Issue 43: Opening the Door

OPENING THE DOOR / 43

Summer 2017 $15

ru’mi-nate: TO C HE W THE C U D ; T O MU S E; T O MED I TAT E; TO THI NK A G A I N ; T O PO N D ER

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P LEA S E J O I N U S .

Cover image: Rhonda Cyr. Fair Friends. Photograph.

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contents

NO T ES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artists’ 32, 56 Contributors’ 85 Last 87 NONF I C T I O N

Like This, We Begin: An Essay in Two Photographs 16 Sonja Livingston The Seven Stages of Not Eating, Anne Boyle 26 Oh, Hi, M. Sophia Newman 46 Allah Loves Beauty, Isaac S. Villegas 68 In the Absence of a Cure, Won McIntosh 76 VI SU A L A RT

Fair Friends, Rhonda Cyr Cover The art of Nicholas Sironka 33 The art of Daniel Kytonen 57

PO ET RY

Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye Just Before, Lauren Camp Only Hope Without Rescue, Lauren Camp Mantra, Erin Slaughter On the Death of a Boy in Brooklyn, Michael Brown, Jr. 42 Portraiture Lesson, Maya Pindyck 43 Portraiture Lesson 2, Maya Pindyck 44 April & Elegy, Jesse Curran 45 Biopsy, Jonathan McGregor 53 At Kafka's Grave, I Repent, Ariel Francisco 54 Ojai Flying, Ephraim Scott Sommers 65 Little Mermaid, Virginia Konchan 66 Monster Psalm #14, Melissa Atkinson Mercer 67 Depth of Field, Sandra Marchetti 73 Part or Particle of God, Mary Buchinger 74 NPR's Science Friday at the Intersection of Grant and 24th, Alex Mouw 9 22 24 25 41

2017 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize

SP ONSOR E D B Y D R. RA N D A L L VA N D ERMEY

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

SONJ A L I VI NG STON

A N N E BO YL E

Like This We Begin: An Essay in Two Photographs

The Seven Stages of Not Eating

HON O RAB L E MEN T I O N M . S O PH I A N EW MA N

Oh, Hi

F I NA L I STS CAT H Y BERES KE R R I D I EF F EN W I ERT H BL A I R D O N A H U E N A S EEM J A MN I A BRO O K E J A RED R I CH A RD K EN N EY I SAA C S . V I L L EG A S

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2017 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize

F I NA L J U DG E J OS H MA CI V O R- A N D ERS EN W RI T ES :

In Sonja Livingston's essay "Like This We Begin," she says: “Just photographs Just a moment or two captured and held on film. But the power of such moments. The way they stand not only for themselves, but can be read like tea leaves of things to come.�

Linvingston's essay is not only powerfully written, the prose is tight and lithe, ready to pounce, but also heart wrenching in its simple and unsentimental descriptions of loss: the personal, the tactile, the relational. And in these deftly chosen words, I find a potent meditation on memory and legacy. When we, as readers, realize the loss of those pictures, how rare and important they were to the narrator, we share in her grief even while rejoicing in the details of her recollections, now residing exclusively in the fire of her synapses.

is the author of the memoir On Heights & Hunger and the editor of Rooted: An Anthology of Arboreal Nonfiction, both from Outpost19. His essays, reviews, and reportage have won numerous awards and can be found in journals and magazines such as Gulf Coast, Paris Review Daily, Fourth Genre, Arts and Letters, and many others.

J OSH M A C I VOR - A ND E R S EN

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editor’s note

brother winter sent his stuff falling with so much ferocity and volume that the sky was a mostly white sky with only tiny specks of gray appearing every so often.

Which is to say it was a lot of snow.

ONE DAY I N M AY,

A middle-aged man wearing black rode by slowly on his bike, his bike! His face was lowered, his back hunched under a ridge of white.

Our three-legged dog hopped by the window and began eating something on the ground, digging through the snow with his nose while balancing on his three legs.

A few minutes later, another man walked by with sunglasses on and something tucked under his arm—a golf club, a metal detector, a cane?

And the snow kept falling.

And the neighbor’s cat ran from the barn to the garage for some purpose unknown to me, gathering a nice pile of snow on the ridge of her spine in just those few seconds.

But perhaps most miraculous of all that morning were all the trees that had leafed out, opening the door to spring even in the danger of heavy snow. One of the branches from the chokecherry had already broken under the weight, so I went outside with a broom to whisper good luck dear brave ones to the mountain ash and the hawthorn and the crabapple and the rest of the chokecherry branches and to shake their low branches free of snow and watch them bounce back and up into the sky.

And all throughout that day, I went out to shake the branches, to notice what I could notice.

With gratitude for open doors into the unknown— may we all see our resiliency,

P.S. And with gratitude to Naomi Shihab Nye for sharing her lovely poem with us.

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N AOMI SH I H A B NY E

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright Š 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

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readers’ notes ON OPEN I N G T H E D O O R

Brown hair fell on my shoulders and scattered in brown C and S shapes at my feet. I stared at myself in the mirror under lights which shone brighter and somehow harder than usual. My stylist chopped away with purple scissors. This haircut was the (closet) door I opened up, a crack at a time.

This was my coming-out haircut—I was coming out to myself.

I know the stereotype of lesbians having short hair. It was why I had reservations about cutting my hair pixie-short in those long months that marked the passage between my little (big) a-ha moment and finally gripping my gay truth around its waist and pulling it eye to eye with me.

My neck itched. The clippers grazed my scalp, shearing a path that uncovered my ears and cut away the hair that used to fall into my eyes. I like to think this cuttingaway was symbolic of releasing myself from the years of not knowing my authentic self, but then I always had. I just didn’t know that what I felt meant what it meant and repressed any inclination to find out.

So this haircut was a kindness to myself: a sign that said “I see you and I love you.”

That haircut was a small pushingopen of the door, and would precede the bigger pushes still waiting: coming out to my spouse almost two years later, being published in a queer literary journal.

I remember smiling in the mirror at me and my short hair. I looked her in her green eyes, held her hand and pulled her through the closet door.

NICOLE DONADIO, NEWMARKET, ON

Sunrise dazzles my morning as I pull into the high school parking lot. My footsteps echo in the stairwell as I climb to the second floor. I greet the seniors lounging outside the library, wave to the librarian, and turn my key in the lock at the end of the hall.

It’s still half an hour till school starts. I could close my door and grade a couple of essays or work on that vocabulary quiz for tomorrow.

But if I leave the door open, Kevin will wander in with his egg biscuit and cup of coffee. “Good morning,” I'll say. And he'll answer with a sigh, “Good morning, Mrs. Poff.”

If I wait quietly, he will tell me of the latest struggles with his mom, who insists he come to school early to miss the heavy traffic.

“She just loves you,” I'll say. Another sigh. “I know,” as he munches on his biscuit.

SHERRY POFF, OOLTEWAH, TN

As I do daily, I walk from my car toward the handicapped-accessible ramp instead of taking the YMCA stairs. Today, in particular, I feel the weight of my seventy years, especially in my sacroiliac. I’m not looking forward to walking the treadmill. I hope against hope that heat will loosen me up and enable me to stand upright.

An old woman—meaning, by definition, at least ten years older than I am—stands immobile half way up the ramp. She’s tiny, wears a grey dress and white gloves, and holds onto the railing with her left hand while reaching toward the sky with her

10

right. She’s smiling at . . . I can’t begin to guess what. In thirty-seven years at this YMCA, I’d never seen her.

I walk halfway up the ramp. When I reach her, I stop alongside and say, “It’s a bird.

It’s a plane. No, it’s Superman. Or what is it you’re looking at up there?”

She brings her right hand down to her side, looks at me, smiles and with a twinkle says, “Do you know the word ‘prana’?”

“I remember it,” I say.

“Prana means energy, life force. They say it’s the door to everything. I look up in the sky, at the sun, at the clouds, at the trees starting to bud, and at the blue—all the blue everywhere—and I feel prana. I feel a door opening,” she says.

“I love blue,” I say, “but I’m okay with gray too.”

“You’ve been coming here a really long time, haven’t you?” she asks.

“Almost forever,” I say.

“You and I will see each other again very soon,” she says. Then she reaches up again with her right hand while still holding onto the railing with her left, and resumes surveying the sky.

JIM ROSS, SILVER SPRING, MD

I’d called the deacon of our church for the name of a senior citizen willing to spend an hour a week with me to fulfill a requirement for my counseling degree.

“I’ll buy her lunch,” I said, “and help her run errands.” The assignment was the brainchild of my gerontology professor.

The deacon gave me Jenny’s name, saying “She could use some attention.”

I wanted to say, “I have a mother of my own dying of cancer who needs my attention too.”

11

Jenny opened the door to her modest home and said: “You’re the answer to my prayers.”

“It’s just until the end of the semester,” I replied, then handed her a card with my contact information. She showed me where she kept her spare house key under a flowerpot in the garage.

The ground rules were fuzzy; I wasn’t yet a counselor, and she wasn’t a client. At the grocery store, I watched as she dug out change for Depend® panties and a chocolate bar, resisting the urge to pay. But when her toilet clogged and she needed a plumber, I wrote a check to cover the expense.

“I call you my rich friend,” she said, patting the hood of my Mercedes.

Jenny introduced me to Anne, a ninetyyear-old artist with a bright, airy studio who served us tea in colorful cups that didn’t need to match. I bought a painting of a lighthouse on Barnegat Bay. At lunch the following week, Jenny choked on a shrimp. “Does anyone know the Heimlich?” I cried, afraid to hold her in my arms.

When the semester ended, I went on vacation. In the fall, I stopped by to see her, but she’d forgotten me. She didn’t even recognize my car.

CYNTHIA ALLEN, DEMAREST, NJ

As a past victim of an abusive lover, I truly believed that I was too broken to ever open up to anyone again. I was thirteen years old and hopelessly in love with a man twelve years my senior; I did not know he was a severe alcoholic at the time, and when I did learn, it had been too late. Four years of mind games ensued; my outlet was poetry, and it was the only safe place for me to

readers’ notes

exist. When he was arrested, I was finally given a chance to find myself—a door was miraculously open for me—and without that break, I don’t think I would’ve had the strength to keep on living.

Eight years after breaking free, I met a man who not only opened doors (pun intended!) but taught me how to love the contents within myself. In the beginning of our relationship, I still felt that I was undeserving of kindness. I realized over time that the more I focused on what I was doing wrong, the more the cycle would continue.

One evening, as we sat on our patchy white and black sofa sharing a bottle of wine, he remarked on the severity of my silence. It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said it that made me pause to consider. I had heard the same remark over the years, but the difference was that it had never bothered them. That’s when I understood.

By a genuine act of curiosity, he managed to capture and defeat the essence of my trauma by wanting to listen to me.

And so I spoke, I shared, and my poetry began to express not sorrow, but harmonious love for the first time in my life.

HELEN KIRKBY, WEST COVINA, CA

I stood and beheld the sea of objects that you had left behind.

The basement was a sprawling landscape of trash and trinkets, each item coated with the intangible grime of a profound mess.

I was bitter, but can you blame me? I opened the door and let you into this house, only to have you run back out. You had

left without a goodbye, leaving me with an excess of junk and a want of funds.

Reluctantly, I got to work sorting through the artifacts of you.

Hastily, I pawed through your piles, tossing broken lanyards and crusted bottles of nail polish towards the trash. The angry pressure mounted in my head . . . and then I saw them. The birthday cards I made you.

Before I could help myself, I thought of your laugh and smile, still happy memories, despite it all.

I kept digging and found more cards, this time from your parents. I imagined your father putting his head in his hands after he typed the email to me that morning, saying he didn’t know where you were either. You had stopped talking to him too.

My hands kept sifting, slower now, finding unused planners, empty prescription bottles, and urgent bank notices until the threat of hot tears pricked my eyes.

There, suffocating under it all, I finally understood.

And I hurt for you. I knew you, after all.

We were friends.

Then, as if a benevolent spirit had whispered it to me, I knew that I couldn’t let your memory be this mess. I would clean it all till the only thing left of you in this house was mercy.

For your heart and mine, I worked till the sun had set and the floor was bare.

Then I closed the basement door, leaving it all behind us.

NAME WITHHELD, FORT COLLINS, CO

12

For twenty-five years, I thought I walked through doors because of who I am, because of what I achieve . . .

Yeah, like the encyclopedias my parents bought me, like the prep school they sent me to, like the food our maid lovingly prepared.

Then I saw Jim Crow in the mirror, and I did not like him. I could have named onehundred people I thought more qualified for that role, but he stared me in the face, the spitting image of myself.

I thought I was free of racism because my Quaker ancestors were driven from England by 1640, because my grandfather would not join the Alabama Klan and stood down his brother-in-law, its Grand Dragon.

I saw Jim Crow when, already twentyfive, I first encountered black folks who were educated more than I was—over one hundred of them interviewed with just three of us white people for the same fifty jobs in Ghana, all one hundred of the black people with doctorates, mostly in animal science or agronomy, while I had only a master's in English and an undergraduate minor in Greek.

Yet the door opened for me because the British programmed Ghanaians to value Greek more than the farming skills Ghana needed.

When I saw Jim Crow in the mirror, I calculated how much I owed if held accountable for all the spoils of slavery I enjoyed.

When I saw Jim Crow, at last I realized that I’m part of the problem, not of the solution, that the drama is not about me but about justice and fairness and kindness.

I choose to play out the Jim Crow role I inherited by walking through the door in solidarity with the marvelous human race.

LOUIE CREW CLAY, EAST ORANGE, NJ

13

When I went to college, I was divorced with two small boys, working, and going to school full time. It was hard, lonely times, but my grades were good, and my boys were healthy.

One summer, a neighbor invited us to church. It was the first time anyone had ever invited us anywhere! However, because money was so tight, I bought the boys shoes once a year—right before school. By summer they had outgrown their shoes and were going barefoot. I couldn’t tell her they didn’t have any shoes to wear.

We didn’t go.

My money went for rent, utilities, babysitting, and food for the boys. I got used to skipping meals. During my senior year, I would see a young man from the student council when I got out of class and walked past the cafeteria around lunchtime. He frequently called my name when I walked by. He told me the lunch ladies had made a mistake and had given him two cheeseburgers instead of one.

He invited me to sit with him and eat the second cheeseburger. I was surprised at how incompetent the lunch ladies were and how often they messed up his lunch order, but I enjoyed talking with him and he made me laugh. It was nice to laugh.

JUDITH A. BARRETT, NEWBERRY, FL

Pausing in the doorway, I take inordinate pleasure at the sight of my daughters entwined in their sleep. Then grabbing my bags, I head out to buy breakfast.

The streets are quiet. Numerous entryways still house the slumbering bodies of homeless persons, cocooned in untidy arrays of blankets and undecipherable possessions. No longer shocked, I have grown accustomed to their presence.

Today, however, three sleeping masses do

readers’ notes

catch my attention. Storefront cocoons are generally rumpled bundles with dingy topknots and weathered skin. Yet these topknots are shiny tendrils framing smoothskinned faces. Stepping closer, I hear their thick breathing. Stoned, besotted, or simply exhausted, they sleep on, unaware. Only the pit bull curled at their feet raises its massive head to note my passing.

Minutes later, I return. Again the dog eyes me as I stoop to tuck juice and fresh muffins—three for the youth and one for their watchdog—between them. I see that the person on my right is female, nestled under the protective arm of the young man alongside her. To my left, a boy has wriggled free from his blankets. At the sight of his skinny, tattooed arms wrapped tenderly around yet another, tiny, dog, my breath and limbs are transfixed. Gone is any urge I’d felt to hurry onward. I do not know their story. I know only that today these travelers asleep in this doorway are my children.

The youth with the pup grunts, opens a weary eye, and startles to see me inches from his face. “Breakfast,” I whisper.

“Travel safely,” I add with concern for my new son.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he whispers back, then returns to sleep as I move on towards home and my sleeping daughters—a tangle of freshly washed hair, sweetly flushed cheeks, and soft, clean sheets.

In a township in western Kentucky called Possumtrot, there lived a family, a father, a mother, and a son. It was winter—cold, an unusually cold and bitter. The ice crystals swirled about like little tornadoes about the son’s feet as he made his way to the friendly, warm interior of their old Kentucky home.

He just came from fighting a fire with the local fire department, and all he wanted to do was to grab something to eat and some hot coffee to drink. He ate some leftovers and warmed some coffee in the microwave.

After he ate and drank, he went to bed.

He debated if he should take a shower, but weariness won out, and he plopped face down on his bed and . . . what was that noise?

He looked at the clock: 2:27 am. He groaned. The yelping he was hearing was coming from outside. He feared it would wake his parents, so he ventured out.

The wind had died down some, but the temperature was below freezing.

Outside was a tree, an oak tree, and frozen up against the trunk of the tree was a small dog, a Maltese. His leg was frozen to the tree as he was peeing against it. The young man took pity on the little creature and gingerly deiced the dog.

And that, dear reader, is how Gizmo the Maltese came to live with my parents and me.

FILIP BRUNNER, RINGGOLD, GA

CATHERINE BOEBEL GROTENHUIS, ST. PAUL, MN

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When I walk through the door into the dining room, my mother’s face brightens.

“How do you feel?” I ask, sitting beside her in an empty chair.

“Why is everyone asking how I feel?”

“You’ve been sick.”

My mother looks away. “I forgot,” she whispers.

“I brought cupcakes. Red velvet with cream cheese icing.”

Her eyes widen. The glint returns.

“Why, how wonderful.”

The hour I’ve allotted for this visit passes in minutes.

“I need to leave.” Dinner beckons. My dog’s walk tugs at me. But her face plunges. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I promise.

I stand, unfold her walker leaning against the wall and help her stand.

“Ready?”

With arms as skinny and as unsteady as a newborn calf, my mother lifts herself firmly gripping her walker. She grins as she passes wind.

“Need a little extra steam there, Mom?” Her laughter is full of mischief.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” she says.

She shuffles into the lobby, passes through the automatic door that sometimes frightens her. I flag her favorite staff to help her return once I leave.

“Wait for my drive by.”

My car is warmed by the afternoon sun. I roll down the window and drive by the facility’s door. Sunlight breaks across my mother’s face. One hand lifts, waves, and she smiles, a reminder of healthier days when she’d walk me to the door of my childhood home and wish me well on my way. Back to my family, my husband, my girl, and this bright moment today sings both past and present. And I return her wave, her smile, and I go on with my life.

ANNE ANTHONY, CHAPEL HILL, NC

15

An ashen-faced young woman bursts into the hospital hallway. From her sleepless eyes, matted hair, and wrinkled shirt, I see she’s spent the night. The nurse manager says in an undertone, “Her husband’s dying.

He goes to hospice tomorrow.”

I approach the woman. “I’m the unit’s chaplain,” I say.

“I don’t believe in God,” she says, quickly.

I try to catch her eye, but she turns her head. “I’m here to support you,” I say.

Rain splashes the windows. “That’s compassionate,” she says quietly and hurries away.

I watch her go.

The nurse manager clacks on her computer. I thumb through a patient’s chart—sixty years old, recent cancer diagnosis, poor prognosis—and close it.

What a stark divide separates the healthy from the ill. Is there a God who draws the line?

A few hours later I sit with a dying patient, an old woman from Mexico who speaks only Spanish. Her daughter is there; her sister huddles in the corner.

The daughter and I hold hands across the bed as her mother’s bony chest rises and falls. I hum the only Spanish song I know, Cielita Linda.

Soon we are all singing softly, our voices mixing with the raindrops sluicing down the window, the ancient sister swaying in her chair. As we, the two younger women, chant with growing vigor, I feel my heart open. Our chorus rises to what seems to be the heavens. Our song becomes a prayer— to forces unknown.

SUSAN MOLDAW, SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Li ke Thi s We Be gi n : An E ssay in Two P hotographs

L i ke T h i s We B e g i n : A n E s s ay i n Tw o P h o t og r a p h s

SONJA LIVINGSTON

16

I.

you give this child?

The thicket of hair is what you notice first—reddish tufts crowning the wide face. How different this child is from the dark-haired infant brought to the church the year before.

Yet it’s the very same mother standing beside the priest, looking both proud and shy as she presents her latest offering. In an era of lined eyes and bouffant hair, her lack of adornment makes her look younger than her twenty-eight years; but with her blue eyes and auburn hair, she’s more than pretty, this mother, and understands the pull of beauty the same way she knows the world to be a hard place and has come to count on both facts.

A sunny day in Rochester, New York. Unusually mild for October. Sunday at Corpus Christi Church. Maples have started to flame all over the city as the godparents stand to one side, awkward or prayerful, or perhaps both. Either way, the necessary ingredients are there: Water. Oil. Child. A typical baptism. Except there’s no handsome man at the mother’s elbow, no one to slip a twenty into the good father’s hand after Mass.

Metaphorical fathers abound—the kindly priest, the line of gospel writers perched along the high altar, even God in heaven—but these are symbols and statues and theological constructs, none of which will show in the snapshot.

WHAT NA M E DO

been arranged ahead of time, but when my mother tells the story—after I ask who they are, wondering why cards do not come on my birthday and why I don’t know them like my youngest sister knows hers—my mother uses her free hand to bat the question away, as if saying what can something from so long ago matter?

But I persist, and out of kindness or a desire to be rid of me she half-remembers the godmother’s name. “Suzanne, I think.”

My mother isn’t sure of much, except that my godmother left the convent soon after the baptism. As to the godfather: “I don’t remember him at all.”

My mother’s tone is breezy, as if the man had helped with an especially cumbersome bag of groceries instead of swearing before all that is holy to help raise her child in the traditions of the church.

This failing, I take on, absorbing the fact that my mother did not know them, that they did not know me, that I am not suitable enough for godparents. Not so much a surprise as confirmation. We’ve always been the poorest at church, recipients of food baskets and donated Christmas gifts and a general sense of pity, but in my baptism story, I discover that even the beginning of my beginnings was a desperate and charitable act. And if not knowing them isn’t enough, my mother makes it sound like she’d rustled them up during the service. I imagine the priest saying—Who will step forward for this child?—while my mother smiles wide and parishioners lower their eyes and take refuge in the hardwood floor, the entire church becoming a cold stone until the most tender hearts present are twisted into submission and the two step forward. A young nun. An unknown man.

In my version of things, they’re thrown together at my baptism, and this is why the nun leaves—the two recognizing something of themselves in the goodness of the other as they MY GOD PA R E NTS M UST HAVE

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stand there. But when I test my theory, my mother says this wasn’t the case. Her memory is clear where this is concerned. Nothing is certain, it seems, but the forsaking vows and the impossibility of romance.

Is Stephanie there? Just two years old, my sister already looks after me with a precision beyond her years. Stephanie, whose black curls bedevil my mother, whose father is Sicilian while mine is French-Canadian and the three older children have Livingston who’s Scottish and Irish and who knows what else. We are the nations of Europe, Steph and I will later joke, though we have to amend this when the youngest of us comes from a Native American man. Is she there to see me blessed, my closest sister? Do the other kids flip through missals, fold offertory envelopes into accordions, and kick their feet against the kneeler? What is known by the priest and the godparents—how much of anything does my mother ever really reveal? She’d left him years before but still bears her husband’s last name and uses it on those of us for whom it’s untrue. “But only because I have no choice,” she says, “Only because there’s nothing to do but give your children your husband’s last name.”

What name do you give this child?

The names she chooses are not overly religious, her lifelong swing between novelty and tradition reveals itself by greater degree with each child. Her voice may quaver as she speaks, but it’s more likely that she’s afloat in a stew of independence and obliviousness and says my name steady and proud so that the priest may have to remind himself to be patient and the godparents may think of not-long-ago days when children had two parents and babies were given simple solid names: Patricia, Catherine, or Anne. But in the fall of 1968 the world is spinning so fast even the sacraments have started to blur, and what on God’s good earth makes sense anymore?

The church itself is in flux. Not only liturgically—the calendar chugging through Ordinary Time toward the feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’ and into Advent— but, in a larger sense, too, as the decisions of the Second Vatican Council continue to reverberate and take root in local churches. Even outside the stained glass windows, things are coming undone.

Martin Luther King is murdered in Memphis in spring, followed by rioting in Baltimore and a hundred other cities. Robert Kennedy is gunned down in Los Angeles a few months later. Boys continue to return from Vietnam in boxes. Campus protests rage. At the Democratic Convention in August, Chicago police subdue anti-war demonstrators with clubs and tear gas. In September, one hundred fifty women protest the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. Apollo 7 has just been launched into space. The neighborhoods surrounding the church are in a similar state of unrest. Black and Puerto Rican families replace Italians and Poles who flee to the suburbs and the Irish and Germans who’d left a generation before. Only a few years earlier, violence erupted in streets not far from the church. One of the earliest race riots, Rochester’s clashes, usher in a new season of tension that continues for summers to come.

Even the music intensifies. Sound is belted out, lyrics become raw. Between stories of war and turbulence come the sounds of Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. Dance to the O CTOBER , 19 6 8.

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Music, sing Sly and the Family Stone. Hey Jude, sing the Beatles, and Lady Madonna—and the lyrics must seem so familiar to my mother, she might think Paul McCartney has seen into her kitchen, writing her into a song as the sumac flares and she carries the latest of her children to Corpus Christi Church, past the statue of the Blessed Mother cloaked in blue, candles lit at her feet. Lady Madonna, the Beatles sing from across the ocean.

Love Child, Diana Ross sings from over in Detroit. Appropriate anthems. The first for my mother, the second for me.

What name do you give this child?

The church on East Main Street may have not so readily baptized me in other circumstances and in other times. But out of some combination of necessity and social justice, the church has begun to open its hands to the changing needs of the neighborhood.

And so, with her collection of mismatched children, my mother stands alone and unashamed beside the priest and a set of makeshift godparents. Baptism, the Church says, replaces original sin with the grace of God. If my mother worries about sin, she doesn’t show it. For her, the church itself is a blessing. A place of mystery and peace and light.

In baptism, she shares the best thing she has to give. My mother will never be like other mothers, but on a clear day in 1968, she wraps me in white and speaks my name and somehow the church receives me.

Like this, we begin.

II.

and newly married when the photograph emerged. I’d seen a few pictures of myself as a little girl, taken in schools or on front porches by neighborhood friends. My brothers and sisters had eight-by-tens of their infancies, their cheeks tinted pink by the studio, and these I envied for the way their faces were brushed ivory and made to look like porcelain dolls. Money had always been tight—this was the most consistent fact of my mother’s life—but our poverty was cemented by the time I entered the scene, or by then, the novelty of airbrushed cheeks had worn off. Either way, there was no eight-byten photograph for her fifth child, and I’d never seen myself as a baby.

That anything survived those years is a miracle. But somehow, in my teens, I discovered a cache of undeveloped film in a box. If film was a luxury, its development required an even greater collision of time and money. I held onto the rolls, and when I started to earn good money—after exhausting my desire for shoes and hair supplies—I moved on to the film, developing what my mother had somehow managed to hold onto as she moved from place to place.

Every few weeks, I’d deliver the film and return to grainy images of birthday cakes and strangers lounging on 1970s sofas and long-gone family pets. That the photographs were lackluster did not derail me. Developing them was about possibility. What might be on the next roll? I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but found it on the last roll. Caught between pictures of murky children and backyard picnics were a series of images of the interior of a church, dark wood pews, an infant in white. Most were out-of-focus, but one was clear.

I WAS A YOU NG WOM A N

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I was astonished at the hair—why had my mother never mentioned how much and how red? I locked onto the photo, showing it around and studying the sight of my own face. So it was true: I had once been a baby and held in my mother’s arms.

I kept my baptism photograph with another I’d fallen for in those days. My mother as a young woman. A girl really, so thin her hipbones are sharp under the fitted skirt. A monochrome picture, yet she pulses as she stands with a rifle in her hands, taking aim at whatever target flies up and into the air. Her face is turned from the camera, focused on the shot, but it’s the best image I’d ever seen of her, truer than the wedding photo at St. Mary’s or the picture of her holding her first baby, all cream skin and halo of dark waves.

My mother always said that as a girl she’d wanted to be Annie Oakley, and in this photograph, she outshines Annie as she holds her gun and flares in the face of the world.

Later, she’ll say she wants to be a hobo, to pack a small bag and ride the rails. The word hobo is too close to homelessness and our precarious existence for my comfort—but what I know, what I’ve always understood, is that while her adventures may have been limited to the workings of her body, more than anything, my mother longs for movement. together, setting them on a shelf in a living room closet. We’re moving soon, my husband and I, but throughout the packing, I take them out and look again at the infant in the church and the girl with a gun who will become my mother. I stare into them too much, those snapshots, but it’s good, I suppose, because in the end both are lost and all that remains is what burns into my synapses while studying the barrel of my mother’s gun and the mystery of my own face.

I wonder sometimes, when I cannot sleep, where those photographs ended up, and what stage of decay they’re in, in some landfill in western New York State. I suppose they will have returned fully to earth by now. What does it take? Three or four weeks until the earth begins to chew the plastic backing? A few months to dissolve the image of mother and child? A year to swallow entirely the large ark of church?

For years I rose at night searching boxes and junk drawers and pages of old books.

What if, I’d think, gripped by sudden mania, I tucked them someplace safe after all? But the photographs are gone. They were part of a stack of papers tossed by my husband during our move. He was a mild man, but the move was haphazard, and he’d swept the entire shelf into the trash or accidentally disposed of the wrong box. Either way, my leaving of the packing of the closet to him has turned out to be a larger regret than the eventual loss of the marriage. For the first few years after our divorce, I’d send anything I found of his (high school year book, newspaper articles, records of immunization), hoping that a similar package might one day arrive for me.

It’s not like me to cling to such things. I mastered early the letting go that comes from having a mother who harbored fantasies of hopping westbound trains. It’s served me well, this detachment. I do not grieve long over lost earrings, for instance, or stained blouses or cash that falls from unzipped pockets of my purse. How to explain then, the ache over this loss?

I KEEP T HE P HOT OS

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here and gone so fast, I have begun to wonder if I only imagined them. But no, my sister still begrudges me the loss of our mother’s picture and after it disappeared, refused to send anything but copies when I asked for others. I do not blame her. Unlike the sight of the infant swaddled in white, of interest only to myself, the sight of my mother with a gun at the height of her beauty was a perfect image, striking in its own right.

Just photographs. Just a moment or two captured and held on film. But the power of such moments. The way they stand not only for themselves, but can be read like tea leaves of things to come.

It’s clear to me now that the world can be divided into two distinct spheres: the time before the baptism photograph, and the time after it was developed and lost. The phases are separated by the thin isthmus of its existence in the world, the brief time apart from its years as silvery shadows coiled onto a strip of translucent plastic and its subsequent years as memory. Who I was before the photograph is not who I was once it was developed. And once it was lost, I became someone else again.

Before the photograph: a girl who wondered if it was true she’d ever been blessed.

After the photograph: a woman who’d looked into the flower of her own face, who’d seen her mother wild with possibility, who felt for the first time what it meant to have something worthwhile and to lose it.

Perhaps it’s fitting that they were lost together. They were bound together from the beginning—the baby in the church, the young woman taking aim at the sky—so that even now, just thinking of them means placing a hand over my mouth to keep stray bits of grief from slipping out.

Beyond proof of my early existence, the baptism photograph meant the day had been special. My mother had long ago traded in her gun and slim skirt for babies and men.

She lacked the means and the motivation to have the pictures developed and, after a few months, had forgotten they were ever taken.

But none of that can change the fact that in the spring of 1968, while the world was coming undone a different thousand ways, my mother wrapped her newest child in white and brought her to the church where someone lifted a camera and pointed it our direction, flooding the church for a second with light.

B OTH P HOT O G R A P HS WE R E

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LAUREN C A M P

Just Before It would have to be in the only dark place —where the joist of the roof rests on the header— that I keep trying to focus the binoculars, the eyepiece huddling in to the corner. My father is always pushing his household objects on me: his hundred spare pencils, his thesis on the threads of the Middle East, so when I asked for these— and I’m sure he used them from his condo to look for ladies undressing once my mother had died—he handed them over, wanting them back again, but willing, as always, to deny himself pleasure. I focus the lens, try to discern the nest in the eaves. For weeks, one goldfinch has flown in, hour by hour, arcing the sky with a twig or a string in his mouth, every day carrying each part of his house, building a suitable swaddle for the high notes of his new family, and I’ve sat here on this little chair, mesmerized each time he lands, even though every detail is dim. I know

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his home may not hold through wind and owl. There’s no sense in seeing. In two weeks, I’ll find the nest on the ground, twigs woven but weak to a tattered spine. I’ll think of the threshold, the starting over in another blurred corner. My love, on the eve of our anniversary, please remind me to see only so far, and not further.

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LAUREN C A M P

Only Hope Without Rescue I am trying to keep track of everything I must do: post office, Tax & Rev, a house call to a friend with two new hips, the cornbread, the milk, but the sky is slightly purple above the clouds, and I don’t know how anyone can think of the throat of this country’s danger when clouds trawl by in puffed white flocks in an almost reachable heaven.

I am driving between levels where sky elbows land and land finishes arranging its hills on the blue on a day breaking toward autumn, while others are busy surging to greatness or annihilating an enemy.

Such a narrow path. Today the air is cheerful with variants of leisure after last week’s storm.

During the entire afternoon of errands, I am caught in the weave of my private life and the gyring weather as crows dip in and out of the sheer fabric of sky, and somewhere off the edge, the hem of the larger world keeps unraveling— But who can care? Who can notice when it happens with such repetition and the probability of understanding the worst war in Syria or the next wearying circumstance is a small second version of reality?

We’re near winter’s rim, and next month or next week the language of cold will press in with its frigid syllables; and yes, attention is plentiful and sorrow indefinite. Right now, greedy clouds are swallowing the lower part of the sky—I hate to keep mentioning sky, but nothing comes closer to merciful—and somehow, that sky is just a few feet away from my eyes.

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ERI N SL A U G H TE R

Mantra Love is saying yes to what is. —Richard Rohr Call love what you want: the one out of six people whose eulogy you get choked up imagining in traffic.

The Pavlovian response in drinking 7-Up and hallucinating a fever. The song on the car radio after the tornado, when the peach-core sky smiles and you begin to tremble.

Name it Matt, Wanda, Alex, Aziz. Name it like Adam named the beasts, who paid no mind and continued to be striped, hunt mice.

Call love on the telephone, in the closet, in a blackout.

Or a body with a splash of light behind the eyes and the gentle pain that comes next, the constant casual brush of fingertips with history, new witness to each time-trickling crest of breath that drifts us further out to sea. & saying yes. & saying yes anyway.  

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Wednesday

Tu e s da y

Thursd ay

2

1

The 8

S tag es

3

Seve n 9

of

15

10

Not 16

17

23

24

E a ting 22 A N N E BO YL E

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1. Beginning my bedroom after I receive the diagnosis that is not a diagnosis. Ineffective esophagus, ineffective stomach, something about chest pain and breathing.

I am annoyed before I am angry. These are estimates and guesses; I would prefer a six-syllable medical term, one to quiet my indelicate, if well-meaning, inquirers. I am twenty-five and wrapped up in my childhood quilt, hugging it around my shoulders and shaking arms.

I have had three cups of coffee and no calories today. Mom wants to put her arms around me, too, and she also has that firm look on her face. Because I have assumed a posture of defeat, and she will insist upon my finding joy no matter how much I snarl at her. She is ticking off appointments to make, books to find, and supplements to order.

“Let me grieve a little,” I snarl again. She leaves me to escape into my old quilt and my old bookshelf but keeps the door cracked. For a moment, I feel like I am eight years old, going to sleep with a sliver of hallway light. Not twenty-five, visiting home from a new and distant city.

I am not grieving. I am stunned at the way that jeans slide off of my hips and how much I hate the pile of loose clothing that I have pushed to the back of my closet. I am stunned that, for years, I did not marvel more often at my gloriously churning, strong body with its long limbs and graceful strides.

I go back to Portland, my new city, and back to work. I delete my social media accounts and stop answering phone calls for a few weeks, going instead to the rockiest trails I can find, determined to feel my body as my own. I push through limbs that shake and the whirling hollow in my stomach, cursing with each stomp all of the times I have heard the word “idiopathic.” It means we don’t really know why it happens. When my chest floods with pain, all defiance withers. I go home to watch Netflix, hoping that someone will ask how things are going. I don’t know how to answer when someone does; I don’t have a name for the knot in my throat. Sometimes it whispers and sometimes it shrieks, sending shock waves of panic down to my fingertips. I send texts that say, “Miss you. Talk later!”

Portland is grey most mornings, and occasionally bits of bright white poke through. I say hello to the morning, every morning. This is something I can do.

M Y MO T HE R C OM ES I NT O

2. Agency would stare down challenges with meticulous to-do lists.

When she wanted to travel, try a particular kind of work, or overcome heartbreak, she listed the steps she thought it would take to get there.

We sat at her kitchen one evening when we were both home from school for the summer, sipping wine and swapping updates.

“I think I’m going to spend time in France after I graduate,” she said, swirling her glass.

I looked up from my own glass, and she was grinning.

“Why do you want to go to France?” I asked. The question sounded absurd in my mouth; there are thousands of reasons to go to France. I wanted to know which of them would rise to the top.

Jess had already opened the Excel file from her computer that carried flight options, grant opportunities, and destination cities, scanning to the list of tentative departure dates. She became enamored with an idea and with bringing life into it, the why of it wrapping delicately into the how. Details captured her imagination as she mapped out how she M Y CHI L D HO OD FR I E ND J ESS

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would get to a place, and the pieces of getting there were a part of its magic.

She didn’t answer the question. Our conversation moved into museums and cobblestone roads and warm bread at every meal, a perfect combination of research and fancy floating off of the lists. Jess would go to France. She would go, and, if going wasn’t right, she would sit down and make another plan.

Six months later, I was tacking photos of Avignon, Nice, and Paris to my fridge, well wishes scribbled on their backs. lists like Jess makes lists, full with items I intend to accomplish. They vary from the strictly practical (make x appointment, try x recipe, prioritize x minutes of exercise) to the wildly subjective (be braver, say hello to more people, pray more) to the unexpected (try yoga, pretend to like yoga, drive without the radio). I pretend that they emanate optimism and agency.

Some of them work and some of them don’t. I despise yoga; I rarely want to try new recipes; I begin to crave silence, though.

I have never made lists the way that Jess makes lists. I like the long, neat rows with everything spread out in front of me. I like categories and color codes. The little ping! of a checked box. But they are descriptions of various horizons and not mandates to myself.

Eventually I stop marking them. Sometimes I forget how fragile my body is, and I think maybe this means it is strong.

IN PORTLA ND, I T RY T O M A K E

3. Ritual “a net for catching days.” Dorothy Day says that, in ritual, there exists “a sureness and a conviction.” We have too little ritual, she says. Even the instinctive kiss between a wife and her husband, departing for separate days, is holy; it is performance become sacred. It is a rope to hold in changing tides, its base knotted around goodness or creativity, or something.

Maybe there is something I can do every day: not a list but a habit. Wake up and write for thirty minutes. Wake up and read for thirty minutes. Get ready slowly. Take a walk at lunch. I start and stop doing each of these things, and then I start again. I try reading a psalm each day, in the morning while the coffee pot drips and hisses. I work chronologically through the gritty ones about judgment upon enemies and the ones that are all consolation. Green pastures and still waters. A lamp for my feet, a light on my path.

I am not praying with them, though. I am reading them and looking for their beauty and finding them interesting and worthy of picking apart. I try simply praying with them, but I get caught in their mysterious angles again. I am thinking.

I decide maybe this is prayer, too. Bits of each psalm find their way onto the tops of planner pages and on sticky notes across my computer and closet mirror. “Isn’t that cliché?” I ask Elise, a friend from my graduate program. We once laughed as we wondered how many of us theology students had considered tattooing Scripture verses across our ankles.

“Not if it fits,” she says. They do fit. They are little mantras.

Elise tells me about her job search. This one didn’t work, that one was promising, those others are too far from home. She’ll do different things while she tries again. I adore her matter-of-fact-ness and her warmth all mixed together. She tells her life’s story through tenderness and quiet pauses. It winds all over her movements and her decisions and the ANNIE DIL LA R D CA L LS ROU T I NE

28

way she talks about her day. It is strong and light and stormy all at once, and all of it is hers. I wish I had the grace with which she faces hard things.

“You do,” she tells me, only I don’t remember voicing the thought. After we say goodbye, the day unfolds more slowly. Kindness, kindness, kindness. There’s that Susan Sontag passage that begins this way and ends with courage. And that Wendell Berry one. Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.

These words go onto calendar pages. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Julian of Norwich hangs on my office wall.

4. Desire and even more time to blossom. They don’t always work.

Maybe the desire to form them reveals things anyway, though. Maybe it says: These are the things for which you need to create space.

A mentor suggests I write about all of this.

“That sounds self-absorbed,” I say. I feel self-absorbed, I say only to myself.

We are standing in line for coffee, and she is shaking her head.

“And anyway,” I say, “I want to write about other things: the big and bright and terrifying and low things that have formed me and still sound a little graceful. The word ‘stomach’ isn’t graceful. None of it is.” She is smiling now.

“I’m the crazy Tupperware girl and I don’t even know why.” She laughs, and I don’t mind.

I can’t stop writing, though, so I attempt poetry and blog about how much I love Portland’s pine trees and foggy trails. I write letters and emails and submit essays about anything I can imagine that is not a protein shake. I reread the books that I love and write reviews for no one but myself. I tell myself I am a writer and a minister and a friend and maybe even a new friend, one who meets for espresso on an occasional Sunday or for a rainy mid-week hike. Sometimes I think I am a good sister, a runner, a becoming-theologian.

“Has my body changed all of this?” I wonder aloud to my sister on a day when I can’t do anything except lie still. She is far away in Michigan but feels close on the phone. She pauses.

“Of course it has,” I say. “Although, that’s ridiculous,” I say again.

She agrees both times, letting the question hover easily between us. I keep walking on rocky trails when I can, because I am a walker when I can’t be a runner. Eventually, I try running again. I move in stops and starts. When my breath catches and I need to rest my hands on my knees, I list off the people who have told me: You should be running. You should be writing. It’s like they’re saying You can still be you and letting me escape into their arms all at once.

I run more and more; I can’t be angry when there are sticks crunching under my shoes.

Their rhythm plays another mantra. Sore muscles and a sweat-tipped ponytail become Saturday morning trademarks. They become the push to try other things again, too.

H ABITS TA K E T I M E T O RO OT

5. Community in Dostoyevsky’s grand novel, The Brothers Karamazov, where a despairing woman goes to the monk, Zossima, and begs that he tell her how to overcome TH ERE I S A P LAC E

29

her anguish. To which the old teacher replies that she should focus on loving other people; forgetting yourself in love becomes a paradoxically freeing endeavor, he says. “This has been tried. This is certain.”

I am not always able to remember this wisdom, but I remember those who are good at remembering. I think of them when highs become lows again. They are the ones who know that community is not just a good thing but it is a needed thing and a responsibility and a beacon that is a way forward even when it is a pale grey and not a bright, golden yellow.

I think of my scattered friends, many of them venturing into new territories themselves, who wield kindness as a force: Nora is a mom, and she is a radiant mom. I can tell from her voice, a phone call and seven states away, humble and delighted and entirely mystified at the ruddy-pink body in her arms. She cannot stop laughing into the phone. Katherine is in New York, about to move from a 200 to a 400-square-foot apartment. In my mind, though, she is the person from college who asked me the questions that people need to be asked in college. We sat in a crowded dining hall and she listened with steady eyes and thoughtful questions. I wonder how many people have rested in her questions since then.

I think of the intentional community in which I lived after college. I remember Paul, who was a part of that community and who died three years ago this fall. I remember how bright he was and still is.

After Paul died, someone wondered aloud about what he might say about everything.

What would he say about the accident, none of it his fault? I can’t imagine anything but his gentleness and energy and his light humor and his face poking out of trees, over bicycle handlebars, loading his plate with the last corner of food from the pot. Hungry for humor and life and food and everything. Especially food. But I once dropped my dinner on the floor, and he gave me his plate before I could blush. Most of my memories of that time involve tables and plates and crossed legs on the floor when there were too many for our table.

I am hungry for a warm table with hands that are familiar, resting on table dents we did not make. We left our own water rings from mugs of tea and glasses of beer without a second thought; it was home before we got there. who are not far away but are here right now. They are bright, too, because nostalgia is not what makes people bright. They won’t stop asking me to share dinner with them, no matter how many times I say no.

I TH INK O F T HE P EOP L E

6. Pilgrimage M ORE THA N A YE A R LAT E R , I host a friend who is visiting. We climb trails and visit

gardens and drink third cups of coffee. I drive us through the city without using navigation, pointing out different buildings.

“You really live here now,” she says. “Is it weird?”

“Yes.” The answer comes quickly.

I don’t call this city “home,” but I know so many street names. Quick fixes for rainsoaked hair. The exact time a garbage truck will rattle down our street on Thursday morning.

“But I think I love some of its pieces,” I say. She nods.

We toast to long-time friendships, and the city feels more like my city, even though she does not belong in it. We find a supermarket and pile a bag with mismatched selections to

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eat in the park near my home. Many days, this is easier for me than going to a restaurant.

She anticipates this but does not mention it, and I am more grateful than she knows. Later, we walk on one of the trails I have claimed as my own.

I BECAM E FASC I NAT E D WI T H the idea of pilgrimage during graduate school. Not because of that old platitude about “enjoying the journey” but because walking seemed to create the road in the first place, drawing a person’s inner self onto lines on dusty roads.

I have walked on many mornings during the last year: when I can’t be running or when I want to remember that my body is still my body; when I want to pray next to trees or when I want someone to tell me things will be okay. I am furious when someone does.

Sometimes I remember the ancient Peruvian saying that a professor shared with me during graduate school: Pilgrim, pilgrim, pilgrim, there is no way; there is no way; there is no way; you make the way; you make the way; you make the way; by walking, walking, walking.

I was fascinated with the pilgrims, too. The ancient ones and the modern ones, the ones who called themselves pilgrims and the ones who didn’t. In them, an inner life of peace spilled onto the earth in front of them; it increased, impossibly, the amount of time in a single minute. It was attention never depleting. Or, never seeming to deplete, because using it all up was a good in itself. Still, it did not suppress hard things, because some things cannot be suppressed.

7. Community, Again the outline of a phase that is not a phase at all.

I am not there yet. But there are gaps in time when time is illumined even while it is elusive. It is a place that fits my exact shape, a little ragged but sturdy too. In those spaces, I know that kindness has been pulling me along even when I have been certain that what has been pulling me along is ironclad will and gritted teeth.

Sometimes it is kindness that has worn into my own rhythm without my noticing, and I am eager to share it. Much more often, it is gentleness I receive. I can’t anticipate where it will come from—my oldest friends or the woman who smiles on the bus. Whether it becomes mine or remains theirs or exists somewhere in between us.

Embedded in this gentleness are spaces to say when things are not okay. To wonder at and fight and wonder at again the brokenness that surrounds all of us. Embedded, too, are their stories of doing what they can and being strong when they can’t possibly be strong.

The table we share is dented and stained and full with warmth because we are dented and stained and full with warmth, too. It is a space where we say what is good and beautiful and also what is not. And saying what is not becomes a part of that warmth.

I once heard someone say that community rubs the raw edges off of things. I think this is true, and I think that those edges, sanded into dust, trickle along in swoops after us, softening a little but still tough enough to help us rub the raw away from others until all of the pieces are mixed together and so far removed from rawness that we don’t know what to call them anymore. Bits of creation or dust to dust. They are so bright, though.

My bedroom gets the best light in the mornings. I say hello to the morning, silently, every morning. Sometimes it is a habit, and sometimes it feels like a prayer.

SOM ET I M ES I T HI NK I SE E

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artist’s statement NI C H O L A S S I RO N K A

that I create articulates a facet of Maasai culture. My hope is that the viewer understands the content and composition of each piece in relation to the Maasai culture. This enhances an appreciation for diversity, and a respect for our diverse values and beliefs.

EVERY P I EC E OF A RT

The work featured here is a collection of Batik paintings—a process using water-based dye in tandem with a wac resist on fabric. They are glimpses of a lifespan; vignettes of my culture from childhood to old age.

I believe that if I can use my artistic talent to touch another life and make it better, then I will be fulfilling the purpose for which God put me on this earth.

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NICHOLAS SIRONKA . Feed Me With Words. Batik. 36 x 54 inches.

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NICHOLAS SIRONKA . A Mother's Love. Batik. 26 x 36 inches.

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NICHOLAS SIRONKA . A Gift from God. Batik. 36 x 28 inches.

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NICHOLAS SIRONKA . A Warrior's Song. Batik. 36 x 28 inches

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NICHOLAS SIRON KA . Forever Young. Batik. 36 x 28 inches.

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NICHOLAS SIRONKA . Exodus. Batik. 28 x 36 inches.

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NICHOLAS SIRONKA . The Long Journey Home. Batik. 28 x 26.

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NICHOLAS SIRONKA . Another Song for My Warrior. Batik. 36 x 28 inches.

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MI CHA E L B R OW N, J R .

On the Death of a Boy in Brooklyn Now in the bone-white wastes Of your eyes, you carry the dust Of us—a dearth—that always was.

You speak no bones up. You kiss no clay alive.

On your forehead and some nights on your lips, You wore the smeared ash of us that once was One word: bliss. Old Hispanic women drip Like dreams down memory's avenues, Selling sweet, breaded confections And steaming meat patties in push carts.

Tongue-tied geists go gliding down The block, fumigating with the flames Of their addictions the manmade stars Of Manhattan. And the train goes ministering, Offering passage out of the poverty of the body.

And it all harangues the tides of my heart.

Like waves beneath the moon, it aggregates And demands a rage of my heart. You appear As a raven, dangling a morsel from its beak, Pecking matted, molting feathers, demanding An outpouring of that word: grief, like a wound On my heart. And it is then that I wish We were not separate bodies but of a single body: Organs underneath the miracle of form: Atoms, the gears, animating the gyres Of the soul, so that we would know No longing for before but transfer these passions Toward breaking the body's Babel with mourning.

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MAYA PI N D Y C K

Portraiture Lesson how direct the gaze in grief

you may think an image of tears welling up is a better truth— it isn’t when the brush dries drag it so it makes tire tracks reading

bones unseen—

never forget

to whom this face belongs

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MAYA P I ND Y C K

Portraiture Lesson 2 can you hear the invisible boy knocking—I was

here, here, here— lavender is a good color to make a mouth not quite closed & your own eyes, painter, your own inventory of losses press whose?

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JESSE CUR R A N

April & Elegy I used to pray and sometimes kneel and speak with the dead and think they could hear me thinking. I was a child.

At another point, I believed in Nature and April’s ecstasies to make us strong— in healing through the magnificent magnolias and the lyric ascent of the lemon-breasted meadowlark.

In the garage, your pansies were potted and re-potted, telling me you were not yet ready to leave. This is where sense struggles. This is where grief goes: to the pansies, yellow and deep violet.

Not consolation, but creation.

Your funeral lilies are heavy and white, and teach only fragrance.

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JON ATH A N M c G R E G OR

Biopsy With a twist of the doctor’s hand, the trephine, a tiny circular blade, pierces the bone’s cortex. Pressure, pain. The interior of the bone cannot be numbed. The aspirate needle fracks the marrow, fingers the core of the body’s silence.

The clinician at her microscope divides cell from cell, mumbling to herself, “Mene, mene, tekel, parsin.”

Six hundred miles away, I wait with a book of poems in one hand, a phone in the other.

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Oh, Hi

M . S O PH I A N EW MA N

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woman with her legs propped atop the hospital sheets.

I didn’t reply. I was the emergency medical technician who’d come to transport this bedbound woman to the hospital, and I should’ve been hospitable. But I couldn’t speak. The old woman’s legs were fetid with infection and blackened like burnt cork, and they gave off a smell so foul that stomach acid burbled into my esophagus.

It was an ordinary day on the job. Gangrene sounds like a disease that would strike people on a wagon train trapped on a mountain pass in the winter of 1846, but it is an ordinary, modern disease, the kind that can require ambulance transport to wound care, too. To an EMT like me, people who stink of gangrene were a dime a dozen.

Nonetheless, the smell of decaying flesh posed questions, which soon cut a surprisingly vast swath through my mind. To answer them involved my own time in a hospital bed, a harrowing moment in a dark street, and a bit of enlightenment, if it exists.

“OH , HI ,” SA I D T HE OL D

knew nothing about God, and thought of God even less. I wasn’t wondering about religion; I was wondering what to do with the feelings that flowed along with the water from my eyes.

My job as an ambulance worker, low on technical skill but high on human contact, was a place where a person’s innate sense of disgust could easily conflict with the basic achievements of the workday. Worse, I noticed that feeling physical revulsion led to hardheartedness. If I felt disgust, the patient seemed to perceive a measure of contempt. They weren’t entirely off-base, either. I struggled to separate my aversion to the disease itself from judgments of the patient who suffered it. Gazing at wounds, smelling rot, watching others seize or vomit or scream caused some dark fear to bubble unbidden from my brain stem, poisoning my cerebral cortex with a cruel, irrational, victim-blaming conservatism.

The goal of common decency slowly became an ever-looming question.

It would stand to reason that other healthcare workers had this problem. But it was almost impossible to raise questions about how working with patients—smelly, cranky, and irrational as their myriad circumstances dictated—demanded a balance between disgust and compassion. Some people seemed able to block out their own senses by will; others to never notice how any of our work connected to ethics. I never once heard the problem of compassion discussed in earnest by any healthcare worker, even when stress erupted into staff screaming cuss words and striking patients. The lowest echelons of healthcare workers were among the roughest, too; it became easy to see my answer would never come in the back of an ambulance.

But I was twenty-one, ambitious, and wishing for a full-fledged career in medicine—and secretly, what I wanted most was something more than no one in the medical field had ever told me I could have. I wanted to be kind.

In the end, it didn’t matter that nobody in healthcare ever spoke about kindness. The answer was still in science.

One day, I found an article about new research into kindness. The study was cuttingedge but quite simple: Neuroscientists had shown repulsive images (the mention of gangrene caught my eye) to participants as they lay in brain scanners that recorded their mental responses. Half the subjects were ordinary people, the rest Tibetan Buddhist AT TH E B EG I NNI NG , I

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monks recruited to the study with the help of the Dalai Lama. The study had a clear conclusion: the monks were highly skilled at converting their innate disgust for disease into empathy for the person suffering. So clear was the correlation between monkhood and this skill, in fact, that the authors felt free to declare meditation the reason the monks could do this.

In other words, compassion could be developed. It didn’t matter that what I needed wasn’t available in an ambulance. I could find it in a temple. unusual. For most of the last twenty-six centuries, a priestess explained one Sunday at the local Zen Buddhist temple, only Buddhist monks and nuns had meditated. When Buddhism came to America, the absence of monastics meant casual participants had begun to engage in these formerly rarified ancient practices. For the first time in centuries, any random fool could meditate.

A random fool was what I was. Like most American meditators, I wanted to meditate like a Buddhist without bothering to become one. Not eager for the bracing practices of an actual monk—the three a.m. wake-up calls, the shaven head and thin robes in winter—or even inclined to be a devout layperson, I instead envisioned a rather easy secular mental fitness routine, as transformed as the corporate flesh-toning Westernized spin on (Indian, Hindu) yoga. I wanted to become an athlete of compassion.

I had plenty of company. All around me, Zen people meditated while evading hard questions—questions about God, for example, which American Buddhists never mention, and questions about enlightenment, which they mention all the time.

And what was enlightenment? I had no idea. On Sundays in the monkless Zen temple, lecturers would speak of enlightenment as if it were the clear, sudden miracle that would set a person free from gangrene-induced gagging. But as I listened, I realized contradictions obscured the concept. Some teachers suggested enlightenment was feasible for many, but others claimed that it is very rare. Some described many small enlightenment experiences, and others one grand moment. They didn’t seem to be talking about any one thing.

Written teachings were no better than the spoken kind. Zen priestess Charlotte Joko Beck, for example, once published a book that claimed there were six stages of enlightenment, the last of which is “buddhahood, where purely experiential living is one hundred percent.” Then she suggests this might just be BS, and named her book Nothing Special in an unsubtle dig at the general unimportance of the whole concept.

I suspected the same. Sitting stock-still in the silent Buddha hall, I would think, maybe mental fitness is all there is.

A priestess at the temple argued otherwise in her lectures, noting that the obscurity was a clever move. Declaring the endpoint unattainable reversed a constant problem of inexperienced meditators, she said. They regarded attaining enlightenment as “winning” Buddhism, like a kid winning a video game. And this was pointless, a total dead end, a way to waste time and irritate yourself. On this point, I soon found every teacher agreed: to think about achieving anything will end in achieving nothing. But whatever this alleged enlightenment was, it was safe to forget it and just meditate.

So I did, until I got malaria.

WH AT I WA NT E D WAS

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common causes of death, but to experience it first-hand was surprisingly mild. In 2010, I visited West Africa to do healthcare work, and I’d come home to Chicago in August feeling fine. But it turns out a subspecies of malaria parasites can hide in the liver and emerge months later, and in late November, I fell ill out of the blue.

By chance, it was an unusually weak strain, and despite a certain unforgettable metallic bone pain, it felt much like the flu.

What happened next was no near-death experience.

I went to the ER late on Thanksgiving, looking for the right medication. An ER doc checked me in to the hospital—I suspected so that Midwestern medical students could see a rare malaria case. The next day, after a troupe of students shuffled through my room at six a.m., I found myself lying around a beige and white hospital room alone, body under a stiff white sheet, arm propped awkwardly open to accommodate a saline IV. Out the window, the autumn sky was overcast. Inside, my mind pitched between my urge to get up and work and the fatigue of disease. Above me, a wall-mounted TV played Titanic—and then, after it ended, played all over again. Flicking it off, I watched night drop its inky black sheet over the city. The dullness seemed unrelenting.

But it did relent. At no particular moment, for no particular reason, I began to have a deeply peaceful feeling. Out of nowhere, everything about the uncomfortable room became soft and cozy and still. In my mind, there was enormous silence that stretched out in all directions, a warm infinity. I began to have the sense that my heart and mind were pure and unified with this limitlessness.

Immediately inclined towards skepticism, I tested myself, considering if I could still find the world imperfect. I could. I wasn’t losing track of logic. I still had malaria, still disliked Titanic and its repetitive flute-y bullshit soundtrack, still found the late November Midwest imbued with a tediously encroaching desolation. I still wanted to go home.

But I also could suddenly see that all this, and indeed all our troubles, were small waves atop a vast, deep, silent ocean. An inner voice both overwhelming and quiet told me nothing is wrong. It was intense, but also ordinary.

I knew what was happening. According to the books and lecture, this was enlightenment—right there in the hospital, for no reason at all. I lay in bed, my own heartbeat the only sound in my ears, and observed the feeling till it faded.

With banality back in bloom, I mulled infinity over. I still thought the idea of enlightenment was probably baloney. But the experience had another, more unexpected element: I’d felt the presence of God. It felt as the way the Quran said it would be, in fact: closer to me than my jugular vein, closer to me than I am to myself. And it had been weirder still. I’d held questions about religion for most of my life, but the experience of God had turned out to be the state of having no questions at all. Lying in bed, all I’d wanted to say was, Oh, hi.

M ALAR I A I S A M ONG T HE M OST

created, the moment left me confounded. Inwardly, I contemplated whether the brain perceives God or produces God. My conclusion was neither. I knew malaria parasites easily infest the brain and interfere with its functioning. Neurological research on people who experience various unusual FOR ALL T HE C OM FORT I T

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phenomenon alleged to have established a connection between temporal lobe epilepsy and spiritual experiences. Cobbling those two scientific ideas together, I hypothesized that my spiritual experience resulted from the disease’s damage to the right temporal lobe of my brain. God’s presence, I thought, was just an artifact of the parasitic infestation.

It was a testament to my spiritual unease that this tidy answer felt like a relief, notwithstanding the obvious ickiness of having microscopic bugs in one’s brain.

Nonetheless, I remained bothered. The experience seemed to demand a change in my approach to religion, but American Buddhism says nothing about God. In one step, I’d been lifted away from my rationalist skepticism and my community. And for all my reluctance to join a temple in the first place, I found I didn’t want to stop enjoying the life I already had.

For a time, I didn’t stop. I said nothing about what had happened. A day and a half after being admitted, I left the hospital. My health returned the following week. Two weeks later, I was well enough to make it back to the temple for a Sunday service. For months, I went on meditating. Whatever spiritual experience I’d had was little more than a quiet itch deep back in my brain.

Then, almost as suddenly, there was a deus ex machina: a call from the State Department. I’d applied to a scholarship to Bangladesh that November. I’d been informed I’d made an “alternates” list—and weeks before the program started in June, got an invitation to join. I left the temple, but not to resolve a quandary. I just got on a plane.

Arriving in Bangladesh, I realized I was a big white cliché: a confused goofball who shows up on the Indian subcontinent hoping for an answer to some grand spiritual question. But I was thousands of miles from the Hippie Trail, in a Muslim society that excluded women from organized spiritual expression and was riven, anyway, by dysfunctional political rivalries and intense street violence. Studying language seventy hours a week, I had no time or opportunity to seek gurus. And I had a spiritual question I couldn’t articulate, anyway. Once or twice, I went into a local mosque, knelt on the cool marble floor, and considered how good I had once felt. In my mind, I would say Oh, hi, in empty mimicry of the moment in the hospital. It was pleasant, but not clarifying.

Eventually, I finished the language program and stayed on to research my master’s thesis. I moved to a friend’s apartment, arriving with a slight fever and hoping it was just another of the minor pestilences that tend to afflict travelers. But by the next day, I was sick enough to sleep for twenty-two hours, waking only to crave water and painkillers and wonder how to move my aching body to get them. This was no minor infection; nor was it malaria, which might have been easy for me to self-diagnose and treat. This was dengue, a mosquito-borne illness with no cure or effective palliation.

For the next three weeks, I surrendered my plans to the virus nicknamed “bone-break fever” for the vivid pain it causes. I developed a wracking cough (later determined to be a fungal infection, thought to have afflicted me only because my immune system was so busy fighting dengue). Whenever I coughed, a sensation in my back felt like my ribs verged on snapping.

Spirituality felt irrelevant, out of the question. If magic had alighted on me once, this illness disproved an innate connection between being sick and being enlightened. This was

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banal, pointless, sweaty misery. I felt no insight—in fact, I was hideously aggravated. Time passed without answers. called a friend to arrange a ride to the airport; it was time for me to leave the country. At the time, most flights from Bangladesh departed around dawn, the country a victim of its own perpetual airport construction and an international flight pattern that prioritized every other airport in the region. My friend Ifti, a Bangladeshi who had expatriated to Australia but had come home for an approaching Eid holiday, offered to drop me at the airport at two in the morning after a final late dinner together. A sweet friend from the scholarship program, Tara, came along.

It was a mundane evening. We dined in a restaurant kitted out for Ramadan, sipped overpriced coffee in a hotel lounge, took photos, chatted about the future.

Tara was staying with a family in a neighborhood not far from the airport. Although she’d been upfront about staying out late, they soon began to send frantic texts asking when she’d be home. We dawdled past midnight, assuming they were making too much of their own hospitality or some perceived weakness of female foreigners.

We were wrong, though. Soon enough, we knew it.

It was one in the morning, and we were in Ifti’s car, searching for an entrance to the gated subdivision where Tara’s family lived. Our driver, Hashem, a lean, middle-aged Bengali with an air of resignation about him, found the one gate that remained unlocked and asked for directions. Despite that help, we found ourselves twisting down a maddening rabbit warren of nearly identical narrow lanes.

“Ah!” Tara finally blurted out in the quiet car, “There it is. That’s the house!” We’d shot past it, but Ifti muttered to Hashem to double back at the end of the block.

The lane ended in a T-stop, and there Hashem paused to prepare a three-point turn.

There was another car behind us, and he stuck his hand out the window to wave it past.

That car, however, stopped, engine revving and headlights flashing. For a second, its purpose seemed confounding—until, in one collective moment of horror, we all figured out the driver’s plan.

In Bengali, Ifti urged Hashem to go. Needing no urging, Hashem had already stomped the gas. We blasted forward and around the corner—and hit a deep pothole with a skullpounding cha-chunk. Minding a persistent rattle immediately rising from the underside of the car, Hashem tread the gas pedal with caution. From behind, the sound of the car stalking us grew clearer.

In the front seat, Ifti looked over his shoulders and fluttered his hands. “Get down, get down!” he told us, breathing too loud. Tara laid her head on my lap, clutched my pants near the knee, and whimpered. I hunched my torso over hers.

But then I had a sudden impulse to look out the rear window. Sitting up and turning my head, I saw a white car with its high-beams trained on us. Jogging beside it was a darkskinned, rail-thin man in dirty jeans and a white shirt. Pointed skyward in his left hand, he held a rifle that seemed almost comically outsized. Yep, I thought. A carjacking.

I turned around, slouched down again, and looked forward. In my lap, Tara stuttered a ELEVEN W E E KS LAT E R , I

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brief nothing into a phone and then hung up. In the front seat, Ifti was panicking.

I wasn’t. Suddenly, without any effort, I felt the same feeling I’d had in the hospital. I looked out at the inky night in front of our windshield, and suddenly, without effort, saw our problems as small waves atop a vast, deep, silent ocean. Without making a sound, I greeted God by the same words I had thought before: Oh, hi.

Being calm, I had time to notice how well things were going. While my head was turned, Tara had dialed her family and stuttered a ten-second explanation ending in a rush of “okay, okay, okay okay okay!” Even that simple staccato gave me the idea that they understood what was happening and were just blocks away ready to help us if circumstances required. In the meantime, Hashem was solid, calm, driving as well as anyone could wish. The car was damaged, but functioning. No guns were being fired.

Nothing had happened yet.

Better: I had a moment to notice the problem I’d had was solved. When I was an EMT transporting patients with fetid wounds, I had the bad habit of seeing only the gangrene that consumed them. Now, face-to-face with the disease of violent criminality, I noticed the men who suffered it. A carjacking is every bit as nasty as wet gangrene, but it was the carjackers’ lives being subsumed in its life-threatening foulness. They could clearly cause us catastrophic harm, but whatever entrenched misery that drove them to do this to us probably involved far more serious suffering than we would ever know. I felt empathy and a grave sadness for them.

We did what we could to help them: we avoided becoming their victims. You can’t win Buddhism, but you can win a carjacking. And we did.

Hashem, our stalwart leader, chanced upon a van in motion and began to follow it. With that, we had witnesses—and, luckier still, a guide. The van led us to the one open gate.

When we hit the main road, where traffic was still flowing at two a.m., the carjackers dropped back. The airport was just a few minutes’ drive, and there we found Dhaka’s usual heavy bustle. In the parking lot, Hashem fixed our car’s cracked bumper, reversing the source of that scrapping sound we’d heard. Tara and Ifti, still shaky, told the story a few times to themselves aloud, exclaiming over our bad and good luck. Eventually, we shared an affectionate goodbye. That was all.

Alone in the terminal, I sat on a hard plastic bench and waited for my flight at daybreak.

With time to think, I contemplated my skepticism about God. A definitive—if entirely selfdirected answer—seemed obvious: If it works when guns are drawn, just go with it.

I recited an ancient Buddhist chant, accessible in this strange moment, an answer to my original question: May I be the doctor and the medicine And may I be the nurse For all sick beings in this world Until everyone is healed.

And then I said a one-year-old prayer I believed in just as much: Oh, hi.

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ARI EL F R A NC I SC O

At Kafka’s Grave, I Repent I think of my grandfather, his death the reason for my first trip to the Dominican Republic as a teenager, my father’s homeland, The Metamorphosis tucked under my arm at the funeral, my reading of it interrupted by the news. I can’t recall the eulogy.

Who rose before the graffitied catacombs and spoke?

Who sobbed? Who stood stoic? Who prayed silently?

Who called up to god for an explanation? A reason?

I remember the atrocious heat of Caribbean summer, tugging at my collar, annoyed that I had to wear a tie, my dad next to me, head bowed like a dog-eared page.

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EPHRAI M SC OTT SOM M E R S

Ojai Flying So begins the game of how long I can hold a fist around it, this thin, red stem of a lit bottle rocket before it blossoms three fingers off my right hand, the game of rainbowing lit bottle rockets out the side window of the minivan because my brother, Delta-259, is back home for the first time since boot camp began with a V-creased bill on his Dodgers cap and Baghdad on his list of imminent possibilities, so, tonight, the two of us Piccolo-Pete down the thirty-three freeway messy and reckless as the way we love each other but won’t say it out loud, the same way I’ve never told my father something so simple as, I don’t want you to die.

Instead, we are knifing into the night. This big black roadblock of sky, we are slicing fire right through it with the knees blown out of our Levi’s, and having parked the minivan, the ritual of Jolt Cola begins, the ritual of two dollars

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in a coffee can, of a hardcore show in a brick basement with a low ceiling and the crowd already stomping foxholes into the floor, and the lead singer with a gash in his forehead is eating the microphone, the drummer stabbing a stick through his snare, and this is the future we are rumbling into, this pit, this tonight I follow my brother inside and through, this darkness and feedback I begin to lose him to. This holy tonight— beneath these jagged lips and all this salt—is a thing to kill for, this family history, and, now, everyone I’ve ever lost is right here with me, moshing and floor-punching through this hurricane of bruises for the right to stay alive in this loud little room, in this tiny little poem in which we are lifting my little brother up over our heads, and on a river of open palms he is floating away.

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artists’ statements DA N I EL K YT O N EN

disability often leaves me in a quiet, in-between world. My art practice is part of discovering and searching this in-between space. Whether I use oil, ink, or spray paint, I am seeking for the sublime to speak through my work as I discover its form myself. In my mono-prints, I press paint between sheets of glass, letting the paint organically flow, going back to search the image for what it is speaking to me. I draw what I find in the in-between world.

LIVING WI T H A L E A R NI NG

I am constantly looking; sometimes it's searching just to search. As I search, my body moves through physical space, finding things inside myself that connect to humanity. This space has led me to something bigger than myself in the universe, and my work seeks to pull out ancient truths that exist in the sublime. My hope is that you come along on the journey and find something with me.

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DANIEL KYTONEN. The Ones Before Us. Oil on canvas. 30 x 40 inches.

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DANIEL KYTONEN . Separate Issues. Oil spray paint imitation gold leaf on cnavas. 14 x 24 inches.

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DANIEL KYTONEN. Hard Times. Water color pen tracing paper over light box. 8.5 x 11 x 7 inches.

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DANIEL KYTONEN. A Bridge in Kolkata. Water color pen tracing paper over light box. 8.5 x 11 x 7 inches.

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DANIEL KYTONEN . Red Rings. Water color pen tracing paper over light box. 8.5 x 11 x 7 inches.

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DANIEL KYTONEN. Hazardous Environment. Oil and pen monotype on paper. 8 x 10 inches

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DANIEL KYTONEN. A Brighter Face. Oil and pen monotype on paper. 8.5 x 13.5 inches

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DANIEL KYTONEN. Silence. Oil and pen monotype on paper. 9.5 x 12 inches

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VI RGI N I A KONC HA N

Little Mermaid Please define mayhem. Please define lucid dream.

Being one whose existence is debated is difficult— when your own senses lie to you, how to know what is real? We are at the ballgame, trying to decide between popcorn and peanuts, the third choice—the disruption of the binary—being nothing at all.

If chivalry is dead, who is that hirsute man offering to pay my tab, open the door?

The truth is, life is about managing expectations.

Please define woodrot. Please define pyramid scheme.

Please turn your attention, now, to the underwater mermaid. Watch her decide not to risk her life for the prince—split legs and earth alienation in exchange for a philandering fool. Please define buyer’s remorse. Please define care.

I spy, with my little eye, God’s love, which is, like circumference, everywhere.

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MELI SSA ATKI NSON M E R C E R

Monster Psalm #14 And then all my bones were beasts: girl beasts, mother beasts, beasts of the sudden womb. (I wanted what I wanted like I want you now.)

I could never convince them to walk the same: use the same fins, the same hooves.

In the bathtub, half of me was drowning, half murmuring gleefully in the brown water.

In fields of long-haired cows, half of me was always running to meet them, to rub their bellies with my soft new nose.

And half of me wouldn’t move for anything—wouldn’t be moved—would chant and chant and never cease: just one more prophesy of doom.

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SANDRA M A R C H E TTI

Depth of Field From above filaments form a branch circling in the pond.

At eye level it’s dirt in standing water, filtered through light.

If survival is hope by another name, cram the blossoms upon my tongue.

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A l l ah Lo v es B e au t y I S S A C V I L L EG A S

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Then I heard every creature in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing . . .

Revelation 5:13 from where Christ was born, under the gaze of watchtowers, as the afternoon shadow cast by the state of Israel’s separation wall creeps along the ground, a friend meets me at the entrance to the Aida Refugee Camp, once a neighborhood of tents and now a swelling, piecemeal housing project sheltering people exiled from their villages near Jerusalem and Al-Khalil sixty years ago. We walk narrow alleyways, a labyrinthine path through a jumble of structures—concrete blocks mortared atop each other, jagged walls—until we reach the apartment that will be my home for the week. Exhausted from flights and buses and taxies, I toss my pack in the corner and lie down, falling into a deep sleep. I dream the most beautiful music, the sounds of mysteries.

Before dawn, as I am dreaming, with my eyes still shut, my ears begin to open, and the music becomes more and more clear, the sounds of the call to prayer, the Adhan, echoing from one minaret to another—voices chasing one another in the night, making strange harmonies, singing that is dancing. Allahu akbar, “God is Great.” Hayya 'alas-Salah, “Rise up for prayer.” As-salatu Khayrun Minan-nawm, “Prayer is better than sleep.” These lines sing as a refrain, over and over again, waves of sound, musical words, pouring down from the sky, into my ears.

In my waking dream, an image flashes into my mind, a portrait I had seen in Nazareth, at the place where the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would give birth to the Messiah—there, in a cathedral, I had seen an icon, the figure of Mary with a scroll unfurling from heaven into her ear: Christ conceived through her ear, the Word entering her body in a sound, descending from the sky. According to a line from a sixth-century hymn, “the angel bore the seed, the virgin conceived through her ear.”

The Muslim call to prayer is called the Adhan, which derives from an Arabic word for ears.

D OWN T HE HI L L

a friend invites me to join the refugee kids on their soccer field, a new addition to the camp. I walk down the road that runs alongside the wall separating olive groves on the other side from cramped housing units on this side, segregating the state of Israel from the Palestinian territories. As I turn the corner to the Lajee Community Center, I hear the children before I see them—shouts of joy, of delight, the music of kids at play echoing off the adjacent mosque and the wall, always the wall, a fixture of the horizon, a reminder of quarantine.

Little girls are scrimmaging, and they put me on a team as soon as I arrive. The first time I get the ball, I pass it to a teammate near the goal. She puts all the power of her seven-year-old body into her leg as she swings her foot into the ball, which bounces wide of the goal post, and she plops to the ground, furious. Her friends lift her up and we play on, our team losing, but that doesn’t stop us from laughing. And as we play and laugh, the IN TH E M OR NI NG

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ball is kicked up in the air leading my gaze to the netting far above—a web stretched from sideline to sideline, pitched in the sky by a skeleton of metal rods—where flashes of light pierce my eyes, the morning sun reflecting off fist-sized chunks of metal caught in the net.

During halftime, sitting on the grass after the game, pointing at the web of mesh, I ask one of the players about the cylinders. “Those are tear gas canisters, shot from over there,” she gestures to the concrete wall beyond the community garden and playground.

“The soldiers shoot them,” she whispers. “See them, standing by the tower, looking down at us?” An older youth explains that when they started playing on the field, Israeli soldiers would fire tear gas, the canisters landing on the grass, forcing the kids to run back home. Now, with the netting above—he points—when they shoot, the gas doesn’t take as long to blow away.

The coach blows a whistle, and we take our positions back on the field, with grass under our feet and signs of warfare canopied above our heads. To reside in Aida Camp is to live in the valley of death, shadowed by militarized walls, without an escape from the panoptic stare of the Israeli surveillance state, without respite from the threat of soldiers’ weapons and an army readied for incursions to disrupt the goings-on of a refugee city.

But the children play soccer. The toddlers run around and around the swing set. And the mothers in hijabs talk and laugh as they watch from the shade of olive trees. “Existence is resistance,” my Palestinian friends tell me as we lace up our soccer cleats and later as we walk through an almond grove. The first time I heard that saying was in At-Tuwani—an ancient Palestinian village near the recently constructed Israeli settlement of Susiya— where two women gave me a tour of their garden, rows of cabbage and beans. “We plant, we eat, we struggle, we hope,” they said in unison, a mantra. “Our existence is our resistance.”

Those words weighed down on me because I heard them as bearing witness to an impossible life, full of loss after loss, inevitable defeat in the face of the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian territories. Now, however, after wandering through almond trees, after kicking a soccer ball with kids, after listening to the music of laughter, I hear “existence as resistance” as an invitation to rest into the beauty of life.

Life. Surviving on the edge of violence, always under threat, but life nonetheless: the mother who passes her infant into the careful arms of a friend—the gentleness of existence. The children at play on the field—the joy of resistance. The gardeners tending to olives and almonds and cabbages and beans—the beauty of life. up the hill from Aida Camp, through another refugee neighborhood, zigzagging through narrow alleys near the Church of the Nativity, finally arriving at Ma’an Lil-Hayat, the L’Arche community house in Bethlehem.

They had told me to come around eight in the morning. People are already gathered in the main room, seated in chairs pushed against the walls. A woman greets me with a smile and waves me to an empty chair. As soon as I sit down, a young man darts from his seat across the room. He stands in front of me, almost on top of me, hunching down into my face, his eyes dancing—first glancing at my forehead, then the ceiling, then my beard, THE NEXT DAY I H I K E

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then the ceiling, only looking into my eyes for a flash of a moment, a flicker of mutual recognition. He smiles, and in a voice much louder than I’m used to—a gentle yell—he says, “Yes.” One word. Yes. Then he rushes back to his chair.

After their morning ritual of sharing and singing, the thirty people in the room divide into five groups for a day of crafts, of work. I am led to one of the rooms, and as I enter I see him again, the same young man, seated at a table with six other people—and he sees me. He jumps from his chair, bouncing his way to me, bumping into the wall, the table, his friends. He comes to my side, as close as he can without touching me, and he points at the empty chair beside his. He says the same word again, “Yes.” I take my seat in the workshop, where baskets of wool are washed and felted into miniature sheep and caves for nativity scenes. I am asked to introduce myself. “I’m a pastor from the United States,” I say, “I’m here to visit, thanks for welcoming me as a guest.” I am going to say more, but I notice that the man across the table begins to move his lips, stretching his mouth, preparing for the labor of speech. He voices words slowly, straining one syllable at a time, “Here. You. Not. Guest.” He takes a deep breath. “You. Are. Friend.” The rest of the group expresses their agreement, each in their own way.

Seated beside me, my companion offers his same “Yes.” Across the table a woman smiles, giving me a subtle nod, a rigid gesture. Her eyes reveal more than she can say with words, more than the rest of her body allows. From his wheelchair a man looks up from the wool in his hands. “Welcome,” he says in perfect English. The person on my right talks quietly to herself the whole time, in Arabic. She glances over at me, and as she speaks, the others around the table giggle. The man who speaks English translates, as he laughs. “She said, Welcome man with the beautiful beard.” “Shukran,” thank you, I say, as I blush.

I watch them work, their hands busy with artistry I do not know. When the person beside me notices that I’m not doing anything, she takes each of my hands in hers and puts them on the bundle of wool, moving my hands in circles, massaging the wool into the rough mat.

“Hal tafham?” she says. I have no idea what those words mean. Someone begins to translate, but she speaks to him abruptly, scowling, almost shouting. “She does not want me to tell you what she’s saying,” he explains, rolling his eyes. “She believes you will understand her if you try hard enough.” So I try, paying attention to the tone of her words, studying the expressions on her face, feeling the push and pull of her palms. She leads and I follow. I learn slowly, she is patient. She finally releases my hands, and I continue on my own—dunking the bundle of wool into the warm water, rubbing it across the rubber grooves of the mat, skimming the suds into a bucket. She says words that sound kind, an approval of my efforts, I assume.

We work together that day, despite my lack of artistry and my inability to speak their language. With gentleness and love they welcome me into their lives, into their work, and into their dancing, which happens during breaks as we gather into the largest room and someone grabs a drum—all of us stomping, clapping, and spinning with the beat. An assistant pulls me into the circle, and as we twist and turn with the others, he leans to my ear. “This is our struggle for peace,” he shouts over the singing. “This life together,

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here—everyday we are fighting for life, by dancing, by singing.” Then he points to the scar on his cheek. “A reminder from years ago, another life, when I did not yet understand how to fight for peace.”

As our break ends, my friend comes back to my side, pointing the way to our workroom, saying his only word to me, “Yes.” “His name is Rami,” the man with the scar says. “In Arabic it means ‘to dream’.”

My mind drifts back to the morning, when I was lying in bed, before daybreak, when I dreamed music—and I picture Rami in a minaret, singing his yes as the call to prayer, his music echoing through the cramped alleys of the refugee camp, his song in the sounds of children at play on the soccer field and in the garden, waves of sound crashing through the massive wall, his “yes” as God’s mysteries spilling into me: God’s word entering my body through my ear.

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MARY B U C HI NG E R

Part or Particle of God —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transparent Eyeball” I am opened wide curious what are the funeral rites in this place where do the flowers come from roadside chicory wild carrot no— crimson carnations nail down airy palms pungent red cinnamon spice coverers of death not in season not homegrown and lily lily white lily float above all their milk gold stamen-stained who loves me best and where now do I belong passed from embrace to embrace ready to be picked and vased whole opposing worlds have hold on me love tinyblossomed as baby’s breath aside from ritual love and its clear window onto death its reminder that this too is always mine is not an other merely observed

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ALEX MO U W

NPR's Science Friday at the Intersection of Grant and 24th Seconds after the Big Bang, the universe entered a Dark Age of Physics— prior to and not to be confused with medieval indulgence-sellers, whole lives used up copying Ovid— and for millions of centuries, nothing, says the radio scientist.

Even to call it dark is too cozy.

And I thought today was important, traffic slow as honey.

And ninety-seven percent of the universe is plasma? asks the interviewer.

In a way, answers the scientist. But if you flip every person, gadget and meal inside-out, perceive them from all angles at once, there's another form of matter, entirely different and, well, unobservable.

Outside my car, finches peck a styrofoam plate of Chinese takeout.

A crow shivers, flattens its wings.

The scientist continues: we guess at dark matter by the way stars flow through space with the precision of a waiter

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pouring wine. But it refuses to stand still or be measured.

A group of students passes on a crosswalk, a woman with feather earrings and a man who cut off the bottom halves of his denim pant legs.

I see a beer can crushed to a wide tin coin, something an ancient human might spend on seeds, on weapons, and were he gangrenous or soaked with flu and chills, on the quick alto notes of an icaro, his head tilted back as the shaman drips a bright green potion into his waiting mouth.

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of a cure ce

IN the a

n e bs

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mornings at church and afternoons on the phone with the insurance company, trying to finagle coverage for a series of tests to figure out why I was losing my hearing. After months in prayer and hours on hold, she sat with me in the doctor’s office as he made a diagnosis. Severe sensorineural hearing loss with reduced word recognition—progressive. The cause was deemed congenital, which meant, in a way, “We don’t know.” Congenital suggested from birth, but I had been a teenager when my hearing loss began.

The doctor pointed to a diagram of the ear, to what looked like a snail shell at the end of the labyrinthine organ. It was blue—my favorite color. “Sensorineural hearing loss occurs here,” he said. “The nerves in here are damaged, and there is no cure for that.” The disconnect between damaged nerves and the brain were why I could place my ear against a blaring smoke alarm and hear only purrs. Why my hold on music, a ringing phone, or the words that people spoke each day around me had slipped away. Progressive, the doctor explained, meant the loss would continue until there was nothing left to lose.

My mother felt that God was the only one who could stop this onset of deafness. A healing service at her Korean Methodist church coincided with a visit home during my first year of college. She convinced me to put myself in God’s way, and that’s how I ended up among the needy in a line at the front of the sanctuary, at the foot of a dais, the only young person in a row of ahjummas and ahjussis. The pastor moved down the line, anointing us one by one. A deacon stood behind me, ready to break my fall and set me gently on the floor in case the mighty power of God knocked me over. He wore a gray suit and brown loafers. Standing behind others like me were others like him, dressed in their Sunday best on a Thursday night, lifeguards of the Lord, trained in revival should mercy become too great.

Across the small sanctuary the faithful prayed. Some knelt in the aisles, rounded backs rocking to and fro like self-soothing children. Some stood with their arms raised high, begging to be picked up. Others gripped the backs of the pews, unwilling to be picked up at all. The lights were low in back, growing brighter only around the dais. Its polished wood shone beneath warm spotlights, reminding me of the still, golden water you see on a postcard from the beach. A large thin wooden cross hung on the front wall, where a setting sun would be on the same card. Two tall palm plants sat beneath either side of the cross. All that was missing, I thought, was a caption: Wish you were here.

When he got to me, the pastor pressed oil to my forehead, willing me by the trembling pressure of his fingers to succumb to God. The softness of his fingers surprised me. I wondered how, at his age, they could be so free of the calluses and coarseness that marked my mother’s hands. As far as I could tell, he was older than she. I wondered if it was the oil that made them soft. What if the oil clogged my pores? Perhaps I should get my mother some new hand cream. My mother stood beside me, gripping my arm. I endured this laying on of hands for her and for that part of me that could not help hoping. Feeling guilty for letting my concentration slip, I fixed my eyes on the pastor’s lips, reading in their pursing and parting something about healing, about opening. He moved his hands over my ears. By the zeal of his prayer he shook my head. Please let this work, I thought, please let me hear.

Here I am.

MY M OT HE R SP E NT E A R LY

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I wasn’t knocked to the ground. But for some reason, I folded into myself and clumsily sat down. I lay back on the floor, knees bent, as if sunbathing. Tears slipped down my face, into my ears, a shallow pool in each ear canal. Why was I crying? The glare of the spotlights, the blank ceiling, a sense of shame—I had to close my eyes against it. I heard nothing as I felt my mother wipe the side of my face, only the skin around her knuckles soft and loose.

We drove home without speaking. It was dark and hard to lip-read, the intervals of light from passing cars not enough to see by. My mother drove, her chest close to the steering wheel, looking at me from time to time. I knew she was wondering whether anything had changed, whether I felt any different. I was not born deaf. I started losing my hearing after I was born again—an incremental stripping, layer by layer, of sound and speech comprehension that followed a decision to follow the Lord.

In fact, neither my mother nor I had been long to this faith as we drove home in silence, ill at ease with the silence of God. We didn’t talk about it—that night or the nights that followed—why the Gospels were full of healings, and yet. We didn’t vocalize our suspicions: mine about the goodness of God; my mother’s about her own. Arriving home that night, I retreated to my room. My mother sliced up an apple and brought it to me, telling me to go to bed soon. As she left, she looked at me and said slowly, Doo-goo bah-yah-jee. We will have to let it be and see. a cure, there were only stopgaps, and I entered the world of assistive listening devices, of which hearing aids were the workhorse. I went through three of them in twice as many years. I started with Beltones—small, nude-colored plastic nubs that fit discreetly into my ear canals. No one could see them, and I was happy about this, never mind that after a few months they were as useless as foam plugs. Next came 3M Multipro Power BTEs—larger, over-the-ear aids that gave me increased amplification. They were capricious things, screeching at random, like a drunk in the corner of a subway car. I held myself like a wary passenger, trying not to set them off.

I moved on to Siemens Prisma Power Digital Hearing Aids—the latest technology that promised to “bring every decibel to life.” If the 3Ms were cassette tapes, the Siemens aids were CDs. With these I managed to lip-read through my first job, graduate school, a long-distance relationship, marriage. When I couldn’t manage, I faked it. At my wedding reception, my father-in-law gave a toast to welcome me to the family. I smiled politely, unable to lip-read by the amber restaurant light what exactly he was saying. Siemens didn’t live up to its promise of clarity. No hearing aid did.

As my hearing worsened, phone calls required a separate device—a TTY—and a telecommunications relay service. If I wanted to call my mother, I first called a relay operator.

While I waited for the operator to dial my mother’s number and tell her that her daughter was calling, I fancied this person, a female, waking up each morning and arriving for work at the relay call center. She would turn on her ‘90s-era PC, put on her headset, drink a Diet Coke, and weave in and out of the lives of the deaf and hard-of-hearing, transcribing and eavesdropping sometimes the same. I considered her blessed. Relay Operator 1457 of the Massachusetts Relay Service must have had perfect hearing to work at a call center.

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How are you today? GA. My mother’s words appeared on the backlit screen of the TTY. GA indicated my turn in the conversation—Go Ahead.

“I’m OK, go ahead,” I said.

Are you resting enough? GA. Our conversations on the phone were stilted, limited to the physical conditions we were going through. It was easier for my mother to ask about sleep than to ask about disappointment or fear. Speaking English the entire conversation took effort, and she never fully expressed what she wanted to say because her English couldn’t translate the feeling of it. Often, the operator interrupted her, corrected her, when her pronunciation of a word hindered transcription. She never mentioned how cumbersome it was for her to speak with me this way—my mother who communicated best in the tempo of her native tongue.

Knowing how onerous it was, I could only stand to use the TTY with two people: my mother and the man I eventually married.

It was an audiologist I was seeing during the 3M years who first broached the cochlear implant. “You’re a great candidate,” he said. Because I’d once heard sounds and speech, the device could jog my auditory memories. He described the implant as a bionic ear. An electrode array was surgically placed inside the cochlea, the snail shell. A speech processor was worn like a hearing aid, hooked over the helix of the outer ear. There was a transmitter and a receiver, and the technology together turned sound into electrical signals that stimulated the damaged nerves, reopening communication with the brain’s auditory cortex.

To put electronics inside my head seemed extreme. The procedure was irreversible and involved cutting into my head. Any residual hearing, as poor as mine was, would be destroyed. Why would I hasten my own deafness? Perhaps I was a great candidate, but could they guarantee how well I would hear? No. Healing couldn’t mean risking what I had left for the sake of another device. Healing should be the hand of God reaching out, his fingers in my ears, adding to, not taking away. “Ephphatha,” he should say. Be opened. I could bear God knocking me to the ground with healing. I could not bear messing with the chance for him to do so. I pushed away talk of the implant and waited for this healing curled inward like the very cochlea in question—incurvatus in se. I invoked the grace-of-God-that-issufficient and made my days as small and predictable as possible, until the desire to be a mother—a hearing, functioning mother—pressed against my need to remain small.

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to try to hear like normal again without really good health insurance—one that covers, beyond prosthetics, the incredible cost of a cochlear implant. It takes me a while to come into this kind of insurance, and when I do, I commit only one ear, the left ear, the one with which I have the least to lose. I find an otolaryngologist who has eyes I can read as clearly as his lips. Then surgery, with incisions in the pale skin behind the ear and drilling into the mastoid bone. He threads the electrodes through the cochlea and carves into bone a shallow well for the receiver. Outpatient becomes inpatient when the anesthesia makes me retch for hours afterward. Once home, there is pain and Percocet—pure, sweet Percocet. Recovery takes a month. It is a month with only tinnitus for company, an internal ringing, humming, buzzing, droning that is always with me despite IT IS N E A R LY I M POSSI B L E

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the absence of any actual outside sound. It’s a common symptom of hearing loss. For me, tinnitus is the wing beat of a frightened bird darting through my head from one side to the other, never able to find its way out. No amount of Percocet calms its fears.

After a month, after the stitches dissolve and an occasional Tylenol controls the pain, we hook up the outer part of the implant. The audiologist holds the speech processor in her hands with the sure and tender touches of one trained in the care of fledglings. She connects the processor to her computer, and a line graph appears with my name on it.

This is what will be known as my map—the customized coordinates of what I can hear, from the softest sound I can perceive to the loudest sound I can bear. Twenty-two coordinates stud the graph like eighth notes on sheet music. They correspond to the twenty-two electrodes that lie coiled and ready for life within my blue cochlea. Twenty-two to try and do the work that normally thousands and thousands of nerves would do. The audiologist will activate each electrode one at a time, and I picture tiny batons prepared to prod my dormant nerves: Sing! Sing! She hands me the processor. It is new and gleaming; its black body almost iridescent. The transmitter, round as a mouth, latches on to the side of my head as if instinctively; its magnet meeting the receiver beneath my scalp. She waves to see if I am ready, and I nod.

The first thing I hear is a beep, softly ephemeral, like a single note of birdsong coming from miles away. Then more, beep after beep, nearer, bolder, louder. She tells me to count them and tell her how many—four beeps, two beeps . . . five . . . was that five? Phantom birds have joined in, and I can’t be sure how many beeps I’m truly hearing. This commonly happens, and she makes concessions for tinnitus and false positives. We do this over and over, along low frequencies to high, until suddenly, she’s done. My threshold and comfort levels are set. The map is uploaded into the processor, and my hands feel cold with anticipation. Please let this work, I think. She turns the cochlear implant on.

I hear a whir, and not the whir of tinnitus but a whir coming from somewhere behind, above, of . . . of . . . “What is that?” I ask, simultaneously taken aback by my own tinny, mechanical voice.

Then in tight, squeaky tones, the audiologist saying slowly, deliberately, “The air conditioner. Central air conditioning. How does it sound?”

“Well . . .” I shake my head. Did air conditioners make such a ruckus? I look around the small room for something else, something recognizable. My husband sits beside the door, watching me. “Hi,” I say. He leans forward, and his chair’s metal joints creak unexpectedly. The sound scrapes its way through my head as I watch his mouth. He says, “Hey there.” My auditory cortex, stunned out of the atrophy of muted conversations, takes my tall husband speaking and gives him the voice of a cartoon chipmunk. I don’t care though.

In that office and in the hallway afterward, I understand him. His words are not murmurs but the consonants and vowels I have missed. The air conditioner and the noises of a body moving through a room are terrible, but I can understand speech. That first day, I can’t stop smiling.

Initially, my sound map can accommodate only a narrow degree of shock and wonder.

Even so, sounds insert themselves mercilessly. They do not sound the way I think they would. My brain scrambles to interpret them, and I often get it wrong. The repeated rap-

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ping of sheet metal from the neighboring cubicle turns out to be typing on my coworker’s keyboard. Someone innocently crumples up a plastic bag, and the sound upends me like a jackhammer in church. I wash the dishes and keep turning the water off to listen hard, convinced that my child is crying from his room. Water running from the faucet sounds just like him. As much as I relish communication, the noise and confusion wear on me. When they get to be too much, I turn off the implant and secretly, guiltily, welcome the quiet that used to unnerve me each day. I am deaf, and it’s a relief.

But during a first car ride, I hear a ticking that I cannot place, cannot associate with a reachable memory.

“What is that?” I ask my husband.

“The turn signal.”

Oh! There are turns—right and left and left and right—that I make him take around the neighborhood, just so I can hear such a wonderful thing again and again. Over time, sounds become more consistent with what I remember or envision. I tolerate more shock and wonder as my brain adapts to hearing what it hasn’t heard for years or has never heard before. The chipmunk leaves my husband’s voice, and in its place is the deeper, more resonant voice of a man who grew up in the laid-back prairies of Alberta. Some months after activation, I call my mother while she is caring for my ailing grandmother. There is no TTY, no operator, no GA. I can’t recall the last time I heard my grandmother’s throaty voice, the inflections of her village dialect, but when she speaks I suddenly feel twelve. Won Jung-ah, she says. Halmuni-gah sah-lang-han-dah. She loves me. I imagine my cochlea unfurling, stretching out like blue sky. times before my mother answers. “Hi, Umma,” I say. She responds in Korean, asking, how are we? how are the children? She wonders if I’m feeling better about the worry I mentioned last week. She tells me she is short-staffed once again. She wishes she could see us more often. Her voice drops at the ends of her words, and she sounds tired. I used to never be able to tell. “Let me talk to my boys,” my mother says.

I take the phone into their room, set it on the floor, and put us on speaker. The boys, who are five and three, look up from where they are connecting engines and freight cars and cabooses on wooden tracks—clack, clack, clack. They shout out, “Hi, Halmuni! Hi, Halmuni!”

Her voice lifts with delight, and she asks what they are doing. “We’re playing trains!” the oldest declares. “My trains are going all the way to 205th Street!”

“Ah, can you take your train here to Florida?”

“No! It’s a subway train!” He shakes his head, smiling at his grandmother’s joke.

The youngest, not to be left out, leans in and tentatively offers, “I . . . I haf a coal car.”

“What do you have?” my mother asks. My son looks at the phone shyly. I coax him.

“She didn’t hear you. Say it again?” He bites his lip and shakes his head slightly. I lean toward the phone.

“Coal car,” I relay, “he has a coal car.”

“Ah, coal car!” and she laughs. The goodness of all this would knock me over if I weren’t already sitting cross-legged on the rug.

In the evening, a thunderstorm drags itself through our area. The boys are scared of TH E LINE R I NGS FOU R

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them. At the first distant rumble, they suddenly freeze, ears up like field rabbits. It is still so far away, I don’t know how they hear it. It is one of those sounds I never can. “Mommy!”

They run to me. “Check the weather! Check the weather!” yells the oldest one. We check the hourly forecast, and the boys stare at the small cloud and lightning bolt onscreen. On stormy nights, my oldest, in particular, cannot sleep without more reliable company. He ends up in our bed, curled up between my husband and me, his forefingers stuck in his ears. My implant is off and tucked into the dehumidifier. There are restrictions to wearing the implant overnight. I hear no storm, no thunder, no rain drumming on the landing of the fire escape. But I feel my son’s every move—the way his heel shifts against the sheet, and his head slips a little off my pillow. I feel his small heart pound against his ribs. “It’s okay,” I say, “I’m here.” I can’t tell if he says anything back.

In the days and months after the diagnosis, my mother used to check in on me at night.

She would sit with me as I slept, smooth my hair, and pray. The pressure of her hand, the usual rough skin of it still warm and damp and softened from dishwashing, would awaken me, but I’d feign sleep. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but I knew she was praying for my hearing. For healing. My deafness coincided, strangely, with my mother’s conversion, too. I’d contend that she prayed for my healing more than she did for her own soul. What the ear doctors could not do, she begged of God. I’d lie there and feel my mother’s heart through the palm of her hand—longing cupping my ear. I’d lie there so still, afraid to move and change the moment. Night after night, she anointed me with drops of dishwater and hope. After a while, she would rise and find her way to the door in the dark. She would let me sleep and wait for the morning. For an answer to prayer.

Here I am. I see the dim outline of my husband’s shoulder rising just beyond the outline of my son’s. Nights are when I feel the bare permanence of deafness and know that I am not healed—when my loss is plainly unchanged, and I am once again the needy girl in the line at church. And yet, I am more open than I ever was to this world and perhaps, in that, more healed than I ever was. For what is healing but a breaking open of a small, predictable life. Of returning, morning after morning, to a sound state—a state of shock and wonder. Are we healed by degrees, progressively? Are we only ever healed for the sake of another? Nights are for remembering that all is not yet whole. Nights are for understanding fear and smoothing its brow. I wait for the lightning to stop flashing. I wait for the languid rise and fall of my son’s chest in sleep. Together, we wait for the morning.

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contributors

is the author of the poetry collection Saint of the Partial Apology (Five Oaks Press, 2017), as well as four poetry chapbooks, including Star-Blind in the Family of Fortune Keepers (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2017) and My Own Strange Beast (Porkbelly Press, 2017). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and has recently appeared in Zone 3, Menacing Hedge, Literary Orphans, and others. She has an MFA from West Virginia University.

MELI SSA ATKI NSON M E R C E R

is a campus minister at the University of Portland. A Midwesterner at heart, she arrived in Portland after receiving her master of theological Studies in systematic theology from the University of Notre Dame. In writing and in conversation, she is eager to explore the intersection of the sacred and the ordinary, and she is enormously grateful to witness the wisdom and creativity of college students each day.

AN NE B OY L E

was born and raised in the Bronx where he still lives.

The first poem he fell in love with was T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” while in school. He is published or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, SAND Journal, and American Chordata.

MI CHAE L B R OW N, J R .

the author of two collections of poetry, Aerialist and Roomful of Sparrows, grew up on a MARY B U C HI NG E R ,

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small family farm in Michigan, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, and earned a doctorate in applied linguistics from Boston University. Buchinger is co-President of the New England Poetry Club and Professor of English and Communication Studies at MCPHS University in Boston, Massachusetts. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, two sons, dog, and two cats.

More at MaryBuchinger.com. is the author of three books, most recently One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press), winner of the Dorset Prize.

Her poems have appeared in Cave Wall, The Missing Slate, Rock & Sling, Beloit Poetry Journal, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. Other literary honors include the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, and a Black Earth Institute Fellowship. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Spanish, and Turkish. Lauren lives in sky-drenched New Mexico. More at laurencamp.com L A U REN CA MP

holds a PhD in English from Stony Brook University and is an educator, gardener, and yoga instructor. Her poetry and essays have been published in numerous journals including the Emily Dickinson Journal, Green Humanities, Blueline, the Fourth River, About Place, Lime Hawk, Spillway, and the Common Ground Review.

Since she was a teenager, she has kept a handwritten journal, now in its eighty-fourth volume.

J ES S E CU RRA N

lives and works in Spokane, Washington. She describes her practice of RH O N D A CYR

photography as: “Walking out the door with camera in hand . . . my breathing deepens, and the joy of finding that sweet spot between peace and adventure settles in. The happy clutter of family, home, work, and volunteer schedules . . . quiets. The magnificent, big, wide world becomes cropped into extraordinary bits and pieces of life: manageable, memorable, and more meaningful to me. And hopefully to others.” is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he completed his MFA at Florida International University in Miami. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016, Fjords Review, Gulf Coast, PANK, Poets.org, Prelude, Quiet Lunch, Washington Square, and elsewhere. He lives in South Florida (for now).

ARI EL FRA NC I SC O

is the author of the poetry collection The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018), the short story collection Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and two chapbooks, including That Tree is Mine (Dancing Girl Press, 2017).

Virginia Konchan’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Best New Poets. Co-founder of Matter, a journal of poetry and political commentary, and associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly, she teaches at Marist College and has two extraordinary cats.

VI RGI NI A KONC HA N

currently lives and works in Spokane, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington in 2013 with a BFA in painting and drawing and has since exhibited his work regionally across Washington and DANI EL KY TONE N

Idaho. Daniel enjoys basketball, outdoor recreation, and a general exploration of life.

S O N J A L I V I N G S T O N’ s essay collection,

Ladies Night at the Dreamland, combines history, memory, and imagination to explore the lives of women. She’s also the author of Queen of the Fall and Ghostbread, which won the AWP Award in Nonfiction.

Her writing has been honored with a New York Arts Fellowship, an Iowa Review award, the Susan Atefat Essay Prize, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund. Sonja teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. is the author of the poetry collection Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). She is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays, including Sight Lines (Speaking of Marvels Press, 2016) and Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications, 2016). Sandra’s poetry appears widely in Poet Lore, Blackbird, Subtropics, Ecotone, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Her essays can be found at the Rumpus, Words Without Borders, MidAmerican Review, Barrelhouse, and other venues. Sandy is also a sports and Seinfeld fanatic.

S A N D RA MA RCH ET T I

is a postdoctoral fellow of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he helped start the Spectacle literary magazine. His creative work has appeared in Image Journal and elsewhere. He is originally from West Texas and thinks flat, dry places are pretty.

J O N AT H A N M c G REG O R

works as a project editor in educational publishing, raises two boys, and writes. Her writing has appeared in Crux Journal, Kinfolk Magazine, and the WON McINTOSH

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Alphabet Family Journal. She enjoys books that surprise you, hot morning coffee, and rearranging furniture. Home is her family, and they make one full of sounds in Queens, New York.

ALEX M OU W’ s poetry has appeared in

Tahoma Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere, and his scholarship is forthcoming in Christianity and Literature. He and his wife are both Michigan natives currently transplanted in Indiana where they spend time perfecting their homemade pizza and trying to find a loophole in the landlord’s no-dog policy. He is a graduate of the Purdue University MFA program.

M. SOP HI A NE W M A N , MPH, is a writer

whose work has been published in the Atlantic, Religion & Politics, Vice, Vox, Tin House, Lithub, Next City, and elsewhere. In 2014, she received a Shannon Fellowship from the International Thomas Merton Society to report on environmental issues and religion. She continued this work at a 2015 writer’s retreat at Collegeville Institute for Cultural and Ecumenical Research. She has also completed a Critical Language Scholarship in Bengali and a Fulbright Fellowship in Bangladesh focused on public health research. is a poet and visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent collection of poetry, Emoticoncert, was published by Four Way Books in 2016.

MAYA P I ND Y C K

writes: “I am a Kenyan Maasai Batik artist with a Godgiven talent, and I reside in Spokane, N I CHO L A S SI R ONKA

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Washington. I am also a motivational speaker and storyteller and use facets of my Maasai culture to share and clearly articulate the ways of our people. Our people say ‘words are nourishment for the spirit.’ It is with this saying in mind that I weave my words together with a view to accept and celebrate a greater understanding of the Maasai culture and peace between all people of the world.” is pursuing an MFA at Western Kentucky University, where she teaches undergraduate writing classes. You can find her writing in River Teeth, Sundog Lit, and Bellingham Review, among others.

Her first chapbook of poetry, Elegy for the Body, is forthcoming from Slash Pine Press.

She loves historical graveyards and bad puns.

She lives in downtown Bowling Green with a cat named Amelia.

ERI N S L A U G H T ER

writes: “I am a poet and singer-songwriter from Atascadero, California, so a poem for me, like a song, is the place where meaning and sound collide.

My first book of poems, The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire, is out this year from Tebot Bach Press, and I currently teach on the graduate creative writing faculty at the University of Central Florida. My work has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.” www.ephraimscottsommers. com EPH RA I M S CO T T S O MMERS

is the child of Colombian and Costa Rican parents. He was born in California and now lives in North Carolina where he is a pastor of a Mennonite congregation.

I S A A C S . V I L L EG A S

last note ON O PEN I N G T H E D O O R

We never locked our back door that summer. Its steps collected coffee mugs and sneakers and dog-eared novels and garden gloves. Once there was zucchini bread, left by the neighbor, so we left her our cherry tomatoes, spattered with dew.

We were to live simply that summer in our community home. But simplicity grew into abundance again and again, and we found we could squeeze many shoulders around the backyard table. And the open door and the leaning shoulders became habit—for the nights when the world seemed too wide and our hands too empty.

towards me with a man in full restraints— wrists handcuffed together in front of him, fastened to a chain belt around his waist and shackles on his ankles. He is naked, except for what looks like a tight miniskirt made out of thin, white plastic, like a kitchen trash bag. Our eyes meet before the officers prod him to another door. I watch him shuffle away, his silhouette disfigured by the plexiglass doors as one after another slide shut behind him, doors rendering kindness impossible, except for that glance, a fleeting moment of shared humanity.

AN NE BO Y L E , NONF I C TI ON

My poem “Mantra” was partly inspired by Richard Rohr's quote: “Love is saying yes to what is.” I guess for a while, that was kind of my mantra. To me, it means joyfully accepting things and people as they are, including yourself and the circumstances of your world. It’s pure vulnerability, a kind of irreparable opening, to allow yourself to love. Even more so when you realize that the people you love are imperfect and sometimes incapable of loving you back in the ways you need. There is a strength in saying yes anyway, saying yes to love and experience, even knowing it might hurt later. It feels worth the risk because it is.

Rilke wrote, “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go.” This is, to me, the ultimate act of being human: to let someone be what they are, to let them go where they must, and to love them anyway.

What love is, in my mind, is an obliteration of the border between self and other, and I go back to the poem and back to the poem in order to remind myself over and over again that in order to love the world more, I need to make myself matter less and less.

EPHRAI M SC OTT SOM M E R S, P OE TRY

The correctional officer escorts me up the long, wide passageway that intersects with the housing units in the maximumsecurity prison. As we turn a corner, all the doors around us clamp shut and to our left another slides open, the door to solitary confinement. Five guards walk

I S A A C S . V I L L EG A S , N O N F I CT I O N

ERI N S L A U G H T ER, PO ET RY

I have taken in two stray cats, once while living in Austin and once in Montreal. Both times, the choice to adopt a stray cat has been spontaneous. My heart was touched

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by the animals’ plight and the sense that I’d been chosen (whether as first or last resort) to save the animals from what was surely a short life, one lived in hunger and desperation. The first stray cat I adopted was pregnant at the time of adoption, and we found homes for her kittens. The second cat, Ella, while still timid and with socialization issues, is a constant source of joy. Animal and human lives are interconnected: I’m so grateful that— prompted by mewing—I opened my door.

VI RGI NI A KONC HA N, P OE TRY

I have never been good at working with salespeople. When I found out my coupon could not be used or they didn’t have something in my size, I became curt quickly.

As a hospitality professional, my husband could be seen cringing in the corner when I unleashed my frustration on these folks.

Ever the giving sort, he quietly and gently taught me a better way. He talks up clerks and asks them about their kids, their hobbies. He catches more flies with honey than vinegar. Through loving him, I realize now how hard it is to work holidays, or on commission. He helps me acknowledge my privilege when it comes to those who serve the public at restaurants, hotels, and stores.

SAN DRA M A R C HE TTI , P OE TRY

Some years ago while working as an artistin-residence at Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital, I was struck by a message brought to me by one of the nurses. She said that one of the little girls had requested that I not see her that afternoon to continue with our painting class! “Why?” I asked.

The nurse explained that the little girl had recently had surgery and that my jokes were hurting her stitches. I was very sorry

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and asked her to give my apologies to the little girl, and I hoped that once she was healed she would still find time to come and paint. I also promised to limit my jokes.

I returned to the afternoon session with the other children a little disappointed, hoping I did not actually cause the little girl much suffering. As the other children and I painted and chatted, we noticed a girl in the distance slowly rolling towards us in her wheelchair. It was the little girl with the stitches. A nurse went to meet her asking her what she was doing. She responded by saying that it was okay to tell me that I was allowed to make her laugh “just a little bit”!

N I CH O L A S S I RO N K A , V I S U A L A RT

Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” I’ve just returned from promoting my book One Hundred Hungers in Washington, DC. I was in an unfamiliar region, relying on the benevolence of strangers to point me forward. I received every generous act of heart and home, a glass of wine, a pan of Epsom salts to soak my tired feet. I was companioned to varied locations—to talk, to share meals, to linger within city realms. Repeatedly, I entered the room of gratitude, all the doors flung open. And at each reading, people thanked me for my honesty, for inviting them to pass through my history. Such a circle of connection.

L A U REN CA MP, PO ET RY

The year I moved back to Bangladesh, the Economist labeled the capital, Dhaka, the world’s least livable city. The epithet was apropos. A vortex of nauseating pollution and political violence, Dhaka imposed relentless frustration on everyone, and through it, monstrous numbness. The

last note

collective lack of compassion was both consequence and cause of suffering.

But Dhaka could surprise. Among the street beggars that summer was a man so frail he couldn’t sit or stand. For days, he lay abandoned near a traffic circle, filthy, waving arthritic fingers in the air, and weeping. One Ramadan sunset, as iftar began, I noticed a man kneeling to hand-feed an elder some rice. It was a tiny gesture, but in Dhaka, it was striking.

That was when I decided to stay.

M. SOPH I A NE W M A N, NONF I C TI ON

This morning I pulled into church on time, for once, with my family in tow. There was even a space left in the parking lot. A blonde woman nosed her gray sedan toward the empty spot from the other direction, but I gently edged her out. As she left the lot, I saw a child stir in the car seat behind her.

At some point during the service, a phrase about charity from Ezra Pound’s “Canto LXXXI” lodged itself accusingly in my brain. After communion, I looked for the driver everywhere. Words of apology burned in the back of my throat. Briefly, I even staked out a gray sedan parked on the street. But I never found her.

JON ATHA N M c G R E G OR , P OE TRY

“Your kindness cannot be said. / You open doors in the sky. / You ease the heart and make / God’s qualities visible.” I read this poem from Rumi as ars poetica. Writing requires generosity and vulnerability—a Yes! Yes! Yes!, a welcoming of come-whatmay, doors open to the wild, unpredictable sky, good and bad raining, sometimes thundering, down—all this ultimately easing the heart, maybe many hearts.

Writing is essentially an open stance toward the world, one of attention and care, an effortful forging of some kind of meaning. In other words, the act of writing makes those qualities we seek in a God visible—manifest—to ourselves and to readers.

MA RY BU CH I N G ER, PO ET RY

If I am on the elevator and see you coming, I reach out to press the “door open” button, knowing in my introverted heart—the heart that so enjoys a solitary elevator ride—it’s the right thing to do.

And yet—it has happened—I press the wrong button. They look so much alike, those buttons. Eagerness turns to panic. I have closed the doors unwittingly, watched your face fall, felt reproof. But sometimes, I have been quick. Sometimes, I have been brave even—sticking my hand through the closing doors, desperate to let you in.

W O N M c I N T O S H , N O N FI CT I O N

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DANIEL KYTONEN. Clarity. Oil and spray paint on wood panel . 24 x 27 inches.