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