Ground Control
SPRING CLEANING
Catherine Stansfield
[gets harder:::every year]
Today’s daily log denotes my attempts to keep you small have failed once more— another blinking satellite lost in orbit before it even breached the stratosphere. Your little hands push the earth away; you begin to toddle onto tiny feet. I take in these moments with the unyielding, stationary focus that only an incubator can achieve for its beloved specimen. I slow down time with the same success of an ant digging its six heels into gravel to stop the earth from spinning. My working theory is this: Soon you’ll turn your back to the stars and chase the sun’s splendor through the streets as each dwindling ray falls behind the planet’s curve. And I’ll tell you that the search for celestial bodies can wait until after dinner. But for now, I’ll continue to be your ground control and pick you up when gravity prevails and try not to think of how the sum of your mass is greater today than all of your yesterdays.
Catherine Stansfield’s poems and short stories are featured in Ignatian Literary Magazine, The MacGuffin, Plainsongs, Presence, Slippery Elm, and others. She works in the publishing industry as a graphic designer.
18
David James The birds are moulting. If man could only moult also—his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions. —James Lane Allen I’d love to take out my brain and shake it like a rug against the fence, hearing that thwack, thwack, echo off the cedars, watching bits and pieces of lies, debris, mistakes, even tiny chunks of defect floating away in the wind. I’d wash it with soap and water, take a brush to the crevices hard to reach, and hang it out to dry in a spring sun, a bit cool, a bit warm. The heart, however, is trickier. You have to cut out the misplaced affection, dissect the lingering anger that poisons the flesh, scrape away the crust of misery that spreads from atrium to ventricle to aorta. There’s always risk involved, a little tremble in the hand, a wrong move, and you bleed the heart, spilling into every part of your life. Even if you clean up the mess with white rags, wipe with alcohol, and fall in love again, a noticeable stain often remains.
Born and raised on the third coast, Michigan, David James has published eight books and has had more than thirty of his one-act plays produced, including six off-off Broadway.