Oxford Magazine 28: Isolation

O XFORD MAGAZINE 28 / SUMMER 2012 M S

ISOLATION

T Thhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk..

ii

MASTHEAD Editor-in-Chief Jacob Harksen

Fiction Editor Annie Bilancini

Essays Editor Nona Landis

Poetry Editor Alice Ladrick

Managing Editor Joe Squance

Staff Readers Steve Dudas Austin Flynn Megan Giddings Tyler Groff C.J. Opperthauser Tony Ramstetter

iii

CONTACT For general inquiries: oxmag@muohio.edu

For submission guidelines and to view past issues: oxfordmagazine.org

Special thanks: David Harris Ebenbach Matt Kish Dana Leonard Christopher Michel Billy Simms Tin House Books Creative Writing Department of Miami University Diego, for being a loyal friend.

Established in 1984 and still produced by the graduate students of Miami University’s Department of English. The views expressed herein are those of the artists and not the editors or sponsors. After first publication, all subsequent rights revert back to the author.

Copyright © 2012 Oxford Magazine

iv

OXFORD MAGAZINE ⋅ ISSUE 28 ⋅ SUMMER 2012 ISOLATION

CONTENTS

Featured Fiction DAVID HARRIS EBENBACH Into the Wilderness

19

MICHELLE MOROUSE Basement, Unfinished

1

DAN DAVIS Constance

7

J. TANNER CUSICK Another Glimpse

9

SUSAN TAYLOR CHEHAK The Beginning of the End of All That

42

BRENT FISK Everything Must Go

53

KAREN EILEEN SISK Finding My Mother’s Species

2

NICOLE STEINBERG First Elegy Getting Lucky with Edith Getting Lucky with Amelia

5 6 6

JOHN McKERNAN Missing the Big Party

17

Fiction

Poetry

v

KEVIN SIMMONDS july in st. helena a sentence

36 38

RACHEL MILLIGAN She Says She Has to Talk About It. I, As a Rule, Never Do Supposedly Terminable Things Like Hunger and Waiting The Germination of Fingernails

49 51 52

Artwork MATT KISH Hixoi, Emperor of the Celestial Ponds Flying-Not-Swimming, the Effervescent Satellite Excerpts from Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page Excerpts from the Illustrated Heart of Darkness Excerpt from The Alligators of Abraham, Book II

3 4 12 40 58

BILLY SIMMS Into the Wilderness

26

CHRISTOPHER MICHEL On Necessary Echelons: A Review of Henri Cole, Billy Collins, Derek Walcott, Terrance Hayes and George R.R. Martin

27

Nonfiction

Notes on Contributors

59

vi

MICHELLE MOROUSE

Basement, Unfinished

More than the sum of it all: crowded shelves calling — learn Spanish, learn German, practice yoga, do the tango, hip-hop, hops and malt, go skating, make a quilt, make your own will, will away the pounds. And the plush purple sofa rests under arachnid lace, redolent of old boyfriends’ sweat and the dander of dogs long departed — beside the bread maker, silenced two diets ago. The kin cries out — remember that dress, that neighbor, that wedding, that Christmas, that cat, your teacher, your blessed birth. More than the sum of it, some oblique calculus — and the crock of kim-chi continues in the corner, fermenting to infinity.

1

KAREN EILEEN SISK

Finding My Mother’s Species Blue heron feet and thin zigzag legs move slowly through pond muck to keep fish still like my mother’s words tested my father to prevent his temper frothing to surface.

As a chickadee her black mascara bled out purple circles around her eyes, her mask at restaurants eager, flitted, pecked, strained among plates ate scraps and crumbs.

When a chicken wire caged just her size.

Beak and nails broken from trying to turn.

My father shut her in and ignored molting feathers, clouded eyes, and her shrinking.

Somehow she survived.

Maybe she was always a Canada goose, a water lover often floating.

She protected her young like one, hissed at any threat, unleashed long neck sways and loud lingering honks.

2

MATT KISH

H’Xoi, Emperor of the Celestial Ponds

Ink on watercolor paper, 8” x 11”, 2006

3

Flying-Not-Swimming, the Effervescent Satellite

Ink on watercolor paper, 10” x 8”, 2005

4

NICOLE STEINBERG

First Elegy I threw myself down on the pine-needle evening.

—Muriel Rukeyser

Take comfort, the rabbi advised— comfort, my namesake in the Hebrew tongue once reserved for admonishments, a time when I still wore pigtails.

My hair grew long as the evening behind me, the list of evenings meant to bury, made of hours spent washing cemetery dirt from my heels, stung everywhere capable of feeling.

I want to lie on the evening that shrouds you and returns all the time as rare beloveds do—to bleed myself into the earth, return you to you.

5

Getting Lucky With Edith It’s ennui that plagues the beautiful starlet who claims to love cheeseburgers. She tastes mildly of peppermint and cinnamon chalk, bathed in creams, milks and pistachio butter with a just-back-from-safari glow. You might spot her at a cool London flea market, straight from the planetarium, or just grabbing milk at the store—a Studio 54 Audrey Hepburn in strappy sandals, tulle overlay and a most wearable cape from a Paris couturier.

It’s important that fashion be reasonable with a touch of hysteria. We’re all fighting over who gets to take this pedigree peacock home, the lush kaleidoscope under that flouncy skirt.

Getting Lucky With Amelia My most intense childhood memory is a freak ink blot on a watercolor foundation: knotted stockings and oversized roses, a strange gentleman winking from the frayed edges of my comfort zone.

Pulled from the playbook of tough circumstances, I'm a muted stingray; some bad girl's doppelganger handpainted charcoal gray, oxidized and angular, artfully askew. Aristocrats and heiresses, polished and pretty, wound around the waists of men, tighter than tight—they make me want to skunk my hair, go Jackson Pollock on my ultra-sensitive bedfellows. In this parochial age, there's no easy way to be fearless. I show a little ankle like the girls on the street, who seem to float along, iridescent.

6

DAN DAVIS

Constance She smiled, though her muscles were sore from all the smiling she'd done at him, always in his presence smiling.

“Constance,” he said. “You can't keep this up. He'll kill you.”

More the better, she thought.

“He's eating away at you. He's the kind of person they call a monster. Anytime you've heard a man called a monster, it's somebody like him.”

True, she thought. But not all monsters are dangerous; some are just…hurtful.

“I'll have a talk with him.” He stood, walked over to the hat rack — they had a hat rack, of all things, a hat rack — and grabbed his fedora. He thought it made him look cool, not archaic. “I'll go right now.” He stopped at the door, turned back to her. “Unless you think I shouldn't. I mean, unless you think…”

What did she think? She thought he should sit right down and suck it up like he always did. She thought he should take a shower, fuck her, make her dinner, call her a whore. She thought all these things, but what she said was: “Talk to him.”

Her voice was even. She was smiling, but her voice was flat. It made him pause even longer, staring at her. Then he turned without a word — it had been a dare, he decided; it hadn't been, but that's what he thought it was — and left, closing the apartment door gently behind him.

She watched him leave. The kitchen was small, close. It felt smaller than the rest of the apartment, and not in the obvious way. She got up and went into their bedroom, which felt small too, but was at least more comfortable. She lay down on the bed, mattress springs poking into her back. They weren't poor, but they couldn't afford a decent mattress. Did that make them middle class?

Okay, she thought, as the ceiling fan whirred overhead. Okay, so Richard hit her.

Once, only once. And yes, she'd hit him first. Said things, too, things that maybe she deserved to be hit for. Or maybe she didn't — no, she didn't. No woman deserved to be hit. No man, either. Did that make them even?

7

So many reasons she shouldn't see him. He was violent, for one; he'd only hit her the once, but there were other kinds of violence, other forms of torture. The torture of addiction, for example. She needed him, he knew it; he knew when to deprive her of himself, knew when to let her throw herself onto him.

She was married, too. That was another reason. Paul was a good man, in the way that Richard was a bad man — meaning, as compared to society at large. Richard was violent; Paul was pacifistic. This “talk” would come to nothing. It couldn't. Paul wasn't the type for talk. He was the type to be talked to, and she did her share of talking, everyone did, people he knew and people he didn't. All those years of being talked to made a man good, she thought. It certainly didn't make him bad, though occasionally he was wrong, and often he was just plain naïve.

And she? What was she? Well, it depended on whom she spent more time with, didn't it? She was married to Paul, so that made her good. Or at least lukewarm. Perhaps she was like fresh toilet water — technically clean, but you still didn't want to drink it.

She smiled at the thought, smiled to herself this time. Her face was blank, nothing there, no presence of herself, no trace of anything conscious. This is how she waited — thirty minutes, an hour. Until the sound of the apartment door opening, and closing, and the metallic tremble of the hat rack. And then footsteps, voicelessly calling out for her.

He didn't speak, which meant that she'd been right.

He stood in the doorway to the bedroom. He was backlit by the light from the hall. The bedroom was dark. He was a shadow there, a void in time, and for a moment he didn't look like himself. Something in the lay of his shoulders, in the stiffness of his neck.

Which one was it? The good one or the bad?

And then it was gone, and he left the doorway and went into the kitchen, where he began cooking a belated dinner. She stayed on the bed. She hadn't smiled at him, then, but perhaps he hadn't noticed. And if he had noticed, he hadn't said anything, which maybe meant that she didn't have to smile so often. Perhaps that was the reason that kept her seeing the other one, the bad one — she never had to smile for him.

8

J. TANNER CUSICK

Another Glimpse I had noticed that the sun was hitting her eyes and had asked if she wanted me to lower the shade, and she did, a bit, and so I did, a bit, and then that shelf of light cut across her neck. Up or down it didn't much matter to me, I was just going to lean back with my noise-canceling headphones and fall asleep. Next a female voice clicked on and said that it was up to us, of course, but if we lowered our shades it would make the movie easier to see. The sun was already beginning to set, though, so I left it where it was. I put on a lilting ambient album and decided that sleep was too boring, switching over to my list of favorites, a hundredish random songs that had in recent months earned a twinkling yellow star from me, letting them shuffle at first, but soon swiping in and further curating my curation — this song, and now this one, and then that one, or no, this one instead.

Restless, searching for something, nameless but cloyingly urgent. Taking headphones from the flight attendant, she and her husband watched the movie and I closed my eyes and opened them for longer and closed them more. She would nudge him and then cock her head, both of them admiring the sunset briefly and then turning back to the screen as I would feel depressingly superior — either they didn't look long enough to grasp the nuance, or maybe they looked even longer than the scene warranted — that is, I had seen much better sunsets than this one, so why dignify it with undue attentions. The wing was blocking most of my view and the colors beyond were just watery pink and smudged yellow, so I closed my eyes once more. Still I couldn't deprive myself, wanting to see with their eyes and surreptitiously leaning forward on some pretense, getting something from the bag at my feet as I tilted my head just so against the tray table approximating their angle, not wanting to appear as if emulating them, allowing a blasé gap between their gaze and mine, looking out along the wing's trailing edge and far into the solid red heart of the sundrop proper — glowing hard and pure, nothing muted or dirty at all. And oh, it was a real sunset, one-dimensional perhaps, but intense. Though how long can you reasonably take to retrieve something from a one-packet bag, and my self-consciousness

9

gathered as I worried about blocking their vantage — yes, it was my window seat, but I felt they deserved it more. The silent movie flickered by, soundtracked by my zeitgeist sugar pop. I squirmed and thunk, and finally tapped on “Genesis,” by Grimes. Look, the song of course is immaterial to what follows — you will pick your own — but this was mine: The gloaming now, so often the best part, a delicate moment after everyone else has ceased to appreciate. The wing now crisp, somehow so defined, its whitesilver lines resting on the whitepeach grayglow sky. Calmed to stillness, floating, no urgency at all, the perfect drift and smooth. The onlyness of the slowering moment on that pristine synthetic hum, a glimpse so clear and obvious that the brain just quiets. o o oo oo o ooo oo o o o oo ooo oo o o ooo Brief, fragile, yes, the brain never shuts up for long. The desire to capture those instants — recognize them, savor them, articulate them, name them, document them, catalog them: The oneness! Buddhist Hallelujah! How everything is this and nothing could be better than this exact thing right now! This! now! To understand, that this is all! And then the hum switches off, that droning current suddenly absent from your body and truly you levitate most frightened and free, the tether abruptly cut and replaced by no sound or vibration. You float forward but fully unmoored. The engine has failed and now you are crashing, because each transcendence must be paid for, each price more exacting than the last. There is no doubt you are guilty for feeling too much, for seeing too much, for not thinking for too long.

A female voice clicks on and says that the captain has initiated the landing sequence, please put your electronic devices away. You notice that the song, only four minutes long in any case, has not even played halfway. You want to hear the rest, to return, you don't want to die, just two more minutes — please! let me back in, just two more minutes — please! Next time, maybe start a bit sooner?

10

ooo o o oo ooo oo o o oo o oo o ooo o oo o My heart I never be I never see I never know. Oh heart and then it falls and then I fall and then I know.

11

MATT KISH Excerpts from Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (© Matt Kish. Reprinted with permission from Tin House Books)

Moby-Dick page 109: “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.”

Colored pencil, ink and marker on found paper, 11” x 7.75”, 2009

12

Moby-Dick page 117: Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.

Colored pencil and ink on found paper, 7.75” x 11”, 2009

13

Moby-Dick page 131: The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters…

Ink and marker on found paper, 15.75” x 10.75”, 2010

14

Moby-Dick page 534: ... Moby-Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.

Ink on watercolor paper, 8.25” x 12”, 2011

15

Moby-Dick page 538: "Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck; "never, never wilt thou capture him, old man - In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone - all good angels mobbing thee with warnings; - what more wouldst thou have? - Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh, - Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"

Acrylic paint and ink on watercolor paper, 12” x 8.25”, 2011

16

JOHN McKERNAN Missing the Big Party Bix Biederbeck & Charlie Parker Jim Beam over shaved ice Elegant finger food Braille onions Desserts with lemon Trying to read the penciled hieroglyphic address on the back of the electric bill Maybe I heard wrong at the gas pump Maybe scribbled it wrong Here we are prowling back & forth this coil of a gravel road The scent of apple blossom off that road two turns back Perfume in an aggressive twilight Defenseless broccoli We are missing the party Missing All that free vodka All the pine trees the shape of arrows Needles Cones Turpentine They’ll have talking birds in cages in a row behind the drinks table Drunk parrots reciting the weather report for Brisbane There’s the cemetery again With the scowling night watchman We’ve been up & down this road four times The buildings grow bright then dim again

17

Foot paths crawl in wood across the creek bed to porch light Wherever or whoever or whatever we are missing isn’t here The smell of mud & worm from a plowed field Wild onion

18

FEATURED FICTION DAVID HARRIS EBENBACH

Into the Wilderness My parents helped me get from the hospital to my apartment. We rode up in the elevator with all my stuff, and then at my front door I felt this strange wash of relief, and even more as I opened the door and saw my little living room, the little hall that pushed back past the bathroom to the bedroom. I saw the couch, the rug that defined the living room, that set it off from the makeshift dining room, the small round table I used for eating off to my left, the kitchen tucked in behind it through the doorway. And, all around me everywhere, the reproductions of my favorite paintings — mostly portraits. Modigliani, Close, Matisse. This was the place where my life happened. Coming back offered this sensation that my previous life was sitting there available for me, that I could stroll in, grab the splayed-open book off the coffee table — novel, interrupted — and just get back to it.

Of course, just then, behind me the baby let out a little cry of reminder.

“I think someone’s hun-gry,” my mother sang, brightly cheerful.

I sighed. “Who isn’t?”

And so I sat on my couch, my Ethan Allen couch that was my second bed, the reading and napping and foreplay place, and I breastfed the baby on a couch pillow on my lap. Meanwhile my father was opening the shades on the windows and my mother was in the kitchen, pulling some snack together and also throwing away things that needed throwing away. Looking down, I watched a drop of milk fall from the breast that was waiting to be used and land on the pillow. This was not the first time some bodily fluid had ended up somewhere on this piece of furniture, but I had this weird feeling that it was somehow, for me, the least innocent of the fluids.

“Where will the baby go?” my father said, when we were all sitting down with sandwiches. He scanned the space for appropriate nooks.

“The bassinet can strap right up against the bed,” I said. I had thought of some things in advance.

19

“What about when she’s older?”

This was just another version of his usual astonishment that I could live in such a small space, but amplified now that his granddaughter was here, the problem too serious for him to ignore. I looked around a little. This had been a good place to be a single person. Was this a bad environment for the baby?

“That’s a good question, Dad,” I said. “I haven’t worked that out yet.” I pictured my apartment in boxes, all packed up, felt the edge of panic.

“You won’t be able to stay here.”

“I think it’s a romantic kind of existence,” my mother said, dreamy. “But it’s true — it won’t work when the baby’s older.” The two were like tag-team wrestling partners.

Or good cop, naggy cop.

“Well, she’s not older now,” I said. Goddammit. “For now, she can sleep next to the bed in the co-sleeper.”

“Is that all set up?” my father said, eyebrows up high. I shook my head and watched him clap his hands once with a renewed sense of purpose, and then disappear off into the bedroom.

I looked over at my mother, studied her aggressively-colored hair (brown with the dye but would have been salt and pepper without it), studied the hang of the skin under her face. Still — despite the signs of age, she looked more like the baby’s true parent than me, and not just because the child had a width in her face that was definitely from my mother. It was also because she was somehow just so good at the nurturing all of a sudden. The baby was asleep in her arms, and she said, “Pass me that pillow,” which she then tucked under the baby to rest her arms a little. She did all of this gracefully, easily. I really had never thought of her as an expert mother, but here were these things that she did so naturally, like they were a part of her DNA. With me, all these same things were clumsy, strange, fake.

“Maybe I ought to take the next round of pills,” I said to her. There was a low, warm pain starting to brew in me. Every once in a while it hit me — they had cut me.

They had cut through skin and that little bit of fat that had turned into that whole lot of fat during pregnancy, and through muscle, and right into the uterus itself. My uterus.

Something about that last part — to invade a person’s organs — seemed appalling. But it

20

was hardly a private space at the time, I guess, with the baby already in there, growing, drawing life from my veins, out of my own food supply.

My mother, meanwhile, sighed and gingerly got up and just as carefully transferred the baby and the pillow to me, which all sort of pinned me to the couch, and she went off to find pills and water. The baby stirred a very little bit, but never opened her eyes. What was going on in there, I wondered?

“Oh, child,” I whispered. “Why did I bring you here?”

My mother came back with pills and water. “Here you go,” she said, but I had trouble getting a hand free, so she put the pills in my mouth and tipped the water glass so I could drink them down.

“Where have you been all my life?” I said.

“How’s that baby?” she said, looking down at her.

“Asleep, I guess,” I said.

My mother sat on the edge of the couch, put her hand on my knee. Her face was curious, even solemn. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “And to do it on your own…”

I knew they were going to bring up the single mother thing at some point today.

“Mom, I—” I started to say, but then I cut myself off with some very unexpected tears.

My mother froze at first, and then patted my knee with a few efficient pats, her bracelets piled close on her hand. “Okay,” she said. “All right.”

I heard my father’s footsteps come into the room behind me and then pause and retreat again. Something about that made me want to stop crying. “Could you wipe my face?” I said — my hands were full — and my mother found a tissue on herself somewhere and wiped me down briskly. “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t know what that was.”

“Really?”

Normally I would have answered with some snappy comment, but the birth had slowed me down in a way, and the comment didn’t make it out. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said.

My mother smiled, dreamy again. “Daddy and I used to sit out in the living room drinking booze and tearing our hair out while you were in the next room crying, and we didn’t know what to do.”

“This, I have to tell my therapist.”

21

My mother looked at me with a little sudden contempt on her face. “Those people.

They expect miracles from parents. They’re like little idealistic children. Santa Clausers.”

“I was kidding, Mom — you know I’m the only unanalyzed Jew in New York?

They did an article on me for Time Out.” Well, I hadn’t totally slowed down.

“All the better for you,” she said. “You and your brother can think up enough nasty thoughts about me without some self-important social worker’s help.” At that, she stood up to tackle the next thing. “Now, what am I doing?” she said. “Oh right,” and she went to my refrigerator to see what wasn’t in it, and to make a list.

At one point that afternoon, I remembered the voicemail and listened to all the messages.

Mara (from college, calling from Delaware): I have this feeling you had your baby. Am I right? If I don’t hear from you I’ll know I’m right — so if you’re still just pregnant, call me, girl! Wow — maybe you’re having your baby right now. Call me!

Secretary: This is Dr. Reed’s office in Dental Associates, calling to remind Judith Berger that it’s time to make another appointment…

Josh (from work): Hey, there, Judith — how’s pregnancy leave treating you?

When’s that baby coming? This place is a shambles without you — get back here ASAP! Cousin Shoshannah (after visiting at the hospital): I just met your baby. She is so beautiful, I’m dying. I’m dying from it.

And on and on they went — mostly people who didn’t know if the birth had happened yet or not, and a few who knew and were excited. Cousin Janet, my born-again Christian cousin Janet, left a quote: But now faith, hope, love — abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. The baby woke up while I was abiding that little chestnut, and I fed her and paid half attention to the sort of stridently happy tones of the voices on the machine. I realized that half-attention was about as much as I could muster anymore, and that it would be like that for a long time.

Dad found a huge dish of baked ziti that my friend Ellen had left in my freezer for just such an occasion, and he heated it up for us in the microwave. “Marathoners eat pasta before marathons,” he said ominously.

The baby slept on a playmat while we ate. She seemed to sleep a lot, at least during the day; in the hospital the nurses had started to wake me up for night feedings, to

22

get that milk supply going, and at those times it seemed more like the baby was awake a lot. On some level, it just seemed that she tended to do what people did not do; she slept through conversations, took drugged-seeming, expressionless surveys of rooms and faces, moved her limbs without purpose, ate from my breasts, woke in the night. I couldn’t help thinking that she was like a different kind of creature, a different species altogether. An alien advance guard doing reconnaissance, aiming to disarm us through strangeness, cuteness, apparent helplessness. And me the first step in the plan to conquer Earth.

“So,” I said, and I had nothing else after that.

My parents looked up from their food, and I saw that they were tired, too. There wasn’t anywhere near enough room in the apartment to comfortably put even one of my parents up for the night; though each had offered to stick around and sleep on the couch I had turned them both down, knowing that my mother had enough insomnia and my father enough back problems, that it just wouldn’t be nice of me to lay either of them out on the couch — and, with my fresh scar leering across my belly, I wasn’t going to give up the bed myself. So they were staying with cousins out on Long Island while they were in from Indiana — here for the birth and, sooner or later, for the naming ceremony — and I could tell they were wanting to go back there and get some sleep. Still, my father looked around, as though searching for a few more tasks, or as though trying to locate some hidden other person, someone who could help me out when he was gone, and he said, “Is there anything you need us to do before we go, to get the apartment ready?”

Take my place, I thought. Stay and do this for me. I’ll be out having crème brulée at the dessert café a few blocks down. But I couldn’t think of anything I could actually ask for. “Just be sure to leave the instruction manual when you go,” I said.

“Don’t believe what any of the books tell you to do,” my mother said, as usual missing that I was kidding, pointing at me with a fork. “They all disagree with each other, anyway. Sleep her on her back, don’t sleep her on her back, let the baby cry, God forbid you let the baby cry.”

“So some of them must be right, then, right?” I said. “If they all disagree. If they all say the opposite thing.”

“They’re all wrong. You can’t find right in a book,” my mother said.

23

“Okay, ma — no books,” I said, making something like a Boy Scout salute with my hand.

Eventually, dinner was over, and when my father had quietly and not all that carefully washed the dishes, it was time for them to go. They were seeing me in the morning, but they kissed me like I was going off into the wilderness to find the meaning of life, likely never to return. My mother even held my face in her hands a minute and shook her head at me, her eyes full of wonder.

And then they left.

This was the real moment — in some ways, the strangest moment. There was the birth, of course, but I had been dizzy with exhaustion then, and so didn’t catch the full strangeness of it at the time. Plus the idea of birth was pretty well tied to the idea of pregnancy for me. But this moment, alone in the apartment, the door closed after my parents, and then this sound, this thin, testing cry from behind me — I turned to the playmat that was next to the couch, and saw the baby, and although most of me knew intellectually that this was the deal, this baby, at the same time there was this other voice, a minority voice but a forceful one, astonished, that said to the baby, You’re still here? I almost fell back against the door from the force of it.

I mean, shouldn’t the hospital stay have been the duration of it? Isn’t that what happens at hospitals? You go in because you have something, and you go home when you don’t have the thing anymore. They don’t send you home with jars of neutralized viruses or surgically-removed appendixes for you to take care of, after all. They just remove them. Or, if not that, shouldn’t my parents have taken the baby with them when they left, as though they had been a party of three guests?

But in that moment of turning from the front door toward the cry, I think I began to understand it.

“You’re here,” I said aloud. The baby was a baby, not just an idea of a baby, a vague expectation. “You’re not going anywhere,” I said.

The baby, eyes open but only dully open, looked into some middle distance while I tried to stay upright. For her part, she didn’t seem at all freaked out by the arrangement, probably wasn’t even aware of it. I had the idea that the world, including me, was mostly invisible to her. I walked over to the mat, feeling some pain in my incision or maybe in

24

my head, and sat down on the couch. She continued to blink and look out at nothing in particular, but I studied her. I studied the black, thick hair that had been so surprising when I first saw her, the wide forehead, the small eyes that had so much iris and so little white, those eyelids that slid open and shut like a relaxed pulse, her skinny arms and the sleeves hanging loose off them, arms that moved like separate and blind animals, her skinny legs that moved the same way, the feet that still seemed strangely angled, the whole bowlegged structure of her lower body. And I lifted her shirt, looked at the black stump that was what was left of her umbilical cord, looking more like the end of a slender tree branch than part of a human body. Just that day they had taken the clamp off, the clamp that had been irritating the skin on her belly a little, and now the branch was there by itself, waiting to fall off. I remembered what it had looked like before they cut it, when they held her over the sheet for me to see — ta da! — and my eyes, my baffled eyes, went to the cord, the strangest aspect of this strange creature — it was so bright, so colorful, like the rainbow wires in phone cords, in some kind of cloudy but translucent sausage casing. I hadn’t expected all the color, and then I hadn’t expected the shift to tree bark. Somehow I hadn’t expected any of it.

I pulled the baby’s shirt down again and just sat there next to her while she did whatever she did with the world around her. Eventually she made her tiny lion roars for something, and I guessed it might be food, because who knows, but it had been food before, and this time it was, too, as it turned out, and we sat together while she ate. She had no idea, I could see, where this food was coming from. For that matter, I didn’t really understand it either. We had that in common, anyway. At one point I looked down at her, every part of her precisely supported in my arms, and I saw her skinny, helpless neck.

Right there in the neck, I thought–right there is where this child is an instant away from — and I shook my head to clear it of that.

The apartment was bright, fully lit. But that wasn’t how it felt. It felt like we were sitting in one soft, yellow spotlight at the center of a lot of dimness: woman and baby, feeding and eating in that small light. Woman and baby.

25

BILLY SIMMS Into the Wilderness

Lino cut relief print, 8” x 6.5”, 2011

26

CHRISTOPHER MICHEL

On Necessary Echelons On one of my grad-school professor’s office doors there was a line, attributed to George Bernard Shaw or some other highly quoted name, to the effect that every reader needs both great writing and trash. Originally it struck me as a dictum: this is how one becomes well read (and why was I using up precious years on an English graduate degree, if not to become “well read?”). Lately, Shaw-or-whoever’s quote seems more a description of the human condition. We are omnivorous creatures. Too much or too little of any particular thing will unbalance us. Still, I took (and take) the line primarily for what it is: an exhortation not to be ashamed by the lower echelons of my reading appetites.

Among the small library of books clenching bookmarks on my coffee table are the four slim volumes of poetry I mean to review here, Henri Cole’s Pierce The Skin, Billy Collins’s Horoscopes for the Dead, Derek Walcott’s White Egrets, and Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead, as well as my own lower echelon: all four of George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy series, a highly readable collection of over-thick books rife with knights doing battle, swords with names, medieval political intrigue, and dragons.

In the time it took me to work my way through two of the more literature-minded books of poetry (101 and 137 pages) I’ve covered nearly 1500 pages in Martin’s series.

Though I love and avidly read poetry (Hayden Carruth’s and Wallace Stevens’s collected works are also bookmarked at the moment) as well as literature and literary nonfiction, my personal appetite for trash, it would seem, is much greater. Based on a general sense of book sales, I’m guessing I’m not alone.

Of course, you may say, it’s yet to be proven that any of the books I’m reviewing, (if I get around to actually reviewing them before this piece is over) are actually great literature. Sure. True. But three of these books are trying to be literature (in the “timeless subject” sense), and are making use of the kind of highly specific botanical, geographical

27

and historical references that are the coin of literary writing. Besides which, very few books of poetry I can think of have ever aimed at “trash” status in the naked-appeal-tothe-New-York-Times-bestseller-list sense of that term. What would be the point?

So what to make of this — that trash is much more readable than literature? That it’s more accessible? There’s certainly plenty of accessible poetry out there — and of the four poets I’m reviewing, none are what you would call difficult.

I think, for my own tastes, I read so much less literature because I’m a lot less forgiving of it, especially poetry. I expect more out of it. And I read it harder, as well. I expect to put a lot more into it.

For some, poetry is wordplay — it’s messing around with sounds to see how they fit together. The point is less the overall meaning than the unexpected connections that can be made. This can certainly be pleasurable, but I find poetry most satisfying when the meaning and the sound sync up, like sine waves amplifying each other. The poetry I love is the stuff that sounds so good it makes me wish I’d said it — the lines I repeat so often in my head they come to feel like a part of me. Here’s an example: part IV of Walcott’s “Sicilian Suite” from his very excellent book, White Egrets: On the cathedral steps sprinkled by the bells’ benediction like water that blissfully stained the scorching street, you were not among the small crowd in the sun, so many in black against the Sicilian heat.

I never entered the shaded church with its pews facing the tortured altar, but I hoped to find you: Oh, I did, half-heartedly, but by now it was no use.

The bells meant nothing or the swallows they lifted; still I felt you were ahead and I was right behind you, and that you would stop on your shadow and turn your head, and there in Sicily turn into salt, into fiction.

I don’t know the cathedral’s name. It’s in Syracuse.

I bought a paper in a language I cannot read.

There was nothing in the paper about this. It wasn’t news.

Walcott’s judicious words constantly surprise. The way he uses “sprinkled” to tie the spiritual but physical benediction of bells to the earthly but incorporeal heat of the scorching street creates a complex tension between the two types of solace his speaker is seeking that plays out across the rest of the poem. The church provides comfort and

28

reprieve, but not, perhaps, the kind intended, and thus the speaker avoids it. Despite the recurring motif of birds throughout the book, the swallows taking flight come as a surprise, echoing the effect their flight would have in the moment. And the poem builds powerfully to its revelatory moment, which is no revelation, but feels like one anyway, as the form of the poem nearly demands it.

A poem like this can be so well-said that it demands re-reading until the reader risks conflating the speaker’s and the reader’s experience. This quality of conflation is, I believe, what leads critics to call certain poems “universal” and it’s in quest of that type of universality that, I think, so many poets try to write work devoid of modern markers.

Walcott does this. With the exception of one line about “the DVD going / in the rented burgundy Jeep” and a few references to Obama, (that are, let’s face it, just as historical as references to Heraclitus) these poems could be set anywhere in the last couple centuries.

They are island pastorals: egrets and beaches are prominent tropes; cell phones and reruns are not. But Walcott’s Sicilian Suite isn’t great because it avoids a singularity of experience — I’ve never been to Sicily, or felt I had to choose between the oppressive heat outside a church and the oppressive shade inside it. But I’ve seen sparrows take off at a loud sound, and I’ve heard church bells. I’ve wondered about the existence of God and I’ve felt alienated in a strange place. The poem is satisfying because I believe that Walcott’s speaker has had these experiences as well, and because the scene is presented with enough detail to make the emotional tensions real.

That, and of course, it’s really, really well said. Walcott is a master of the steady line: he holds to the loose pentameter without making it sound repetitive or dull. He lets the lines rhyme but doesn’t jump onto those rhymes with both feet. More importantly, he evokes the physical and emotional settings of his poems with a beautiful, sure hand.

These poems are dark and mysterious, well-wrought without being precious and worth the conflation that attends multiple readings. ...

29

Former U.S. Laureate Billy Collins, in Horoscopes for the Dead, also reaches out to the reader, aiming to engender a sense of universal experience. Unfortunately, he falls about as flat as he can get. This is Collins’s ninth book, and it’s bad.

Like all writing, poetry is about tension. Whereas stories provide tension through plot, building the reader’s concern for what comes next, poets provide tension through line and word choice, creating expectations and thwarting them with surprising turns, references, images. Collins has long been a poet of minor tensions: small mirths, jokes about humdrum daily life, thoughts that might pass through one’s head during a Saturday afternoon puttering around the house, that sort of thing. So the stakes have never been terribly high. This may be the source of his popularity: he’s a highly undemanding poet.

But in his latest book he demands so little, and puts so little at risk, that his limp lines fall apart. A typical poem begins with the supremely uninformative title, “Her:” There is no noisier place than the suburbs, someone once said to me as we were walking along a fairway, and every day is pleased to offer fresh evidence: the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing one leaf around an enormous house with columns, on Mondays and Thursdays, the garbage truck equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper and merciless grinder.

There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes, or serious earthmovers if today is not your day.

How can the birds get a peep or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?

But this morning is different, only a soft clicking sound and the low talk of two workmen working on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing.

Otherwise, all quiet for a change, just the clicking of tiles being handled and their talking back and forth in Spanish, then one of them asking in English “What was her name?” and the silence of the other.

30

Leaving aside the sheer ridiculousness of the first line (which I assumed was a joke until he made serious argument for it), Collins’s flaccid mannerisms cannot let him even be specific about who first said it. Though clearly it must be someone other than the speaker, who cannot bring himself to make any assertions at all. Aside from the grumbling about his noisy neighborhood, the only indicated tension in the poem comes from two people that Collins’s speaker does not know, cannot see (he can only guess at the work they’re doing) and can only half understand. This is a poet who cannot bring his speaker to get up and investigate the subject matter of his own poem. There may be something interesting in that overheard, half-Spanish conversation, and it may be fun to lie back and dream about what that may be, but this poem doesn’t convey it.

The rest of the poems in this book are worth as little. Collins’s speaker wanders lightly through them, jingling the change in his pocket, occasionally noting the scenery, then arching an eyebrow, hoping a casual reader will confuse it for a kind of dry wit. …

Henri Cole is not a poet of dry wit. He is darkly earnest, as his recent collection of selected works, Pierce The Skin, details. Cole has worked both in free verse and in form, investigating the perplexities of his sexuality, familial relationships, social, religious and cultural milieus. At times his early work can sound like imitations of Thom Gunn, but his later poems are more wholly his own, and in many ways more successful.

Here’s a poem from The Visible Man, published in 1998, called “White Spine.”

Compare it with Walcott’s poem, above: Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others, how can He love me and hate what I am?

The dome of St. Peter’s shone yellowish gold, like butter and eggs. My God, I prayed anyhow, as if made in the image and likeness of Him. Nearby, a handsome priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back, not desiring to go it alone.

The college of cardinals wore punitive red.

The white spine waved to me from his white throne.

31

Being in a place not my own, much less myself, I climbed out, a beast in a crib.

Somewhere a terrorist rolled a cigarette.

Reason, not faith, would change him.

This poem doesn’t lack for tension: there is sexuality, politics, religion, alienation, all more or less battling for space. But the tensions do not inhabit the word choice, the descriptions, the lines, or even really the imagery. They are inherently a part of the narrative — the speaker is tense with conflict, but it isn’t present in the language of the poem. The single exception is the odd metonym “white spine,” which rightly titles the poem and stands out for being such a surprising descriptor. At the end, having done much to describe the scene but little to investigate all the tensions named, Cole flees the church and settles on a heathen — a terrorist rolling a cigarette “somewhere.”

The move is a mistake, I think, and it makes the poem less, not more satisfying.

There are two reasons for this: the first is that it takes the reader away from the conflicts within the speaker, and tries to replace them with the cultural conflicts of religion in general. The second is because the terrorist is more stereotype than anything — with no description of him other than his cigarette, most readers have a good sense of what this guy looks like. There’s nothing interesting or surprising about him. Nor is there much interesting in the self-satisfied conclusion that reason is stronger than faith (which is arguable at best ). Compare that to the ambivalent, precise, personal, and deeply regretful final line of Walcott’s poem. In “Sicilian Suite IV” the reader is left with a portrait of a grieving, lonely person, a specific and interesting person. In “White Spine” the reader is left with a political position straight out of The Nation or The Huffington Post.

Cole’s work has moments of real interest and surprise, but they are unfortunately as occasional as the phrase “white spine” is in the above poem. The great bulk of his work is far from unreadable, but it’s a shame that he so often loses the tension in the words for the tension in the ideas. …

32

By contrast, Terrance Hayes is one of the few poets writing today whose lines can consistently surprise. He’s probably best described as an experimental poet, though only in as much as he seems least likely to be aiming for any literary or “universal” quality.

Just the named references in Lighthead include David Bowie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Wallace Stevens, a Japanese business presentation format called “pecha-kucha” and Antony & The Johnsons. Here is a writer supremely uninterested in the timeless subject .

But it does not feel as if Hayes includes references for their own sake. His poems worry over ideas that seem to be of genuine concern to him. His speakers reach out, often reaching widely for other ideas to help his speakers come to terms with those ideas, and they keep reaching until the poem has settled on an ending. In “The Elegant Tongue” Hayes uses both anthropological language and a children’s fable to examine the dwindling romance of married life: It’s Yoyo who says Tonguing, a form of kissing favored among the half-lit young, is mostly overrated and rarely practiced among married folk like us, but we give it a try, clumsy as two elephants swapping gin-tinged saliva Friday night to prove the idea is always better than the act, and since I am wistful as the blind old lumberjack who touched the elephant’s knee and fumbling for his ax declared, This animal is most like a tree, I remember my tongue sandpapered against vowels in a mouth named Yolanda in the dark of a yellow bus long ago, and I tell Yoyo how that girl may still be somewhere thinking fondly of our tangle. Forgive me: I believe, as the elephant must, that everything is punctured by the tusks of Nostalgia.

They use those things to uproot roots, but let’s never forget the old blind warrior who touched the elephant’s tusk and said, This thing is most like a spear, and took it as a sign that Man should spend his life defending his house, and though he probably wasn’t wrong, it’s the best intentions that turn need into want, which is another way of saying the tongue is mostly disgust coated in desire, or desire coated in disgust depending on the way you look.

My tongue is unusually short, but I’m happy to say Yoyo prefers my lips. If you are not an elephant more adept at using your trunk than your tongue, you cannot wrestle, nor caress, nor blow water into the air while your kiss

33

is being chewed in a dining room beside a houseplant called The Mother-in-Law’s Tongue because of its sword-shaped leaves or perhaps because it has no mind for boundaries, though boundaries too are a matter of the way you look.

The African elephant, for example, can be found in countries like Angola, Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, and that must mean a tongue knows nothing about territory. It’s a spit of land, a promontory.

Remember the blind prisoner who touched the elephant’s flank and said, This creature is most like a wall, and believed it meant all the world must be a jail? Some say it’s mostly walls that constitute a marriage, and in many ways that may be true, since Yoyo will not divulge the slip and slither administered once by a boy plucked from the pews of her serious Pentecostal history, which I know featured a perspiring, eye-tossing glossolalist mouthing things only the faithful could decipher so that Fuck might be translated as the sound at the beginning of Forgiveness, and the hands of the white-bloused ladies, her momma among them, patting the convulser’s shoulders, might be said to emulate several vibrating reeds.

I’m talking about the rapture of tongues. The Holy Rollers say it’s most like a flame in the devil’s blackout because in Acts, tongues of fire are said to alight on the apostles, filling them with the Holy Spirit and allowing them to speak in a language understood by foreigners from several countries.

Darling, kiss me again in the nastiest possible way.

When the blind fondle the elephant’s trunk, an organ of fifteen thousand miraculous multipurpose muscles, and hiss, this creature is most like the serpent in Eden, tell them, If there is goodness in your heart, it will come to your mouth, and if that doesn’t work, tell them, In the dark it’s not the forked tongue that does the piercing.

Here, there is tension in every part of the poem. There is the wordplay — “depending on the way you look” conveys (the first time) both “the way you look at it” and also how ugly or beautiful you are. The second time, it also can mean whichever way you are looking. There’s the imagery: “my tongue sandpapered against the vowels in a mouth / named Yolanda.” There’s the switching of language from high diction (“mostly overrated and rarely practiced”) to low (“married folk like us”). There’s the tale of the blind men and the elephant, which is familiar, but has been changed enough to be an entirely new story. And there is, of course, the fraught tension of the narrative, the problem of tongues,

34

what they mean and what they are good for in the foreground, and the difficulties of marriage underlying it all. At each point it’s hard to know where the speaker will go next.

Hayes has worried the idea of tongues and marriage from all angles, bringing in botany, geography, history, fables, and personal narrative. And though we never seem to arrive at any easy answers — no “reason prevails over faith” — the last line of the poem is spoken with just as much authority as in Cole’s poem. More so for the way the authority feels earned. …

R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” series is a fun, fast read. Martin draws great tension by mapping complex characters and tight plotting onto his fantasy world, and the books are the definition of page-turners. But they do not reward close reading. The sentences are generally functional, and when they reach for lyricism, they all too often stumble into tired inversions (“hungry he was, and thirsty as well”) or biblical mannerisms intended to convey the medieval perspective. One gets the sense he loves the story more than the word. Though readable, this makes them disposable, and is what relegates them, for me, to Shaw’s latter category.

I don’t think Hayes is trying to write in a “literary” style either — especially not with the sort of timelessness that marks most of Walcott and Collins’s work. But it’s clear that Hayes loves language, and his phrases are as bright and alive as any written. These poems, along with Walcott’s, reward re-reading — in fact, they demand it — and they carry the same kind of conflatability. I may read Martin faster, but Hayes and Walcott’s lines are beautiful and surprising enough that I wish I’d thought of them. And I’ll read them over and over until it feels like I have.

35

KEVIN SIMMONDS

july in st. helena vine workers pass like la brisa calma though my windows as i ease up on the gas to san francisco an hour away one dirty white man against a newspaper rack by walgreens waiting for anyone to look i will but won’t say sorry i don’t have a job either & poetry doesn’t change that the slant of sorry doesn’t ease his tightened throat when the vine worker hears there are five too many & he may be one of them saying in his mind mi hija mi hija like hail mary without the beads now dangling from his rear view what is want what is need what’s sweat without the breeze my stepfather would say

36

in his wide brimmed hat staring at how delicate i would always be how scared he was of that

Â

37Â

a sentence needs at least one subject and one verb (though sometimes the subject is unnamed, it’s understood

nevertheless objects must be named)

Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant III.

subject: Johannes Mehserle verb: shot object: Oscar Grant III

a sentence becomes sophisticated when it includes complexity and detail

Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant III who was restrained faced down on the ground surrounded by three police officers.

subject: Johannes Mehserle verb: shot object: Oscar Grant III

A white police officer shot a black man faced down on the ground

38

and will spend less than two years in jail for his criminal conviction.

what is the object of that sentence?

object? anyone?

Â

39Â

MATT KISH Excerpts from Illustrated Heart of Darkness (© Matt Kish) Heart of Darkness page 19: They were dying slowly - it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now - nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.

Ink on watercolor paper, 7.75” x 10”, 2011

40

Heart of Darkness page 041: Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of over-shadowed distances.

Ink on watercolor paper, 7.75” x 10”, 2011

41

SUSAN TAYLOR CHEHAK

The Beginning of the End of All That I will say nothing about what I know. When John comes in, emanating winter in his wool coat and his scarf and his cheeks rosy, his nose bright, his eyes, as always, like ice. If I didn’t know it yesterday, then I will still not know it today. By the time I see my husband again, I’ll have already put it all out of my mind. And he can continue to rest assured.

What I know is what I’ve always known. What I don’t know is, who sent the note.

There was no postage, so I have to assume that it was hand delivered. Someone walked it to the box. Or drove it there. We can’t see the road from the house because the driveway is almost a quarter mile long, and when we bought this house all those years ago one of the things I loved about it most was exactly that, our remove. Then, there was a white fence — now that’s gone — and, for me, an attraction to, a sense of fortitude in, the idea of that daily half-mile walk to pick up the mail. Also gone. Or in sending the children for it, later, when there were children. There were none. With the dogs alongside, romping.

Chasing each other. Chasing a tossed ball. Yes, over the years, there has always been a dog.

You’re a romantic, John said, and that was a part of what he had found attractive about me, then. But now here we are, and time has passed, and romance doesn’t last. It hardens with knowledge, with experience; it turns to rock, then erodes to dust, then blows away when you’re not looking, leaving a hollow cave, an empty place, all dug out, where the dreams used to be. Things are as they are, not as we might wish them to be.

Dr. Valentine shakes her head. She purses her lips. Frowns. Even on the radio you can hear her frown. Cut the crap, she says. Her phrase, this is, her catchphrase. Cut the crap. I have the T-shirt and a mug and a set of Post-it notes to remind me of this. Cut the crap. If you can just do that, she says, you can do anything.

The long driveway, the mailbox, the dogs, the white fence, even the children.

That’s the crap needs cutting. To get to the point, which is this: a white envelope. A yellow card, folded. Blue ink. “Your husband is a liar.” A photograph. John’s face. His hair. His hands. An entanglement of limbs. It’s hard to tell which is which. Or who is

42

who. But what’s what is very clear. *** It didn’t have to be this way. It could have turned out altogether otherwise. You make one decision and then that takes you to another and then after a while you get to be a certain age, my age, ours, and it happens. You look back and you look around and you wonder about what you’ve done. Sure, everybody knows this is so. But maybe what you didn’t expect — maybe even worse — is that you’re seeing what you didn’t do. I’m guessing that when the word gets out, no one is going to be much surprised to know what John has been up to all this time. Although they’ll love to talk to each other about it.

Some will be glad to see it ruin him. Our friends have wondered, I know, it’s obvious — what can he see in a wife like me. He, so handsome, so important, so charming, so strong.

And me, the sky, the greenery, the grass. I’m the background space, something for him to stand out against. You keep me grounded. His words. He used to tell me this. So be it. I am the ground upon which he walks. I’m the rock, and he’s the wind. He changes, he goes here and there, but I stay put and I remain the same. And all the while, we both, together, age.

So no surprise then, really. They must have supposed he’s been up to something.

Whatever it may be. Which I have chosen not to know. *** Last night I dreamed of Henry Beale, the boy that was one of the choices I didn’t make. Because I had found John, or he had found me, and I told Henry, simply, it’s over.

I handled it badly, I know that now, and maybe I knew it then too. His pale face, smooth and hard. Jaw clenching. Teeth bared, as if he might be about to bite.

No, that’s not right. The truth is, I don’t remember the moment, that exact moment, when I told him. I only recall that later, a week, maybe it was more, I saw Henry again, on the street. It was another college town that we were in then, and there was something going on, there was always something going on at that time, everybody was angry, there were marches and demonstrations, floods of students on the street, and in the midst of all that — the shouting and the music, drums and chants and the roiling crowd — I saw Henry, tall, his head above the others. His yellow hair, his blue coat, his amber eyes. I realize I couldn’t have seen their color from that far away, but I remember

43

it this way. Mixed with other memories, I suppose, of when we were together, those three years, which seemed significant then, but now it’s a trifle, fleeting, compared with the almost forty that I’ve since been with John.

I turned away. I saw Henry see me, I saw the smile, his mouth opened and he was about to speak, but I pretended not to see and I turned away, ducked off, fled, because already there was John. I skittered through the crowd, small. I slipped away and didn’t stop, didn’t listen to hear Henry calling to me, I didn’t look back. John was there, waiting for me in the bar, and he gathered me in, his smile, his arm around me. He didn’t miss a beat. Just pulled me close and went on talking to the others who were with him, watching this, watching me, listening to him and whatever it was that he had to say. Which could have been anything. *** I’ve burned the second note in the kitchen sink, the way you see people do in films. Then I ran water. Turned on the disposal. Washed my hands. I won’t say anything.

I won’t do anything. I am the ground. I am the rock.

This afternoon, as I was cutting back the roses and bundling them in burlap, I thought of Henry again. I saw my own hands, and they seemed to belong to someone else. I touched my face, pulled at my hair. I watched the birds in the tree take off and swoop across the sky, the woods, the lawn. I felt Henry there.

Now it’s dark, and I’m here in the house alone. John has called to tell me he won’t be home for dinner — a meeting, he said, something, I don’t know, they had to talk about the student-something, and he said he’d be late, don’t worry about him, don’t wait up.

Alone then, in our beautiful big house, more space, more of everything, than the two of us together need. The rugs. The crystal. The wide stairs. Emily was here earlier, cleaning, but by now she’s gone and there’s a fire and candles and music and a glass of wine. The bottle on the table, within easy reach. A cascade of roses, the last of them. And an old photograph album, with shots of me as a child, a girl, a young woman, all from the years that came before I knew John. I study my face and think I see there the shadow of myself as I am now, lurking behind the features of my face as I was then. As if it’s a promise that I didn’t know I’d made.

44

*** I’ve begun to regret burning the note, destroying it. I’d like to look at it again. The stab of those words felt good somehow. I’ve always known, of course, but this is different. Someone else knows now too. And having told me, that person also knows that I know, and whoever it is, they are waiting, watching to see what I will do. *** The television is a secret vice. I turn it on when John’s not here, which is more and more often lately. At first it was just sound, to keep me company. In the middle of the morning on a crushing late summer day when the sunshine and the blue sky and the cicadas and the whole damned fecundity of it all made me feel like a tiny little ball rattling around inside an empty box, I went into the den, where it was dark and cool and the shades were pulled, the lights were off and I turned on the TV. A beer that time. Then it was a bottle of wine. Finally it is vodka, cold and clear, a knife that can be counted on to cut through the gauze, the mist, the fog. The crap.

I sit in John’s leather chair before the big screen. This is where he watches films or listens to music. All a part of the process he has said, famously, in interviews and on other screens with other people watching, rapt. John — everybody loves him. He is very much admired. His light falls far.

His collection is impressive. And the sound system is excellent. But I ignore all that and change the input mode to television — always careful to change it back so he won’t know. Not that he would be angry. He would just take it as another dent in my fender. A chip in my china. I smile at this, my teeth on the rim of my glass. *** Channel 7. 11:00 a.m. Dr. Valentine’s face fills the screen, her eyes brimming, her lips pressed, a crease of pain on her beautiful clear brow. A close-up, just before the camera pulls back to reveal the set, the audience, the couple on the sofa opposite, sitting close, and an old woman limp in a wheelchair, chin on her chest. The audience, applauding madly. Whistles and hoots and Dr. Valentine with a hand up to hush them before she turns to the couple and asks them, for what seems to be at least the second time: What will you do? The man stands. He takes one step and then he’s on his knees before the old woman. He peers into her face, then turns to Dr. Valentine and smiling,

45

tearfully, he murmurs something too softly for the microphones to pick up. Dr. Valentine tilts her head. Cups her ear. He speaks up. She still can’t hear him. He pulls himself to his feet, turns to look at me. His face, a grimace. The right thing, he says. I’ll do the right thing. And the audience goes wild. *** Last night John sat across from me at dinner, smiling as if the world were whole, and said it would just be a short trip, he’d only be gone for the weekend. I could come along, but why would I want to do that? He’d be in meetings the whole time, and the city was not an interesting one, not this time. Brutal in winter anyway, frozen solid. I’d be stuck in the room, I’d be unhappy, I’d be better off at home, and didn’t I agree? I could tell he was lying, of course. But I don’t try to imagine anymore about what might be the real story. Probably he isn’t going anywhere at all. *** This morning the boy was here to plow the driveway after last night’s snow. And John was in the kitchen, impatient. Ready to go out, but waiting for the plowing to be done. I was waiting, too, in my room at the other end of the house. My poems. My scrapbooks. My flowers, my chocolates, my books. Women’s work. In a silk robe with more flowers. My hair piled up on my head in a way that has always felt glamorous to me. A cup of tea, steaming. And I wondered, what would Henry think? What would he say, to see me now — older, fatter, softer.

The truck out there, with its plow blade scraping at the asphalt. Drifts piling up on either side. The light post capped with snow. And John’s footsteps coming to me from the far end of the house. I could hear him and then he was there, in the doorway. His hand on my back, breath in my ear, lips on my cheek.

Saying, You know where to reach me. Meaning, his cell phone. And, Enjoy your solitude, darling. The smell of his cologne. Hair. Skin. I did not move as he drew away.

His footsteps receding. His bag already in the car, backing out, turning around, and then, the long drive. Taillights, exhaust, and he was gone.

My solitude folded down over me. *** When we brought this dog home two years ago, I was glad to have it. Company,

46

John said. Protection, I thought, but from what? A companion, Emily assumed, with my husband traveling and me alone in the house so much of the time. She comes in once a week to clean, but that isn’t company, that’s something else, and I stay away. I’m a kept woman, I’ve joked, to friends and strangers both, but of course it’s not a joke. They never are.

Small, black and white, a mop of curly hair, the kind of dog you see on television, in a family show, or on a commercial, a movie dog, a trick dog, an all-American dog, nipping at your heels. Curled up at the foot of your bed, following you from room to room. Lifting its head to look at you as if it knows something, then tearing through the house, barking, to the front door, because someone is there, leaving a package on the porch. *** At church they talk about words and deeds and the difference between them.

What we say and what we do. They’ve been horrified by what’s been taking place at a truck stop out on the Interstate, not far from here. They know about it, and they talk about it, but what can anybody do? They showed photographs, but I looked away. And the woman in the next chair gave me a nudge. Come on, she said, it doesn’t do any good to pretend it isn’t there. So strident. Her hair a mess. Her fingernails chewed. I told John about this and he smiled. Why do you go there? he asked. To church, he meant. He shook his head. Lit the candles. Poured wine. Turned up the music. Smiled and reached for me.

His lips at my ear, whispering: You’re safe. *** Little girls. Young women. Taken from their mothers or given away by their fathers or sold by who knows who.

I drove out there to see it for myself and then sat in the parking lot. But I saw nothing. The huge trucks, steaming, sighing, like large animals. Horses snuffling in their stalls. A woman and a girl in a red car near me, arguing. A man with a limp. The neon of the sign, glowing, for everyone to see. *** I’ve put the package in the trash bin; I’ve buried it under the plastic bags of garbage that Emily left out for the collectors to take away. Maybe it’s evidence, but it

47

can’t be proof. *** What John said to me, in the beginning: This will be our arrangement. It has nothing to do with you. It’s me. It’s who I am. It changes nothing between us.

We are more modern than our friends, John said. We’re not like other people.

And I’d loved that. My own rarity. *** This house hums. Sometimes it sounds like voices in another room. Their conversations, their accusations, their announcements, their instructions, their questions, their judgments, their decrees.

Or whispers, mumbles, murmurs. The slurred mutterings of a drunk.

Or an announcer on the radio, on the television, volume low. I crane to catch what she’s saying, what she’s trying to tell me, but I can’t quite make it out.

I used to go from room to room, trying to find her, but I don’t bother with that anymore.

I’ve come to believe that there are many things not meant for me to know.

48

RACHEL MILLIGAN

She Says She Has to Talk About It. I, As A Rule, Never Do If we were in a supermarket, our silence would have forced the muggy air to manifest and shatter like fistfuls of needles dropped to checkered tile.

This kind of heat squeezes our eyes blue, and when confronted with a sound, we reach down to the root of it. I cannot remember holding a shovel before but now a shovel is in my hands, and I think of a lake surrounded with candles, a beetle with furrowed brow on needle-like legs skirting across the water, a wet cloud in the shape of an antelope. She is here and she wants to place her handful of earth in my palms. She is disinterested in the mystery of lakes. She has been thumbing quietly for hours through an encyclopedia of steam. Days later, the man and I walk by the river. I carry an egg in my mouth, cautiously widening precarious jaws. He looks like he never met me. He does not look at the river. If the sky were not so red and cold, I think my breath could be caught in a bottle.

That night he weaves ribbons through my ribs, tears swept away by sooty fingers. If we were in a supermarket, they would all watch us roll around on top of all of the food. Cereal would burst out of boxes and, crushed by our weight, crumble in strange diagonal patterns across aisles. She carried a horse here, in her arms, surprised by how light it was, but not too surprised. She had to get it here, anyway.

Now, the few children brave enough to approach it feed the horse cereal and pat it gently. I see train conductors in plain clothes

Â

49Â

and they look like ghosts eating meat. Years of stationary bicycling have left me unable to hide emotion on my face. I make shadow puppets in the shape of the old country. I make flashlights out of ice and snow. I make poems like pieces of food to show you what is inside of you. There is a key and a box of keys. There is moss and the sound of a toad just sitting. There is a flower-covered bridge, over which, from afar, I will watch your body float, like the silent ghost of a horse, as long as my eyes can follow you.

Â

50Â

Supposedly Terminable Things Like Hunger and Waiting You've never seen owl feathers fall from the branches of trees, neither oak nor cypress. Nor inky shadows of grandmothers knocking decorative plates to crack and crumble on hard wood floors. But you left all that behind when you forgot how filling your mouth with bread felt: like an anchor, like a swirling dustcloud, an endless search that ends in a prayer. So here you stand, quivering, your ankles thick with soggy leaves, mumbling words you could not spell in your second grade spelling bee - angst, sarsaparilla, and, most embarrassingly, strength: that which carries stone after stone across the backs of the men that are building your house, their mouths are filled with leaves, they are building it, they are carrying you, they cannot hear you scream. You are not stone.

Â

51Â

The Germination of Fingernails Her goals are higher than green soapstone.

She does not take scissors to bicycle brakes.

When questioned, she will respond delicately, “The temperature of sweat.”

I knew her in a fishing town where the ground was thick with salt.

She might have had a nightmare once: endlessly placing marbles in a child’s mouth.

She offers no clues, and thus I might appoint marigolds the emperor of neglect, or the art of fencing.

In theory, there are no easy answers, but in a century, we will all sprout feathers and come to know the elegant way the eyes of oxen and eaves of violets came to meet beneath the skin of her face as he knelt on that floral bedspread, like a dog with thumbs.

52

BRENT FISK

Everything Must Go My grandmother raised my brother, Darryl, and me when my mother died in a crash. We barely knew our father. She worked raw hours as a nurse, caught seconds as a waitress.

She slept all day while we learned to cook and clean. She called each night at random times to make certain we were home. On Saturdays she was ours and no one else’s.

I was new to seventh grade, with Darryl starting tenth, and though I was his shadow, he rarely bristled at my presence. Tall and wire thin, he tried to grow a mustache. We walked home along Washington Avenue past the nature center and the elementary. The stench of sour milk filled the dumpsters. We often bumped into Tater and Cassius who liked to throw rocks at passing cars. Cassius was a black boy with patchy skin (vitiligo the teachers said) who was missing three fingers on his throwing hand. Cassius told the teachers he cut them off himself, but Larry Bateman said Tater had done it. Hiding in the weeds he saw everything: machete meeting concrete block, Cassius running home with his bloody hand in his mouth, Tater with the fingers in a folded napkin trotting off to the woods. Cassius missed three weeks of school, and the principal, a policeman, and a lady from child services could not shake him from his story.

Tater’s real name was Melvin Coolidge, but nobody called him that, not even his mother. His father owned a carpet store that was perpetually going out of business.

Billboards along the by-pass advertised “Coolidge Carpets--Everything Must Go.” Their swimming pool, once the envy of the neighborhood, had slid into swampiness.

Tater flunked third, and again sixth and seventh. He drove to middle school until he wrapped his car around a light pole. He was large and rather lumpy, and though he was slow he was cruel and persistent. Most boys who found a snake took it home in a tube sock and stashed it in a shoebox for safe keeping. Tater thought of ways to torture the snake, or use the snake to rattle others.

There was, of course, a girl. Alicia went to Icy Sink Baptist Church, same as us, and her mother worked in the department store where my grandmother waited tables. On

53

Sundays we biked downtown to visit them, though my brother snuck away to Bestbooks and pilfered Penthouse from the top racks when the clerks were helping others.

Alicia’s mother would lean across the perfume counter and spritz Alicia’s wrist with some heady fragrance. I felt the pulse in her wrist and forced myself to let go. Then we rode the escalator to the second floor café for grilled cheeses with my grandmother. I made a show of leaving a tip with money she’d give back to me later.

Summers were a feral thing. We fortified a clubhouse in a ditch beneath a culvert, but the sheriff ran us off. We strayed further out the country road where Black Beauty Mining owned all the property. Blasts rattled houses off foundations, so a company man would step in and lowball desperate owners. Old McCormack never sold, but simply vanished, all of his animals shot through the head. A dog tethered to a tree still had meat on him. In the barn, two calves and a pony maggoted the hay. The tire swing was sturdy.

Further on the landscape was scarred, dark and lunar. Nothing grew there but sassafras and sumac. The water seeped out strange, metallic orange and beautiful. The shed-like entrance to the shaft had been sealed, but the wood rotted and the nails came shrieking loose. We tossed rocks into the blackness until our ears lost the sense of falling. We knocked together shelves and tables, made rough seats of mattresses. We hoarded matches, broke bottles, masked our pornography with comic book covers.

Then Tater and Cassius also discovered it. Tater kicked tables over and all the birds went quiet. Cassius blocked the entrance as Tater worked his way into the gloom.

He sent his voice booming down the shaft for several minutes.

“How’d you like to walk the plank like a pirate?” Tater asked Alicia.

“Pirates make people walk the plank,” Darryl corrected.

“Well, in this case, I’m the pirate,” Tater said, emerging from the shadows.

Alicia backed against the rough-hewn boards and she was softly crying.

Cassius was distracted by a wasp pinging beneath the rusted eave, so my brother made his move. He grabbed Alicia’s hand, gave me a shove toward the light and drove his shoulder into Cassius’ solar plexus. Cassius sprawled down a gully but took so long to scramble up again that we had a safe head start. We ran until our lungs screamed. It was my brother’s first true act of bravery.

54

One day after a rain, we grew careless. We chased each other to the school to see if it was locked. I went one way checking all the doors, Alicia and Darryl went the other.

I ran around a corner and stumbled into Cassius and Tater who’d been breaking windows with a bat. They were close enough for Cassius to catch me if they wanted.

“Well looky here,” said Tater. “The prodigal son.”

I said nothing, just looked at the broken glass at their feet.

“You know, in India there are spooks who can walk on glass,” Tater said.

“Always thought you looked about half Indian.”

“How!” said Cassius, cracking himself up. When he laughed he did so silently.

“Not that kinda Indian,” said Tater, jabbing Cassius in the shoulder with his bat.

Tater swept his shoe through the safety glass, and told me to take off my sneakers.

I sat in the mud and started unlacing, but Darryl came around the building and interrupted. He was holding Alicia’s hand and they kept moving toward us. Suddenly I was crying. I never felt smaller.

“Go on home,” Darryl said to me. Tater blinked at him as if he looked into the sun.

“We ain’t through yet,” said Tater.

“Yes, you are,” said Darryl, and let Alicia’s hand slip from his fingers.

When Tater tried to jab my brother, he was surprised as anyone at how easily Darryl took the bat away from him.

“You got one last chance to give me back that bat,” said Tater.

“You’d be less bossy with a shattered knee,” said Darryl. He seemed to tower over everyone, and Cassius eased toward the corner of the building. Tater hesitated and Darryl cracked the bat against the wall so hard brick shards flew to the ground.

“You keep the bat,” said Tater. “I’ll get it from you later.”

I was no longer my brother’s shadow. I was something less. I hid in our house and imagined Darryl and Alicia at the clubhouse holding hands, kissing. My grandmother was dead to the world. Cassius stood in our yard next to the forsythia bush inspecting its leaves for aphids. Tater used his bat to knock chunks of bark from our ancient maple.

I eyed them from the porch and slurped a popsicle.

55

“You and your brother want to come play ball,” yelled Tater. My grandmother would soon rise for work and leave me unattended.

“My brother’s with Alicia,” I heard myself say. Something burned deep in my throat that the popsicle couldn’t cool.

“Off at that shack?” I heard Cassius ask, and I found I was nodding. Tater shouldered his bat and lumbered away. The light bent funny, and Cassius stripped the leaves off of the branch he held and waited a long time before following.

I knew I should wake my grandmother but did nothing. The last of my popsicle fell into the flowers and I went inside to read my comic books.

And then my brother and Alicia were gone. The sheriff’s strong opinion was they’d run off together and would come back when they got hungry. My grandmother knew otherwise and spent the whole night retching in the toilet. When she came out of the bathroom her makeup was screwy.

On Sunday I confessed silently to God. Jesus looked down with miserable eyes.

After the service the congregation formed into groups; the women put up flyers while the men searched field and wood. The phone never stopped jangling and the casseroles were endless. Alicia’s mother even went on the news. What I’d done flopped around in my belly like a fish, but when I watched my grandmother’s face go soft when she dozed, I kept it swallowed. Once my brother’s name flew from a dream, and I finally emptied my belly. She woke and put a washcloth on the back of my neck and I wondered how it would be to have her hate me. A flicker of life burned in knowing nothing for certain.

Late that week Cassius banged at the door, a bloody duckling aproned in his shirt.

Tater was nowhere. In the side yard we hosed the small thing off and tucked him in a shoebox. My grandmother watched through the curtains with the gauzy eyes of God. “It’s the only one survived,” said Cassius. He looked wild-eyed and drawn.

“Don’t know many know what Tater can do,” he said, petting the duck with his missing fingers. “Even you think you got him stopped, he come on like a dog. You hoping for a chain or fence, but with him, no fence tall enough.” Cassius smelled of pee. I did not let myself wonder what he’d seen.

56

“Want to keep the duck?” I asked.

Cassius wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve.

“You best. I’ll only get it killed.” He rose and shimmied out of his shirt.

“I hope they find your brother and that ‘licia,” he said, cutting eyes out toward the country.

Cassius was tall as anyone I knew, but he seemed diminished as he shuffled away kicking the crab apples that had fallen in the street. I took the duck inside and laid it on the table, but my grandmother washed away her face and barely noticed.

The week we got the late notice from the electric company she went back to work.

There was little news, though she hoped reported sightings in Elberfeld and Cincinnati might lead to something. We buried the duck in the vegetable garden, and I would not let her hug me.

I went to the clubhouse many evenings. I sang songs into the darkness and threw day lilies from the ditch down into the shaft. I was going to burn our dirty magazines in a broken pail but they had also disappeared. I kept a paring knife in my back pocket and waited for Tater, but he never showed. In mid-August Coolridge Carpets burned to the ground. The papers said accelerants and arson. When I throw things in their swampy pool, I can see the house is empty. On a tree near the nature center D + A is carved in the center of a crude heart. My fingers trace the letters and I forget how to breathe.

57

MATT KISH The Alligators of Abraham Book II illustration: And the alligators went up all over the land, and they rested in the coasts: very grievous were they; before them there were no such alligators as they, neither after them shall be such.

Ink on Bristol board, 6” x 9”, 2011

58

CONTRIBUTORS

SUSAN TAYLOR CHEHAK is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and the author of five novels, including Smithereens, The Story of Annie D., and Harmony.

Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Folio, Folly, Word Riot, Coe Review, Guernica Magazine, L.A. Under The Influence, Sisters in Crime 5, and The Chariton Review. She has taught fiction writing in the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, the University of Southern California, and the Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. Susan grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spends as much time as possible in Colorado, and at present divides her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. She writes about consciousness and fiction at www.susantaylorchehak.com.

J. TANNER CUSICK is a writer based in Ohio. His work has most recently appeared on PopMatters.com.

DANIEL DAVIS was born and raised in Central Illinois. His work has appeared in various online and print journals. You can find him at www.dumpsterchickenmusic.blogspot.com, or on Facebook.

DAVID HARRIS EBENBACH’s first book of short stories, Between Camelots (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the GLCA New Writer’s Award. His poetry has appeared in, among other places, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Subtropics, and Mudfish. Recently awarded fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, Ebenbach has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Into the Wilderness, a collection of short fiction about the varied experiences of parenting, has won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize, will be published by WWPH in November.

BRENT FISK is a writer from Bowling Green, KY who has had work in the Louisville, Cincinnati and Southeast Reviews among other places. He is finishing his MA in creative writing at WKU this spring.

MATT KISH lives in Ohio with his wife and their two frogs. He is immensely fond of books. Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page—which is exactly what it sounds like—is available now from Tin House Books. His forthcoming collection of illustrations, the Illustrated Heart of Darkness, is due in 2013.

JOHN MCKERNAN—who grew up in Omaha Nebraska—is now a retired comma herder after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives—mostly—in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems: Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New

59

Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines.

CHRISTOPHER MICHEL is a poet and stay-at-home dad. He teaches yoga and lives in Hoboken.

RACHEL MILLIGAN is a Philadelphia native studying poetry at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has her BA from Temple University and her birthday is November 1st. Send her a card.

MICHELLE MOROUSE is a pediatrician and emerging writer from Michigan. Her work has appeared in The Rose and Thorn Journal and Dogzplot.

KEVIN SIMMONDS is a writer, musician, and photographer originally from New Orleans.

His writing has appeared in Asia Literary Review, Chroma, FIELD, jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Massachusets Review, Poetry, PANK, and elsewhere. Most recently, he wrote the musical score for Hope: Living with HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, which won a 2009 Emmy Award. He edited Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof, a collection of poems by the late poet Carrie Allen McCray, available from the University of South Carolina Press. His debut poetry collection, Mad for Meat (in which these poems appear), is available from Salmon Poetry. He currently resides in San Francisco.

KAREN EILEEN SISK’s work has appeared or will appear in PERMAfrost and Harpur’s Palate. She received her MA in literature from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and is currently working on her PhD in English with a focus in Creative Writing and Poetry at Oklahoma State University.

NICOLE STEINBERG is the editor of Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, February 2011) and the author of the chapbook Birds of Tokyo (Dancing Girl Press, July 2011). An editor-at-large of LIT, her poetry has appeared in No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, BOMB, Barrow Street, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the founder of Earshot, a reading series for emerging writers, and currently lives in Philadelphia.

60

OM

61