Issue 59: Forged

FORGED / 59

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Cover: NILS HINT. Cutlery Pieces, 2017.

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contents

NOTES

Editor’s

6

Readers’

7

Prize Pages 12 Contributors’ 84 Last 88

FICTION

Latchkey, 58 Mary Kate Baker Of the Eating Variety, 72 Allison Field Bell

NONFICTION

Mysteries and Symbols of My Past, 14 Mildred K. Barya Derecho, 32 Alex Pickens

VISUAL ART

The art of Andrew Hayes 41 The art of Stacey Lee Webber 42 The art of Jill Baker Gower 44 The art of Sarah Perkins 46 The art of Noam Elyashiv 48 The art of Myra Mimlitsch-Gray 50 The art of Ben Dory 52 The art of John Rais 54 The art of Sophie Glenn 55 The art of Nils Hint 56

POETRY

26 My Mother’s Feet, Mary Jo Firth Gillett 27 As the Nurse Fills Out the Intake Form, the Ocean Speaks Your Name, Jamaica Baldwin 28 Funeral Anagrams, Aliki Barnstone 29 Weaving, Judith Sornberger 30 Shattered, Saddiq Dzukogi 31 I too take shelter in the body, John Sibley Williams 39 April 23, 2020 and Today is Shakespeare’s Birthday, Sunni Brown Wilkinson 57 In the Hopes I can Spell out my Name, E. Kristin Anderson 68 The Weight of Dreams, Sharamang Silas 69 The Weight of Trains, Sharamang Silas 71 Karolyne Makes Kliesel, Melissa Spohr Weiss 81 Communion, Michael Garrigan 82 Fred Wants to Know if I Believe in God, Margot Wizansky 83 When it Comes, Sunni Brown Wilkinson

editor’s note

Amidst the monotony of pandemic life this past year, there is one day that I’ll remember vividly. In late October, a wildfire sparked and burned furiously down the slopes of the foothills just nine miles west of my house. The same time that fire was burning, winds kicked up another one on the west side of the Rockies and in one night it burned up and over the continental divide, though the heart of Rocky Mountain National Park. Simultaneously, a third fire burned farther north, along the valleys and ridges that are home for many of Ruminate’s staff.

Smoke choked the air for weeks, compounding the sense of unease we already felt during a year stripped of normalcy. Some days, I found myself muttering the phrase, we are hard pressed on every side. . . but not crushed. Struck down, but not destroyed.

Fire can be destructive, but it can also be a tool for revelation. I love the cover image of Nils Hint’s Cutlery Pieces and how the charred hand tools are transformed into burnished gold utensils. In the midst of the pressures of this past year, many of us have experienced what it is to be stripped down to essentials. Something which is forged is something which has been made stronger by fire.

Our issue includes many examples of lives forged by experience. The characters in these poems and stories are shaped and revealed by what they endure. There is heat and pressure in Alex Pickens’ piece, Derecho, in which he immerses us in a sweltering Appalachian summer in the aftermath of a storm. Sharamang Silas’s poem “The Weight of Trains” inquires, “What is worship if not the desire to offer yourself to the fire / & everything you have ever loved?” There is the more common forging of sustenance in the form of kliesel, the pastry Melissa Spohr Weiss’s poem describes, baking alongside her never-known great-grandmother. It is nourishment made by careful hands against the backdrop of unrest, and yet, “[s]he unspeaks / futures, wipes the war off her lips.” Additionally, the featured artists this issue all create through the medium of metalwork, shaping the hard surfaces of minerals, steel, and stone into objects that reveal new beauties through the processes they undergo.

Ruminate has been undergoing a forging process as well, saying goodbye to staff members and welcoming new voices, as well as restructuring our organization to revive old practices and reach new spaces. We are certain that the struggles and challenges we’re undergoing will shape our community in beautiful ways. We hope the words and images we share with you in this issue, “Forged,” will help you reflect on what has shaped you, and encourage you to recognize how strength has grown when you’ve passed through the fire.

Warmly, JEN

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readers’ notes FORGED

My ninth-grade English class was in an old room with scratched hardwood floors, giant windows, and dark green blackboards. I felt extreme discomfort and embarrassment as I walked down the aisle to my seat in the back each day.

All the cool girls wore tight designer jeans and lots of mascara, but not loosepleated-jeans-wearing, scuffed-saddleshoed me.

Mr. Northern, the only Black teacher I ever had, was of medium build and dressed neatly in dress slacks, shirt, and tie. I don’t remember much about his lessons, but do recall his energy and excitement about teaching. And I remember that one writing assignment that found me at home, leaning into the circular table in our den, scribbling away on loose-leaf, describing my favorite boxed chocolate chip cookies—a rare moment of joy in that new-kid, outsider year.

A few days after handing in the cookie essay, I entered Mr. Northern’s room and began my usual awkward journey to my desk. Snapping out of my haze of selfconsciousness, I immediately recognized my essay hanging on the bulletin board.

A big red letter “A” followed by multiple pluses was scrawled across the top of my paper with a word, one I would always remember, “Superlative,” written in Mr. Northern’s robust hand across the top.

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Such a small thing, but this would be one of the greatest days of my life, the day where my sense of self was restored and my future life would start to take shape.

MAGGIE NERZ IRIBARNE, SYRACUSE, NY

He’s a blacksmith, I’m a poet. Ten years since we exchanged vows and the steel bands he made. Encircled by friends and family, in the meadow below his family’s cabin, built by hand over several summers. At a distance, my ring looks gray. Closer, you see its wood-grain pattern, a feathered arc and swoop: the result of his hands wielding elemental tools—hammer, tongs, anvil, fire—to bend and fold the metal over and over again. Have you ever noticed how much wood grain resembles a fingerprint?

Count the rings, trace the life line in each palm: together we’ve been bent and folded on the hard edges of what is (in sickness and in health), building a life by hand with what we’ve been given. With three little lives, now, looking to us with their lake-clear eyes. What can we give them, what can we salvage from a burning world? Knowing their maker, and how to make things. Knowing the worth of hands calloused by love, careful with others.

Knowing each of us only happens just this way, just this once.

MELISSA REESER POULIN, FAIRVIEW, OR

readers’ notes

Almost every day, like clockwork, Tía (aunt) Bell shuts her door at 4 p.m.

She closes the shutters, pulls down the curtains, locks away any view from the outside, securing herself inside the house where she’s lived most of her life, a woman going on nearly seventy. Tia Bell closes up the house well, and no movement is seen in or around the house after this hour. She is careful—like clockwork.

Sometimes when Tía Bell comes to my house next door, I can smell the cigarette smoke still on her breath. The truth is, I’ve never actually seen Tía Bell smoke.

Ever. This she keeps hidden, like so much of her life, and I wonder at her deepest fear, or even joy, rather than her deepest sadness, which shows on her like a bad hair-do.

My son, Santiago, and Tía Bell share a birth month, both under the horoscope sign Virgo which implies traits of elegance and poise, but nothing about cigarettes or suffering or hidden loss.

Her husband, my Tío Eppy, died nearly twenty-five years ago; this means Tia Bell’s now been a widow almost longer than she was married. Refusing to let him suffer in a cold, colorless hospital, Tía Bell cared for Tío Eppy until his last breath, and he died on the couch of their home’s living room, surrounded by familia and ruffled home-décor. Tía Bell

has every right to be bitter about life, and most of the time she is, but I imagine there must be a spark of joy somewhere.

Tucked away.

Tía Bell closes up her house early every day, a stack of fresh tortillas on the kitchen counter, shrouded with a soft-linen towel, and a pack of cigarettes waiting, perhaps in the bedroom drawer or on the bedroom nightstand, but always in that place we cannot see.

L E E A N N A T O R R E S , T O M E ’, N M

I sat on my friend’s bed anxiously fiddling with my hands. “I have something I need to tell you.”

“What’s up?”

“I would prefer if you called me Jaxson.”

She said she wouldn’t until I had medically transitioned. She was the first person I’d ever told.

A year later, I sat across from the principle of my new school. I had told my friends to call me Jaxson and he’d found out.

“I heard that you were going by a different name with your friends,” he said.

I looked up from my lap, waiting for him to laugh.

“Would you like us to call you that?”

“Please.”

My principal’s acceptance gave me courage to tell my parents. They were not

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so accepting. My dad believed it was an agenda being forced onto me, shaping me into someone I’m not. My mom stayed silent.

My transcripts say my dead name, but when I go to college my name will legally be Jaxson. I’ve learned in life that you have to forge your own path.

JAXSON SNYDER, DRYDEN, MI

On any other day, “forged” would have brought to mind a smithy—a workshop where metal is first heated, then bent by a hammer into useful, beautiful tools.

But today I have watched the George Floyd murder trial, specifically the testimony of Christopher Martin. He is the nineteen-year-old employee of Cup Foods in Minneapolis who accepted Floyd’s $20 bill on May 25, 2020. Martin testified that he believed the money was counterfeit, fake. Forged.

Yet he took the $20 bill because Floyd appeared “a little high.” Whether Martin acted from compassion or pity, he may never know—the true difference can be hard to discern even in one’s own heart.

What Martin knows is burning guilt: “If I had not taken the bill, this could’ve been avoided,” he testified.

Guilt lies with the police officers, not Christopher Martin. George Floyd was not killed in white-hot rage, but ice-cold indifference. The maliciousness that, as one’s knee forces life from a fellow human being, keeps sunglasses in place and a hand in the pocket. As Robert Frost claimed, “for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.”

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I write in the middle of Holy Week.

Long ago, a brown-skinned man cried, “I have come to bring fire on the earth (Luke 12:49)!” My heartfelt prayer is that, from the fiery intensity of last summer’s protests and the searing truth of this murder trial, a new nation shall be forged—not from counterfeit lip service to equality, but by the hammer of justice, which in the end makes beauty from the heat.

ANDREW TAYLOR-TROUTMAN, CHAPEL HILL, NC

I grew up in a central Indiana trailer park that smelled of antifreeze and cheap beer and the continuous waft of a neighbor’s cigarette. A halfcharred trailer leaned at the park’s entrance, a monument to the shortlived relationship between fire and manufactured homes. All our coming and going—to church, the library, the grocery store, and the firehouse on government cheese day—was marked by the collapsing shell of someone’s former living room, the couch blackened and completely exposed. I wanted to look away, but at five I was compelled to stare at the remains every time we passed.

Mom and Dad, both teachers, made a lesson of the landmark, reminding my younger sister and me to leave dangerous things alone. Being timid girls, we did just that, but Annie a few streets over played with matches in her bedroom closet, or so she told me. The firetrucks squealed through the park a few months later and

readers’ notes

doused Annie’s home, and although I didn’t see the fire, I never did see Annie again.

Kids didn’t stay in the trailer park long; they were always moving to another state, like Minnesota, to live with their grandma or dad. Sometimes they’d come back, say it didn’t work out. My home stayed the same—two parents and two little girls, dinners around the table, long summer evenings on the swing set while Mom and Dad watched from deck chairs. At night, alone in bed, I’d think about fire, how it could snatch my happy world with one lick, and I’d pray feverish prayers until the panic burned away and I fell asleep.

MICHELLE STIFFLER, MESA, AZ

There’s a cardboard box in my basement containing some old photographs.

This morning, I went down to check a mousetrap and after, with a similar uneasiness, I opened the box. In one photo, I smile broadly as the man I was married to for over twenty years holds our daughter. They smile, too; she bites her lower lip. There’s a part of me that wants to throw out the photo, but how do you forge fully ahead when a residual heaviness pulls you back, even if it’s to a life you no longer want?

I’m in my mid-fifties, of a generation of women who started to believe we could be anything we wanted. But messages

were mixed. Speak up but not too often.

Be confident but not too sure of yourself.

I don’t remember ever being taught it was okay to have my own needs. My mother grew up in poverty, the child of immigrants. She lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York City, and her own mother died at a young age.

“Quit your bellyaching,” she often told me. “Make it work.”

So that’s what I did. Until I didn’t want to anymore.

I’m still not sure what to do with that old photograph of my ex-husband and me. My grown daughters have their own family photos and memories. My marriage helped shape me into the person I am today, so maybe that’s why I hold on to it. Or maybe I know even if I throw out the photo, the shadow of that other life will follow me anyway.

LIZ PALEY, CONCORD, MA

By our senior year in high school, my friend Adele and I had pretty much had it with the rank cafeteria food. We were looking for something a little more outof-the-ordinary. There was a Chinese restaurant, the Ni Hao, located in a strip mall beyond the school parking lot and a busy street. Although ours was a closed campus, Adele and I decided that a decent meal was worth the risk, and went there for lunch at least one a week.

10

I had a blank permission slip, signed by my English teacher, Mr. Corey, that I’d found on his classroom floor. I hoped it would serve as a pass to present to the authorities in case we were caught.

One day as we were coming back, the campus “police”—basically moms in cop uniforms, but fierce nonetheless—asked us where we’d been. I showed them my pass from Mr. Corey, which they didn’t believe was real for one minute. They led us back into school where a bemused Mr. Corey told them he hadn’t authorized anything. The housemaster suspended us for leaving campus without a legitimate permission slip and called our mothers to come pick us up.

I don’t know about Adele’s mom, but my own was furious that the school would suspend me for such a stupid infraction, although I think she really just objected to having her day interrupted.

Mr. Corey took my forged slip in stride in that kind, absent way he had, as he did the afternoon when our humanities class read aloud The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and made the argument that it was really about him.

MICHELE MARKARIAN, CAMBRIDGE, MA

“Best chile relleno I ever had,” my friend said yesterday. She couldn’t resist a warm packet of temptation offered by a woman in a striped rebozo and huaraches at one of the pueblos along the tracks. I’d been living on oranges and Dos Equis since we pulled out of Tijuana two days ago.

This morning, her eyes glassy, I take her clammy hand and guide her to a pair

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of seats under the only cold-air vent in our second-class train car. I lean my sweaty forehead on the grimy window, watch the rocky, creosote-gnarled hills of the Sonoran Desert flow by, and picture the fir trees on my university campus.

What am I doing in this furnace on wheels?

For three years I have hammered away at vocabulary lists, chanted verb conjugations with every stroke of my bike pedals, and forced my dictionaries flat until their backs broke, dreaming of the day I’d coax, complain, chastise and comfort in the language of Lorca. Verde que te quiero verde. But when I opened my mouth my face would redden, my stomach twist, and I would stare at my shoes, silent, afraid I’d warp my beloved Spanish with my blunt gringa breath.

She’s in the bathroom, again, and a man is about to sit next to me. I bring my hand down on the seat, look up, and say, way too loudly, “Está ocupado.” It’s taken.

Struck like a new coin, in a single blow.

He smiles and steps back.

That evening, on the platform between cars, I take a long drag on a short, dry Mexican cigarette. Scattered maguey cactus point tall, blue-green spikes to the sky. The sun burns like a low gas flame behind the hills.

VICTORIA LEWIS, PORTLAND, OR

readers’Nonfi notes 2021 VanderMey ction Prize

SPONSORED BY DR. RANDALL VANDERMEY F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

HONORABLE MENTION

CAROLINE TRACEY

ALEX PICKENS

MILDRED K BARYA

The Ephemeral Forever

Derecho

Mysteries and Symbols of My Past

F I NA L I STS ANNELISE JOLLEY

MARILYN MCFARLANE

SUANNY VIZCAÍNO

Luminosity

From Here on Out

Warnings

WALTER ROBINSON

JILLIAN WEISS

White Coat, Black Habit

Seven Seven

L A U R A J O Y C E - H U B B A R D

64 Inches MARIANNA MARLOWE

Wrinkles

S T E P H A N I E S A U E R

Five Ways to Effectively Collaborate with Teams

“THE EPHEMERAL FOREVER”

BY CAROLINE TRACEY

Jasmine V. Bailey says: “‘The Ephemeral Forever’ presents us with two women’s compelling stories: that of the queer rancher narrating and that of an aboriginal artist whose work and biography strike a chord with her. This essay posits a theory that it is possible to tract the historically ephemeral nature of queer experience to a lasting, satisfying life built with a partner and literally grounded in the land and its creatures.

The profundity and hopefulness of that idea will stay with me.”

Caroline Tracey is a writer originally from Colorado and currently living in Mexico City. Her nonfiction has appeared in n+1, Kenyon Review Online, The Nation, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and in Spanish in Nexos. In 2020 she was runner-up in the Bodley Head/Financial Times essay prize. When not reading and writing, you can find her exploring the city on a nineties Trek and gardening tomatoes in buckets on her rooftop.

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“DERECHO”

BY ALEX PICKENS

Jasmine V. Bailey says: “‘Derecho’ plunges us into the lyric mystery of Appalachia from the first word. It is the story of a week of power outage during a searing heat wave, inviting us into the trippy internal experiences the narrator has alone in the woods and encountering his own community in that extraordinary moment. The writing is lush, precise, and seductive.”

“MYSTERIES AND SYMBOLS OF MY PAST”

BY MILDRED K. BARYA

Jasmine Bailey says: “’Mysteries and Symbols of My Past’ remembers the healers from the narrator’s childhood village in Uganda. Each has a unique personality and expertise, skillfully drawn to show both their eccentricities and the gravitas their power commands. Their power even transcends death, as the narrator probes her memory of them to question modern and Western assumptions that discount such people’s powers or render them invisible.”

Judge Jasmine V. Bailey is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her book-length poetry collections are Alexandria (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), winner of the Central New York Book Award, and Disappeared (CMUP, 2017). Her chapbook, Sleep and, What Precedes It won the 2009 Longleaf Press Chapbook Prize. She is the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review’s Lawrence Goldstein Prize and Ruminate Magazine’s VanderMey Nonfiction Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, a PhD in creative writing from Texas Tech University, and has been a Fulbright fellow in Argentina, an Olive B. O’Connor fellow at Colgate University, and a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She is Translations Editor for The Common, and her translation of Silvina López Medin’s That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon.

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To whom do I owe the symbols of my survival?

—Audre Lorde.

I

LO OK BACK ON my childhood. Growing up, my family was friends with

medicine folk who resided in our village. There are lessons I wish I’d paid attention to then—I find myself thinking that the medicine people of my youth would have the answers to questions I now hold. Today, I live thousands of miles away from my country and continent. How to reach them again—how to tap into their spirits. That is my greatest conundrum.

They are all deceased.

Hanna She was a short, deep-skinned, elderly woman. We would often meet her on the road when I took walks with my mother. Hanna was an herbalist—she had a special connection with land, plants, crops, and all things food. If a thief happened to be stealing potatoes or maize from your garden, Hanna was the person to contact.

She would be quiet for a while, doing inner work. Accessing her spirit—like an act of meditation, a quieting of chattering minds in order to hear from our hearts and receive guidance from the collective intelligence—God, or one’s higher self, the ancestors, or whatever name is comfortable. A few minutes later, Hanna would know the culprit.

The issue would be resolved by the aggrieved member going to the thief’s home and saying something like, I know you’re the one who’s stealing from me. Stop it, before I do something terrible to you. Confronted, the thief rarely denied. The thieving would stop. Sometimes the offender would make a spectacle—not by denying but by begging for pardon. This required swallowing one’s pride and revealing that factors led to pinching: there was no food to feed the family, their gardens had failed—the soils were poor. Or they had no savings, had lost them to misfortune, etc. Could the aggrieved member be merciful—reach a new understanding? A dialogue of services that could be bartered for food would ensue—could they mow the yard? Trim hedges? Build fences?

Weed gardens? Make bricks? Remodel a kitchen?

Hanna’s methods always revealed that the problem was in the same orbit as the solution, like the head and tail of a coin. I remember how one time she tipped my chin with her index finger and looked into my eyes, which were terribly red and itchy. The skin underneath was sore, and yet I couldn’t resist the urge to scratch. “Eat more carrots and greens,” Hanna said. The veggies helped a little. Eventually, my father took me to the town ophthalmologist at Kabale Hospital. The specialist gave us a name—allergy—a good start. I hoped he would cure me. I was five or six, too young

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to understand the nature of allergies, but what struck me was the realization that Hanna dispensed with names—a distinct difference. I was, however, disappointed when the specialist recommended eating carrots and greens. Exactly what Hanna had said. “That’s it?” I asked. The doctor was discerning. He scribbled a prescription, and on our way home we bought eye drops from the pharmacy. The allergy persisted.

Next time I saw Hanna, she added local honey to the list of food for my eyes. I thought maybe she was trying to sweeten my temperament. Now I understand scientifically how eating local honey pollinated by bees in my area was a perfect antidote to boost my immune system, which then would combat my miserable pollen-related allergies.

I did not appreciate Hanna’s methods then. The fact that she did not explain the “science” of her approach bothered me. As a child, I would have been comforted simply knowing what, why, and how. I was yet to learn that some ways of knowing lie outside the rational. It was up to me to believe her or not. In retrospect, I see her as a health practitioner who believed that body ailments could be corrected with a particular diet.

Once, she made a small cut on my calf with a razorblade. She pressed her mouth on the cut and sucked out of my body the source of troubles. My parents gave her money for her help. Other times she’d prefer a basket of sorghum, or local brew. She didn’t talk much. But she had a way of listening and connecting to one’s body that made one sure of being heard.

Hanna, the energy corrector. Sometimes, my mother would give a long explanation of everything that was wrong. Hers was a catalogue of ills. To top it all off, she was convinced that a devil existed and was creating chaos within her. Hanna’s calm presence would soothe my mother’s buffeting ill winds. She would nod, and then walk away. That evening or the next day, she’d return with herbs or tinctures to rub onto the afflicted areas, and some to drink. In a week or so, my mother’s strength would be restored. Until Hanna’s expertise was required again.

I find myself wanting to sit with her in silence, absorbing her wisdom and letting her know of my deep respect.

Potomia We belonged to the same clan. Potomia lived in Buhara, about eight miles away. It seemed like another country—in my young mind, anything farther than a stone’s throw was a very long distance, and my view was magnified by the reality of not having a car.

We depended on our feet and single-speed bicycles. As an elder, we called Potomia our uncle. You’d think that would have made us close. But his visits were few and far between. During the nights he stayed at our home, it was clear he was on a mission that had nothing to do with us kids. He remained distant and seemed concerned only with the business of adults. He wore an old dark coat and hat, which heightened the air of

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aloofness and mystery. He was a fearful thing. I tried to hide whenever he appeared and my parents would call us to greet him. Afterwards, I’d surreptitiously follow him, my footsteps silent. He would turn when I’d least expected him to.

Embarrassed, I would dart away.

He walked around our house sensing the air—nose up, ears alert, hat pulled back.

I wish I’d asked him what he saw or what he was reaching for. I have baptized him the atmospheric man, since he was more into the atmosphere. He would sprinkle cleansing water and chant. Then he would enter the house and do the same in all the rooms. We would all be very quiet. Later, he would sit with my parents and any other grown-ups around, drinking beer or fermented sorghum porridge, chatting animatedly.

One time, Potomia gave us a graceful long-necked gourd, which we kept on the fireplace mantel in the living room. I asked my father why. I don’t remember getting a straight answer, other than a hint that there were things no one understood— ebirikutangaza—except for the medicine folks: obscurities and other extraordinary events that were only disclosed to those in touch with their higher consciousness.

Armed with that knowledge, I walked to our small farm and chose a patch where the grass was tall enough to cover me. I stretched on my back, my eyes poring over the sky. I don’t know what I expected. A hand of God would have sufficed. Clouds parted and revealed the bluest firmament. I was in no hurry, so I decided to focus on the different shades of blue as I waited—baby blue, royal blue, indigo blue (my school uniform), navy blue (my father’s umbrella), sapphire blue (my mum’s hair holder), and so on, until I dozed off.

Soon I heard the rustling of leaves, opened my eyes and there was a chameleon fleeing from a green snake. Oh dear! I was so scared that I ran home before attaining higher consciousness. Had I known what I know now, I would have registered two essential lessons: The snake and chameleon were probably manifestations of higher consciousness— the sacred—which not only dwells in the sky but inhabits the crawlers of the earth as well.

Our symbols are always linked to power and survival. My family reveres the chameleon because it is our totem. To see it is a good sign.

But I considered myself a failure and took to watching medicine folk. They performed miracles in our midst that amazed us and distinguished them from the rest of us ordinary people. It did not matter that they lived “normal” lives—for lack of a better word. They had homes, families, gardens, and were not isolated from us. While they were very important members of our community (everyone used their services), they did not stand out as special people who wished to be treated differently. If we met them on the streets, we hugged them. A typical greeting included questions about how

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we were, the chickens, goats, cows, sheep, how many chicks had hatched and which family member had malaria.

Bitonza I was a little in love with him. Just a little, which, in other words, means much. He was tall, big, and strong. He had a light complexion and a laugh that shook the hills.

What I would not give to hear his laugh! It was his most charming attribute—it came from his lungs, from the depth of his body, and it was infectious. I found myself happy in his presence, and I often asked my father to take me to his home in the neighboring village just to visit. My father would oblige, and didn’t think it strange—a six-year-old asking her dad to visit her beloved—who could have been in his fifties or sixties then.

I was smitten. Bitonza would give me a bear hug, then hold my hand and take me to his consultation room. I would walk around from wallpaper to wallpaper (imitating Potomia). Bitonza’s walls were covered with dried animal skins, all beautiful: leopard, lion, goat, and other creatures I didn’t recognize, but would ask about. He understood my fascination (my love!), and he always responded with kindness and respect. He embodied the spirit of play and fanned my curiosity. I’m glad my parents trusted him.

At some point, he let me sit in during patient consultations. Unlike others who would send children away when adult business was going on, Bitonza didn’t mind my staying.

I looked forward to telling my dad all about it. How to describe it? It was like being in other worlds. I was not yet exposed to dimensions beyond my immediate geography, so my current notion of the possibility of alternate realities didn’t apply, but I do remember feeling something sensorial—visceral—an awareness opening to include me, that was not part of this life as we know it. My village stopped being the small place that it was. Looking back, I can see that Bitonza was a portal to the expanse of the universe.

He performed more cuts on his clients’ bodies than any other medicine person I observed. Like Hanna, he would also put his mouth to the cut and suck out the cause of trouble. He would spit it all on a tray: snails, shells, tiny bones, and things that looked like broken teeth. Afterwards, he would assure his clients of their restored, natural well-being, and from then on to avoid so and so, or to make an ancestral offering: a bottle of alcohol and a pound of meat. He would tell them specifically where to place these items. I learnt that one’s gate, or entrance/exit points, were extremely significant. It was where the jealous people put their juju, and also where the dwellers put their protection symbols to safeguard themselves when going out and coming in. I asked Bitonza about the snails because they were alive. To this day, I do not know how that is possible. My father was right about the essence of inexplicable things. Even though I witnessed some of them, I’m not a step closer to in-depth comprehension.

Bitonza talked about sluggishness, a kind of bewitching that cripples the person from

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doing or accomplishing anything. In that sense, Bitonza was a doctor of spirit—great at sacred magic because he was able to go into the darkness and bring out light, to sift through flows of negative energy and draw in healing. While the body hosted the disease, the attack was on the individual’s spirit—fatigue, depression, lack of alertness, absence of motivation, and a general deficiency of well-being.

Whenever I feel sluggish, I remember the snails— How to doctor myself?

At the moment there is tension in my shoulders. What could be the spiritual implication? Perhaps a massage would do since I’m hunched over my desk for too

“Until that point, I’d assumed that everybody acknowledged and talked about their spirit as an essential part of their identity. It was my turn to be surprised.”

long. Perhaps a walk in the woods. I live in North Carolina and therapy exists in expensive forms. Whenever I visit my birthplace, Kabale, I talk with my sister about our childhoods, things the adults around us did that we can never fathom but simply respect.

I remember my first time arriving in the United States—I went to Syracuse University for my MFA program in 2009. Prior to that, I had been living in Senegal for three years, and while I had lived in Europe for a few months and also in other parts of Africa, it wasn’t until I was in Syracuse that I became awkwardly conscious of my speech idioms. It had been the norm when conversing with people to say things like: The spirit has impressed upon my heart this or that… My spirit doesn’t feel comfortable doing such and such. My new friends would roll their eyes. I would ask what was wrong, but they would say nothing. It was my mentor in the program who said, “You know, we don’t talk like that. This spirit thing you got, nobody talks like that.”

“But everyone has a spirit.”

“Really?”

Until that point, I’d assumed that everybody acknowledged and talked about their spirit as an essential part of their identity. It was my turn to be surprised. Shocked, in fact, to become suddenly aware of the absence of spirit where I was. I could not tell him that we talk of spirit as felt presence within us. That spirit leaves the body

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when one dies. You can literally hear the sound of its departure if you’re with someone dying. It comes out as a loud exhale. Alive, we receive guidance from it, so when we’re asked to perform a task, it’s common to say, “Let me see what my spirit thinks about that.” If the spirit says no, you don’t do it. If the spirit says yes, every part of your body resonates with it. If the spirit says no, but you reason with it, giving your mind the benefit of the doubt, along the way you discover the error of your judgment. The spirit doesn’t hold grudges because it has no religion. It’s the most universal feeling, a vibrant aspect of a human being. It’s not jealous or vengeful like the Old Testament God. And it’s not a trickster like most African gods. You can always honor it in the next decision-making. Even for those of us who acknowledge receiving feedback from the spirit, we don’t always stay on track. We have been trained to be rational. To go with the masses.

We’ve learnt to research, inquire of others (it’s a democracy!), and use a spreadsheet to tally the pros and cons of a given situation before making up one’s mind. On most committees when you’re asked to back up an opinion, saying that it doesn’t feel right may not be appreciated. We’re tasked to give data to support our rationale because the force of the better argument favors quotes, figures, scenarios, statistics… We want to be understood so badly that we eliminate things that cannot be known logically. We want to please others as proof of our collegiality even when it costs us joy.

However, all around the world are individuals who are in touch with their intuition and are willing to guide others how to connect with theirs, without sacrificing the benefits of rationalism, or what we attribute to the functioning of the mind. Shamans, acupuncturists, and energy healers use a variety of tools—stones, crystals, magnets, laying on of hands—to relieve the sick. There are beings for whom the supernatural is natural. I’ve heard of shamans and sangomas who can teleport across time and space, or thin out so as to pass through a wall. Can the rest of us ever comprehend such skill to shift shape, to be here and there, just like that? Other than the make-believe of science fiction, humans penetrating walls or turning into weasels in order to fulfill a higher purpose is beyond our ordinary grasp. My impression is that we don’t actually have to fully comprehend such phenomena but we can have enough room in our heartminds to accommodate them.

Hajji He attended to the business side of things. He was wealthy—one of the few people who possessed a car, beautiful houses, wives, and lots of well-dressed children.

He also owned shops and other buildings in town. Whenever we visited, we’d find his place filled with businessmen and women, mostly traders, who wanted magical success in their ventures. Hajji was busier than the other medicine folk, and his

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methods were cut and dried. Meetings with him ended quickly. He wore a watch and after no more than thirty minutes, he’d excuse himself to attend to another client.

I don’t remember him visiting our home. We went to him instead. I would accompany my parents but stay outside while they talked with him. Only once or twice was I allowed in his consultation room after asking so earnestly that he couldn’t say no. I wanted to compare, since I’d seen Bitonza’s. Hajji’s was larger and posh with black leather furniture. The animal skins were rugs instead, stripes of black and sparkling white. The ambience was clinical, lacked the warmth and coziness of Bitonza’s room which had more color—brown, yellow, cream and gray, in addition to black and white. As for Hanna, she lived in a small house and didn’t have a consultation room. She attended to clients in her bare living room or outside, like one who’d mastered the art of Zen minimalism.

What I found enigmatic about Hajji is that he’d made a pilgrimage to Mecca and occasionally paraphrased verses from the Quran. He was a Muslim and a magician, walking the line of ambiguity with ease.

He charged exorbitant fees for his services. Stories of doubling in the dark side of sorcery and Islam at the same time made me cautious, an impression I may have picked up from my parents. We had no problem with the Islamic aspect of his repertoire. We were practicing Protestants and Catholics, who also happened to believe in the knowledge of our ancestors. Religions, therefore, did not hinder us. It’s the dark part that we didn’t embrace. I’m not sure if a messenger of the Gods could pick and choose—it seemed like Hajji’s advice always contained a drop of poison that could injure or cure, like the rod of Asclepius with a serpent curled around it. It was said that Hajji could summon thunder and arrange for one’s enemy to be struck by lightning. Whenever I’d hear thunder or see lightning without rain, I’d wonder who was getting killed.

One time, my father sought Hajji’s advice before buying a used van from a high school. The van ended up a disaster. Almost bankrupted us. It needed major repairs, a new engine, tires, constant water refills, oil. When one item was fixed something else would break down. My father persevered—sold a cow, goats, sheep, and also leased a plot of land to take care of the van. As children, we were excited to have a car, even one that needed us to push it out of the garage before it could start. After the ignition, the engine had to stay running, until my mother cried, “Enough! Pat. Sell that thing before it ruins us.”

It turned out nobody wanted the van. Its fumes and body patchwork announced its condition ahead of what my father could possibly market. Finally, a mechanic bought and dismantled it immediately to sell individual parts. My father returned home with the license plate and a look on his face that should have warned me to keep my mouth closed. Instead, I welcomed him and asked how much the van had gone for. My father,

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always a Buddha, threw the license plate at me. Weirdly, I kept it under my bed. There was a tacit agreement about the van. Silence.

We got busy with other things, went through college, graduated, became employed, and some of my siblings married. One Christmas we gathered at the family table and I asked if anyone remembered the van’s plate. Like the dead one forgets to talk about until something shatters, we all began to release bits of memory about the van.

Nostalgia gripped my father and for the first time I saw his tears. “UVT 131,” I said.

“Oh my, you remember?” He was surprised.

That night as a family, we made new plans to purchase a truck to help my father with farm work.

Ngasige She was said to be a spirit medium. She would be good to consult at this time when a lot of people I love have died. Besides, I’m older. While the idea of communicating with a spirit medium is still uncanny, I have entertained it. Systems of divination and

“While the idea of communicating with a spirit medium is still uncanny, I have entertained it. Systems of divination and the afterlife appeal to me.”

the afterlife appeal to me. Anyway, Ngasige loved our family and visited often. We were somehow related—I think we called her our cousin. She owned several herds of cattle, goats, pigs, ducks, chickens, and three mean-looking dogs that she always brought when she came to see us. I was terrified of the dogs, and I hated visiting her as her yard was full of animal shit.

One time, she organized a huge party at our home. She showed up with an entourage of forty adults, each carrying a big basket of fresh produce—sorghum, millet, peas, potatoes, and wheat. We had slaughtered a bull in advance, cooked lots of food, and made barrels of local brew.

Everyone in our village was invited and, for three straight days, we ate, danced, and listened to stories around a huge fire. Ngasige loved roasted meat! Every few minutes she would shout at me to bring her another plate. She ate noisily and tossed the bones to her dogs. She was boisterous—the opposite of Hanna in every sense. Now that I think of her, I doubt if she talked with the dead. When would she do that? She was so alive and turned on by the physical, breathing world. I never saw her alone. She

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was always surrounded by a horde of people, chatting, giving orders, and having food brought to her. Parts of her body were covered in henna and glossy jewels —large beads from her wrists to her upper arms, anklets that tinkled like bells when she walked, and multicolored waist beads that rested on her large tummy. She was the only adult who exposed parts of her flesh like that. I’d steal glances at her belly and, when she caught me, she would shout, “You, come here!” Cold sweat would trickle down my spine and I’d lose my tongue. Symbols are always linked to our voices and womanhood.

I used to have nightmares about Ngasige or her dogs. The dogs would turn into monstrous lions chasing me. I’d climb a tree and they would jump onto it, snarling. I’d fall off the tree, only to wake up on the floor. Then I would climb into my sister’s bed and ask her to hold me until I was able to fall asleep again.

Bonesetters Rose was not considered a medicine woman, but I find her practice equally fascinating. She worked as a gardener, but if you had a broken or dislocated bone, Rose would sit on it and set it back in place. There was pain, the excruciating kind, she would inform you, but once she did her “enchantment” a person who was brought to her on a stretcher, unable to hobble, would be able to walk back home. How do you explain that?

She never accepted money for her bone-setting work. Perhaps there weren’t a lot of people with broken bones to make a lucrative living, or it was not necessary since she earned her livelihood by working in other people’s gardens.

She was my mother’s best friend and voiced her disappointment when one of my brothers who’d broken a shin playing soccer was rushed to the hospital. His leg was put in a cast for six months and after they took it off the x-rays indicated that the bone hadn’t healed properly.

The In-Betweenness of Worlds We were raised as— Well, let me say we were baptized in the Anglican church and taught the Bible.

Every night we prayed, thanked God for the gift of life, food, shelter, safety, kind neighbors, and so forth. Every Sunday, we went to church and sang in the choir. We were active members of our local Protestant church, and also the Catholic church.

This used to perplex my friends, so I would explain: my father was a Protestant while my mother was a Catholic. They’d agreed that we would be christened in the Protestant church but when it came to service, we could attend both churches. So we did. I especially loved the Catholic church because the members had a peculiar way of clapping and drumming that produced a staccato rhythm. Then two altar boys my age

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would walk in carrying censers, followed by a priest who would swing the censers to release a powerful frankincense scent. If we were sitting in a middle row, I would ask my mother to lift me and, with my nostrils up in the air, I would inhale deeply before sitting down. The priest would greet the congregation and proceed to conduct half the liturgy in Latin. The service never failed to put me to sleep. I would get poked in the ribs when it was offertory time. I would walk from the church refreshed, looking forward to the next Sunday.

The Protestant church required alertness, call and response songs, and the whole morning worship was in our language. The members, especially women, were often filled with the spirit, so at any one moment they would stand and break into a hymn or vibrant praise song. Everyone was required to stand and dance, followed by testimonies that tickled me: folks who had fornicated and were repenting (I asked my mother what that meant and she silenced me with a look). Even in my language, fornication— okushambana—was a long word I was not familiar with. Some were envious of their neighbors’ fortunes, others had backslid and were therefore not praying as they ought to… so many sins. It was fun! At some point, I was so moved that I stood up without knowing and shouted, “Praise the Lord!” That’s how I gave my life to Christ and started fellowshipping with the old women. They were outrageous, which is why I loved them.

We would meet every Wednesday evening at church. I was the youngest member. I was the only young person, and these women were in their fifties, sixties, and seventies.

Since I had no experience to speak of, or grievous sins, they did not mind confessing theirs in my presence. I learnt to put on a serious face so they would not send me back home before fellowship was over. Resisting laughter became my sin. Even when I was welcomed into their circle, I was aware of being outside it by virtue of my age. My gosh, these women were full of life: lustful, scheming to manipulate their husbands and describing everything in detail—full story—unedited versions.

Again, my world became larger than it had been. I would arrive home, satiated with other people’s stories, and my mother would ask me what I had learnt. I’d memorized the Ten Commandments, so I would recite them, and she would be very pleased. She made sure that I didn’t miss a single fellowship. I was fine with that.

These women were truthful—they genuinely loved God like my family did. And they loved the soft animals of their craving bodies like I do nowadays. In my understanding, they were complete—none of them broken—and they still sought to be touched by the compassion of a savior whose body was broken on the cross to atone for humankind.

They were simple village women with a lot of wisdom to go around. They knew how to give to Caesar what belonged to him, when to seek Hanna’s blessings or Bitonza’s, and be in church every Sunday to learn about other blessed mysteries. We all walked between the lines without doubting or ever forgetting that we were Beloveds of God, Gods, ancestors, and other humans.

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I find it challenging nowadays to be in situations that expect black-and-white, either-or scenarios. Nothing like a combination of choices to solve complex problems.

I for one never imagined that I would meet people who think of identity as a singular thing. One linear story—I am this or that, period. I belong to this party or that.

Nothing fluid or in-between. It makes me sad sometimes. How could we ever bridge our differences if we’re so polarized—too one-way?

I don’t mean to suggest that the world I grew up in was perfect, but I think it was perfectly imperfect and wholesomely human. There were several ways to approach a problem. A lot has changed—Christianity has taken on an element of fundamentalism, and our former spiritual healers, if they still exist, are in hiding and demonized.

Others openly practice terrible, dark things, because promoting well-being is not their intention.

Recounting these reflections has made me realize one basic quality that the medicine folk of my childhood shared: all were very grounded individuals. They did not have their heads in the clouds, and everything they did was in the service of a better life on earth. It is sometimes assumed that people who are engaged in metaphysical or mystic experiences are not practical— that they are airy or “cuckoo”.

But these folks’ grasp of reality was so strong that they never lost sight of it, whether their work was for their gain or for others.

What they gave came back to them.

I wonder in our modern lives, if we lose contact with profound mystery, won’t our creativity and imagination diminish years down the road? It is true that our physical world has its own bewilderment and rituals, yet I fear that too much emphasis is currently put on what we can tangibly prove, touch, and feel, while we neglect the spirit that inspires action, awakens our curiosity and trust. For what we seek in evolved beings is also what we seek in others and in ourselves—connection, communion, divinity, spontaneity, knowledge, love, harmony, peace, wellness—all the good that’s inexhaustible and ensures our sustainability as human beings.

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MARY JO FIRTH GILLETT

My Mother’s Feet after Stanley Plumly How she would lower them, her doll-like feet, into the enamel basin sprinkled with Epsom salts as if lowering her gnarled toes, calloused heels into a rejuvenating mineral spring, a fountain of youth. How she’d dip them delicately, almost lovingly, a jeweler gilding less precious metal.

And then, a quiet exhalation.

When the hard flesh had softened and the water cooled, she’d bring forth her cardboard emery board and go at it, sanding away the buildup of dead skin as a woodworker might take a plane to an old finish. It was fascinating and horrifying to my young eyes.

After she dried off each small foot, wrinkled and withered from the soak, they seemed somehow new, as if her ministrations were a ritual, something other than how one learns to almost embrace the hurts of a hard life, something more than accepting the body’s frailties as fact.

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JAMAICA BALDWIN

As the Nurse Fills Out the Intake Form, the Ocean Speaks Your Name after Gwendolyn Brooks When the nurse asks, have you ever been pregnant? I clench my teeth, hold my breath for what comes next: do you have any children? In the space between the questions, I heard the ocean sleepwalking, followed it up the road where in the middle, under the streetlight, it turned around. The mouth of the ocean spoke the name I never gave you, voices I never learned by heart, a body I never held pacing the hallways of motherhood pleading with God for sleep. In silence, the nurse records my answers. I meet her silence with the wind of my own quiet womb. Time calcifies your memory: the unbone, the unbreath, the songs we never sang, our voices never fading into sleep. I realize sorrow is not made solely of this blood. Wind forgives the mother who opted out, but mysterious is the still childless woman who chose the same dim impossible light. Listen, I wanted more joy to greet you, less time killed in thirst. I wanted more of me able to take on the world for her children.

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ALIKI BARNSTONE

Funeral Anagrams for the poet Monica Aileen Hand I don’t give a damn the undertaker made you pretty, an aim you didn’t pursue. Am I mean?

I couldn’t go to your funeral, no, I couldn’t accept you lain in open casket was a fitting coda of your life, your death cleaned from your face, yet not an icon of you in the sky, maybe an idol, your hands enlaced in prayer, posed in the lie you acceded to a creed, your skin in candlelight cold and bronze, chemically enhanced.

I didn’t want to join in, drop a clod on your casket. One day your carved name will be illegible, your stone lichened.

Your embalmed body can bear no likeness to your focus and calm as you Coptic-stitched a book, your sure hand.

You said of this last one you made for me: “The signature papers are an experiment, each I painted with different media.” I hold its beauty, keepsake of you, recalling you inclined toward your next poem, your next line set down as if the linen returned the ink to its homeland.

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JUDITH SORNBERGER

Weaving from the painting by Diego Rivera I want to believe nothing is lost— not a leaf or syllable, not a snip of thread or needle,

that the cobalt blue cabinet

holds everything that has passed beyond our vision, that the kneeling woman before it weaves the white hair of the dead, sinews of April skies, ebony of fallen feathers and red streamers of sunsets into a new pattern ancient as the mind of God. I want to see the lapis waves of her skirt as the sea we all began in, to believe the braid down her back holds codes for streams and paths, languages and equations, that the fabric rolled in her lap is the map of a beginning.

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SADDIQ DZUKOGI

Shattered A raven’s song echoes against a wall where the bark of a tree is a rough marble-face, a place to put his tongue so it says what needs to be heard. Nothing is sustained inside his mouth but stories, stories that deepen everything looking for light inside the raven’s mouth, steeped in the dense waters of morning.

Sadness runs like a white horse deep into the gravity human eyes have never touched until it scratches the place where a soul is weak, where a flaw is most visible, where light fills his bones until light and darkness collapse into each other.

The mind turns into a hem, a black hole where escape is a prayer that is never answered.

Prayer is now the dark side of light, a night so impenetrable, heavy with a silence that tears the neighborhood, his skin, his entire body.

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JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS

I too take shelter in the body in the picks & plows, millstones, the indelicate hands working a country back into loose soil. Above me, the once-scattered stars clump together for warmth. Only so much remains for my daughter to wish upon, for my son to name after mythical beasts, for my father to cradle between steepled fingers reciting my mother’s name over & over into specter. & our branches tire from holding so much nothing. Rope swing snapped, not anything like a noose. Wild grass browning around an empty silo. Not at all like the torch-lit bodies the papers promise will wash away with the next good rain. I too take shelter in this Catholic silence, in the overworked machinery rusted in place, reddening the field, in these patchwork hands whiter than next season’s hard frost. Here, a burn barrel for our unmended shingles, the collapsed shed out back, the part of the animal we didn’t bother to eat. Here, son, is your myth, your beast, where we watch a fawn crawl back into bullet.

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B

LACK CLOUDS ON the mountains, black clouds rising so high sparkling

purple crystals touch the stratosphere on the fringes. The woods go dark, the ravines nearby sinking like grooves where ink drained off a topographical map. Crows vanish in the sky, and when the power goes out, our house goes dark, too.

Weather channels gave no warning. Neighbors did not call. An ominous monster looms over Appalachia, slithering through the woods, blowing trees just to see how far they will bend before they break. Many break. A boom like a cannon and half an oak topples in our yard, shivering and snapping as it lands. I close the door, and darkness engulfs me and my family. We light no candles, turn on no flashlights, hiding from whatever is moving through the forest. When it passes, it leaves most of central Appalachia in the nineteenth century. For some people around here, not much changes.

Then the heat arrives. One of the worst heatwaves in years, I have never known heat like this, day after day of triple digits with no A/C to stand in front of with my shirt up around my shoulders, feeling the cold wind after venturing out in the broiling heat to jog through forests on paths through the 125-acre plot I call home—a forest now decimated. There was a blight this year, a blight that weakened the trees, and the ones that have toppled behind the shed have chalky blocks of burgundy wood in the rotted core, wood that crumbles in my hands, a forest that has aged. Rotting: when time is sped up, when the fibers of life age prematurely. The storm’s rage exposed the gaps in time, and now the forest is calibrating, slowing down, stopping.

This monster changes the rhythms of life, rhythms that fade until I lose track of them. It no longer matters which side of the house wall I am on. Heat drains out of the hills and into seas of molten air, valleys and yards and gravel roads filling and becoming impassable. Now I am an interloper in summer who has lost his way. No clocks, no screens, no communication, even the phone lines are broken.

Insects inhabit heat, this much I know. The hotter it gets, the slower I move, and the faster the spiders move. Sometimes I can hear the big ones running in the woods from a distance. When the heat thickens and slows me to a crawl and I sit at the base of a tree to rest, I hear the tiny ones skittering across the brittle leaves. There are more than you think. The cicadas, the soundtrack of heatwaves, hiss like a dentist drill mining my skull, until finally the logic that had strung together what few thoughts I could muster comes unwound in the unending afternoons when I wander alone, sleep-deprived from nights lying next to my open window and wondering how it could still be 88 degrees and muggy at 11 p.m., come unwound like a spool of fishing line.

There is a big one on the other end and I think he’s going to get away.

EVERY AFTERNOON I STAND in the gravel road, our 1.5-mile long driveway, and stare

at the western skies, praying for a thunderstorm to cool it down, to quiet the cicadas for a moment so I can regather my thoughts, but rain never comes. Ever since the looming darkness plowed through from that direction, nothing comes from the west anymore 33

except heat. My mother asks me what I was doing out there in the driveway when I come inside, and I tell her I was praying for rain. She does not say anything. She once told me she believed Satan sometimes sweeps across the country, usually north to south, wreaking havoc and causing school shootings and unrest and natural disasters. I wonder if maybe when he came through this time he left the door opened to hell. I am not sure I should say this to her, she might think I am belittling her intuition, and one ought never belittle a mother’s intuition. Besides, just thinking these words makes me want to take a nap under an oak tree by my water garden, where my pet ducks give me accusing looks because I have not given them fresh water in days.

I take my axe, because my axe still works when the TV doesn’t and I can no longer concentrate on my research of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, and I wander into the woods to cut down pines. I hate pines. Forty foot weeds whose snot fossilizes on car windshields, sticky bark like bran flakes with too much honey clinging to my shirt, conspiring together to hide trespassers during hunting season when all the other leaves have fallen, trespassers that I sometimes chase. Fear is not something that comes naturally to me, and as I swing my ax in the heat, shirtless and grimacing with every shuddering blow, I think about my brother, my opposite, the man who once said to me Alex, I’m not sure if there’s anything you’re scared of. I used to take it as a compliment, but these days I wonder.

It is too hot to cut down the big pines, so I have found smaller ones far from home, somewhere near the border with my neighbor, the miscreant who let a hunter onto his property, a hunter who nearly shot my little sister with a high-powered rifle—and then justified himself when we called. I forget his argument; it did not matter.

I hack the pines down near power lines after eyeballing distances and trajectories, but my lazy trigonometry betrays me when the tallest pine tangles in the power lines.

Is there electricity in these lines or is the outage further down? I have to get the tree disentangled before someone sees, before power companies blame me, before my brother laughs at me. The lower ones are for phone lines, right? I won’t get electrocuted if the tree is touching those. And I have rubber-soled shoes, so I will be insulated. Standing on the angled trunk, cicadas laughing at me, I jump up and down on the tree because this makes sense on the fifth day of 103 degrees. The power lines shiver and twitch as I jump like an excited capuchin monkey, the pinecones hooked over the wires, jump until the tree snaps free and the black lines of information that the storm has rendered useless undulate like sound waves, light waves, heat waves. I have been ridiculous and some part of me knows it, but it is too hot to care.

Besides, I fear nothing.

I WALK HOME, horseflies droning around me. Then I notice I have stopped moving,

standing in the sun as horseflies and deerflies circle. A corpse of myself, like the blighted trees. I start walking again, though I have nowhere to be. I start walking again 34

because this is what the living do, or so I have heard. I start walking again because humanity has walked for thousands of years to get me to this point, and I must continue to walk to get humanity to wherever they are going.

When I walk through the doors of the local grocery store, the deli stockers are pitched into the coolers like vomiting sailors, throwing out pizza and crab legs, anything not native to the land, before it stinks the place up. Too late for that, but at least they are trying. Kroger’s backup generators are running, but I guess fuel has run out or they are only strong enough to keep the lights burning. No one expected the power to be out for this long, so all of the perishables are perishing. And wandering among the country folk are unnatural, misshapen shut-ins who have emerged from their wilderness hideaways in search of canned food and clean water. I stare at them because here in the Virginia mountains people stare like it’s a pastime. I stare at them because I know this is the only time in my life that I will ever see these endangered specimens of Appalachia in public. And they stare right back. And I think of spiders.

What caused the power outage? Not a hurricane. It came from the wrong direction, from the other side of Appalachia, beyond West Virginia, where none of us go unless we have no plan to return. And there was no rain. Hurricanes have rain. It was not a tornado, though winds surpassed 80 mph. When the power company comes through after many days, searching for their toppled poles in the rattlesnake-infested brush and marveling at how many of their lines snapped, they call it a derecho. We ask them what a derecho is, what a derecho means, but they don’t know. It’s what experts are calling it, they tell us, as if a name makes it comprehensible. Name it and maybe we won’t fear it. Name it and maybe it won’t come back. Never come back, derecho.

THE DERECHO OF 2012. One of the most destructive natural disasters Appalachia

has ever seen, but you’ve never heard of it, because this is the land of forgotten wonders, of overlooked demographics, where the only natural disasters to hit are the ones that no one understands, the ones that happen because a hurricane wandered so far off course meteorologists lost it, the ones that must be named because they cannot be explained, the ones that have purple-fringed clouds touching the heavens like the foam of a colossal wave about to crash. Here, meteorological phenomena emerge and vanish in an instant because here there are secrets, unnatural natural disasters that leave families huddling in church basements and drivers dodging downed lines and trees.

By the sixth day, logic is in disarray and memories have become hopelessly muddled in the overheated monotony. But I remember that white oak. White oaks are so hard that when my father cuts them for firewood, his chainsaw blade becomes dull and smokes by the time he is halfway through, but the derecho has brutally bent this one in half, the fibers tangled together like a rope twisted too far and then released, like a green sapling a child has wrenched beyond recognition in a fit of impatience. Broken 35

majesty, it stands like a tortured dissident, a tree the storm took offense to when it refused to bend, to play along with the game. The trees around it, trees that were far more brittle, stand untouched. The place is haunted by the memory, as if it has seen something it should never have seen, and I leave, though I will revisit it many times in the future. It is always very quiet there.

At least the bugs are having a good time. They sing in the treetops, giant hornets zip past my ears munching the heads of cicadas that are still hissing, grasshoppers sail on the oceans of heat, and, several days into the heatwave, the bugs begin partying in the rotten trees. Carpenter ants and termites congregate as a boring bug makes tiny scratching noises, like twisting corks being loosened in wine bottles, like a million tiny washboards harmonizing in the forest as they harvest the pulp of the trees that have been toppled in the maniacal rampage of the derecho. The forest is letting the insect hoard remove its fallen, the forest is celebrating life, the forest is celebrating death, the forest is persisting. And I am here not because I am on my way somewhere else; unlike most of the world, I do not walk through forests to get to a destination: I walk because this is where I belong. This is my destination, and I will always return no matter how far I wander. I am not an outdoorsman. I am the outdoors.

I can tell the time of day by the smell of the undergrowth½I can identify any animal of Appalachia by the noise it makes on the leaves½I can see variations in the trees when the wind blows and know if there is an animal in the limbs and divine what kind½I can watch nervy birds and know where the predator is and what species it is½I can listen to blue jays and cardinals and wrens and know when they are lonely or when they are playful or when they are cussing each other out½I can tell what the squirrels are saying when they chuckle and spit at each other above my head½I can distinguish the silence of a contented forest from the silence of an uneasy forest from the silence of a sleeping forest from the silence of an angry forest from the silence of a watching forest because I have just appeared with an axe on my shoulder½I can watch a vulture and know if he is circling because he has found something delightfully dead or because he is enjoying the late morning updrafts½I can walk past deer who know me and be so close I might reach out and touch their noses—even when they have fawns that buck and run parallel to me when I jog½I can tell the difference between a rabbit’s ears perked because he senses danger and a rabbit’s ears perked because he senses family and know whether family is coming to socialize or settle an old score. I don’t know how I know all of this, but I do.

WHEN I WENT to college after nearly two decades in the Appalachian wilderness,

I took my girlfriend to Massanutten mountain one night to see the moon, and when we walked back I sensed tension in the forest. I listened as my girlfriend talked, but when a branch snapped strangely I shushed her because something was wrong. The forest 36

was silent, and I knew which kind of silence this was, and I didn’t like it because the bear was too close and he did not know I was there. Then, I clapped my hands once so loudly the darkness echoed sharply, and I knew from the silence what expression that bear had on his face as he leaned away from me and then barreled down the hill, so close to us that my girlfriend clenched my arm until the nails dug into my skin. The cataclysm-crashing charge of black bears moving in the opposite direction because black bears are the biggest cowards in the East and I love them to death.

For twenty years I walked the forest for hours every day, for twenty years I got closer to the forest, for twenty years it shaped me. Eventually, the forest accepted me, and when it accepted me, it told me its secrets. The forest is my mood when I am with it; the forest is alive, and I live with it; so when the bugs break out in a hoedown in the height of the simmering summer, I join them. Sitting on a stump beneath shafts of sunlight that fall like Jacob’s Ladder in a clearing in the forest, among the fiddlesticks and blueberry bushes, I listen to the rhythms of the scratching in the trunks and tap my foot and hang my head in the haze to doze and groove with the arthropods. This derecho has gotten me closer than I have ever been to the forest, closer than I have ever been to my family, closer than I have ever been to myself.

AFTER SIX DAYS (or more), I cannot sleep. The forest cannot sleep. Nearly 90

degrees at 10 PM when I get out of bed to go for a walk, I know the forest is tired from so many all-nighters, and the walk is surreal. Moonlit contours, a charcoal painting in bad light, stars floating in the smog, when a gunshot goes off in the distance. Then another gunshot, in a part of the forest where no one lives. Standing on a hill in front of an unoccupied building, I listen to gunshots multiply. Sporadic reports of gunfire echo up and down the ravines, and I strain to hear, heat-thickened blood pounding in my ears. I know the sounds of the forest, but sounds that people make here confuse me, because these mountains do strange things to noise, as if to mix up intruders so that they became disoriented and turned around and walked right back out. Echoes and their source overlap in the deep hollows here, and sometimes I can’t tell which has come first, so I do not know where the gun is. When the gunshots stop, the forest is silent, though I do not recognize this silence. The forest is as confused as I am. I shrug at the forest and walk home.

In bed, I lie on my back, naked, staring at the stars, when the gunshots start again at exactly midnight. Multiplying, spreading, filling the forest, I wonder if an impromptu Civil War reenactment is taking place among mountain men whose boredom has finally gotten to them (and I wonder if they need a standard bearer), but then sirens sound in the distance and I know something unusual is afoot. Throwing on a pair of pants, I walk through the woods in the only direction that makes sense. Up and down ravines, through spider webs, past sleeping owls, mashing molehills, sliding down stumps dusted with bug-made sawdust, I walk past ten-foot high barbed wire along the 37

border with the neighbor’s (that one who nearly got my sister shot—hence the barbed wire) until I see it. There on the horizon an orange inferno glows, bizarre. Through black silhouettes of trees, light pulses, skies glow in the wilderness of one of the darkest regions of the East.

I sit down in the leaves, astounded, and thoughts that have drifted apart over the last ten (or so) days sluggishly reconnect. I watch, wondering, as the orange glow fades behind the hill, and then I hear laughter. Laughter? Who would be laughing about the biggest shootout the mountains have ever seen? Suddenly, rediscovered facts come together of their own accord, as if God is letting me in on a private joke.

June recently ended. It is now early July. My neighbor, who lives a mile up the valley and has always enjoyed extravagance, a man who is a relativist when it comes to law, a man who owns racehorses and once jokingly accused my brother of “stealing” his tadpoles when he found my brother wading barefoot in his creek with a tiny terrarium, has been the victim of a cosmic coincidence. This neighbor has a large barn down the valley, closer to our house than his, and the conflagration has taken place in that approximate location. Like an epiphany firing spark plugs, my mind revives and I know what has happened: my neighbor stored a colossal stockpile of fireworks in that barn and the stockpile ignited in the extreme heat and went off, one-by-one, until a flame hit the motherlode at midnight, exactly when July 4 began. Independence Day, the dawn of the American nation, the spark of a newfound identity, the light of liberty.

I suppose it came a little earlier than anticipated for my neighbor friend. All mysteries solved, I walk home, laughing the entire way, thinking clearly for the first time in days and inordinately proud of my country.

When the power comes back on the next day, I stand in front of the air conditioner with my shirt pulled above my shoulders, feeling the cold wind engulf me until my chest is numb. I think about my neighbor, and how Appalachia has managed to get the last word. This wilderness always reclaims its rightful place, when history is forgotten in the forests of Appalachia, as history always is, because Appalachia will never change, because any alteration feels as if it has always been here, as if the past is just a trick of the mind. Life is a circular dream in the mountains, and you forget about everyone else hidden in the nooks and ravines all around you as you wander this temporal milieu, but for that one heat spell in June and July, when the clocks all stopped and everyone forgot their quibbles and quodlibets, we all came together as one in the grocery stores.

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SUNNI BROWN WILKINSON

April 23, 2020 and Today Is Shakespeare’s Birthday and it’s raining, a grand gray opening to the day, the bucolic dramas unfolding in the grass, in the nest, in our own humming houses.

Another friend’s heart broken, and starcrossed trees throw their white confetti over the budding peonies. All of us are masked now, playing a part, not quite sure of our lines but the rhythm like our heartbeats leads us on.

All the world’s a stage and the play must go on despite fresh graves, all the Yorricks we have loved, the great monologue of death rolling through the evening news, armies of us lurching to the store to Home Depot, lost but gathering seeds, flowers, like Ophelia: daisies for innocence we’ve lost, violets for our faithfulness in dark times, rosemary for remembrance of what we once were, still want to be.

At the throne, our own mad king, a Lear still loving the wrong daughters, the crude, threatening tirades, and yet life is still a miracle. Here on my lawn quail chase through wet grass.

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Rock cress flaunts its yellow stockings.

Mourning doves sing life’s a tragedy but all afternoon the swallows peer in our windows and we laugh with our children again, watch the bread muscle its long rising.

The fog moves in and the rain falls like a curtain on a play we’re still naming. If we’re lucky, this one’s about redemption.

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ANDREW HAYES . Shadow, 2019. Fabricated steel and book paper.

14 inches x 10 inches x 7.5 inches. Photo Credit: Steve Mann.

ANDREW HAYES: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I work with book paper and steel, two materials with very different meanings in the context of our daily lives. The book is an object of education, growth, and escape. Steel is trickier to see and often invisible: its forms make up so many primary structures in our constructed environment. Using book paper and steel, I explore these meanings and find a curious harmony between these materials and the flexibility, history, mass, and density both possess.

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STACEY LEE WEBBER . The Craftsmen Series: Ladder, 2010.

Copper pennies silver soldered together with brass accents. 36 inches x 36 inches x 72 inches

STACEY LEE WEBBER: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

As a contemporary artist, Webber cherishes working with found materials whose history is physically evident. Her work is often described as meticulous, pushing the boundaries of everyday recognizable objects to the point of being unidentifiable.

Through these materials, she strives to make artwork that appeals to a broad range of viewers and challenges their preconceived notions of the objects that surround them.

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STACEY LEE WEBBER . Coin Vessels: Penny Teapot V1, 2017.

Copper pennies silver soldered together with brass accents. 12 inches x 10 inches x 10 inches.

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JILL BAKER GOWER . Patterned Rosette Brooch, 2009.

Vitreous Enamel on copper, argentium sterling silver, stainless steel, velvet. 3 inches x 3 inches x 1.5 inches.

JILL BAKER GOWER: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I create jewelry and sculpture informed by my female experience, exploring how advertisements, popular culture, beauty products, and fashion trends portray what women need or want. Ornate mirror frames, tools used for beautification, faceted gems, and the human body inspire the design of these objects. The surfaces of the work are often lace patterned and at times include actual crocheted elements. I include crochet for its lacey, frilly appearance and due to my interest in the technique, as well as because it has historically been viewed as a women’s skill. Materials such

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JILL BAKER GOWER . Golden Reflection Brooch, 2017.

Argentium sterling silver, 14K gold fill wire, mirrored acrylic, 23K red gold leaf, stainless steel. 3.75 inches x 1.75 inches x 1.25 inches.

as skin-toned rubber and mirrors illustrate the human body, self-examination, and vanity. Other materials like pearls, gems, feathers, enamel, hair, silver, and gold are chosen for their aesthetic qualities, emotional resonance, preciousness, and value associations.

I aim for my work to be both beautiful and playful, and at times even absurd or humorous; it addresses my own repulsion, frustration, and at the same time attraction to gender-based expectations.

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SARAH PERKINS. Corroded, 2017. Copper, enamel.

3.75 inches x 4.5 inches x 4 inches. Photo Credit: Tom Davis. Collection of Emily Berg.

SARAH PERKINS: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

As a metalsmith I use properties of the metal: its plasticity, permanence, and dimensionality. As an enamelist I use properties of the glass: its preciousness, surface qualities, and color. In my work these properties function together to make a whole, with the two materials complementing and completing each other, rather than either being more visually important than the other. I find enameled containers to be eloquent, a compelling blend of self-containment, secrecy, and preciousness.

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SARAH PERKINS. Orchid Container, 1992. Copper, silver, vitreous enamel.

4 inches x 4 inches x 3.5 inches. Photo Credit: Tom Davis. Collection of Janet Bouley.

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NOAM ELYASHIV. Balanced, pendant, 2019.

Silver, 18K Gold. 3. 5 inches x 3.75 inches x 0.5 inches. (23” chain).

NOAM ELYASHIV: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Desert: I grew up in a desert city, where dust was unavoidable and the topography flat and silent. My visual memories are of light, openness and sand. The glowing horizontal landscape felt boundless and mysterious. I refer to the desert as a metaphor. It teaches me that to find understanding and beauty, one needs to be present, and wait. In time, our eyes learn to see through the flat surface and we come to realize its depth. There will be fine imprints of life and countless time lines, but at night the wind will erase all traces. And tomorrow is, again, a beginning.

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NOAM ELYASHIV. Split Curve, brooch, 2017.

Silver, 18K Gold. 2.125 inches x 1.125 inches x 0.5 inches.

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ARTIST ALL CAPS . Art title, no 11, 20xx.

Black-and-white photography. Description.

MYRA MIMLITSCH-GRAY . Stretched Platters, 2014.

Porcelain enamel on fabricated steel. 3 inches x 27 inches x 6 inches.

MYRA MIMLITSCH-GRAY: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I explore fracture as an idea, image, and process, conceptualizing material conditions to construct fictions and portraits. My technical methods are deliberate: force and tools displace the metal; residual marks document the process. The trace is conversant with the staged, formal outcome. Together, they reflect ideas about how and why we build things.

Forging is a subject that I interpret through mimicry and sleight. Or it is a practical assertion—the intent to move form forward. The forged ideal is achieved when the original stock disappears, fully transformed into a new image. My work is at times a forgery of the forged, a literal and conceptual fabrication.

I build tension between the familiar glassy skin of enamel and the unconventional form, between gesture and structure in a material parody. The organic process is tempered by a clean, analytical slice.

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MYRA MIMLITSCH-GRAY. Oval Band, 2007.

Brass. 10.5 inches x 21 inches x 8 inches.

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BEN D ORY.

Hematite and Sequin Ring, 2019. Stainless, hematite, sequins.

2.5 inches x 1.5inches x 1.5 inches.

BEN DORY: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Excerpt from Dory’s Metal Museum solo exhibition, Kissing Numbers, in Memphis, TN: Ben Dory is fascinated with the how of granulation, an ancient technique where small, primarily gold spheres are fused together using a torch or kiln. How do spheres of various sizes fit together and form simple, repeatable structures?

Dory is a pioneer of the stainless steel granulation technique and uses special machines to individually micro-weld the steel granules together and onto a base surface. His work both honors the tradition of granulation and breaks from it. His work begins by following certain geometric guidelines, but his creativity is not constrained by them. According to Dory, “as the granules move away from vertical stacking and onto curved surfaces, the rules bend…” and previously finite strategies blossom with potential. As Dory explores the possibilities, his style shifts from scientific and molecular to emotive and ornate, reminiscent of the Victorian era with all its flourishes.

Dory relishes the exacting and inspiring challenge that granulation presents today’s artists.

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BEN D ORY.

Teal Ring, 2019. Stainless, nanosital, cubic zirconia.

1 inch x 0.75 inches x 0.5 inches.

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JOHN RAIS. Hard Leisure, 2004. Steel, copper, brass, paint.

24 inches x 29 inches x 24 inches. Photo Credit: D. James Dee.

JOHN RAIS: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Through metal, I build a language that reflects the human condition as well as the fragility and strength of our relationships to each other, and our planet. At its core, my work is an exploration into connectivity—those things or phenomena that make us feel a connection to ourselves and each other. It is a celebration of connectedness and relationship in a time of separation, isolation, and solitude. I make the objects that I wish I could find, in a world I idealize, as an aspiration to our blended selves.

Admittedly, the love of making prevents me from ever finding exactly what I am looking for, or even knowing what it is.

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SOPHIE GLENN . Twins, 2013. Cast bronze. 3.5 inches x 1.5 inches x 4 inches.

Photo Credit: Jean Vong Photography.

SOPHIE GLENN: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

This piece is part of a series of small, cast bronze chairs, and was the first instance in which I combined my love of furniture making with my educational background in sculpture. The chairs were first made out of wax, allowing me to make the forms much more gestural. They were later cast in bronze using the traditional “lost wax” technique. The miniature scale and the idea that these familiar forms can be handled in a totally different way was intriguing, adding to their delicacy and intimacy.

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NILS HINT. Cutlery Pieces, 2020. Forged iron, readymade.

19 inches X 23 inches (approximately).

Collection: MUDAC - Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland.

NILS HINT: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I work with iron. It is my medium for expressing things that are hard for me to say or imagine without the presence of the physical material. Often the work, the process, is technically very complex as well as limiting. It is my hope this makes me think twice about what I have to say with my work, and to help me to be more focused.

After this clumsy attempt to understand who I am, I still have to say that it is quite irrelevant for me to define my practice. I prefer not to load my pieces with too many words. I work with movement, movement in space and time, and my ever-evolving relationship to this never-ending motion.

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E. KRISTIN ANDERSON

In The Hopes I Can Spell Out My Name after Aimee Mann I keep checking my garbage disposal to see if it’s broken again or if that was just a dream. This is how I find clarity, how I know I’m still here. Even when I feel like a ghost I am deeply aware of the space I take up and I think about each breath of air and forget how to breathe and this almost feels like magic. There’s a joke here somewhere, floating in the wind, tired. But we haven’t spoken in a year and you never thought I was funny. Still I’m willing to swim in cliché every time I tell you that my body is a catalog of bad news—it’s been too long since I’ve seen the inside of a hospital and I don’t know how to modulate the things I can’t see, how to sleep through another siren. These debt collectors call anyway and, despite death, this is the borrowed time I fear the most. And I try to separate you from this, from the woman I’ve become, but there you are, disappointed. I often think of that Ouija board you got me for Christmas one year. I was fourteen and I hid it in my closet. I already had enough ghosts.

Now I’m just a few photos in your house and with that perspective I create my own body, let the artist ease a moth into my skin, buy clothes that fit, hide your letters in the back of that one cluttered drawer. There’s weight and there’s anger and they creep up on me even if correlation is not causation.

I’ve learned to translate that look in your eye and I’ll never wear it. Tonight I cut a curled telephone cord in half, and in half again—and again and again until your chain reaction is my own story. I can hold it in my hands, all these pieces.

I can collect everything that shines and build an image in silver to serve as a map, wash it in the creek—I’ll always know what I saw. What I made.

Even when I am a ghost I can turn the lights on and know I’m still here.

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M I L D R E D B A RYA

T

HERE WAS A rumor going around that a monster was picking off kids.

“Come on, guys, there’s no monster in this town,” said Benji.

The rest of us—me, Beth and Richie—looked at Benji dubiously.

“You sure?” asked Richie, eyebrows pulled tight.

“Sounds like something a kid made up to scare other kids,” said Benji.

“Nah,” Beth shook her head. “I heard these two ladies talking at the grocery. They weren’t kids, they were adults.”

Eyes were on Beth. Benji sucked in his cheeks, annoyed.

“What’d they say?” I asked.

Beth looked pleased to be the center of attention. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “I can’t remember exactly.” She said this out of the corner of her mouth, the cigarette dangling from the other corner. “They didn’t say monster. They said something like, ‘there’s an evil taking our kids’ or ‘there’s an evil in this town,’ something like that.”

“An evil?” Benji looked like he was going to laugh.

Beth removed the cigarette from her mouth. “They were church moms, you know.

Think the devil gonna come for their precious kids and whatnot.”

“That shit ain’t real,” said Richie.

Beth shrugged and tapped her cigarette. “They were talking about if it’s safe for kids to play outside and stuff like that.”

“There ain’t no monster,” said Richie.

“Yeah,” said Beth, “not real flesh and blood, not like Leather Face or anything.”

“Leather Face wasn’t real,” Richie pointed out.

“Before he was based on a real person,” I argued. Though to be honest, I doubted myself as I said this.

“No he wasn’t,” Benji said. He looked at me like I was stupid.

“Honestly,” Beth tapped her cigarette again. “Who gives a shit about Leather Face or this evil or whatever? I mean I live with a goddamn evil monster.”

“There are worse things in the world than your dad,” said Benji.

Beth stared at Benji coolly and smoked her cigarette. “Easy for you to say.”

•••

WHEN I GOT back to my house that night, my mom was standing in front of the

kitchen sink. The water was running, but she wasn’t washing any dishes. She was leaning forward, hands planted on the edge of the counter, everything written in the slump of her shoulders, in their delicate trembling. I crept through the kitchen, hoping she wouldn’t turn and look at me. I didn’t want to have to see her face. My tennis shoes made light tapping sounds on the grimy linoleum floor, but my mom didn’t move. She wanted to avoid the interaction as much as I did. I shut myself in my bedroom and stood still for a moment, listening. I could still hear the water running

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in the kitchen. I could also hear the television in the den. I knew my father was sitting in his leather armchair, watching television, swirling bourbon in a thick-bottomed glass. It sounded like he was watching Gunsmoke. One could gauge my father’s mood based on which television show he was watching, how much time he’d had to drink his bourbon. Gunsmoke meant he’d already been sitting there for an hour and a half.

That was enough time for anything. That meant I wasn’t leaving my room. My house was either saturated in a still, tepid quiet, where one feared moving too much, or a red maelstrom of anger roiling off my father. One had to be careful of where one stepped. I lay back on my bed and made myself very still. I listened to the faint, distorted sounds of the television bleeding through the walls. I heard the water in the kitchen shut off.

The light outside my window had compressed down into a perfect crepuscular indigo.

•••

BY THE TIME I woke the next morning, everyone in my house was gone. My father

was at the gun and ammo shop we owned. My mom was at the hospital where she worked as a nurse. My sister was either with her boyfriend or working at the pizza place/bowling alley/arcade. I wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

The assortment of items inside were uninspiring: a carton of milk, eggs, slices of cheese, a tomato, a jar of pickles. I ate a slice of cheese, then wandered into the bathroom. The counter was littered with my sister’s makeup. I uncapped a lipstick and carefully twisted the color out of the tube. I eyed myself in the mirror as I applied the lipstick. The spread of pink across my mouth was mesmerizing. I made a popping sound with my mouth by pressing my lips tightly together and then blowing out. I tilted my head, watching my reflection. I pursed my lips. I pouted. I turned my body and pushed out my chest. The effect was disappointing. My girlish body still lacked all sign of curves. I decided that I was not very pretty, not the way my sister was. Strangely, I found myself comforted by this. As I watched my reflection, I got embarrassed. At the sensation of someone watching me, blood rushed into my cheeks.

In the mirror, my reflection looked foolish and sticky. I felt sick to my stomach. I took a wad of toilet paper and wiped the lipstick off my mouth. It smeared onto my face and I yanked more toilet paper, frantic to remove all evidence of this moment from my being. I tossed the pieces of toilet paper into the toilet and flushed. My pulse rattled as I watched the pink-stained paper twist away out of sight. I stepped carefully out of the bathroom and looked around, listening to my house. It was still and silent. No one was there.

••• I HAD LIVED in the same town my whole life, a town that looked faded, had

looked faded, as long as I could remember. It was the kind of place that felt coated in dust, or the idea of dust. It settled in the lungs and kept people from being able to

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breathe properly. I couldn’t remember the last time it had rained. Sweat gathered under the straps of my backpack, making my t-shirt wet. Beth was standing outside the gas station, smoking a cigarette. She saw me approaching and waved her hand, smiling. Beth’s soft brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her fingers holding the cigarette were slender and beautiful. She handed the cigarette to me and I inhaled.

“I think they know I steal from them,” said Beth, tilting her head toward the gas station.

“Yeah?” I handed the cigarette back.

Beth nodded. “Yeah, but they let me get away with it. I think they feel bad for me.”

“Bad for you?”

“Yeah,” said Beth, squinting.

I looked through the front window at the man behind the counter. He had been there for as long as I could remember. He had wrinkles pressed into his face.

I held out my hand and Beth passed the cigarette back to me.

A man walking out of the gas station eyed us. I stared back boldly.

“Aren’t you a little young to be smoking?” he asked. We stared at him and shook our heads. We had been smoking for years.

••• THE CLEARING WAS our spot; it was where we always met. It was among a

grove of trees that many referred to as a park but was just an uncultivated and poorly maintained piece of land behind a strip of restaurants and stores. We liked to meet in the grove of trees because we felt like no one could see us there, especially adults, especially our parents. The grove provided the illusion that we were far away from our town, but really, the back parking lot of the local diner was visible through the trees, and when the waitresses brought the trash out to the dumpster, we could hear the trash bags contents rattling from where we sat. In the summer, the grass was long and painful, the dirt parched and chalky. Mosquitoes buzzed around our heads of wild hair. We would lie flat on our backs, squinting into the sun, trying to watch the clouds, sharing whatever we had.

It was Benji who made rules, gave commands. “I want everyone to bring something tomorrow,” he said.

“Like what?” Richie asked.

Benji shrugged. “Something good.”

So, Richie brought cigarettes, stolen from his mom. He stole cigarettes from his mom all the time, just one or two, slipped from packs in her purse. His mom never noticed. She was drunk almost every second of the day and was the kind of drunk that could be convinced of almost anything. She believed she either lost her cigarettes or smoked them all. Today, Richie had taken an entire pack, and produced it now, smiling proudly.

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Benji pulled a half-empty bottle of gin from his backpack. He said gin was his grandmother’s favorite, and she always had several bottles hidden around the house.

As a kid, he and his brother had made a game of trying to find all the hidden bottles.

We all knew that if Beth tried to take anything from her house, she’d get caught.

Beth had once tried to bring beer to the grove, but her dad had noticed the bottles missing from the refrigerator and beat the living shit out of her and her brother. After that beating, her face had looked like a drawing, something contrived, not real. Today, Beth had brought snacks she stole from the gas station.

I brought my father’s gun.

••• IT HADN’T BEEN hard to take. My father owned the only gun shop in town, called

simply Barrett’s Gun and Ammo, Barrett being our last name. Guns were my father’s favorite thing. He loved them more than anything. He loved them more than me. When I was younger, my father had been sober more, and there had been afternoons when he took my sister and me to a field outside of town and lined up targets for us to shoot.

My sister didn’t like doing this. She hated guns, and she hated our father. There were times I hated our father too, but I loved shooting guns. There was energy in a gun, I learned, a sense of power and danger, a vital, visceral thing. When I held one, I felt myself lift out of my skin, remade into something shiny and sturdy. When I pulled the trigger, the jolt of utter strength knocked me silly. It was not difficult for me to sneak off with one of the guns from my father’s store. My father was a good salesman. He was good at talking to people, convincing them they needed things they had never thought about. He had that syrupy kind of charm that made me curl with a kind of pity and hatred for his customers. Despite his talent for selling guns, my father was less talented when it came to keeping inventory of his shop. This made it easy for me to slip away with a small semi-automatic pistol. It was easy to hide it in my red backpack, taken from the back storeroom, using the key I knew my father kept hidden under a cinder block. I liked the feeling this evoked in my gut, a mixture of fear and excitement. I was dangerous, daddy. Of course, I feared what would happen if I were caught, but that fear seemed a necessary and inevitable part of the experience, of my very existence in fact.

••• WHEN BETH AND I reached the grove, Richie and Benji were already there,

leaning back against the trees. They were chewing tobacco and spitting globs into the dry grass. It was clear that neither boy had much experience chewing tobacco but refused to admit it. Richie appeared to have too much in his mouth and struggled as he chewed. Richie offered some to Beth and me. Beth wrinkled her nose.

“Where’d you get that?” asked Beth.

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“My brother,” said Benji.

“He know you took it?” I asked.

A grin spread slowly over Benji’s face. “Course not.”

“He’ll find out,” said Beth.

Benji shrugged. “I’m not afraid of him.”

We all knew that Benji’s brother beat on Benji regularly. I just assumed that’s what brothers did.

“What’d you bring?” Benji eyed Beth and me.

Beth opened her backpack and pulled out the snacks she had stolen from the gas station. I settled in the shade and set my backpack on the ground in front of me.

“Dana?” Benji looked at me.

I opened my backpack and lifted out the gun. I could feel the energy of the group change.

“You wanna kill some fucking monsters?” I said theatrically. I had thought up this line on my way over and was quite proud of it.

“Shit,” Richie murmured, moving closer.

“Is that real?” asked Beth, her voice quiet.

“Of course.” I felt large and important.

“You know how to use it?” asked Benji.

I nodded.

“Can I hold it?” asked Richie.

I considered, reveling in my moment of power.

“I’ll be careful,” said Richie.

“Fine,” I said. “But don’t shoot it.”

Richie held the gun with reverence, his eyes wide. We were all turned toward Richie, the gun a central point around which we seemed to pivot. Richie aimed the gun at a tree and pretended to fire, making a pow sound with his mouth. I saw Beth flinch.

••• WE KNEW THE grove was too close to town for it to make a good shooting range.

“I know where we can go,” said Benji. We packed up our pilfered items, zipped them safely into our backpacks, and followed Benji. Benji led us out of the grove, through the diner parking lot, and west, away from town. My house was in the opposite direction, but I knew heading west led toward farmland, flat expanses. As we walked, there were fewer and fewer houses, the neighborhoods dissipating and giving way to swaths of land. We walked single file along the shoulder of the road. Cars rushed past, creating thick eruptions of wind that skirted around us like entities sparing us their wrath. We took turns kicking at the pieces of garbage, tin cans and bottles, that were littered along the roadside. The sun beat down. Beth smoked a cigarette, flicking ash

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into the breezes. Richie continued to spit dark-marbled globs of saliva, leaving wet spots on the asphalt. Eventually Benji led us off the main road and down a gravel drive.

“Where are we going?” Beth sounded nervous.

“This is where I live,” said Benji without turning around.

My curiosity grew. I had never seen Benji’s home. We approached a small house.

The exterior was a faded yellow, stained in places with determined brown. Three or four cars sat in various stages of disrepair, rusted and faded. The front porch sagged under the weight of accumulated items that were piled upon each other; a grill, several chairs, a table laden with boxes and lumpy garbage bags, a disassembled plastic playhouse of some kind. A large dog attached to a long rope jumped up from his spot in the shade and barked at us.

“Shut up, Harley!” Benji yelled at the dog. The dog kept barking until Benji walked over to it and gave its head a pat. “He’s friendly,” Benji explained. “He just barks a lot.”

We nodded but kept our distance anyway. People always tended to say this about their dogs, and I just didn’t believe that it could always be true.

“There’s no one here,” said Benji. “There’s a field out back. It’s big enough and we can set up targets to shoot at.”

We collected a variety of items to use as targets. There were plenty of options around Benji’s house; large sheets of plywood, glass bottles, cans, broken toys, chairs, etc. We lined up the items on the far side of the field.

“You got any neighbors?” Richie asked.

Benji shook his head. “Not for a couple miles.”

We lined up twenty yards from our targets. Everyone looked at me expectantly, and I pulled the gun out of my backpack. Part of me, selfishly, wanted to be the only one to shoot the gun, but I handed the gun to Richie, who was holding out his hands with an eager look in his eyes.

“You know how to use that Richie?” asked Benji.

“Sure,” said Richie. Richie spent a moment fiddling with the gun. “I’m just checking everything.”

“There’s only eight rounds in the gun, so we each get two shots,” I said.

“Fine.” Richie stepped forward and held the gun out in front of him. I could tell he had never shot a gun before. Benji, Beth, and I instinctively stepped back away from Richie.

“It’s best if you stand with your feet—” I started to say, but Richie cut me off.

“I got this, Dana.”

I looked at Benji and he shrugged.

Richie pulled back the hammer and readjusted his stance, digging his feet into the dirt like a baseball player at bat. He looked small. He pulled the trigger. I had forgotten the way the sound of a gunshot could move through the air, ripples disrupting the skin and bones of anyone nearby. I felt my heart leap. Beth let out a cry of surprise.

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Richie’s body rocked backward with the force of the discharge, but when he turned to look at us, he was grinning and breathless. As the sound of the gunshot faded, a silence replaced it that felt thick. It settled over us for a moment. Then Benji let out a whoop.

“Holy shit!” Richie cried. “You gotta try.” He held the gun out to Benji.

Benji stepped forward and took the gun from Richie. Benji took a stance that looked like he was copying a character from a Western, stylized and macho. He held the gun before him, arms stretched out and centered. He took a moment to aim and then fired.

Benji’s shot hit the sheet of wood we had propped up. The board splintered and slivers of wood bloomed from where the bullet had landed. Benji lowered the gun, trying to act cool, but I could tell he was shivering with excitement.

“Wasn’t it awesome?” Richie was practically jumping up and down.

Benji nodded, grinning, his excitement more contained.

“Beth, wanna try?”

Beth’s arms were crossed over her chest. She looked the least excited.

“Come on,” urged Richie. “You gotta.”

“Fine,” said Beth, marching forward and taking the gun from Benji.

Benji stayed close to Beth as she hefted the gun nervously and pointed it in the general direction of the targets. Benji reached out and gently guided her arms.

“I got it,” said Beth, a touch irritated.

“You sure?”

Beth nodded and Benji stepped back.

“It’s not that hard,” Beth muttered. “I just pull the trigger, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Beth pulled the trigger. She screamed and stumbled backward as the sound of the gunshot blew through us once again. Beth’s shot hit the dirt in front of the targets and a light spray of earth and dust flew into the air. Richie was laughing. Benji was smiling.

“Here,” Beth held out the gun to me. “You take it.”

There was an expression in Beth’s eyes that I had never seen before, a flinty defiance, a dangerous courage.

I took the gun from Beth and stepped up to shoot. It had been years since my father had been sober enough to take me shooting. I aimed at a glass beer bottle and fired.

The bullet flew past the bottle and disappeared into the field.

••• WE EACH TO OK a turn firing a second shot until all the bullets were spent. Benji

was the only one to hit any of the targets we had bothered to set up.

“So, if we see a monster, give the gun to Benji,” Richie joked, as we left the field.

“Why?” said Beth. “The gun’s out of ammo anyway.”

Richie rolled his eyes. “I mean if it had ammo.”

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“Yeah, well it doesn’t.” Beth’s mood was obstinate and boiling.

We wandered back along the road to the grove where we sprawled out in a circle.

The sun was on its way down, the day cooling. Benji had brought back out the halfempty bottle of gin. Benji was the only one of us that had drank gin before. Beth sipped nervously and then scrunched her face at the taste.

“You gotta drink it faster,” said Benji. “It’s not like beer.” He took the bottle and swigged quickly, throwing the gin straight to the back of his throat. “That’s what my brother told me. You taste it less, but feel it more.” Benji handed the bottle back to Beth, whose face was still pinched in disgust. She looked at the bottle, unconvinced, and then attempted to throw back the gin as Benji had demonstrated. I watched the clear liquid slosh forward in the bottle. Beth coughed and sputtered, spraying gin over the ground.

“Don’t waste it,” cried Richie, taking the bottle from Beth.

“I think I like beer better,” said Beth.

“Yeah, but you have to drink way more beers to get drunk,” said Benji.

Beth shrugged. “So?” Benji raised his eyebrows but didn’t answer. Richie tilted his head back and gulped at the gin. I could see that it took effort for him to keep himself from coughing as he handed the bottle to me. His eyes were wide and diamond-glinted. I reminded myself not to sniff the bottle as I brought it up to my face. I tilted the bottle up quickly and liquid rushed into my mouth, hot and unpleasant. I forced myself to swallow, but the taste remained, a glowing thing. I handed the bottle to Benji and waited to feel the things I was made to believe I would feel. I waited to experience whatever vital component alcohol seemed to provide. I felt a smile spread on my face as I watched Beth attempt to take another drink from the bottle. She held the gin in her mouth, shaking her head.

“Do not spit it out,” said Richie.

I laughed. Beth swallowed and stuck out her tongue. “I’m done,” she declared. “I don’t want anymore.”

“That means there’s more for us,” said Richie, taking the bottle.

••• WE WENT OUR separate ways as the sun hit the edges of things and turned the

sky orange. To us, the night felt like the world of high schoolers and adults. We didn’t want to be caught in it. Sometimes, when it got dark, we went to the roller rink or to the movies, but usually we went our separate ways. When I stood to leave the grove, I felt the gin moving in my body, I felt the sky moving in its oceans overhead. I felt an excitement at the idea of being drunk. I felt affection toward my friends and I was smiling as I walked home. Things were transitioning, lights going off or coming on, people heading out or going home. The heat was being sifted out of the air. A stoplight

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flickered over an intersection like a twitching eye, watching madly over everything.

As I walked, I became aware of a sensation I could only explain as prickly. My skin tingled, and I turned, casually taking in my surroundings. The gin I’d drunk made the world a roving thing and I felt a distrust of my own senses. As I turned, I saw that there was a car, driving slowly several feet behind me. The car was red and the dying sunlight that reflected off the windshield made it difficult for me to see who was inside. I stopped walking and watched the car roll closer. I felt acutely aware of my bare legs. They felt exposed and vulnerable. I was able to make out a man in the driver’s seat, wearing sunglasses. I didn’t recognize him. The car moved past me without stopping. The man didn’t even turn his head to look in my direction as he rolled by, but around his mouth hung a smile that disturbed me. I thought of the gun in my backpack. It was empty, but still held a weight in which I normally found comfort.

As the car moved away, I considered how quickly I would be able to get the gun from my backpack into my hands. Not quickly enough, I decided.

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SHARAMANG SILAS

The Weight of Dreams Every man is powerful in a dream. You can wrestle your God, & triumph over the wars, which means you will be held again in the ceremonies of life, which means you are faithful to your song, which means a carnival of children in the moon’s arms, which means year after year, your father is alive & says, Hashim, which means the horse of destiny still gallops into the olive fields, which means the road leads to tenderness, which means your mother’s kiss returns you to childhood, which means you can usher yourself into the morning of joy, which means Yara is alive, which means the end of loneliness, which means you’re loved, which means you’re back in the gentle rain, which means the body in celebration, which means you will love again, which means nothing is divine than two of you knowing you’re wet in the name of love, which means you kiss & say God because you are warmed in the snows falling which means everything is a dream: your body is awake in a thunderstorm.

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SHARAMANG SILAS

The Weight of Trains “I have gathered many consolations in life” —Yehuda Amichai, Ruhama

Apathy Your baby’s head in a cup, they say to you, Drink.

Your baby dressed in ice, they say to you, Hold.

Suspicion A man is guilty of murder the day he touches love.

A child on his mother’s breasts questions his father’s eyes.

Miracles Like a mother, I have kissed children born in fire. I have held in my arms angels buried in rubble. But nothing beats the boy in the air who failed to land like a human before his mother.

Silence Abdulbais!

Abdulbais!

Abdulbais!

Exit If your name departs my tongue, Abdulbais, I refuse my memories.

Bewilderment Is this blood? The trainmaster asks three women.

Forgive us, they answer. We cannot explain the streets flooded by a weeping race.

Witness Across St. Anthony’s cathedral, the gathering mothers mourn their children leaving the same way Jesus was dragged with the wood of sorrow in Jerusalem.

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Invitation If your heart is beautiful, behold my baby dressed in ice. Watch angels in their little boxes ready for silence.

Futility A train arrives.

A city is dead.

Emptiness You are here & nothing is with you.

What do you have? The trainmaster asks again.

Nothing, the women chorus, turning from the light.

Sacrifice What is worship if not the desire to offer yourself to the fire & everything you have ever loved?

A train beneath the mercy of fire cuts through a small village sleeping in ashes. A train beneath the mercy of fire becomes a burnt offering.

There is sacrifice in every city.

The women at the station reject the beauty of God. Darkness The rest of the mothers after the holocaust wait for God in the grass, invisible. One of them watches the banishment of butterflies from the city. She hides her child like a family secret.

Stay here, she says. The world is not ready for you.

Cataloging In this poem, I want to tell you the train is the child beneath the mercy of fire.

Loss There is silence in every poem & that is what terrifies me. Where the blood spills, a mother reaches out to a departing train.

Expiration Is this the end of your road, Little Train?

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MELISSA SPOHR WEISS

Karolyne Makes Kliesel In a poem I can’t quite get right, Karolyne kneads flour into old potatoes, cracks an egg, rolls plump dough skinny between palms. The woman who will never know she’s my great-grandmother doesn’t need a recipe, sprinkles a little more flour to get the stick off her fingers. I’ve never been to Berestechko, haven’t seen the kitchen muck smeared across her apron. Never asked her what it’s like to be a second wife, a third tragedy. In this poem, she doesn’t know Siberia. Hasn’t felt the earth cool under her soles (or her soul cool under the earth). Instead, she boils her dumplings, fries them. A little Speck, a little Zwiebel. In this poem, Karolyne and I don’t need this poem. She unspeaks futures, wipes the war off her lips. Fills her mouth with warm onions and bacon, and invites me to komm essen.

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I

WILL EAT A croissant today, an almond croissant from the local café on the

corner of Main and Hillside. And I will not worry about whether or not I will need to use the bathroom too soon afterward because the only reason to use the bathroom will be a normal reason so I will not need to feel anxious about using or not using it. I will not worry about the bathroom situation at all—one stall or two, secure bolt or unreliable knob lock—because I will only need to do normal bathroom things in the bathroom, which can be embarrassing, but only in the normal human way.

That is, in the bathroom, I will not be vomiting.

IT’S ONLY SIX and the sun is still mostly down, but I’m awake and I have decided:

I will eat an almond croissant today. And I will not eat it too quickly because it is a delicacy and the proper etiquette for consuming a delicacy is to cherish each mouthful, knowing and feeling how indulgent, how wonderful to be able to sit at the café on the corner of Main, undisturbed by all the people purchasing their morning coffee in paper cups, their morning pastries in paper bags, taking everything to go because they are rushing off to work, to life. There I will be, at one of the round wire tables, enjoying unhurried mouthfuls of croissant. I will have no need to hurry because I have no work to rush off to and very little life to attend to.

Do not trouble yourself with work, my sister-in-law tells me, stay as long as you like, rent-free. This is family. This is the time for you to take care of you and your life.

Yes, this is the time, as I am almost thirty, and more determined to be more serious about my life, to take better care of me.

Thus, the almond croissant.

FOR SOME PEOPLE, I imagine, an almond croissant would be the antithesis of self-care. Self-care as New Year’s resolution likely includes an intentional avoidance of croissants or pastries of any variety, and the reestablishment of a healthy diet consisting of more vegetables, more fruits, fewer calories. I suppose then, my actions in the pursuit of self-care could seem enviable: Your version of health is an almond croissant? How fortunate that, today, your health will be made better by such a delicacy!

Yes, I will eat a croissant today. And I will feel fortunate and in full service of my health. And I will not think about bathrooms. I will not need to worry about my courteous, though wasteful, running of sink water, which is, or has been in the past, utilized so that the people in line, if there is a line, will not have to hear the sounds of vomit. Using water for its sound alone is unforgivably bad for the environment, and I imagine my water usage over the last two to eight years has detrimentally impacted the water table, especially since we are in a drought. But people do not want to hear the sound of a stranger’s vomit in public. There is a specific hierarchy of acceptable public

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restroom activity—the most acceptable being urination or maybe simple handwashing, though there is always a question of what provokes the handwashing, and if it is perhaps symptomatic of some compulsive handwashing tendency. And then there is the current societal debate that my sister-in-law informs me is rampant in preschool classrooms and daycares: Is there such a thing as too much handwashing? Peanut allergies, for example, are they caused by excessive hygiene? Studies are unclear.

In the bathroom hierarchy, however, it is clear that vomiting is the only activity that demands inquiry. Are you OK? people will ask, either with looks of pity or, in the cases of older nosy women in particular, with actual words. There is no best-case scenario if a stranger hears you vomiting. There are three options: food or alcohol poisoning, stomach flu, pregnancy. The truth, though an option, is even less acceptable than the occurrence of vomit or the wasting of water in the first place. You cannot just discuss your disorders with strangers in line to use a public restroom at a café.

Neither can you discuss your disorders with family members who have their own hierarchy of concerns. My brother’s concerns mostly lie with ecological catastrophe (the status of the fish population among the Channel Islands) or the ways my niece and nephew show signs of future interest in academic pursuits (yesterday, Lily: linguistics) or potential developmental delays (Zander is a very clumsy climber of trees). My sister-in-law attributes my disorder to my previously unhealthy working lifestyle. My proximity to food and alcohol and the unhealthy behaviors they encourage—excessive drinking and stress and late nights with coworkers who are sleeping together or trying unsuccessfully to do so. Slow down, my brother and sister-in-law insisted, take some time undisturbed by the rush and grind of city life, spend some time with your niece and nephew, and here’s your own private space, your country studio.

By country studio they mean trailer in their backyard, beside two rows of tomato plants and a handful of fruit trees—apricot, peach, plum, and in the fall, my brother says, bright orange persimmon, the kind that is really only good for baking or preserves, but still. Behind this trailer studio is the horse barn, the goat pen, and the chicken yard. And right now, the roosters are signaling the start of the work day. My brother and sister-in-law will already be awake and feeding and dressing my niece and nephew so that they can be off to their jobs, my niece and nephew to daycare.

They will not worry about waking me because I do not have a work day, and even if I did, I would not need to rush because it is only six and I do not have children and likely my work would not start until nine. A nine-to-five, it’s called. The good American dream. Which means, even considering the time it takes to shower and dress, and because I do not have children to dress and feed, I would still have at least an hour to sit and eat a croissant well before I am needed to answer a phone call or send an email.

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That is, if I were somehow qualified for a nine-to-five. Because, considering my skills and work experience, it is unlikely that I am. And if I did have some of the work that I am qualified for, here or in the city, I would either be still asleep from a closing shift and therefore not even contemplating croissants, or I would be at work already, behind the coffee bar, making drinks, serving croissants with revulsion and envy to the people who order them. And if I worked at the café on the corner of Main and Hillside—which I imagine relies on a French pastry chef who arrives every morning before sunrise with trays of croissants, chocolate and almond and plain butter—I would most likely never eat one myself.

If I were to work at a place, eating their delicacies at the free or reduced rate that I would likely be granted is unhealthy—the antithesis of self-care. Because if I were to begin eating free indulgent croissants every day, it would become a routine, a necessity, not a delicacy, so that even the days I was not working, I would have to come in for my croissant—early enough so that they weren’t sold out. And if I happened to sleep in, or be distracted by my niece or nephew (Zander’s latest cardboard-box fort or Lily’s scraped knee), and the croissants were then to sell out, the remainder of my day would be spent in perilous anxiety and discomfort and resentment of the obese patrons (I will of course project obesity onto all of them) who have so rudely consumed the entirety of the croissants, one of which should have been reserved for me.

On the other hand, if this daily croissant were available for my consumption, there is still the question of what to do afterward. At work, at the café, the bathroom would be of equal concern: line or no line, water wasting, hierarchy of acceptability.

But now that I’ve considered this, the bathroom situation, I will no longer have to worry about it while I’m sitting in the café enjoying my croissant. Because the truth is, I am convinced, as I am most mornings I have the luxury to lie in bed and listen to roosters (which so far has been five mornings, not that I need to keep track), there is a worry quota that I must meet for the day. And once said quota is met, I will have zero worry left and will therefore be more likely to sit anywhere with any food, untroubled by thoughts of bathrooms or lack of life and work. So far, I have yet to discover the limits of the worry quota, but I am confident that enough mornings in my studio trailer will provide me with a better understanding.

Again, it’s a matter of self-care.

I IMAGINE MUCH of the quota is currently met by my worry over spiders. The

studio trailer is a great host to them. This is not something I am well-adjusted to because of my city life, which was not entirely without spiders but was also not entirely infested. Here, I believe my country life to be entirely infested. But I have decided that it is healthy for me to readjust and live in harmony with them. They were here first,

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after all, and my brother tells me that they are good for all the plants—they keep the insects away. I believe him because he has a successful garden with many healthy plants. Plus, they, the spiders, are also a good challenge for my sleeping abilities.

At night, I allow my worry to drift around the corners of the trailer, between the webs over the window screens and to the uncanny sensations on my skin caused by, mostly, my hair shifting. They won’t hurt you, my sister-in-law tells me, even the black widows are so shy and are usually drawn to darker places like the wood pile or the barn storage. You shouldn’t worry, but if you want we can spray the trailer for you.

No, no, I am adamant: I will adjust. I will learn to live in harmony with spiders, to be more serious about my lifestyle, to be more grown-up, to handle each day as an adult and not as a woman who worries about bathrooms or spiders.

Likely, I will not become harmonious with spiders in one day, like today, though I will continue to try. But, in one day, like today, I can and will walk to the café on the corner and order and eat a croissant, slowly and without worry.

I have concluded that all of this worry is due to my disorder, a disorder of the eating variety.

It is a common misconception that disordered eating is divisible into categories or isolated to the time spent eating or around eating or measuring the effects of food.

Worry over spiders and bathrooms is rarely on any checklist of symptoms. Nor is worry over mirrors. While disordered eaters tend to think extensively about mirrors as a kind of confrontation with depleted self-esteem, a venue for self-critique, my mirror routine is more closely affiliated with psychedelics. I know this because I once consumed peanut butter–psychedelic mushroom toast with some friends in high school. This was before my disordered eating habits made themselves fully present, so I did not worry about the toast or peanut butter, bathroom or no bathroom. I did, however, worry over my appearance in the full-length mirror in my friend’s bedroom.

Not my appearance so much as the appearance of my appearance. That I was just a body seemed incredible to me. That my skin was a complete sheath for all the muscles and bones beneath it. That I could touch my wrist and chest and feel the trembling of the blood there. That I had eyelashes! And fingernails! And freakish cartilage between my nostrils! I remember feeling very powerful and very afraid in front of the mirror— that I was a body seemed to be the most important revelation since food storage (we had just studied the fertile crescent in history). And then the fear: the more I thought and pressed and stared, the less body-like my body became. It was suddenly no longer a body, it was just the appearance of a body. I was just the appearance of a body.

AND THIS IS the thought, perhaps, that makes me so desirous to feel the edges of my body, to remind myself of it, which for many people, I imagine, involves pleasure, but for some of us, the disordered of us, involves pain.

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And vomiting is very painful. The pain of it is not something I imagine bringing up in conversation—vomit seems synonymous with disgust, not pain. Unless we consider baby vomit, which is acceptable (in relative moderation) and referred to less as vomit, more as throw-up or spit-up. In my disordered experience, the disgust associated with adult vomit, like other private bathroom activity, is in direct correlation to frequency of experience. A stranger’s vomit will always be disgusting, but the more practiced a person is at encountering her own vomit, the less it matters whether or not disgust is part of the process. Pain, however, is always present. There is pain in the throat from the stomach acid, pain from where teeth hit the knuckle of the index finger leaving a hard red callous that sometimes breaks and bleeds, pain in the stomach and the head afterward, and sometimes the jaw, too, becomes sore. The body, no matter how adjusted it is to vomiting, resists it. The disordered body, in this case, fights against its resistance, its natural state of not vomiting, and the result is pain and an inexplicably comforting awareness of the body as body, however disordered it may be.

My brother does not call it a disorder and my sister-in-law is careful not to reference it in his presence. A brother does not like to consider his sister disordered, especially an older brother who is socialized to understand that it is his genetic duty to protect his sister from everyone in the world who may wish to harm her—lovers, friends, employers, even parents. But how does a brother protect a sister from her own body? He can’t, my sister-in-law confesses, and he knows it. It sometimes makes him angry at me. I understand, I empathize. If my brother told me he spent the morning lying in his trailer studio contemplating the perils of consuming a pastry, I would be furious with him.

But then, my brother has a wife and children that he is obligated to prioritize.

Perhaps if I had a wife and children, I would not worry over whether or not I should eat a croissant. I would worry instead: Is Lily the proper weight and height? Does Zander have sunscreen on his ears?

Or, in a moment like this, if I were ever to have a moment like this, alone, in a trailer, I would wonder: What about when they’re grown? Will clean drinking water still exist then? And the next thought: Thank god I won’t be alive to see the world they’ll have to live in. Electronic screens, cancer, hungry and homeless people everywhere. Nothing green left. Robot roosters.

Lately, Zander will approach me with his latest favorite toy in hand—a plastic dinosaur, a wire bug trap, some Play-Doh crafted food item (bananas or bagels or triangles of pizza)—saying, Auntie, Auntie, and I will feel a conflict of interest. There is the unprecedented and surprising love I have for my nephew, a human who every day is becoming more human, who suddenly and currently exists, it seems, merely to receive my love. And there is also a confusing jealousy: I want one. I want my own Zander or Lily who will depend on me and my body for everything, who will come to

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me not just with toys but with tears. This is likely a tapping into some bizarre biology that really should be phased out genetically, considering issues of overpopulation, climate change. And then I consider whether I want one because I want one biologically or emotionally. If a child, say, were to occupy the emotional space of an almond croissant, then my worry quota would be imbued with more universally acceptable significance.

THINKING THAT I would rather have a child than lie here contemplating

croissants is unreasonable. As though child is interchangeable with croissant. Likely this means that I am the kind of woman who should never have a child. Replace a disorder with a child. There should be a law against a woman like me—or maybe just me—giving birth, raising children. I should probably not even be around someone else’s children with this destructive, disordered thinking. If my brother and sisterin-law had any sense, they’d kick me out of my trailer studio and ban me from ever returning. At least, with the croissant, the worst-case scenario is this: I eat it too quickly, feel too guilty, vomit, have to confess my vomiting to an old woman, offering some mumbled explanation, and the whole four dollars is effectively sacrificed so I can further jeopardize my teeth and intestinal tract and likely embarrass myself in front of a stranger or two.

This is perhaps another fact of the eating variety of disorder that doesn’t occur to many—the embarrassment, the shame. It’s easy to imagine, from the outside, that a person with disordered tendencies feels shame and therefore enacts the disorder—one feels shameful about one’s weight and therefore takes drastic measures in pursuit of a solution. One of my former coworkers, for example, only allowed herself to consume one hundred calories per hour because she worried over the width of her hips. There are plenty of reasons to blame society for its unrealistic expectations imposed on women these days. I worry for Lily in this regard, and sometimes I feel anger toward my brother and sister-in-law for bringing a girl child into this world—will she be too pretty or not pretty enough? Too smart and therefore unaccepted by certain circles in high school? Or not smart enough and therefore sneaking out of class and lying about drugs or sex or who knows what? And what of her potential disorders?

The blame doesn’t necessarily rest with society though, and I imagine in many instances disordered women are blamed for our unrealistic vanity—not all of us should expect to be supermodels. But based on my somewhat limited experience, which is to say my own experience (two to eight years if we just consider the vomiting trend), it is not about vanity or societal expectations. It is more about routine, worry, and a different kind of shame. Not this abstract harm-oneself-for-beauty kind of shame. And I imagine that even if this shame is true for a person, then thinking of it as somehow integral to the physical experience seems somewhat irrelevant. Because

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logically, many people feel shame about their bodies (too much fat here or there, too short or tall, acne), but not everyone self-induces vomiting, refuses to eat an almond croissant.

The more relevant shame, then, is directly linked to the more immediate compulsion to feel the presence of one’s own body. This other type of shame, the embarrassment in front of a stranger in line, is more immediate, more of the body, and it drives a person to even more shameful actions.

Once, for example, in a nice restaurant in the city, in the bathroom, which was four-stalled and immaculately polished black-and-white tile, I was in the throes of my vomiting when three teenage girls walked in. There was no sink in the stall to run to muffle the sounds. They quieted immediately and whispered to each other.

Through the crack in the stall door, I could see them poised, each girl, in front of her own mirror. I could wait them out, I knew. I had done that before, waited until the bathroom had cleared until I could safely rinse my mouth and wash my hands. During this period of the disorder, I did not mind what my companions, if I had them waiting for me, thought I was doing in there, unless of course they suspected the vomiting.

Initially, a positive byproduct of my disorder was that I had become unembarrassed about any length of bathroom stay so long as vomiting was not the suspected activity.

This is obviously no longer the case, since vomiting and bathroom have become synonymous, any bathroom usage of any length of time worries me.

But that day, with the three teenage girls, I resolved myself to attempt the excuse I had not yet attempted, though it had occurred to me some time before. I flushed and opened the door to their curious, embarrassed faces.

Perhaps one of them understood what was really happening—teenage girls are always a risk to their own bodies, hiding their secret disorders from one another. I looked the one closest to me directly in the face—a smooth, tanned face with a small pierced nose and thick blue eyeliner.

Are you OK? she asked me.

And the others nodded in agreement with the question.

Pregnant, I said, rubbing my belly like I had seen my sister-in-law do. But shhh, I said, no one knows yet.

They all seemed relieved by this disclosure, despite the fact that I have always looked younger than my age, that even in my distorted, disordered body image, I knew from the mirror that I looked only a few years older than them.

Congratulations! they exclaimed.

And I left the bathroom, not disordered but expectant, triumphant.

I WONDER NOW, in my spider-infested trailer studio with the sun almost fully

up, the roosters still overly excited, if maybe I should have taken my lie and turned

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it into a kind of lifestyle lesson. This is not a thing to be congratulated, I should have said. This was a mistake! I’m getting an abortion! And I’m damn lucky I live in a state where I can, I should have said, where I don’t have to drive ten hours to a clinic with protestors holding signs and sloganing horrible things at me. But even then, I’d still have to get rid of it. Otherwise my boyfriend will leave me, I should have said, and I’ll be forced to drop out of college (assuming I was in college), move back in with my parents, and work as a waitress in the little diner across from my high school to provide for the child. Let this be a life lesson to you, young teenage girls: Get yourselves to Planned Parenthood, take your birth control pills. Promise me, right here and now in this black-and-white tiled bathroom, solemnly swear to take full responsibility for your bodies. The pull-out method doesn’t work, I should have said, pointing to my belly, no matter what he claims.

All further evidence that I should never be allowed to have children, that I am not a physiologically or emotionally viable candidate for pregnancy, and that I should never attempt to mentor Lily on matters of female sexuality.

I would be a terrible mother, I decide, resolved to quit worrying, particularly about incidents of the past or unreasonable possible incidents of the future. Don’t worry so much, my brother says. Can’t you just be a normal person? he asks, and my sister-inlaw modifies his request: Can you try to take things one day at a time, maybe?

Yes, I will try to be more serious in my thinking about my lifestyle from here on out, one day at a time, without so much worry. I will shower and dress and eat a croissant like a normal human being.

It will not really be significant to anyone else, but I will feel radiant with significance. I ate a croissant! I will say in my head (a few times, not too many). And after I eat it slowly at the café, enjoying every indulgent mouthful, watching without envy or worry as people come and go with and without children, I will walk back to my brother and sister-in-law’s house and they will still be readying my niece and nephew for school. And I will offer to help Zander select socks without seams, wipe the food crust from Lily’s cheek, wash all the breakfast dishes myself—no need to help, brother and sister-in-law, I’ll handle this, seriously—and my brother will say, Good to see you up and about. And my sister-in-law will ask, Have you eaten breakfast today?

And I will respond, smiling, triumphant, Yes.

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MICHAEL GARRIGAN

Communion Take these wafers of jewelweed and ragweed between fingers place them on your tongue, now say Father Son Holy Ghost (forehead stomach shoulders) Swallow. Amen.

You are now a humid summer day, veins of thicket creepers spread through you, your eyebrows are crows, your eyes eagles, your feet they stay feet, but now leave paw prints of five in the mud, river otters. Your knees don’t bend, they arch, elderberry. Your lips do not kiss but stab deadwood laying on railroad bed gravel searching for ants, splintering the afternoon, finding shade.

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MARGOT WIZANSKY

Fred Wants to Know if I Believe in God At lunch in Cambridge, England, he asks me unironically. A hush falls over our table—no context here for such a question. I could say yes, I do believe in a God I don’t comprehend, a wisp, or maybe a force stronger than anything, far from me, outside the cosmos. I can’t see what it is, not a him or her, no robes, no arms, no legs. I could say no to Fred, I don’t believe in your God. He’s too small, too human. And how could you still believe anyway, Fred, after he took your daughter, gave her a stupid infection from a fall in the road?

I look out of my eye sockets, and I feel a power near me or in me. It grabs me when consciousness leaks out of me, grabs me, and shakes me alive.

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SUNNI BROWN WILKINSON

When It Comes “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.”

—Job 3:25

Water the daisies.

Watch the dirt turn dark with relief.

Love the bees. Like you, they have names and middle names, memories, deaths.

Open your hand to the tug and huff of toddlers, the macaroni on the table hardened to half-smiles, half-moons.

Watch the fish rise from the lake See how they’re filled

of childhood. by the fruit of air.

Refine stillness. Let the good milk spill.

Praise each freckle, a star in a constellation of your vast

fleshy galaxy.

Thank it — what eats your heart into grave simplicity, leaving it easy to pack, the pit of a plum.

Guard your true promise. Be lucid and wide. Animal-soft.

Full as a bride.

What matters is nearly invisible.

Search for it snout-like, close to the ground, bloodhound sharp and howl.

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contributors

E . K R I S T I N A N D E R S O N is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and her work has appeared in many magazines. She is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), We’re Doing Witchcraft (Porkbelly Press) and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press).

Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on Twitter at @ek_anderson M A R Y K A T E B A K E R currently resides in Philadelphia, PA, and holds a BA in English from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Rainy Day Magazine, Fish Food Magazine, The Write Launch, and GRIFFEL. J A M A I C A B A L D W I N ’s poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in RHINO, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, the 2019 winner of the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Contest in Poetry, and a 2020 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize Runner Up. Jamaica currently lives in Nebraska where she is pursuing her PhD in English at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. www. jamaicabaldwin.com A L I K I B A R N S T O N E is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and visual artist. She is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent of which include: Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems

(Sheep Meadow, 2009), Bright Body (White Pine, 2011), and Dwelling (Sheep Meadow, 2016). Among her awards are a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Greece, the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and residencies at the Anderson Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is Professor of English at the University of Missouri and served as poet laureate of Missouri from 2016–2019.

M I L D R E D K . B A R Y A is a writer from Uganda and Assistant professor at UNCAsheville, where she teaches creative writing and world literature. Her publications include three poetry books as well as prose, poems or hybrids forthcoming or published in Shenandoah, Tin House, Obsidian, poets.org, Poetry Quarterly, Asymptote Journal, Matters of Feminist Practice Anthology, Prairie Schooner, New Daughters of Africa International Anthology, Per Contra, and Northeast Review. She’s at work on a collection of nonfiction, and one of the essays—Being Here in This Body—won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award. www.mildredbarya.com A L L I S O N F I E L D B E L L is a Jewish American writer originally from California. She holds an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University, and she is pursuing her PhD in Fiction at the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, Witness Magazine, Shenandoah, The Pinch, The Florida Review, Fugue, New Madrid, and elsewhere.

“Of the Eating Variety” is a chapter from her novel-in-progress, Bodies of Other Women.

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B E N D O R Y is an artist and metalsmith originally from Kansas City, KS. Dory received his BFA in Metalsmithing/Jewelry from the University of Kansas and his MFA in Metalsmithing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2014. Dory recently finished a three-year artist-in-residence position at the Windgate Center of Art + Design in Little Rock, AR. www.bendory.design S A D D I Q D Z U K O G I is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). His chapbook Inside the Flower Room was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Oxford Review of Books, Poetry Society of America, Gulf Coast, African American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Verse Daily. In 2017, Saddiq was a finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he is currently studying for a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

N O A M E L Y A S H I V is an Israeli-American artist whose work focuses on the conversation between drawings to objects on the body. She explores the formal changes, visual gestures, and the duties of function that accrue due to relocation and gravity, when a shape emerges into its dimensional phase. She received her BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art & Design and her MFA from RISD, where she has been a faculty since 1994. www.noam-elyashiv.com M I C H A E L G A R R I G A N writes and teaches along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and strongly believes that every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. He is the author of two poetry collections: Robbing the Pillars (Homebound Publications) and the chapbook What I Know [How to Do] (Finishing Line Press). His writing has appeared in

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Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Hopper Magazine, Permafrost, and Split Rock Review.

You can find more at www.mgarrigan.com M A R Y J O F I R T H G I L L E T T ’s collection, Soluble Fish, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. She’s also published four prize-winning chapbooks, most recently Dance Like A Flame (Hill-Stead Museum). Her poems have appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily sites, and elsewhere. She’s won a Kresge Fellowship in the Literary Arts and the New York Open Voice Award.

Born and raised in New York City, S O P H I E G L E N N received her BFA in Sculpture and Drawing from SUNY Purchase College, and her MFA in Furniture Design and Woodworking from San Diego State University. She has exhibited her work across the country, and has received several grants, fellowships, and residencies to help advance her career. Sophie has taught workshops and has held academic appointments at Tennessee Technological University and Mississippi State University. www.sophieglenn.com J I L L B A K E R G O W E R is a metalsmith and educator who resides near Madison, WI. Jill received her BS from UW-Madison, and her MFA from Arizona State University. Her work has been in many juried and curated exhibitions nationwide and has been published in Metalsmith magazine and books such as 500 Enameled Objects, CAST, and Little Dreams in Glass and Metals: Enameling in America 1920 to the Present. In 2019 she had a solo exhibition at the Metal Museum in Memphis, TN. www.jillbakergower.com A N D R E W H A Y E S , born in Tucson, AZ, studied sculpture at Northern Arizona University. He left school to learn more about

contributors

metal fabrication and eventually participated in the Core Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts. In 2014 Andrew returned to Penland as an artist in residence. Since 2018 he has been working out of his studio in Asheville, NC. He creates sculptures that are exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions. www.andrew-hayes.squarespace.com

Contemporary Enameling, The Penland Book of Jewelry, and The Art of Enameling www.sarahperkinsenamels.com

N I L S H I N T is a blacksmith artist from Estonia.

He received his MA and BA from the jewelry and blacksmithing department in the Estonian Academy of Arts. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Thailand, and throughout Europe.

He has participated in numerous group shows internationally and his work can be found in public and private collections around the globe. www.nilshint.com

A L E X P I C K E N S lived for two decades in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, where he spent his spare time writing songs, reading the classics, and exploring every stretch of backcountry he could. Most recently his work has been accepted by Crab Orchard Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Texas Review Press, Constellations, and won Appalachia’s 2019 Waterman Fund Essay contest, while his screenplays and fiction regularly place in national contests. He just completed a novel called Mountain and Valley, inspired by the wilderness and people of Appalachia. He now lives in Raleigh with his wife.

M Y R A M I M L I T S C H - G R A Y is a metalsmith whose studio practice is at times speculative and theoretical, reflecting pedagogical concerns. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in significant museum collections in the US and abroad. Fellowships include the United States Artists Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Mimlitsch-Gray maintains a studio in New York’s Hudson valley. www.mimlitschgray.com

J O H N R A I S has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has been a blacksmith artist since 1998, where he designs and creates one-of-a-kind forged metal art. He has had many solo and group shows. His work is regularly featured in numerous publications, and books. He is also in many permanent collections including Yale Art Galleries and the National Metals Museum. John lives, works and teaches in Philadelphia, PA. www.johnraisstudios.com

S A R A H P E R K I N S received her MFA at

S H A R A M A N G S I L A S is a poet and literary

Southern Illinois University – Carbondale and is Professor Emerita at Missouri State University. She has shown her work in the USA, India, Canada, Europe and Taiwan. Her work can be seen in Metalsmith, Ornament, American Craft and in the books

facilitator from Nigeria. A two-time winner of the Korea-Nigeria Poetry Prize, he is a 2018 fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency. He lives somewhere in Northern Nigeria.

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J U D I T H S O R N B E R G E R ’s full-length poetry collections include Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (Shanti Arts), I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock), Practicing the World (CavanKerry), and Open Heart (Calyx Books). Her prose spiritual/travel memoir is The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany (Shanti Arts). She is professor emerita at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania where she taught English and Creative Writing and founded the Women’s Studies Program. She lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. www.judith sornberger.net

American artist, S T A C E Y L E E W E B B E R was born in Indianapolis Indiana in 1982. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Ball State University in 2005 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2008. Webber moved from the midwest to Philadelphia in 2011. She has been living and working full time as an artist in the Globe Dye Works building since 2015. www.staceyleewebber.com M E L I S S A S P O H R W E I S S is a graduate student at the University of New Brunswick.

Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Riddle Fence, The Malahat Review, CV2, Prairie Fire, The Maynard, Oakland Arts Review, and elsewhere.

S U N N I B R O W N W I L K I N S O N ’s poetry can

be found in Western Humanities Review, New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, SWWIM, The Maynard and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of the 2020 Sundress Chapbook contest). She also won New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize and the 2020 Joy Harjo Prize from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. She teaches at Weber State

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University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.

J O H N S I B L E Y W I L L I A M S is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A twentythree-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Laux/Millar Prize, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, and others. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

M A R G O T W I Z A N S K Y ’s poems have appeared online and in many journals, such as The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Moon City Review, Salamander, and The Maine Review. She edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains.

In Don’t Look Them In The Eye: Love, Life, and Jim Crow, she transcribed the oral history of her friend, Emerson Stamps, a grandson of slaves and son of sharecroppers, her poems and his story. Margot has recently retired from a career developing housing for adults with disabilities. She lives in Massachusetts.

last last notes: notes forged

The word “forged” immediately brings to mind Brigid, the Celtic goddess of poetry, healing, and the forge. My poem considers a mural created by Diego Rivera in which a woman is weaving. I love the triple “forging” involved here—the weaving, the painting, and the ekphrastic poem—in which three creators across time, medium, and space are bound together. Certainly, my poem is inextricable from Rivera’s painting, as is his mural from the woman’s weaving.

My poem is now “forged” into a collection of poems and essays—issue 59 of Ruminate. And, like the iron whose form is forever changed by heat and hammer, I believe our collective writings are altered by their new context, are forged into a new shape together and, perhaps, even additional meaning(s).

JUDITH SORNBERGER, POETRY

“Of The Eating Variety” is a fiction forged of my own experience with an eating disorder.

The piece emerged as a way to grapple with my own history and slowly transformed into a fictional work, a work not about me but about a character. This character, of course, is then forged of me. I think, to a certain extent, I am always part of the characters I write. Even the bad guys. This is how humanness happens to them, how they live and breathe on the page.

Call it narcissistic, but I believe it is about empathy. How we feel with a character. Many of my stories, then, including this one, are something beyond fiction, are something more like autofiction.

ALLISON FIELD BELL, FICTION

I wrote “Communion” as I walked along the Susquehanna River on a hot July morning.

Those summer days, with the fog of humidity and pollen so thick everything seems to blur and melt together, made me think about

walking up to the red-carpet altar years ago and having the priest place that dry wafer on the tip of my tongue and the sacred forging between bodies that happens during transubstantiation and how I wanted to partake in that again. I realized I could by simply replacing the altar and wafer with the plants and animals of the riverlands I live in.

MICHAEL GARRIGAN, POETRY

Craft is for something. This notion has challenged me deeply over time.

My earliest training was rooted in craft, with its certain technical requirements, learned expertise, and presumed outcome of a thing that does something. In the 1970s I joined in the family project to build a house, an A-frame with plans pulled from The Mother Earth News. As the youngest, I was given simple tasks—among them, the straightening of double headed nails to be repurposed in scaffolding. I forged the spikes on an anvil fashioned from scrap wood and stored them in coffee cans, enjoying their gathered density, order, and the sound of metal in the can. The result was deeply satisfying. I grew to swing hammers, sledges, pickaxes and the like, gaining confidence and appreciation for handwork of all kinds.

It takes a hammer to make a hammer. I am not one to throw away a shovel when the handle can be replaced. There is a stubbornness that comes with skill, and I can sometimes be drawn to absurd lengths simply because I can fix something or improve it. While nourishing, this is discrete from my creative research.

Craft is for something that can be easily identified, or not. “What is it for?” This is often asked about my work: its purpose is to provoke the question.

MYRA MIMLITSCH-GRAY, VISUAL ART

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ANDREW HAYES . Chevron, 2019. Fabricated steel and book paper.

6 inches x 3 inches x 2 inches. Photo Credit: Steve Mann.