligator pear.

Year astronauts first walked on the moon Sal was my sole friend, the one who pelted bullies, square-dance partner when others kicked me in the knees. Sal too an outcast: orphan girl, poorest in sixth grade, fat tomboy with dark skin, quarter Seminole, grandmother’s shotgun shack across weedy railroad tracks. Pockets squishy with baitworms, we rode to brackish sinkholes, glass-sharp limestone, brittle as eggshells;

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Orlando Ricardo Menes

cast cardboard reels to hook spotted gar, bluegills, swallowed gummy flesh with Diablo sauce, braided guts into necklaces, played stickball with heads. Nightfall, we climbed gumbo-limbos to slurp bromeliad water, dead leaves roosting like bats, fingerbone twigs, trudged sloughs where bullfrogs bubbled in mud wombs, food for pet indigos, scarlet kingsnakes.

Sometimes hot air gusted from faraway sawgrass fires, wilting leaftips, mossbuds, & hundreds of gambusia would leap like sparks, oölite ponds, gulping fig crickets, fly larvae—the water milky, tart, almost scalding, we belly-flopped holding hands, her tiny teeth— burrs of bone—nibbled lobes, cockspur toes scratched shins raw. You’re mine now, Sal said, I the boy, you the girl. Beneath dwarf liana vines, she painted my lips red acacia, drew circles around nipples, made a wig from Spanish moss. I tucked genitals between legs, tiptoed in tacones, mama’s stiletto heels; she bit puckered labios, slug tongues rubbing together, our bed wet humus, moldy naseberry flores. This is how it’s done, Sal said, arms taut, spine arched, her seesaw motion un cachumbambé, throat gurgling springrain bambú, fluttering eyes, zunzún wings. Wind singed tender parts of orchids—stigmas, anthers, ovaries— I felt my arms crawl through the undergrowth, ficus roots—jagüey—that climbed high canopy of caoba, sapote, wild tamarindo, seed pods sticky as geckos; neck stretched out into the sea, aigrette fronds growing from my head, speckled petioles de palma jaca; legs dug into peat, snaked miles through aquifer,

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toes sprouting low tide as mangrove breathing tubes, soft-mud manglar negro. Through galled ears, saltwater oak, I heard corĂşa birds coo the dawn gru-gru, gru-gru.

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Leslie Adrienne Miller

Trading Love Stories in Installments, Ruined Amphitheater, Provence

Today the indolent prologue of July, sun rattling olives three broken Roman terraces down, a stasis of tarnish and haze. My red beach towel fumes on the line, and below us, a dry gorge piddles, hooves ring the stone. Above us on a hot spar, three shuttered houses, and a plot stirs in the white pebbles that scorch the pads of twelve dogs, bleaches the lavender blue. Then an itchy accompaniment of cigales touches wings to feet, so you have to shout your story at me: the crowd scene in the loony bin, the fatal flaw that got you there: a gift of scored wrists you brought your mother from afar. Then this lull where we could nap in the garden of rubbled walls, or walk to the village for metal chairs on the hosed stones. There is even a lumbering bus we could take to the ribbon of sea, if only oleanders werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t so thick on the path. Their hubris could blind us like pins on golden brooches if we dared walk into them in the dark, but in the intricate layers of afternoon, they only wad and drop their shredded hankies into the shrinking grass. We go nowhere but here, you and I with our rumpled pasts, though my red beach towel fumes on the line, all its motivations wrong; it says nothing but that it has no end. Tell me Olivier, how dĂŠnouement might taste, better yet, intoxicate, how long 150 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

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the twiggy thyme will lace the path between your place and mine. Tell me, you who share a name with the native trees, whether the jasmine will go on suckering with scent or fall to tragic rust over the face of your father’s house.

Tell me the American girl you loved is well and carving widows’ wishes over all her bones while she waits for you in her tiny house in the country where I was born and do not want to die, that you’ll go back to her, simple as she is, that you’ll stay. My red beach towel fumes on the line. Lucky and bright, but ever unwise, it will play here after me. I need to know you’ll love this girl well and all your days, my friend, and then the mistral’s hint of menace thrilling the olives’ silver tops where you were born and cannot die, might stay with me all of the rest of mine.

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I Am Looking

for you in the bars of Zaragosa, among mesquite-strewn sand hills, in amaranth growing wild in cotton fields. I am looking in government documentsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;no one has your picture, no one remembers your name.

I stand on your bones in Mt. Carmel cemetery and even the decorative silk flowers are missing from your grave. Recuerdos de sus hijos, your headstone reads but I am looking for you in dirt floor adobes and huecos gathering rain. You are like a jackrabbit in high grass waiting until I am almost upon it before bounding away, all ears and legs and feet.

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and blanket flowers? Abuelito, I wonder if someone will praise my own father for growing up in a shack full of relatives and not really knowing any of them. No one has a picture to put a face to your name, so my mother says: Look at me. Look in the mirror.

And still I want to ask: What tells the juniper to berry pewter-blue?

What tells the cactus pad to break into ruby nubble and yellow flower? What tells me you are jimsonweed blooming noxious, beautiful on a sand dune?

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After Revolution

Sunlight on my eyes, the dead among my feet. The sacks of beans, the pumpkins piled in the shed.

Even the mice speak of keeping in this time of grief. A ditch like a dried-up lake. Cobs bleaching, teeth.

And the shoveling.

Will I recognize you —me—within the strata of this new gathering?

In the streets, fireworks kiss hello a burning sky. Sparks find their way back into silver.

I catch my reflection in an openair market. The flaking skulls of coconuts have two dulled eyes, milk that may never flow.

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The Appeal of Prophecy

In the garden the trees grow colder, endlessly offing themselves—alarmed by their ancestry, those terrible, gossipy rings. In the woods, the deer stand still and stare me down, when dark begins to fill the gorge. Two miles below the cluster-flies can’t stop their dying game, beating obscene bodies against the window panes, begging for murder like Nicola Six. Fly blood yellow from the grass this year, water-poor. It is nice to speak of nature, the minutiae of the landscape: the beauty of the woods, the shirruping of the sparrows, or the five shades of yellow in this field of hay. I will allow the leaves their color, in the proper context, have even collected the first violent red of the season, but the forest rots around me, green-furred, eclipsing its own avenues, trees uprooted in a pile of pus. They feed each other terrible. The trail’s blue markers have faded to a widow’s lip, blue lines like the streams the coroner draws on his cadaver, cholera blue, blue like ink. The trees are falling down

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around me, their branches constant creaking, sign of nothing terrible. More rise to take their place, the old stumps rotting, no way to read the rings.

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Faith Adiele

Passing through Bandit Territory

I am on a train headed north from Singapore up the Malay Peninsula.

The train, windows shut tight against the black night air, rattles from side to side. Outside, thick vegetation crowds against a landscape so different from the mountains of northern Thailand where I have spent two years. If I squint hard, I can make out rubber trees, dark tendrils reaching to the ground, bright red flowers like flecks of blood on a shadowy body, shuttered houses on stilts. Each stop looks ominously static, like the set of Swiss Family Robinson might look once production has shut down.

Southern Thais say two things to me. The first is phrased as query, after a sharp glance at my sarong and locally-tooled sandals: “Are you Malay?”

“No, American,” I usually admit, reluctantly owning up to all that it implies, unless I’m negotiating for budget accommodations, in which case I give myself leeway to claim my father’s nationality: “Nigerian.”

You could be Malay, they insist, eager to explain that there is an indigenous group on the peninsula with Negroid features. Light brown skin and curly hair just like me. With my smooth Thai, they assure me, I could almost “pass.”

These earnest ethnic Chinese and Thai and Lao encouraging me, a Nigerian Scandinavian-American girl, to pass for Malay make me smile. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of passing. My child’s fancy was stunned by accounts of light-skinned blacks who left home and became white, trading all ties to self and family for freedom, something I could understand, or wealth, something I could not. The only biracial member of my family, I devoured tales of Tragic Mulattas who married white men then waited in horror to see how dark their children would turn out.

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it didn’t bother me not to be like them, it was frustrating not to be able to pass for what I actually was—biracial. Other mixed-race children had golden skin and wild sheaves of hair like straw. They clung to their white mothers in public, as if their blue and green and hazel eyes that passed through and over everything, refusing to see the world staring at them, were indeed transparent. Unlike them, my complete heritage wasn’t obvious to the naked eye. I worried.

How would my tribespeople recognize and come to claim me?

What I wanted most to be recognized as was Nigerian, an identity I imagined might account for my perpetual feelings of misplacement in the U.S. In college, I studied other African students with their dark skin firm as tree trunks, their bodies so strong they nearly burst out their flimsy European clothes, and gave up. There was no imitating the deliberate roll of the girls’ hips, the way the boys threw back their heads and laughed, white teeth flashing. They were too confident to have come from any country I knew. And so I passed for African American, a dynamic which, carrying no privilege, was not even considered passing. I was just another insecure brown girl on the shores of America.

The second thing the locals on the Malay Peninsula say is: “Be careful of armed bandits.”

Southern Thailand is notorious for its gun-toting robbers and smugglers who roam in bold bands, sometimes posing as shaven, saffron-clad monks, oftentimes murdering their victims. The Bangkok papers are filled with sensational reports of gangs attacking long-distance buses then slinking into jungle lairs or melting over the border to Malaysia. It is said that some villages are virtually owned by bandit leaders, who conscript young men into service much like the drug warlords of the north.

So far I’ve been lucky. A woman—and farang, foreign, at that— traveling solo with all her wealth in a single bag is almost too easy a mark. When queried about the existence and location of my protective male, I reply that I am a serious student on thudong, pilgrimage, and have only recently stopped being a Buddhist nun.

Buad maechi? The Thai exclaim in disbelief, and I nod, yes, I did indeed ordain. My close cap of curls, just now recovering from the razor, supports this claim. All interest in my recalcitrant protective male now lost to concerns of karma, they tell me which guesthouses are not in league with bandits, which towns to avoid. And except for once hearing gunshots in the road during dinner near the Malaysian border 158 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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and having to shutter the kerosene lamp and lie with our faces pressed to the floorboards for the rest of the evening, nothing has happened.

Staring out the train window at the murky, abandoned streets, I decide that good karma and luck may not be enough this time. It occurs to me that the Thai’s two discussion points are somehow enmeshed to my advantage, that I can best be careful of armed robbers by passing as Malay. The less foreign I am, I try to reassure myself, the greater the likelihood that I will be passed over when choices are made to rape, rob and kill.

I get up and stagger through the rocking train, keeping my movements muted and tight, resolving to be less forthcoming in my conversations. In the north, no matter how Thai I acted, I was always too big, too brown, my body movements too unrestrained. There was never any possibility of melting into the scenery. Now, if viewed at a distance, my very brownness might save me.

In the dining car, three men in the snowy shirtsleeves and dress slacks of Thai businessmen blow my cover. First they send the waiter to my table to ask if I speak English; then they insist on buying me dinner. They look to be in their mid-twenties, which means thirtysomething, and are on a slow, steady path to drunkenness, having chosen pricey Singha beer rather than cheap Mekhong whiskey.

Everything about them, from their pinkening faces and expansive gestures, to their courtly invitations of “Please to join us,” seems more intent on impressing each other than me. I accept.

Their questions, phrased in excellent English, are the usual suspects: Where do you come from? How do you like Thailand?

Where is your husband? Can you eat Thai food?

I reply in English, with a few Thai words dropped in, pretending to speak far less than I actually do. This is Plan B: if unable to pass as Malay, always make sure your opponent underestimates you.

They crow with delight to hear my simple Thai, and when I cover my rice with tiny green heaps of chilies, there is much giggling and nudging. Look, look, they tell each other, squirming with delight.

The farang eats Thai chilies!

This obvious lack of familiarity with foreigners lessens the likelihood of them being hustlers. Still, I shake my head when they ask if I drink Singha and keep to tiny, chilled bottles of orange Fanta.

They order another round and tick off a list of beautiful beach islands near the Gulf, places like Phuket, Haad Yai, Koh Samui, the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 159

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so-called James Bond Island, all of which will later be immortalized in big budget movies, blonde starlets spilling onto the sand like oil slicks.

I explain that I’m not on vacation. I’m on a pilgrimage in search of famous nuns.

In my pocket is my most valuable possession, next to my passport: a list of nuns and temples from my teacher. Next to each person or temple he has scribbled the name of the province it is in or, if I’m lucky, the town. Nothing more. Imagining myself a black female Paul Theroux, I’ve traversed Southeast Asia from Burma all the way down to Malaysia, throwing myself off the train wherever I hear of someone or someplace I should see. The words “I’ve heard of some nuns living near . . .” are enough to start me fumbling for my bag, heading for the exit.

“Let me see,” the youngest and best-dressed businessman insists, holding out his hand. It occurs to me that this might be his promotion celebration or that he could be the CEO’s son who has just landed his first big deal. He studies the list, his eyes tiny slits of slate in a lobster-red face. I feel drunk just looking at him.

“Wait a minute,” he says, sitting up and jabbing a manicured finger at the very next stop on my list. “You can’t go there! The town is owned by bandits!”

The train jolts around a corner, throwing my heart against my rib cage. I am scheduled to disembark there tonight. The town is crucial to my pilgrimage; one of the only centers for nuns is rumored to be nearby.

I shrug, feigning indifference. “Mai pen rai,” I say, invoking Thailand’s most commonly used phrase. Never mind. It’s okay. No problem.

“No, no,” he insists, his eyes sharpening with increasing sobriety. “The train gets in at three in the morning. They know who arrives, where they stay!”

He whips around to his friends and blurts a flurry of southern dialect. Most of the words are familiar, but I assume a blank expression, heart still racing.

“What should she do?” one of the men asks. “Mai dii leuy.” It’s not good.

“She shouldn’t go alone,” he replies. “They kidnap visitors and plantation workers to extort money.”

“Why doesn’t she get off at your stop?” the third suggests.

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town is larger and more secure. I can make sure she gets to a guesthouse. In the morning I can come with my car to drive her to the nun center. I think I know the place; it’s between the two towns.”

“Dii lao,” the second man counsels. Good enough.

It is indeed a good plan. I decide to accept. I know that to ask a Thai for help, even directions, is to embark on an extended relationship in which his responsibility will not end until I have achieved my goal or safely reached my destination.

The first businessman, face red above his pristine white linen shirt, turns back to me and proposes his solution, speaking carefully and clearly. “You should not get off at X-town, which is the next stop,” he cautions. “You should get off at Y-town, the following stop, where I live.” He explains why.

I look skeptical for a few minutes before making a show of allowing myself to be convinced.

The bill is then settled, a ritual involving a race to unzip their clutch wallets of Italian leather and shouted claims and counterclaims of being the eldest and thus responsible for paying. Giggling, each tosses red and tan bills onto a mound on the table.

I thank all three, placing my hands together in a steeple and bringing them to my forehead in a traditional wai. This delights them immensely, though their drunken attempts to return the gesture are more Three Stooge-like than Thai. Afterwards, I head back towards second class, while they exit out the front of the dining car, to first class, fresh bottles of Singha clinking in their hands.

“See you in a few hours,” the first businessman says. “Remember not to get off at X-town—wait to Y-town!” We agree to meet on the platform.

Back at my seat, I find that a family, a tiny mother with three children, has joined me. Trying to keep my head respectfully below the mother’s, I duck into my window seat, diagonally across from hers.

Once seated, I nod and smile. The broad planes of her face twitch a moment, as if processing the information that she has inadvertently installed her family next to someone strange, be it Malay or farang, then smooth into determined pleasantness. The two younger children freeze in mid-gesture, saucer-eyed and speechless.

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makes a fluttering gesture with his hand, an unspoken plea. His mother snaps a single syllable in southern dialect, its meaning unmistakable: Stay!

Keeping his head perfectly still, the boy monitors me out of the corners of his eyes, pupils rotating in their sockets as if he were performing khon, a Thai masked dance based on the Ramayana. He is Hanuman, the Monkey General, terrifying the demon army with his jerky movements and wildly spinning eyeballs.

Grinning to myself, I fall into that half-waking state of train travel. My limbs loosen and follow the jarring rhythm. Outside an epic battle rages, blue-faced demons pitted against Lord Rama and the monkey soldiers, little Hanuman poker-straight at my side.

When the conductor comes through the car, calling X-town, my original destination, I consider jumping up and dashing for the exit.

Why have you allowed your plan to be modified? I reprimand myself.

What if the businessman, now drunk, has forgotten our agreement? Or what if he was just talking? What if there are no armed robbers?

I press my nose to the cold glass and peer out. The platform looks empty, though it’s too dark to be sure. What does a bandit-owned town look like? I wonder. I imagine clusters of men with machine guns on every corner. Will they be dressed in dark blue farmers’ shirts with red headbands and sashes like the opium smugglers of the north? Or in snug polyester pants with flared legs and mirrored sunglasses, like the gangsters in Bollywood movies? I imagine a banner strung across the train station: Welcome to Bandit Territory! in six-inch letters.

I decide to get off. Stick to my original plan. Rely on myself. I lean forward to grab my knapsack from under my seat.

Just then Hanuman nods off, his head dropping face-first into the crook of my arm. He is warm as a furnace, his soft cheeks like sun-ripened peaches against my skin.

Startled, I sit up and lift my arm. The stubble of his shaven head scrapes along my flesh. He squirms into fetal position, his small, round head falling in my lap like a gift.

Across the aisle, his family dozes, piled atop one another, the younger children’s mouths half-open like tiny, budding flowers. I rest my hand lightly on the shoulder of the sleeping boy. The train hurdles through bandit territory.

An hour later we reach Y-town, my new destination. Reluctantly, I lift the boy from my lap. His eyes flutter open for a split second, 162 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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momentarily wild, then close, the lids settling into smiling gold crescents. I drape him over both seats, then grab my knapsack and sprint to the end of the car.

The conductor watches as I disembark and scour the length of the train in both directions. “Khon urn?” he asks. Someone else?

I nod.

A minute later he jerks his chin at me—“Malay?”

I nod.

We wait some more. The station is locked and dark. No banner, which is good. Except for a samloh driver asleep in the back of his tricycle rickshaw, the platform is empty.

Finally, the train conductor shrugs. “Sure this is the right stop?”

I wonder if I got them mixed up and was supposed to have gotten off at X-town, the first stop. “Did a man get off at the last stop?” I ask.

He shakes his head, the gold braid on his cap glinting in the light from the train doorway. “No one likes to get off at these stops at night.”

This is why he has kept the train waiting. I stare open-mouthed, just now beginning to comprehend the size of his concern, of my stupidity. I know nothing about this town, other than that it is an hour south of my original destination and supposedly larger and safer. For all I know, this is the heart of bandit territory, and the businessman gets a commission on all farang women he lures here.

The train begins to snort and strain, like an animal in restraint, and the conductor hops onto the metal step. “Glap maa?” he offers.

Do you want to get back on?

I shake my head. In the temple they taught us to confront the very things that terrify us. Or perhaps I am simply paralyzed with indecision.

With a great squeal, the train pulls away. “Good luck,” the conductor calls. “Be careful!”

I hoist my knapsack to my shoulder and turn to find the samloh driver sitting up regarding me.

“Samloh?” he inquires.

I nod briskly and scramble into the back. “Take me to the Chinese hotel,” I bark. “I’m late.”

As the driver begins to pilot the samloh through the abandoned streets in that slow, standing pedal that resembles slow-motion running, I pray that the stereotype about samloh drivers being drug pushers, pimps or bandit informants is greatly exaggerated. I also pray that there is a Chinese hotel.

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Though the town doesn’t seem as large as promised, the center resembles any other Thai town at night—dark and shuttered, with metal gates pulled down over shop entrances, crushed glass atop stucco gates, and decorative grilles covering the windows of upstairs apartments. These are standard security measures, as common as the high sidewalks to protect against flooding, so I tell myself there is no reason to read them as ominous.

Again I think about Maechi Roongduan, the head nun at my temple.

It was she who inspired me to make this pilgrimage. When she was in her late twenties, not much older than I, she spent three months walking from one end of the country to the other with only an umbrella, a mosquito net, an alms-bowl, and the robes on her back. She reached the Malay Peninsula during rubber season, which meant that the villagers worked at night stripping trees by candlelight and slept during the day, when alms-rounds happen. As a result, she went for days without food and had to meditate frequently to overcome hunger pangs. Often, alone in empty fields, the stench of rubber heavy in the dark air, she came out of meditation to find cobras with their heads in her lap.

“Perhaps drawn by my body heat,” she’d marveled to me, and I had instead marveled at her and her fierce determination to love all creatures, no matter the cost.

To my amazement, the samloh driver deposits me at what is indeed a Chinese hotel, a modest gray stone building in the center of town. I pay him, tipping just enough to suggest gratitude but not wealth, before thrusting my hand through the iron gate and ringing the bell.

The ubiquitous old Chinese watchman in white undershirt, drawstring pajama bottoms and slippers shuffles across the courtyard with a lantern and heavy ring of keys. Without question, he shows me to a room, clean and Spartan, and points out the shower room.

Once inside the stone room, I ladle cool water from a giant jar over my body, shaking a bit in the chill air, allowing myself a few tears of relief under the camouflage of water. For a short time in this tiny, gray space, I am me. Not moving. Not negotiating. Not slipping into any particular shape.

I have just returned to my room when the watchman knocks on the door and announces that someone has come for me.

My heart thuds. This is it. The samloh driver has sold me out!

“No visitors,” I cry, eyeing the flimsy bolt. “It’s too late, and I’m a respectable girl.”

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to find the businessman from the train in the hallway. He is red as ever, his boyish face sheepish. “May I come in?”

“Only for a minute,” I say, “I must sleep.”

He enters the room and plops heavily on the bed. Alarmed, I leave the door open wide and stand between it and him. “What happened to you?”

“I fell asleep,” he says, rubbing his puffy eyes, “and missed our stop. I had to get off at the next town and find a taxi to bring me back to Y-town. It was difficult at this hour. Then I had to get here.”

“How did you know where I was?”

He chuckles. “How many farang get off the train in the middle of the night? I went to the train station and asked the samloh driver.

He brought me here.”

I join in his laughter, though it occurs to me that my initial assumption was correct and the driver did indeed sell me out, albeit to this bumbling businessman instead of a bandit king.

“How did you know about this place?” he asks.

I grin. “I didn’t! I figured this wasn’t a tourist town, so if there was a hotel at all, it would be a ‘traveler’s hotel’ for traders. I just guessed it would be owned by ethnic Chinese. I said, ‘take me to the Chinese hotel’ and it worked.”

He roars. “That’s very clever. You’re quite resourceful!” He shakes his head. “Here I was supposed to protect you, but you did fine without me.”

I duck my head modestly.

When he expresses some interest in more drink, I tell him it’s time to go. He stands up, shoulders slumping in exhaustion, his fine linen looking like a wilted carnation, and says he’ll be back with his car at eleven to take me to the nun center.

“I will make it up to you,” he vows. “Eleven it is!”

At half-past noon the following afternoon I consider my options.

Who knows how far the center is and how long it will take me to find it? I need to budget time to travel back to X-town, time to find the center, time to meet the nuns and see the place, time to return here to Y-town. I want to be back on the train this evening and get the hell out of bandit territory before dark.

The Chinese hotel owner confirms that there is indeed an evening train and tells me where the marketplace is. He’s never heard of a nun center in this town or the next, however.

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“If a man comes,” I tell him, “please explain that I had to go but will be back for the train.”

The walk through the town feels odd. I am used to two extremes, either tourist metropolises like Chiangmai and Bangkok that teem with expatriates and English-language signs or small, traditional villages, where everyone turns out on the dirt path to greet the farang.

I have never before negotiated a mid-sized city filled with ethnic Chinese, Thai, Lao, Indian and Malay. I feel like an extra who didn’t get the script.

At the market I wait beneath the sign for tuk-tuk going to X-town.

Several Nissan pickups pass by, the narrow, padded benches in back crowded with passengers. Finally a newer Nissan pulls up and parks.

The driver gets out and heads into the market. A pretty young woman remains behind in the passenger’s seat.

I approach and lean in through the open driver’s window. “Are you going to X-town?” I ask. “I’m looking for this center—” I proffer the piece of paper. “I think it’s on the road between here and X-town, somewhere in the country.”

She squints at the paper, frowning. “I’m not sure,” she says, “I’ll have to ask him.”

The driver returns with a giant burlap bag of rice draped over his shoulder. He staggers to the back and tosses it in, then joins us, slapping his palms together. He has the same face as the girl and looks a bit older, in his early-twenties. “Arai na:?” he asks us. What is it?

“Can we take her to this place?” the girl asks. “It’s a temple.”

He gives me a quick once-over. “A temple?”

“Well, a nun center, really,” I explain.

The three of us study my teacher’s list of names and provinces.

I know what they must be thinking. Thai temples are cursed with long, flowery names that no one uses. In daily life, they are known by descriptive nicknames: Marble Temple, Cave Temple, Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Temple of the Reclining Buddha, Temple of the Ceylonese Buddha. Without knowing its nickname or address, a temple is nearly impossible to locate.

“Get in.” The driver motions for the girl to slide over.

“Oh no,” I protest, “I can just get in the back.”

No, no, both insist, and so I squeeze into the front. We start off immediately, without waiting to load more passengers.

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everyone else’s, I turn around to check on the others through the small window in the cab. The pickup bed is empty, save for the bag of rice. There are no vinyl benches, no intricate grillwork on the canopy, no passengers. This is not a tuk-tuk.

I whip around to stare at my companions. The young man drives hunched over, conferring softly with the girl. It dawns on me. They are brother and sister come to market to do shopping, not pick up fares. I have just commandeered the private car of some family out doing errands.

“KhOO thôod!” I cry. Excuse me! “I thought you were a tuk-tuk!

I am so ashamed! Please,” I beg, fumbling for the door handle, “you don’t have to take me.”

No, no, they assure me. Mai pen rai. Never mind. No problem.

For the next hour I cringe against the door of the cab, trying to make myself as small as possible, as if the size of my gall could somehow shrink with my body, while my shy hosts drive around town, silently intent on their task, asking none of the usual, eager questions of me. At each bend in the muddy, rutted roads, the brother disembarks and asks for directions from befuddled monks and laypeople. At each wrong temple, we are directed to another, equally wrong. Finally an old woman sends us to the long-distance bus park, where a driver in a silky disco shirt and wraparound sunglasses assures us that yes, he passes by the road to the nun center.

As they hand me over, my hosts apologize for abandoning me before my destination has been reached. They would like to take me to the center themselves, the sister explains, a crease appearing between her perfect brows, but their mother expected them home an hour ago. Can I possibly forgive them? They lean forward in the cab, twin faces rosy with sudden boldness and affection. They look for all the world as if we have spent a lovely afternoon together.

“Are you Malay?” the brother blurts out, finally daring to ask something of me, of this interaction.

“No, American,” I say, for once happy to be so, hoping to give them a story for their mother that’s a fair exchange for their generosity. “I used to be a nun in the north, and now I’m on pilgrimage. You’ve helped so much.”

Their eyes widen, and we all grin. I entered their truck under misapprehension and they invited me under a misapprehension of their own, and all this time we’ve been sitting side by side, mistaking each other for someone easier to imagine. Passing.

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“Good bye!” the sister calls out the window. “Good luck!” her brother adds. Both wave. “We’ll miss you.”

When I return to the Chinese hotel that evening, after the bus ride into the countryside and the three-kilometer hike down a dirt road, after my tour of the nun center and my afternoon spent talking with the head nun, after catching a ride back to Y-town with some local farmers, I find the businessman from the train waiting in the lobby. He looks forlorn yet dapper in fresh linen and glossy leather sandals.

“I overslept again,” he wails, standing at my approach. “It took me forever to get home last night—the samloh driver didn’t wait outside—so I was completely exhausted.” He blushes and hangs his head. “I got here at one.”

I make a flowery apology for not waiting and explain that everything worked out. Ten kilometers outside of town, the long-distance bus had stopped alongside a lonely stretch of rice paddies, hectares and hectares of emerald and gold fields broken only by the occasional morose-looking water buffalo. The afternoon sun beat down, hotter than I was used to in the north.

“Here?” I’d asked the driver. “This is the nun center?”

He’d shrugged, eyes camouflaged behind the sunglasses gripping his face, and pointed to a dirt path bisecting the road. “There are some nuns down there,” he’d said. “So I hear.”

Fair enough. “Khob khun kha,” I’d thanked him.

The bus lumbered away, and I’d started down the path, trying not to think about how I’d get back to town. After all, I’d made it the entire length of Southeast Asia with no plan.

After reporting to the businessman on the success of my visit to the nun center, I collect my bag from the old Chinese watchman, who startles me by flashing a row of betel-stained teeth, and I ask the businessman to do me the great favor of seeing me to the train.

Perking up a bit, he ushers me to a sparkling cream Mercedes.

As he holds open the door, he shakes his head. “You’re a woman alone,” he marvels, “a poor student, a farang.” He pauses, as if pondering this triple source of my isolation before concluding, “But you don’t need any help.”

Though it isn’t quite true, I smile modestly, once again accepting the compliment, momentarily relishing what it is to be Malay.

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Junk

I.

When I was about seventeen, I became my grandfather’s assistant.

On weekends he would enlist me to help him in his chores around the house. My parents and I lived upstairs, my sister and my mother’s parents, downstairs; it was a large house and there were always many things needing to be fixed and seen to. One of our chores was hauling cans and bottles and other indigestible trash to the dump. The dump, as we called it, was really a steep bank of the Black River, a small yet torrential and dangerous stream that runs through that part of New York state, and which, at that time, was famously polluted.

Perhaps because it was so filthy, we thought it an appropriate resting place for all our household trash. We didn’t throw things in the river itself, of course, but rather down some almost cliff-like banks which fell in a steep dirt scree—a few small bushes here and there—to end in flat rock shoals and shelves that always looked to me so strangely forbidding and forlorn, like the remnants of a prehistoric world. We were not the only ones to dump trash there; everybody did it. Yet it was still illegal. So carefully we’d load the trunk of his car with bags full of old tin cans, jars, light bulbs, small broken, unfixable, corroded things. My grandfather hardly ever threw anything out, but when something is done, it’s done, and there’s no sense keeping it. I don’t recall that we went under cover of darkness.

Yet there was a stealth and furtiveness to my grandfather’s very movements as we loaded up the car, and certainly when we got there, got out, went around to the trunk and opened it and began to take things out. There was a noticeable change in his posture: shoulders a little hunched, head down, his straw hat or white papery Pratt & Williams painting cap with its dried dribbles of paint pulled down a little lower: a glancing left and right, a slightly lowered voice. You watch, Steevie eh? Anybody a come? No? Ok come on, come on.

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where they throw before? Yeah throw in there. It was the posture of someone trying not to be seen. It was a remote area. Yet someone might come around, if not the police, then someone who would tell the police, and more than once we did have to stop what we were doing, close the trunk quickly, and pretend that we were just sight-seeing.

My grandfather was a commanding figure in many ways. Short, but broad and powerful. I once saw him set a 2x4 at an angle to the side of the garage and crush it in with his foot. It was an old 2x4 to be sure, but still. Yet I realized suddenly—or was it slowly, gradually?—that this sneakiness, this trying to become invisible, was something he had learned, had had to learn, coming here to the United States. He came when he was 17 in 1923, well after the large waves of immigrants, came when little more was wanted of such people from such places, southern Italy, Poland, the Ukraine. He had come here with three friends, in steerage, sleeping on straw that had been spread on the floor. But someone must have been in charge of such an operation, and someone had decided that straw spread on the floor was good enough. To such people, we ourselves were trash. Yes. That’s what we were.

I did not see any of this then. Instead I saw an adventure. I pretended we were secret agents on a mission or valiant soldiers in World War II fighting the Germans, and the rocky gullet of dirt down which we chucked our shopping bags full of tin cans was really a machine-gun hideout and we were throwing grenades down onto it.

How strange that even in my idiotic daydreams, history, albeit in a cartoon version, would still show itself.

On our way back from our ecological misdeeds, we’d stop at the “gas house,” an industrial yard kept by the gas company, where, near the low brick bunkers, the large gas-work pipes that always reminded me of those tall cacti in the desert, with meters perched on them here and there, there was a low, sandy and unfenced yard where rows of pipes, presumably waiting to be laid in the ground, were kept. My grandfather and I had a game. By now it was evening.

The orange light of sunset tinted the roof of the derelict paper plant on the other side of the river; it glittered on some broken glass in the corner of the yard and shined the rims of the metal pipes themselves. The wind was beginning to blow. Was a storm predicted?

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down so that my face would be against its opening, as though at a portal to another world, like Alice’s rabbit hole perhaps, and he would do the same on the other side. I’d see his upside-down face at the end of the narrow tunnel. The wind was picking up—yes, it was really blowing now. Hello, he’d call, the syllables lengthened out in the reverberation of the long gun barrel, hell-oooo. And I’d answer, though at a different frequency perhaps, hell-oooo. And then we’d run to another pipe. I’d get there first, dip my face down again, only to see nothing, calling out hell-oooo grampa. And then, after an interval, his upside-down face would once again appear, as though at the end of an enormous distance. What was this distance, and what was its actual nature? It would take so long to find this out.

Hell-oooo, he’d call, hell-oooo.

II. The junkyard was not far from where we lived, which was a semi-rural area at the edge of town. The houses there all had extensive gardens at their backs, so that the center of each block was a kind of patchwork consisting of plots of zucchini and tomatoes, peppers and pole beans, sometimes even corn. Everyone grew their vegetables in gardens bordering on each other; some sold what they grew in little roadside stands, but many people gave away what they didn’t need to their neighbors. My grandfather’s uncle, old Joe Peppe (it was pronounced “pep”), would often leave things—tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, some cantaloupe—in a paper bag in the crook of the 2x4 and wire fence that separated our backyard from his. Some people raised rabbits or kept chickens and, in one or two cases, horses. But if you went a little way to the east—two or three blocks perhaps—there was a change. There was a used car lot, then an outpost of the electric company, where trucks equipped with cherry pickers sat, each confined in a yellow-striped space, the parking lot itself enclosed by a chain link fence and guarded by a locked gate. Beyond that, and as though to mark a boundary, there were the railroad tracks, where the Delaware-Lackawanna blared past at intervals. On the other side, there was a dusty dirt road turning off the sidewalk, which was itself broken in pieces there, cracked and jagged. The small dirt strip was full of ruts and led to a tall gate which, unlike the electric company’s, was always open wide for anyone to enter.

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Mostly, it seemed, only large trucks went through—dump trucks, huge Macks, or long, low flatbed lorries, doing so in what I always now recall as the middle of a hot and bright midsummer afternoon.

Gray dust hangs in the air. The sky is a bleached-out, whitish blue.

Why do I associate that type of sky with metaphysical perplexities, let’s say, with the enigma of time itself? But at this point in my life, I was not concerned with time. It was concerned with me, of course, although I didn’t know this; or rather, history, time’s poorer cousin among the metaphysical abstractions, was concerned with me. And yet this, too, I didn’t know. Then, at that stage of life, there was merely the visible world itself, which was simply present, entirely visible, and waiting, wanting to be seen.

It was a huge junkyard, bordered by a tall and very old wooden fence—fence is not the word, it was a rickety barricade of old, gray wooden panels, like huge billboards, which did sometimes serve as billboards, announcing the coming of a circus or the stock car races (it was always something like that). These huge posters of white and cobalt blue and garish red would stay up long after the event had passed, left there to slowly peel down, like the white bark off a paper birch, so that a clown’s tear-droppy, painted face would be interrupted by a straight rip down through his brow—that eye and cheek quite gone, fusing, as though in a jump cut, with the flaming wheels of the stock-car race coming up this Saturday, which was a Saturday some five or even ten years in the past. Is it possible for paper things to last that long? But these seemed to.

There was no junkyard dog. Instead an industrial crane, painted green as I recall so that it looked like a two-story-high mantis, shorn and eyeless, presided over a boarded-in kingdom of scrap. I never understood what they did with all the stuff, so much of which was metal of one kind or another, and which seemed to glisten hotly in the summer sun as I walked past on my way to wherever I might be going. I glimpsed forbidding piles of metal trash: pieces of cars, washing machines, old water heaters, huge corrugated sheets rusting to the color of a bloodstain partly washed out of gray flannel. There were bamboo forests of copper tubing, there were sinks and toilets piled in odd pyramids, bundles of pipe ten feet tall and stacked all askew like a clutch of straws; there was a row of old refrigerators wrapped with long chains like prisoners, a pyramid of industrial gray pipe stacked very neatly like a giant honeycomb of lead. The strangest sight was a mountain of tin cans as high as a small house.

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There were cans of all shapes and sizes, some with their labels still on, most without, and all in various stages of rust; they were smashed and flattened, twisted and bent in every possible way, and some, here and there, remarkably untouched by the fray. I remember hubcaps stacked like cheap hats at a milliners or loaves of flat bread at the bakery, and ranks of old tires with rust-speckled rims leaning against each other along the side of a discarded school bus, like unemployed men in the Depression idling along a brick wall in some photographic downtown of the WPA. It was a world of metal and rusted metal, a place where objects had fallen out of the social order that had created them. They were now just things. Yet they were unlike anything else on the face of the earth, neither natural objects like rocks and trees and yet no longer implements. They belonged to a special category: they were junk.

III. I remember especially the wrecks. Cars with their front ends smashed and twisted into odd shapes, one with a sort of pug nose, its hood jack-knifed up over it like a little tent. There was another with its right front crumpled in, so that it seemed to frown and flinch away, with its hood pleated up into a ruffle. Another had gotten bonked right in its snout, which wrinkled up halfway to the windshield, which was smashed out completely on the driver’s side, both doors flung open wide, so that it seemed to have sprouted wings on its gray cinder blocks in the gray dirt yard. There was a car with a huge scoop out of its front where something very large had swiped it in an arc; the metal was all bunched up in waves and gathered around the central gaping hole, which looked like the opening to a cave— the mangled underchasis—and at the top of this cave mouth, the front axle was bent up in a gooseneck, at the apex of which the front wheel hung suspended, caught up there, as when you see a dog with its front paw hooked through its collar. Windshields spilled their bright shatters, some just spewed all over, some still in place but spider-webbed with infinite cracks. There was one with a single bull’s-eye-like hole at the center, where someone’s head must have hit it, as though the splash of a diver breaking the water’s surface had been preserved in the medium of glass.

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amusement park, and part graveyard. It was a place of hauntings, of lost intentions, devastated hopes, destroyed ambitions, thwarted plans.

That’s what all this junk really was. People’s lives had come to this.

There had been people in that car, and that one there. It was bad enough to see the cars. What had the people looked like? The world is divided into two groups: emergency room personnel and the rest of us.

To this day I have a gap in my memory. A boy about a dozen years my senior lived next door. Johnny was his name. John Liberatore. Naturally he was my idol. I remember him teaching me how to catch a baseball in his backyard beside the green-painted clothesline poles. Were the lilacs out then? I remember he actually gave me one of his old baseball gloves at one point. And I squeezed back through the space at the edge of the white picket fence that separated our two backyards and was eager to show my father, who actually knew as little about baseball as I did, but who was pleased and amused and encouraging nonetheless. I think the two of them exchanged some friendly words about me, just out of hearing. At that moment they both seemed like adults to me, though Johnny was a boy in high school and my father, of course, a grown man.

I was hopelessly awkward, shy, and fat, and out of it; but he was always patient and friendly and tolerant of my five-year-old presence. I recall one afternoon when he showed me the model planes he had in his bedroom. One, an F-100 SuperSabre, was exactly the kind I always liked the best, and I remember how, poised on its holder, a kind of curving plastic stalk, there on the top of his dresser, it soared into its skies of boundless speed and of nameless, sunlit adventure.

I remember him playing real catch out in the street with one of his real friends. I sat on his front porch steps, watching and admiring how he threw the ball. And yet a boy at that age doesn’t really admire.

He watches, wide-eyed, wondering, and wants. He wants, he wants to do like that. That was what I felt. I wanted to be that, to have that lanky ease, that graceful sidearm throw, to make the ball sizzle through the air like that. I sat there singing softly to myself, “Deep in the heart of Texas. . . .” I don’t know why I chose that song, and the two of them overheard me and they both cracked up, regarding me as an odd amusement. Then—it can’t have been the same day, but in my memory these days are not like days, they’re vectors of light and motion, shadow and sun, and the special sky of youth, much bluer than any of our later skies, though possessing somehow, 174 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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too, less depth, unmarked as yet by the knowledge of infinite time and infinities of space, a domestic sky, rather, presiding over our small but burgeoning and multiplying world, our world of sight and smell and touch, of images and obscure portents, our always charmed and savage childhood—he raced a go-cart, a low-slung contraption made of black aluminum tubing, four outsized wheels, an engine in the back like a kind of outboard motor—or perhaps a metal beehive, since the thing made such a terrifying racket—a steering wheel, also of metal tubes, shaped like two pie wedges tip to tip. He sped around and around his driveway at horrific speed, his friend was shouting something no one could hear. Gravel spat out from the tires, the cart was up on two wheels at one point like a kite tipped sideways in a gust. . . .

I don’t remember when he was killed. I don’t even remember how I found out. Perhaps my parents told me. They must have done so, if only to prevent my saying something stupid to his grieving mother and father. He’d been killed in a car accident along with one of his friends; they were both seventeen. It has always seemed so strange to me that I could remember so many things about him well, and yet the event of his sudden death not at all. Not even vaguely, not even in the dim way we recall our earliest experience—of light, so often, as mine is of the light across the claw foot of an old upholstered chair, in the house of my great-grandmother, which was only down the street from ours, of being carried there on my grandmother’s hip, and of being bounced up and down on my greatgrandmother’s lap as she made me inflate my cheeks and then “burst” them by a playful daubing with her fingertips. I remember many things, but from the world of my life as it then was, this one event has been erased.

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Kathryn Rhett

The Big Timeout

I gave my daughter the needlepoint strawberries I made in the mental hospital. Two strawberries on a blue square ground. I haven’t made a needlepoint in the twenty years since; haven’t done a paint-bynumber since chickenpox. We weren’t allowed to smoke on the ward, and I needed to occupy my hands. Reggie, my fellow suicidal teenager, made detailed pencil drawings. Others played ping-pong, and those most severely drugged shuffled up and down the carpeted hall or watched television with their mouths open. The year I quit smoking I learned to knit. Haven’t knit since.

Being in the mental hospital was my first experience of being a spy. I wanted to act outrageous and be sent to the lock-up ward and write an exposé. When I went for morning blood draws, I could see the patients’ faces floating up against the rectangle of glass crisscrossed with wire. Behind that door was where Elise went after electroshock erased her name. We took turns holding her head in our laps, her curls spilling over our legs; we kept saying “Elise” but she wouldn’t claim it and she wouldn’t stop crying and finally they took her from us. I may have been mentally ill just to assume that I was unlike the others, that I could watch us all and write about it. But the observing part of me felt most real, everything else a disguise.

I checked into the mental hospital on Halloween. My mother and I walked into the ward with a suitcase, and all around us swooped witches and Frankensteins and rubber Nixon masks. Pointed hats, trailing sleeves like banners, orange face paint with a black spiderweb drawn over. I liked the whole scene. My new roommate Gina, an overweight Italian woman, sat in a flowered housecoat on her bed, muttering. At high school, I had just said goodbye to my handsome boyfriend Philip, luminously sweaty from shooting hoops in the gym after lunch. My motel room with Gina scared me, but it suited me more. The hospital appeared strange, a whole separate self-contained reality (like the Biosphere experiment, I think now), 176 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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buzzing away up the road from where I lived. Carpeted and curtained, the room looked reasonably friendly, and undemanding. I don’t know if my mother put my socks away before leaving, as she would a year later at college. After a while, I sat on my bed and Gina turned to me and smiled. We each had our own twin bed.

At home in my twin bed, I would wake and call my friend Kate at 6:30 a.m. on school days so we could have our first cigarette and decide what to wear. Then I let the dog out and packed lunches and yelled at my younger sister to remember her homework, her library books. Our mother left early, commuting to North Jersey. Our father lived four blocks away. My sister and I liked to make spaghetti for breakfast, we watched the four o’clock movie after school and ate ice cream sundaes, we rode our bikes to buy the groceries and pedaled home with our mother’s drycleaning held high streaming behind us. At school the classrooms were oases of order, but in between, the lockers crashed and the guys grabbed you and someone was getting stoned behind the theater. I could have been like Juliet B. who took ballet and stayed aloof. But I couldn’t stop myself from answering questions. Why not hitch a ride home with the laundry delivery truck?

Nowadays we give our children timeouts, sitting them in a blank corner to think for a moment. It’s not a punishment, the discipline books say, just an occasion to pause and change direction. I sit my daughter in the blank corner and she doesn’t like it, but we’re different. As a child, I always enjoyed being sent to my room.

I didn’t feel lonely except when I fainted after blood draws and woke on the hall carpet near the lab with patients stepping over me on their way to breakfast. Then I was just one of them, another girl lying face down. On my ward I got noticed for being young and not too messed up. The forty-somethings in for drug and alcohol rehab nicknamed me ‘Ivory Girl,’ which pleased me when they called it out. Other teenagers seemed hopeless: schizophrenic Steve, heavily sedated, dragging along in his black Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Of course I didn’t see him as hopeless then. My first impression: ‘There’s a really nice guy here named Steve—at least there’s one person I can relate to—who says he’s into rock ’n’ roll, which is cool.’ Even half comatose, his blue eyes beamed a weird anarchic glimmer. Hey man, he would say, raising one hand in limp greeting.

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birdbath. We would smoke and walk the edge of a stubbled cornfield, and I would stare down the road toward my other life. The Skillman School for Boys, a juvenile detention facility, lay nearby. I had volunteered there the previous year—me, a curer of waywardness!

The next school along that road was Stuart, a Catholic girls’ school which I had begged to attend in the eighth grade, attracted to the uniforms and prayers. But I was sent to Princeton Day School, the next institution past Stuart. PDS, for cool preppy jocks like Lily D., who could kick a soccer ball or throw on a pink strapless cotillion dress with equal aggressive confidence. I preferred the sideways cackle of Reggie, who had driven one after another of his father’s farming vehicles into walls until he was sent here.

I felt at home with the sadness of the midlife failure patients.

Maybe their sadness felt familiar, the particular sadness of having to drop, after long struggle, all appearance of success. By the time I knew my mother’s mother, she hardly moved from her chair in the living room. We had to hug her when we arrived, feeling her ribcage through the silky bathrobe. She watched television and smoked and ate candy and drank. Her hair fell out and she wore a wig which she never brushed, flat blondish curls. And my father’s mother, once grand and matriarchal, dwindled to an alcoholic widow during my childhood. She charred the Thanksgiving turkey one year. We ate it without comment. Then there were two uncles, one who’d been unemployed for years, another who had never had a job. The unemployed one, a Harvard MBA, still wore a silk square in his blazer pocket, but the act was wearing thin. The other one, always on the verge of a megadeal, supposedly in music but actually in drugs, only showed up sporadically, when he could bring an armload of gifts. My parents had gone to graduate school, and they kept their houses well and adhered to the basic Christian belief system and the Democratic party. We were safe, weren’t we? Around us the relatives crumbled.

Dr. Sugarman gave me nothing. He asked clinical questions about the duration and frequency of the suicidal impulse; he nodded, wrote briefly in a notebook, twirled his chair around so I faced its high tweedy back. I wondered if he were German. The first suicidal impulse had occurred at age eleven. I snuck into the bathroom at night to shave my legs. When I picked up the razor, it glinted in the medicine cabinet mirror, and in the mirror I looked at the razor and it seemed to look at me. Did the razor beckon? I began to conceive 178 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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of Dr. Sugarman as a German sugar man, enticing a column of children up a street. A cobblestoned street, and he walking backwards up it, offering lumps of colored crystal in his hand. Where were the children going? To the clinic. He told me I would never live a normal life without medication. The streets grew dark with soot, the fringes of the trees smoked in the November evening. The candy was a lithium salt. Dr. Sugarman was the father of a classmate. My classmate was normal.

My mother and I had walked into the clinic as if into church, hushed and abashed and dressed properly. We genuflected at the desk and signed forms for a 21-day observation, a voluntary commitment. Voluntary, though strongly suggested by the psychiatrist I’d seen for fifty minutes after school one day. I had not been caught, as my friend B. was, with razorblades in my purse. But my arms were scored under the sleeves, and there had been the Tylenol overdose incident, my poor red-haired pediatrician standing over me with his blue eyes bewildered. We walked into the clinic as if onto a cruise ship, the director with her clipboard pointing out the beauty salon, the game room, the gym. Oh how nice, we murmured to each other.

My boyfriend’s mother had spent time in this clinic. She was manic depressive, bipolar as it’s now called, just as they said I was.

Her husband had left her with seven children. How could she not have been crazy? Ordinarily Mrs. F. was a benevolent presence in the kitchen, her hair held back in a loose bun, cooking dinner amidst a sprawl of teenagers. Then she had rages, breaking half the plates.

More than once the kids came home from school to find their rooms emptied into the upstairs hall, mattresses up-ended against the wall, books and clothes in heaps. Your rooms were a mess, she said. I couldn’t stand it anymore. Clean this up. Insurance would pay for a few weeks in this private clinic and then Mrs. F. would be transferred to the state hospital where she lived, it seemed to her son, behind a chain-link fence, surrounded by animals and ghosts.

My mother and I walked down the clinic hallway on Halloween as ghouls streamed past us, and perhaps we seemed startled by a vampire or a Dorothy because the director said conspiratorially, It’s Halloween. We let them dress up. Having just walked in from high school, a little depressed, a minor troubled teenage thing, I wasn’t Crab Orchard Review ◆ 179

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one of them. I didn’t hallucinate or scream in public. My pupils weren’t dilated. I didn’t drool. No dark circles under my eyes, no wild tangle of unwashed hair, no shuffling, slouching, mumbling, stuttering, not too fat or too thin, without facial tics, not trembling or sweating. Just swinging my hair, I used Breck shampoo, I could be a Breck Girl, turning my head to take in the ping-pong table, the silvery bank of payphones, the brown patients’ lounge, the line of diner stools at the snack bar. Then the director pushed through a door, explaining that patients on this ward could come and go. The locked ward held patients who needed to be confined. Yes, of course, we nodded in our tourists’ way, but the possibilities dwindled for all of the tours a girl and her mother might be taking, for here, the director gestured, was my room.

The situation was fine because you just keep walking and put the suitcase down and nod at Gina, a mental case with a bad haircut who is huddled into herself over there, and see the beige curtains and the bathroom and your dresser and listen to the director say the bedroom door must be kept open for the safety of the patients and the lights go out at ten. Your mother asks about visiting hours and you unzip your bag, and there wasn’t so much to dread after all.

Now you are a patient. Back at school the students are passing notes in math class or giving oral reports in European history, but you are not in those rooms or on that schedule. The hospital is a manifestation of your inability to play a successful high school senior girl. This is a relief, because now you do not have to skip school and wander the empty house weeping. You can relax. The dining hall opens at five. In the morning there will be blood tests and an EEG. Maybe they will discover the source of your desire to jump off of the Empire State Building. Isn’t it good they have a high fence, Dad? you had asked on the observation deck, in the innocence of age twelve or so, as if everyone might be tantalized into leaping. Arrested away from the view for a moment, he had turned to face you.

My father said he’d never wanted to kill himself. He had been depressed, sure, but never that depressed. My mother didn’t say.

Once she said that every time she had a headache she worried it might be a brain tumor, and I concluded that she might not mind a heroic exit. Suicide, a failure, always got interpreted. The suicide had to become the proper, inevitable end of the story. I didn’t care so much about controlling the narrative of my life then. ‘Could one 180 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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hang oneself from a doorknob?’ was the sort of question I fell asleep to then. And how much could one sleep? I could sleep after school for hours. In the hospital I couldn’t sleep for hours in the afternoon; we had to choose activities. In the hospital I couldn’t drink vodka and roam dark parking lots looking for unlocked cars and pretend to drive one as my nice boyfriend, Billy, tried to coax me out and laughed nervously. I couldn’t drink and wander alone through the unlocked brand-new science building at Princeton University, the bunsen burners not yet installed, in the middle of the night. Only the red exit signs were lit, guiding me from floor to floor.

In the hospital I made a leather bracelet with a brass snap fastener.

Reggie made a sculpture. I wrote a poem about a locked red box with bad feelings stuffed inside; the art therapist was very pleased. Reggie and I drank milkshakes in the snack bar, and we never touched each other. In the hospital no one touched me; people gossiped about patients sneaking sex in the bathrooms (the only doors we could shut) or being raped or semi-coerced by male staffers, but not me. Goodbye to all that. The defiant gesture Reggie and I made was to sit on the hallway floor, our backs to the wall and our legs stretched out—instead of in chairs in the lounge. In the hospital Reggie made a fine drawing of a burning candle. We were mental hospital artists. Reggie sketched a cowboy in my notebook (he was from Montana). Another patient, Ron (older, alcoholic), wrote a poem in the notebook that began, ‘the world we live in says do or die, but I sometimes ask, why the hell try?’ I copied out Anne Sexton poems and John Denver lyrics (how embarrassing teenage diaries are) and noted that a number of patients had broken arms from punching walls. I wrote: ‘I was so terrified of the EEG—they stick twenty electrodes all over your head and when you move or swallow the needles stick in sharper.’ I wrote: ‘I’m so pissed I can’t go to that Grateful Dead concert.’ Looking back, I think I must have been out of my mind. (But am I out of my mind now? What will I think of this self in twenty years?)

About a month after my release, I swallowed all of my new antidepressants at once, tiny red-hot pills. No one tried to medicate me after that. I thought I could still recover, I wasn’t a chronic mental case. I’ve never gone back to the hospital. But there was no clean break out of prison, no shiny wave goodbye while riding a bicycle past the bare fields. I don’t know for how many hours I’ve sat in a stupor of sadness, as if weighted by stones. How many hours in how Crab Orchard Review ◆ 181

Kathryn Rhett

many chairs. In the years before I had children, I might imagine overdosing in a motel, or escaping—taking a bus to Kansas, working as a diner waitress, renting a room, living quietly under a new name (always Barbara, why?). I willed myself to stay in the chair. Children complicated the fantasy because I couldn’t leave them. The feelings would come, they always came, regardless of circumstance, in a sinister wave. This is why we speak of evil, of possession, because of the sensation of being occupied. The blade would beckon then, and the scratchy household twine, and the winking capsules in amber canisters.

Twenty years after the hospital, at night, I am pacing in a tight square on the kitchen floor, arms crossed, crying. My husband is working in another state for four months, it is winter, the children are finally asleep, I am tired. All evening I have been cheerful, cooking dinner, supervising homework and baths, reading bedtime stories. But now I give up. No one can see me like this: I have covered the glass part of the kitchen door with construction paper, what a clever curtain.

Four steps for each side of the square. Just walk the square, I think, do nothing else. No action, no phone call, no decision. To decide is to cut in two. I must keep walking in a continuous motion until I can calm down. Then one morning I have the jitters, and don’t want to drive the car or leave the house. Someday I will be waving from my front door, I’ll be the woman who never goes out. God you are such a mental patient, I think. Just stop it. You want to sit in a lounge doing needlepoint while your kids go to school with their hair unbrushed and you lose your job? You can sit in a chair pulling the needle through hole after hole in a neat row, chatting with the others (hoping none of them will call you after release, like Ron from Florida did, asking for a date) about their divorces or the best brand of nail polish.

Maybe Gina could be my roommate again. She started and ended every discussion with, “Honest to God, Kathy, you know what I mean?” She’d lost her memory. I could be there with her, existing in a limbo between life and death, but eventually I would have to choose again. I am older now, and expect more of myself. My daughter doesn’t want some sentimental souvenir of mom’s visit to the psych ward. My daughter doesn’t want to feel like I do, ever, and what can I do? My mother loved me well, and yet— Writing this is like talking about migraines, which seems to summon forth that insinuating pain behind the right eye, a snake out of a jar. So I don’t talk about migraines. And in the realm of mental illness, 182 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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too, silence and denial can be useful. Do the dishes, I say, a storm’s coming through. When I was small, we crossed the English Channel on the ferry, and my parents said the best way not to get seasick was to stand on the deck. So my father took me up, and we stood with the other passengers who were able to, in the cold spray as we plowed through clouds. I felt well, and very proud. Time passed, and then we stepped off the boat on the other side, into sunlit France.

One of the nurses rang a gold bell. The ward lined up, twenty-four of us in a straggled line down the hall. When we reached the head of the line, the nurse doublechecked the name and placed two fourounce paper bathroom cups on the counter. One held water, the other the pills. I remember looking down into the cup every time—pills are so pretty—but not the gray and yellow capsules. The nurses turned their faces to us as we swallowed—to make sure. I can’t remember what the nurses looked like, only the whiteness of their skin under fluorescence. I remember the back of the doctor’s chair, the dead grass, the cement sidewalk between the doctors’ building and the ward building, the brown carpet of the halls, the plastic trays sliding along the metal rails in the dining hall, Reggie’s pointy black cowboy boots, the cashier ringing us up in the snack bar. How lucky we were to have money. One day I walked out into the neutral space that was the parking lot and crossed back over into my high school life.

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Sally Read

Winter Light (After Chemotherapy)

At her window crystals filter a sulphurous winter light, so frozen the black threads of trees are shaken.

Ten months ago she was bald.

Now her skull is silky with black curls, though a hacking cough’s still enmeshed in one radiation-singed lung.

She keeps her tub filled all day, needs its chilly clarity, the limpid swell of it, as heating roars up the grate and her window blisters with ice.

In the next room she is seeding a fine glass vase with aquamarine beads, the dry mist of Baby’s Breath.

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packed and stored them in a basement, as if she needed to unhook each small trinket from ankles and wrists so nothing weighs her but her slim fingers untangling dried heather, her long smile, slow as water, and Fitzgeraldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s voice, a saxophone, skirting the dark wood floor.

In her sickness she craved light like water, to prise open the constricted black whorls of nausea.

Now she sets her vase on the sill, thrilled by the opalescence of glass against glass as shafts of pale sun pool in its curves like thin blood in the fist of a heart, shot through and weightless with light.

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Jack Ridl

Waiting with William Stafford in an Oregon Airport

This morning, the rain on the tarmac is the same gray as the sky. You aren’t here of course, gone more than three years now. But I think of you here, wonder how many times you sat waiting in your own quiet for a flight. These stiff chairs would have made you raise your eyebrows, lower them just as fast. You would have glanced at the toddler, watched how the child hides under the seat, giggles toward her tired mother, trying even in this hour to be good.

A dozen travelers all look out into the mountains, everyone going back or away, each lost—in an old conversation, a hidden sorrow, some tiny hope. It’s December 11, the day my mother’s father died in 1943.

Christmas carols lighten the air, a dulcimer bringing us “Greensleeves,” “It Came upon a Midnight Clear,” “Do You Know What I Know?”

The night my grandfather died, his lungs swollen with tuberculosis, my mother and grandmother heard him singing the title song from the musical he took my grandmother to on their first date.

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My mother was pregnant with me.

She can still sing that song.

My father was in Belgium.

For two years the women grieved and listened to the news. Then my father came home. Soon there was penicillin. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s almost time to board. The travelers are walking toward the gate. I have an hour yet before my flight back home, and I want to know if you felt your poems arriving when you asked the guards about their lives, when you looked through the barbed wire, a long way from tuberculosis and the war.

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Maxine Scates

The River

I want to lie down in the river.

I know that’s where sorrow is, sorrow the name I gave to a dog long after she was dead because I forgot to feed her, forgot to feed sorrow, to remember she needed to be fed. The wild cherries glisten in the sunlight, the crows clatter overhead and somewhere the woodpecker thrums a trunk.

I know I could pick strawberries on the road to the river, bend in the dusty rows reaching for them in that moment before sweetness fades.

I know the raccoon lies dead by the side of the road readying me, or is it these days when the iris blooms as I want it to, when the cat sits perfectly on her corner of the fence? I know the flocks of redwings are waiting there. They flash in the trees.

I want to drift all day in the yellow raft past the corn in the fields, past the island, the sweet grasses on its bank. I’ll feel the cool water coursing against my back.

No, I know when Sam Cooke sings This world with all of its allurements I want to cry. I know most of what I feel is the fault of something else, blessed singing or those full glasses of wine 188 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Maxine Scates

though maybe they only eased the way, or maybe I wasn’t feeling it yet, I don’t know.

I don’t know how to say it though the body would, full of its love, its joy.

I want to touch you.

I want you to touch me.

I want to lie down where your arms will hold me, where the birds are at work riding the half-drowning trees.

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Rebecca Seiferle

Internal Clock

In the morning, their heads vised between the pillows, my daughters try to hush the world: the bright peep at the window, the grinding of the espresso machine, the cacophony of piping.

At night, so late the moon is falling back into the sea, they’re improvising a rap song, with click and cluck of mouth and tongue, to keep the world awake.

I tell myself they’re just teenagers—and, thank God, not like those streaming in an erotic medley of stoned cars through the Safeway parking lot every night—that this is why they mimic bears, caught in unpredictable seasons.

But the fact is I’m the one who’s growling, ranging through their rooms, as if rummaging for what I’ve lost, and they’re just children craving what I cannot give— eye of lover, hand of friend—and the love that I still can. So they go on trying to block out my morning racket, and I trying to tone down their twosome at 2 a.m.

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Rebecca Seiferle

and, at moments, we find ourselves in some noon or midnight, laughing, cutting up, unable to stop urging one another into inconvenient song.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 191

Patty Seyburn

Red Level

i. I found it leaning in the basement.

Device for establishing a horizontal line or plane. Like the wheelbarrow in color, a working man’s prop. ii. His draftsman’s tools gone, no straight edge or compass remains Two by four, two windows bound slightly bowed tubes, water within, air bubble in each (the chicken in every pot) that fall between thin, black lines to mark the center, if the surface is as named. iii. and the photograph of a young man in RCAF uniform Two small canoes scooped out on each wide flat. One hole from which to hang it in the shop. Red paint shot with gray.

You can lay it on its side or stand it up. iv. with his cargo plane went to the future Apt palindrome, each side meeting in the “v”—two arms that join at the crotch as of a tree v. patriarch who loves it as he can. cleaved by lightning where trunk and branch unite or part, depending on the heart’s conjugations.

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vi. My brothers find me sentimental and don’t mind In a gloss of stratum, red’s the sunken shelf that shrines the gem’s bathing gangue, vein of the unrefined pulse. vii. say take whatever junk you want.

Even Eliot might like it if correctly correlated: humble properties, lone purpose—to ensure an even surface in the face not of the odd but the imbalanced. Air and liquid kindred, wood and window wed, you and I, you and I level-headed, even-keeled, nonplussed. viii. My mother, who remembers to forget Obligations to object hinge on history. ix. and visits the cemetery often when she’s lonely Objectivity lives in the level’s wide-eyed evaluation. x. wonders how she raised a child If I close my eyes, I see the world divided, not into matter and ether, darkness and light—into those who take object as subject and those who refuse to subject their objects to the mutinies of memory. xi. with such capacity for sadness.

What can be done but make do with the token left behind— unsold, unlauded, earns its scars —is that the person you are?

The one you blame you miss you fear you yearn to be? Be near?

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 193

Cathy Song

Living Proof

1.

Father came home from the Brussels World’s Fair with a doll for my sister and a doll for me.

Halfway around the world he carried two long boxes, like a man bringing roses home to his wife.

The crinkling of tissue paper seemed a faraway sound as Father lifted the doll and placed her in my arms.

Two yellow braids, coarse as burlap, hung like ropes I imagined a priest might pull to bring the good people of a town to God. My beauty of the cowbells wore a dress flocked with tiny meadow flowers and shoes sturdy and pink like the skin of a cow’s udder.

Strung on a wire inside her head, the marbles of her eyeballs rattled whenever the lids fell shut, gravity pulling us both to sleep.

No other girl in Wahiawa owned such a beauty.

No other girl had a father who had traveled halfway around the world to bring his daughter such a beautiful doll.

2.

“The child’s anemic.

Look how thin she is.

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Cathy Song

And tired all the time.

Poor thing!”

Mother sighed.

“Pokanini kid took after me . . . ” Mrs. Matsumoto, listening, puffed sympathetically on a cigarette.

Mother was thin.

And she was weaker than Father.

But anemic leaked onto the floor, odorless at first, until you noticed her shivering, in the corner, the shi-shi girl, who stood all day in her own puddle, too shy to raise her own hand.

3.

I’m sorry playmate, I cannot play with you, My dolly has the flu.

Boohoo Boohoo Boohoo!

Ain’t got no rain barrel.

Ain’t got no cellar door.

But we’ll be jolly friends, Forevermore!

Round and round the yellow sun spun, round and round like a rickety merry-go-round.

I scratched the record.

The needle hit a rut in the mud of Boohoo, a rainy town of sickly children staring out of windows.

I could not play, stuck inside, not for the rain but the ache that chilled my limbs into flames.

Sister took my temperature with a popsicle stick, rationed my cherry-flavored Lifesaver pills, read my palm, and pronounced Crab Orchard Review ◆ 195

Cathy Song

a speedy recovery.

Her walkie-talkie crackled news.

Over and out and she was gone.

A game of marbles, a bike ride down the lane sent her into the world of playmates and jungle warfare.

The rat-tat-tat! of hand-to-hand combat disturbed my rest.

I heard beetles fleeing out of the leaves, out of nests they scuttled, running blind.

4.

I’m afraid I have to tell you . . .

I’m afraid I have bad news.

How did the doctor put it to the young couple he had counseled through colic, chicken pox, and errant nosebleeds?

He was just a mild-mannered country doctor used to the common cold.

The sniffles that blew into his office were not the result of tears.

Halfway around the world it seemed the drive along winding gullies to the clinic in the city, a stop at Scottie’s for a milkshake, some fries, Father lifting me—stiff-jointed, tender lymph node swollen like a berry— from the backseat of the car.

5.

Across the street from the clinic there was a park.

In the center of the park there was a fountain.

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Cathy Song

I did not see the water shooting into the air that day, the water lifting like someone showering the dusty trees with a hose.

On the other side of the fountain, through the water and the leaves, there was a museum, as grand as any Father had seen in Brussels.

Had we been any other family on an outing that day, we could have entered the museum, our footsteps hushed as though we were entering a cathedral.

6.

Mother served another meal I could not eat: roast beef, mashed potatoes, frozen peas.

She did not say “Put some meat on your bones.”

She did not say anything.

I could not reach for the fork.

I could not eat, and feared she did not expect me to, stuck in a body that was failing me, ticking ticking loudly like Mother’s kitchen timer or Sister’s metronome, making us all jumpy.

In the mud of Boohoo, there was a church and a steeple and if you opened your hands you could see all the good people.

Somewhere along the equator far from that town, there was the marrow, a place I imagined buried deep inside me where birds no longer came to drink at the fountain.

7.

Father on his knees acted as a man who had already surrendered.

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Cathy Song

On a trip back from the city, one he thought would be our last, he stopped at Sears Roebuck and carried me from the car.

Sleigh ride songs and the chilly blast of air conditioning piped cold as intravenous through my veins.

I looked up at the multitude— shelves of dolls floating toward the ceiling.

No coarse braids held them down like heavy rope.

No cowhide shoes to get stuck in the mud.

Father kneeled beside me.

His hands held a voice, wingless and trapped.

“You can have whichever one you want.”

The dolls shimmered in cellophane, glistened in their dresses of ice.

I looked at him, confused.

Christmas was a month away.

If I chose to go with an angel, then I would be one too.

Outside, far from the cold air, rain washed the dust from the trees.

I shook my head and refused.

The birds were flying home.

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James Tate

The Nimbus

Tina wouldn’t go to the horse races with me, because she has an inflamed swelling of the small sac on the first joint of her big toe, commonly known as a bunion. Tina doesn’t like the word bunion, so we have to work our way around that.

Last week, Tina refused to go see the visiting Tibetan dancers, because of the recent death of her finch. It was a pretty bird, but she had only had it one week, and I suspect that she failed to ever give it water. We’ve always gone to the Annual Insect Show at the Hitchcock Center, but this year she said no, the memory of the man eating a fried cockroach on a sesame cracker was more than she could take. She developed a sudden case of pink eye before the Civil War re-enactment.

I finally dragged her to the Shaker Farm tour, but she fainted at the sight of the giant oxen.

And why she threw up at the Teddy Bear Rally, even she could not explain. Tina’s so intense.

Sometimes I think I see a nimbus of radiant light about her head. “I’m cold,” she says. “I feel a draft pouring in from the arctic. Let’s move there and get it over. I’ll take my Chinese puzzle and nothing else.” That’s when I know the fever’s got its grip on her. “Yes,” I say, “let’s move there and get it over.” There are moments of great peace sailing out to retrieve the sunken goods.

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James Tate

For the Love of Veronica

I bought one of Yoni’s paintings and hung it above my desk. It was a painting of a nude woman putting a bouquet of irises into a vase. Her expression is that rare mixture of innocence and wanton desire. I’ve found myself staring at the painting for hours on end, my work all but forgotten.

Her raven hair half-covers her breasts. Walking downtown, I’m always searching. There’s a good chance she lives here, or near abouts. She seems to notice me, even as she concentrates on the flowers.

I’m her lover, I’m why she is naked. The light from the window encourages us to abandon all else, all but our passion. In the months that followed, Veronica, for this is what I called her, grew increasingly distant from me. There was even a trace of disdain in her look. I tried to imagine what I had done to offend her. Perhaps I had been too forward too quickly. I could barely stand to look at her withering glance now. I was a lonely, old goat in my own house. I called Yoni to come get the painting. “Keep the money,” I said.

“You don’t like the painting?” he said. “I fell in love with her, but I’m afraid it wasn’t mutual,” I said. “She turned on me, too,” he said. “I was glad when you took her off my hands. I hadn’t been able to paint in months. And I thought I had created the perfect dream woman. I’m going to take her for a long drive, and only one of us is coming back.”

“I hope it’s you, Yoni,” I said. “I mean it.” I know I should have volunteered to go along, but I was way behind on my work, and besides, I didn’t want to ride in the same car with Veronica.

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James Tate

The Fragrant Cloud

I woke in a spacious room with lavender wallpaper and brocaded, antique drapes. There were clothes laid out for me on a fainting couch. They fit as if they had been tailored for me. As I descended the staircase, I had no idea what to expect. A maid showed me to the breakfast room and brought me coffee and biscuits. I stared out the window at the gardens.

After a while, a man entered the room and asked me if I had everything I needed. “Oh yes,” I said, “everything is lovely.” “Do you have any questions?” he asked me. “No,” I said.

“Later, Gwen and I will show you around the grounds,” he said. “I look forward to that,” I said. Then he left me there alone. Gwendolyn.

It’s strange how one knows nothing, and, yet, knows more than one wants to know. I knew that I would fall in love with Gwendolyn. I knew that there would be a duel. I knew that this graceful mansion would burn to the ground. I sat there waiting, incredibly lonesome with my awful knowledge.

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Judith Taylor

Legacy

Walking, or should I say wobbling, down Fifth, my aunt leans on a tri-wheeled contraption that veers to the left while globs of teens scatter, and I hobble alongside with my sprained/strained/ weak ankle. We’re quite a pair, I see, by the stares of the kids, the turnings-away-of-the-head of polite matrons. My mother’s knees were starting to go, too, before she died. We’re kind of flat footed. Our gait passed down from the house in the Ukraine, the piano, the French lessons, the five proud daughters and the playboy father.

And before these stories? (True? Half true?)

A whole family’s past is whited-out. But that walk’s been there for centuries, gimpy gals in every generation. I’m trying to walk differently.

When young, you think you’re so rare, so original, squinting out beyond the grown-up photographer into the distance of your own sweet future.

Parents are young, slim, keen (oh, how beautiful they are!), no one believes in the knees or diabetes, no one yet dreams of the cancer. They’re left back in Minsk or Warsaw, with the rest of the missing.

Good-bye to the shtetl or dacha, good-bye to thick black boots, gleaming proud piano.

Good-bye to dead babies, lost fathers, sisters

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who die young. Good-bye poverty, good-bye Anti-Semites, farewell pogroms. Wave good-bye, too, to the lump on the old auntie’s breast, just forget all of it when you depart for the Brand New World.

My sister says we met my father’s father once.

Legend has it he peddled fruit on Delancey Street.

My father never talked about the past. My aunt and I, a little unsteady island of connectedness, totter to the Met. Finally, what heritage comes down to: knees, feet.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 203

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Magnificat

In the pulpit, in the swirling dust after the saints have sung “Sweeping through the City” and the front pew’s children danced, stomping towards the altar their cadenced hoe-down, holiest of double-dutch Pentecostal, pastor opens his mouth.

How quietly Mary’s speech falls past the neat square patch of hair beneath his lips, he that is mighty has done to me great things, and holy is his name. His belly pushes against the buttons of his three-piece suit’s black vest and I almost would believe in the quiet hum of “Come to Jesus,” of every saint’s sweet supplication. How many times will a girl hush the hop-skipped rhythm of pulse, lie back in sacrifice, take in salvation that she can’t hold. Pastor opens like gardenia blossom every Sunday, so meekly. He has come this far by faith. Girl-child, I lean into this offering, get my lesson. I will make flesh word.

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Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Hum

Sometimes the hum and pull keeps me awake all night: a low current, some faint desire— I’ll write it down. I’ll see what I can make.

The next day catches me chasing the wake of some stranger, his soapy smell, this wire of want drawn taut. The pull keeps me awake and searching. But to love is a mistake, to fall for what means only to inspire, to start the dance and see what I can make— I’d fall in love with every man who spoke, if not careful, of blackberries, of fire, of turning leaves, or being kept awake by what he couldn’t name. The claim to stake is naming. I’ll change dumb awe for this dire risk: writing, God-like, see what I can make of longing; wring insomnia to slake need’s lime-dry substance. Take what I require.

Sometimes the hum and pull keeps me awake all night. All night, I’ll see what I can make.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 205

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Bop: A Whistling Woman

Mama couldn’t break me of whistling like a boy the way she stopped me hollering across streets at boys I knew. Let them recognize you.

Young ladies don’t raise their voices.

She knew—or thought she knew— somewhere inside her, I would not end well.

A whistling woman and a crowing hen always come to no good end.

Let some boy use you if you want!

Her imperatives ran together. She glared, tight-lipped at the threat of my summer days spent less tight-legged, her fear, so ardent, of one wrong wind, vibrating high-pitched, passing between my lips.

A whistling woman and a crowing hen always come to no good end.

This morning, train and tea-kettle catch the devil, fifteen finches outside my kitchen window— whose lessons do I choose?

Seven years without a slip beneath my skirts. I’ll flirt with destruction, shame my kin.

A whistling woman and a crowing hen always come to no good end.

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Tony Whedon

White Cirrus

Here’s to the basket-weavers, the cider-makers, the gypsy kitchen-tunkers, the grease-stained camp chefs and horse harriers; to the long silence of a pond scummed with the blood-history of the dead drifting through fireweed and mallow—to call up their names, to see in this tarnished light what the dead still resemble; here’s to those camped below windswept ridges through spring floods and the rare tornado, rain pounding the tin roofed deep-woods squatter shacks; to the midwives and undertakers in snowbound sleighs, or snug in their salt-boxes, burying their imperfect and lonely dead, some drunk or heartbroke sober— to them I raise my cup and look out at what’s left of a sky thick with road dust, no rain but heat-lightning, the start-up of owls, white of high cirrus back-lit by an old intimacy.

I’ve spent a quarter century watching how dew flattens the grass and is accompanied by moonlight: what I’ve not understood is why the dead will not rise to meet me, that this rag box I drag around will betray me any chance it gets.

It’s not easy to see tonight—but clouds won’t spoil my view of our little valley. A road winds through all this, pebbles gleaming.

Everything’s empty—a star train uncoupling, and rolling fearlessly through heaven.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 207

Tony Whedon

Elegy for Europe for Adam Zagajewski Look how light streaks the canal—like lines of verse, like words gone empty and pure into thin air: tow path, arched bridge, a waterside town soaked in murky sepias.

Some still-lifes at the little museum of flowers and fruit make a rainy afternoon bearable; how to praise the charm of pink blooms in a pewter vase, a few petals fallen on an oak table, and more light falling here in sweet reasonable Holland where an immaculate old man sets his watch to the express train hurrying past the cafe: he and his cognac-sipping wife of sixty years go through the faint gestures of remembering and forgetting. Oh, bring back a moment when the music enters a third-class carriage of a train arriving in a village whose main affair is to ship mushrooms, tulips, and working girls on the Night Express to Brussels.

A frosty morning. Steam gushes around the great wheels that cart the dead in their coffins: the train plugs along. Lindens and willows are draped in mist by a sleepy river— the low-country sky’s the paleness of worn leather. An occasional barn, a muddy yard with fluttering hens, slips by.

Orchards and hedgerows, cows wading in black ponds, hayricks, millraces, and symphonies of geese, unwritten concertos of late-summer cloud, sweep furiously past.

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Tony Whedon

lulled by rumors the war is over— which war is uncertain, but say it’s the middle of the last century and the train carries the bodies to a final destination: what the dead wouldn’t give to hear a snatch of Chopin sweet and clear, the notes held to sustain the moment, music composed with wine-stained hands, an étude rare even for the living, hear it rise through smoke and sputtering ash, free at last of salon and concert hall, and regard the eyes of the dead as the train sighs into a station: crates of iced Danish mackerel, blocks of limburger; curly kale, bleeding sugar beets and clustered leeks and radishes—the whole teeming larder of Europe shunted onto palettes and wheeled from the station; then a wild chugging and farting, an elegiac whistle, and then silence while the flags are folded, apologies are made to delegations of wives, husbands, lovers and children who’ve come expecting some fanfare. The dead travel by lorries to a field where once the gypsy-poor made their own mad music.

The coffins are unloaded, the stout Belgian ponies don’t pull at their reins: how quiet it is here among the larch and birches.

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The Summer I Thought the World Was Going to End (1959) for Maisie I lay painstakingly awake, my skin A suit of stiff, Sunday clothes, my breath A soft whistle, my heart a frail tocsin.

Quiet as the June night, I waitedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Eleven years old, unkissed at bedtime By my mother and her mingled odor of Kools, Lilac cologne, and cherry Lifesavers.

I could sleep without the attendances of love.

I felt the blast first in my eyes: sudden darkness Giving way to orange and yellow rays That were lances of anti-light, that shattered The conscious frame and perspective Of vision and left me not so much blind As trying to focus what I no longer possessed On a world that no longer was there.

My bones throbbed and jigged, my flesh bubbled And flaked, then oozed a thick, purple serum.

Then I was a leaf driven through the sky On a jet-like wind, so lost, so empty Of any daily, cajoling identity.

I could feel the seconds like drops on my forehead.

I knew what was coming and I knew every moment Was a door that could suddenly open And I would fall forever, not like Icarus Into the ocean but into something much deeper than death.

I trembled though it was almost sultry out And rose to go to the bathroom to get a drink of water.

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Over the darkened street. Mr. Stefano Had watered his melons, Mrs. Bolus had walked Her basset hound, Miranda. One of the Beasley kids Two houses down was bawling, a thin, unsteady Wail, tired anger.

Harmon Street could vanish easily.

Atoms could do anything. I had learned that in school.

I read between the lines and between the voices Because I knew how adults love to trick children, How they think it’s in the best interests Of children to be lied to about anything important.

The prior year, when I was ten, I used to get angry about it but I was past that.

I saw the pity of it, how adults couldn’t help themselves, How they were as weak as we were.

I got back in bed. The sheets were sticky and close, A hug I didn’t want. The face of the clock On my bureau glowed with what had to be radium.

I took a deep, resolute breath, then I sighed Like an old man who has lived too long and heard too much.

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“You Have Given This Boy Life”

When I have kids, friends tell me, it’ll get worse, this intermittent death thing of mine (priest to his parents at Jimmy Passaro’s baptism: “You have given this boy life, but you have also given him death”).

For now, it comes and goes predictably with the other rites of passage. My wedding, Jesus: ghosts everywhere, but that was years back. Now at hand (along with middle age) is tenure and promotion at my great and eternal Midwestern land-grant university, Ohio State.

Glum, glum, congratulations, Bill. Grim, grim, the march is on, I’m going to die.

This past fall behind our rented house here in Columbus (“Poor, gray Columbus,” young Robert Lowell mourned in a letter home), the leaves fell and revealed neighbors’ yards and also a large parking lot that happily I mistook when it was wet for a black pond. Often it was wet this winter, often the lot was water, only a rare police car, idling, to kill the illusion. Empty, empty.

But suddenly, the lot would be full for a few odd days, then empty again for several more, then—around Christmas—full for weeks, then empty and full sporadically till now here in March, nearly spring. One influx would be rich: Mercedeses, Jaguars, Cadillacs. The next a different class altogether: pickups, muffler draggers, rusty old American sedans, low to the ground, shocks dead. The next, family values: minivans, “sport utility” vehicles, Volvo wagons. Always there was a thread of some kind in the grouping of autos. A puzzle, that lot, the kind of thing I notice while playing absent blues runs on the piano and looking out the window, rainy morning.

I didn’t figure it out till I saw the hearse one day: the O. O. Olson funeral home out on High Street. What must Olson’s full name be? Oscar Oliver? Anyway, his initials are O.O.O. His monogrammed towels, his ring, imagine: oOo. For five years or more after in dreams, I saw the young man’s Nike Air sneakers, and the puddle he lay in, and the dark square of 212 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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sky at the top of the air shaft. The dreams focus on his chest somehow, his perfect chest exposed so fast by the ALS guys, his bright brown skin, his beauty, his youthful belly, the band of his boxers, his one moan as the medics sought his wounds, which were many, and not only from the fall. The dream is static, no movement, a vision really—dying boy, odiferous air shaft, cops, a certain hovering viewpoint—fixed, everlasting.

At a dinner party in Soho, lower Manhattan, I got seated at the very end of a long table next to Larry Vignoble, the mysterious new boyfriend of an actress I knew back then. Across the table perched an intent woman I didn’t know at all. The guy to my left was enormous and sat with his back turned, effectively isolating me from the rest of the party. Beside the intent woman was a nervous young actor with a long chin and judgmental eyes. He stared down at the head of the table hoping he was finally in the presence of his big break (and maybe he was).

As we ate the salad thrust over our shoulders by catering staff, the woman and Larry Vignoble and I began to chat, even grew voluble, and it seemed less to matter that the famous people I’d come hoping to meet were far up the line of faces by the host, talking, clinking, laughing hard. My interlocutors and I got past the weird weather of that season and dismissed the Mets and Yankees easily, then the lady told us what she did: public relations. What do you do? she asked me. I saw that she hoped I was famous, or at least important. I didn’t want to talk about what I did because what I did in those days amounted to nothing in most people’s eyes. I tried to put a good face on it, said I was a contractor, said I was a writer.

Trying to be a writer, was the exact phrase.

The big man next to me turned at that, smiled indulgently. “You’ll get there,” he said. Then quite subtly and charmingly he turned the talk at our end of the table to his scriptwriting successes. People several seats down began to listen. He was hilarious and quick and likeable and had big names rolling from his lips: Dusty, Meryl, Madonna. He included me with winks and pats on the hand. He graciously declined to talk about money when someone asked, and—just when the time was right, just when you felt he was dominating the talk—he handed the baton to Larry Vignoble: And what about you?

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had fallen silent, regarded him benignly. He shrugged and said, “I work in Jersey.” Still the expectant silence. “For a small company,” he said.

“What company?” said the PR lady, with the air of a person who knows all companies large and small.

“What sort of work?” said the scriptwriter.

Larry gave a sad smile, sighed, said, “I am a funeral director.”

The answers to two or three questions from the scriptwriter made it clear: a funeral director is an undertaker, a mortician, an embalmer, haberdasher to the deceased, make-up on dead skin, barrels of loose body parts, ghosts, death, doom, horror, despair.

Deep pause.

The scriptwriter said, “Well.”

We turned to the nervous, good-looking fellow, who smiled painfully and started to talk about the class he was taking with Uta Hagen at the Actor’s Studio.

But quickly some uproar at the host’s end got the scriptwriter shouting wittily, the PR lady laughing. Both of them turned to the length of the table, silencing the young actor, cutting the mortician and me off entirely from everyone but one another.

I turned to Larry, said, “All right,” meaning that his work interested me. We drank sips of wine.

He said, “It’s a job,” understanding what I’d meant.

I asked how he’d learned his trade. I mean, how did someone learn that stuff?

He said that, okay, a lot of morticians grew up in a family trade.

But some didn’t. He hadn’t. “Christ, my dad’s an engineer at WABC radio.” He eyed me suspiciously, trying to know whether my interest was real. He seemed to see it was, seemed to trust me not to make any jokes. He let it out: he’d gone to the Cincinnati College of Mortuary. I said I knew at dental schools they practiced on plaster heads and porcelain teeth, hoping to lead him along.

He said at mortuary school they practiced on dummies, first.

Then cadavers. Then actual newlydeads (he said) whose families got the benefit of a budget funeral. But the general public doesn’t think past the dead-body stuff. Part of the curriculum at school, for example, was a psychology course about grief. And you took business courses: bookkeeping, marketing, advertising. You took medical courses: anatomy, communicable diseases, embalming.

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he did except to accuse the trade of deception, chicanery, dishonesty.

This brought the blood to his cheeks. He sipped wine, looked uptable at his girlfriend by the host. At length he said that somehow he’d been drawn to funeral practices from high school. Did all his papers on subjects of death: Amish burial practices, say, or treatment of the dead in Homer’s Iliad. Couldn’t say why. Something about the quiet dignity of the enterprise, its plain necessity. Also, he’d been curious. Drawn to the dead.

After mortician school he’d lucked out and gotten this job in Jersey right away. Super benefits. Fair pay. And there were quite a few weeks in the year with no work, since people tend to die in bunches. Stedler Funeral Home averaged 70 funerals a year, most in the winter, a lot toward the end of summer, not many in the spring or fall.

I found a roundabout way to ask if he’d thought he’d gotten inured to death. He said, “No way. In fact, it’s really scary. You just can’t believe all the ways there are to die.”

My dad took us five Roorbach kids to Jones Beach on Long Island, New York, once or twice a summer to get our early sixties sunburns and to get smashed up in the real surf and to have a day of it, a long ride from Connecticut. In the car we all called first shower (you sang it loud: I call first shower) and felt itchy with the salt and roasted by the sun, burned to a crisp. I see even now the traffic jams there, and then a particular jam, the cars just stopped in thick air.

Ahead you could see police lights, hear the sirens coming.

“Accident,” Pop said sighing.

Then our lane began to move, bumps and starts, bringing us closer to the flashing lights, the trouble. On a bridge over an inlet the road was mostly blocked with police cars and fire engines, men milling about, an ambulance, a guy out of uniform directing traffic through the breakdown lane one car at a time. Down in the marsh reeds four cops leaned dolefully, their heads almost touching, looking at something. Pop moved a slow carlength ahead, and I saw the heart of things: a motorcycle seriously mangled, partly hanging off the bridge. On the sidewalk a teenaged girl in a bikini lay on her back with her head crushed badly and the cops and two doctors (yes, doctors then, straight to the tragedy, no EMTs or ALS in between) busy around her.

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idled. We’d been halted by the plainclothesman’s hand; the ambulance was maneuvering. What else could we do? The girl’s lips moved like talking, but she was not talking. She put a hand to her face, let the hand drop, felt the pavement beside her. Then she died. You saw the life leave her, somehow. You saw how it couldn’t stay. I knew what I had seen. The doctors saw it to, looked at each other, looked sick, really, looked at one another helplessly, stopped their ministrations in the hot white sunlight. One of the cops brought a blanket.

I looked till suddenly the plainclothesman waved and Pop hit the gas and we were free. He said, “That was awful to see.” And he said something grim about motorcycles. He also used the word rubberneckers with some disgust, and defined it for us: people who slow down to look at these things, people who clearly weren’t us.

Pretty soon, being kids, we were nuts again and calling first showers and saying how we would kill each other. Pop was quiet, quiet the whole ride home. But later, when I couldn’t sleep from the sunburn, I just lay there in my bed thinking about that girl. That older kid in her bikini. Dying and then dead. When a minute before she’d just been riding along behind her boyfriend, maybe laughing, holding his flat stomach. The whole thing had a kind of plainness to it: if your head got crushed, you died, just like anything that got its head crushed, just like anything, a squirrel or an ant or a dog.

I kept calling Larry Vignoble because I wanted to do a story on his work. I wanted to do a story on his work because I was morbidly interested in his work. I mean, it was morbid work, and that was exactly why I’d got so interested. I called him a couple of times, trying to interest him in my interest, in the supposed interest my readers would have, that some important magazine would have. But I’d had something of a breakthrough: for the first time I was more interested in my subject than in venal and unwriterly ambition. I wanted to see the whole death operation, from pickup to burial. I wanted to see an embalming. I wanted a tour of the morgue.

“No way,” Larry said. “I’ve got to protect people’s privacy. That’s the main part of my work.”

“They’re dead,” I said. “What privacy?”

“The families aren’t dead,” he said. “Think about it. Your wife, say.”

“I’m not married,” I said, though in two months I would be and actually could see his point.

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“Then think about your mother there,” he said. “You want everybody looking at your mother dead and naked and all fucked up?”

On Martha’s Vineyard I went to nude beaches with my friends and got sunburned like a little kid. I’d lie in the sand with my naked white butt in the air and cook it so badly you’d think I had red underpants on. And we friends would swim and nap away hangovers and flirt politely with naked young women and turn hand-springs into the surf and yell with laughter and with being alive and having nothing better to do but feel the sand and be with young women and not think of the future (except maybe the coming sundown, or even as far ahead as fall).

The best beach was Zack’s at that time, up-island below the cliffs on Gay Head. At Zack’s there were few older folks and few folks in any case and a guy who flew in from Boston in his private helicopter and a Korean woman with a surfboard and a muscular black man who juggled and a pair of white sisters who sat lotus back to back. The cliffs were made of clay in many colors and every day naked people bathed in the clay and walked the beach covered in it, prehistoric souls. Some were tourists, some were islanders, some were like us: young and willing to be poor and to take sporadic work—just enough work so we could manage a whole summer goofing off.

We went to Lucy Vincent Beach too, which is the town beach of Chilmark. To get on that strand you needed to know someone from Chilmark, or hitchhike in with a stickered car. There were other scams, too: phony leases, altered passes, friends at inns, even counterfeit car stickers. We were alive. And each summer we’d find the way to get on that beach. At Lucy Vincent you’d walk a half mile down the sand to get to the clothes-optional area, a few hundred yards of exquisite sand and dunes and real surf and rocks.

There we sat amidst families: kids trying handstands, coolers and sandwiches, volleyball, sand castles. Rich families. Mercedeses and Volvos in the small parking lot, move star sightings, attorneys general, surgeons, successful artists: everyone naked. We met psychiatrists and architects and writers for the New York Times; we met professors and construction bosses and the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut. We met their daughters, too, and liked them or loved them.

And one day a corpulent old guy was playing in the surf, really having a blast, yelling with laughter like a hatchling, kicking the waves, watching the young women, holding his arms out wide to Crab Orchard Review ◆ 217

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accept the horizon, swimming, floating, body surfing, inspecting shells, diving. Displacing more water than most men, he dove and romped in the sea, then trotted pinkly up the beach. We noticed him and his happiness, his big, important nakedness. His vacation must just have started. Late in the day he stood up to his waist in the water and gazed out at the great Atlantic. When a big wave broke, he let out a yell and dove under it, then surfaced and stood and watched the sea, and shouted and dove, and stood and watched, dripping, grinning. Then he fell. I saw him fall; quite a different gesture from the dives. He dropped face-first into the water and did not get up. Too slowly I got myself up off my towel and ran down to the water and, with several naked souls who had also seen him collapse, dragged him up out of the foam and onto wet sand. He was not alive. I knew this from experience of the living; something we apprehend in the air around one another was missing, something the presence of which is only confirmed when gone, maybe electrical impulses, maybe something more holy, I don’t know. Or maybe it was nothing, just emotion, the romance I attached to all experience at that age.

On the beach were three doctors in three separate family groups, and the three, two women and a man, rushed to the fat burgher and went to work. One, prepared for anything and not afraid of lawyers, even had his black bag along. All were naked: extinct patient, three doctors, those who would help them, those who could only watch— all the rest of us. A man known for his determined jogging put a towel around his waist and ran off, a mile plus to tell the gate guard to call the police.

On the beach one of the doctors had taken charge and CPR was in progress, but not simple CPR: some kind of doctor’s CPR, one naked man puffing breaths into another’s gaping mouth, one naked woman lifting the patient’s naked legs high in the air, one naked observer pumping the man’s dead chest, the last naked doctor injecting adrenaline, saying calm instructions. How fat the dead man was. How dead he was. How dedicated the doctors were despite this.

At length, the Chilmark Police Bronco arrived, and two dressed people—police officers—helped lift the great man onto a stretcher, and, never flagging with the CPR, two of the doctors climbed naked into the back of the Bronco, continuing their hopeless work. They all drove away and the beach was itself again: the tide rising to cover the small marks the man’s plight had made in the sand; the children 218 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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returning to their games; the adults turning inward; the young adults—my friends, me—turning to excited and respectful analysis of the event we’d witnessed.

The police came back to get an I.D., but no one knew the guy. We knew he’d been sitting approximately there, somewhere over there. The cops waited and as people left the beach in the lateness of the afternoon a little pile of clothing gained prominence, and there in some white shorts was a wallet, and the dead man had a name.

We friends agreed over many beers that night that the whole thing was pretty lovely: the guy came into the world naked and wet and alone, and he left it so, and left it happy, with maybe only one last blast of fear. Lovely, idyllic, we said. But we were young.

Larry Vignoble wouldn’t talk to me anymore. I’d been calling him once a week, trying different stratagems. I wanted access to that embalming room. He’d become suspicious. But this wasn’t sick.

I wanted to see if I could figure out what the body means without a soul (if that’s what is missing, finally), or see what the body doesn’t mean. I was about to get married and I was suddenly thirty-six years old and for the first time I really knew something: living doesn’t last. I wanted to look this death thing straight in the face. I wanted to see Larry sewing lips shut or repairing the damage to a face from a fall. From this I was sure I would learn something important, something that would extend my understanding of life and of being alive and ease my new worries about the speed of time.

I went to the New York City Library and took out old books: Death Customs, by E. Bendann, written in 1930: “The Vedic Hindu when cremating their dead cried out ‘Away, go away, O Death!’” and “It is a custom of the Fiji Islands to break down the side of the house to carry out a dead body, although the door is wide enough . . .” and “In Savo, the bodies of commoners are thrown into the sea. . . .” I got out On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (she of the famous five stages of grief), thought with her prompting about how strictly death these days has been quarantined, denied, made invisible. We don’t get to see it much, not the way our grandparents did, or mine, anyway, born at the end of the nineteenth century, Victorian times, when six of ten infants didn’t make it to adulthood. And people conceived ten children in those days because they were aware of those kinds of odds. My mother’s mother watched several siblings die. My mother, one of eight kids, saw her little brother Bobby die Crab Orchard Review ◆ 219

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of polio at five. My own four siblings and I have all made it to adulthood, all five of us, unscathed. What with modern medicine and pasteurized foods we didn’t have to think about dying at all.

Death was not in our house. You could forget about death.

I read and I read more, twenty books with Death in their titles.

I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Comfort? A reprieve?

What on earth good was reading going to do?

I read The American Way of Death, by Jessica Mitford, and suddenly understood Larry Vignoble’s defensiveness. It’s she who exposed abusive practices—the switching of coffins, impossible promises, the preying on bereavement—back in the fifties. All of which led to laws, regulations, associations of ethical practitioners, but also to a lasting negative impression of the undertaking trade, which didn’t exactly need bad press to begin with. If you were in funerary service (as Larry called it), you didn’t want a reporter in there even if you never did anything wrong, because no matter what you did your work was death and you were an emblem of death and would always be unwelcome, unclean, a ghoul with formaldehyde faintly on your breath, your fingers stained. I called Larry and mentioned the Mitford book.

He freaked. He’d read it, all right. All the funeral directors I talked to in those months had, some of them five times. Mention Jessica Mitford to a funeral director if you want to get below that famous layer of reserve.

I read Martin Buber on death, Dostoyevski, Heidegger. I asked friends for theories and experiences till they told me to shut up. I talked to peaceful old people, those who were resigned, but if you didn’t believe much in the Judeo-Christian God what they said was useless. I comforted myself with what a biology professor had told us in college: that people are matter, that matter can’t be destroyed, that every molecule goes back into the soil or into the air or out into the infinite Universe and gets re-used somewhere and soon. Even as the callow freshman I was, I saw this recycling as reincarnation, and believed. It’s comforting: you will come back as everything, always, and you were always everything before. Death is a matter of thermodynamics: all matter seeks randomness. Life is only a temporary bid against entropy, which is death.

I was thirty-five and for the first time I couldn’t throw a baseball more than twice from the outfield without pain, couldn’t run indefinitely or even reliably, couldn’t drink hard without paying dearly, couldn’t miss sleep gracefully. The change was pronounced and sudden. In the ten years that have disappeared since then I’ve gotten used to this new, 220 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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more frail (if larger) body. I’m in a less athletic phase, that’s all. Life comes in stages. Or should I say that other word?

In my twenties in Greenwich Village I went to bars nightly.

Preacher’s was in a basement on Bleecker Street, and there a man called Preacher, a former priest, provided live music and sold drinks to the living (he had a photo of himself in vestments next to the cash register, and under that a message for the bartenders: Thou Shalt Not Steal). He was fair to the musicians and calm and didn’t judge anybody at all.

One spring night I went there to see a friend perform, a lady with a big voice and big good looks and a lot of showy, hilarious personality. She wore a shiny silver shirt that showed her navel. She wore a skirt and under the skirt silver underpants you saw repeatedly.

She sang Aretha Franklin songs and Bonnie Raitt songs and gospel stuff, and she was hot.

In her break she sat with us at our table and we barked and roared with laughter and told her how her singing knocked us out. We felt good being her friends, joked all the louder for being noticed with her, admired her as she fielded compliments from a virtual receiving line of strangers, the Preacher’s other customers, scores of them, red faced, sweaty from dancing, relieved for the moment of unhappiness.

A little fellow walked up, nicely glazed, and over the loud jukebox yelled how wonderful our friend was, how wonderful and how beautiful, and in her joy at possessing these talents Shermaze (I will call her Shermaze) leapt up and began to dance in place, shaking her ample, vital body under her tight silver bodice, and we laughed and the little man laughed and danced and you knew he hadn’t had a woman smile at him in a very long time. He grew more excited, and more red in the face, shouted “Hey!” and danced, and Shermaze (not making fun, and not afraid to be a fool, and not afraid he’d misunderstand), Shermaze shouted back and danced harder, looking into his eyes, shouting “Honey!”

The man fell across the table, never losing the big smile, fell directly on our table. Quickly the ambulances came and the EMS guys and ALS, but by now you know the theme of this little catalogue of mine and have guessed: our man was dead. Poor Shermaze; she blames herself still.

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liked me particularly in this regard because I was working in the building trades and always had terrible cuts on my hands and was willing to show her. She’d say, “Can I see?” And I’d peel off the bandage. She’d study the cut or bruise or blister steadfastly—this tiny little girl—study this evidence of my fragility until she’d had enough and went to get me a fresh bandage.

People gather around. In primitive cultures without shame, in the more repressed (our own, right now, though TV changes this), furtively. People gather to see. They gather to learn something.

Rubbernecking is a tool of survival. You look a long time so you can learn: What was the exact error here?

I sold my death story idea to 7 Days, a big, beautiful weekly magazine in New York. The editor came up with a structure for me: a Day in the Life of Death. I did the preliminary work with real excitement. I was going to be a writer if it killed me. Poor Larry Vignoble, harassed by me past all sympathy, wouldn’t take my calls.

But I had to have a funeral home. I called all the mortuaries in New York City, trying to line people up. Everyone I talked to was suspicious. No funeral director would talk to me, much less show me anything, even though I told them I wasn’t Jessica Mitford. They knew that name, all right, banged phones down when I intoned it.

In desperation I posed as the nephew of a dying society matron, got to see the most expensive coffins in New York City ($175,000), purported guiltily to ask questions as my aunt’s advisor: How long would her remains last? (No guarantees.) Was a woman embalmer available? (But of course.) Would they have to cut her favorite dress to get it on her? (Possibly, though rigor slackens as the days after death pass.) Would they have to sew her lips shut? The funeral director was somber and all business, honest and straightforward as death itself. “No sewing,” he said. (I learned later that the modern trade uses Crazy Glue, and sweetheart, those lips stay shut.)

Finally, I found a convivial mortician in the Bronx who believed in openness. He even used the term Glastnost when we spoke. He’d show me whatever I wanted to see, tell me whatever I wanted to know.

In long interviews I heard about his childhood in the funeral business, his fear of AIDS, his stories of drugs smuggled in corpses. He told me the realities of racism even toward corpses, the industry attitude toward sex with cadavers (which with a wry grimace he called dead-sticking, and a sordid myth). For forty-five minutes he listed weird ways to die, one whole side of a tape: yeast infection of the blood, power drill through 222 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the head, space heater in the bathtub, tree limb in a wind storm, cue ball lodged in the esophagus, milking-machine masturbation, chunks of ice from building ledges, multitudinous adventures with alcohol, plenty more. He complained of sloppy autopsies, sinking grave sites, lazy shovel men. He showed me his whole operation, from pickup to cleansing, from haircut to hole in the ground.

I lined up a date with the New York City Morgue, scheduled a shift with the New York City Medical Service (called EMS), got permission to visit two emergency rooms. Everybody everywhere was suspicious. They’d all been jerked around by reporters before.

But they all wanted their pictures in the paper, their names in print, public confirmation of their lives.

My Day in the Life of Death turned out to be Good Friday. Also the thirteenth of April. Just a coincidence. I picked up a corpse at LaGuardia Airport at 6 a.m. with my Bronx pal, went on from there, straight through to midnight.

Code 100, or something like that. A kid has been thrown off the roof of a building on 141st Street. The cops are there already. They walk us (medics, supervisor, callow reporter) through a dripping archway into a basement-level airshaft courtyard and there the boy lies. He makes noises like humming, breathing hard. The EMTs work on him and intently I watch. The cops watch, too, make jocular conversation, loudly ask what the fuck I think I’m going to learn from standing around in piss and puke.

He’s an athletic kid, washboard stomach, muscled thighs, great biceps. This much you can see. You can’t see how smart or dumb he is or how well loved; you can’t see his kindness (if any), his crimes (if any), his girlfriend at home. He wears new Nike Air sneakers which the EMTs scissor off his feet. He lies in urine that is not his own. He hums. On my tape, you can actually hear his humming.

“Ah, crap, a knife wound,” one of the EMTs says suddenly. “Here too,” says another, and puts his clean finger deep in the slit, trying to tell how deep.

The ALS guys duck in—Advanced Life Support—and calmly they go to work.

This boy who couldn’t fly has been stabbed six times and thrown off a roof. He hums. I hear that humming now, even without the tape.

During a long ten minutes the medics get his neck immobilized and his blood-pressure pants in place and get him on a stretcher and Crab Orchard Review ◆ 223

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into an ambulance. On the way into Harlem Hospital he suddenly sits up, opens his blank eyes, rips the IV from his arm, rips the oxygen mask from his face. Then he falls back, dead. I am right there, crouching.

Away! Go away O Death!

I wrote the article, got it in on time; I forget which day in May, except that it was the same day 7 Days Magazine folded. I felt bereft, guilty, as if my story had killed the magazine somehow. And as if the magazine’s death might kill my supposedly budding career. But the story ended up elsewhere. New York Magazine, if you want to know. October 1990. No Problem. “A Day in the Life of Death.”

Five in the morning to midnight, Good Friday. The only real trouble I had was that the hospital wouldn’t verify the murdered boy’s death.

I don’t blame them. Death looks bad. But because I couldn’t verify, the fact checkers at New York wouldn’t let me say it.

But here I will: he died. That kid died. I knew it then and I know it now. And I see his lean form and hear his humming when I least wish to. And no matter how many times I dream that dream I don’t learn anything useful from him at all. Nothing. And nothing from the motorcycle crash or the fat man whose heart burst in spindrift or the little man who danced himself to death in the Preacher’s busy bar, nothing at all from the half year of study and reporting that came later. What was I doing, anyway? What did I think I’d learn, staring at death so hard, so shamelessly?

Death exacts awe, it’s true, and the awful demands a certain amount of looking away. Perhaps the looking away has something to do with the privacy Larry Vignoble kept talking about. And maybe such denial is a mistake, as Kubler-Ross says, a flaw of the modern Western character. But then again, isn’t denial a survival tactic in itself? Why live with fate as with some depressed and depressing lover when there are girls in bikinis walking by and boys with flat stomachs?

Today a funeral in the rain at O. O. Olson’s. I play the piano and look out the window. Before long here, the trees will bud and leaf and I won’t see it so clearly anymore. Anyway. Someone rich—the lot is full of Mercedeses parked in the rain on wet pavement as on the surface of some black pond.

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Cherkovski, Neeli. Whitman’s Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999. 325 pages (including 16 pages of photographs). $18.00.

Neeli Cherkovski, author of several volumes of poetry as well as biographies of Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was unknown to me until, a year or so ago, I chanced upon his Elegy for Bob Kaufman (Northville, Michigan: Sun Dog Press, 1996) while doing research for a course on the Beat Generation. Lately there has been growing interest in Kaufman, who, along with Ted Joans and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), was a significant African American participant in the beat project, and Cherkovski’s book-length poetic tribute is impressive and moving.

Kaufman, Bukowski, and Ferlinghetti are among the ten poets discussed in the first edition of Whitman’s Wild Children, published in 1988. The remaining seven are John Wieners, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsberg, William Everson, Gregory Corso, and Harold Norse. For this new edition, Neeli Cherkovski has added chapters on Michael McClure and Jack Micheline. But the book really could be said to contain portraits of fourteen poets, since the introduction focuses on Walt Whitman, who indeed is a presence throughout the text, as is Cherkovski himself, who knew all of the authors he writes about, some of whom he was quite close to. (I use the past tense here because, although only Kaufman was deceased when Cherkovski published his first edition of this book, since then, Bukowski, Everson, Ginsberg, Micheline, Broughton, and Corso have passed away.)

This is a deeply personal book, “a critical memoir” in which Cherkovski details his own relationship with the writers he has chosen to profile in addition to providing us with thoughtful and heartfelt assessments of their work. It is not an academic study— there isn’t a single footnote!—but it is intelligent, impassioned, informed and informing. The organizing theme, uniting an otherwise highly disparate group, portrays these authors as the “wild” creative progeny of Whitman, his “poets to come,” who would, like Whitman Crab Orchard Review ◆ 225

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himself, travel their own roads, give rein to “the free expression of emotion,” and bring the voice of prophecy to the people.

Cherkovski met Charles Bukowski when he was fifteen and Bukowski was forty-two, and the older writer’s role as an often brutal recorder of the commonplace and an assailer of those forces that feed our daily dread set an example that makes the placement of the Bukowski chapter as the first one in the book perfectly logical.

“Bukowski’s protest had the feel of the outsider who lived beyond all limits and ideologies,” Cherkovski writes. And this is a point that resonates throughout the book. These writers can’t be pigeonholed; they even defy the assumptions held by those sympathetic to their aesthetic enterprises. For instance, Cherkovski reports that, on being asked how he felt about being a third world poet, Bob Kaufman replied, “There is no third world. There are thousands of worlds. They all exist at the same time . . . I live in all those worlds. That’s where a poet lives.” On another occasion, Kaufman said, “I’m Black, Jewish, white, green, and yellow with a blue man inside me struggling to come out.”

Cherkovski not only provides us with worthwhile discussions of lesser-known poets like John Wieners and James Broughton, he also has interesting things to say about the better known ones, such as Allen Ginsberg—an outsider who also became the most famous American poet of the latter part of the twentieth century. “‘Howl’ is a poem of love,” Cherkovski writes, “not the love of popular romanticism preoccupying American culture, but one approaching Whitman’s fervent adhesion of man to man possible only through a sustained self-expression, one man, inviolable, cooperating with others in building a lasting commonwealth of feeling.” And considering the emphasis the Beats supposedly placed on “spontaneous” forms, it is instructive to learn that Gregory Corso told Cherkovski, “Revision is where you really find out how skillful you are.”

Books such as this guide one to discovery and rediscovery.

Cherkovski’s chapter on William Everson led me to an exploration of his work, which I had previously been only marginally familiar with through the beat period poems of Brother Antoninus, as Everson was formerly known. And his chapter on Philip Lamantia sent me back to this American surrealist, whose Selected Poems I had not looked at for years.

Anyone who is interested in the practice of poetry, its risks and rewards, will benefit from reading this book.

—Reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox 226 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Book Reviews

Revard, Carter. Winning the Dust Bowl. Sun Tracks, Vol. 47.

Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2001. 240 pages. $17.95.

Carter Revard is a consummate storyteller in both poetry and prose, which, intercut with family photo collections, he counterpoints in his mixed-genre autobiography, Winning the Dust Bowl. What’s more, Revard has a remarkable story to tell, growing up an Osage mixedblood on a reservation farm during the Depression and then leaving Oklahoma on a Rhodes Scholarship for a life in literature.

In this volume, Revard, recently retired after some four decades at Washington University, celebrates not separations but enduring connections that make the past present. We meet his family, a dashing bank robber uncle, the cousin who taught Revard to read, and the Ponca aunt who became a powwow princess at 80, among others.

Connections through story mark the finest contemporary American Indian writing, and Revard weaves a lifetime of cultural experiences, Indian and white, into the seamless fabric of his larger story. With wit and craft, he gives us an epigram on a fried skunk dinner in traditional alliterative verse and a villanelle on championship greyhound racing. If the volume’s first poem is an unrhymed sonnet, it is a sonnet about coyote and thunder, whose power pervades both the Native oral tradition and contemporary Native literature. With this poem, Revard tells us, he found his voice, our signal that his volume stands, at one level at least, as an explicitly literary autobiography in the EuroAmerican tradition, but when Revard uses this familiar metaphor, he means it literally. Like so much contemporary Native writing, Winning the Dust Bowl is grounded in orality. In a new twist, Revard improvises on the tradition of the contemporary poetry reading, in which one poem so often suggests the next and poets are privileged to tell the stories of their poems.

Readers will find as much pleasure following Revard through this thicket of narratives as he and his younger brother and sisters did trailing a shitepoke to the confluence of Buck Creek and Doe Creek, a shallow, crystalline stream they had never seen before.

Again and again the poems shimmer through the prose like light glancing off water, but there is no room for sentimentality here, in nature or in memory. Revard reminds us to be ever-alert to the current. If Doe Creek brought a water moccasin so close that the children could see the slits of its pupils, there are greater dangers in “Indian Country.” While, as Revard suggests in “Spirituality 101,” Crab Orchard Review ◆ 227

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there are confluences where traditional and modern, Native and European traditions flow naturally together, the trickster lesson of “Spirituality 102” is that Native spirituality may be too complex a subject for the English language. Still, Revard attends carefully to its complexities in poems where, half a century after his death, Uncle Gus appears in the dance circle at Cahokia, and a century and a half after Sand Creek, his cousins hear a Ponca song in the ruins of an abandoned fort—“one / that we still sing.” This, Revard asserts, is “Indian Survival,” giving us with his own words a new understanding of the power of song to bring into being.

—Reviewed by Linda Lizut Helstern

Dodd, Elizabeth. Archetypal Light. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000. 85 pages. $14.00.

In her second collection of poems, Archetypal Light, Elizabeth Dodd engages the contemporary landscapes of the American West by looking through them to their human and nonhuman pasts. Her wanderings from the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Northwest and points-in-between uncover distinctly personal visions of wild places and creatures always rooted in a long view of time. The greatest reward of rereading this book is the way it consistently reveals multiple layers of history in all the landscapes it cites, as in the long poem “The Route”: “At Big Two Medicine Lake, / almost a mile of Pleistocene ice / preceded Lewis, Clark, / these three mergansers pausing / in the turquoise cove.” The range of associations Dodd draws from her impressive powers of observation point to another consistent feature of Archetypal Light: natural history interwoven with human experience. Like her obvious predecessor Gary Snyder, Dodd not only knows her plants, animals, and geology, she knows what they’ve meant to people through the ages.

Often speaking in the voices of historical figures, she loads what could be mere taxonomy with practical and spiritual resonance. In “Into These Places,” an explorer of the West relates how water “ . . . is found only by following / old Indian or mountain sheep trails / or by watching the flight of birds . . .” In “The Door,” a Kansas woman coming to terms with the violence surrounding John Brown and her state’s settlement remembers:

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sunny days I’d bring the wash and find a flock of flycatchers perched on the line.

They’d lift off in a flash of sudden color, hover for a moment overhead, and I’d stand still enough I’d think God would reveal something, time or Providence resolve itself across the fields . . .

Sometimes, Dodd jumps from natural history into personal history, too, moving deftly between remembrance and present revelation. In the poem “Virginia Rail,” her description of a secretive wading bird turns on the dime of the bird’s name into a well-drawn memory of elementary school square-dancing, which ends with the speaker stating, “. . . I’m left // beside the salt marsh squinting, trying to see.”

In Archetypal Light, clear glimpses of a creature or a moment in the past are elusive and ephemeral when gained. Dodd seldom dwells on an image very long, formally reflecting her preoccupation with the flux of nature and time. In her many poems that deal with paintings, she confronts the difficulty of fixing the ever-changing lines and light of the physical world. The collection’s final poem, “The Blue of the Mussel Shell,” considers a painting by Andrew Wyeth and arrives at the questions that underlie all Dodd’s investigations of landscape: “What anchors / our attention, what / endures?”

Elizabeth Dodd leaves no doubt that the focal point of her attention is the interface between people and geography. What endures, she says, is “. . . memory articulated / into headland, stone, / volcanic ash and harder caprock, life / translated slowly into layers” (“At Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska,”). With a scope expansive as the vistas of the American West she eloquently admires, Dodd shows that poetry concerned with the intricacies of the natural world can also illuminate human experience in original and compelling ways.

—Reviewed by Douglas Haynes

Lee, David. News from Down to the Café: New Poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1999. 145 pages. $14.00.

David Lee, the current Poet Laureate of Utah, is a poet in the strictest historical sense. A Milton scholar and a recipient of many awards, Lee does not write with academic frill, though intellectual depth Crab Orchard Review ◆ 229

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is always present. He writes like the Elizabethan poet, the bard, recording the events of peoples’ lives. He remembers the lives of the dead for the living, in each telling a new legend, a new memory. People who have read David Lee’s book My Town have grown accustomed to the oral digressions and hyperbole of urban, or shall we say, rural legends. Lee is a modern-day romantic. He tells the tales of men and women much as Wordsworth proposed, in the language of the common man, for it is this aural quality, this oral-telling, that raises the common man to his own immortality.

However, in Lee’s new book, News from Down to the Café, he does something more. Loyal readers will enjoy updates to the legends of Reverend Strayham and Goose Landrum, but you need not have visited there to return. Reading Lee is always like a homecoming to a strangely familiar place. The beauty in his poetry, I think, is in the art of its telling. He owns the bard’s voice, and so he owns the listener and the reader as well.

To a new reader, I offer some advice: Open the book and read it out loud. Let the whole room hear you. Upon reading Lee for the first time, my father told me, “He seems funny; I like the stories, but is it poetry?” I say read it aloud, as I told him then. He called me back and said, “I get it. I see what he is doing. I knew just whose voice to use, too. I read the book cover to cover in my best imitation of ol’ Bob Mercer, a World War II vet who I studied with in school. He spoke slow and deliberate. It was like being told a story by a very wise person in a very old bar.”

And that is true. Lee’s new book is being told by a wise person, many wise people, in a very old café. They are telling the tales you would not know if you were outside the café, the stories you would not hear if you were only visiting. They tell the truth, and you take it with you. More than telling stories of living and lying and loving and dying, however, News from Down to the Café tells the stories of living on, of remembering, changing, forgiving, and continuing and making. Lee invites you into the café without formality or interruption, and upon leaving you have not left, yet have become one of the town, one of the dying presences in the book, one who lives on changed by the memory of others. You might even wonder if your presence in the café will change the remembering there in that small town for the people like Jesus Salinas and Good ol’, sometimes silent, E. U. Washburn, who, perhaps, if you are lucky, will talk to the grass on your grave someday as your memory fades 230 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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from the impression of the book. Perhaps, he will remind you, like the mockingbird told Janie Grace Gosset: Your life in the waking time, my child, will find its glory not in departure or fact but inside the remembrance and how that tale will be told; life separate from its story withers to the bone, mute and cold.”

And as you listen to the wise songs of the mockingbird, who is only, after all, mocking the living, you may hear the voice of someone you used to know or wanted to know, someone who tells the stories for your clan or countrymen, an Uncle Joe or a Grandma Minnie.

My father will loan out Bob Mercer, and I my own weak rendition of Lee’s gentile Tex-Utahn twang, but whichever voice you choose to hear, whichever storyteller in your head can bring the tales of this modern day bard to life, Listen. For when a man says a dead man tells no tales, he is lying. Dead men tell the tales of living on, and David Lee listens: just between the dreamsay and the realsay of it all that place where those who know who live there know that without the making and remembering and telling to help us all get on along it aint no difference or worth finally in none of it at all —Reviewed by Brett M. Griffiths-Holloway

Micheline, Jack. Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints. 2nd edition. San Francisco, CA: FMSBW Press, 1999. 245 pages. $20.00.

Jack Micheline, who wrote that “a poet’s life [is] like tears of lost rainbows,” was born Harvey Martin Silver in the Bronx in 1929, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 231

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and died in 1998 on the Bay Area Rapid Transit train somewhere outside of San Francisco, where he spent the last years of his life.

Legendary in the literary “underground” but not widely known, Micheline lived the life of a vagabond devoted to painting and to the composition of twentieth century songs of innocence and experience: “I child poet have sought in the spires and mud of cities / the rose of love and the vine of pain and forgetting.”

Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to Micheline’s first book, River of Red Wine and Other Poems (1958; reprinted 1986). Over the next four decades, Micheline produced dozens of books and broadsides, including Poems of Dr Innisfree (1975), Street of Lost Fools (1975), Purple Submarine (1976), Skinny Dynamite, a collection of stories (1980), Acappella Rabbi (1986), Imaginary Conversation with Jack Kerouac (1989), and Outlaw of the Lowest Planet (1993).

Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints originally was published in 1997 in a limited edition of 400 copies. It was the last book of Micheline’s to appear during his lifetime. Reviewed here is the second, expanded edition. The number in the title doesn’t refer to the actual number of poems in the collection—there are in fact ninety, along with numerous photos and examples of Micheline’s artwork—but was intended to commemorate the author’s sixty-seventh birthday.

As he wrote in River of Red Wine, Micheline was acutely aware of “the beauty no one saw / but the lovers and the insane.” His domain was the underside of cities, his subject “the tears of the real.”

O God what a world, O rose of the saints torn minds and red eye of the night we will live our childhood dreams to the end never denying what suffering means Micheline assuredly was beat, even if he didn’t claim to be one of the Beats. According to Gerald Nicosia, who wrote the essay on Micheline for the Dictionary of Literary Biography’s volume on the Beats, Micheline believed the beat movement was a commercial “product” concocted by publishers (and if one thinks of the use to which beat images have been put in recent years, one could say that Micheline was right on the money in estimating how rebellion could be exploited).

Nevertheless, in a letter written to Robert Creeley in 1960, quoted at the end of this book in a section called “Reviews of Micheline Over the Years,” Charles Olson characterized Micheline this way: “‘He strikes 232 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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me as . . . the genuine citizen beat—more than [Gregory] Corso who is literary and only substantively street.’” San Francisco poet A. D. Winans in fact claimed that Micheline was the last of the street poets—“These streets I walk upon speak of light!” Micheline declared—but there are plenty of that scattered tribe still around, not only on the streets of San Francisco but even on the streets of Melbourne, Australia.

Micheline was honest about his existence. In “Chasing Kerouac’s Shadow,” he wrote: I am fifty-two, live alone, considered some mad freak genius In reality I am a fucked up poet who will never come to terms with the world .....

He bemoaned the “Years spent begging and hustling . . . / For a muse that rarely pays off,” and it certainly didn’t in conventional terms, but then Micheline never expected that it would. As he himself admitted, “I chose the safety of failure over the Winner’s Circle.”

But the muse often did pay off with a seemingly endless supply of poems, many of them quite engaging.

In Paradise Outlaws (New York: Morrow, 1999), John Tytell refers to Micheline as “one of the great readers of poetry in our time,” “a poet of urgency and exhortation.” We’re dealing with performance here, as a number of photos in the book testify. One is of Micheline on stage with jazz great Charles Mingus at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco in 1977. Here, Micheline looks anything but “downtrodden”; he displays the confident, even arrogant demeanor of a rock star. (Twenty years earlier, Mingus had been one of the judges who awarded Micheline the “Revolt in Literature Award” for his performance at the Half Note Café in NYC.) Another photo from 1977 depicts Micheline performing in a café in San Francisco with saxophone accompaniment. Still another shows him receiving an award for “best performance” at a Kerouac conference in Boulder, Colorado, in 1982.

“Lostness” in a dual sense characterizes Micheline’s work, as suggested by his unpublished manuscript Notes of the Lost Cities.

First, the city denizens with whom Micheline primarily is concerned are the “losers,” “the damned singing with angels,” while the fact that the cities themselves are lost underscores the self-delusions of the “winners.” Second, although some of the poems from Notes of Crab Orchard Review ◆ 233

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the Lost Cities do appear in Sixty-Seven Poems For Downtrodden Saints, the rest remain, like a good deal of Micheline’s writings, unpublished; and most of Micheline’s work that did appear in print was either self-published or came out from small presses and is now unavailable. Thus there is a special poignancy to the photo on page 168 of Micheline writing a poem on the side of a Southern Pacific boxcar, an act both swaggering and ephemeral. This photo should have appeared opposite the poem “Make Your Color in the Sky,” which begins, “Make a mark / With your finger / Like a heartbeat on a wall / Like the wind . . .” In any case, Matt Gonzalez, editor of this book, is to be commended for the labor of love that went into making this much of Micheline easily obtainable. What one hopes will be possible one day is a volume of collected poems that will bring together as much of Micheline’s work as can be found, so that his overall achievement can be properly assessed.

As it is, the conclusion of his poem “Praise to the Original Mind Who Breathes Fresh Air” could serve as Micheline’s epitaph: “Piss on despair, do ya hear. Adiós, Baudelaire, firebug of my mind, longshots come home after a long ride!”

—Reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox

Satterfield, Jane. Shepherdess with an Automatic. Washington, D.C; Washington Writers Publishing House, 2000. 66 pages. $12.00.

Jane Satterfield’s first book, Shepherdess with an Automatic, lives somewhere between the worlds described by its title; seldom concerned with the setting of a fictive place, but intimately concerned with the borders between convention and the impositions of life lived, past and present.

In Satterfield’s poems, history and convention (or their avoidance or circumvention) provide place. In “Pastoral,” the book’s first poem, the borders between reality and art are flexible, or perhaps porous. The “he” of the poem, “Swarthy, Italianate,” “. . . cultivates a casual ease / that intoxicates, the way that he leans on a rustic fence, / jug at his feet, the other business dropped and forgotten.” The painting described, its shades and valences and relative stances, seems mistaken to the speaker, and the emotional impact of the poem is present in these impressions: the poem ends, “The space between them is small, 234 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Book Reviews

immeasurably deep, / and will have to be crossed again and again / to an uncertain, improvised air.” The perceptions men and women bring to love are a glut of archaisms, even if they are just the archaisms of their own lives, and the care and the terror with which they must be negotiated are the stuff of life and art, unavoidably and fruitfully.

Many of the poems that seem most impressive and moving exist where the border between history and the present is gone. To reach “The End of History”: “That walk led out to perpetual mist, the threat // of rain, same swatch of gray / the fighter planes had slashed all morning, . . .” In “Leaves,” the English-born poet refers to visiting a graveyard of American airmen, and both her content and aesthetic are made vivid by the lines, “no one / place safer for standing / than the bone-stuffed ground.”

Satterfield is a poet of the observation made into deft verbal gesture. In “Mannerism,” she writes of “the reckless glance of a girl about to get / what she’s after. . . .” And in “Desire”: “But // what moved us, fallen skaters / back onto the ice, headfirst // for the flaw, the perfect promise / that can’t be kept?” She makes these simple, general figures in a way that gives them a particular power.

Indeed, the singular power of the best of these poems is in diction that both courts and utilizes archaism, constantly testing the border between mastery and affectedness. The mere title of “Nocturne” could draw accusations of affectedness, but Satterfield makes the perfect introductory move by not avoiding the expected, but boring into it headlong with “Night falls,” which she follows with “overstressed as / an old tune / gone flat in the throat of the exile, . . .” Using “overstressed,” in just that spot, must be counted as a sort of minor miracle of poetic diction. It at first seems janglingly contemporary, but then, Satterfield moves it naturally into an affecting figure.

Much of this book is affecting—not just clever or apt or wellformed, as these excerpts may suggest. Satterfield could be tagged as a distant poet, but that would be misleading. She reminds me at times of W. H. Auden, another poet who wrote of borders and marches and airmen and perspective. She writes not of distance, but of all the objects and negotiations that fill distances, whether personal, historical, or physical. This is certainly not a perfect book. Sometimes she does seem to succumb to her own ability to make spare and beautiful language; but from the first page of Shepherdess with an Automatic, Jane Satterfield establishes herself as a strong and distinctive poet.

—Reviewed by Fred Von Drasek Crab Orchard Review ◆ 235

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Adewale, Toyin, editor. 25 New Nigerian Poets. Berkeley: Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, 2000. 67 pages. $9.95.

African fiction and autobiography have more “presence” on the global literary stage than African poetry, even though poetry—an indigenous form, unlike the other two genres just mentioned— reaches more people, and has a wider impact on its audience, in Africa itself. Much of this poetry is in African languages and therefore inaccessible except through translation, and since poetry isn’t as “marketable” as certain other types of literature and therefore less likely to be translated for publication on a broad scale, it frequently is unseen, unheard outside of its immediate context.

Poetry written in European languages—a colonial inheritance that is both a blessing and a curse—initially escapes the translation problem, even though the “commodity” conundrum remains and in part accounts for one weakness of this book—its brevity. Twenty-five poets are represented, which might appear adequate for an “overview,” but there are only forty-five poems. Seven of the poets are introduced by only a single poem; two poets have three poems each; the remaining sixteen poets, including the editor herself, have two poems apiece. Ishmael Reed, who visited Nigeria in February 1999, recognized a need to provide an outlet for literary work that had limited availability because of publishing and distribution difficulties in a nation that had experienced a decade of chaos; as a result, he undertook the publication of this collection, for which he is to be commended. But because Reed’s is a small press, with the constraints such an enterprise ordinarily encounters, the issuing of an extensive volume of poems probably proved impractical. Thus Ms. Adewale is correct in her assertion in her introduction that the book “should be enjoyed as an appetizer.”

Outside of the specifically Nigerian focus of this book, some of these poems wouldn’t identify themselves as African except by the name of the author, which ought to be instructive to those who believe that a self-conscious flagging of one’s “race” or “ethnicity” is either natural or compulsory for so-called “others.” On the other hand, certain of the poems are loaded—almost overladen—with cultural specifics; for instance, Uduma Kalu’s “Extended Relations”: I danced a stream dance, like ekpe, white in the sun, And stopped in memory 236 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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Ogaranya, decked in nzari ebulu . . .

That day, Unwu, starved and old, died Gbadugbadu, the ritual step, became dumb Nwachukwu, the painted dibia squatted at lonely roads Where fallow land meets dozing forests.

The fact that most of the (to us) unfamiliar terms are included in a glossary at the end of the book isn’t likely to make this poem, steeped in Ibo tradition, much more accessible—which, however, I don’t find to be a fatal flaw. The all-too transparent or highly derivative character of a good deal of modern African poetry is, in my judgment, a much less desirable characteristic.

The poets in this collection are described as “new,” meaning that they are relatively young and not previously exposed to a wide reading public. But is the poetry itself “new” in the sense that it breaks heretofore unploughed thematic or aesthetic ground?

The answer to that question is a qualified no. The newness here lies primarily in the particular responses of this current generation of poets to longstanding exigencies in their country—indeed, their continent—which previous generations of poets tackled in their own time, in their own fashion. (A good summarization of these developments and generational distinctions can be found in Tanure Ojaide’s 1995 essay, “New Trends in Modern African Poetry,” in Research in African Literatures.)

Modernday African culture, the product of a collision and then a collusion of indigenous and alien cultures, is unavoidably hybrid when it is not schismatic, and the multiple influences resulting from colonialism are exemplified in Tony Nduka Otiono’s poem “Rainsong,” in which a foreign chorus, “Rain rain go away / come again another day . . . ,” is counterpointed by a traditional African “call”: you will teach me the rain doctor’s wisdom before the clouds gather you will show me the totems of magic . . .

Exploiting the rich resources available to the typically bi- or multilingual African, Chiedu Ezeanah’s “Song of Songs” captures in English some of the sonorous flow of a tonal African language: Crab Orchard Review ◆ 237

Book Reviews

His silence in the middle of stones Splits the stones Tone atoning tones, streaming tone in streaming tongues . . .

Tony Marinho’s poem “Colour” makes us realize that there are not only different degrees of blackness, but that Africans indeed come in all colors—“Blackymulattowhiteasaghost”—and furthermore beseeches us that “Whateveryourcolourbeapeoplelover.” The “collapsing” here of words into compound phrases not only creates a sense of urgency but enacts a refusal to separate what should be a continuum into potentially combative parts. “[S]hiploads of pain / feast on my soul,” Obu Udeozo writes in “Slave Boat,” a poem dealing with a subject that remains a touchy one for many Africans—witness the hostile reaction to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s approach to the subject in his PBS series “Wonders of the African World” or the complicated debate at the UN World Conference Against Racism in South Africa—though Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, never one to shy away from controversy, did address the issue head-on in his essay collection Open Sore of a Continent.

But slowly time is making me cautious, fastidious I prefer stasis, rock stone basis Not the water moving, but the lighthouse blazing All night . . .

These lines, from a poem entitled “After the Obsession,” were penned by Helon Habila, who, it should be noted, won the 2001 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story “Love Poems.”

The significance of this award can be measured by the fact that the competition included Neustadt Prize recipient Nuruddin Farah, while Buchi Emecheta and two-time Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee were among the authors serving on the panel of judges.

It’s too soon to tell how the writers in 25 Nigerian Poets will stack up against their frequently illustrious predecessors, but there are some good signs in this volume, nonetheless, of poets who merit our attention.

—Reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox

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Book Reviews

Steinberg, Michael, editor. Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2000. 270 pages. $24.95.

Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan, an anthology edited by Michael Steinberg, is solely dedicated to writings from a state split into two by the waters of the Great Lakes. In the preface, Robert L. Root Jr. writes, “the reader will find many rewards to traveling these peninsulas.” Indeed he is right. The “peninsulas” Root refers to, however, are not Michigan, but rather the writers’ worlds, their stories, observations, and glimpses into their unique lives.

Steinberg, one of today’s major advocates of creative nonfiction, has not only strung together an anthology dedicated to place, but also presents the wide range of this genre. Within the pages of Peninsula, one will find the personal essay, the travel essay, the memoir, the nature essay, literary reportage, lyrical meditations, and even a poem by Philip Levine, which, by its inclusion in this anthology, asks questions about the boundaries of this difficult-to-define genre.

Flipping through the pages of Peninsula is like moving through the many landscapes of the Michigan world. The reader travels to the Keweenaw Peninsula where Judith Minty meets her first bear, to Detroit where Toi Derricotte struggles to find identity as a double-hyphenated light-skinned African-American, to the Lake Michigan shoreline where Sue William Silverman dreams of a “man dressed in night.”

Place and identity is a prevalent theme throughout the book. In Loraine Anderson’s essay, “Writing Me,” Anderson comes to a realization that the story she has been trying to write, “so tied to northern Michigan and to the life at the end of the twentieth century,” was actually writing her. “Not only that, it had been writing me all my life.” Michigan, in Anderson’s essay, becomes an entity, a force, a character.

In Thomas Lynch’s “Tract,” a dark yet hilarious rumination about the hypothetical details of his funeral, a Michigan winter becomes the ideal season for his burial. He talks about the poems that might be said at his funeral, though he adds a warning: “I’ve had friends who were poets. Mind you they go on a bit. Especially around horizontal bodies.”

Michigan in Maureen Stanton’s somber essay, “Dreaming of No Grass” is a Lansing neighborhood where she tries to continue on with life after an abortion and the death of her love. In lyrical prose, Stanton writes about her days planting flowers and observing Crab Orchard Review ◆ 239

Book Reviews

the neighbors across the street, while trying to ignore L.C., their erratically violent truck driver friend, who occasionally boards at their house. Flowers bloom; her life becomes metaphor.

In July fat, sexy Gloriosa daises come into their power. They are bold and robust and unashamed. The morning glories, wily ex-cons from Wilda’s garden on the other side of my fence, are choking my plants, strangling me with their vines.

One day I rip them all down. I can hear their green bones snapping and crying as I leave them in a tangled net on my lawn. The coreopsis are breeding, thousands of plants everywhere. I pull out hundreds of babies, leave them to die on the grass. I have the power to kill. I have it in me.

The beauty of Steinberg’s anthology is that wherever readers look, whether flipping from page to page or jumping through the book randomly, they will find a different essay, a different voice, a different Michigan. The anthology treads the rough lake waters and resists the Midwest winds, yet still manages to stay afloat and take us somewhere.

—Reviewed by Ira Sukrungruang

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Contributors’ Notes Faith Adiele has just completed an account of having been the first Black Buddhist nun in Thailand. Her essays about culture, travel and spirituality have been widely published. She currently lives in Iowa City, where she is at work on a memoir about growing up Nigerian Scandinavian-American. The essay in this issue will appear in A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe, an anthology from Seal Press.

Susan Aizenberg’s first full-length collection of poetry, Muse, is forthcoming this spring in the Crab Orchard Award Series from Southern Illinois University Press. She is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press), author of a chapbook-length collection of poems, Peru (Graywolf Press/Agni’s Take Three Series), and a contributing editor of the Nebraska Review. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Dick Allen has a new collection, yet unnamed, forthcoming from Sarabande Books in early 2003. His last book, also from Sarabande, is Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected. New poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Raritan, Massachusetts Review, and Poetry. He is one of the forty American writers and photographers whose work is featured in the N.E.A. sponsored Millennium Survey Project, set to begin national and international museum exhibitions in Spring 2002.

Chi-Wai Au received an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and currently works and lives in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in Seattle Review, James White Review, and Asian Pacific American Journal. He recently received a Walker Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusettes.

Jedd Beaudoin holds an MFA from Wichita State University, where he was a 2000-01 Creative Writing Fellow. He currently lives in Gdynia, Poland, with his wife.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 241

Contributors’ Notes

Robin Behn’s third book of poems, Horizon Note, won the Brittingham Prize and will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2001. She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama.

David Bond is the manager of Interlibrary Lending at Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. A 2001 Illinois Arts Council Literary Fellowship winner, he has published poems in Clark Street Review, Black Dirt, Farmer’s Market, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and National Forum. His book, Colors, is available at bookstores and online at www.greatunpublished.com.

Kathryn Stripling Byer’s fourth book of poetry, Catching Light, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press. Her second book, Wildwood Flower, was the 1992 Lamont selection from the Academy of American Poets, and her first book, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was an AWP Award Series winner. She lives in the North Carolina mountains.

Liam Callanan received his MFA from George Mason University.

He currently teaches there and at Georgetown University. The Eudora Welty short story referred to but not identified in his piece is “The Wanderers,” from her collection The Golden Apples.

Wanda Coleman’s recent work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Other Voices, and Zyzzyva. Her awards include the Harriette Simpson Arnow Prize for fiction from the American Voice and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her books from Black Sparrow Press include A War of Eyes & Other Stories, the novel Mambo Hips & Make Believe, and Mercurochrome: New Poems, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry. She has a new story collection forthcoming from Black Sparrow Press in 2002.

Jennifer Davis, a native of Dadeville, Alabama, holds degrees from the University of Montana and the University of Alabama. She has work published or forthcoming in Sundog: The Southeast Review, Other Voices, Rosebud, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Apalachee Quarterly. She is the recipient of the 2001 AWP Summer Seminars in Prague Fiction Fellowship. She lives in Miami, where she teaches at the University of Miami.

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Contributors’ Notes

Danusha Laméris de Garza has published poems in Lyric, El Andar, and in the anthology Intimate Kisses. She writes: “I enjoy choosing the characters I address—or am addressed by—in poems and am often surprised by the ensuing interaction.”

Camille Dungy is Assistant Professor of English at Randoph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Obsidian III, Boston College Magazine, International Poetry Review, African Voices, Cider Press Review, Fugue, Controlled Burn, Greensboro Review, Louisville Review, and Poetry International.

Steven Frattali is an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa. The selection in this issue is from a book-length memoir called I Advance Masked.

Brendan Galvin is the author of twelve collections of poems. His recent books include The Strength of a Named Thing and Sky and Island Light, both from Louisiana State University Press, and the narrative poem Hotel Malabar, winner of the 1997 Iowa Poetry Prize from the University of Iowa Press. His new collection, Place Keepers, will appear from LSU Press in 2003. He lives in Truro, Massachusetts.

Nola Garrett, Professor Emeritus at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, has published poems and reviews in Poet Lore, The Formalist, Tampa Review, and Georgia Review. Her chapbook, The Pastor’s Wife Considers Pinball, was published by Onionhead Press.

She has been a Resident at Yaddo and a Scholar at Bread Loaf.

Mary Jo Firth Gillett’s poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Sycamore Review, Third Coast, and Green Mountains Review. She has published two award-winning chapbooks, Tiger in a Hairnet (Small Poetry Press) and Not One (Detroit Writer’s Voice). Her poems also appear in the recent anthology of Michigan poets, New Poems from the Third Coast (Wayne State University Press).

Elton Glaser, Distingushed Professor Emeritus of English, edits the poetry series at the University of Akron Press. His most recent book of poems is Winter Amnesties (Southern Illinois University Press).

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 243

Contributors’ Notes

Lisa Glatt’s work has been published in literary journals and anthologies, including Columbia, The Sun, Indiana Review, Gargoyle, and Another City: Writing from Los Angeles (City Lights).

She currently teaches at California State University, Long Beach, and at the Writer’s Program at UCLA. Her books of poetry include Monsters and Other Lovers and Shelter.

Mark Halliday is in Italy during 2001-2002 as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy of Rome. His books of poetry are Little Star, Tasker Street, and Selfwolf. He teaches at Ohio University.

Twyla Hansen’s new chapbook, Sanctuary Near Salt Creek, was published by Lone Willow Press. Her previous books are In Our Very Bones and How to Live in the Heartland. The poems in this issue are from her latest full-length manuscript, Potato Soup. Her writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Midwest Quarterly, and New Delta Review, and in an anthology of Western women writers, Woven on the Wind (Houghton Mifflin).

Ann Hudson’s work has recently appeared in Iris, North American Review, and South Carolina Review. She lives in Chicago.

Ellen Hunnicutt’s story is part of her forthcoming collection, Sun Dogs. She is the author of a novel, Suite for Calliope. Her collection In the Music Library won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

Gray Jacobik is the author of two collections of poetry, The Double Task (University of Massachusetts Press) and The Surface of Last Scattering (Texas Review Press).

Nicole Johnson received her MFA from the University of Michigan.

She is currently living in New York and teaching at Parsons School of Design.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of five books, including World as Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University Press), a poetry collection, and Space (Algonquin Books/Penguin), a memoir about growing up in Florida during the moon race. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, where she directs the Wisconsin Instutite for Creative Writing.

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Contributors’ Notes

Deborah Landau’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, Mudfish, Columbia, Spoon River Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, ONTHEBUS, Salamander, and Gulf Coast. She is a core faculty member in the B.A. program at New School University.

Joseph O. Legaspi was born in the Philippines, and raised there and in Los Angeles. He holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University and New York University. He lives in New York City and works at Columbia University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, Puerto Del Sol, Many Mountains Moving, Gulf Coast, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, and Tilting the Continent, an anthology of Southeast Asian literature. He is a recipient of a 2001 Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California, where she was raised in a community of artists and writers including her stepfather, Brady T. Brady, and her mother, Stacia Brady. She is a Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Review and Blue Mesa Review. She teaches creative writing to second graders in the Bronx, and lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and she is not very good at math.

Moira Linehan lives in Winchester, Massachusetts, and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Green Mountains Review, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry. She received Honorable Mention in the 2001 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Contest.

James Lott is Dean of the College and Professor Emeritus of English at Mary Baldwin College. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Mississippi Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. He has received an O. Henry Award and an Emrys Award for Short Fiction.

Maria McLeod has been published in Cream City Review, Puerto del Sol, Chiron Review, and 5 AM. She directs Bennington College’s July Program in Bennington, Vermont.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 245

Contributors’ Notes

Orlando Ricardo Menes teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame. His latest poetry collection, Rumba Atop the Stones, was published by Peepal Tree Press of Leeds, England.

Leslie Adrienne Miller’s fourth full-length collection of poems, Eat Quite Everything You See, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2002. Her previous collections include Yesterday Had a Man In It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Aimee Parkison is an MFA student in the fiction program at Cornell University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, American Literary Review, Fiction International, and Other Voices.

Emmy Pérez, a current resident of El Paso, Texas, received an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Blue Mesa Review, Story, and Luna: A New Journal of Poetry and Translation. She has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Joanna Smith Rakoff lives in New York with her husband, poet Evan Smith Rakoff. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Gettysburg Review and Jacket.

Sally Read has been published in a variety of British magazines, including The Tabla Book of New Verse 2000, The Tabla Book of New Verse 2001, London Magazine, and The New Writer. She is currently teaching English and completing her first collection.

Kathryn Rhett is the author of a memoir, Near Breathing (Duquesne University Press), and editor of an anthology of memoirs, Survival Stories (Doubleday/Anchor). Her essays and poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, Creative Nonfiction, Bellingham Review, Harvard Review, and Greensboro Review. She teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and, during the summer, at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

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Contributors’ Notes

Jack Ridl has taught poetry writing at Hope College for 30 years.

His manuscript Against Elegies was selected by Billy Collins for the 2001 Chapbook Award from the Center for Book Arts. He is co-author, with Peter Schakel, of Approaching Poetry (St. Martin’s Press). Jack and his wife, Julie, have two clumber spaniels, one of whom is named Stafford after William.

Bill Roorbach is the author of five books, including a Flannery O’Connor Award winning collection of stories, Big Bend, and a new novel, The Smallest Color. A sixth book, Into Woods and Other Essays, will appear in late spring 2002. His other books are Summers With Juliet, Writing Life Stories, and The Art of Truth. His shorter work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Granta, and has been featured on the NPR program “Selected Shorts.”

Maxine Scates is the author of Toluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press) and is co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (Copper Canyon Press).

Rebecca Seiferle’s third poetry collection, Bitters, was recently published by Copper Canyon Press. Poems from her previous collection, The Music We Danced To, won the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America and were included in The Best American Poetry 2000. She is the editor of The Drunken Boat, a poetry magazine online at http://www.thedrunkenboat.com.

Patty Seyburn has work forthcoming in Field, Slate, and Paris Review. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Cathy Song’s latest book of poems is The Land of Bliss (University of Pittsburgh Press).

James Tate’s thirteenth book is Memoir of the Hawk: Poems (Ecco Press). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Judith Taylor is the author of a book of poems, Curios (Sarabande Books). Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Boston Review, and Witness. She has received a Pushcart Prize and the Open Voice Poetry Award from the Writer’s Voice.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 247

Contributors’ Notes

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon holds a B.A. from Washington & Lee University and an MFA from Penn State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in African American Review, Callaloo, and Shenandoah.

Tony Whedon has poetry and essays forthcoming in Fine Madness, Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, and Western Humanities Review. He teaches at Johnson State College, where he is fiction editor of Green Mountains Review.

Baron Wormser is the author of five books of poetry, including When (Sarabande Books), and is co-author, with David Cappella, of the textbook Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves.

Agica Zivaljevic was born in Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia.

Her story “Village at the Bottom of the Lake,” an excerpt from a novel in progress, was a finalist for Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award 2000. At bedtime, her husband—like Scheherazade—spins the tales and she writes them down.

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 Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT 248 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

David R. Godine, Boston, MA Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA FC2, Normal, IL FMSBW Press, San Francisco, CA 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 Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI 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 Steerforth Press, South Royalton, VT 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 ◆ 249

Announcements Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press are pleased to announce the 2001 Crab Orchard First Book Prize in Poetry selection.

Our final judge, Allison Joseph, selected Joelle Biele Siegwarthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s White Summer as the winner. Her collection will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in October 2002.

We want to thank all of the poets who entered manuscripts in our Crab Orchard First Book Prize Competition.

Crab Orchard Reviewâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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/>.

Crab OrcharD Award Series In Poetry — FIRST BOOK AWARD TRAIN TO AGRA Poems by Vandana Khanna “Vandana Khanna’s sensual, evocative poems sweep the reader away on a journey of family, culture, and spirituality. In Train to Agra, Khanna’s deft language and bright, revelatory imagery bring both physical and emotional landscapes to life. Khanna’s gifts as a poet are many, and she uses them to cross borders and countries, to bring alive ‘The India of Postcards,’ to fill in ‘colors, the smells, to translate to English / To translate into the present, into beautiful.’ Vandana Khanna is not only a poet to watch; she is a poet to savor.”—Allison Joseph, author of In Every Seam and Soul Train 55 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2405-9 $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

Forthcoming April 2002 in the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry FABULAE

Poems by Joy Katz “In poems shot through with grace, intellect, and control, Katz considers the history and culture we all stand, finally, as heirs to: from Dachau to the deceptively still surfaces of American suburbia, from Proserpina to Plath, from the subjugation of women to the lust for empire—the result is a collection as rich as it is ambitious, announcing an already accomplished new voice in poetry.”

—Carl Phillips, author of Pastoral 88 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2444-X, $12.95 pb

MUSE

Poems by Susan Aizenberg “From a beautiful elegy for the poet Lynda Hull to a brilliant sequence on Vivienne Eliot, we are moved by narrative, delighted by the music of speech, and dazzled by glittering imagery. . . . A real, three-dimensional human being emerges out of the phrasing, the images, and the thoughts of these memorable poems, shaped out of words but entangled in the gritty detail of ordinary life.”

—Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine 88 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2443-1, $12.95 pb

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

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 67 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 111 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

the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry 2001 titles:

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

MISERY PREFIGURED Poems by J. Allyn Rosser

“Do not be misled by the darkness of this collection’s title: Misery Prefigured is in fact one of the brightest volumes of verse to appear in a good long while. . . . J. Allyn Rosser is one of the most distinctive poets of her generation.”

—David Wojahn 96 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2383-4, $12.95 pb

THIS COUNTRY OF MOTHERS Poems by Julianna Baggott

“Julianna Baggott has a fierce imagination that probes the ordinary details of a woman’s life and lights up both the sacred and profane. In a poem called ‘Blurbs,’ she half facetiously hopes for the words ‘sexy,’ ‘elegance,’ and ‘bite’ to be applied to her work. Happily in this book, she earns all three.”—Linda Pastan 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. . . .

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