Raleigh Review 12.1 (Spring 2022)

new poetry by allison blevins, bruce bond, helena chung, jose hernandez diaz, sara eddy, grace (ge) gilbert, sabrina guo, emily kingery, ellen kombiyil, abby minor, darren morris, eilín de paor, pablo piñero stillmann, sm stubbs, maria zoccola fiction from rita ciresi, barbara westwood diehl, sandy fontana, savannah horton, vandana khanna, wendy elizabeth wallace, keith s. wilson featuring the haiku collage of christine kouwenhoven, winner of the geri digiorno prize

“And once, you were both running at full speed down the uneven asphalt like the rabbits did, your bikes tangled behind you like sheets, and you were laughing but you were mad.”

RALEIGH REVIEW

featuring the winner of the raleigh review flash fiction prize

RALEIGH

— from keith s. wilson’s “blood” winner, flash fiction prize

52000>

2013

9 780990 752288

vol. 12.1, Spring 2022

$20.00 ISBN 978-0-9907522-8-8

REVIEW

vol. 12.1, Spring 2022

RALEIGH REVIEW

vol. 12.1 spring 2022

RALEIGH REVIEW VOL. 12.1 SPRING 2022

publisher

assistant fiction editor

co-editors

assistant poetry editor

Rob Greene Bryce Emley Landon Houle

fiction editor Jessica Pitchford

poetry editor

Leah Poole Osowski

editorial staff / fiction

​ has Carey, Madison Cyr, Susan C Finch, Robert McCready, Jeff McLaughlin, Erin Osborne, Daniel Tam-Claiborne

board of directors

Joseph Millar, Chairman Dorianne Laux, Vice Chair Landon Houle, Member Bryce Emley, Member Will Badger, Member Tyree Daye, Member Rob Greene, Member

Shelley Senai Tyree Daye

consulting poetry editor Leila Chatti

copyeditor

Garrett Davis

editorial staff / poetry

Ina Cariño, Chelsea Harlan, D. Eric Parkison, Sam Piccone Aimee Seu, Annie Woodford

layout & page design Alexis Olson

literary publishing program interns Chris Ingram Jeremee Jeter Da'Jah Jordan

Raleigh Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 2022 Copyright © 2022 by Raleigh Review Raleigh Review founded as RIG Poetry February 21, 2010 | Robert Ian Greene Cover image "Snapshot" by Christine Kouwenhoven.

Cover design by Alexis Olson ISSN: 2169-3943 Printed, bound, and shipped via Alphagraphics in Downtown Raleigh, NC, USA. Raleigh Review, PO Box 6725, Raleigh, NC 27628 Visit: raleighreview.org Raleigh Review is thankful for past support from the United Arts Council of Raleigh & Wake County with funds from the United Arts Campaign, as well as the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.

table of contents

raleigh review fiction 5

Blood

vandana khanna

13

Good on Paper

rita ciresi

17

All Rise

wendy elizabeth wallace

19

Witch

barbara westwood diehl

36

Blazes

savannah horton

46

Favorite Child

sandy fontana

63

Creeping Phlox

1

P.S.

2

New Moon

bruce bond

4

The Butterfly Effect

eilín de paor

8

Interlude

helena chung

9

Domestic

maria zoccola

10

property

keith s. wilson

poetry abby minor

poetry cont. ellen kombiyil

11

Municipal Pool, Closed in the Blackout

jose hernandez diaz

12

The Alien

emily kingery

34

Purification

sara eddy

35

Buffalo Jump

allison blevins

40

Cataloguing Pain as Non-Narcotic Pain Reliever

42

Chapter from Handbook for the Newly Disabled: How to Fuck a Disabled Body

44

Chapter from Handbook for the Newly Disabled: My Neurologist (Who Doesn’t Have MS) Explains Pain is Not a Symptom of MS

55

Today is Our Century

57

Today is an Anti-Depressant Intimacy

60

Today is the Afternoon Logic of the Devil

61

{_____/_____}

80

Afterglow

grace (ge) gilbert

sabrina guo

poetry cont. sm stubbs

83

Asylum Release

darren morris

84

Kid Stuff

pablo piñero stillmann

85

Night comes clean like a boy

86

Systematics

87

Dark Harvest: new & selected Joseph Millar

book review rob greene

contributors

raleigh review vol. 12.1 spring 2022

from the editor today is friday, a snow day—something that doesn’t happen too often where I live in balmy eastern South Carolina.

Thursday afternoon, the university where I work canceled Friday’s classes and activities. The ice was supposed to start overnight, supposed to be followed by snow so that when we woke up the next morning, the world would be changed and beautiful but even more dangerous than it is already.

Thursday night, there was rain—cold rain but not ice—and this morning, there is nothing but cold, so that in jumping from the kitchen to the laundry room, across the tiny, cement-floored screened-in porch, to change a load from the washer to the dryer, I call out “burr” in a tiny cloud of my own making.

All day today, I’ve been home doing laundry, reading, heating a pot of soup, thinking right now I’d be in a classroom, or in my office, or in a smaller office making copies of a copy.

The forecast has recently changed, and they say the snow will happen but later than they thought—Friday, today, this afternoon, any minute now, it will start.

Every so often, I turn from the desk and look out the window. I locate the neighbor’s evergreen ivy hedge, use it as a backdrop to clarify my vision and focus. Into that middle distance, I squint and strain to see a flake so I can be the first one to say, “It’s snowing!”

Anticipation.

Waiting for snow. Waiting for what will happen next. Another page.

Another line. The next word.

If I were teaching my classes today, I might say something about anticipation and the way it keeps us writing, the way it keeps us reading long into the night, far past our reasonable and well-intentioned bedtimes.

And yet, there’s something else to all this, something more.

The greatest use of a thesaurus isn’t finding a word with an exact-match definition but rather, finding a word that bears significance in even the slightest difference of meaning. For example, under “anticipation,” you’ll find words like “expectation” and “hope.”

Maybe that’s really what I’m looking for on the other side of my window. Maybe that’s what I want to be the first to spot. It’s what we all need, what we’ve been waiting for while we imagine ourselves doing other things in other places. Hope.

And in fact, maybe it’s been right in front of me all along—here in these pages. Read carefully, and you might catch a glimpse too, in the stories, the poems, the art we love and have collected to share just with you.

Our special congratulations go to the winner of this year’s Geri Digiorno Prize, Christine Kouwenhoven. Christine’s cover collage is titled “Snapshot,” and the second of her two prize-winning entries, titled “Haiku Collage,” will be the cover of our fall issue.

Allison Blevins’s work was named a finalist for the Geri Digiorno Prize, and Allison has three flash creative nonfiction pieces in the issue.

And congratulations, too, to the winner of our flash fiction contest, Keith S. Wilson for “Blood.” “Good on Paper” by Vandana Khanna and “All Rise” by Rita Ciresi were named as honorable mentions.

Cheers to these winners, finalists, and all our writers and artists. And to you, dear reader. We hope you enjoy!

◆

Landon Houle, co-editor

abby minor

P.S. My dears—I hope your new year is off to a beautiful start. For dividends, as in, the immediate, inky pink some pokeberries make when doused with apple cider vinegar in the jar. You know I was trying to find a voice I could slake, you know I sup of you, wherever you make the photograph or pull the clay, while ‘what are we doing about rosh hashana’ mom texts as gold and blue crowns, the light and sky, slip down around the ears of the mountains, around the chicken wire, turkey houses, gates I saw at auction where this morning you could look out across the valley as if you’d flung it—flung those huge flags of gold light flapping—and it had flung you back—saying, p.s. the purple aster smells amazing, fruit of the spirit, fruit of the overhearing year, fruit of the crown, there is no law.

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new moon Shivering in the garden there’s a stiff west wind & evidently one of the seven deadly sins is despair. Certainly the wormwood’s persistent silver would strike me as miraculous if I weren’t sad but I’m not dead, it’s just that the dragons and the angels of reality keep rolling up their silk and moving on, or I should say they keep dropping duplicates of the same miscellaneous key.

Across the creek the sound of winter surges high up in the white pines.

It’s a power way beyond the power lines.

Ego death—shit, I want that, death death, I’m interested. The loneliness gathers and flags, rickety tall grasses are filled with it.

Apparently if you freeze to death in the woods there’s a part at the end that’s transcendent and warm. I’m interested, patterns form on the water like schools of cold dominoes, fishy they flip and fall, and what part of me needs to die? Probably the faithless

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raleigh review

emperor, the craze to pry what’s uncommon from what’s common, like the grasses from the lavish blanks—across the creek everything surges up into the trees.

Everything is silver and invisible. That new moon is like a hole scraped clean by a very cold bouquet of keys.

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bruce bond

the butterfly effect If you drop a wing in a pool of water, the ripples widen to an eye, fish rise, and when one leaps, it breaks the glass.

The shiver of being, once again, alone, washes over, and then, blown loose, the chirp of doors. Nothing, you think, nothing before, nothing after. Trees leaflet the shallow pond. When I grow into a window, I want to be this clear.

What I lose to the waters of the glass is water after all, and then one day the vital parts I barely knew were there appear. Here, they say, let me show you the tumor. And I write, dear brother, I am so sorry to hear about your friend.

Thank you for the elegy. And when I am done, I step out into the night rain.

Flames of grass flicker on their candles, surprised. So much easier to breathe.

And the garden smells lacquered, new.

And heaven lays a hand across my face.

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flash fiction prize winner

keith s. wilson blood you couldn’t get away from him—not a single minute your entire life—and maybe that’s what irritated you. That he didn’t seem to have a stone tied around his neck, but was laughing, loud, the way he always did, and that’s exactly when you happened to slip. It isn’t a stab—is it?—if it’s accidental?—but you were leaning a stick against the old brick wall between your home and the neighbor’s, and he was joking and the stick had seemed to slip and must have whisked—barely—in then out of your brother’s temple. It happened so fast. It was a head wound, and you didn’t know it yet, but heads bleed and bleed and bleed and fill two cotton shirts and your hands, and no amount of crying or promises will make it stop. Not until it’s ready. It all turned out okay, and he wasn’t upset, even though his face was slick with all the liquid stuff a body was

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capable of, spit and tears and snot and blood—he was only scared and hurt and confused, and those are alright emotions for someone else to have when you’re afraid of your father.

And once, you were both running at full speed down the uneven asphalt like the rabbits did, your bikes tangled behind you like sheets, and you were laughing but you were mad. Because though he was two years younger than you—and that used to be forever—he was still pulling ahead, first by a nose then almost (but not quite, and this is important) an arm. You thought to pretend he had started the race early, which was absurd since you had started the race—on a whim to the corner store where they sold cheap plastic bags of dollar soldiers and also purple drink and vinegar chips—but he was starting to get far enough ahead of you that soon it became your last chance, and if you were going to do anything but lose you were forced to act. You pushed him, and running like that, as fast as your muscles can throw, leaves no room for your legs to go but out like wings, and he flew for a second—like the space between your stomach and your lungs—and landed hard on his knees and hands.

You were both older now, so he didn’t cry exactly, but his eyes wavered and he sat for a long time picking gravel from his skin, and the blood glistened but didn’t run. You knew by now he wouldn’t tell, so you didn’t make him promise. You only said you were sorry. You said it twice.

And when nobody else was home, you remember being alone with him in his room. He was facing away from you, trying to play a game, and you told him he was acting like a bitch. You don’t remember what for, but probably he was hogging the Xbox or had won a game winning kick that both your parents had attended—you would not have said this was the reason, but it would have been the reason—or for not being upset enough at something else you had called him earlier. And then you pushed him hard because nothing ever seemed to hurt him, even though he was younger than you. He pushed back now, and when you came at him again, he dropped you to the ground and kept you down, his whole body seeming to crush you. You couldn’t breathe. Except that wasn’t true—the kind of breathing you couldn’t do was nothing like your body—and so you pushed all of yourself into one arm and got it free and hit him just once in his face, a fist, your first time being the one to throw it, and blood poured from his lips. His front tooth was lying perfectly

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raleigh review

white and still on the sheets. In everything that happened after, it would take years for you to remember that right now you were thinking, in that sliver that happens before skin breaks and the blood comes, that you had just read in school the story of a boxer who had hit another boxer in his eye socket, and something had broken apart or pushed into his brain and killed him before he hit the floor. You thought in that moment as your little brother who was a head and a half bigger than you held his mouth, his eyes wide, that you had been lucky, since at some point you had become strong enough to have done that without trying. He didn’t say anything and you didn’t say anything as he ran water in the bathroom sink. You stood in the doorway, but you couldn’t stop thinking about how you might have a bag of stones. You put the tooth in a glass of ice, and you thought you might have killed him and if you had, you’d have both somehow deserved it.

◆

ei h

wl

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eilÍn de paor

interlude Gin in the sun before making dinner: the slow hum of August bees.

The children, sun-dank, basking in blue screen light: whale calves in echelon.

Disagreement on the cliff path, words skitter lamb-legged on the shale.

Stopping to get the dogs from the kennels, they forgive us instantly.

Three weeks away, familiar bedroom shadows already look strange.

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helena chung

domestic Fermenting on the composite porch, the leaves make in flavor what they lose in texture: every day the cells sigh a bit of themselves away and that’s better for me, us.

Next week we’ll eat it every night for dinner with white rice, sticky pins of anchovy. Next month we’ll cook the sourness down into stew. By then Bishop will have learned sit, lay down, how to pretend she’s been shot by little finger guns.

We’re ambitious, don’t yet know how hard it is to train a puppy, and are only prepared to sacrifice what we can: a little time, the neighborly peace, clean furniture, our only good rain boots.

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maria zoccola

property the air con sputters out. sunlight lances through the windows in waves that cook the air, flash-boil of humidity, pillows bleached to bone. i sit on the floor in the kitchen with the box fan and breathe lungfuls of floating dust, great big gasps of wet air, and when i touch my fingers to the soft grain of the cabinets that hold the good china and my beautiful old heritage pie plates, i feel for the first time where the wood warps at the center, an irreparable buckling, unsalvageable. the saints of a house are the oven and cook-top, the mantel and whatever you’ve hung above it. the doorbell, which is always the first to go. a place tells you to leave and then hooks you by the ankle, grips you inside the meat of itself, roped down by ligaments of linoleum and wallpaper. a place backs up the sink just to keep you on your knees, hands reached into dark cavities of tile, your smallest pinky finger brushing ruptures in the line.

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ellen kombiyil

municipal pool, closed in the blackout When dog days lay us out flat for sweat— it’s two days I didn’t see John-o after he climbed the iron fence so he could dive into blue sparkle, some hero to shatter that cool glass, even if I just watch furious w/ want & pedal back to my dark apartment, 3-speed fan not throbbing in the window, such hot stillness

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jose hernandez diaz

the alien An alien arrived on earth in a silver spacecraft and immediately went to Dunk n’ Donuts. The Alien ordered a dozen donuts and a large, iced coffee. The alien ate on the pier at the beach. Next, the alien wondered: why is there a pier in the ocean? It doesn’t lead to anywhere. The alien didn’t realize, of course, the beauty of sunsets. While the alien was at the beach, it swam in the ocean. The alien was even capable of surfing without a board. Rock on! alien friend. As the sun faded away and the moon rose above the city, the alien went back to its spaceship and flew home to another galaxy. The alien would always remember earth, though, tiny as it was.

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flash fiction prize honorable mention

vandana khanna good on paper meena’s roommates liked the good-on-paper guy—that’s what they called Ravi. Erica, an only child and business major, was predictably rational. “He’s hot, drives a Porsche, and has an off-campus apartment.”

She ticked off each detail of his existence on her fingers. Nikki, who was a volleyball player and only ate raw carrots before her games, said, “He’s Indian so,” she shrugged, “you know, it makes sense that you’re into him.” She turned back to examine her eyeliner in the mirror without offering any more advice.

Jennifer was the deciding factor. She had a long-term boyfriend who went to a rival college in North Carolina and knew all about relationships, having been someone’s girlfriend since the age of thirteen. Meena and Jennifer shared a room in their on-campus suite to cut costs, while

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the other two girls were in singles. At night, Meena would whisper questions into the dark and Jennifer, like an ancient oracle, would answer them.

Meena and Jennifer had met freshman year and gotten close when Meena’s roommate, Amber, began inviting her boyfriend to stay over on the weekends. Doug was easy going and dull, with a soft, ruddy face.

Amber, on the other hand, was sharp and no-nonsense. She’d gotten a perfect score on the SATs and was pre-Med. Meena had no idea what the couple had in common besides pot and sex, but for the time being, that seemed to be enough. The couple would lounge on Amber’s twin bed, legs twined around each other while Amber studied her Bio notes.

Tucked in her corner of the room, Meena tried not to look as Doug’s hand snaked up and down Amber’s legs like he was soothing a wounded animal.

Meena’s situation got immediate sympathy from the other girls on the hall: “I mean, who does that? It’s so awkward.”

“Every weekend? What are you supposed to do when they’re in bed together?”

Jennifer had offered up the floor of her single room, and Meena accepted right away. So, almost every weekend of her first year of college, Meena packed up her belongings—books, toiletries, and blanket, and retreated down the hall. All the girls in Jennifer’s circle would go to the dining hall together and to frat parties and football games. Nobody ever got left behind.

And for the first time, Meena wasn’t the nerdy Indian girl anymore— everyone around her spent their days in the library and their nights out at the frats. Jennifer and the other girls took for granted that Meena was just like them, and she felt invisible and seen all at the same time. When her parents called, she could tell that they were relieved to hear girls in the background, relieved that their sacrifices had paid off and Meena was officially a typical college student.

Then, the January of their sophomore year, Rush changed everything. The suite, which had been filled with the relentless chatter of four girls, was too quiet. Throughout the month, Meena’s roommates shuffled down sorority row in black flats and long coats, through slush and

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sleet, until they were ushered through front doors with much chanting and clapping.

Meena felt out of place all over again, spending more and more time at the library while her roommates crowded around the bathroom mirror, sharing lipstick and mascara, a haze of hairspray like a dome separating them from her. At first, Meena joined them. But after a recruitment visit, where a circle of girls held white candles and sung earnestly into the semi-darkness, Meena felt like a fake and backed out of the whole thing.

So when Meena met Ravi at a local café and had written her phone number on the smooth brown of his palm, she was tired of the silence that followed her throughout the day. And finally, she had some of her own drama to share.

Meena and Ravi started spending every weekend together. Tucked into the bucket seats of Ravi’s car, which cost more than what her parents made in a whole year, Meena thought about Amber and Doug. What kept them together? Some kind of chemical reaction—pheromones, or dopamine or something? Whatever it was, Meena knew she didn’t have it with Ravi. Still, she decided to stick it out. Even though she didn’t expect Ravi to have the guts to run his hands down her body like she was the hood of his car, which he did. Didn’t expect he’d beg her to stay over and refused to give her a ride back home until she let him slip his hand under her shirt. Because the good-on-paper guy wouldn’t do that.

Lying on his bed, Meena closed her eyes, picturing Ravi at dinner with her parents, asking for an extra helping of her mother’s keema matar.

She thought about the dinners at her American friends’ houses—all of those bland baked chickens and blonde boyfriends. How many times had she’d tagged along as a buffer while her friends flirted and kissed, sitting there, obediently looking away? Always a good girl. Always a good friend. The blurry one at the end of a long line of girls modeling their spring break tans for the camera. Maybe now was her time to be in focus, even though it didn’t feel the way she’d imagined it would.

Maybe that’s why she’d let Ravi’s tongue curl like a dead flower in her mouth. After, she knew she’d never return his calls. Would never make misshapen chapatis for him in her mother’s cramped kitchen. He was good on paper, a paper-thin dream that easily crumpled with the slightest pressure. Maybe the good-on-paper guy needed to stay tucked away

va

a a ha

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in the pages of a book, or on the sidelines of one of those Bollywood movies her mother watched, folding laundry on Saturday afternoons.

He’d strut around the girl, stealing all of the good light. The spotlight only returning to her, glittering and alone, for a split second before the screen went dark.

◆

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raleigh review

flash fiction prize honorable mention

rita ciresi all rise the altos suspected the bass. The bass, the sopranos. The sopranos eyeballed the tenors, who blamed the brass who blamed the winds who blamed the strings who blamed the percussion.

All wondered which musical selection had been the super spreader.

The dark Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem? The bombast of Carmina Burana? Or the crowd-pleasing encore, “June is Bustin’ Out All Over?”

No matter. After the final performance, we toppled one by one. Sore throats were followed by fevers, fevers by shortness of breath, trips to primary care doctors by middle-of-the-night visits to emergency rooms.

A soprano who baked specialty cupcakes for a living lost her appetite for buttercream frosting. A bass dropped forty pounds. The conductor—known for his wild gesticulating behind the podium—felt his elbows and shoulders stiffen and lock.

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In the end, fortune placed her uncaring hand upon the twenty-nineyear-old rehearsal accompanist. Why him? we asked. He was so young, and sat so far away from us, shielded by the length of the grand piano.

At his graveside service, half a dozen so-far healthy members of the chorus stood six feet apart, cold puffs of air wafting from behind our masks as we bowed our heads and prayed we someday would rise again to mouth the frightening fate-strikes-down-the-strong lyrics of “O Fortuna.”

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wendy elizabeth wallace witch when katerina bought the cottage, the one that was barely even part of the town and had belonged to Herr Trimmer (who we knew was so mean it killed him one day), everyone was suspicious. No one had moved in or out of Halle in generations, and then an unmarried woman arrived with a cartful of colorful boxes, and, when asked where she was from, just shrugged and said, Here and there. And to decide to live out in the woods, all alone—unsociable, Herr Eisen called it, strange. But then she brought the first basketful of pastries into the town, set it steaming beneath the statue of the long-legged man no one could remember the name of, and Frau Schmidt bought the first strudels because she could never say no to her daughters. Liesel and Ursi were large-eyed and hollow-cheeked, like all of us children had become since the crop-killing

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cold came and stayed. But when they’d finished eating, her daughters’ skin turned the healthy rose Frau Schmidt hadn’t seen in years, and there was something in their smiles, something satisfied and whole, and that couldn’t be kept silent. Suddenly, Katerina wasn’t some suspect, unwelcome visitor, but the woman whose Schnecken and Baumküchen and Bratapfel were delicious and restorative. No one knew where she could be getting the ingredients from, but Frau Weis, the butcher’s wife, insisted that she must be some sort of eccentric Bavarian nobility who had untold wealth and a penchant for a quiet life. Then Herr Andreas, the pastor, declared her, although not present for his sermon, a gift from the Almighty, and that was that.

My first memories were of her sugar buns. Papa would let me choose one and I’d cup it in my hands, breathe it in for minutes before allowing myself to begin to eat. They had a power to warm all the way through me, and a spice that sang on my tongue long after I was done eating.

Papa bought her bread, too, because it stayed so much softer than Herr Finster’s, and cost less. Sometimes, I noticed, when I was old enough to count, she wouldn’t charge for my cakes at all.

Katerina fascinated me. She wasn’t a beautiful woman in strictest terms, her nose a little too broad, her blonde hair pulled back too tight from her face, and her body all sharp angles. It was the way she looked at me. Not the patiently tired smile the other adults used—it felt deeper, as if she knew I was thinking valuable and interesting things. I wondered, sometimes, if my mother had been anything like her.

My stepmother wasn’t. She loved my father fiercely and she could make him laugh a laugh that would fill the house. She brought some beautiful things with her when they married, dresses her mother had made and books. At first she was kind to me, took me for walks and smoothed my hair before bed, even after the baby had begun to grow inside her.

But then the baby came out wrong, twisted and bluish and strange with too few limbs. The midwife told my stepmother that stillbirths like this came of an evil influence in the house, and her eyes rested on me.

My stepmother wouldn’t leave her bed, and the noise of her grief was terrible—worse, if she caught sight of me. Papa told me to be patient, that I was strong, and she was delicate and in more pain than I could imagine. When Papa was not trying to keep up with the villagers’ need

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for wood, as snow began to gather at our doorsteps, he was at her side. I grew silent and faded into the corners of the house, running my fingers over the illustrations in my stepmother’s books, which now felt like my own. The castles and men on horseback had started to feel more real to me than this house.

And then another baby began to grow. Papa said wasn’t it time that I went out and played with the other children? I wanted to ask him if it was because there was something wrong with me, if I really had done something terrible to hurt the blue thing that had come out of my stepmother and I sometimes saw when I closed my eyes. I hadn’t spoken any enchantments like the ones in the books that the witches used to curse the heroes, but I wondered if maybe I didn’t even need to, if there was something broken inside me. So I went out.

For days I wandered on the fringes of the knot of children, but I could never find a way in, and they seemed always to have their backs to me, always moving away from me. On the third day, they seemed to be digging in the snow to find palm-sized stones, a game I thought I could understand. I burrowed until I’d collected a pocketful, ready to show them, but when I got close enough, they threw theirs at me, laughing and shouting, Stone the witch. One hit me in the stomach, and another on the leg, before I ran far enough into the woods that their voices thinned, then were gone.

I sat in the hollow of a tree to cry, snow melting to cold puddles inside my boots, wishing I had thought to at least bring my books with me, but afraid to go home to get them until dinner. I wanted Papa to think that I was being good. I wanted to be good. But my skin was tender and painful where I’d been struck, and something hot and terrible throbbed inside me, in time with the bruises I could feel forming. It scared me, how much I hated them, how badly I wanted to be one of them.

And then Katerina entered the trees, empty basket swinging, and waved to me. It felt like an invitation, and, without thinking, I followed her, though not too close in case she changed her mind. Although she didn’t look back, she seemed to know I was still there, following the swish of her cloak, deeper into the woods than I’d ever been where the branches pressed thick. Suddenly, though, she led me into a neat clearing, and it was as if I’d crossed a threshold into summer, a ring the snow and cold couldn’t cross. A garden, bright with herbs and flowers, ran in

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concentric circles around the cottage, filling the air with the green smell of growing things. She stepped over the plants—there wasn’t a path up to the house, just a few patches with exposed soil—and I hopped after, careful not to crush any stems. She swung the blue door inwards, and, hesitating for just a moment on the threshold, I entered. I was hit immediately with the rich odors of baking—flour dust, the tang of yeast, a riot of spices. There was a sense of controlled disarray in the room, each surface crammed with baked goods, useful-looking devices, and books—so many books. Even the bed supported stacks of large volumes. Katerina sat me down at a wooden table, pulled some pastries from a cooling shelf, and placed them in front of me. The icing reflected the firelight from the oven that squatted in the corner, breathing heat.

“Please,” she said. “Help yourself.”

I ate. I hadn’t realized how hungry I had been, but now my mouth was full of lemon and honey and ginger. I wanted to thank her, but I was afraid to start to speak, afraid I would cry again, or that all my words would be the wrong ones.

“You’re unhappy,” she said. “Tell me about it. It’ll help.”

With Katerina looking at me like she’d understand, no matter what I said, and the glow of the pastries in my mouth, everything I’d been keeping shut up in my head came loose all at once. I told her about the way the house had become dark and unwelcome to me, about Papa sending me out, about the children. “And everyone thinks I’m an evil witch, and maybe I am, but I don’t want to be and I don’t want to make this baby come out wrong,” I said. “Please tell me what I can do.” I’d started shivering, despite the warmth of the house, my teeth clacking together.

Katerina laid a hand on my shoulder. “You’re not a witch,” she said, “and more importantly, you’re not evil.”

I took a deep, shuddering breath. I wanted to believe her but needed to be sure. “What happened to the baby, then?”

She sighed. “What happens to many babies. A sad, but entirely natural occurrence.” She paused, thoughtful. “I could have saved him, maybe, but I don’t like to interfere when death decides to come.”

“So you can do magic,” I said. “Like your garden. That’s magic.”

She nodded.

I should have been frightened, but I wasn’t. I realized, then, that I hadn’t paid for the pastries she’d given me, but all I had was the pebbles

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in my pocket. “Here,” I said, offering them. “I’m sorry I don’t have any money.”

She took them. “You don’t ever need to pay,” she said, “but thank you. Would you like to see some more magic, Greta?”

“Yes,” I said, then “please,” and followed her to the door. She leaned out and breathed on the pebbles, and they flew from her palm, multiplying in the air into a luminous cloud. Then they settled, one by one, into two lines, shining silver as moonlight. “So you can find your way back here. A path only you can see.” i continued to visit katerina as the new child rounded out my stepmother’s stomach, and kept coming after Hans emerged screaming but healthy. No one seemed to mind that I spent most of my days away, and no one asked me where I went.

“Why did you come here?” I asked Katerina one day.

“When there’s not much happiness to go around,” she said, her hands deep in dough, “this will do.”

From one sack of flour, she could pull loaves upon loaves of bread, and batches upon batches of sweets and pastries. “I can’t make something of nothing,” she said, “but I can stretch something as far as it will go.” And she poured power into it, something warm and sustaining. I watched carefully as she combined ingredients, worked the mixture with her capable hands, and eased the stone slabs into the oven. I expected to see sparks fly from her fingertips, or to catch her mumbling spells, but I never did.

“That’s not how it works,” she said and laughed. “All of that is a load of nonsense storytellers made up.” No magic came without a price, however. After she was done baking, she was often weak and needed me to lead her to the bed so she could rest. The rose in her face would fade to a sickly yellow, and only returned after she had spent time recovering her strength. Though she was reluctant to admit any suffering to me, I eventually learned about the headaches that felt as if a chisel worked its way into her skull. Occasionally she would shiver and convulse violently on the bed, tell me to leave so she wouldn’t frighten me. It did frighten me, but I stayed. I would sit in one of the wooden chairs and read to her from one of her fabulous books about history or plants. I didn’t understand much of what I read, but I felt I was beginning to absorb more and more

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of the world. My presence soothed her, she said, and she would correct my pronunciation through chattering teeth.

The aches and weakness were not the only price. Since she put the power she had into the food she made, her body could never support a life other than hers. “I never intended to have children, though,” she said. “The whole process, start to finish, is terribly messy.”

“I don’t want any either,” I told her. I was eight by this time and had made my way through Katerina’s books on anatomy, understood that the human body was a delicate collection of bags and pouches for fluid. I didn’t like the idea of another being pushing all of that around inside me. And, even more, I’d experienced enough of Hans’s tantrums, wailing, and careless destruction to be convinced that if the devil existed, infants and toddlers were his doing. “I want to be like you,” I told her. I’d learned that evil witches only existed in stories, and wanted to be the real kind, what Katerina was.

She rested her hands on my shoulders. “Greta, remember I told you, when you first came to my house, that you’re not a witch? It was the truth then, as it is now. There’s no magic in you—it’s rare, and not always a gift. But that doesn’t mean you need to become a wife and a mother, if that isn’t what you want. There are other paths.”

I barely heard her. I’d started to believe that I was becoming an apprentice of sorts, that Katerina was just waiting for the right moment to show me how to make beautiful and powerful things. That I could use magic to send my stepmother and Hans somewhere else—not anywhere bad, of course, or even particularly cold. But I wanted the half-remembered times back when Papa held onto me like I was all he had, because I was. Magic, I’d thought, could give me some control over my life.

“I know this is disappointing,” she said. “But you can be like me in other ways.”

I cried that night, trying to muffle the sound with my blankets. I must have made more noise than I thought, because Hans wobbled in and held his hands out to me, a serious look of concern on his pudgy face. “Sad?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. This was the first time he’d come to me willingly. My stepmother didn’t like me getting too near him, and Papa had long ago given up trying to tell her what was best for their child. I helped him

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onto the bed, and he snuggled his body against mine. His breath was warm and smelled nice, like wood chips.

“This will be our secret,” I said.

“Secret,” he said, and put a finger to his lips. when he was old enough to stray out of my stepmother’s gaze long enough, I would bring him with me to see Katerina, the two of us following the path of illuminated stones. At first, I didn’t like the thought of losing what had become my own personal retreat, but Katerina insisted.

She would set up a picnic for us in the grass outside her house, which was velvety and lush. She could call squirrels and rabbits to her, and Hans had a way with them, luring them close enough so he could run his fingers through their coats. They never seemed to want to get near enough to me.

“They sense the wolf in you,” Katerina told me.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“The part of you that’s wild and hungry, that needs to roam and explore, that is loyal to those she chooses.”

This comforted and frightened me.

“What am I?” Hans asked.

“You’re a boy,” Katerina said. “You can be anything you want, and unlike your sister, you don’t need to learn to be fierce to get it.”

“Oh,” Hans said. “I want to be a squirrel, though.”

“Sure,” I said, tickling his foot with a blade of grass. “You’re a squirrel.” it was during one of my visits without Hans when Herr Finster, the baker, came for the first time.

He was holding a bunch of wildflowers, some of which I recognized as the sort that could make you itch. When he handed them over, I could see the angry welts on his palms. Katerina proffered a jar for them, politely, and listened, just as politely, as he confessed his undying devotion to her and requested that she become his wife.

“You don’t want me as a wife,” she said, “and I don’t want you as a husband.”

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This surprised him so much that his jaw seemed to dislodge, and it hung there for nearly a minute before he got it working again. “You have no husband, and your life is lonely. I could protect and provide for you.”

“I’m doing just fine on my own,” she said, and, smiling kindly, she stepped over and turned Herr Finster’s shoulders in the direction of the door, and guided him out. “Thank you for the flowers,” she said.

As soon as the branches obscured his grey coat, I began laughing.

“That man is ridiculous,” I said, then realized Katerina wasn’t laughing with me.

“Not ridiculous. Unhappy and ambitious, and not someone I trust.”

Herr Finster, Katerina told me, never even wanted to be a baker. He wanted to travel, to see mountains and the ocean, but his father didn’t have patience for imagination. He would beat Herr Finster when he caught him looking out the window instead of kneading dough or watching the oven. And finally, his father seemed to have beaten the desire to be anything but a baker from Herr Finster, and, when he died, left the business and a lifetime of bitterness. I didn’t ask how Katerina could know this after only five years in our village. She made a point to know anything worth knowing.

“I believe he sees a way out through me,” she said. “Herr Finster knows how little I charge for what I bake, and how much he could make people who love my baking pay, if he had control. He could have all he’s always wanted, while I take over the work he hates. It makes perfect sense to him.” She returned to kneading bread. “I don’t think this will be the end of things.” in the following days, Herr Finster came twice more to beg for Katerina’s hand, and twice more she denied him. The final time, we could feel the anger rolling ahead of him, in the way he knocked. I picked up a knife used for cutting patterns in the dough. I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, but I wanted to be prepared. Katerina smiled but grasped my hand until I had lowered and dropped it. “No need for your claws today, little wolf,” she said.

When Herr Finster thrust his way in, he told Katerina that this was his final offer, and that if she didn’t accept he would see to it that no one in the village would buy anything from her again. At this she at last lost her

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practiced calm. She seemed to grow taller in front of him and her voice resonated with inexorable command.

“Out,” she said. “Now.” I never found her so lovely as she was in this moment. Her blonde hair was saturated with light, her able hands pregnant with power. I didn’t even notice him leave. When she turned to me, her eyes were still bright, but they seemed to look beyond me.

“I’ve overextended myself,” she said, her voice suddenly husky. “I’ve told you before that there’s always a price. For warding him off, I seem to have exchanged my sight. There’s no telling for how long.” She smiled a little. “I don’t regret it, even if I should. He’ll have to run the whole way home and won’t be able to stop until he reaches his own door.” She put a hand out to me with the faith I would take it. It was dry and cool, still coated in flour. I led her to a chair. Her body felt nearly weightless against mine, as if her skin held only air. Her absent eyes troubled me, too, but at least my face wouldn’t show this to her. “I think I may be done baking for today,” she said. “Listen. There’s something important for you, a gift. I’ve put it on the highest shelf, with your favorite books.”

Her arm gestured toward it, and I saw a box, wooden with a tiny brass clasp.

“It’s not my birthday,” I said. “You don’t have to give me anything.”

“It’s not time to open it yet. But it will be soon. Remember it’s there.” it was dark by the time I left the woods, and I felt immediately that something was wrong. A meeting fire burned in the square, and the dark backs of most of the village crowded around it. The shouting voices were thick with anger. And then I recognized Herr Finster’s voice, above the rest.

We’d all been deceived, he was saying, by the witch, a woman living alone in the woods. So she could cast spells, and none of us would know.

“I feel strange every time I eat her cakes,” said Herr Weis. “Don’t you?”

The crowd murmured an assent. “She’s been using them to control us, keep us blind,” Herr Finster said.

“The devil tempted Jesus with bread, too.” This was Herr Andreas.

My legs were shaking, but I pushed my way through the dense bodies.

I needed to stop him, tell the village what he was doing.

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“I felt her evil on me just now—” Herr Finster broke off, seeing me.

“There! This girl is her pawn. The witch has already turned her.” He pointed a thick finger at me, and the collective gaze shifted, bore into me.

“So that’s where she’s been going. I should have known.” My stepmother’s voice, cold as metal.

“Her first baby was stillborn,” said Frau Heim, the midwife, looking at my stepmother. “I knew it was unnatural, the way the child came out, a color I’d never seen before. The girl must have done it.”

“She learned the evil arts from the witch,” Herr Finster said, his voice gaining strength.

“Speak, Greta,” Herr Andreas said, moving towards me, though not too close. His eyes were wide, and I realized he was afraid of me. “Confess your crimes and perhaps it’s not too late to find salvation in the Lord.”

“I haven’t committed any crimes,” I said. I wanted the words to come out powerful, but my voice was shrill and small. My whole body was shaking now, icy, despite the fire just feet from me. “She’s only trying to help you.”

“See how far her spirit is bent,” Herr Finster said. “She’ll do the same to all of your children, if you let her.”

“No!” A small voice, Hans’s. I tried to find his face, communicate to him with my eyes that he should stop. “Katerina is good. She said I can be a squirrel.”

“She told you she would turn you into an animal?” It was my Papa’s voice now, hoarse with fear, and he pulled Hans back to my stepmother, who clutched at him desperately, as if afraid he would transform if she didn’t keep her hands on him.

“See? See?” Herr Finster had reached a new height of ecstatic rage, and the people around the fire seemed to catch his energy. “None of us is safe, not even our children. And we’re all hungry, have been since the witch cursed our crops so all we had to eat were her devil breads. Haven’t you had enough?”

I think it was my stepmother’s voice that started the chant.

Death to the witch.

Death.

Death.

Death.

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The crowd swelled around me, and I knew I’d be trampled. And then I felt broad hands around my waist, lifting me into the air. At first I struggled, flailing my arms and legs to try to get free, but then I saw Papa’s bearded face.

“I’m sorry,” he spoke into my ear. “If I had just—well, it’s too late for that now.” He brought me to the edge of the woods, set me in the hollow of a tree. “Stay here,” he said. “Don’t move. I’ll come back to get you when it’s done.”

“Papa,” I said. “You don’t believe them, do you?”

He paused, looked down at me for a long moment. “I believe that you’re my daughter and can still be saved.” And then he was gone, his large strides eating up the earth.

Saved. So he thought I might be possessed, might be as terrible as Herr Finster said. I needed to get to the one person who knew me, trusted me, to warn her. If I ran, I could get there before—before they came for her.

From here, I could see the faint glow of the pebbled path she’d made for me. I let my fear carry me.

I had expected to need to shake Katerina awake, but she was sitting in the wooden chair I usually stood on when I helped her with the dough.

Her hands were folded, her unseeing eyes open.

“Greta?” she said.

“It’s me,” I said. “Katerina, they’re coming for you. Herr Finster—he told everyone—they’re coming.”

I waited for her to reassure me, to spring up, to take some sort of action. I waited.

“I’m not ready,” she said, her voice rasping. “I thought I had more time.” She turned her head towards me, though her eyes hovered a foot to my right. “I’m sorry, Greta. You need to go. I wish there was more I could give you, but—well. I think you have more than enough. I’ve done what I’ve come for.”

I heard the tromp of footsteps, coming closer. I took one of her hands, tried to push some warmth into it, to pull her up. “Come with me. We can run.”

She shook her head. “Some things are set and sealed. I can feel that this is one of them.” She squeezed my hand. “This isn’t something you should witness. Go now.”

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But then there was the sound of fists against wood. Her head snapped towards it, and she extended a palm to me. I felt myself lifted with invisible hands, and brought softly to the space under her bed, my arms and legs folded gently as I was tucked beneath the mattress and out of sight.

And then the air was alive with the sound of wood splintering, falling.

She’d done nothing to stop them. I peered out to see her still perched on the chair, head slanting slightly to the left as if mildly interested. I tried to spring up, to push myself between her and these men, their faces evil, dark angles in the light from their torches, tools of their trades held like weapons. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t even speak. She’d put a spell on me, as if dough-soft yet firm bonds held me back, as if flour caked my throat into silence. I watched from beneath the bed as they grabbed her, shouted accusations and curses. I wanted her to blast them away, use her power against them. She’d said things were set, but wasn’t she strong enough to change them? But maybe she’d exhausted the last of her strength on protecting me. I wondered, as tears I couldn’t wipe away gathered on my face, if she’d be able to resist if I hadn’t come.

As the men shifted I could see who they were, each of them—Herr Finster, Herr Andreas, Herr Weis, Herr Schmit, Herr Eisen—my Papa.

He barely looked like Papa, his features twisted by the light. I tried again to scream. They were forcing Katerina to stand, now, and still she was calm.

“Witch,” Papa spat in her face.

“I am,” she said.

This seemed to first surprise, then incense the men. “No need for a trial, then,” Papa said. The other men nodded. “Bind her quickly, so she doesn’t curse us all.”

As they tied her, the ropes biting deep, she closed her eyes and drew a deep breath.

“Killing is an ugly thing,” she said, “and what it does to a man even uglier. I want you all to know that you’re just helping send me on my way.”

“Enough.” Herr Eisen clapped a hand over her mouth. “For the sake of our children, let’s burn her right here, in her own oven.”

The men roared their assent, used their torches to encourage the fire that had browned bread and cakes that had sustained and delighted

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them and their families. I could feel the heat on my skin, and I struggled against the binding spell as I watched the hands lift her, carry her over and feed her, placid and silent, feet-first into the flames. She didn’t cry out as her legs were consumed. Papa and the others were shouting, encouraging each other to keep going, to see the witch dead, but their voices had begun to sound strained. Even they, it seemed, were horrified by what they were doing to this woman who remained quiet. I saw her face, lit orange, beautiful and smiling, already elsewhere. I made one more desperate bid to get to her in time to save some part of her, to keep the life from burning out of her, but it was useless. I closed my eyes — I couldn’t bear to see any more. The heat was terrible, and it beat at me.

I couldn’t shut it out. Time stretched impossibly and the air grew thick with smoke that smelled, somehow, of burning sugar.

Finally, I heard the floor shift under the weight of retreating boots.

They were singing now, a hymn about God’s salvation. Their voices were rough and ugly around the words. Papa’s voice. Papa’s words. Papa’s hands, around Katerina. I heard the song long after they’d left, echoing around in my head. I opened my eyes, felt the ownership of my limbs and voice return, but, for a long time, I couldn’t bring myself to use them.

I don’t know how long it was before I looked into the oven. It’s difficult to remember. Time had gone jagged and broken. When I did, I expected to see burnt flesh, blackened fabric, bone. But there was nothing, save the coat of ash on stone from years of use. I put a hand in, felt the oven floor. It was cold and empty. I thought, then, of one of the stories I’d read in Katerina’s books, of a bird that burnt down to cinders before rising again and taking flight. I pulled back my soot-black hand, sat on the floor to wait. She would be back. Surely she’d come for me, if I were just patient, there would be one more big magic for me. i must have slept, maybe for hours. A snap from the woods brought me back. Springing up, I peered out the window, hoping to see Katerina, perhaps dressed in bright plumage striding towards me. Fearing to see, instead, torches and men returning. Outside, though, only deep blackness pressed against the window. I realized, then, that the glow in the stones Katerina had set out for me to light my way had gone out. It came

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back, the last thing she’d said to them men—or to me. That they’d be sending her on her way. She was gone. Really and truly gone, and I was alone.

I couldn’t stay here. But I couldn’t go home to Papa. They might burn me, too, once they found me. It was something Papa could do. I had seen it.

Katerina would know where I should go, but she’d left me directionless, empty. I shoved my palms against my eyes to force myself to stop feeling, to think, to plan, to do something.

And then I remembered. The box on the shelf, the gift she had left me. This had to be the right time, what she’d meant. I pulled it down, popped open the latch, looking for a spell inside for summoning, or reincarnation, or whatever would be required to call her back. For a moment, I hoped again.

But what I found was what looked like a fur cloak, neatly folded. I pulled it out, marveled at its thickness, the richness of its greys, the silkiness of its lining. It seemed to pulse under my fingers, beg me to pull it on.

As I wrapped it around myself, I felt it close me in, edges joining around my torso, my arms, my legs, until I was covered in thick hair. And then it was inside me, too, changing me, my hands shortening and sprouting claws, my legs bowing and no longer able to balance my weight, and I fell forward to be caught by my own soft paws. There was length and sharpness in my nose, now, and scents came to me from outside the house in intense waves, full of layers of meaning. The moist bark of trees, the grass bent fragrant under the feet of a fox, who smelled young and hungry, the distant whiff of men, acrid with sweat and smoke. My ears were keener, too, whipping about to match sounds with what my nose was telling me.

I knew I should be terrified, to be so suddenly transformed, to be crouching in a form so animal, so different from the one I knew. But nothing seemed worse than staying in my own body that would be hunted, soon, that ached for Katerina. That body was everything I wanted to be done with, and this one felt fresh, taut with energy.

I could kill them, I realized, the men who had taken Katerina from me.

If I waited in the fringes of trees at the edge of town, I could catch each of them alone, unsuspecting, and rip the life from them. My tongue ran over the points of my teeth, imagining the taste of them in my mouth,

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the way they’d whimper as I broke them. All of them. I could do this, and it would feel good, hot and savage, like justice.

But this, I somehow knew, was not what Katerina had changed me for. I noticed then, at my left paw, a small seam, a glimmer of pink skin beneath. I felt that if I tugged there, it would come loose, and I could return, be Greta again. But not yet.

As Greta, I’d never be able to slip away, travel safely through the night, for the days or weeks it might take, but this shape gave me that freedom.

I could go anywhere I liked, try out a new town, be unmarked and new.

And, if I searched long enough, maybe I could find Katerina, or whatever she’d become. Maybe.

The woods were calling me. I opened my mouth, the jaws that felt capable, heavy with power, let the tangled grief and longing out through my throat where it became clear, uncomplicated sound. This sound vibrated through me, through the house, through the windows. I hoped the entire town could hear it. Let them be afraid. I would feel nothing.

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purification

What I tell myself I won’t do then do trails me for days, like bonfire smoke scenting hair. I also have said under duress and influences, most elusive now, what I would do, then failed to follow through. I blame my instinct: an animal caught inside a purgatory set ablaze, raging with unbridled fire confounding water. When people say I would die for you, we understand that it’s rare they would, though they may surprise. They did when they rescued the koalas in the bushfire, didn’t they, even if it’s true they wouldn’t have for ugly animals. But who among us hasn’t vowed to love, then retreated?

Who doesn’t know already the names of beasts for which they wouldn’t die?

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buffalo jump

A cliff, jutting outwards its edge fragile, crumbling beneath the weight of hundreds of buffalo, all charging pellmell over the precipice, pushing, jostling, fighting with dank animal panic. The ground below is out of frame; the buffalo will never stop falling. The illustrator of this children’s book chose to center one animal mid-fall, its eye meeting ours and rolling wild at us, saying I was not meant for this.

This is the picture I turned to first always, the spears and bullets rushing me to the edge, my belly feeling already the panic of unbelonging.

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barbara westwood diehl blazes at some turning point in the hike, the red blazes on tree trunks were replaced by strips of cloth. The two women aren’t sure when this happened. They tend to get distracted when they chatter about things of little consequence—all those thoughts that flit through their heads like children through a screen door. But they do know that they are far from their original trail now. The red trail.

One of the women tells the other, not accusingly, that this rough path they’re on may not be any real trail at all. There is too much bramble vine clutching their thin socks. Too many burrow holes in the ground.

Yips and growls from the brush. A hissing in the grass.

There are no neatly painted rectangles of red, blazes, on tree bark at eye level. And no fork-in-the-trail arrows on posts, pounded into the

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ground by park rangers. No small kindnesses for hikers along this path.

Only tattered strips of cloth snagged on bark where blazes used to be.

The women have always managed to get back on track in the past, to hold a map this way and that, to locate some familiar landmark, until it all made sense. But this time, they have no map with dotted-line trails and solid-line roads, with rivers and lakes in paintbox blue. They had told themselves there was no need, this time, for a map. They thought they knew the way by heart.

In the beginning, some of the tattered strips were as low as their knees.

They rose as the women walked, gradually, to the height of their waists.

As if pinned by a blindfolded birthday child. As if the blindfolded child had strayed far from the paper donkey taped to a wall and the room of cake and ice cream and crepe paper streamers.

The forest is drawing closed, the undergrowth thick with thorns, struggling saplings, weeping pines. The dry branches break underfoot.

They snap like ankle bones.

The women have lost the red trail, but they keep to the trail before them, as they always have. If they see a deer slip from the trees or a heron fishing in a stream, like an illustration in a storybook, that will be enough. They want the uncomplicated magic of a fable. An escape through a secret passageway with a key tucked into a pocket for their return.

They didn’t think to observe their surroundings closely, to be alert.

To see the wildflowers shuttering. To hear the screech owls trill and the wings beating down on mice. The women hear this as children in the distance, spinning maple seed wings and shaking sweetgum seeds from branches.

They tell each other stories about children in forests just like this one.

The children who fall under spells and break them. The children who nibble the house and the children who follow the piper. The women say, with wonder and some regret, that children’s stories are much kinder now than they used to be.

Because the women come to believe they won’t be going back the way they came, that they won’t somehow stumble onto the red trail again, they begin to tear the strips of fabric from the trees. They are curious, as characters in a story should be. They pause, briefly, heads bowed, fore-

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heads almost touching, to look closely at the strips. These, they agree, have to be the raw edges of fabric torn from a summer blouse. A blouse with a pale, floral pattern. The daisies so faded they are only ghosts of daisies.

The women are flooded with childhood, a last remembering of satin hair ribbons and bow barrettes, cotton blouses with daisy buttons, flouncy tulle skirts, and patent leather shoes. The catchy tunes of children and the children of children. Everything they will lose. Gone like mice in a scuffle of owl wings.

The women have weathered their pasts. But in the wrist bones that broke in falls and knit imperfectly back together, they still feel a cold front coming.

They can tell that the strips of cloth were torn by human hands and not by a woodrat or a bobcat hidden in the brush. This is obvious. But they talk of animals, anyway, of wilderness and wildness, and not what humans are capable of and endure. One of the women imagines a bobcat, a woodrat hanging limply from its mouth. She doesn’t tell her friend what she imagines. This is a small kindness. The women always try to be kind to each other when they can.

The last strip of cloth they find is higher on a tree trunk than the others. As if the child in the ghost-of-daisies blouse had aged during her walk through the woods. One woman reaches out a hand to touch the strip of cloth. The other notices how easily, how naturally, her friend’s hand touches it, how she doesn’t have to bend or reach for it. It’s right before her eyes.

They talk to each other about all the times they could have used the strips of cloth to find their way back to the red trail, instead of forging on the way they did. They have some regrets, some remorse. But they have done the best they could. They are not women to find fault or dwell on what could have been. They only want this story to end with some small comfort.

As the bookends of the day close, the two women turn to each other, as if the other can write a better ending. The woman who had carried the car key plunges both hands into her pockets then pulls them out. Empty.

She has no fabric where the pockets should be—except for a few loose threads from a frayed seam—and she has no key.

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Her friend can’t help smiling at this pantomime. What would they do with a key here? Now, they only want the kindness of fairy tales, not the old stories but the versions their children tell their children now.

Where everyone is happy and a little wiser at the end, and everyone lives.

They can give each other this much. The kindness of stories. They close their eyes and listen to each other, and when both of them come to the ends of their stories, they listen to the forest. But as hard as they try, they don’t hear park rangers who paint blazes or fairy godmothers who grant wishes. They don’t hear the spinning of maple seed wings or children leaping into mounds of crisp oak leaves or laughter when a blindfold is removed. Instead, they hear the whimper of a woodrat caught between teeth, a hissing in the grass, branches breaking beneath nests with broken shells.

They are cold now. When they look down at each other and at themselves, they see that what remains of their cotton blouses—and there is little left of the fabric they had covered themselves in before this long walk—is in tatters. Do they see a pale pattern in the strips? Do they see where the strips of cloth, the blazes, were torn from them? The woman who lost the key asks her friend if she kept the cloth they took from the splinters of tree bark, if she has them in her pockets, so they can piece themselves back together. Her friend reaches into pockets that are only wisps of thread and holds out empty hands. Everything they had has come unstitched.

They tell each other that all this talk of children and fabric faded as the ghosts of daisies has made them old as fables. With the strips of their fabric torn away, they are down to skin and bones and stories. When they turn away from the bramble path leading into the dark and look at each other, they see the shadows of night birds fly across their faces.

Shadow puppets, they think, the hands of winter elms and the motherly face of the moon. But this is one last kindness.

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geri digiorno prize honorable mention

allison blevins

cataloguing pain as non-narcotic pain reliever “Pain is a common symptom in MS, with up to two-thirds of people with MS reporting pain in worldwide studies.”

—Multiple Sclerosis International Federation

My children beg to be loved with cartwheels and screams. I read once about microchimeric cells, know I still carry the children inside me. My mother lives in me too—a silent, slow swimmer. I know I’ll still belong to them when I can’t remember how I shit as I pushed my children from my body.

I'm wearing my old maternity clothes around the house. So brave, they will say at my funeral. If I can do this well—this slow death from disease and medication—I’ll be lovable. My therapist calls this a martyr complex. Someone must witness the chrysalis, the knife, how it burns to expand and dry and shake in the shell, I tell her. Interesting, she says.

My face has aged and tired, so I open my eyeshadow palette. Pigment dust poofs into the starkly white bathroom. The smell reminds me of my mother. I can love the eye bags darkened even more by the harsh overhead light and leave well enough alone.

In the sun-shadowed yard, my baby’s fingers brush and splash in our grass. She speaks mostly gibberish now. My husband reads the newspaper. The older children read on swings. I think I’m writing a love letter to them, to us, to the words we fit together, to my body turning slowly to floating light.

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I hold hands with my son on our sofa. My daughter brings ice packs.

The whole family holds me after a fall—you might not see it, but this is beautiful. We teach our children to dial 911. They memorize our address.

They will understand how to give to another body in need of a body pressed tight to the skin.

A new specialist asks if I take any medications. I laugh, hand her a list a page long, remember when my answer was multivitamin. After the exam, the doctor and nurse huddle behind a computer to find a medicine that won’t kill me, settle on one with the side effect of making my Xanax stronger. I’ll take it! I try to act concerned, serious.

Our baby’s scream flies into our bed at five in the morning. I don’t wake enough to hold her, change her diaper. She settles into the nacre of our bodies spooned face to face and knee to knee. In a fog, I move to adjust blankets and my husband’s hand grabs mine in the dark. Rough. Warm.

He covers me in the dark.

Some nights our bodies still bend into negative space left to fill by our curving flesh. Our bodies whisper vows again and again—your mouth on my ear like our first drenched I love you. I want you inside me, your hand on mine.

Each of my children fed from my breasts, wrapped their tight hands tight around my index finger as they tippled and dozed on my belly. This is the tight I feel as the nerves band my legs and chest—the memory of my children squeezes me, not the electric pain of information pulsing over battered nerves.

I like to use both feet to cover our standing shower’s drain—watch thefiberglass basin fill and fill. I imagine the water filling our bathroom and my children swimming, strange aquatic mammals.

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II. I re-imagine our last fight as tango. My brain steps as it once did, leads in response to your lunge. I’m no longer your cape, red and stuttering. We are graceful.

I imagine my feet as ruby slippers—click-click—dancing me from grayscale to color.

All of us will never be something we might have been. You see us smiling in our chairs, leaning on canes in commercials for pills and infusions. To love me, put your legs in ice.

I. You will enter my pain / inside my body / pain will coat your fingers, slick your lips and tongue. Remember, pain doesn’t belong only to me. Some other crips and spazzes and . . . are here in our bed. Swallow them too. I’ve become obsessed with the word farrago. This word is true and right. I was looking for a word to keep us all warm, warm as my children under blankets on the bed I can’t leave.

chapter from handbook for the newly disabled: how to fuck a disabled body

geri digiorno prize honorable mention

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V. Last night, in her mostly asleep but awake nightly wake and tousle, our toddler poured raisins from the box onto her face and bed like a Night Train drunk teen, not the usual post night-terror sweat and shriek.

Bed-hidden raisins. We laughed to tears. This handbook is for remembering how I suspect she might never know a version of me without a walker.

IV. After your chest has caved around my face, mint-musk breath—filled to the throat— ricochets shoulder-chest-shoulder-neck, your hard trans walls, and I become only my breath filled with you. I pulse in the after places—in this crease I forget my legs, in that crease I forget walk. My face, now sweet-flushed and forgetful, forgets how the medicines burn my cheeks and arms red-flush each morning and night.

III. I want every orgasm to surprise like spring—how pink-purple sneaks and sprouts, how green lounges like a flung shawl. You refuse to make left turns while driving, but your lips have brushed every part of my body. Licked all the fragrant shame of my body. Imagine. How bodies have suffered and shuddered under the weight of all our fragile bloom and wilt—all so fucking inevitable.

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II. Write your chapters. Send them by post. I want you all like bitter wine in my throat.

Chocolate. Brussel sprouts. Some people—genetically—can’t taste bitter. You all taste sweet to me. My husband tells me, Doctors can’t help because nothing can be done. Imagine.

Imagine chrysalis, butterfly. Disability isn’t always like the child born blue and still— some is simply a dream of rewind, how a person can never go back to their warm bloody shell.

I. This is the chapter about hope. Fuck him. Please know, we write every chapter out of order, words too. Today, I haven’t walked for three weeks. Pain seizes my muscles, changes my gait to hobble. Maybe this handbook is a love letter to the Lady Doctor who diagnosed me after the men sent a paralyzed woman home from the hospital. Twice.

Remember, you’re allowed to say fuck sometimes. Fuck is true. Fuck feels good. Fuck.

chapter from handbook for the newly disabled: My neurologist (who doesn’t have ms) explains pain is not a symptom of ms

geri digiorno prize honorable mention

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V. Like a movie car accident on pause, we are all always breaking. I mean all. When you spend too much time on pain, pain opens you—zippered up-down center mass—pain pulls and pulls at the holding weave. Pain is a tall city of red and beating wings under skin: glass and skyscrapers and endless honking. Do not become machinery. I’m wrapped in a blanket.

Small hairs breeze my face. In the chapter about hope, pain must become aphorism.

IV. I want to tell the doctor: I’ll never fully be with another person again. Fully with me. I live in legs now, live in twinge and tingle. I live in each electric jolt. Legs are my true love now. When I fuck, I’m thinking of legs. Erica writes to me, We are a sort of morning. Laura, Any flower that braves the snow. Huascar, That bridge will hold. We find each other in the middle. That feels good, true. Even birds, black swoopers and divers, call out for us to stay.

III. I get to say languishing. I get the bright squeezing fluorescent of up again at 3 am. You don’t.

Also, joy. My legs are my father’s hand on the small of my back up the stairs, my daughter’s head in my crying lap. I am shrieking joy. I’m shrinking into my daughter’s hair wet on her wild neck, rocking to soft violin and piano cello viola bassoon—joy in her hair itch-tickle, joy in motion, delicate toddler sour smell, flesh and soil and crushed dandelion milk.

savannah horton favorite child for many years, I thought cars came with an eject function, because my mother told me cars came with an eject function, and this eject function was a perk just for the driver, a switch she could flip if I was picking my nose or whining too loudly in the backseat. As long as the car was moving, the driver could, at any moment, spit me into the stratosphere, where I’d suffocate and plummet, and even if I was lucky enough to suffocate and plummet over an unplowed field or a forest with a thick canopy, I wouldn’t survive the force of the switch, my mother assured me, since my flesh would go limp, and my heart would go cold, and my brain would clang itself soft in my skull.

“I have to be thoughtful about it,” she often told me. “Because once I flip the switch, I can’t take it back.”

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i didn’t know what my mother did for a living, but her job gave her migraines, and it demanded a lot of our printer. What my father did for a living was cement, specifically: mixing it. He said cement was a seasonal job, but I saw trucks out year-round. When I was a toddler, he’d worked as a maître-de at a meatball restaurant, and before I was born, he’d finished a year and a half of dental school. Something about dental school had convinced him higher education was a waste of time, and he’d quit, gone into debt, and then out of nowhere, he’d snapped and threatened a bus driver with a Swiss army knife after she’d denied involvement in the death of Princess Diana. A doctor had diagnosed him with a disorder that required he take a lot of pills. These pills made him quiet and pudgy.

My mother had met my father when he was still in dental school, so she couldn’t have known, really, what she was getting herself into. She only had a high school degree.

Now, when the weather turned, and he didn’t want to mix cement anymore, my father fled to Florida, where he helped clear land for apartment buildings. My grandmother lived in Gainesville, so he had somewhere to stay. When he was traveling, I’d often wonder whether my mother would save me if disaster struck. Such as a band of masked intruders. Such as the house catching fire overnight. The place was poorly constructed, bought with the intention to demolish, and I imagined it easily igniting, smoke blooming through the hallways while the doorknobs fried up. The baby would laugh and scream, and my mother would linger on the staircase like the heat had cemented her skin to the carpet. I had no faith in her as rescuer, not because she was a woman but rather because there was a good chance that if something went wrong, it was her fault. the baby liked pickles, sour and dill, and when I was bored, I fed both to him in thick slices. There was a particular diet conducive to a baby’s windpipe—slimes and goos—but I didn’t care. I was twelve and liked to test the limits of what I could get him to do. He could almost speak, and when he saw my dripping hands, he always cooed.

It was cold enough for mittens in our house. Snow was already up to the windows. I started to wonder if the roof would cave in. Our heat-

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ers were fussy, hissing and stuttering, and I had to kick them until they hushed and let the warmth seep through.

The baby folded a set of plump fingers, bulging as though twined, around my wrist. He stared at me cross-eyed. I looked out the window.

The night outside fell thick as curtains. We lived on a hill, and I knew the fate of the driveway. By morning, my mother and I would need the shovels and a whole day to throw the snow into the woods. I lifted the baby and kissed his nose. He always tasted good, no matter his smell.

The tiny furnace of him grinned at nothing. He had an abnormally high resting temperature. My parents had visited three of the state’s leading specialists about it, but everyone had agreed nothing was wrong with him. At birth, he’d been jaundiced, but they’d fixed that, supposedly. He still looked a bit yellow to me. my mother’s office was small enough to trap heat, so she spent most evenings inside it. I waited in her doorway, and she stretched her hands out at me like lopsided starfish. When I handed her the baby, she panted warm air onto his nose.

“The heaters are making it colder,” I told her.

“I put the electric blankets on your bed.”

The room went dark then light again, and my mother glanced at the window. “The plows aren’t coming,” she said. “I’m going to have to call Noel.”

Noel was a radio personality who moonlighted as my mother’s handyman. He worked at the local station where he played lost hits of the seventies between overlong commercials about erectile dysfunction.

For a handyman, he wasn’t particularly dexterous. I’d twice watched him hammer his fingers into my bedroom wall. Noel lived two streets down with three dogs that were so violent and poorly trained that he couldn’t have visitors unless they were willing to wear protective gear. When Noel came over, my mother would answer the door with her mouth so wide she might as well have been posing for the dentist. Then she’d gape and sputter, and I’d watch her from the staircase as she made up some excuse for why the place was a mess.

“What about school?” I asked.

“I’m sure by morning they’ll cancel. You aren’t walking in this.”

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The heaters gargled back to life. They couldn’t let us forget about them for very long, so they fought with the storm—the wind that cried like cats—for our attention. Something above the house snapped and shifted.

“Just branches,” my mother said. “You’ll know when it’s something to worry about.” overnight, the electric blankets slid up my neck. A thin cord left a swish of red on my collarbone. If I died via fabric, I didn’t think any newspaper would care about running my obituary. I woke up grateful.

Noel was there to help with the driveway. No school, so I was stuck greeting him at the island as he smacked the snow out of his hair. He was shorter than my mother, with swollen eyes and a dense quadrangle of a head. Probably, he’d suffered a severe allergic reaction as a child that had left a permanent bloat. I liked to picture him choking on a cherry, the flock of hives dispersing down his neck.

“Noel finished the walkway in less than ten minutes,” my mother said.

“It’s not very long,” Noel told the floor.

“Are you insulting my home now?”

They exchanged a very loud laugh. The baby clapped. I wondered whose side he was on. “I’m going to get my toolbox from the car,” Noel said.

“You are not,” my mother said. “You have enough with the snow. Another day.”

“I think I can fix it if you let me look at it.”

“No, Dan can do it.” My mother was grinding Cheerios with the backside of a spoon. “Wear a hat outside, please.”

The baby clapped again. This time, I hissed at him until his whole face dilated. He started to shriek in abrupt bursts, like he was on low battery.

My mother shouted my name.

“You can’t eject me in here,” I told her. noel screwed with the faucet. Noel replaced our paper towels. Noel studied a hole by the fridge and tried to stop the freezer from leaking bluish sludge. He tried hard to fix many things, and when he couldn’t, my mother found something even less necessary for him to attempt. The

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house did need work. It had real structural problems, problems my father and not Noel could handle, and my mother knew that.

She tasked him with cleaning out the Brita. I watched his hand wedge to the bottom of the pitcher while it flitted a napkin around. Then a phone call came in on the landline, and I answered it because my mother, from the den, was threatening a future car ejection should she hear it go to voicemail.

On the phone was Gillian.

“Good,” Gillian said. “You’re awake.”

Gillian and I were friends, but we didn’t like each other. She’d tethered herself to me in elementary school and felt it was too late now to admit to other kids her mistake. I did appreciate her honesty.

“I think I’m coming over,” she said.

“Well, I’m very very very busy.”

“Well, I’m in your driveway.”

The baby screamed. A bowl had clattered to the floor. He was chewing noodles now, a different meal every hour. My mother cooked up the whole house for him. He stared at me, daring me to retrieve his mess so he could make it again. I never picked up anything he dropped. I didn’t want him to have the authority over me that he had over my mother.

Once he could walk, he would carry my things, I decided, everywhere I went. in the driveway, Gillian was talking to Noel with exaggerated hand gestures. Seeing me, she swooped closer to him and dusted snow from his shoulders. I waited inside the garage until she noticed I wasn’t paying attention.

“I ate three bags of Hershey’s last night,” she told me as we walked inside.

“Why?” “Tom said I couldn’t.”

Tom was Gillian’s brother. He was nineteen and lived with Gillian and their mother in a house with stone statues on the lawn. He used to deliver pizzas, and now he delivered Chinese food. Mrs. Geyer didn’t want him to move out because her husband lived in Atlantic City, and

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she still wanted her house to smell like a man slept in it. Tom smelled like skunks and tree bark.

“Did you puke?” I asked.

“I wish,” Gillian said. She had a habit of touching things twice. Over my bureau her fingers scanned left to right and back again. “Tom and his friends have been playing human tetherball. They tie someone up and swing him around a pole.”

I shoved the electric blankets onto the floor. “That’s awful.”

“It’s fine for a while. My mom says he’s registering the culmination of his teens.”

Our mothers were similar in that they both preferred their sons.

Gillian didn’t care about that as much as I did because her father sent her a lot of money in the form of Visa gift cards. She took a bobby pin from my desk and began cleaning her ears. When she was done, she offered to clean mine.

“I can wipe it off first,” she said.

I was forcing myself to listen to my mother’s laughter downstairs. I made a point to unsettle myself each day so I could grow as a human person and also curate a childhood of distressing memories that I could draw upon later once I was a well-known opinions columnist, or an actress with a perspective. I had the same laugh as my mother, all shrill.

“Why’s Noel here?” Gillian asked.

“Handling stuff, I don’t know. Fixing stuff.”

“Ugh. Handling. Well, anyway. I’ve chosen a valentine.”

“That’s months away.”

I was one of the only girls at school who’d given up on romance entirely. Love was wretched and artificial and sleazy. All crushes I’d suffered had resulted in torn diary pages or public mortification or leaves in my mouth. By the time I’d turned ten, I’d already filled a full journal with scathing romantic commentary, circling wet spots from tears on the pages and annotating which boy had spawned them.

“Do you know Jonathan Katz?” Gillian asked.

“No.” “He’s on the squash team. I’m going to get him something. But I don’t want it to be weird, obviously.”

“For Christmas?”

“No. That’s weird.”

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“What’s squash?”

“I’m trying to think of things he likes because chocolate is weird, and flowers are weird.”

“Chocolate is weird.”

“He has a lizard, I think.”

“One?” “I think so.”

I looked at Gillian and pictured her tiptoeing into a lizard colony.

Jonathan would be sprawled on a throne of reptilian carcasses, donning a scaly crown and wriggling his forked tongue at her.

“It’s usually never just a one lizard situation,” I said. “I bet he has at least three.”

“Well, he doesn’t.”

“Well, he might. You could get him crickets.”

“That’s not a valentine. Jeez, Hilary. That’s weird.” the power cut after lunch. Noel set up a compulsory game of Monopoly in the living room. Gillian claimed board games gave her migraines, and she threatened to leave unless we made her Banker.

“You girls watch out,” said Noel. “Your mother plays a mean game.”

“It’s mostly luck,” I said.

“Girls, you make your own luck.”

“No one take the money until I say so,” Gillian said.

Within the hour, Gillian had snuck me $500 under the coffee table, and Noel’s fingers had drifted menacingly close to my mother’s. I didn’t mind when he landed in jail. If my father came home, I’m sure he would’ve imprisoned Noel somewhere anyway, in the unfinished basement or the overstuffed shed out back. I tried to find things wrong with Noel’s face, like how it flushed in the cold. His eyes hid under his brows, and in the shadows, they were black as a dog’s. I thought of the poodle down the block who could use the human toilet.

“We could have chosen a shorter game,” I said.

Gillian stood up. She’d lost all her money.

“I’m going to pass out,” she said. “Someone has to walk me home.” while noel walked Gillian home, my mother and I bundled the baby into a second sweater. She was very worried about the power outage,

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since babies couldn’t handle basic human processes like regulating temperature. I reminded her that this specific baby would be fine. We should feel lucky, I said, that we’d lost power in winter and not summer. My mother pretended not to hear. Or else she was so overcome by nerves that her ears had briefly stopped working.

I didn’t expect Noel to come back after his Gillian-errand, but he did, and with distressing verve. The baby and I were playing Impulse Control in the living room, which meant I poked his nose until he hit me.

I watched Noel open the freezer and pull out a box crusted with the bluish sludge. Then he demonstrated, for no one, how to turn on the camping grill.

“You like burgers?” he asked. “Hello?”

“Are you talking to me?” I asked.

“Come look at these patties.”

I carried the baby to his highchair. Noel had spread an assortment of condiments and vegetables across the island, and now they were all in his way. He tried to plug in the grill. I grasped the head of a pickle with two fingers, and the juice bled down my sleeve. The baby shrieked.

I handed the pickle to him. He sucked and gnawed at the knobs in its skin, a miniaturized alligator’s snout. Then his eyes went wide, and he hiccupped. He retched. He dropped the pickle to the plastic table, and it was missing a chunk.

I assumed CPR involved smacking, but I couldn’t be sure because I’d missed the babysitter’s course due to a gushing period. Noel lifted the baby from the chair in one swift pull and pulsed lightly below his rib cage. The baby gagged. The pickle spewed from his mouth like a rind from a disposal. Noel returned him to the highchair and examined his patties again. My eyes went wide, bewildered. I closed them. I had to be careful not to show Noel any signs of admiration.

“Be careful,” Noel told the ketchup.

“Are you a lifeguard?”

My voice had gone all watery. I guess I was imagining the expression my mother would wear if she saw the baby become a corpse, and I guess that meant I was also imagining the baby as a corpse. I started to blink tears.

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“He’s alright,” Noel said. After a minute he added, “She doesn’t need to know.”

My mother wandered down the stairs. She set a palm-sized speaker on the island. Squatting, she nudged her tongue between her teeth and studied the box. She was capable of making herself startlingly unattractive when she thought about anything technology related. I stood up and told her I could put the baby to bed.

“Goodnight,” I said.

Sleep was a dependable way out, the only excuse my mother didn’t interrogate. She loved me most when I was unconscious. In the kitchen, she kissed my forehead with dry lips and smiled at the baby for a long time. I looked at Noel. My father hadn’t called, and that was six days now.

That night I dreamt of the baby and his body. I dreamt I’d brought him into bed with me and thrashed around atop him so I woke to a child of stone. This dream felt real enough that in the middle of the night I sprinted to his room to double check that he was still flat on his back.

My mother had instilled in me a deep fear of SIDS, but not just SIDS, of railings and bathtubs and all the ways my brother could succumb to his environment. My mother would never eject him from her car, I knew.

She’d reserve that threat for me. But she never got the chance to decide, really. He was fine for two years, all bouncing and giggly, and then he yellowed again, and his liver failed quick, and I never got to touch him again.

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grace (ge) gilbert

today is our century our jagged tattoo

i intuit a kitchen a messy precipice

a copypaste god

in the mirror i look long & sudden as if life didn’t just end me it simply fell open.

Long last a book A pipe dream the things god started with & then, the extrapolative business of humans

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wielding it

that petty diminutive Hope

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today is an anti-depressant intimacy remember when i pissed myself in the woods and told u not to look .

well in workshop they want “more of my mother.”

& the neighbors are fucking again,

totality a splinter between us as i am a child

of divorce.

& i just lay there sometimes

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like Louise Glück

split ends sopping wet

but i would never tell you that.

other times thinking of the river the little hangnail in the map of my childhood

my clit a small syllable in your mouth.

or, i would like a portrait of us, as i make eye contact with the tree outside my window.

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or, i watch you stumble over me the way Lana del Rey stumbles over “architecture” and need you for it

my legs somewhere far away my melancholy

even still

a chastening stream.

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today is the afternoon logic of the devil In the jigsaw puzzle There is too much Of the sky once I said “swimming” when I meant “flying”

the blue just too incredulous

with the godhand

I force some edges

Someone always must bring in the red

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{_____ /_____} guess

i fucking hate the word conversation standing in some circle the cup runneTh over w job talk & perpetuity at a Refreshments table i fill my plate w all the tiny shrimps and my inadequacy standing in simple Dress i shirnk under the idea

of my mom who used to pry the wet gum out of my mouth after school

don’ t do it

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she ‘d say don’t be

like your Fucking father

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sandy fontana creeping phlox how his hand, his thumb, pressured my shoulder blade like a blade, or a gun, that seemed to easily push into flesh, crack bone, split the chambers of my heart until I saw myself skewered, lifted from the ground. Nothing of his face or his smell, but the pain, the surprise of pain, and the fear.

I felt foolish for cutting school, leaving the gas station to stand in the rain and not thinking at all, for not fighting, for recalling only the driving rain and the numbers scratched into the metal dash of the car—for not telling anyone until it was too late. Twenty years later, I’m pregnant again, and the ironies are adding up in my head like the seconds of a long life while I stand in my own yard under the wisteria, thick and tangled around itself. It travels the arbor, falls onto the high fence—now without paint, feeble and rotting from the weight, but almost unseen when

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the vines green, when the blossoms cascade. And the creeping phlox, already blooming deep lavender, grows out of melting snow. i was the kind of girl everyone called shy, but they probably meant troubled or slow, like the time the mother of a new friend drove me home, but because I wasn’t watching closely, we drove past my house and because I was too nervous to tell her—she was the loud type, and by that I mean she was a nasty bitch—I let her drive about a mile out of the way.

“Where in God’s name is your house, Anna?”

“Oh, turn here,” I said. On a street with which I wasn’t familiar, I pointed to a house that looked like mine. “This brick house right here.”

She watched me walk to the door as if she thought I was lying. I had to pretend it was locked, or else knock, which I thought would look suspicious, and I knew she didn’t like me, was just waiting for a chance to tell Chrissy, who’d fallen asleep as soon as we’d pulled out of their drive, that I could never visit her ever again. I fumbled at my pockets, pretending I might have a key, and then a man opened the door as if he expected me. And since I wanted Chrissy’s mother to drive away, I turned and waved to her, smiling. She didn’t wave back; she glared at me, as if it were my fault I lived so far away. When she hit the gas, pea gravel spit in all directions. The man at the door gripped my elbow and said, “Come in, come in,” his other hand bearing down on my neck. And I wished I hadn’t been watching Chrissy’s nostrils flare out and come together like invisible fingers, pinching them absolutely shut at the moment we were passing my house.

I jerked my arm loose and fell down on the concrete porch, did a backward crab walk as fast as I could, something we learned in gym class for relay races. When I looked up, I saw the man unzipping his pants and thought he was going to pee on me, like Waverly Stetson peed off his back porch, forever trying to spray my bedroom window. I heard a woman yell, “Mr. Haskins! No! Mr. Haskins!”

Chrissy and her mom were gone in a cloud, and I watched myself run all the way home. It wasn’t nearly dark when I arrived. I came up the alley and shouted, “Bye, Chrissy. Thanks for the ride,” in case anyone was listening, and then with a muffled voice I said, “Bye, Anna. Thanks for coming over.”

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As it turned out, my father wasn’t home, and when my mother saw me her eyes popped. “You look like you’ve been rolling in the dirt—go run a bath. Maybe you don’t need to visit this Chrissy again. What is she, a tomboy?”

“She’s a baby. She can’t even stay awake when she has company,” I said. my father always called me a daydreamer. “You don’t pay attention to details. You don’t pay attention.”

More to the point, I paid attention to certain things so intently that, to other people, it appeared I was merely daydreaming. Who can really know someone else’s mind? The very fact that I paid attention when my father called me a daydreamer or when my mother called me shy, paid enough attention to analyze myself, is proof that I wasn’t dreaming.

I was a thinker. As for being shy—sometimes things mesmerized me, watching Chrissy’s nose flare and suck shut. And sometimes I didn’t like people, Chrissy’s mother. In cases like these, I tended to be very quiet, which could be interpreted as shyness.

I decided to take this as a lesson, to somehow divide my mind so that my interested thinking didn’t erase the whole world, which often happened in school. I’d read my history chapter and visit whatever place I read about, examine the clothes and language of the people, and their shelter—whatever they lived in, often on ships, all those rats on board with them. I’d lose myself in the climate, get chills in May or overheated in January, depending on the location of the natives or the explorers, of the uprising or the camp, so that I didn’t hear my teacher call my name.

To save me from trouble and embarrassment, Dina Sellers, one of my best friends, usually faked a coughing or sneezing spell—she went so far as to pretend she might vomit into her hands if she didn’t race out of the classroom in a big hurry. My mother said Dina was studying her theatrics and that she was imitating her mom. But now that I’d had this fright, and I was frightened, I planned to control when and where my mind transported me.

From fourth grade through eighth, I must have looked like a genius because I’d put into practice my method of concentration, to prove to my parents and teachers that I was complete with a brain. Only when I was somewhere I deemed absolutely safe from reprisal would I let loose

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my imagination. That way, I’d be sure to avoid riding my bike into a convoy of semis. The rule was, any private space was safe, any public place was not. Sometimes the lines blurred, but I’d become proficient at keeping one eye and one ear awake to the real world. I overheard my parents say things like, “Finally, she’s coming out of it” or “I think she’s going to be fine,” as if after holing-up for years I’d crawled out of a box, some kind of survivor. and then i was in high school. Over the summer, after sophomore year, I had a boyfriend, Daniel. He was shy in the bashful sense, so I initiated the idea myself. It had been raining through the night, raining all morning. When we’d made plans to cut school, Daniel said to wait for him at the gas station, he’d pick me up. And that’s where I stood, waiting inside the gas station, the attendant chewing and popping gum like a kid, his feet up on the desk where I supposed he transacted business for oil changes and tire repairs. His dark hair curled around his thin face that hadn’t been shaved for maybe a week. He had the kind of nose that I would have then described as elegant—elegant being the word I used for any person, place, or thing that I found attractive in one way or another—and I imagined how he’d look outside the gas station setting, maybe like an actor. I thought he was handsome enough to start a movie career, young enough to be an idol. He wore a striped shirt with a name stitched inside an oval like an open mouth above the pocket, Frank. It may have been that he’d noticed me admiring his nose, had mistaken the recognition of classic features for an interest in him sexually. And then he smiled at me, adjusted his baseball cap like a cowboy tips his hat and says, howdy, little lady. But Frank said, “Rainy day.” I nodded without looking at him. And then he said, “Kinda day you take your girl to a motel.” Daniel was half an hour late, and I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt to my eyes, walked out the door, into the rain. I would have guessed as much myself, now. At the time, at fifteen, I thought my life sealed itself inside my brain, and I never imagined that Daniel, two years older, would have backed out.

Traffic had let up since school already started. I stood close to the curb under a tree that held most of its leaves, pouring water like cupped hands, while car after slow-moving car made its way through the fourway stop, as if I still had hopes Daniel would show. My clothes had long

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before soaked through when the rain changed from drizzle to a biting downpour, like melted bits of steel so hot it stung cold, but I had a spare sweatshirt and jeans in my gym locker. I could change out of the skirt, Daniel’s favorite—a short, pleated skirt that, if I spun in a circle, opened like a paper fan. I thought to dry my hair as well, in time for second period. When I turned toward school, a man, not Daniel, not gas station Frank, walked toward me from between parked cars. He spoke suddenly and sharply. I didn’t know why he was talking to me and hadn’t deciphered what he’d said when he took my arm. My thoughts weren’t forming, but I tried planting my feet on the puddled gray sidewalk I’d cursed earlier, thought of falling to the ground, racing away in a backward crab walk. He threw his arm across my back, a body slam, squeezed me to his ribs until I could barely breathe. He pushed his thumb into me, like leverage, to guide me. And it worked. It seems I flew at his command. after that day i didn’t skip school, and perhaps it isn’t surprising that nobody knew I was pregnant. I refused to know. My life had changed, but nothing changed—the way old comes round as new again, or the way new grows old. And then the early summer grew hot and intense. By the middle of June, after I had exposed my condition to myself and to my parents, after I’d witnessed my parents falling together into a pyramid of tears, I was sent to California, to stay for those last weeks with an aunt I knew only from family letters: my mother’s younger sister, Marbelle, who resembled my mother if I squinted and pretended my mother would dare wear full-spectrum color. And, who, because she possessed an uncanny poise in her manner and conversation with me, came to know more about the event than anyone.

From her terraced yard jumping with various blooms, Marbelle filled vases. “Smell this bouquet, Anna. If you like it, put it in your room.”

And there she’d stand framed in flowers in her turquoise turban—the one she wore when she painted or gardened or cleaned house. But when we walked to the post office to collect the mail each weekday, she set her hair free so that it tumbled down her back like a river, so that when she stood chatting with her friends the gentle wave, the slight curl, at the ends of her hair trembled.

“Your parents never told you that I had children.”

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“You do?”

“I was a kind of,” she paused, “a kind of baby-maker. No, no children of my own.” She smiled and glanced over at me as we walked back from the post office. “If a couple wanted children,” Marbelle continued, “and if the woman, for whatever reason, couldn’t conceive, I was an alternative, a surrogate—that was a long time ago, of course.” Marbelle picked up a stick from the pathway. She carried it in her hand, slapped her thigh with it as she walked, a giddy-up.

Questions stormed my mind, but I wondered most of all what it was going to be like, to have a baby and give it away.

“But you never married anyone.”

“I carried the first baby during graduate school, and I continued painting, getting my work into shows. Over the next twelve years or so other couples contacted me.” She sighed and bit her top lip. “I realize it sounds unconventional, very bohemian,” she said and winked at me, “and I suppose there was never time to form a long-lasting relationship with anyone, or maybe I’ve never been interested.” She looked up to the clouds and pointed the stick skyward. “I simply offered myself as a choice for couples who wanted children, children of their own—to a certain extent—and it was something I discovered I loved doing, like painting. I desired being pregnant, longed for it.”

“You had twelve babies?” When I asked her, Marbelle grinned brightly, as if she loved the idea of twelve babies, as if she could see them sitting plump on the path in front of us. And then I saw them, chubby and tipping over to crawl or gurgling and grabbing sun-motes.

“Not quite one a year. I had seven, four boys and three girls.”

“Is that why we’ve never visited you all these years, why you’ve never been to our house? Did they think you were crazy? My parents think everything’s crazy.”

“Like what?”

“Well, anything that I like, my clothes, the music I listen to, my haircut, studying history.” I sounded childish and then selfish. “I know they’re worried about me. They always have been.”

“Studying history?”

“It’s not what they’re interested in, you know.”

“Perspective, yes.”

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maybe one or two blocks from Frank’s gas station—but the car could have been three blocks down, or four. And I don’t know which street.

Maybe we’d crossed Monroe Street and doubled-back. For all I knew, I had been extracted from the atmosphere, plucked from time. A mere bundle in someone’s lap, he pushed me as he opened the car door. We were on the passenger side. And then pain. And then fear because I thought I was being killed. I grabbed the dash with my hand and felt the cold rough metal, but he held me by the hair and the nape of my neck.

He pulled my head back. My face nearly hit the dash—that metal dash with numbers scratched into it, like a child might have done with a sharp object, a rock, a pocketknife.

Without remembering walking or stopping at corners or making right and left turns, I found myself leaning against the wall in the gym locker room. I know that I was never transported in that car, so I must have walked. I was wearing my dry clothes; changing clothes had been the last thing I remember thinking to do. I threw my sweatshirt, its front pocket ripe with condoms from the free clinic, Daniel’s favorite skirt, everything wet and stained into the tall locker room garbage can, and pushed it down. And then I walked home in the rain. For the rest of that Friday and the weekend, I stayed in bed, sick with chills and fever.

Daniel avoided me when I passed him in the halls, and we didn’t have any classes together. I didn’t care to try and sort it out: whether he felt embarrassed that he stood me up; whether or not he stood me up, maybe battery trouble again; whether or not he thought it was a lie about being sick when I didn’t take his call over the weekend. My new plan in life included going to school and going home. For a few months, my parents would be pleased that devotion to homework grew into obsession.

Hadn’t their only girl matured this year, found out what mattered in life, her “studies” they liked to say, getting into a good college. Hadn’t she even stopped nagging them about her soon approaching driver’s license test, how she needed a job so she could buy her own car so she could drive to school, to events, to visit friends, stopped hounding them about the new purse or shoes or sweater or coat that she had to have. Hadn’t she stopped pestering them about every little thing. They thought me the ideal daughter, and so, for a short time I felt like one.

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those weeks in carmel, the sunlight and the air on the beach mended me. Before, it had been as though I were seeing only edges, literally, as though I wore glasses with whorls of black paint in the center of each lens—as if I had been slowly going blind. On the beach—in one of Marbelle’s oversized sweaters she called lizard sweaters, for sitting-still days—I slept and woke and slept again, the rhythmic hush of waves lulling and prodding me, the salt spray misting me, a healing spittle.

A neighbor’s dog, Bo Fiddler, regularly chasing in and out of the surf ran to greet me like a friend. Marbelle called me by name at some point during each conversation, spoke my name as if she called me out so I’d recognize myself, to remember myself. I’d see her dressed in her tight yellows and oranges one day, her flowing blue-greens the next—and it seemed, much later, all a plan to wake me with my own senses, to pull me out of a metal-gray rain—because I hadn’t known how I looked to other people. I’d guess now that my appearance upon first arriving at Marbelle’s was something akin to a shell-shocked and abandoned mutt.

I recall Marbelle as she worked at her easel in the sand, looking like the end of the rainbow, golden.

It was my father who spoke with me on the phone while I lived at Marbelle’s. As if they had discussed it and decided he’d be liaison, my mother quickly handing over the phone to him. Unfailingly, his voice sounded tense and coping, and I imagined he had to keep from screaming: if you’d paid attention, if you’d only paid attention! And I found myself feeling sorry for him because I was smart enough to know that what he really felt was anger at himself for letting his little girl walk around alone in a world of danger, for months of not sensing something wrong with me, and then for sending me away—which must have seemed to him like punishment for us all. In reality, it was my father who was the more nurturing. My mother had long played the authoritarian. And I had yet to figure out her aloofness, which made her appear all-business—as if I wasn’t aware how she came to check on me every night when she thought I’d fallen asleep, how she bent close to my head, whispering as if praying, and didn’t I look forward to this more than any part of the day.

Marbelle had given me a clothbound notebook, told me that she’d kept a journal for years, how she found it helpful, from working out problems to discovering her next art project. I started writing down mi-

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nor things of interest that I could talk about with my father at the next call, so that we could have a conversation instead of a painful groping for words. I found the journal came to be the place within the place that allowed me to think clearly. I wrote descriptions of the weather, the beach, of the enchanting urban forest that was Carmel. I described my appearance, when I finally examined myself stripped naked in front of the mirror—a kid whose thin arms and legs looked like they’d tink and chime in the wind, a tough round belly that protruded strangely low on her frame, two small breasts that even then didn’t appear filled with anything that could possibly sustain life. And in a later entry, I admitted that girl’s body belonged to me, that I slept with my hands at my belly and lay awake feeling the child’s movement, as if we were communicating with the same halting stutterings with which my father and I struggled. As if we had late-night communion, the way my mother breathed a benediction over me.

Days after I wrote in my journal about seeing my body in that fulllength mirror, I saw myself outside of myself, as if I were having flashbacks of frivolous mirror-gazing, like when I’d dressed for school, the way I would dip and pose, lift my chin to kiss the air. It happened at the beach during one of my slow walks in the sand, an overcast and breezy day. There, I saw myself rise out of the water, looking at Anna on the beach, as if I’d retained a subliminal image of a fantastic television commercial that now popped into reality before my eyes. My ocean self was dressed in a swimsuit. She happily hovered upright over the waves, with dry hair even though she’d emerged from the sea, and held a placard, a message. I couldn’t read it. She was tilting her head, shoulder-to-shoulder, smiling enormously, and the whole thing made me gasp and slap a hand to my mouth. Ocean Anna turned her head and appeared to be listening to the great body of water behind her. She was gone. Not even Bo Fiddler around to hear me, I muttered, “What in God’s acre?” One of my father’s sayings, his way of keeping a civil tongue, which was the rule at home. I sat down right there in the sand, waited to see if the thing would appear again, like a UFO or a member of the holy family. But it didn’t. it seemed that Dina Sellers’s parents sat her down, laid down the law between seventh grade and eighth. She used to sit on one leg in class, as

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though she were spring-loaded, and always leaning forward so far in her seat that I expected her desk to tip into Waverly’s back. She’d been in love with Waverly since first grade. She didn’t wear make-up on her face or socks inside her tennis shoes. Almost every day, her hair had tangles in the back as if she’d slept in chewing gum. But she was popular and smart and naturally funny, like she should go into comedy as a career. Her parents sent her to camp over that seventh-grade summer, “probably to some exclusive-expensive spa,” my mother said. “It’s just like them to do something outrageous like that.” The Sellers were one of the richest families in the city. And when Dina returned for our first day of eighth grade, she was not recognizable in appearance or manner. Her hair moved in a silky sway, her clothes custom-made. She didn’t have jokes or even a smile for anyone. I remembered when I arrived back home, only two days before my senior year of high school. I felt like Dina looked that day, decades older than a few months earlier.

At home, I missed how Marbelle called me by name each day. How so often she’d ask simple questions, allow me simple decisions. I put into practice some of the habits I’d developed; I made myself tea every day after school. I took walks in the park, around the pond, and through the botanical gardens––a few blocks from my house, the closest I could get to the wonder of Carmel. And I regularly wrote in my journal. Taking my driver’s license test was anticlimactic. Instead of socializing, I drove myself to the library downtown, sat in a study carrel, read history books and art books that I’d planned to check out. Drove myself to my appointments with the robotic psychologist my parents picked out for me, Ms. French. She was as helpful as one of Marbelle’s failed tea blends. A pisser of a psychologist, I wrote in my journal.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I don’t fit in at school or with my old friends.” I didn’t add that there were certain streets I avoided at all costs, that I had a tendency to dart and dodge very tall men, that I felt empty inside and when it rained I could barely move my body through it.

“How does that make you feel?”

“Like I’m ready to be finished and go to college,” I said because I wanted time to pass quickly so I could find things I loved, to fill myself up, to escape the limbo that was this last year of school.

“How are things at home?”

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“My parents are very supportive.” And they were, and happy to have me home. But our time was up, she’d say and flick her fingers in the air as if she were splatting me with water, or putting a hex on me. I wanted most of all to spring forward, like the rat-haired before-Dina, I wanted to jump up and down, shake my hands over my head, while I screamed at Ms. French. Did she ever sneeze or spit to keep a friend out of trouble? Did she ever want to vomit into her own hands? Did she know that the boy next door to me pulled out his little wiener on his back porch every day, tried to pee across twenty feet of lawn, that he continued to pull it out and yank on it even when he was fifteen years old and that my mother routinely opened my curtains after I’d closed them each day, that Waverly waited like a bloodhound for me to walk to my window to close them, again, and what was it with me anyway? Did I have some kind of scent, some kind of curse that said fuck me, fuck with me? And that’s when I remembered, just then when I was imagining getting right in Ms. French’s silly, pinched, hexing face: Mr. Haskins had hold of me, pulled out that spongy-looking penis and pulled me closer, kept pulling on himself until it was long and red at my neck, and then a woman screamed at him to let me go. I ran to the end of the drive and rubbed pea gravel dust all over my face and neck. I was watching myself run home, as if I were in two places at once. marbelle stayed at my side during labor and delivery. There was no concocted story for friends and relatives, only that I would be scouting out colleges on the coast. And Marbelle had chauffeured me to every major campus from Berkeley to San Diego. She told me, “It’s your decision, Anna. You can hold the baby or look at him through the nursery glass or neither.” I held him once while he slept. I talked to him about school, told him if it hadn’t been for him I might never have met Marbelle. the second time that I’d seen the inside of that car was eighteen years later, three years after I’d married. Will stored the car in the barn on the property of his family home, the house now a rental, but Will kept the barn for storage. I’d never been inside. One Saturday in April, as hot as August, I rode with Will for a quick check on the property. While we were there, he thought to show me the car—an antique. Maybe some-

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thing sporty and foreign but rusted through to its frame, I surmised.

More towards appeasing Will than out of curiosity, I entered the tumbledown structure where a great beam of light from the open barn door spotlighted a parked car, a behemoth. I peeked through the grimy window and saw, then, the deep seats, big enough to fall into and not be seen. They were big enough to change the life of a teenage girl. I opened the car door, ran my hand across the etched numbers in that metal dashboard. There, I teetered, leaned into the passenger side of the car, awash with a hollow numbness at the sight, the impossibility, this surreal episode that was my life unfurling before me like Marbelle’s loosed turban, some immeasurable length of blue taken by an updraft.

“Whose car is this?” My throat knotted like choking on dry bread, my voice cawed, a scratching as it came back to my ears after ringing through the interior of the car.

“Alex drove me everywhere in that clunker when I was a kid,” he said, raising the work light, glaring hot, like a second sun over our heads.

“But where did this car come from?”

I’d never told Will about the day I planned in detail to lose my virginity, to cut school, go to a motel out of town and stay the day and night, how, when Daniel didn’t show, a man dragged me to a car—this very car, it seemed—how I gave birth, gave the baby away. I cringed when I felt a hand on my back, but it was Will’s hand, and his was not the hand that pulled me along the sidewalk years ago.

“Anna, hey, you okay?”

“The car, where did it come from?”

“This was Dad’s old car, a project car for him, for Alex, and then for me. None of us really worked on it,” Will spoke with affection and regret, patted the car roof the way I’d seen him gently lay a hand to the shoulder of our neighbor, an elderly, doddering man who used his cane to tap tap tap the newspaper along his drive and into his house, easier, or safer, than bending to pick it up, I’d guessed. After I’d called Will to the window to see, he hurried every morning to get to the paper, left it on Mr. Blanco’s doorstep. But each morning, Mr. Blanco overlooked the paper outside his door, walked to the end of the drive, searched for the paper, stood then circled, confused. He rapped his cane on the driveway

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as if calling the newspaper to him, like calling a dog. Will decided to leave the paper where it fell.

“I don’t know where Dad got the car. Seems like we’ve always had it.

But if I’d known you were interested,” and then a more doubtful tone, “you like old cars?”

We couldn’t stay long. Will had a conference call within the hour. The early drive was intended only to do a few errands—to stop at the newly vacated premises was an afterthought, something about checking on loose shingles, random spring repairs. The farmhouse is located thirty miles north of where I grew up, a few miles east of the house Will and I bought. And Alex remains the brother-in-law I’ve only spoken to on the phone, never met in person. When we were dating, Will told me about Alex, “He had plans, but he came home from college, took care of me after Mom died, helped Dad with the farm and the veterinarian clinic until Dad died. More like a parent than a brother. I started college, and he left for London, never came back.” I had seen pictures of Will’s family. Will, a young boy, in his mother’s lap, both of them small and fair; Alex, seven years older than Will, stood with his father, both tall and dark.

Driving home, reminiscing about his childhood, Will said, “I never experienced sibling rivalry, more like sibling worship.” And I wondered about that day—had Daniel pulled up to the gas station door, winked at me as I whirled out to meet him. Had Frank tipped his cowboy cap but kept his mouth shut. Had I walked straight to school instead of standing on the curb like some vessel filled to overflowing with rainwater. What would it matter about the car?

Years before I met Will, I dropped the habit of thinking it could be that man: that man turning to talk to me or that man walking by me too quickly or that man who is tall and strong, fingers like the claws of a bulldozer’s ripper. For a long while, I had been considering the boy, he’ll be five years old, ten years old, eighteen. I’d been thinking: that lanky boy walking out of school might resemble him or the freckled one in line in front of me or the one who lives down the street, who plays the piano that I hear like a sea wave climbing, skimming Mr. Blanco’s rooftop, sifting through my porch screen like fog, and on down the street as far as sound can travel. On the drive home from the barn, I considered how I’d kept the numbers and the metal dash to myself for so long that

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I came to doubt they existed. Some odd notion, instead, pasted together like kindergarten artwork and nightmares. marbelle walked the steep wooden steps one pace in front of me on the way to the beach, one pace behind me on the way back, her hand always on the rail, all to assure she’d brace my fall were I to stumble or feel faint—although I had no such insight at the time. She daily blended and brewed herself a strong cup of tea. “Anna, we have gypsy moon tea. It’s a mystery,” or “I’ve made black currant and bergamot, Anna.” She held the pot of tea at shoulder level, her eyebrows arched, questioning, until I said, “yes, please” or “no, thank you.” We sometimes looked at each other across the table, our lips pursing and tongues clacking from the unpalatable blend. She’d tilt her head to the cup and mumble, “That’s not tea. It’s cat piss.” A phrase I would never have heard at home had a cat lifted its tail to piss on us all in a row: my father, the engineer who took direction from my mother, the banker who wanted me to follow in her gray-pinstriped-footsteps, me, the daughter who thought if she completed her homework diligently enough she could go back in time.

Marbelle said, “Pick your flower.” We sat outside on faded-blue canvas slings tenuously attached to adjustable wooden frames, Marbelle’s favorite old chairs. Her patio strewn with food and reading material as we searched through a collection of gardening books and special issue magazines: Make Your Garden Grow! Staying at Marbelle’s was like living in a garden in the woods on the ocean. I began waking earlier to include myself in the space, to see the cypress and wildflowers on the beach, to look at Marbelle’s stone cottage from different directions.

“What do you mean?”

“For fun. California’s state flower is this poppy, the golden poppy, right here.” She pointed to a cluster of flowers, deeply-cupped lemon and open-palmed gold. “That’s my flower. Choose one, like a favorite song.” as a child, I’d noticed the abundant flower motif in the world, on women’s dresses—with the exception of my mother’s—on my neighbor’s couch and drapery and bathroom wallpaper, on my own sheets I slept on every night. Waverly’s mother had a flowered rug that we weren’t allowed to walk on. “She likes that rug more than me,” Waverly

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said. “And it’s not even new. It’s old.” I wondered, then, why flowers?

Why not horse heads or butterflies? Marbelle’s paintings abounded with people, suggestions of motion or conversation: people sitting on spindly stools and drinking wine, leaning in shop doorways, mother and child, solitary figures—all surrounded in pouring color, filled to the eyeballs with tint. Any flowers in her work looked like smudges dropped to the ground from a woman’s hand, or like crushed moonlight gathering for a return trip.

I bought and planted the ground cover as soon as Will and I moved into our new home because it was the perfect solution for the sloping lot on which our house sat, as if a mound of fill dirt from three or four other lots had been dumped here by mistake, but seeing as it was too much trouble to haul it away again, it stayed. Consequently, our house was the only one in the neighborhood not arranged on an immaculately flat site, and it seemed comically royal to me, elevated that way, and now a majestic carpet. The ground cover was called creeping phlox, the flower I’d picked as my own at Marbelle’s. One of her gardening books offered two pages spilling purple and lavender—climbing a rock wall, holding a hillside, framing a garden—and a description of the clumpy mass. The name caught me that day, maybe the first time I’d felt carefree in months, laughed to myself. What a lowly name you have, creeping phlox, I thought, as if you’re a severed hand in a horror show, creeping and phloxing along, sly as a phlox, when it says right here that you lead the way out of nearly frozen ground! Hadn’t I learned about Sacagawea in grade school, hadn’t I imagined her falling to her knees in the snow, a baby on her back, to dig roots and tubers. The day I planted the phlox, I smiled, thought to rename them Sacagawea phlox, as I read the printed tabs spiked in each of the containers: brilliantly colored flowers that appear when few others are in bloom. They easily blanket difficult banks and terraces. a couple of alex’s friends from school stopped by to see him when they were driving south on fall break. They arrived early one morning and stayed the night. Will hadn’t liked the way they’d barged in not long after their mom died. And he remembered a fight in the yard.

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“One guy was limping, had a bloody eye. I got home from school in time to see Alex heave that duffle into the mud and roundhouse their car like he planned to dismantle it. I knew better than to ask what was up— he wouldn’t have told me. I never did ask.” Will glanced in the rearview mirror. “Figured there was a reason.”

“What did your dad say?”

“He wasn’t home, afternoons at the clinic, probably a good thing.”

“Alex had a temper?”

“Well, you know. Never saw him start a fight, but I saw him fight.

Guys fight,” he said and shrugged. “He was going for the windows next.

He would have kicked the windows in.”

I wanted to find out when, exactly, the fight occurred, had Alex’s friends any opportunity to drive the old car, what was the fight about.

Did Will think that after all these years he could talk to Alex about it— and then fear that Alex could and would talk, that he’d go so far as to name names. I began to realize that I didn’t want to know who it was. I wanted to know only who it was not.

“You never got into fights, did you?”

“Had a scuffle here and there, country boy stuff, sure.”

“So you were a tough guy?"

“Hey, I am a tough guy. All this time you didn’t know? I’ve got a reputation. People scatter they see me comin’.”

Will’s conference call lasted longer than he thought, and it left him with unexpected work. I offered lunch on the porch before he got started, hoped to rekindle the conversation from the ride home. Alex and Will didn’t exchange letters, but they talked together on the phone every few weeks, regularly.

“Do you think Alex will ever come back for a visit?”

“Thought he might have come back when we got married.” Will smiled as an apology, again. After all this time, he feared I resented Alex’s absence from our wedding. “He was eager to get into the world, you know, his life is somewhere else now.”

“Marbelle doesn’t often leave her haven, her work.”

“We don’t travel to visit either of them, do we?”

“It’s hard to get away, I admit.”

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“Maybe we’ll plan something.”

“We’re busy, too.”

“Right.” Will took another bite. “Off to finish work,” he said and carried his lunch to his office, shut the door just as the neighbor boy started practicing piano, Debussy, something beautifully sad. marbelle and i sat on a blanket on the beach, white sand and electric blue sky. Bo Fiddler was scavenging the surf, excitedly dipping his nose in and out of the water as if he’d found treasure.

“Did you ever want to have children of your own? Did you ever want to keep one of the babies?”

Marbelle adjusted her sunglasses and said, “That would be breaking a contract.”

“You did. You fell in love!”

“Me? Falling?”

“Do you still love him?”

“I don’t know him anymore. It’s been . . . a lifetime.”

“I guess we all have secrets. Even my parents have secrets, now.”

“Your parents had secrets before now.”

“Were you and my mom friends when you were sisters, when you were growing up?” the week that alex called will, told us he was about to marry the woman he’d lived with for the past ten years, I found out I was pregnant, due in the spring. I had been willing to wait, wait until I felt absolutely ready, but who’s absolutely ready for anything?

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sabrina guo

afterglow There I was, bathing in goat milk and rose petals again. Again, mother washing away the blood from my breasts and inner thighs.

Her lips were thin.

As she washed, she scrubbed harder and harder, until I wanted to loop her blonde locks around my finger and tug. * Once, I begged her to stop when I wasn’t on my medication— Please.

She opened her mouth like a fish. You did this to yourself. Her lips shut.

That night, I pulled out the silkiest locks on the crown of her head. * The next day, at school, my face in its afterglow.

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My emerald eyes more yellow each day, yellow to match my skin.

Wasn’t I beautiful? * For months, I wished to see my brother again.

I thought of his last day here, walking in as my father checked my back molars with a finger. * That day, the humidifier broke.

As I ate, my nose bled across the yellow flesh of leftover pineapple.

We lived on the sixth floor. I watched the street below as I bled, wondering when he would return. * When I was done, I broke a row of clementines in half, realized that like fruit, every tongue had a different texture.

Father had a sandpaper tongue. *

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Stars littered the sky until I slept.

I slipped off my shirt, sat on the edge of my bed. * That night, mother tucked the blanket up to my neck.

Her hands slid to the corners.

The crease on my throat faded when we heard two knocks.

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sm stubbs

asylum release We’re scarred, but not all scars are created equal.

It can be helpful to come at it from a surprising angle, i.e., the wire caught in that branch is the same color as the wire he tied my hands with.

Understand, the heart wants to share its pain with another heart. If not share, inflict. This the blues.

This the stretched-out forever ahead. Dolor on the hi-fi, guitar and harmonies like a soul on fire.

A loss. A wound. A scab you carry inside. Bruises and lacerations are fine if inflicted at significant moments: a lover’s teeth, a father’s belt buckle, a mother’s wine glass opening the smooth landscape of your flesh.

In the empty after: the challenge of the body sacred.

No one wants to ruin their childhood yet these thick chains clatter with every step. First, you must admit the child you were wasn’t sure what wanting meant.

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darren morris

kid stuff You know those old games in which you lock yourself inside an abandoned fridge in the irrigation ditch? Or the one where you hold your mother’s hand when she coughs and won’t stop?

Or how about the one we called Monster in the Kitchen. Or Tornado, when the trailers levitated together? The clownish silver lining around my lips is from a bag of inhaled paint.

Apparently, we are still at play with the stars who look back at us, blinking. We want so much to take their places.

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pablo piñero stillmann

night comes clean like a boy Night comes clean like a boy at his mother’s remarriage smashing a gifted vase behind the gazebo. Dandelion eyes leave with the wind joining all that is true. A warning: anger sticks to everything.

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systematics The wood hummingbird she bought at a silent retreat in Morelos hangs above the dining room table from clear wire that pretends to be invisible—just like I pretend to exist.

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dark harvest: new & selected joseph millar

carnegie mellon press , 2021

book review rob greene

revisiting the poetry school of experience among the many poets I introduce my students to at Saint Augustine’s University are those who write of experience. This introduction is based on the poetic and the human experiences including the elements of addiction, war, loss, recovery, love, work, parenting, caretaking, and fear that all humans encounter either directly or indirectly, regardless of any set demographic that is used to separate us as countrymen and as citizens of the world. My students therefore get introduced to poets that convey such a compelling humanness through the poems of Etheridge Knight, Lucille Clifton, Dorianne Laux, Walt Whitman, Philip Levine, Federico Garcia Lorca, and many others, including Joseph Millar, as all these poets write of experiences on the elemental level of the human condition.

In an interview with his wife Dorianne Laux in my PhD thesis The Poetry School of Experience, Joseph Millar supports the concept of love and work in poetry by calling it: … one of the great mysteries of life, our “love made visible” as Kahlil Gibran says. So there’s something honorable to becoming what

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Marx calls a worker among workers. Not trying to be a boss, not complaining (too much) about the labor, trying the best we can to bring humor into a tough day, helping somebody else maybe, trying to get the job done well. Questions of character. So the workplace becomes a deep field of possibility, something realized earlier by poets like Wordsworth and Whitman, and then more recently by James Wright, Adrienne Rich and Philip Levine. The state of mind of the worker, the attitude of sardonic resignation, sometimes bordering on outrage, the moments of acceptance and even triumph.

In addition, craft-wise, when it comes to imagery, there’s something that happens to the tools and materials of our trades as we handle them day after day. They take on a different hue, they become sort of magnetized. Just naming them can help to imbue our poems with life.

Millar’s poem “Telephone Repairman” from his first book Overtime, now found in his latest collection of new and selected poems Dark Harvest, illustrates these ideas through inclusion of tools and materials as images: All morning in the February light he has been mending cable, splicing the pairs of wires together according to their colors, white-blue to white-blue violet-slate to violet-slate, in the warehouse attic by the river.

When he is finished the messages will flow along the line: thank you for the gift, please come to the baptism, the bill is now past due: voices that flicker and gleam back and forth across the tracer-colored wires.

We live so much of our lives without telling anyone, going out before dawn,

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working all day by ourselves, shaking our heads in silence at the news on the radio.

He thinks of the many signals flying in the air around him the syllables fluttering, saying please love me, from continent to continent over the curve of the earth.

In this poem, Millar employs standard American English in conversational language that evokes a kind of dreadful distraction from our work lives, as in the lines “thank you for the gift, / please come to the baptism, / the bill is now past due.” Millar also evokes the language of the specific trade in lines such as, he has been mending cable, splicing the pairs of wires together according to their colors, white-blue to white-blue violet-slate to violet-slate, in the warehouse attic by the river.

He begins with “mending cable” and then goes on to define the process in the very next phrase as he describes the action as “splicing the pairs of wires together according to their colors.” Millar then moves from work to love with the lines, He thinks of the many signals flying in the air around him the syllables fluttering, saying please love me, from continent to continent over the curve of the earth.

Joseph Millar’s style as demonstrated in this poem has influenced my writing directly, as I explore my many trades within my own poems.

The first poem I memorized during my graduate studies in Dorianne Laux’s class is a poem that has stayed with me in both trying and joyful times as I have aged, as this poem is one of mature love. Below is Joseph

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Millar’s “Dark Harvest,” which is of course the namesake from his collection.

For Annie You can come to me in the evening, with the fingers of former lovers fastened in your hair and their ghost lips opening over your body, They can be philosophers or musicians in long coats and colored shoes and they can be smarter than I am, whispering to each other when they look at us.

You can come walking toward my window after dusk when I can’t see past the lamplight in the glass, when the chipped plates rattle on the counter and the cinders dance on the cross-ties under the wheels of southbound freights.

Bring children if you want, and the long wounds of sisters branching away behind you toward the sea.

Bring your mother’s tense distracted face and the shoulders of plane mechanics slumped in the Naugahyde booths of the airport diner, waiting for you to bring their eggs.

I’ll bring all the bottles of gin I drank by myself and my cracked mouth opened partway as I slept in the back of my blue Impala dreaming of spiders.

I won’t forget the lines running deeply in the cheeks of the Polish landlady who wouldn’t let the cops upstairs, the missing ring finger of the machinist from Spenard whose money I stole after he passed out to go downtown in a cab and look for whores, or the trembling lower jaw of my son, watching me

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back my motorcycle from his mother’s driveway one last time, the ribbons and cone-shaped birthday hats scattered on the lawn, the rain coming down like broken glass.

We’ll go out under the stars and sit together on the ground and there will be enough to eat for everybody.

They can sleep on my couches and rug, and the next day I’ll go to work, stepping easily across the scaffolding, feeding the cable gently into the new pipes on the roof, and dreaming like St. Francis of the still dark rocks that disappear under the morning tide, only to climb back into the light, sea-rimmed, salt-blotched, their patched webs of algae blazing with flies in the sun.

In “Dark Harvest,” Millar begins with the line “You can come to me in the evening,” and he immediately brings the reader into a poem that examines the beauty of mature love, which is a type of love that recognizes that the lovers had mates before they met the one they were supposed to be with, though this poem ultimately dismisses those former lovers in the lines “with the fingers of former lovers / fastened in your hair and their ghost lips / opening over your body.” Love, in this case, means more than the sum of the former lovers combined because those who can last together are the ones who know they can be better than their predecessors who are often the selfish and pretentious ones that Millar labels the “philosophers or musicians in long coats and colored shoes / who are smarter than I am / whispering to each other / when they look at us.” Millar goes on to say Annie (Dorianne Laux) can bring it all and they will always have plenty to eat because he will go to work, and they both work very hard to train and support their students.

Joseph Millar’s “Dark Harvest” directly influenced my poem “Biloxi Back Bay.” In “Biloxi Back Bay,” I look back on my preteen years as a homeless youth as I fished and shrimped to support myself and my brother. As I stated in one of my previous Raleigh Review editors’ notes,

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there is an authenticity in the language of work, whether changing a timing belt or a tire, fishing in the Alaskan Gulf or shrimping in the Biloxi Back Bay, tarring a roof in London, slinging drinks to those who think they need them in any pub throughout the world or being told “enough” when we have had our fill, filling up fuel tanks in the rural North Carolina town of Rolesville and commuting to work together from the capital of Raleigh to the rural northeastern town of Louisburg.

There is an immense amount of material that comes from workers’ daily lives, getting up early or working swing shifts in order to pay the rent and keep the lights on in their homes, that far exceeds the attention of the onlooker who catches a whiff of the rot as they pass over a town on the bypass bridge and then gets back to their comfortable big-city life as they open up their laptop to research the town so that they can put it all into a poem they can get published in Best American Poets because they are on the inside as the gatekeepers of the poetry publishing world.

There is something authentic about the daily life and struggles that come with living and working in a town, with struggling in that town to raise kids or care for an elderly parent or a disabled family member, that far exceeds a surface-level view of that town, and this means poems of experience have no boundaries and that poetry, in terms of experience, does not belong to the superstandard elite.

Poetry is a vehicle for redemption for many of us; it is not a throne.

Millar’s examples of experiences are here to say that the poetry of experience is about the everyday, the work, the enjoyment, and the struggles of life that we all share on this rock we call earth while lapping the sun together on average of eighty times in our lifetimes.

With lines like “say what you mean, and mean what you say,” my grandfather Jack first taught me to be dependable. After Jack, it has been Joseph Millar through his poetry who echoes the lessons my grandfather gave me when he took me in from the street. And now, I share that same eagerness for redemption through resilience shared by poets who write of experience with my own students at Saint Augustine’s.

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from the publisher our mission at Raleigh Review states that we want to promote works of experience that allow us to see through the eyes of our neighbors whether across the street or across the globe. When I went down with a heart attack last December at my home in Raleigh, it was a neighbor who also happens to be a world-renowned cardiologist at UNC Rex who saved my life.

At Raleigh Review, we know it takes a village to raise a magazine.

That said, my friends on Raleigh Review and artists, poets, and writers from across the city, country, and world did check on me and my family during that time period when they found out I’d gone downhill. Luckily a few live in town and were able to offer assistance during that frightening time. The heart attack not only showed me who I can count on, it gave me another go at life, and I’m doing much better these days. I know I can no longer smoke tobacco. I also know I can no longer burn the midnight oil and the candle at both ends. I still wake up at 5 AM every day, though I am asleep at a reasonable hour now for the most part.

The point is, like true friends and caring neighbors, true artists are rare and should be cherished and appreciated. So, I thank God along with the poets, writers, artists, friends, family, and members of our community of neighbors around the world who do care enough to support this small, though mighty magazine.

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Rob Greene, publisher

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contributors allison blevins is the author of four chapbooks and the book Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021). Her books Cataloging Pain (YesYes Books, 2022) and Handbook for the Newly Disabled (BlazeVox) are forthcoming.

She is the director of Small Harbor Publishing and the executive editor at the museum of americana. For more information visit http://www. allisonblevins.com. bruce bond is the author of twenty-nine books including, most recently, The Calling (Parlor, 2021), Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021) and Behemoth (New Criterion Award, Criterion Books, 2021). Presently he is a Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas. helena chung is a Korean American poet currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Quarterly West, The Journal, and elsewhere. rita ciresi is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Pink Slip, Blue Italian, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You; the story collections Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Mother Rocket; and two award-winning collections of flash fiction, Female Education and Second Wife. jose hernandez diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is an associate editor at Frontier Poetry and teaches online from southern California. barbara westwood diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, including SmokeLong Quarterly, Superstition Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Atticus Review, The

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MacGuffin, The Shore, and Flash Boulevard.

She also has a poem in The TELEPHONE Project. sara eddy is the author of two chapbooks: Tell the Bees (A3 Press) and Full Mouth (Finishing Line). She has published widely in journals: her poems have appeared recently in Threepenny Review, South85, and LEON. She is assistant director of the writing center at Smith College, and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. sandy fontana teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Shawnee Community College. She received her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her poetry has been published in Atlanta Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nimrod, Tin House Online, and elsewhere. grace (ge) gilbert is a poet and lyric essayist.

Their chapbook NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK is forthcoming with Antenna Books in 2022. Their essay collection the closeted diaries is forthcoming with Porkbelly Press in 2022.

Their work has been featured in The Adroit Journal, Ninth Letter, The Offing, ANMLY, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. They have received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and City of Asylum. sabrina guo is the youngest global winner of the 2021 Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis Challenge and spoke out against climate injustice in COP26. She received the Civic Expression Award, eight national medals from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. savannah horton is the Writer in Residence at St. Albans School. She has written for The Cincinnati Review, where her story was selected as a Distinguished Story of 2019 by Best American Short Stories 2020. She has a story forthcoming in Subtropics. She is a graduate of the MFA@FLA.

vandana khanna’s third collection is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Her previous books have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize and The Miller Williams Prize. Her work has appeared in Poem-a-Day, The New Republic, and New England Review. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review. emily kingery’s work appears widely in journals, and has been selected for several honors and awards in poetry and prose. She teaches English at a small university in Iowa and serves on the board of directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit supporting writers in the Quad Cities community (mwcqc.org). ellen kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cave Wall, Consequence, The Minnesota Review, North American Review, and Pleiades. She currently teaches writing at Hunter College. christine kouwenhoven lives and writes in Maryland. She is a poet and essayist, and has had pieces appear in a variety of print and online publications including The New York Times, Grown & Flown, and others. She has an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. abby minor lives in the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania, where she teaches poetry in her region’s low-income nursing homes and works on poems, essays, quilts, and projects exploring reproductive politics. Her first book is As I Said: A Dissent (Ricochet Editions, 2022). darren morris’s poems appear in the American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, and Poetry Ireland Review. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and resides in Richmond, Virginia. eilín de paor lives in Dublin, Ireland. Her poems have appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears, The

Stony Thursday Book, The Bangor Literary Journal, Abridged and Dedalus Press’ Local Wonders. Her debut pamphlet, ‘In the Jitterfritz of Neon,’ a collaboration with Damien B. Donnelly, is upcoming from Hedgehog Poetry.

Twitter: @edepaor pablo piñero stillmann’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sycamore Review, Mississippi Review, Blackbird, and Crazyhorse.

He is the author of a novel, Temblador (Tierra Adentro, 2014), and a short story collection, Our Brains and the Brains of Miniature Sharks (Moon City Press, 2020). sm stubbs co-owned a bar in Brooklyn until recently. Recipient of a scholarship to Bread Loaf, nominated for the Pushcart and Best New Poets.

Winner of the 2019 Rose Warner Poetry Prize from The Freshwater Review. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Carolina Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, December, The Rumpus and more. wendy elizabeth wallace is a queer disabled writer. She grew up in Buffalo, NY, and has landed in Connecticut by way of Pennsylvania, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Indiana. She is the co-founding editor of Peatsmoke: A Literary Journal, and has appeared in The Rumpus, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. wendywallacewriter. com, Twitter @WendyEWallace1. keith s. wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow. He’s a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry.

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contributors cont. maria zoccola is a queer Southern writer with deep roots in the Mississippi Delta. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work at mariazoccola.com.

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coming fall 2022

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