Inkwell Vol. 37

INKWELL

Spring 2022 • No. 37

MANHATTANVILLE COLLEGE INKWELL

MFA in Creative Writing

Purchase, New York No. 37 • Spring 2022

Interim Editor: Alastair Murdoch

Editorial Board: David Albano, Debra Cerbini, Alice Green, Stephanie Kleid, Alex Lindquist, Donna Miele, Laurel Peterson, Dana Wu, Stephanie Yanes

Graphic Designer: Danielle Cruz

Cover Art: Erik Endress

Cover Design: Out House Studio

Inkwell Journal 37

© 2022 Manhattanville College

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles

Published in the United States by Manhattanville College MFA Program, 2900 Purchase St., Purchase, NY 10577

inkwelljournal@gmail.com

Inkwell Journal, a literary journal published through the MFA Program at Manhattanville College, seeks submissions in English of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction/memoir, graphic novel/memoir excerpts, visual art, and genre-blurring work, as well as translations.

We are interested in both established and new voices, including voices that have been historically underrepresented.

For full submission guidelines and to purchase the current issue, visit inkwelljournal.submittable.com

DeDication

This issue is dedicated to the memory of our friend and colleague, Danielle Surico. Danielle was an Inkwell editor, professor, learning specialist, and MFA candidate at Manhattanville, whose sudden passing last year tore a hole in our lives. Had she been with us through the production of this issue—investing it with the enthusiasm, energy, and dedication she brought to all things educational and literary—it would have all been so much easier, and so much more enjoyable; but that is nothing compared to what her children and her students lost with her passing. This is the best we could do without her.

eDitor’s note

When we selected “Watershed” as the theme of Issue 37, we had no idea how prescient our choice would prove to be. Our editor in chief, Lori Soderlind, who relaunched this journal in 2018 and raised it to new heights, announced shortly after we named this issue that she had accepted a new post. This the first issue to be produced without Lori’s leadership, expertise, style, and drive. If we ever took her gifts for granted while Lori was in the chair, then we have had a tough year to reflect on what she brought to this journal, how much she did, and just how well she did it.

Donna Miele, our managing editor from 2020-2022 and member of our editorial board, had previously indicated her intention to step back from her managing role due to health issues, though on hearing Lori’s news characteristically offered to come straight back as an advisor. As Donna’s interim replacement, I cannot overstate my gratitude for the calm wisdom with which she has guided me through so many crises of confidence, and editing practice and style over the past year.

This is, therefore, a watershed issue in every sense, created by the editorial team Lori and Donna built. I am indebted to every member of that team for bearing with it, and with me, and for all they have brought to their work; I am in awe of their knowledge and skills, their patience, and above all their dedication to this publication.

Watershed has, of course, many meanings, both literal and figurative. That breadth excited us, and was a large part of what made it our pick. Our submitters responded with the same enthusiasm, latching onto the theme to send us myriad interpretations and applications in their poetry, prose, stories, and images. Lori could never have adequately prepared me for the agony of being able to print only the smallest sample of the

wonderfully inventive and creative submissions we received. Watersheds even seemed to rise in un-themed submissions; perhaps this was a late-night editorial obsession with categorization creeping in—but then what piece of writing or visual art worth its salt does not present, at some level, a turning point, a defining moment, a divide, or a confluence?

Themes of confluence are taken up by the poet Margaret Gibson in the interview she graciously gave us, and which we are enormously proud to present here. Margaret talks about the streams of her spiritual and everyday lives converging in her writing, describing metaphor as a device to gather “what’s been separated…into a whole,” and observing that “Poets, more so than other language users, learn how to use language, song, and silence in a way that unites body and mind, presence and absence, word and image.” Confluence then extends to Margaret’s work as Connecticut’s State Poet Laureate, confronting thinking “in terms of separation and division” that separates humans from Nature and divides us by race and class. “So much damage flows from that erroneous way of thinking,” Margaret notes as she outlines her initiatives to gather a diverse poetic community to combat divisive thinking and emphasize the inseparability of environmental and social justice.

Thank you for supporting this journal and its contributors, and for being the reason we pushed through to get it out.

Alastair Murdoch, interim editor May 2022

Dulcet tones at the Dinner Party anD later

I’m pleased to see this sky, like being at a dinner party when a handsome stranger gets seated beside me, the conversation feels natural and maybe I’m a little bit in love. I’m glad when the dinner party ends since I’m getting a headache, Champaign does that to me, so

I say goodbye to my hosts and dining companion, chauffer night standing by my car, angry that I haven’t given him a raise, but I get in hoping he’s sober—he might make it to morning, blue sky tapping on my window, which I open— a hornet cloud gets in and stings me.

Kenneth Pobo

sKiP at the cemetery

Each spring he drives out to Ste. Genevieve Memorial Cemetery, his parents’ graves. Hours,

crimson moons behind chipped stones.

Kenneth Pobo

messing uP

I’m messing up this new sonnet. It’s fine during the octave, dies in the sestet. I mean to be writing about love, mine and my husband’s. The wheels come off. Childhood barges in—its hand slippery and wet. Too many rules to obey, a dark should

interrupting my play, wrecking my sleep. Now I lay me down to drown in the deep

waters of fear. Classmates knew I was queer before I did. Their words surrounded me, hounded me, every hiding place on fire.

You had it even worse than I did, dear, losing your hair at thirteen—family cackled out jokes. Laughter choked like barbed wire.

terri camPion letting go

My sister was an ICU nurse. Death was her life. Thanksgiving Day, 2009, Huntington Hospital called to tell me that my sister had been admitted with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and was in a drug induced coma. I hadn’t seen or heard from my sister for over a year. This wasn’t unusual.

The seed for our proclivity for distance was first sowed on September 15, 1968 at our family dentist’s office. Every twelve to eighteen months, the six of us would pile into the car on a Saturday morning and make the hour journey to the Main Line. There were plenty of decent dentists around the corner and across the lake in Ridley, but “Dr. Grayboy” came highly recommended to our mother by someone rich. His office was on the ground floor of a marble mansion. The waiting room was the size of a classroom and looked like a museum piece. There was an assortment of turquoise velvet chairs, love seats, and sofas, none of which were comfortable. Interspersed throughout the room were bronze and ivory figurines of nymphs, tigers, and busts and heads of famous dead people I didn’t recognize. A place Louis XIV or XVI—either one—could pass through on a regular day. Behind a pair of large, intricately carved wooden doors— the dental chamber.

It was as cold and quiet as a church. We could hear each other shifting in our seats or turning a page in a paperback book; my sneezes were explosions, my father’s apocalyptic. These sounds were underscored by the drilling, groans, and admonishments from Grayboy’s chamber.

Kara had been complaining of a toothache on the upper right side of her mouth for several weeks. She was

thirteen, I was eight. Since she had a real situation and would probably need a longer appointment than anyone else she was last to the chair, after me, our two brothers, and our mother and father. To hold her over and stop her whining, Grayboy gave her a couple of pills for the pain. When I came out of my appointment, she was lying on her stomach on one of the overstuffed couches smiling and laughing at a “Penny” cartoon in an outdated Highlights magazine. Something wasn’t right with her. Penny wasn’t funny! We both knew that. But we read it anyway and never laughed. Kara’s eyes were sparkling and her smile was too big for her face.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked her.

“Nothing. I’m not in pain. Is that a bad thing?”

“No . . .”

“Don’t tell Mom!” she whispered.

“Tell her what?”

“That I feel good. She won’t like that.”

I looked across the vast room. Our dad was snoring loudly, his head against the back of an ornate chair, slack jawed, the opened newspaper draping his legs like a blanket. Our mother was sitting next to him in the matching chair, a standing cast-iron ashtray between them, engrossed in her book.

“They don’t care,” I said. * * *

After three weeks of treatment for the fibrosis, the doctors had managed to contain the disease and transferred Kara to a nearby rehab facility. While there she seemed to be on the upswing, in good spirits, doing her Christmas shopping online, finding great deals. Ten days later she was moved back to Huntington, this time to the ICU. She had contracted pneumonia. A month later, after multiple attempts and procedures to reinvigorate her lungs and combat the

disease, followed by days of “wait and sees” and failures, today, February twentieth, three weeks after her sixtieth birthday, she is to be taken off life support

I arrive at the hospital at 12 noon. I’ve been here so often I’ve memorized every curve of the green-and-white tiled corridors and nursing stations. The atmosphere in the ICU wing seems to be underscored by alarm bells. Emaciated patients roll by on gurneys from every direction, connected to IV drips. My heart is pounding in my ears. I will my eyes forward as I blast Alicia Keyes's “Fallin’ ” in my head to drown out the wails. Kara loves Alicia Keyes.

When I arrive at Kara’s room, there are people milling about, putting on coats and hats, and speaking in hushed tones. The room is dark and shadowy. The only light comes from the digital screens on the machines that surround my sister’s bed. I look around for Abbey, Kara’s daughter, who told me she’d be here. Like her mother, she is a nurse. She works in radiology at an outpatient clinic in Brooklyn. Vinnie, my niece’s fiancé, approaches me.

“Hey Aunt Maggie.” He gives me a hug. “My family,” he gestures toward the huddle of figures, “they always wanted to meet Kara, but never got a chance. This was as good a time as any, I guess.” He shrugs sadly and follows his family out the door.

Now that the room is clear I see my sister, tiny and pale with a head of short black hair, lying in a steel-framed bed surrounded by hissing and blinking machines. IVs and tubes flow out of her nose, arms, and abdomen. She is breathing through a tube in her neck, a tracheostomy. My eyes orbit the room, avoiding the one place that I’ve not yet mustered the courage to see. I am terrified at the possibility that Kara will open her eyes and say to me: “I don’t want to die!” What would I do? I want to make up for all those times of bitter silence between us within the next few hours, and I

know that is an idealistic notion, an unattainable concept.

Grayboy was a cranky SOB, always in a bad mood. Maybe it was just the sight of our family filing into his office on the Sabbath and taking away his day. The only time I ever saw him smile was when he held the door open for my mother as she entered his torture chamber. She pretended not to notice, avoiding eye contact, but she knew. She was a head turner.

After conferring with my mother about Kara’s tooth, rather than do a root canal, which would take another hour and cost more, Grayboy opted to pull it—a top back molar on the right side, number 2. * * *

I rest the pads of my fingertips on my sister’s wrist. Her skin is cool and thin. My heart continues to thump in my head and I try to control my breathing. The machines’ pumping and hissing becomes more aggressive and loud. On a closer look, I notice traces of lipstick, blush, and eye shadow on Kara’s face.

“She wanted to look good for my dad.”

My niece, Abbey, is standing in the doorway in a white wool coat sipping through a straw from a Starbucks Grande cup. Kara and Nick, Abbey’s dad, divorced when she was two.

She crosses into the room and gives me a hug. “He came, we lowered the meds so she could wake up and see him, she waved, then he waved.” She demonstrates with a flick of her wrist. “And that was that. He had to go pick up spices in the East Village.”

She is wearing boots that add three inches to her petite frame and she smells of patchouli. She holds her wrist

up to her nose, sniffs, offers it to me. “Mommy’s,” she says. “I thought she’d recognize it and maybe—” She drops into a chair by the bed. These three months have taken their toll, aging her past her thirty-two years.

“What is it with people?” Abbey groans and takes a long sip of her drink. The ice cubes rattle, indicating it’s over. “Well that went fast for eight bucks.” She takes the lid off the cup, shakes it, pokes at the ice with the straw. “We put a call in for a priest hours ago!” She leaves the cup by the chair on the floor and crosses to the bed. She checks the IV drip, the catheter output, and the other ominous apparatuses, then returns to the IV drip.

“You want to let her know you’re here?” she asks.

“You can do that?”

“Why not? I did it for my dad.”

She adjusts the valve on the drip. After a moment I can see a current traveling through the muscles of my sister’s face and her eyes open. It takes another few seconds before what remains of my sister’s life force appears behind her eyes and she takes in her surroundings.

“Mommy,” Abbey whispers. Kara turns to her daughter, a look of terror and confusion on her face.

“Mommy, Aunt Maggie’s here.”

My sister turns to me, her face lights up in a smile. “I love you,” she says with her lips.

“I love you,” I reply softly, smiling, hoping she doesn’t sense my terror. We hold each other’s eyes for a moment.

* * *

Ten minutes! That’s all it took for Grayboy to yank molar number 2 from my sister’s head. Kara emerged from the double doors holding an icepack to her right cheek. She stepped into the foyer and stood under the gaudy chandelier. Her chest was heaving and her face streaked with tears—wet

and dry. A stream of sunlight from the small windowpanes on top of the door reflected off the crystals of the chandelier and bounced over her face.

“I need another pill!” she cried. “It hurts so bad!”

I would remember this day as the first step into the hell that awaited my sister for years to come.

“You have to rest,” my niece tells her mother as she holds the valve on the IV.

Kara is searching her daughter’s face for answers to questions she can’t voice. She reminds me of a child waking up in the middle of a road trip, wondering where she is, how she got there, and what is going to happen next.

“You have to rest,” Abbey tells her again. “Okay Mommy?”

Kara is weakly shaking her head.

“I love you,” Abbey says.

Kara mouths the words back. There is something else she wants to say but can’t put into words.

I turn away. How can my niece, who in my mind is still that little girl who ran into my arms crying during thunderstorms or when her father stopped coming home, be so brave? I feel inadequate.

Vinnie enters the room with bottles of water and a feeble-looking man, who is hunched over, clutching a faded cotton bag.

“Look who I found!” Vinnie announces, as he hands us each a bottle. “The chaplain!”

“We asked for a priest,” Abbey says, clearly irritated.

“They don’t have one,” Vinnie says.

“In this whole hospital there’s not one priest?” I ask, joining Abbey in her irritation.

“Yeah, but there was an emergency,” Vinnie answers,

then shrugs. “Go figure.”

The chaplain takes one step into the room, his eyes focused on my sister.

“Is she dead?” he asks.

There is a moment of silence as the three of us look at each other. Stunned? Horrified? Vinnie steps into a corner of the room and turns his back to us, trembling with laughter. Abbey answers the man, “Not yet. They are waiting for the DFLST papers.”

“What?”

“The decision to forgo life-sustaining therapy,” I explain.

The chaplain takes a step closer to me and points to his right ear.

“Say again.”

I sigh. “She is not dead.”

“No?” The chaplain swipes a thin black yarmulke from his bald head and opens his bag. He pulls out a crucifix, a small, leather-bound, dogeared prayer book of sorts, and a small jar, the label of which I recognize as Tiger Balm. He places each item on the table by Kara’s bed. He then takes out a red and gold silky beanie and slaps it onto his bare scalp.

“What’s her name?”

“Kara,” Abbey says.

“Harry?” he asks.

“Kara!” Vinnie shouts.

“Huh? Laura?”

“Kara,” I say.

The Chaplain fumbles with his bag and pulls out an orange sticky note and stub pencil, the kind they used to have in libraries by the card files. He turns to us, his pencil and scrap of paper ready, his palm the writing surface, “Can you spell for me?”

Once he finds the right page in his missal and lifts his

crucifix, the three of us join hands and bow our heads as he leads us in a prayer. He keeps forgetting and mispronouncing Kara’s name. He can’t understand us when we remind him and has to refer to the note still sticking to the palm of his left hand. Vinnie and Abbey are nearly passing out from stifling their laughter. I think I see a smile flash across Kara’s face.

As he is anointing her wrists and face with Tiger Balm, a boxy silver-haired woman in Minnie Mouse scrubs enters the room holding up a paper—the long-awaited DFLST.

“I finally got the printer up and running,” she says as she hands it to Abbey to sign. The pen doesn’t work. The woman bangs it about, smacking it like a catsup bottle. “It’s the only one I got. It’s been working fine all morning.”

We all fumble through our bags and pockets. In putting away his props, the Chaplain has unearthed another stubby pencil from his bag and hands it to Abbey.

“Seriously? You can sign this document with a pencil?” I ask the woman, who is unwrapping a Certs from a piece of foil.

“No problem unless someone erases it, and that’s not gonna happen.” She pops the Certs into her mouth and coughs.

Both Abbey and I sign the document. The chaplain has gone, and a bouncy redheaded nurse in turquoise scrubs has arrived for the night shift. She plops her ample butt into the one empty chair. Now we wait for the doctor who will enact the DFLST order to arrive.

“He’s so busy! It’s like Grand Central Station here every day,” says the redhead. “Bonnie,” she says, “but you can call me Bon-Bon. So, where you all from?”

Conversation ensues about where we all live, where we used to live. I tell her I live in Brooklyn and that I work in Manhattan. She then starts a rant about the one time she was

on a subway and someone in another car got mugged and that was in 1982 and she “hasn’t been on a subway since!”

“It’s really the best way to get around the city,” I say.

“Never go, not since 1982.”

I’m the only one engaging in a conversation with this woman, which makes sense. I’m the closest in age and of the same sex. Bon-Bon and I stop talking and observe Abbey, who has been keeping check on Kara’s vitals and is now gently massaging cream into her hands and arms.

“Tsk, you’re never old enough to lose your mother, poor kid, ” Bon-Bon yells across the room. “Make sure you get those chin hairs! I tell my kids, don’t you dare let me lie on my death bed with chin hairs growing nuts on my face!”

My niece gives her a blank stare.

Bon-Bon turns back to me and Abbey throws her a crazy wild look that makes me smile. She smiles back.

“Your mother still alive?” Bon-Bon asks me.

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s in a suburb in Pennsylvania. She and Kara—”

“Clashed like bulls in China?”

“Sorta.”

“Well, tell me something I don’t know. I got two grown daughters. How’s her health?”

“She’s fine. She just doesn’t like to travel.”

“You think her heart isn’t breaking right now, losing a daughter? No matter how much you don’t like your kid, you never stop loving them. Your kids aren’t supposed to die before you!”

I can’t decide if this conversation is comforting or disturbing.

“Damn, I could use a cigarette! In the old days, we had a lounge we could go to and light up. Now we have to wait for the elevator—can’t even take a few puffs out the

window or the fire escape.” She drags herself out of the chair and out the door.

I join Abbey at Kara’s bedside and softly run a brush through Kara’s hair, which is surprisingly thick with very little gray.

“How are you holding up?” I ask.

“All right.” Abbey slowly shakes her head and continues attending to her mother. “It’s just so irritating, this place.”

I don’t know what to say. * * *

The pulling of her tooth that day in the fall of 1968 set off a dynamo effect in my sister’s mouth. Each year there were more cavities, root canals—yanking. Because my mother refused to take her to any other dentist, she’d have to put up with the pain until the next appointment, which sometimes was several weeks away. Kara was willing, as long as she had medication.

It started happening to me when I turned thirteen: cavity, root canal, yank, pain meds.

The euphoria from the meds made our life brighter and more bearable, and we dreaded living without them. Kara would feign other ailments—menstrual cramps, migraines— anything that couldn’t be proven a sham. When our mother finally caught on, Kara pressed me to do the same.

“Why should I? You hardly shared the pills you got last time!”

“What are you talking about? I gave you half!”

“You gave me three pills!”

“I really did have cramps, I thought you’d understand.”

We shared a bedroom. She was the only person in the family I could talk to—most of the time.

“You could at least try.”

“Mom’s gonna know and what if she hits me?”

“She’s not gonna hit you. Don’t be such a baby. You’re a good actress. Better than me.”

That’s how she got through me and through life— flattery. It got her everywhere.

My mother did hit me. She then did everything she could to keep us apart, even giving us our own bedrooms and putting our brothers into one. It didn’t work. It only strengthened our bond, our distrust of our mother and of everyone else in the family.

We were addicts. I stopped all medication once I got my teeth under control. But there was weed, and for one semester at college, every Friday my roommate and I would wash down a tab of “windowpane” acid with tequila sunrises.

“My highs were social!” I’d scream, whenever Kara would start on her Twelve Step shit that she never got through.

“Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.”

When she wanted to make a point that she couldn’t put into words she’d take a long drag off her Salem. We knew each other too well. She never tried to quit smoking. “I don’t need another failure in my life,” she said.

Whenever our conversations took this kind of turn, one of two things could happen: One of us would either slam down the phone or stomp out the door, depending on whether the meeting was in person or not; or we’d proclaim our love to each other, our mutual distrust of everyone else in the family, open a bottle of wine, together or separately depending, and we’d get drunk and eventually resume fighting until we were sick and tired of being sick and tired. Kara coined that phrase. * * *

After another two interminably long hours the doctor arrives with a small posse of white coats. There are other papers to sign before they can begin the unplugging. Fortunately, there are two working pens. Afterward the nurses draw a curtain around my sister’s bed and place chairs on either side for Abbey and me. Bon-Bon plops a box of tissues in each of our laps. I take hold of Kara’s right hand, Abbey her left. The unplugging begins. Other nurses, doctors, aides, who have cared for and gotten to know Kara pop their head in to say goodbye. They all say some version of the same thing: “Kara was so kind to us; it is so sad; she is so young.”

Abbey and I offer them tissues.

My sister’s hand is beautiful, spotless, soft, her fingers long and elegant. In the past years whenever I saw her, her fingers looked clubbed—a symptom of the fibrosis, we later learned. She would wear fake nails in dark shades of purple and blood. Now her nails were natural smooth moons, longer than my own.

“Her nails are perfect,” I say.

“I gave her that QT serum. When she could, she put it on every day. Then the nurses did it when I wasn’t here.” My niece chokes back a sob. “I should have come more.”

A tsunami of guilt and regret rushes through me. “You were here for her. It’s me who didn’t come enough. I should have been here more.” Kara’s face looks worried or pained. Is she picking up my thoughts? I smile, trying to look beatific, as one should look when at another’s deathbed, I read somewhere.

As minutes tick by, the hissing and groaning of the machines trickles to a whisper. Kara’s chest lifts and lowers like a stutter. I’m expecting each of her breaths to be the last, but she continues on as it closes in on an hour.

Abbey breaks the silence, groaning, “Why is this taking so long?”

“Yeah, I thought once they pulled the plugs—” I’m having trouble finishing my sentences.

“She’s holding on,” Abbey says, as she studies one of the monitors. “I thought she would go quicker after seeing my dad. She was waiting for him.”

“She’s worried for you, maybe?” Hoping this is the correct response.

“Mommy, I’m gonna be fine,” Abbey tells her. “It’s okay, you need to rest.”

I close my eyes to give my niece privacy with her mother and to try to memorize the feel of my sister’s hand in mine.

“How could she not know she was sick!” My niece is suddenly angry. “I begged her to stop smoking!”

Bon-Bon appears from behind the fortress of machinery.

“What’s going on?” Abbey wails to the nurse. “Why is it taking so long?”

“It’s almost over,” Bon-Bon says.

My heartbeat is thrashing through my body. It’s an effort to keep from falling off the chair. Abbey has calmed and she and Bon-Bon are watching the monitors. The green and red lines are horizontal, flat. My eyes are blurry with puddles of tears. Since the unplugging I’ve not said anything aloud to my sister. All my feelings and love, I’m hoping and believing, are being communicated in waves of color and light through my thoughts and touch.

“That’s weird,” I hear my niece say.

“You gotta let her go,” Bon-Bon says.

“I’m not touching her!” Abbey yells.

“You, the aunt—”

The aunt?—So much for our heartfelt conversation. I look up at Bon-Bon.

“I can’t call it until you let go,” Bon-Bon says. “Look,”

she points to the screen, to one blue, undulating line.

“You see that? That’s your pulse. You gotta let go.”

I gently peel my fingers from around my sister’s hand. I let go.

Vinnie, the doctors, nurses, and aides fill the small curtained area as we all watch the monitor, as my pulse leaves my sister’s body.

“That’s it,” Bon-Bon says. “Time of death 10:48.”

John Walser

berliner Jazztage (1969) monK

Monk: big rings: starts with applause and Satin Doll and his black suit is an inkspill and his right thumb nail is wide as a bar: and the inside of the piano: a series of lines and circles: gold: is the sunlight right now on the pine tree across the street: a block over:

and no one is on stage: and you have to love technology that I can watch what I didn’t know existed until only four minutes ago:

Sophisticated Lady: and a slow camera circles him: and the bench is brown red leather and he has already begun to sweat and I was alive back then and in thirteen years I would find in his angular sounds the beauty that just keeps growing:

how he spurs silences:

Caravan: his beard is grey filaments.

And his left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing

in the most magical way:

and I never before noticed how large his fingernails are: not long, but broad and deep as a score:

and not even halfway through the set and he’s pouring sweat that turns his suit, his beanie satin creeping deadly nightshade

and he attacks the notes like pigeons flying in wingsnap formation against the hard glint sun reflecting off a dozen windows at a dozen different angles

and Goddamn I want to yell out the window at passing cars, at people walking home: February twilight pretending April warmth: Goddamn. Caravan. Get in here and listen to this. You’ve never heard anything like this before.

John Davis

route 91 harvest music Festival

Las Vegas, OctOber, 2017

song that should have calmed forever that was sung with bodies sobbing running in our ears when rain happened seeped into our souls the calm of dawn flashes of shivers inside our skin already the bullets had scattered ashes why were we going what did we wear unprepared as we were for years the breathing gone in exile gone the cold entering our clothes rain happened and the pond of red overflowed can we say the green of calm was gone because the calm didn’t happen never happened in the song the arms were ours the legs were ours the years of happy beers nothing mysterious about fears we might have feared we would not find them bind them to a calm we could country swing to our souls poised as moonglow and winter with our secrets summer with our runs of laughter rain happened are you with me rain happened and the flood happened and then the flutter red and the pond of red are you with me when rain happened a fashion on the land that stranded passion emptied bodies the way a flood empties the balm of calm rain happened are you with me it was never silent until it was

John

Davis

the DaWn oF grammar Woman

What is the sound of torment if not an adverb being gallant at four in the morning. His grave accent. His seaweed scent. His ly’s echoing on the balcony like a third-rate Romeo. This is the hour to listen, unstiffen the fists of prepositions that twisted her dreams. First tussle with vowels and diphthongs that slept on her tongue. First cough. First spit of the consonant’s cracked skin. First verb she keeps in a velvet tin beside her bed—her pick-me-up to face the nouns that clown in her mirror. Which adjective to wear. Which interjection to stun the children into silence. Which ellipsis will split their infinitives. She un-squints the parentheses from the corners of her eyes, combs out conjunctions bunched in her hair. Later she will perk-up her pronouns with dazzle-white eyeshadow, but for now, she works on her attitude and how she will groove with one eye closed, blushed nude.

Jessica hollanDer

irises

Irises bloomed with tissue paper heads. Mixed with tall weeds and ragged grass outside the old house they rented, they were bearded irises, purple, blue, and pink, with wide crumpled petals that flopped down as though already dying, almost ugly. Her husband, Julian, called them part of the Spring Weed Mix. But she enjoyed the sprawl of it, the frenzied growth around the cracked sidewalk, the overturned bicycle and rusted grill, the weeds crawling up the gray vinyl siding. They were saving money. She didn’t need luxury. Just lower your expectations and open your eyes.

The windows were curtainless. Blinds yellowed at the edges like a creeping sickness. Between the slats, from their bed, Julian watched Carlie walk to the car with her long ponytail, darker brown than when he met her, less wavy, post-cancer. He pulled the covers from her side until bunched in a giant cocoon he’d regret later when he had to make the bed. He should go to the gym so they’d both come home energized. But the rest of the day loomed: his article on 19th century American civil liberties, prepping his summer class. He looked at the clock: 7:30. Better to work now. Make enough progress by the time Carlie came home and showered to allow himself a brief pulse of satisfaction, a half hour break, maybe, then back to work. Leonardo, their cat, wandered in and sprawled on the exposed sheet. Slowly closed his eyes. Better to lay awhile longer. He had all day to be productive.

The campus felt eerie once emptied for summer, the humans snapped away. Oak trees she barely noticed all

winter reigned with wind-rippled leaves over brick buildings, pathways, long grassy stretches. Slow progress on a fountain meant metal fences, piles of bricks, and construction signs cluttered the throughway. Carlie waited for her friends, two other English professors, in her car, scrolling through texts from her concerned parents she’d ignored all week. Same as last time, she wrote them. Just fine. Plywood lay over the wrecked muddy ground so people could circumvent the site, the uneven footing distracting from the monument to wasted money. Early sunlight brightened the grounds. If she could shift her attention to the right the morning would be beautiful. Even the metal fence shone.

Outside the bedroom window sprinklers danced over weeds. All year he longed for summer, and then he couldn’t enjoy it; he needed a vacation, a rush of museums, galleries, historical sites, prominent speakers, theater. Books heaped like mountains on his desk in the bedroom corner, his laptop precarious on top. The easy life popular culture imagined for a college professor was a joke. Lifetime of loan debt, computers in corners, student emails, scrapped research, performance: a pace he’d perfected, a low voice students took seriously. Leonardo yawned and stretched his legs across the sheet. Orange fur fanned, claws extended. Though if popular culture saw him lingering in bed at 8:00 in the morning while his wife ran several miles and most people were at the office or factory or grocery store or wherever, and if popular culture did not return at 11:00 at night to see his furious typing at that narrow cluttered desk, its misconceptions might be confirmed.

When Anne showed up, Carlie stretched with her in the parking lot. Thomas Hall, home to the English department, loomed with its sad brown bricks and rows of

windows. It made a difference. Carlie would work all summer in this depressed building and her weed-ridden rental, while Anne (with help from parents) had bought a modern splitlevel with a well-lit basement a couple miles from campus. They patted their pockets and showed off snacks: Swedish fish, grapes, GU Energy Chews, a Honey Stinger Energy Waffle. Susan showed up with nothing in her pockets. She starved herself while they ran, then went home and binged on pancakes her husband made for her and their kids. She was nursing and always hungry. “I have to impose my own controls,” Susan told them. Carlie stretched her sore calves against the curb. They would run eleven miles, training for a half marathon that fall. Sometimes Julian got up while she was running and made oatmeal. Sometimes she came home and he was still in bed.

After some distractions—his father’s strokes, Carlie’s breast cancer—they were older than Julian thought they should be. Living in temporary housing in this small Nebraska town like kids still trying out life. He knew they’d lucked into jobs at the same university, but so far from an urban cultural mecca, in this room surrounded by weeds and this town surrounded by fields, it sometimes felt like he and Carlie had been packed in cotton and stuck in a box to rot while the world moved on without them. At first, a baby had been the center spoke around which cycled things like: save money, get tenure, buy a house, accept the landscape. But they had accumulated nothing, their desires for the future a small Ferris wheel they rode around and around until three years passed and they hadn’t moved an inch. Carlie said, “A little longer” and “It won’t be forever.” She was settling for barely-sufficient or else bearing it like some self-punishing ascetic. The sky was so big here that even what looked nearby was distant. Just last year her hair reached the length it was

before chemo. She was already almost too old to have a child.

They crossed campus at a steady pace. Susan reported the pains of nursing, missed sleep, reality splintering like hacked-at wood. Carlie nodded, glad that was not her life. With so much cultivated green space, the towering oaks and neat flower beds, it was a shock emerging to a four-lane road beside a water treatment plant. They ran uphill to a path overlooking soybean fields and a six-track railroad where almost always a snake of black and red boxcars passed. “It’s not terrible,” Susan said. “The world goes soft. Whoever’s complaining gets muted.” Carlie had watched amazed as Susan went through her third pregnancy. The slow expansion of her stomach beneath running shirts until it bulged; the thick white band she had to wear so her back didn’t hurt. The quick deflation; the excess flesh that still hung around five months later, though that dwindled, too. Anne passed Carlie a grape. Susan refused. Crops surrounded this town; trains ran like arteries. Exercising in the morning meant the whole day lay before Carlie with its summer flatness: she would read, write, make food, eat. The three of them were the same age: thirty-eight. All on their way to tenure. Count that an equal attribute. * * *

Julian stood near the coffee machine until the smell hit his brain. He held it in his lungs, walked back to the bedroom, made the bed neatly, then breathed in another gulp as he fed Leonardo, a great excitement for the cat, and the only time he wasn’t sleeping. The smell of cat food made Julian nauseous. He booted his laptop on the kitchen counter to be close to the coffee maker. He liked its burble, the oceanic microcosm inside the pitcher. He tried not to think about science fairs or his father, living half a country away,

poorly monitored by Julian’s distracted mother. He thought Carlie ran too much. Her legs ached; she moaned sometimes at night, thrashing around, stuffing pillows between her legs. Carefully, so she wouldn’t notice, he watched her and worried. How her body would shift if she did get pregnant. How she could get sick again. They trusted things in their life that could turn dangerous, like vents spewing mold particles, pollinating weeds, the cat. He wished he could crawl inside his wife’s body and see for himself her bones, heart, blood vessels, cells. He had always liked the idea of the nuclear family, people kept close to a center.

“We’ll take a weekend, see a show in Lincoln.” Carlie felt a drop in her energy around mile three, a shift toward lightheadedness. She stuffed a Swedish fish in her mouth, clamped down on it. “That’s not a real vacation,” Anne said. “We’re trying to build a life,” Carlie said. “Houses are expensive. Babies.” When she wasn’t running, her muscles ached, and her heels – she slept on her side with a pillow between her knees to avoid too much pressure. “Smart to stay focused,” Susan said. “You don’t want to run out of time.” How could you not want to follow this path, know its layers of prairie grass and wildflowers, the stream that ran awhile beside it, the healthy trees growing over rotted ones? Something about the combination of flat landscape and the crazy gusting wind; she had not run so much before moving to Nebraska. She sucked the warm, sweet juice from the fish, her head dizzy with sugar and love for the world.

Julian sat on the living room carpet in sweatpants, with his coffee and his laptop, and the cat sleeping nearby. The windows were painted shut, and the AC was on the fritz. Last night he’d told Carlie he was sick of this stagnated life where all he did was worry. “I need something to look forward

to.” He hadn’t even been able to eat the complicated meal they’d made—chicken flambe with Irish whiskey and cream— the pleasure of deciphering recipe lines more satisfying than putting it in his mouth and chewing. “You’ve got to be ready for the downsides,” she’d said. She ate so slowly and methodically that blinking was sometimes the only way he knew she was still human. “Play tennis,” she’d said. “Take a trip, buy something. A baby can’t be a coping mechanism for life.” He’d left his plate full at the table. She’d followed him to the bedroom. “We used to be calm about things.” He’d dropped into his office chair and spun twice around, smiling. “Who isn’t calm?” Watching him, she’d gathered her hair into a fist and tugged as though reminding herself it was still there. One night during chemo she’d dozed with a textbook on the couch, and Leonardo lunged at her neck. She had puncture wounds; she’d sobbed for hours, saying they had to get rid of him. But they never did. They hadn’t even made that small change to dispose of this dangerous animal. “I don’t want you miserable,” she’d said, still tugging her hair in the doorway. He’d understood; she wanted him to pretend. He’d turned to his computer. Write another book. Teach another class. Trust Leonardo won’t lunge. Each day they plowed through not dying was sufficient. * * *

She knew by landmarks when they’d hit three, four, five miles: an iron fence with a lion’s head, a faded stop sign, a face in a tree trunk missing a nose, a trailer park with sealed windows. A disinterested audience. Her battle with cancer had been like a pregnancy; nine months where her body wasn’t her own. Chemo had made her weak and nauseous; she had stayed in bed eating the broth and crackers Julian brought her. Cells multiplying. That year had aged him. Even when he had smiled she had seen the future in his forehead, when one

or both of them would be weak like this, needing care, like babies. Julian still paced some nights saying, “What’s next?” and “We haven’t moved,” and she didn’t know how to explain about her body. Couldn’t he see she was always moving? At five and a half miles, they reached a wooded park with trails and morning fishers and a lake full of geese. She split a waffle with Anne. Susan hugged her stomach, jogged toward the lake, waited for them to finish. They acknowledged the beauty of the sun shining down on all of it, and they turned and started back toward campus.

Julian opened the door so the cool morning blew through the screen. He couldn’t remember how many miles she’d said; he’d asked her to run with a phone; she’d refused. He looked at the irises Carlie had pointed to growing among weeds like How bad could a place be if there are flowers? Birds chirped, and behind them, a distant beeping. Gravel popped from tires rolling across it, a neighbor backing out of a drive. But the irises looked wrecked, like someone had come along and squeezed normal flowers, leaving petals disarrayed, stuck at odd angles, some barely holding on. Leonardo wandered into the kitchen with his back shaky leg. Julian knew he should listen to his body, eat a banana, sit on the couch, tell himself there was plenty of time. A breeze bent the flowers into weeds, and his stomach ached.

Around mile nine, the conversation turned to food. New recipes, breakfast plans, reducing sugar, what gave energy. The path curved through an overgrown patch where prairie grass turned to dirt and bushes tangled with rotting branches. Out of the shady patch, just ahead of Carlie, Susan stumbled. Her legs wild, she fell to the cement path, caught herself with her hands, pulled them back scraped and bloody. “You okay?” Carlie asked, offering a hand. She wanted to

keep moving. “When’s the last time you ate?” Anne asked. Susan sat on the path, legs sprawled, studying her palms. Anne held out an energy chew, and Susan pushed it away. “It’s not worth dying for,” Anne said. Susan stared at the folds of her stomach. “I’m never going to be who I was.” She put her hand out for the chew. Carlie made herself sit beside her though she had that flutter in her chest when she stopped too quickly. She wanted to keep running. She watched a train move steadily against the horizon. Just breathe, let the world accumulate its minutes. Soon she would drive home and pet her cat; she’d shower and braid her wet hair, which had grown back thin and stiff but as far down her back as she liked. She’d go into the kitchen because surely Julian would be awake by then, hungry, and she’d find him chopping at the counter, smiling at her in a way that said the irises and the weeds are fine.

craig beaven a sPiDer nameD JeFFerson Davis

At the Original Grave of Jefferson Davis, Metairie, Louisiana, body disinterred Monument to the spider held inside one hundred twenty years, Nephila clavipes, she spins a golden orb, is her oldest known species, fills the tomb with pale silk once used by slaves to dress wounds. Instar where the body was the phase between stages of molting, their sticky yellow webs stick to your face and hands, Nephila often builds them higher to the sky, builds only one web her year-long life. There at the top glittering like a brooch— does the spider know her name is Jefferson Davis, here lies chiseled in marble, that she is the last to bear the name, descending the glistening line she makes, Jefferson Davis,

rules a country made fragile, nest of blonde, empire of stone and pollen, all history should be this way: walking through we break it, pause to rub it from our hair and eyes

elise chaDWicK

uPhill

When I pass the barren cornfield newly plowed, where bell bottomed butternut squash rest sideways scattered like corpses on a battlefield, I pump and steer and pump some more ignoring my wobbly knees, panting lungs, and fingertips gone numb from a too tight grip on the handlebars.

Nowadays it takes mostly nerve, faith in equilibrium, and confidence that the truck, so near I can feel the breath of his engine, will brake when I steer clear of potholes, broken glass and lumps of roadkill fragrant and swarming with flies, smeared across both lanes of the country road.

But it wasn’t always like this.

When the training wheels came off and I mastered backwards footbrakes the world pulsed with possibility. I could ride alone to the schoolyard where packs of big kids smoked cigarettes and threw rocks at rumbling trolley cars and educate myself on how to be cool. Or I could ride by myself to the square

park my bike in the metal rack and wander the aisles of the pharmacy before stopping in at Bob’s for a roll of Lifesavers to stash in my pocket for safe keeping during the pedal home.

Though it’s never safe to look back to check that the deep whistle trailing behind is only the wind, at this late hour, I steady my eye on rolling terrain ahead comforted still in knowing how to downshift for that last climb home.

alter ego

Where was she planning to go— the fraudster who stole my credit card— and did she have to abort her road trip when the card was declined by Hertz? Or did she nod with nonchalance and pull another plastic square from her back pocket ready to swipe, ripe for processing and theft.

I study my credit card statement, teeming with fraudulent charges and conjure the life of hipster luxury my fake self has been enjoying— starting at the organic bakery coop hoodie up, earbuds in, where I sip a soy latte, nibble neatly on a parmesan rosemary scone and save a couple of gluten free cowgirl cookies to share later with a fraudster friend. Next, I browse the Kings Boutique, select a pair of silver cascading drop earrings, look in the mirror to admire them against my olive skin and natural waves, before finding respite for my weary feet in a pair of silver and rhinestone espadrilles.

What a chill life of indulgence my fake self leads

there on the West Coast among the laid-back palm trees and Zen masters.

It doesn’t take the phone representative long to untangle the fake from the real: recurrent co-pays to the on-line pharmacy, monthly donation to public radio, weekly purchases at Shoprite a big box grocer that stocks cooking oil in jars big enough for bathing and tubs of peanut butter sure to last through the apocalypse. A case file is opened and the representative assures meif foundthe fraudster will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

When I travel to the West Coast to visit her in jail

I will bring a bag of brioche knots from the coop bakery that we love.

Jamie etheriDge

Prom night

No one asked me to dance, so I stood on the outer rim of the crowd, like a meteorite caught in an asteroid belt, floating among the debris and space junk, waiting for the magic to occur.

I was space junk, extraneous, a girl who went with a friend whose boyfriend then showed up, and so I sidled off to the sidelines and planned to leave by myself, take the requisite prom photo, and down a Dixie cup of the vodka-laced punch before calling my mom for a ride home. But then my friend pulled me back into the swirling mass. After a few sweaty dances, a chorus of “Tainted Love” echoing up to the ceiling in the hotel ballroom, and boys in rented tuxedos smacking our butts as we sashayed back and forth to the powder room, we slid out of our dresses and pulled on T-shirts and shorts. Then we stuffed ourselves into the narrow back seat of an older classmate’s CRX and went to Dauphin Island to drink warm beer and watch the moon glitter and sparkle on the inkblack water.

We’d made it. Milestone moment achieved, and here we sat, waiting for that coming of age, John Hughes-fulcrum to leapfrog us to adulthood in a twinkling. By that time, most of us had already kissed boys. In bare feet ankle-deep in the damp sand, the boy’s breath smelled of beer and cigarettes as his cold, clammy hand snaked up the back of my shirt.

We knew our social rankings wouldn't change no matter how beautifully cut our gowns, how well styled our hair, or how frequently we reapplied the seashell pink lipstick Momma bought from the local drugstore. But still, we believed or at least pretended to think that the moment

meant something. So, we dug our toes into cold, caked sand, leaned into the warm chests of indifferent boys, and imagined our futures: The cars we would drive. The children we’d have. The destinations we’d go to for our dream honeymoon. We’d been taught since early childhood to believe in princess fairy tales, the belle of the ball, gowns floating across a dance floor in glittering pink or gold, and that magical moment when all your dreams come true. We believed that first comes love, then comes marriage, then mama pushes a baby carriage while papa works.

That night I wasn’t sure whether I believed in the certainty of a well-planned life, but also, I had no alternative. I didn’t have a vision, a dream, or even a ride home; only a crumpled, mint green satin ball gown wadded up in a gym bag in the trunk and an aching wish to belong. I kept waiting, wondering when it would happen, if it would happen, that watershed moment—that decisive spark that would send me tumbling like scattered debris through space toward a future I could imagine, a woman I could become.

I stayed quiet, even when I realized that there would be no fairy godmother arriving this night, waving her wand to save me from poverty and pre-algebra, no foot-fetishizing prince toting jelly sandals around the neighborhood. I took another swig of beer. It stung when the boy ignored me afterward. I let the disappointment seep out of the sides of my eyes when no one was looking.

The night remained murky and starless. Our breath soured; our voices slurred. At dawn, we finally climbed back over the sand berms and sedge grasses that scratched our bare legs and piled into the CRX to head home. Aquanet hair pasted to our foreheads in tangled mats and smeared eyeliner streaked our faces, hungover, disenchanted and children still.

timothy Fox

the DeaD have their DeaD

i found an old blackandwhite photograph of a gravestone in the family plot in gospel texas // the stone is marked infant // born and died may eighth nineteenandeleven // i asked great aunt florence who the infant was but she said she didnt know

they useta have lotsa babies back then and whosever it was otta be buried nearby

there is a shadow in the bottom righthand corner // the photographer // their back to the sun

brett thomPson

40 remind me again

i am not in mourning the harshest winter is over and the grass in renewal (sharp, agrestal)

afternoons soon for dark coffee and circuits around our little lake -two daughtersone oversized heart

thudding across my chest

Lord, give me breath

keep my fists unclenched defrost my eyes just once to watch them pluck

pistils of flowers from the side of your road

dogwood

honeysuckle

forsythia

there is no end to suffering

brett thomPson

hunger

Just give me a little more another sunset spilling out across the yard one last lazy afternoon spent in the shade.

I am not asking much, a few more breathes please, allow this spring, cicadas, thrushes, ivory petals in every bramble, trees pregnant

with peaches that will soon be bursting. Excuse me my upbringing, two loving parents the three bedrooms in the clapboard house

with no open windows that ever spoke or wept. All about us, the day remains long. There is such hunger in the trees.

Would we be the ones to allow this bounty to spoil?

Are my daughters not the stewards of this land?

With two silver nets they twirl in their long skirts under the cool, broad leaves. They are shouting and laughing all the time now.

Their legs are strong.

Their mouths are wide open.

J.t. toWnley

DoWn so long

By the time Phil’s lackey came knocking, things were already getting out of hand. We’d hocked our harps, for one thing, and now we kept hearing phantom arpeggios. We sold our robes, too, replacing them with skinny jeans and oversized flannel shirts and hoodies. We all wore hats: beanies and ballcaps, Kangols and cycling caps, fedoras and berets. We had a lot to hide. It was no surprise that Phil found us. Not after what we’d been up to. We were sprawled out in the living room, sipping Beaujolais from Mason jars and watching a Celeste movie marathon on Celeste’s huge TV. She was currently shooting on location in Tuscany. None of us had ever met her, though we loved her films. We passed around a spliff. It was just for effect: we couldn’t feel a thing.

Then came hammering at the enormous front door. We froze, eyes darting toward the exits: sliding glass doors, automated windows, a series of skylights thirty feet up. We put out the smoke, lowered the volume. An angry fist thumped the door into submission. Something told us the jig was up.

Silence for a bloated moment, followed by the rattle of key and latch. The huge door swung open, but it wasn’t Celeste. Instead, Phil’s flunky, Donovan, appeared in the hall, white wings aflutter.

“Come on in, Donny.”

He minced toward us. His pinched expression looked incongruous with his golden headgear. “I can’t believe you made me come all the way down here,” he said.

We patted the couch cushions. “Take a load off.”

Donovan gazed down over his aquiline nose. “This

whole thing has put Phil in a very bad mood.”

We laughed too loudly.

“I’m not kidding,” he said, hands on his hips. Beyond the huge panes of glass, breakers crashed onto the sand.

Donovan dug in his satchel for papers attached to a clipboard. “You’re in big trouble. You know that, right?”

“Someone pour Donny a drink,” we said, then passed him a jar of red.

“That is not the blood of Christ,” said Donovan, waving us away, knocking it from our hands. The Beaujolais splattered all over Celeste’s white shag rug.

We exaggerated our appraisal of the multi-million dollar mansion, its polished concrete floors, exposed beams, and walls of glass. “How will she ever replace it?” we said.

Donovan gave us his best paternal stare. “You shouldn’t be here in the first place.”

We grimaced, waving away his words like smoke wisps.

“Phil knows what you’ve been up to,” he said, examining the papers attached to his clipboard. “We have an itemized list of infractions. Phil’s had to invent a gold star system just so he can give you demerits.”

One of us relit the spliff with a platinum Zippo. The room soon filled with aromatic smoke.

“Item one,” said Donovan. “Hustling tourists. That includes shell games, pickpocketing, and—he chewed his lip—confidence scams involving promises of corporeal pleasures.”

We scratched our beards, fiddled with our hoodie tassels, and gazed out the windows at the stretch of virgin sand.

“Item two: selling happy smoke.”

That made us chuckle. We passed the joint around. It was an annoying affectation, but it helped prop up the

personae we’d created.

Donovan wagged a finger in our faces. “Need I continue? You went AWOL. You’re acting like complete ingrates. You’re supposed to be protecting them.”

One of us turned up the TV volume.

“Phil wants you home posthaste,” said Donovan.

“What was that?” we said, cranking up the volume even more.

“I said, Phil wants you—"

“Good to see you, Donny.” We stared at him. He stared back at us, his face a clerkish question mark. Then we said: “Have a safe trip home.”

We were only chasing a dream. That was the whole reason we went to Los Angeles in the first place, same as everybody else. We’d heard all the stories. Not all of our kind stayed up there in that opalescent prison, whiling away the time plucking harps and singing. Not all of us did what we were told. Take, for example, George Aster and Katherine Ether, international superstars of the silver screen. Or Tom Stellar, Astral Andrews, and, most famous of all, the great Jimmy Devine. Their origins may not have been common knowledge, but they’d been just like us, white-robed drudges at the bottom of the celestial hierarchy—until they wised up and went out on their own.

Trouble was, auditions were tough to come by, no matter how many palms we greased. It was all we could manage to snag screen tests for TV commercials: Glistermint toothpaste, Fire & Ice unguent. Maybe we needed more grease? Offers weren’t exactly coming thick and fast, so when we weren’t hustling tourists, we staged scenes from Banishèd and Adiós, Saint Peter on Abbot Kinney or the Strand. (It’s possible that, on occasion, we might’ve used such performances as a pretext for hustling.) Somehow, nobody seemed to recognize our greatness.

One afternoon down on the Strand, as we performed another dramatic scene, a pair of confederates worked the crowd, liberating wallets from pockets. Spectators’ laughter made it all seem okay. When the show was over, the tourists wandered up the boardwalk or out to the beach. That’s when we noticed the old blind man in dark sunglasses. His nappy hair bore streaks of gray. His strange scent of sandalwood and sweat wafted toward us. Something about him seemed familiar. He sat on a folding chair, cradling a beat-up old guitar. The open case at his feet was sprinkled with the spare change of passers-by.

“Some show,” he said.

We exaggerated bows and curtsies by way of thanks.

He chuckled into his fist. “That wasn’t no compliment.”

“It wasn’t?”

“Really?”

“Why?”

Fat seagulls shrieked, swooping at trash barrels.

“Oh, y’all got it down pat. No doubt about that.”

We exchanged glances amongst ourselves.

“Only thing is,” he said, “y’all ain’t actors.”

We gritted our teeth. Was he an undercover cop, wise to our wily ways?

“I can hear it in the way y’all deliver them lines. Got what you call a mellifluous quality.” The blind man’s gaze bore through us. “Don’t tell me: y’all singers, right?”

We shook our heads, crossed our arms, toed at knots in the two-by-sixes underfoot.

“Singers?”

“Us?”

“Who are you kidding?”

We wanted to make more forceful denials, but we’ve always been lousy liars. It’s the cloth from which we’re cut.

“Come on now,” he said from behind his dark glasses, strumming an open E. (The D-string was a quarter-step flat.) Y’all can’t fool me. He played a quick progression—E-A7B 7 -A 7 -E7—then fiddled with the tuning. Let’s sing us a ditty together.

We shuffled in place, surging with panic. Now he picked a walking intro and sang:

Been down so long, look like up to me. Said I been down so long, look like up to me. Need a miracle to save me, O Lawd, where can He be?

We admit it: we were enraptured. Not that he was the first street musician we’d run into. They were a dime a dozen around here, screeching and banging on banjos, ukuleles, and pawn-shop harps. But this guy was different. His music put a spell on us. We were tapping our feet and clapping in time. We might’ve even launched into four-part harmony if another shrieking seagull hadn’t splatted right next to us. That snapped us out it. We hadn’t sung a note since arriving in the City of Angels, and we didn’t plan to start now. We shoved each other, staggering and stumbling away. Our minds had never felt so muddy. Before we were out of earshot, the blind man said: “Okay, y’all run along now. Just remember what they say: One who follows his nature keeps his original nature in the end.”

We needed to work more quickly. We could see it in each other’s eyes, though nobody wanted to say it aloud. The idea came to us later that day, as we passed around a spliff and tried not to think about the near-miss. One of us procured a Map to the Stars, which detailed the residential locations of

Hollywood’s most famous actors. The next day, as the sun rose in a burst of radioactive pinks and greens, we signed up for an open-air bus celebrity home tour. Think: Brad Bitte and Chris Fir, Jennifer Lee and Amanda Adams—all the hottest A-listers. We saw where they lived and how. We learned how long they’d been there. We listened to ballpark estimates of their net worth. It was a valuable research endeavor.

Back home (Celeste’s home), we sat around a huge, hand-crafted table, drumming our fingers against the lacquered cherry, listening to the wall clock tick-tock. Then, at last, someone spoke:

“It’s too risky.”

“It’s too far.”

“We could buy a van.”

“With what money?”

“That’s the whole point, right?”

“Part of the point.”

“Let’s not quibble.”

“But the traffic.”

“It’s awful.”

Getting to anywhere from the beach took hours, not to mention all the honking and screaming, vulgar gestures and macho head-games.

“Still, we can’t foul our own nest.”

“You mean Celeste’s?”

“Let’s not split hairs.”

“We’ll make it too easy for them.”

“Who’s them?”

“You know, the cops.”

“LAPD?”

“With the badges and guns.”

“It’s not like they can kill us.”

“That won’t stop them from trying.”

We chewed our lips. We stared at the carefully ripped

holes in our secondhand designer denim. Someone lit a joint, and as we puffed and shared, we wished in silence that it would make our heads spin.

Then someone said: “What if we went north?”

“As in, San Francisco?”

“How would we get there?”

“Bus?”

“Train?”

“Plane?”

“All I meant was Santa Monica.”

Eyes widened. Grins glistered. A thin plume of cannabis smoke slithered toward the thirty-foot ceiling.

“There’s an idea.”

We nodded, chuckling. And just like that, we had a plan.

It wasn’t the swag we were after. Not exactly. Of course, none of us minded laying our hands on precious luxury goods selected by rich and famous movie stars—Bucci sunglasses and Strada boots, silk Marponi ties and diamondencrusted Tök-Jaar watches. And there was the thrill of it. Our small troupe of misfits slinking through the shadows, snipping security wires, jimmying locks. We didn’t have to go to all the trouble, since we could’ve easily breezed in through an open window or wafted through a wall, but how much fun would that have been? We marveled at exposed bricks and fifty-foot ceilings, floor-to-ceiling glass and concrete so polished we could see our reflections in it. We enjoyed those stars’ mid-century modern furnishings, their abstract paintings and sculptures, their trinkets from on-location shoots in Tibet, Japan, and India. Hollywood memorabilia, too, especially autographed photos in exotic locales. We commandeered what we couldn’t live without. Mostly, though, we stuck to what was easy to transport and easier to

hock: clothing, footwear, and jewelry.

Eyes on the prize.

Night after night, we made our raids. Problems were rare. The few Rottweilers and Dobermans we encountered were easily subdued with heavenly manna. Everything was going to plan. We’d slip inside, run our fingers over the rare pink granite countertops, slide down endless hardwood hallways, then locate the master bedroom and pillage the closets. We layered dresses, blouses, and jackets or pants, shirts, and blazers. We strapped on necklaces and bracelets, watches and rings. We pocketed gold cufflinks and thousanddollar ties. Shoes posed a different challenge, but they were worth their weight in gold (Vouvoutins and Jonny Woos and Valentinis), so we loaded up gym bags, leather satchels, and André Buisson luggage with as many pairs as would fit. Then, exuding nonchalance, we strolled back home.

One night we were lingering in Tomás de la Cruz’s steel-and-glass beach palace after a gourmet meal delivered from Giorgio’s. Not that we suffered from hunger or thirst. That was beside the point. One of us opened another bottle of Burgundy and topped up our glasses.

Then, without warning, there was Phil, lounging next to us on the leather sectional. One minute, empty space, the next, Phil. None of us could do that. Rank had its privileges.

“Howdy, friends,” he said.

We nodded, faux-smiled, shifted uncomfortably in our seats. We poured him a glass of wine and set it on the coffee table in front of him.

“Much obliged,” said Phil, “but I won’t be partaking of your little shindig.”

We gave each other subtle looks. We found Phil’s manner irksome.

“See, that elixir don’t belong to you. Same as that

couch, this room, this whole house—not to mention them clothes y’all got on and the bags of shoes piled up over yonder by the door.”

“It’s not like Tomás is gonna miss any of it.”

“He’s a millionaire movie star.”

“I’m sure he’s got insurance.”

Phil laced and unlaced his fingers. His wings fluttered with irritation. He studied the intricate stitching on his gold Tommy Vacuña boots.

We shielded our eyes from the glow of Phil’s huge belt buckle and waited.

“I sent Donovan down here to deliver a message,” he said, gazing at us one-by-one. His cowboy hat pulsed.

“From what I can tell, y’all ain’t paid a lick of attention. Mind helping me understand why that is?”

Nobody wanted to be the first to speak. Instead, we followed the dance of light from a beach bonfire.

“Well?” said Phil.

We swallowed our wine, then cleared our throats. “It’s just that Donovan’s a—”

“Stand-up guy?” Phil said.

“No, more of a—”

“Loyal sidekick?”

“What I mean is, he’s a—”

“Hyper-efficient professional?”

Phil studied our expressions. His face darkened, even as his buckle glowed and hat pulsed.

“Donny’s more of an annoying—how shall I put this?”

“Toady.”

“Bootlicker.”

“Brown-noser.”

“Lickspittle.”

“Flunky.”

Phil sat there, fuming. He cracked his knuckles, one by one. He rubbed a non-existent smudge off the toe of his golden left boot.

“Now listen up and listen good. The Big Boss himself is mighty disappointed in y’all.”

He let that sink in. We fidgeted where we sat. Our wings ached.

“So cease and desist pronto,” said Phil. We opened a window, and cool salt air wafted in.

“That’s PDQ, if not sooner.”

Muted voices drifted in from the beach. Otherwise, silence.

Phil glared our direction, wings fidgeting. “10-4?”

We didn’t want to kowtow, but what else could we do?

“10-4,” we said.

Our commitment was half-hearted at best. We really just wanted to get rid of Phil. So after a couple of days, we were right back at it. All the cash the resale of those designer clothes generated helped get us spots on even more commercials: Shine soap, Halo shampoo, Divine deodorant. We hadn’t exactly hit the big time—so far, none of us could get an audition for prime time TV, much less a reputable movie of any sort—but we were doing alright. Not that we were proud of ourselves: looking in the dozens of mirrors that hung Celeste’s walls was no picnic. But if we’d learned anything, it was that stardom didn’t come cheap, even for the likes of us.

Then one night, rifling through Mario Estrella’s closets, our situation changed. We were trying on suit jackets, savoring slices of chocolate pie and washing them down with Elysée champagne when we heard a car pull up out front. Just how we noticed anything was a mystery, given we had Band of Angels, Estrella’s breakthrough heist movie, playing at high volume on the 65-inch TV. We lowered the volume

and started switching off lights, hissing Shhh, Shhh, Shhh. We stood there in the semi-dark, tongues thick, whipped cream on our faces. Our headgear radiated rich golden light. We clamped our hats back on and waited.

“What is it?” we asked.

“A car.”

“Make that cars.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“In the street.”

“In the driveway.”

We tiptoed toward the kitchen. Now we noticed the swirl of red-and-blue lights. Doors slammed. Footsteps padded through the xeriscaping. Some officers flanked the house, while others scurried around back. We held our breath, wondering if we should simply float out through the roof and disappear.

“But what if they see us?”

“Won’t that only create bigger problems?”

“The Big Boss would not be happy.”

Then came a rapid thump on the door. “Police! Open up!”

We just stood there in the semi-dark, gaping at each other. No one had a clue what to do. We did nothing, hoping they’d get frustrated and go away. We were simple like that.

Not two minutes later, they kicked in the door and crashed into the room, pistols drawn. Their Mag lights blinded us. They spoke only in exclamations: “Hands up! On the floor! Now!”

It wasn’t easy to comply with their commands, since our hands were full: pie plate and whipped cream canister, champagne flutes and wine bottle. Those brutes knocked them all to the concrete floor in a cacophony of clanking metal and shattering glass. Some of us had already begun

layering on the pants and shirts, so we couldn’t raise our arms above our shoulders, and bending at the knees was all but impossible. L.A.’s finest assisted with jackboot kicks and billyclub swats. They had us in handcuffs in nothing flat.

They placed us in separate holding cells, then asked us all the wrong questions. They only wanted facts: who did what with whom and when. They were missing the bigger picture. We tried to explain it to them, to help them understand the rationale for our choices, but they weren’t having any of it. When we said, But you’ve got it all wrong, they hauled back and slapped us in the mouth. We stopped trying to explain.

Once the police had what they needed, they locked us up together in a group cell. The walls and floors were stained, and the air was heavy with a sour, vinegary stench. We hugged—one by one, then as a group. We tried to ignore the gawking and gaping of other delinquents in the adjacent cages. We sat there in silence for a long time, pondering our fate.

Later, a cop came in, smirking and rattling his billy club against the bars. He spat on the stained concrete floor. “Lo and behold,” he said. “You got a visitor.”

“Hurrah,” we cheered. Though who even knew we were here?

We’d seen all the crime melodramas, so we expected the officer to lead us to another room with a plexiglass wall and a little phone we’d use to talk to our visitor. Instead, he sneered at us, then stepped back through the doorway. We clutched the bars of the cage, butterflies flitting around inside us.

That’s when Phil sidled into the room. He sported starched Hombres and a long-sleeved plaid Western shirt with his golden boots and cowboy hat, his impressively large wings in plain view. His belt buckle seemed to radiate even more

light than usual. The cop paid no attention. Phil’s flunky Donovan skittered in behind him, hunched over, eyes glued to his clipboard.

“You got five minutes,” said the cop.

“Much obliged, officer.”

Phil loped over and took in the whole scene, shifting a golden toothpick around in his mouth. He clucked his tongue, shook his head, and shifted his hat back, exposing a broad, leathery forehead. “Well, I’ll be,” he said.

We said nothing.

“Caught red-handed, huh? What’s that highfalutin way of putting it?”

Donovan leaned in: “In flagrante, Archangel sir.”

“Yessir, that’s the one.” Phil studied us. “Now what’d I tell y’all about carrying on with your crimes and misdemeanors?”

We didn’t respond for a long time. Someone in another cage belched. Then came donkey laughter. A minor scuffle broke out but quickly fizzled into half-hearted insults. Nobody was shivved.

After a time we said, “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Phil sucked his mustache. “What don’t?”

“We disabled the security system, right?”

We nodded.

“Coulda been there was a backup,” said Phil. We all knew there wasn’t. We’d checked.

“How did anyone even know we were there?”

Phil smiled, picking his teeth. “Y’all were reckless and sloppy. Neighbors probably heard you.”

“Uh-uh.”

“The houses next door were dark.”

“And there was a birthday party across the street.”

Phil shifted his weight. Donovan looked even more skittish than usual. A cold, wet feeling seeped into us.

“Don’t matter a lick,” said Phil, clapping his meaty paws together. “Y’all got yourselves busted, no two ways about it. As you might imagine, the Big Boss is none too pleased. Said y’all are besmirching our reputation. How’d he put it, Donny?”

Donovan leafed through his pages. “Making us look ugly, he said.”

“Maybe somebody tipped them off?” we said.

“The Big Boss?” said Phil.

Donovan snickered. “The operative word is omniscient.”

“Them,” we said. “The cops.”

“Now y’all are just getting paranoid.”

“Maybe someone trying to make his point known sold us out?”

“You hearing what I’m hearing, Donny?”

“Yes, Archangel sir.”

“Somebody,” we said, “trying to shepherd home the flock before the Big Boss notices anything.”

“Because it sounds like these jailbirds are pointing the finger at Yours Truly.”

“Indeed it does, sir.”

We white-knuckled the cell bars, glaring at him. “A certain someone,” we said, “who was hoping to frighten us into submission.”

Now he pulled his hat down tight, gazing at us from under the brim. “Donny and me come down here outta the goodness of our hearts, and here y’all are making unfounded accusations.”

We studied our high-end Italian loafers and fashion boots.

“Okey-doke,” Phil said. “Guess y’all don’t need no help from the likes of us.”

He gave us a hard stare, then turned on his heel and

clomped out. Donny followed.

Not forty-five minutes later—miracle of miracles!— they cut us loose.

After the arrest, we strongly considered the straight and narrow. We even tried to go back to our duties, though the effort was half-hearted. The citizens we scouted already had protection anyway, and we didn’t want to step on anyone else’s turf. Anyway, who were we kidding? We weren’t guardians and never would be.

We lounged on the beach for hours, moping in the hot sun.

Time passed. Our mood grew despondent. A couple of us donned hair shirts and dabbled in self-flagellation, while others toyed with the idea of going back. Neither lasted long. For one thing, how could we ever work under Phil again, after what he’d done? And while none of us would admit it, we weren’t sure we could face the Big Boss. Not that we’d ever even met him. All the same, we were sure he’d call us into his office, one by one, as soon as we stepped through the gates. We’d be forced to grovel. That prospect alone was enough to keep us in L.A. for the rest of eternity.

Nobody planned on the singing. We were idling on the boardwalk one morning, humming and whistling without even realizing it. Then one of us broke into song: Gloria in excelsis Deo. Without missing a beat, the rest of us fell right in, tight harmonies and all. It was just this reflex we had. Our voices still blended well. When we resolved the chord progression, the final notes rang out, pitch-perfect and golden, in the warm, salty air.

A cyclist rang her bell. A skateboarder clattered by, yelling, Dig it, bro! A gaggle of tourists in matching khaki shorts reached for their wallets. When the hubbub died down, we smelled sandalwood and sweat mingling with the salt air.

One minute, empty boardwalk, the next, that old blind guy in the dark glasses. He sat on his folding chair, cradling his guitar in his lap, his face a huge grin.

“Now that’s what I call mellifluous,” he said. We weren’t sure if we should thank him, so we just nodded and smiled.

“Like I said: y’all ain’t no actors. Never was.” We didn’t disagree.

Waves crashed. Surfers whooped and hollered. Seagulls didn’t come anywhere near us.

The old blind man played a bluesy lick, then arpeggiated an E7. “Well,” he said, “y’all ready?”

“Ready?”

“What do you mean?”

“For what?”

“Don’t act a fool. Y’all ain’t got no talent for it. But we already been through all that, right?” He grinned and exaggerated a wink. “We gonna blend your tune with my ditty,” he said. “Just follow my lead.”

When he launched into Down So Long blues, we didn’t fret or hand-wring. We didn’t worry about a thing. We just belted it out, right on cue. Nothing could’ve been simpler. What we sang together was a strange mix of gritty and ethereal. When we’d finished the first song, we sang another, and another after that. The crowd thickened, mounding filthy lucre at our feet. We sang and sang some more. We were finally feeling like ourselves again: light, golden, transcendent. Our brows lost their furrows. Our minds went empty and clear. Our smiles were radiant.

When it was over, the old blind guy put his guitar away and folded up his chair, then stood there in the dusky light, grinning. “Forget all that acting nonsense,” he said. “Y’all got pipes. Use ’em.”

We nodded, beaming.

He adjusted his dark glasses, patted his pockets, then picked up his guitar case and folding chair. “Be good, now,” he said.

“Will do.”

“Always.”

“You, too.”

“See y’all again real soon,” he said.

“Sounds good.”

“See ya.”

“Thanks!”

Then, all at once, his glasses were gone, and he gazed at us with clear, ice blue eyes. “One more thing,” he said. “Take it easy on the Big Boss, okay?”

Our chins dropped. Our tongues lolled. We studied each other in silent disbelief, our mouths full of unformed questions. Waves crashed. Seagulls shrieked. A gust of wind sprayed us with sand. We wiped our faces and blinked. We blinked again and gazed toward the old blind guy, but he was already gone.

aFter the storm

It hasn’t rained since and the crow  comes every day, its crooked wing, a cardboard reminder, scrawled on which, black-on-black,  a message kept from the sky   about how its weight only increases every day.  My sister came back from her driver’s test  and I found her passport photographs  lying by the gate, two down, one up  like a game of cups and balls.  She’d failed a second time   and I returned the pictures exactly   as I had found them, still not knowing  if it was her in the other two.  My brother, who is in another city  becomes a person for ten minutes in a day.  The rest of the time he is a very lazily growing  hole in the earth into which things fall  without a sound, as if the whole bottom  of him is carpeted with felt.  My mother gives the crow rice and dry bread  beside a bowl of water and sitting in her chair  tells me there should be a spray  that can heal a broken wing so that  you don’t have to see these poor things  move less and less when you approach them,  not out of trust, but acceptance   of something equally wrong   with you as with them.  Her imagination is cruel that way.  The crow watches the sunset from our balcony,

letting go of memories of flying, and accepting  what in return?

When it’s dark, it is lost and we prepare  ourselves equally for seeing it there  the next day and finding it gone.  We prepare ourselves for that among many,  many other things.

abhisheK mehta

lay DoWn the Day

In that first clear minute  after the day-long rain had stopped,   the clouds were thoroughly wrung-out lumps  curling slowly back to their natural shapes.  The water that stuck to the trees  all along the street was somehow one quantity,  each drop traceable to the other  and redeemable for none.

A bird crossed overhead while  people opened their windows and emerged  sluggishly from the stuffy day indoors,  their carefully wrinkled faces like old laundry  out from its two-hundredth wash.

Smiling at everything as if they finally trusted  the cycle of being soiled and washed  and soiled again.

abhisheK mehta

a stationary liFe

My uncle’s car stopped in front of our house  and he began unloading the pots  from the back seat, disturbing the night  only as much as was necessary.

A week ago at his retirement party, he’d remarked  how plants are an easy gift; such passive life,  it almost doesn’t exist when you don’t  look at it. Then sometimes  it doesn’t exist even when you do, and whoever  is around when that happens has to suffer  the concentrated weight of a life,  an elephant foot on the chest  when a moment ago, all that was above it   was a clear sky.  He’d gotten so many,  he was giving some to us.  My mother never said no to plants,   she always had a sunny corner in the house  spare, as if it was a thing she lost  too many of on a regular basis.  Walking up the stairs, the sound  of gritty dirt under our shoes,  crusty sighs of worlds collapsing under  the weight of people moving around the props  of a stationary life.

My mother made us lemonade and we drank  looking in different directions, complicit   in something we weren’t quite sure was bad yet.  When his car left in the otherwise silent night,  we went to sleep, the pots bunched up

in one corner where we didn’t know  what they talked about in the moonlight,  if time for them existed constantly   or fell in leaves,  sudden and collected.  Next day  we each, separately,   walked into them,  as if misdirected down a corridor,  not wanting to admit   we were lost.

coree sPencer

King oF the courts

My dad always tells me that nothing feels better than winning. He claims that tennis is a metaphor for life. Gladiators like Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg struggle in front of a crowd, and after the struggle, one is a winner and the other a loser. And that’s life.

My dad, Dick Spencer, has played tennis for over twenty years. He coaches the boys’ tennis team at Minnechaug High School in western Massachusetts, where he’s also an English teacher. According to my dad, he’s one helluva coach. After his team wins a major tournament, the players give him the broken racket award—a spray-painted tennis racket smashed by an opponent from the losing team. He has his high school players read the book, The Inner Game of Tennis, so—like him—they’ll be thinkers as well as winners.

I’m a girl who couldn’t care less about tennis. I prefer to hang outside the tennis courts, throwing a Frisbee with my two sisters while Dad plays. On occasion, he’s forced to play mixed doubles with Mom, but Dad finds playing with a woman frustrating. According to him, every married man has his own mixed doubles handicap—a wife.

Sometimes I watch him play against his best friend, Mr. Holt. I find tennis completely boring, that is, until either my dad or Mr. Holt, or both of them, lose their temper. For me, that’s when tennis gets fun. They curse at themselves, at each other, at God, or at the tennis ball. If that doesn’t work, they have an all-out tantrum, flinging their rackets into the net or kicking their thermoses full of ice water.

It’s 1978, the summer before I enter ninth grade, when my dad gets a job teaching tennis to the residents of the nearby town of Enfield, Connecticut. For a few years now,

he’s been trying to lure me into playing the Sport of Kings. I have absolutely no interest in playing tennis, but I live for ice cream—especially soft serve, which I rarely get, because the only stuff my mom buys is cheap, store brand ice cream on sale at the A&P. He tells me that if I help him with the lessons, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll buy me an ice cream cone at the Dairy Queen on the way home. So two days a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I help my dad with the kids in the afternoon, and the adults in the early evening. In exchange for the mere possibility of soft-serve ice cream, I have to do three things. First, I unload all the city-owned equipment from our VW van and bring it down to the courts: fifty tennis rackets, four large buckets of balls, two huge thermoses of ice water, and a bag of plastic cups. Second, I toss balls for the kids to hit. The third part of my job is to run around gathering up all the balls while Dad teaches backhand swing technique. I do this for two hours for the beginners and intermediate kids. Then the adults show up and I do the same for another two hours.

I work up a sweat sprinting all over the four tennis courts, scooping up balls. I stop and think of the reason why I’m there—chocolate soft-serve ice cream dipped in chocolate jimmies. Dad sees me just standing there, a dopey grin on my face, daydreaming about my ice cream reward. He scoots over, brings his tennis racket back and whacks my butt, shouting, “Hey—come on! More hustle, Coree!”

The only time he’ll break a sweat is if there are a few attractive ladies in his adult class. That’s when he might hit a ball or two himself, just to show off and maybe take his shirt off to wipe perspiration from his face. My dad’s convinced word has gotten out about him—the tall, handsome, muscular tennis instructor who sometimes shows off his bare chest. Every week, a few more middle-aged ladies show up for adult tennis lessons.

One day after I drag equipment down to the courts, I ask Dad, “Can I hit a few balls too?”

Dad whips around, a Cheshire cat grin on his tanned face. “Go get a racket.” I pick out a blue Stan Smith wooden racket from the box of equipment.

With glee, he tosses neon yellow balls to me. The first one comes at me and when I hit it, it makes an odd pinging sound.

“Agggh!” he bellows, pointing to the middle of his racket head. “Aim to hit it on the sweet spot, the center—not the wood!”

He throws another ball. I swing wildly and smack it into the net.

“Come on Coree, you can do better than that!” he growls.

I grit my teeth and wallop the third ball with all my might. It sails over the chain link fence of the tennis court and into the field behind it. He slaps his forehead.

“Geez, you play worse than your dang Mother!”

From then on, I’m allowed to join his kids’ class, but I’m still his lackey, unloading and loading all the equipment and gathering up all the tennis balls.

I start to look forward to tennis lessons, and not just for the occasional ice cream cone. I quickly join my dad’s intermediate kids’ class. After a few weeks I even volley against some of the players in his adult class.

That summer, we spend so much time on the courts that I watch Dad’s tan get darker while my sunburn peels and then I burn again. On days off from our twice-weekly fatherdaughter teaching gig in Connecticut, we spend several hours on our local tennis courts. We pack sandwiches so we don’t have to go home for lunch.

I wrap the handle of my Stan Smith wooden racket with blue gauze tape so I get a better grip—and because

my dad does this too. I’m a pretty quick learner; I can run fast and hit hard. But my dad claims I need to use my head more. He says my brain is as important in tennis as running fast. I think I’m doing just fine slugging it across the net and hoping for the best, so why should I bother to use my brain, especially out here in the hot sun?

He insists I read his tattered paperback copy of The Inner Game of Tennis. I don’t make it past the first few pages. It’s all mumbo-jumbo to me. First he wants me to use my brain to play tennis, and now he wants me to use my inner self too?

I’m a huge frustration for my dad, because for a fourteen-year-old girl, I play pretty well against him, without using either my brain or my inner self.

He’ll stop right in the middle of a volley against me and scream. “Think! Coree! Where do you want to PUT the ball?”

I shrug my shoulders and yell, “Over the net?”

He just shakes his head.

We continue playing for hours every day we can, my dad growling, grunting, and sweating like a lawn sprinkler. I’m on the other side of the net, smiling, quiet, except for when I get to call his serve out of bounds. This is the most time I’ve ever spent alone with my dad. It’s exhilarating that he wants me around, that he needs me to play tennis with him.

When I’m lucky enough to get soft-serve ice cream, my dad and I sit at a picnic table outside the Dairy Queen and he reminds me that he was this close to becoming a professional athlete. He coulda had a chance, but gave it all up when he got married and started teaching. Then my Mom gave him three daughters, so we pretty much killed the possibility of him ever getting on the cover of Sports Illustrated. I think he secretly believes that someday he, Dick

Spencer, will go to Wimbledon and beat all the top players half his age because he alone understands the inner game of tennis.

At home, the two of us watch tennis tournaments on TV. My dad acts out the anguish of every close volley, every overhead smash, every bad call, writhing on the couch or jumping up and shouting to me. “See that shot Jimmy Connors hit into the net? I coulda made that shot! With my eyes shut!”

On some evenings, we play so long at our local courts that we’re late for supper. We volley back and forth endlessly. We always finish by playing a tennis match, best two out of three sets. Occasionally, I win a game. I relish these small victories against him, realizing I could never win an entire set or match against a man who claims he can beat Jimmy Connors—with his eyes shut.

One late summer afternoon, Dad drives our VW van to our local tennis courts. I’m in the passenger seat so I get a front row view of him seething when he sees all six courts are filled with assorted local rank amateurs. For fifteen whole minutes, which for Dad is like an eternity in Hell, he glares at these people playing a wimpy game of tennis.

“Look at those two housewives,” he scoffs. “They’re just tapping the ball back and forth like two little girls!”

“What about me, Dad?” I ask, “I’m a girl?”

“You’re different, Coree. I taught you how to play like a man.”

I look out the rolled-down window and I grin—that’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to me.

I join my dad wincing at the two housewives wasting everyone’s time.

Dad can’t take it anymore. He gets out, slams his door, grabs his equipment and thermos out of the side of the van. I get my racket and follow behind as he pushes open the

chain-link gate with a bang. The two of us stalk around the ladies’ court while they finish up. Dad drops the thermos on the asphalt with a loud thud. For the first time the ladies turn and look at us.

He glares back while they saunter past us to get their water. White towels are draped over their shoulders, even though there’s not a drop of perspiration on them. He’s already bouncing a tennis ball loudly, as if he can drum these two housewives out of here. I feel bad. I know we’re being rude since tennis, as I’ve read in Dad’s tennis magazines, is a gentlemen’s sport. Dad thinks it’s okay for women and girls to play tennis, but we have to know our place. He rooted for Bobby Riggs over Billie Jean King five years ago in the Battle of the Sexes. He still claims Riggs got robbed after losing to Billie Jean in three sets.

Once the ladies leave, I get my terrycloth wristbands on. I twirl my racket. My knees are bent and all my muscles are ready to receive my dad’s rage when he serves to me. I like it when he’s mad because he messes up more.

The ball comes at me like a bright yellow blur and I return it using my backhand.

Dad grunts like Jimmy Connors. I barely make a sound. I just smile at my dad when I make a good shot, and grimace when I miss one. I’m silent rage, but I play angry, just like my dad.

My tread-bare Converse All-Star basketball sneakers pound the asphalt court noiselessly. Dad’s brand new white Adidas tennis sneakers squeak when he stops short to hit a forehand.

That day, all my shots go over the net and stay inside the court. I don’t give Dad any breaks. Maybe I’m finally using my brain because I send one shot to the left corner and the next shot to the right corner, as if I planned it. Dad’s grunts get louder. This attracts other players who are packing

up to leave. But not us, because we keep ending up at deuce. He won the first set and I unbelievably won the second. It is the third and deciding set. Even kids on their bikes grip the chain link fence and lean on it to watch this spectacle of a grown man doing battle with a teenage girl.

I’m out of breath only because I’m giggling. It’s so undignified in this Sport of Kings, but I’m coming so close to beating my dad for the very first time. I’m almost scared. And I giggle when I’m scared. And worst of all for my dad—there are witnesses.

I know, even from way across the net, that my dad wants to wipe this smile right off my face. And he almost does. He sprints to the net and smashes an overhead shot that whizzes past my cheek. I duck and smirk even more, because he’s so mad—and he’s losing his game. I sprint back just in time as his shot lands on the line and in-bounds. I wallop the ball back way over his head while he stands at the net.

“Agggh!” He shouts as he turns around and scurries back to the baseline. He’s so off balance he almost falls when he swings, but even worse—he hits the ball into the net.

I stand on my baseline, twirling my racket, a grin on my face. I have the advantage on deuce again. This is for the match point.

I return my dad’s next serve. He swings and I hear an odd ping. I know he hasn’t hit it with the sweet spot of the racket but on the wood. I look up as the ball comes back to me, sailing way over my head. I turn and watch it plink on the chain link fence behind me. It’s so far out of bounds he can’t even reasonably argue that it’s in.

I hear gasps from the onlookers. I turn around and smile at my dad.

He’s stunned.

I throw my arms skyward, waving my racket over my head. Then I jump up and down, shouting, “I won! I won!”

All I can think is, my dad has lost to a girl—a fourteen-year-old girl! Just like Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, I beat my dad!

From way across the net I see his face, so red from fury, from the heat, from playing so hard—and now from this humiliation. He slowly raises his racket over his head like an angry god and he smashes it down onto the asphalt. But it just bounces right back at him, undamaged. He grabs it, raises it, then smashes it down, again and again and again. Then he looks at the mangled, mess of a racket, satisfied it will never be used to play tennis ever again. With one last grunt he flings it into the net.

People are shocked. I’m not sure if it’s because I beat my dad, or because my dad killed his tennis racket, or maybe both. I stand there, my arms still up in victory and a wide grin on my face. Dad yanks up the thermos, stalks off, and kicks open the gate of the tennis courts.

He opens the side door of the van and throws his stuff inside. Then he hops in the front seat and slams his door. He burns rubber out of the parking lot. I’ve also just lost my ride. I’ll have to walk the mile home. I don’t care.

I’m still standing with my arms up, not wanting this moment to end. I remain rooted, my shabby sneakers sticky on the heated asphalt, knowing the memory of my victory will start to fade away the second I move. Dad is right, winning does feel great.

People are leaving, pulling out of the parking lot. I drop my arms, go around to the other side of the net and pick up his sad, broken racket. I feel bad for it. I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of my dad’s anger.

isaac melum betelgeuse

L.H. Sigourney is known as “the sweet singer of Hartford,” who was one of the first American women to succeed at a literary career.

for lydia

1. Connecticut

Desire is a song of ricocheting feathers. Knife arc: the shine-sunny morning. Listen. This is what happens when you die. Green light—afterghost beyondness—praise.

Home comes to those on their own terms.

2. Lydia

Where are you going lonesome spider-blade? Plum night? Toil on sand-based structure?

Iridescent newly-dead sing on a continuum. The simple human wish: good morning. Good morning.

Cobwebs in kitchen corners instead.

3. Afterlife

Dust. Could there be dust? Wallpaperless

Place she might call starlight. Common

Simple Further Here

Death is personal. This is what happens when You die. This is what happens when she dies, and he dies.

Bone as soft as charcoal. A leg full of shark teeth. A snake rattle between bed sheets. Half your fish body,

That pure muscle burnt into coal mirrors. I take a knife and create a cup of your skin. Let what was once melded fold, separate.

Did you bring your book? Did you see those excommunicated ghosts? Did the door open to another version of your home? Is it possible to turn calypso into fear?

4. The Birds of America

Cannon fire used to punch holes for the sun to shine through. Gilding Glade was named

after a field of dead Goldfinch. A bird who molts twice, enjoys thickets and late timing.

Black cap and white under-coverts, perch body and conical beak. Now birds like

the Purple Martin live in my attic, beat the wall nightly with its bill.

WenDy booyDegraaFF

oPen house

Outside it snowed, fat heavy flakes, and as she had every other day for the past three weeks, Marta wished today would be the day. Traveling the snow-covered highways to the hospital would be exciting, a story to tell later: a slippery ride to the emergency room, Darren avoiding a near accident or sideswipe that would make their pulses race, cause the contractions to quicken, make them worry their baby would be born on the side of the road—the way the grocery store cashier’s baby had been, delivered by the cashier’s own father, who had to stop the car on the busy highway, and the cashier had to lay across the back seat, skirt hiked up, not pushing at all, and the baby slid right out onto the green vinyl. The cashier had stopped moving the carrots and potatoes and onions across the scanner to tell her this, and now Marta thought it could happen to her, too. Hoped it could happen that fast, that easily—in the antiseptic safety of the hospital.

Marta had been pregnant for forty-one and a half weeks. It was time. Beyond time. She was impatient with the boredom. The baby needed to come out and occupy some of this endless space of time. Marta was no longer working; her belly got in the way as she pushed the residents around in their wheelchairs, helped them in and out of bed, on and off the toilet. The day she fell, in her thirty-ninth week, she officially started her maternity leave. It wasn’t a bad fall, more of an awkward tumble. Then a few contractions—false labor, they called it at the emergency room, but there was nothing false about the feeling. The baby could come any day, they promised, as they sent her home. Two and a half weeks later, here she was, still pregnant.

At home, she shuffled the same piles of mail and receipts on the shelf in the tiny nook where they paid bills. Old notebooks and college textbooks were lined up under the window in orange crates, kept in case they needed to reference something they had once learned. A few paperbacks, read two or three times each, stood alongside, and the hand-me-down parenting magazines and classic what-to-expect type books from her coworker whose kids were in school now. A few fat childbirth books from the library, too. She’d read all of them, was overprepared.

She scrubbed the kitchen—at least the parts that didn’t require bending at more than a thirty-degree angle from the waist. She wiped down the surfaces, polished the mirrors, and pushed the broom around before she allowed herself to go into the nursery and touch the plush sleepers and onesies in the drawer. “Don’t you want to wear this one?” Marta fingered a fleecy footed sleeper covered in lambs. She had found that one at a summer garage sale, tags still on. All of the blankets and soft things were laundered, with an extra rinse, and folded to look new. She closed her eyes. If she could coax the baby by sending cozy pheromones . . . the baby kicked. Marta smiled. The baby knew her, knew what she wanted, and was willfully resisting. She admired this strong will. It was needed in this harsh world.

During yesterday’s appointment, she learned her mucous plug was still firmly blocking the baby’s passage. Her uterus was still soft, without contractions (other than those false ones, eons ago, that did “no work,” according to her midwife). The baby had dropped lower toward the cervix, giving some hope that the birth would be this month, this month with thirty days left in it. Every day was a calculation of how much maternity time was being used up without the baby in her arms. Because this wasn’t maternity time at all. Family leave, medical leave, saved-up vacation time. Whatever

the official name, it began the minute she took off work, was forced to take off work, baby or no baby. True maternity leave ought to start when the baby was born and not a minute before.

She tried to shovel the driveway, but the shovel kept catching on the puckered concrete and bumping into her belly. She wanted to go shopping, but the groceries were bought and the layette for the baby had been prepared for weeks now. She wanted to have the baby, but no twinges spurred her to call her midwife. Nothing was happening and nothing was about to happen. “The baby knows the right time,” the midwife, and everyone else, freely told her.

Marta had researched how to stimulate labor. Every single wacked-out idea was worth trying, one per day: mineral oil, sex, spicy food. How about stimulation of the nipples for fifteen minutes on the hour, every hour? She set the timer for fifteen minutes, massaged her enlarged nipples—one hand for each side—then reset the timer and waited for forty-five minutes, during which time she went back to boredom. The timer went off, she set the timer for a second fifteen-minute round of mammillae self-massage; the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome pressed on the nerves inside her wrists. Marta imagined continuing nipple massage throughout the next five days—a whopping total of 1,800 minutes of nipple massage—before giving up at bedtime, only because Darren needed some sleep without the bloody timer going off.

Boredom loomed, pelting her with dark seeds of frustration. Frustration, boredom: both involve a lack of action. Everything she read told Marta it wouldn’t be long now. How could she believe it? It all seemed so elusive rather than imminent. Time stretched as thin as the taut skin of her belly. Forever. She was living forever in anticipation of a baby that refused to be born. The glossy two-page spreads were wrong. Pregnancy was forever and Marta decided to boycott

all of it and coast along on instinct instead.

“Come out, Babyface,” she singsonged, “come out. It’s time to get moving and vacate my body. It’s time. The time has come and the time is now—Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now!” Marta rubbed spirals on her belly. “Come out and I’ll read you the whole book.” A kick, softer this time. Marta sang of warm baths, tummy time, soft blankets, board books—anything that might coax the little neonate out of her body. She lifted her sweater and rubbed her belly.

The baby moved, something softer than a kick, a shoulder shrug maybe, or a leg stretch. Her belly skin stretched with the baby’s limb. Marta sighed. “You’ll have so much room out here to do that! This whole wide world is waiting.”

And that was it, wasn’t it? The world outside was waiting.

Marta bundled up—that took some time—and headed outside to beseech the universe for release. Darren had asked her to call if she went out, but he meant with the car. She had her un-smart cell phone packed in tight against her hip in case of emergency.

The wind bit at her face. She covered her nose with her scarf and surveyed the snowy vastness under which lay the driveway. She stomped through to the semi-cleared street. She passed the single-level cottage-style homes, that either had the one floor plan or the inverse. Houses built in the 1940s for those working at the nearby steel mills. But the steel mills weren’t booming anymore. Nothing was booming anymore.

If Marta pounded her heavy-soled boots against the snow-packed concrete, surely the baby would shake loose, cause her membranes to rupture, stimulate delivery.

Marta waited at the crosswalk, fresh snow thickening over the intersection. After the snowplow passed, Marta crossed Highway 8 and entered the historic homes section.

Large, graceful trees held sleeves of snow over the street. This neighborhood had sidewalks. This was where she’d walk and dream and plead for the baby to come out.

Marta stopped in front of a Victorian brick, watching the snow collect on the edge of the front porch. She closed her eyes and imagined living there, her baby peeking out of the narrow lattice window, waving to passersby. She imagined the Christmas wreath she’d hang on the heavy mahogany door, the tiny white lights she’d wind around the wrought iron railing, the evergreen garlands she’d drape on every post.

“Excuse me.” The gruff voice interrupted her reverie, startled her. Before Marta could squeeze to the side, the person brushed past her. Her eyes opened wide and her hands flung outward to steady herself. There was nothing to hold. All she registered was the person’s coat—a long, dark wool coat, the kind she’d want if she’d gotten the teaching job at the community college. She tipped forward. The coat marched onward. Gravity pulled Marta toward the tread marks imprinted in the snow, the tiny circular emblems, the miniscule snow clumps that had fallen from the tread crevasses—closer, closer, closer. She landed belly down on the sidewalk like a raw egg whose yolk squished around when cracked into the bowl. She twisted into a muffled heap, half on the sidewalk and half on the snow piled alongside. Sharp, iced points of shoveled snow, softened only by the fresh snowfall, dug low into her abdomen. The baby shifted heavily onto her left kidney. Marta rolled to her other side, holding her belly, and pushed herself up to sitting with her hands. Taking a mittened swipe at her forehead to wipe away the snow, she forced herself to her knees, then to her wobbly feet. She wasn’t hurt. She’d fallen before and nothing had happened. This was the same. She brushed the snow off her stomach, caressed the baby through the layers of her jacket, clothing, skin, embryonic fluid. “You all right, Babyface?” she

said, and was answered with a nudge from within, an in-utero high five.

She squinted at the coat, shrinking smaller and smaller as it continued down the sidewalk, now only the size of her thumb. She reached up and blotted him out. Who brushes past a pregnant woman and then doesn’t turn around? Sure, the snow had silenced her fall. She hadn’t made more noise than a sharp intake of breath. She was used to holding in her surprise, from work. Didn’t the gruff-voiced stranger with the long wool coat know how physically unbalanced pregnancy made her? She marched after him, intending to inform his ignorance. The coat became pin-sized, then a speck, then was completely gone.

Good riddance, Marta thought. Good riddance, you damn coat.

The baby kicked sharply and Marta put her hand on her belly. “Sorry, oh sorry.” She didn’t mean to send adrenaline to the baby. She took a deep breath, then exhaled a cloudy lion’s breath up at the snowy sky. She trudged onward, up the winding streets, admiring the fretwork on one home and the snowy mansard roof on another. She rounded another corner, and there it was. The most majestic house of all, the one with wide sweeping tree limbs on either side of the front door, as if even the trees knew how to honor this house. A for-sale sign stood proudly in front, and next to that, a red and white sign: OPEN TODAY: 2–6 PM. On a Tuesday? Marta wasn’t going to argue with serendipity. Pulling back her mitten, exposing her wrist to the cold, Marta checked her watch. It wasn’t there. Oh yes, she’d stopped wearing it—her wrist had swelled and the watch Darren gave her years ago no longer fit. The light above the entrance was on, glowing dimly through the falling snow. She walked up the freshly shoveled walkway, which had already collected a lacy veil of snow. Cautiously she mounted the steps, making sure to hold

the railing. Though, what the hell? Another fall could induce labor. She let go of the railing.

A small, spectacled man appeared and greeted her briskly. “Welcome! I didn’t think anyone would come in this weather, but we already had it listed in the paper. This one is a beauty no matter what.” Salesmanship oozed out of him. His thin veneer of hair glossed over his forehead, barely concealing his bald truth. “Come on in. I only ask that you remove your boots to protect the hardwood floors from that nasty salt they put on the sidewalks.”

“Sure,” Marta said, forcing a smile. Taking off her boots had become one of her most difficult tasks. Her feet pulsed. Her anger at being toppled had increased the swelling, and she was sure her feet were Velcroed to the thick, slightly torn, winter lining of her boots. At home, she could wander around, boots on, waiting for Darren to come home and yank them off. He’d offer a foot massage, too. She turned to leave.

The marble fireplace flashed over the real estate agent’s shoulder. A marble fireplace! Damn serendipity. Dutifully, she eased herself onto the second lowest step of the staircase, spreading her legs apart to make room for her distended belly. She reached forward for her boots. The real estate agent watched silently, rocking on his heels. Marta struggled. She shifted, pulled, wiggled. Finally, her boots, and socks along with them, disengaged from her hot feet.

The real estate agent stepped forward; Marta shifted to stand. He pulled her up by the wrist—didn’t he know you could dislocate a joint that way?—and her bare feet splashed into the melting slush puddled on the tile entry. “Well! The previous owners did a fine job restoring the hardwood and updating the kitchen and baths. The wood here at the entrance was replaced, as you can see, with classic slate.” He rambled through the list of updates and selling points as he led Marta through the main level: the 1.6-gallon flush of the

toilet, the mold-resistant paint, the original crown molding. Marta nodded, scanning the layout of the kitchen, the height of the windows. By avoiding the eyes of the real estate agent, she remained noncommittal, not that she had any fear of committing to a sale. She and Darren were not in the position to buy a house this glorious, a house with the perfect mesh of old and new. They had a house and that was enough.

“The bedrooms are generous, and all of the upstairs floors have been refinished as well.” The real estate agent climbed the wide stairs.

Marta followed, slowly, with heavy steps, taking in the open space, the high ceilings, the walnut banister. The flower in the stained-glass window above the doorway matched the purple hummingbird in the transom window above the landing midway up the staircase, tinting the neighboring rooftops purple. If she lived here, she would take time each day to watch the landscape through her purple glass. When her whole body tensed involuntarily, beginning at her navel and simultaneously radiating both up and down until she was sure she’d implode from the incredibly tightening grip, Marta first thought it was due to the intense desire to own something she couldn’t have, and then she thought maybe it was indigestion. Silly. Silly to not know what this was. Her ears pushed themselves tautly against her skull. Her bare toes clutched at the slatted wood. The real estate agent noted her staring out the window and expounded on the history of the stained glass, enthralled with his own monologue, oblivious to Marta. “Moving along,” he said. He disappeared somewhere upstairs.

Marta stayed on the wide landing between the twisting flights of stairs, immobilized.

The real estate agent popped back to the top of the stairs. “Everything okay?” he called down to her.

Marta leaned into the banister.

The real estate agent rushed down to the landing. “Are you okay? Is it the baby? Shall we go down the stairs?” He pranced in and out of her line of vision. “Are you okay?” he said again, as if she were ill.

Marta took a deep breath—a cleansing one—she remembered that much from childbirth class. “I’d better get going.” She took another deep, cleansing breath. “I’m fine.”

She stepped down and then clutched the banister, her knuckles whitening. The vise tightened, tightened, tightened. She stood teetering on the step. The real estate agent’s sudden support kept her from pitching forward. He had somehow jumped or squeezed or ducked around her to the step below and had both hands on her belly, pushing upward, countering the force of her forward lean. “Can’t have a fall,” he said. Under any other circumstances, Marta would have been appalled at the intimacy, his hands pushing on her baby, but the clench of her uterus was too sudden, too intense. And then it was over. Marta breathed a cleansing breath. It was what she remembered to do. “I really need to get home.”

“Let’s get you down these stairs, Miss.” The real estate agent squeezed her elbow. Marta hated him taking charge, guiding her as if he knew best. But what choice did she have? She did need to descend the stairs. She shook off his grip. She eased down two steps before the next contraction held her hostage. In the throes of this unparalleled uterine spasm, Marta seized the real estate agent’s shoulder and pushed down hard. His feet slipped on the polished hardwood. He fumbled downward, his feet sliding to the next step down, landing flat-footed on the tread. “The pains are worsening?” His voice tremored, and somewhere in Marta’s prefrontal cortex the synapses sparked as if to start a fire, because why should he be afraid? Every person alive should know something about childbirth. All of us were born out of another human body, every one of us. And what was with this antiquated

terminology? “Pains”? “Worsening”? “Miss”? Was he going to boil a pan of water next?

Marta groaned. The contractions, this forced reliance on a stranger—this particular real estate agent stranger—on this everlasting staircase was too much. She trained her mind on breathing through this lengthening contraction. “Oh, oh! I’m supposed to be timing these!” She grabbed the real estate agent’s wrist, twisting it to lift his watch to her face. “Two seventeen. Remember that!” The real estate agent nodded and prompted her down three more steps before her face tightened into a grotesque grimace—she could feel her facial muscles mimicking the oncoming contraction. “Quick! What time is it?”

The real estate agent looked at his watch. “Two nineteen.”

“Two minutes? Two minutes? They cannot be that close. The labor just started!” Marta screamed. “I don’t believe you.” She felt for her phone, tucked away in her sweater pocket beneath her jacket. Darren’s jacket. Hers didn’t fit. It was difficult to reach under the bulk to wriggle out the phone, and when she finally got it loose, she couldn’t focus on the numbers. “Tell me what it says.” Marta thrust the phone in the real estate agent’s face.

“Two fourteen?” the real estate agent said. “Impossible! Time can’t go backwards!” Marta took a breath. She tensed, though the contraction had passed for now. She creaked down the last step and stood next to her boots. She smiled. She’d made it. “Your watch must be wrong,” Marta said calmly, now that she didn’t have a contraction binding her. “I’m not sure what’s going on here. Everything is happening too fast.” As if her words brought it on, the tight wave rolled forward, and her next words raced out before the next full-on contraction stifled her thoughts. “I need to get home!”

“Okay!” the real estate agent said. Enthusiastic to get her out of the way, off his hands.

Marta imagined him guiding her out the door, off the property, bootless, contracting all the way down the sidewalk on her way home. Alone. “Call Darren,” she demanded. She held out her phone. She wasn’t going to leave until Darren came.

He looked at her phone as if it were a foreign object. Yes, it was old. She flipped it open for him. “Darren. My husband. He’s in—” The next tidal wave washed over her. She stood, half crouching in the entry way, breathing heh-hehheh-heh, then edging past the real estate agent, shuffling to the middle of the living room, pressing on her knees, amazed at her own strength. She didn’t buckle. She didn’t explode. She didn’t do anything except endure.

Finally, finally, she made it to the edge of the couch. She sat. She twisted her hair out of her face, sticky with sweat. She tugged one arm out of the jacket, then the other. The real estate agent held her phone and peered at the buttons. “Hold down the 1,” Marta said. “Speed dial.” If Darren could come get her, if he could transport himself somehow and be beside her this very moment, he could make their birth plan happen. The well-researched plan they wrote together included notes on perineal massage, episiotomy prevention, cutting the cord, immediate skin-to-skin contact. He’d call the midwife. He’d get her to the hospital. Everything would work out if Darren—she closed her eyes with the effort of hope, and her water broke. The deluge of amniotic fluid poured out of her, soaked the inside of her jeans, drenched the couch seat cushion, pooled at her feet. Marta shouted at the real estate agent, who was talking into her phone, to her husband. “Hey—” She didn’t remember what the real estate agent’s name was, or if he had introduced himself when she had arrived.

“1580 Belcourt, right off Standale,” the real estate agent said into the phone. His eyes grew wide at Marta’s puddle. “Come right away!” He hung up and immediately dialed another number.

“Is Darren on his way?” she asked. Her voice sounded panicked, as if it were someone else—someone flustered, someone afraid—talking.

“I left a message.”

“Where was he? He said he’d be at his desk!”

“I have no idea,” he said. He spoke into the phone, her phone, “Yes, it’s an emergency. I have a woman here who’s about to give birth. There’s water all over the hardwood floor—” he flipped up the wet edge of the area carpet and rolled it away from the amniotic fluid— “and she’s been having extreme birthing pains. Extreme.” He paused, then gave the address a second time. Another pause. “Okay.” He set the phone down on the mantelpiece. “Let me—” he said, and he grabbed Darren’s jacket and two couch cushions from behind her. He arranged them on the gleaming hardwood floors in front of the marble fireplace. “Lie here,” he said.

Marta didn’t want to lie down. The next contraction came on and she squatted, her back pushing against the couch. It screeched back and bumped the wall. She jerked back. Her thighs gave out.

She went on all fours, panting. Such tightening, such squeezing. Her belly swayed beneath her, heavy and uncomfortable, her skin stretching like plastic wrap. If only the baby could poke through and relieve this strain.

The real estate agent talked rapidly into the phone. He looked at Marta’s face, then turned away, his finger pointing down on the mantel, as if to say Now, right now.

Marta groaned, rocking side to side. Such pressure. Such immense pressure. It was as if one of those exercise bands she tried during a demonstration at the mall, eons

before she was pregnant, wrapped itself around her hips, her thighs, her lower half of her belly—wrapped so tightly no other part of her body existed, an intense pressure that pulsed toward her perineum, as if the band was also somehow inside, bearing down on her from all angles, within and without.

The real estate agent ran into the kitchen and Marta heard water running. She rolled her eyes. Boiling water.

The real estate agent came back into the living room, shaking his head. He said into the phone, “Thirty seconds.” Another brief pause. “You want me to do what? I don’t—no, no, I don’t want that to happen. All right, then.” The real estate agent walked over to Marta and said, “The ambulance is on its way, but the roads are slippery. They are about fifteen minutes away in good weather. I’m on the phone with a paramedic. She wants me to check and see if—” He looked down.

“Are you crazy?” Marta shouted. “The baby is not ready yet! This is not happening!’”

The real estate agent went back to the phone. “Did you hear that?” he said. He handed the phone to Marta. “She wants to have a word with you.”

In the midst of another contraction, Marta’s response was strained. “I’m—not—taking—off—my—pants.” She pushed out her stilted words as strongly as she could.

The paramedic spoke in her calm, non-emergency voice that belied the dire consequences she spoke about. “Honey, I gotta tell you like it is. Your baby’s welfare has got to come first. You’re not taking your pants off for just anyone—you’re taking your pants off for the only person that can help you right now.”

Marta shook. “Oh no. Oh no.”

“Sweetie, I know this isn’t what you wanted, but you can’t give birth in your pants! The baby will—you know, you’ve just gotta let go of your inhibitions. Let the man check,

and then, if I’m wrong, you can put your pants right back on. If I’m right, this will be the best thing you ever did for your baby.”

Through the soothing voice of the paramedic and under the averted gaze of a real estate agent she didn’t know an hour prior, Marta flipped herself sideways and writhed out of her elastic-waist maternity jeans, the only pants that still fit, and the cotton underwear, too.

The real estate agent’s eyes bulged and he lunged for the phone. “I see it! I see it!” he shouted. “That’s the head!”

The pressure increased and released and a leaden heaviness in Marta sheathed low, low. Low. Pressing. Incredible pressing.

She pushed, involuntarily. The sudden raw burning of what must have been a vaginal tear ripped through her.

“What do I do?” the real estate agent cried into the phone.

The fuck she’d let this guy have the first contact with her baby. She willed herself up against the couch, braced herself, leaned forward, stretching her spine further than she had when taking off her boots, further than any yoga pose invented, over her knees and there, bent and twisted, she saw the back of the baby’s head, right there, between her spread open thighs. Dark, dark hair with a thin waxy layer of white substance—there was a name for that white rime. She couldn’t think of what it was. It wasn’t important, except that it was normal. Perfectly normal. She reached around—the baby was facedown—and gently wiped at the baby’s face with her hand, though she could barely reach. She had to clear away the mucous, keep the airways free. Her hand came away with white cottage cheese chunks on it and the baby gasped a raspy breath and then snorted a tiny, sweet snort.

“One more push!” the real estate agent cried, the phone at his ear. “She says give it one more push!”

Marta stretched more—the impossibility of it and yet more—and when she saw the tiny shoulders sliding out of her, she grasped the baby under those little arms and pulled. The baby slid out and she turned him—it was a him—high above her, saw his pink hotdog skin covered with patches of that sticky white stuff, and then hugged his slippery body to her chest, the umbilical cord trailing behind, thick and heavy across her stomach and on her thigh.

The baby sputtered and squirmed on her chest. He wobbled his head side to side until Marta spoke and calmed him with the voice he already knew, had always known, and he nuzzled his head into her throat, at the place where her voice vibrated against his fuzzy slick forehead, and sighed his phlegmy newborn sigh.

Darren arrived and then the paramedics arrived. It wasn’t until the placenta delivered and she was mostly wiped up and blanketed on the gurney, about to be rolled out of the house and into the back of the ambulance, that Marta saw it, hanging neatly on the coat rack. Long, dark, and woolen. The coat.

laura mccoy

it Will taKe many years

The wheel ruts end at the house’s north corner.

Two strips of dry dirt and everything else, alive.

We close our eyes. The house disappears.

We are in a field. Chicory, tansy, yarrow,

they ask us, they expect us,

they weave us into their braid

of stalk and leaf and human.

We go to seed. The days become

fireflies that shine just past

where they should. The snow falls,

bends our bodies to the dirt. We kneel

knowing the weight will splinter us.

The spring runoff will drown us.

We must prepare for children

as if we would have truly met them.

charlotte FrieDman

visual grammar on the 72nD street subWay PlatForm

We stand next to each other in proximity you & me a pear & apple in some sallow still life lit by fluorescence you twirl your earring snap your gum your backpack the same color as the bubbles & flip-flops I bought on a whim because every girl needs pink shoes to step out & away in which you do & we move into juxtaposition our surface differences highlighted brown/white old/young hijab/Star of David & you raise yourself up on your toes again & again in relevés or out of boredom and I do the same as my calves need muscle & we make the most of our time waiting me behind you a superimposition my face your veil but all appearances are veiled with or without fabric & life’s repetition just might become a reversal if you put on my flip-flops & I slide into your red Nikes maybe we alter us & thus the world

laurel s. Peterson

inKWell intervieW margaret gibson

Inkwell had the great pleasure of interviewing Margaret Gibson, author of thirteen books of poetry, including the trilogy, Broken Cup, Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, and the recently released The Glass Globe. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, she earned her BA from Hollins College and MA from the University of Virginia. She is the recipient of the Lamont Selection from the Academy of American Poets, the Melville Kane Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Connecticut Book Award, and she has been a Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the Poet’s Prize. She is professor emerita at the University of Connecticut and has lived in Connecticut for many years. This interview took place as Margaret Gibson was coming to the end of her three-year term as Connecticut’s State Poet Laureate.

Laurel S. Peterson: Thank you for agreeing to talk with us. I’m looking forward to talking about your books and your projects as Poet Laureate. Let’s begin with your memoir, The Prodigal Daughter: Reclaiming an Unfinished Childhood, which talks about the process of growing up and leaving home— both literally and metaphorically—and how those contributed to your becoming a poet. In this book, there is a lovely scene of you sitting under a lilac bush for one long afternoon and coming to understand how much reveals itself to you just by being quiet. Being quiet seems harder and harder in our world with all its distractions, even during the COVID shutdown when it seemed that quiet was handed to us. How do you create a space for this quiet in your life, and how does it

impact your writing process?

Margaret Gibson: Being quiet is both simple, and not. Being quiet is a making a return to one’s natural mind. To be quiet in a meditative or contemplative way asks you to slow the incessant drift of commentary and storytelling in your busy, reactive mind, often called “monkey-mind.” We sometimes call this drift of inattentive commentary “thinking,” but it’s not even that. Being quiet really means paying full attention to one’s breath, watching the mind—which includes the body—but not getting caught up in reaction, argument, contradiction, agreement, storytelling and so on. Being quiet means being fully present. Under that lilac bush, I was, at first, only hiding out from my family, finding a spot in which my sister couldn’t pester me, nor my parents direct me. At first, I felt the delight of naughtiness: no one knew where I was. Off by myself, I could think what I wanted, direct my attention to what pleased me. Gradually, there was a simpler quiet. As I simply paid attention to what I could see or hear, thinking about things vanished and physical sensation focused on the bird that alighted in the lilac and went about being a catbird, entirely without fear of me. It was as if I were seeing the bird for the first time, and I felt effortlessly related to it. As I watched, the quiet became less something I was “in” and more something I was being. That was it: I was just being—and “just” being wasn’t a diminished state; I felt more fully alive, larger somehow, more myself and less myself in a way I had no words for.

Poems are all about finding the words for the inexpressible. When you’re quiet in a contemplative way, you can tell if your ideas and responses arise from an original source within you—in other words, if they’re authentic, original, true to your own inner witness. That’s when you

begin to write poems that are yours and no one else’s.

Laurel S. Peterson: It is so powerful to realize what is authentic in yourself, witness it fully—and accept it. I think that writers are such brave people because they take this work on willingly. In your introduction to Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti, you write that you imagine her writing the poems “in the spirit of querencia, a gazing back through the distance toward home, toward various points of origin, when she had once again shaped a new life for herself…” This sentiment or this stance seems to mirror one that you take in The Prodigal Daughter, and also in Broken Cup. Can you talk a bit about how this stance has informed your work?

Margaret Gibson: Querencia is the Spanish word for that gazing back into the distance toward home that a retired and aging bull engages in once it is put out to pasture after its vivid, dangerous life in the bull ring. The bull stares off in the direction of its natal place, or first home. Is querencia a longing for home? A way of meditating on one’s life? A way of measuring how far one has come from a point of origin?

Querencia strikes me as metaphor for . . . being quiet, attentive, open, receptive, all this in the service of memory and inquiry. The question is not so much “Where is home?” but What in us is “home?” What is always there? What comes from nowhere and is inseparable from the wind, the sky, the stones? How does gazing at that which does not change . . . change us?

Before she left Mexico, Tina Modotti asked herself in a journal whether anyone really “changes.” Since change is a natural process of being alive, she must have meant a more dramatic change, something like conversion. As I see it, Modotti’s life was one of radical change. From being an

object in front of another’s camera (she was very beautiful), she became a photographer herself: she engaged in active seeing. From being apolitical, she changed into a dedicated revolutionary. As she changed, so did her lovers. She changed countries, lovers, vocations, beliefs. Because many of the changes were painful, one could say she was a phoenix; she burned up in the fires; and yet as in the myth the phoenix comes back, reborn. But does “reborn” mean “changed?” As Yeats put it: “changed utterly,” so that “a terrible beauty is born?”

When I was writing both Broken Cup and Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, I was reminded of what Ramana Maharshi said, “Let what comes come; let what goes go. Find out what remains.”

I’m fascinated by impermanence, by what changes— and I’m also drawn to what “remains.” Querencia must surely begin with “not knowing” and with a willingness to investigate by standing still and letting what comes come. My poems often arise from a fundamental stance that combines memory and inquiry—and passion—along with a faithfulness to the present moment.

Laurel S. Peterson: That idea of impermanence must have also impacted the poems in Broken Cup. These are deeply personal, as they respond to and record the decline of your late husband, David McKain, from Alzheimer’s. I imagine that “faithfulness to the present moment” might have been particularly challenging work during this time. What was the necessity of this book for you? That is, was it a necessary work of memory? Or a record as you walked through those events? Or a way of holding onto love? Or…

Margaret Gibson: I didn’t write for two years during both the abrupt and gradual changes at home in the early years of his

illness, just after his diagnosis. When I began writing again, I read the poems to him, and we talked about them. The poems were, of course, necessary as records of small, fleeting moments. They were an aid to memory as well as an aid to understanding what was happening to us. They helped us talk to each other—this before his language loss became such that we had to find other non-verbal ways of communicating.

It is one thing to witness your Beloved forgetting words and sentence structure, forgetting experience, and suffering the various cognitive disturbances Alzheimer’s causes. But because of my training in Zen, I was also asking “What is the Self? What is it really?” Is it what we remember? What we’ve achieved? What we’ve experienced? IS there a self? How is it constructed? How is it deconstructed? What remains when the “stuff” of self is forgotten?

These can be painful questions, of course, not simply intellectual ones. His illness gave them urgency. When personal pain is no longer avoided, when it makes you ask questions and wait for clarity, then pain is doing its work.

As for love, or holding on to it, the poems served as reminders that the one who needed my love was not the “historical” David of memory and accomplishment: that person was part of the past. David as he was now, that’s who I was asked to, and did, love. Writing the poems grounded me in the present and reduced my fear of inevitable losses to come.

Laurel S. Peterson: That resonates so deeply with me: that we are asked to love the version of the person that is present with us, not the historical version of them or our anticipated future version. That’s a wonderful thing to remember no matter where we are in life.

The poems that came out of your experience with David were collected in your trilogy, Broken Cup, Not Hearing

the Wood Thrush, and The Glass Globe. They are shattering. What practice or lessons have allowed you to develop that vulnerability on the page (that so many are afraid of)?

Margaret Gibson: What is shattered, I wonder? Only the fictive notions about who we are. I owe any acceptance and serenity and courage I discovered during the eleven years of David’s illness and in the period after his death to my Zen practice and my writing practice. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have pain. It’s important to feel it, ask it questions, know it face to face. You can’t write about what you don’t know; you also must “not know” what you know. To write about difficult experience requires a willingness to take on difficult experience, assimilate it, learn from and transform it. No true joy is possible without that willingness. Otherwise, we’re just trying to separate out what we don’t like or don’t want. A willingness to let go of fear is also transformative.

Laurel S. Peterson: Yes, that willingness to take on difficult experience harkens back to the witnessing and being present that you mentioned earlier. Those seem to me to be both at the core of the writer’s work, and perhaps at the core of the Zen work you describe.

In the first book in this trilogy about David, Broken Cup, you ask, “What is this Nothing/ that holds me”— speaking of staying with your husband during his illness. In Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, this idea seems to come back in the form of a character named No One. “No One” seems to be connected to this idea: “And it’s essential to believe in nothing, to feel its presence,/its loving-kindness and vast aloneness, its love cry, its weight” (49). But in The Glass Globe, that “nothing” seems to turn into a something, a sense of being present in the world, despite absence. Even the last poem in The Glass Globe is about something—all the things

that have been left behind. Did you intentionally create this tension between nothing and something, the embodied world and the spirit world? How does this tension feed your work and your life?

Margaret Gibson: It's important to understand what “Nothing” is and isn’t. In the poem “What Is It?” a friend asks me, “What’s to keep you from leaving.” And the speaker answers, “Nothing.” And what is this “Nothing?” No wedding vow, no feat of character will keep you faithful, keep you present. We are often victims of desire, whim, weakness—you name it. And besides, who wants to feel “held” or “bound” to stay by force?

So, the answer is “Nothing.” But nothing isn’t . . . nothing. Love flourishes in an emptiness in which the ego is absent, an absence that allows for a presence in which nothing’s left out.

In Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, I was writing during a period of David’s illness when he was in memory care or nursing care: not home with me. I was with him every day, but I was alone at home, lonely, and engaged in transforming loneliness and fear into a solitude that could be sustainable, creative.

In this book, both storytelling and prayer are ways of using words to create and clarify, to say what can’t be said any other way. In the prayer poems, the speaker does not use the word God, substituting for it, No one. The prayers are directed to the God-behind-God, the inexpressible, unknowable God—not the word God which, like a suitcase, we’ve packed with so many “meanings” and “definitions.” Paradox abounds. God is both Presence and Absence, in the same way that some contemplatives approach the sacred on the Via Negativa, others on the Via Positiva.

Interestingly, and inevitably, when one addresses

“No one” and talks to this absence with an open heart and intelligence, then No one takes on presence—becomes embodied, if you will. And in this process of addressing “No one,” the speaker takes on greater presence as well.

So it turns out that “believing in nothing” has a substantial effect. “Nothing,” as the poem “Passage” says, has presence, even a loving-kindness; it can be embodied.

The Glass Globe doubles the focus: the Beloved has breathed his last; the Earth is in climate crisis.

The shock of the last breath becomes, for the speaker of “Moment”, the experience of having breathed in that last exhaled breath herself, so that the Beloved is still part of her and part of this Earth. Personal bereavement is joined and deepened in this book by an environmental grief, sparked by global climate crisis, by the losses that have occurred, are presently occurring, and (if we do not change our destructive impact on the Earth) will result in the loss of Earth that sustains our lives.

In “Irrevocable”, the final poem, the verbal tactic is one of naming what has been lost or what will be lost, letting those losses (named and said aloud) have such presence that they re-create the Earth which has created us, and on which we have created art, culture, industry, community and so on—life in all its natural and social diversity.

In “Irrevocable”, the metaphor of “washing” the body of the Earth is a continuation of the actual washing of my deceased husband’s body, the first poem in the book. We know how to feel personal pain. We don’t know how to feel about the end of Nature, the destruction of the Earth as we know it. As a result, too many deny that climate change is happening at all. If poems have power, they teach us how to feel when we don’t know how to feel. Can you grieve for the Earth in the same way as you would a person, I wondered? I had this idea: Wash the Earth as you would

wash the body of the beloved. Treat the global as if it were intimately personal. And so, in the poem I wash the body of the Earth as if for the last time. That’s the metaphor of the final poem.

Laurel S. Peterson: Thinking about the earth as the body of the beloved is a such a beautiful and healing image, a way to connect us all across the conflicts that divide. Perhaps metaphor is a less threatening way of approaching an issue that has sadly become so controversial.

You’re speaking a lot about your Zen practice. It seems to me that spiritual practice is also fundamentally about metaphor. Can you talk about how your spiritual and poetry practices intersect, and perhaps, have grown across this trilogy? As we move from the first book in the trilogy, Broken Cup, to the last, The Glass Globe, the poems seem to become more associative, less linear. Can you talk about the structural or stylistic changes in your work across the three books?

Margaret Gibson: As for spiritual practice, everyday life is my teacher now. And in everyday life there is no separation between the two practices, between spiritual exercises and writing poems. I like what you say about spiritual practice being fundamentally about metaphor. Metaphor is a verbal device whose focus is interrelationship, kinship, the gathering of what’s been separated (even shattered) into a whole.

Thinking, all by itself, often categorizes, divides, sorts, sifts. Consider the way we’ve divided body and mind, material and spiritual, ourselves and “Nature.” For certain tasks, skillful thinking is appropriate. But there are certain imponderable aspects of living one can’t simply “think” about. One of the strategies the mind has developed for drawing what has been separated back into relationship, into a unity, is metaphor, which takes two apparently separate things

and finds . . . a kinship. Poets, more so than other language users, learn how to use language, song, and silence in a way that unites body and mind, presence and absence, word and image.

The poems in Broken Cup are, many of them, rooted in daily life, specific instances and moments that reveal the changes Alzheimer’s has caused. That clinical forgetting is offset by a clinging to a “moment by moment, breath by breath” way of living into the answers—especially when there are no answers. The poems in Not Hearing the Wood Thrush are grounded in the dominance of silence, (not song), darkness (not light), death (not further life), fuzziness (not a sharp-edged clarity). The poems that come forth from this are looking for change, passage—and trying to find passage by consulting myth (Orpheus and Eurydice), prayer (the No one poems), and by personal narratives that engage the speaker in ridding herself of fear and anguish. Story matters, words matter on this journey toward unconditional love and an embrace of mystery.

In The Glass Globe, the Beloved has died; the globe (both glass and actual earth) has a crack in it, but it still holds. The world the speaker inhabits has been changed utterly. She is “searching for another way back into her life.” Many of the “formal” elements of using language, employed in the two previous books, are relinquished and the mind that loves language is given more play, longer lines; it’s given loops and ellipses, associative lists and litanies. Words within words appear and become teachers. Inside flower . . . flow. Inside not knowing . . . now. The speaker is rebuilding a world, word by word, transforming absence into presence.

And for a poet, even a change in the line (its length, its placement) changes everything.

Laurel S. Peterson: Yes, I love that: that we can rebuild a

world word by word in our work. So much of human work, it seems, is figuring out how to tell our stories in ways that empower rather than disempower us. You write: “To vanish is to live at the heart of the matter;/ to vanish is to live at the lip of invitation,/ embraced by emptiness and great joy.” (15) This seems like death, but it also seems like being absorbed into oneness.

Margaret Gibson: What we humans live with uneasily and want to deny is the knowledge that we will die. That “my” life will vanish. But to vanish . . . that is the way of things. And yet we resist this, creating a variety of immortalities: our children (passing along our DNA), our books, (passing along our knowledge), our accomplishments (ditto), the immortal soul itself (that loveliest of fictions.)

And yet to vanish is to accept the challenge of impermanence and live this “once”—this one life, the moment we have been given—as if it is a “once and for all.” To take up that invitation is to be truly creative. And, of course, alas, to save oneself one must lose oneself. To create, to live, to be . . . I must relinquish the well-defended ego, assent to being “No one,” find myself everywhere and in everything. This is to live with heart, “at the heart of the matter.”

Laurel S. Peterson: What wonderful, thoughtful answers. Before we go, I wanted to mention again that you are currently State Poet Laureate of Connecticut. What have the pleasures and projects of that position been for you? Do you have any new projects you’d like to talk about?

Margaret Gibson: There are many pleasures, but chief among them is being able to work with other poets in Connecticut in a close way, to strengthen the poetic community. I took “Poetry in a Time of Global Climate Crisis” as the social

theme of my term as CT Poet Laureate, and with a grant from the Academy of American Poets I have been able to sponsor readings, finance videos, underwrite an anthology of 63 CT poets: Waking up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis. (Grayson Books). In my final months as Poet Laureate, I’m continuing that theme and also sponsoring readings by African American and Latina poets in CT. It’s crucial to understand that the same flawed thinking that underlies destruction of the climate and the earth includes the flawed thinking that creates separation of human beings by race and class. That flaw is to think in terms of division and separation. Divisive thinking asserts: I am “human,” therefore separate from “Nature.” So much damage flows from that erroneous way of thinking.

Currently, I am working on two new books. In one, I return to the strategy of persona. I’ve done this before, in The Vigil: A Poem in Four Voices, and in Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti.

Draw Me Without Boundaries is a book that crosses genre lines, and there are two speakers: a woman isolated in a nursing home during Covid and her granddaughter, an artist who is living by herself, deciding whether to bring her unborn child into the world.

The second book is called Old Love—a book whose poems embrace “restoration” and new life.

sPecial section WatersheD

Austin Roots

Craig Weisz, photograph

miKe Wilson

nervously Waiting For the george FloyD Jury to return a verDict

Black girls go missing, faces not found on milk cartons or Discovery I.D. Same with Native American women.

Do the math, calculate the equation that defines the American psyche, the amniotic fluid we float in

blind to the snuff film that plays over and over in a theatre where only the rich have the price of admission.

Each laugh, gesture, clearing of the throat erupts from the ohm of that home, a concentration camp song, where we strive

until we die, and those born of our bodies grow to fill our shoes, put on our raincoats, inherit the cataracts in our eyes

How, dear God of human beings, do we witness murder, corroborated in the mirror of a billion eyes yet contemplate innocence, this or that defense, a technicality, some evil trump card played, playing us?

ryan harPer aiDs to navigation I.

A green nun reflecting off starboard a pale sun— the fog is lifting, the channel widening. As we do each time the waters open, we wonder abaft and inland.

At confluences the work was hard but clear: we built our tow above Defiance, twenty boats to one, leaping cargo, catching between the gaps visions of the Ohio trembling like a snake pit—long, lank, and brown—in the white-hot dawn, swinging cables over timber heads, the pawl crackling as the winch spun. So, we gathered our giant to itself.

The idle tug snarled impossibly to life— the force to flip an empire, sweetly mortal. We sent off our continent down the Mississippi the span of all goods. We prayed to pray well.

There are runs where the lead marks align but variously. The corps undid the oxbows long ago. Deadly bends, the moil of old stories: blue cat big as jon boats, dark economies, a stow of goods to slip like crushed pills into the channel.

We have sought invention, received double: easier going these days, the ligature of the old errand-ways undone, we square the shoulders of the giant, shoot the middle, resolute unto the mean. But there are runs where the old marks remain, rusty, inviolate in the bluffs and bittersweet hickory wattle, impossible for exegetes of finished passage to pass unglossed. There,

the danger: the alert, exchange of notice for notice. We the bodies reading go to

at half-throttle, diamond, and balls lashed at masthead. We pray to believe the sounding call of the dead in chorus with the living known, praying before they resolve into meanings that destroy each the other.

A green nun reflecting off starboard, pale early morning: our nocturnes fly slowly away into day. Between wake and sleep, The channel widens; at last, our load we feel as loss, drawing us down.

Weeping for the young masters, their chroniclers drowned, we turn to the fading moon: praying a stay, for ourselves, our origins, the best in tow— Mississippi—madrigal—relief.

The law of change, the darkness of the river parting, turns on our hope. There are lead marks aligning. Real bodies running the entire course— some beyond the cloud of memory, some telling in decay—we the corps in the channel, slide under deep mist, our giant passing to the gulf unseen.

ryan harPer

south river I. Kittatinny

In lighter years and quicker runs I draw about a foot. Squat effect: dense American alley, compressed relay of gated sound, neither silence nor noise, a national gap, where the hemlock folds darkly into white oak, river birch bows waterward into deep rhododendron—perchance conversion, recreation, late June on the Delaware, but a passholder scuttles through, thinking Jersey too much everything to be anything:

In even flow I am snagged in the dank rites of pursuit— ever hazard, ever my garden stocking the master’s storehouse, my runoff set for Manhattan despite myself, my song the transponder invisibly sculling the sky. Drift or shoot, so I ride. I was asking for specific measures: fleet thoughts arrived, of vague range. Now the second growth

hems me quick, draws me low, feet spilling in—vast flows of claimed waters— I, the reserve.

II. Trenton

The deferring manic manifest at tide-head:

If for a moment I am making a mess of things, and you understand little of the body from the shot you are taking at the highway pull off, consider a turn into the marshes: reeds fiddling the cool morning air, aureole flutter on the surface deep beyond the traffic bow— the most exact stillness, the bittern stretching, unbeaten, skyward in the mallow sprawl, as day matures today, never dry.

It is just damp here with spirits, low camp of new and inner lights in vast supply: the souls incline unto divinity, the immersions, never total. More than one scraggly bishop has tripped the circuit of veiled and shallow pools; more than one bold friend has fumbled across Jersey’s hidden districts

to minister in the union of caught waters. You, like them, put off your way, merely a mess, might do all right here. But if for this moment I seem in poor form, speaking of a healing turn in the jug handle state, where even rights are complicated,

know there is a river, that even tide gives way, even highways come to term, even history, having braved the shoals, flows into mere lies for a time, reflecting.

megan lynn WilKinson

she rises

Prestonsburg, 1958: “Divers go to the bottom of treacherous and swift Big Sandy River today to seek the bodies of 26 children and a bus driver, victims of the most tragic school bus accident in the nation's history.”

In the murk of my girlhood room let your thoughts swim no longer. Replace them with these dribbling words under yonder river’s lull. Come Mama to where I dream up goldenrods and drift.

Make our bed of rushed water. Sink your tired toes into the coalslurried silt which mudded that heavy morning into my winter dress, the one you made, found to hug my body the one

you made, until I was not frightened, not lost. Drown your tired lungs in Big Sandy and I’ll breathe for you again.

sarah benal

liKe rivers aFter a storm

Two things go up the first week my husband Tony and I move into our house in Missouri: our bed and Tony’s drum set. It is August 2020, but we quit our jobs months before we knew how bad Covid would become and declined to renew our lease, so the move from South Carolina to Missouri could not be stopped. We move from an apartment to a house, and even though our new place is much smaller, it is a house.

Our off-yellow house is packed onto a crowded, funky street. A neighbor has a disco ball on their porch. Another’s lawn is covered in political yard signs. Tree roots have cracked and split the sidewalk so it looks like arms reaching from below about to yank themselves aboveground. Inside it is hot, and sunlight warms the vinyl floors as we arrange the living room, unpack boxes in the kitchen, and set up the drums in the back room.

The back room is an obvious addition to the rest of the house. The walls are thinner, like the landlord used whatever he had on hand and tacked the wood in the shape of a room. It doesn’t hold onto sound the way the rest of the house does. In the winter we will learn that everything becomes cold to the touch. His set is made of drums from two other sets, one silver and one black, and they wrap around the seat like an uneven fortress. When Tony sits his knee dips in and out of the window of space between the snare and the tom.

Before I met Tony, I thought there was only one kind of drumstick, but I was wrong. Drumsticks, brush sticks, and mallets of every size and color are laid over the drumheads or packed away for safekeeping. Cymbals hover like halos and

one is wrapped in bells for a more layered sound. The bells linger the longest and rattle like falling glass.

The first few weeks after we move are silent. Tony is a teacher, but his schedule is constantly rearranged when a student or another teacher comes in contact with Covid. When we are both working from home, the house divides us: my office at the front, his computer open on the table in the back. In the mornings sunlight rises in blue and purple before growing thick with heat, and we open the windows hoping for a breeze. The drumsticks float from one place to another as though a ghost tried playing discreetly while we slept, but I never hear Tony play. In September I suggest to Tony that he play as loud as he can while I walk around outside to see if his drumming can be heard by our neighbors. * * *

We have been married for five years, together almost nine, but I have rarely touched Tony’s drums. It is not out of any spoken or unspoken rule; the drumsticks feel clumsy in my hands. I don’t want to adjust the seat and disrupt Tony’s ideal setup, and my wrists resist each time I attempt to play.

I am not a drummer and I am not a musician and that has always been fine with me.

Before the pandemic I wondered what Tony felt when he played. I wanted to cross the valley of understanding to look for the similarities between his playing and the things I love: reading, long walks, writing, or cooking. In the valley, discoveries appeared to me like river tributaries that travel from point A to point B. During our nine years together I think of our relationship as one in constant motion, but I still don’t understand what compels him to play. What makes one drummer better than another? What sound does that mallet produce? Where does that tributary begin and end? I worry if I do not learn, eventually our

motion will stop. This strange, stagnant, and frightening time will hold us in place, keep us frozen until the distance seems too far to cross.

Over the months of the pandemic I am on alert. The valley of understanding is more unfamiliar now, darker. I’m scared that one day I won’t be able to see my hand in front of my face as I try to make my way across it. If it gets dark, I will need tools, strategies, a plan. But the pandemic has taught me that tools must be made with materials we already have. We will only know if strategies work through trial and error, and often new plans must be formed after an error proves to be deadly. * * *

We lived in South Carolina for four years. The apartment was loud. We heard dogs, trains, drag racing, and fireworks in the middle of the night. When our neighbor dropped something the whole building shook. A woman laughed every evening, her voice rising in sudden soprano before disappearing just as fast. There were gunshots more than once, and the car radio from our downstairs neighbor. In the middle of all the noise Tony muffled his drums with towels.

I couldn’t stand how Tony kept his drums quiet. Everything was already so loud. I didn’t think his drumming would create more problems. Play now and apologize later if it meant he could play for real, just once. But the towels stayed. He was clearly disturbed by the limitation. At times I begged him to try hoping that even one moment of full drumming would loosen his spine and smooth the creases from his face. I tried not to imagine the way his arms must have had to seize to keep from playing too hard.

After four years in South Carolina we moved to Missouri and the drums were unfurled in the back room.

The windows were opened to let sunlight in. Tony could look over our uneven and weed-covered lawn and through the arching tree branches. I thought the problem had been fixed. I thought he could unclench his arms and play until blood moved through his veins like rivers after a storm. We’re here now. In a house. This house is safe. When we first moved here, we drove through neighborhoods and pointed out bars and theaters glowing under Edison bulbs and tried imagining people walking between the marquee shadows. But the pandemic stretched on, and we have stopped imagining. I remind him that music won’t die, and for every glowing theater there will be ten, twenty, thirty bands looking for a drummer.

In September people stand outside. Bars keep their doors and windows open. They install garage openers. In January the doors are closed, but we see shadows shaped like humans pull over the sidewalks from inside the bar.

What is grief when the thing that is gone is not completely gone yet? Is it grief? What is the space between point A and point B called when it is so still that the air hums? I imagine standing in a valley before a tornado, when the air is green and the heat so thick that either I or it must break. And it is always the air that breaks, isn’t it? It twists madly and whips our skin and there is nothing we can do about it. In retrospect, the stillness seemed like a warning, and it is always my reaction to grow angry at all the things I did not do in those moments before the storm. * * *

I suggest to Tony he play as loud as he can. I will walk around the house and listen. Don’t worry, I assure him, I will run in and stop him if it’s too much. He sits, drumsticks

poised. It is late summer. The sunset is buttery and drips down the pink wall and over the wood floor. The silver drums sparkle. The black ones gleam. I close the back door carefully and stand on the hot concrete. It takes a moment. I imagine Tony’s face settling into his familiar, concentrated frown. In the moment before he starts playing, I think about how his dark hair is getting long and his beard must feel uncomfortable in the Midwestern heat.

And then it starts. The house does little to muffle the sound. I don’t know what he is playing, but I never do. A drummer sets the tone, pulls the other sounds along, and curves and spikes and warms the room. I walk down our driveway and the sound shrinks behind me. When I reach the front of the house the sound is barely audible, or maybe it mixes well with the rush hour traffic. I place my hand on the house and I feel dust melt under my sweaty palm. He keeps playing even when I am back inside. When he’s done he exhales and smiles.

“How did it sound?”

I explain.

“Maybe I can put up some blankets or something to block the sound against the wall?” He hands me the drumsticks. “Do you want to play? I’ll walk around and listen to you.”

He takes a walk. I play the drums.

amy Davis

restoration (in the san JOaquin VaLLey)

Although we call it grassland no meadows turn this valley green

Except for irrigated farms and orchards every swatch of ground in the irregular floor pattern assumes pale shades of arid land and sand

Layers of grit and dust flat tans and grays spread where water should be pooling *

When floods came aquifers long enough to reach far-off fields of apricots and tomatoes had not begun collapsing could still absorb and store the wet

rivers still within their banks arrived downstream in great measure and when storms turned fierce they overflowed reached high enough to threaten towns

The new model (feel free to call it the original model) moves the means of control from gray concrete walls to the rooted greens of trees

It razes the levees quits barricading water invites floods onto flatlands they filled in decades past Missing rivers will flow again Wild ones lose their fury

eDges raDiate From the center

Shouldn’t we remember the hours—the during—and how everyone said day was any day

and the season somehow burned up sooner than it should have? Each tight and tiny group of us: one or two, a legitimate lonely. We were here anymore and here we got tired

of yearning for only. Perfect attendance, but the longest stretch of waiting, and waiting

we tired of the walls and door, relapse, any reason. Our matter was no longer for answers. Babies outgrew

and Gallup took a third stay with the Riot Act, then beaches opened simply to show every version. We didn’t go because we didn’t know where to put our bodies but danger. Even Walmart had shuttered and it was all something to figure. From screens we watched bucolic settings. Was there a before the middle of this? Not the end—

inFinite galaxy

I’ve done a lot of thinking about the velvet-blue possibilities that come next, the ancestral realm. He lies in his bed almost there. The rabbi enters and sits by his bed a bit hunched. Recites a prayer. My father’s mouth moves the smallest amount, echoing words he knows. Lambent language. Still a matter. Overhead, muscular bright lights. My father’s eyes are closed. He loved and no less did he mean by it. Today he is wearing his orange shirt.

To that crossing, we’re close; I agree to my side of the trench. The room fills with clues and that’s what there is. Birds in wind, the sound of a baseball game. Right now, losing my way.

simon WolF

i KnoW immeDiately

(WhO may stiLL care When tO break?)

I want to cry like this city, at the back of the field disentangled there is a Madrone looking downriver. I name what comes undone: a dry valley, a sun’s dust. My ribs guard empty tidal flat building a different way home. I end up a black south, four paper birches bark blowing in the wind. Stuck looking out, I abandon myself.

simon WolF

Public access

The concrete factory along the Duwamish makes perfectly unnatural clouds.

Cuticles of smoke, pressure washed perfect lawned business parks afford peek a boo views.

Fluorescent orange spray paint on a rock

“high tide” written with an arrow.

Always in relation.

A man and a woman start a fire in front of a van.

A block south, four paper birches, peel of bark blowing in the wind. Smoke combines with the factories. The river moves out of my view.

Craig Beaven has received fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee Writers Conference, The Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, and the Vermont Studio Center. His first collection of poems, “Natural History”, won the Gerald Cable Book Award and was published in 2019. His second book was awarded the Cutbank Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in spring 2022. His poems have appeared in the Best New Poets anthology, Atlanta Review, Tin House, Prairie Schooner (Glenna Luschei Prize winner), Third Coast, Pleiades, Artful Dodge, and many others.

Sarah Benal grew up in Nebraska and moved to South Carolina to earn her MFA in Fiction Writing. She currently lives in Missouri. Her work focuses on bodies and dealing with trauma through earth and foundation. It can be found in The Watershed Review.

Wendy BooydeGraaff’s work has been included in SmokeLong Quarterly, Great Lakes Review, West Trade Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Popshot Quarterly, Five South, Nurture: A Literary Journal, The Ilanot Review, and MASKS Literary Magazine. Her short fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Best Small Fictions anthology.

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), Winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry and Distinguished Favorite for the Independent Press Award. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and a finalist citation for the Arab American Book Award. Her

poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poet Lore and Ecotone, and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com.

Terri Campion’s short story, “Thanksgiving 1974”, was published in the Washington Square Review. “My First Kiss,” can be seen at cafélit.co.uk. She recently completed a novel in fourteen connected stories: Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, which was inspired by her award winning solo show: Following The Yellow Brick Road Down the Rabbit Hole. Her plays have been read and produced at venues in the New York/New Jersey area including Women Center Stage, Emerging Artists, New Georges, New Jersey Rep. Her monologues have been published by Meriwether, Smith & Kraus, and Great Kills Press.

Elise Chadwick writes to reflect on and remember life experiences, with perhaps the greatest pleasure occurring when a moment of discovery or deeper understanding emerges during the writing process. During the many decades she has spent teaching and reading poetry with her high school students, her taste in poetry has evolved from enjoying the challenge of cerebral and abstract poetry to appreciating the poetry that her students lik to read—poetry by Sharon Olds and Li Young Lee and Rita Dove, poetry that her students found accessible and engaging because it told stories and raised questions. And so, perhaps it is not surprising that this is what she tries to do in her poems.

Amy Davis is a historian as well as a poet, with an AB from Cornell University and a PhD from Columbia University. She has taught at Purdue and UCLA. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, december, The Southern Humanities Review (honorable mention for

the Jake Adam York Prize), The Free State Review, Levure littéraire, Crab Orchard Review, Spillway, Women's Studies, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2016. She was the recipient of a month-long writing residency at Yefe Nof in autumn 2018.

John Davis is the author of Gigs and The Reservist. His work has appeared recently in DMQ Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Terrain.org. He lives on an island in the Salish Sea and performs in blues bands.

Erik Endress is a resident of Ramsey, NJ. He studied Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. On most days, Erik is out the door at sunrise on a hike or adventure. He has traveled all over the United States and has been fortunate to photograph many of the greatest parks and natural landmarks the country has to offer. erikendress@ gmail.com

Jamie Etheridge is a previous contributor to Inkwell. Her work has also been published in JMWW Journal, Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y Lit, (mac)ro(mic), Emerge Lit, and anthologies including Serious Flash Fiction 2021 and the forthcoming Parenting Stories Gone Speculative. She placed 2nd in Versification Zine's Mosh Pit CNF 2021 contest. She tweets at LeScribbler.

Charlotte Friedman is a writer, teacher and artist who grew up in Seattle and now lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Connecticut River Review, Intima, Waterwheel Review, The Maine Review, Nightingale & Sparrow and in the anthology, A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic. Her first book, The Girl Pages, was published by Hyperion. When she is not writing or

painting, she teaches Narrative Medicine at Barnard College in New York City.

Timothy Fox is originally from Texas. He received a Houston Press Theatre Award for his play The Whale; or, Moby-Dick and a Vault Festival Spirit Award for his play The Witch’s Mark. His writing has appeared in, among others, Westchester Review, Gordon Square Review, and Passengers Journal, and is forthcoming in New Writing Scotland. He lives in London. www.timothy-fox.com.

Ryan Harper is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Colby College’s Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Change Seven, Tahoma Literary Review, Wild Roof Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. A resident of New York City and Waterville, Maine, Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal.

Jessica Hollander has published over sixty stories in literary journals. Her collection of short stories In These Times the Home is a Tired Place won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and was published by the University of North Texas Press, and her chapbook Mythical Places won the Sonder Press Chapbook Competition and was published by Sonder Press. Her stories have appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Quarterly West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, and Redivider. She received her MFA from the University of Alabama and is now an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska in Kearney.

Laura McCoy lives on the Rensselaer Plateau in New York State. Her poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, William & Mary Review, and North Dakota Quarterly Review, among others. She is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Abhishek Mehta is a marketing professional from India with a discreet passion for putting words together in a way that they may be able to hold his short and sudden glances in their direction every now and then. He aims to make the paler things in life less apologetically pale.

Isaac Melum lives in Everett, WA and is currently teaching in Seattle on Capitol Hill. He is a graduate of Gonzaga University and Northern Arizona University. His work has been published in Santa Clara Review, Waterlogged August, Thin Air, and Temenos.

Laurel S. Peterson is an English professor whose poetry has been published in many literary journals. She has two poetry chapbooks, That’s the Way the Music Sounds (Finishing Line) and Talking to the Mirror (Last Automat), and two full-length collections, Do You Expect Your Art to Answer? and Daughter of Sky (Futurecycle). She has also written two mystery novels, Shadow Notes and The Fallen (Woodhall). She is on the editorial board of Inkwell magazine, the Norwalk Public Library Board, and served as Norwalk, Connecticut’s, Poet Laureate from April 2016 – April 2019.

Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). Opening is forthcoming from Rectos Y Versos Editions. Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose is forthcoming from Brick/House Books.

Coree Spencer has been living in New York City for thirtythree years, and when not writing, she works in the catering industry. She has been published online on Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Ducts.org and Sensitive Skin. She has most recently had a short story appear in the anthology, Rimes of the Ancient Mariner Silver Tongued Devil.

Brett Thompson has been writing poetry since his graduate days at the University of New Hampshire where he earned a M.A. in English Writing with a concentration in poetry. He has been published in various journals, including Plainsongs, Tilde, District Lit, The Literary Nest, and Peregrine Journal. He teaches and lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two young daughters.

J.T. Townley has published in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and many other magazines and journals.  His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (three times) and the Best of the Net Award.  He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in English from the University of Oxford, and he teaches fiction writing at Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University.  To learn more, visit jttownley.com.

John Walser is a professor of English at Marian University of Fond du Lac. He holds a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Plume, Posit, Nimrod, december magazine, Spillway, Lumina, The Pinch, Water-Stone Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Iron Horse, Thin Air, and Lunch Ticket, as well as the anthology New Poetry from the Midwest 2017. A four-time semifinalist

for the Pablo Neruda Prize and a Pushcart nominee, he is the recipient of the 2015 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers.

Craig Weisz is a filmmaker and Professor of Screenwriting & Film History at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  Originally from California, he now resides in Northern New Jersey with his wife and two teenage kids.  His work is available at craigweiszphotography.com.

Megan Lynn Wilkinson is a poet, writing teacher, and cultural enthusiast who is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Creative Writing at The University of Southern Mississippi. In her endeavors to convey human experience through language, she considers ideas of womanhood as they relate to environment, empowerment, and generational progression.

Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in magazines including Cagibi Literary Journal, The London Reader, The Aurorean, The Ocotillo Review, and in his book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, (Rabbit House Press, 2020), political poetry for a post-truth world. Mike lives in Central Kentucky, and can be found at mikewilsonwriter.com.

Simon Wolf has an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington Bothell. His work has been published by Leveler Poetry, Seattle’s Poetry on Buses, and featured in Coastal Poets - A Reading and Film Festival. He lives on South Beacon Hill, in Seattle Washington. He works as a waiter and bartender. He is the co-founder of Stay Happy Arts Collective.