Issue 42: Forming One Another

FORMING ONE ANOTHER / 42

Spring 2017 $15

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

Ruminate is a nonprofit, reader-supported community chewing on the mysteries of life, faith, and art. We invite slowing down and paying attention. We love laughter. And we delight in deep reading, contemplative activism, telling stories, asking questions, and doing “small things with great love,” as Mother Teresa said.

P LEA S E J O I N U S .

LUCAS MONEYPENNY. Untitled (transfiguration 3). Oil on Canvas. 72 x 68 inches.

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T O B E C OM E A F RI E N D O F

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contents

NO T ES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artists’ 32, 56 Contributors’ 85 Last 87

FICTION

Nonna’s Story, Joseph Truscello 16 Angel of Ashley Place, Karoline Strickland 65 Maybe We Were God in That Time, Amber MV 81 NONF I C T I O N

Lang and Drake, Fortunato Salazar 29 Styles of Communication: A Reflection in 46 Fragments, Kerry Muir Fear and Trembling, John Kimmey 70 VI SU A L A RT

The Art of Lucas Moneypenny 33 The Art of Chakila L. Hoskins 57 The Art of Carolyn Mount 62

PO ET RY

26 Translations, Melissa Reeser Poulin 27 Christmas Morning, After Illness, Jason Tandon 28 The Sacred Spaces Are Full of Pills and Smoke, John Gosslee 41 When the Good Lord Willed the Creek to Rise, Charnell Peters 42 Laying on of Hands, Elizabeth Acevedo 43 Medusa Teaches La Negra to Pray, Elizabeth Acevedo 44 June Bug Penumbra, Jason W. Selby 52 A Great Emigration Comes and Camps Near Humboldt Lake, William Kelley Woolfitt 53 Cutting the Good Rosemary, Michael Mlekoday 54 Ode to Compost, Beginning with Three Lines by Ellen Bass, Michael Mlekoday 68 Dust on Horses, Natalie Homer 69 Glue Market, Natalie Homer 77 When I Am Finally Gone and You Are Waking Up, Brittney Scott 78 The Liturgical Leap into Monday, Benjamin Hertwig 80 Twins, Tara Mae Mulroy

2017 Kalos Visual Art Prize

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

L U C A S M ONE Y P E NNY

CH A K I L A L . H O S K I N S

HON O RAB L E MEN T I O N C A RO LYN MO U N T

F I NA L I STS ST EV EN CA RREL L I J O H N CH A N G M AT T H EW EA MES M A G G I E EVA N S C AI T L I N F EN N EL LY MA RY G RI S EY S U S A N H A RT A D RI A N J O H N S T O N RY O TA MAT S U MO T O J EA N N A G A I E K AT ERI A PO PO VA SU SA N A A RO N - TAYL O R B ET H A N Y W RAY

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2017 Kalos Visual Art Prize

F I NA L J U R O R S CO T T K O L BO W RI T ES :

represent a unique engagement with the tradition of the figure and the formalist expressive painting legacy of the 20th century. Themes of embodied spirituality are explored through calligraphic brushstrokes and swirls of color, resulting in arresting compositions that communicate something of the mystery and glory of the human experience.

LUCAS M ONEYP E NNY' S AC C OM P L I S H ED PAI N T I N GS

was born in Washington State in the early seventies and grew up in the Northwestern United States. As a kid he spent countless hours drawing to stave off boredom, and drawing continues to play a dominant role in all his work.

He became interested in the tradition of satire by looking through art books in the library and realizing that he was most attracted to prints with funny-looking people in them. He received a BFA in painting and printmaking from Boise State University and an MFA degree in printmaking from the University of WisconsinMadison. Scott lived in Spokane, Washington, for twelve years while working as a professor at Whitworth University, and in 2012 he took a faculty position at Seattle Pacific University. In his studio artwork he is interested in the incorporation of new technologies into traditional art-making strategies and mixing together elements from high and low culture. Scott exhibits his work locally, nationally, and in webbased formats.

SCOTT KOL B O

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editor’s note

TH ERE’S J UST NOT E NOU G H T I M E , I hear myself saying. And then at night, Hustle, I say to

the kids. Get in bed. It’s late. You’ll be tired in the morning. And then in the morning, Hurry, it’s late—hurry, get ready.

But one morning this past January, as the winter quiet settled in, I found myself noticing the curtains slowly waving over the vent near the window, the blue sky opening above, the kids back in school, the Christmas tree down, and the clean, quiet room.

On that morning I noticed the abundance of the day and all the seconds and minutes and hours it kept offering me—here’s another, and another, and another, the day said to me.

There is always enough.

My daughter recently asked me if love will someday run out, like tomorrow, she said. The scarcity haunts us all. Yet the days keep whispering, in the curtains and the sky. The days keep whispering, there is always enough.

Tonight I think I’ll say something into my own heart and into my daughter’s ear, something that sounds like the wave the curtains made that morning as they brushed the floor, back and forth, another, another, always enough. *** I’ve been pondering the topic for this issue, forming one another, and I keep returning to the spiritual practice of hospitality. Especially in a world that feels increasingly inhospitable, this practice is more important and life-giving than ever.

The spiritual practice of hospitality is a way of living and moving through the world with your eyes open and your heart awake. It’s a posture; it’s a daily decision. It’s a choice made in the details, in choosing abundance over scarcity. It’s a softness, an openness, a willingness to be moved and formed by others, which can be so very hard after a lifetime of protecting our actions and opinions.

As author and Benedictine oblate Kathleen Norris writes: “True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who ‘have found the center of their lives in their own hearts’.”

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Often, what keeps me from practicing hospitality is believing in scarcity—not enough time, not enough energy, not enough love, not enough. The poverty of this “not enough” mindset touches all aspects of my life. When this happens, out of fear and self-protection, I shut down my heart, close off my mind, and become driven, grabbing onto whatever I can reach and asking everyone around me to do the same.

But I am struck by Norris’ and Nouwen’s words, that in order to welcome the “other” in our world, we must first welcome the “other” in our own hearts. I happen to think this is one of the gifts of literature and art. Much like the gift offered by each day, the story or poem or image keeps offering us an invitation—to remember or begin to believe in expansive and imaginative abundance, to wonder if we all really are enough.

So, this year, this spring, this day, I’m practicing abundance over fear, connection over isolation. I’m choosing art, poetry, and story, which comes to us on its own terms, shaping us and teaching us to pay attention. This isn’t always easy, and this isn’t a side note; this is holy and critical work. I’m grateful to have begun the year with this community and with this issue of Ruminate. Together, we’re exploring the marks the world leaves on us and considering the ways we have left, and may yet leave, our marks on the world—waking up to the truth that we’re part of a larger body and we belong to one another.

I want to gently hold onto all of this, not worrying too much about the drops that will spill over the edges of my hand or through the cracks between my fingers. Because we’ll each hold what we can hold, and we’ll each keep offering our prayers as we move forward— prayers that we may stay soft and open, making real space to befriend the stranger in our own hearts, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our world. Because there is always enough.

Gratefully,

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readers’ notes ON F OR M I N G O N E A N O T H ER

Sometimes this house feels more like a trap than a haven. We four, parents and kids, crammed inside with our big emotions bouncing off each other, our puffed up pride and egos reacting off one another and swelling with indignation. Our best moments? When we are separated: the boys cloistered upstairs in their bedroom listening to a story so they don't have to interact; mom downstairs doing yoga in the living room trying to take deeper, calmer, easier breaths; dad out and about town running errands, working off steam. We are a mess together. We are learning how to let each other be.

Is this what iron sharpening iron means?

These jagged and rough parts being forced together, these emotions jutting out, making sparks. Does this process really hone us into smoother angles so we can fit together better? Because mostly it seems like we’re just breaking our edges up more and making them rougher. Like the shells in the ocean that are so bombarded by water, churned up and knocked around that by the time they come up and out onto the beach to rest, they are so broken up, sharp edges sticking out for the passersby to cut their feet, unrecognizable.

There is an image from Wendell Berry’s novel Remembering about how time flowed “like swift water over stones, rubbing them together, grinding off their edges, making them fit together, in the only way that fragments can be rejoined.”

I want us to be like that, not ugly broken seashells that litter the sand on the beach.

Or maybe I just need to look ahead farther, to the time we are finally ground down to fine sand. Then we will find peace together and become a soft place to walk.

JENIFER HEMPHILL, PITTSBURGH, PA

Of the communities that have formed me—family, school, church, friends—one community that deeply calls to me is the community of the dead, “all those heavenly hosts.”

Every week, at least one woman whom I know dies of metastatic breast cancer.

The pattern is predictable and pitiless. I meet a woman in an online support group.

It turns out that we have a lot in common.

We’re young. We’re mothers. We know that our disease will kill us in an average of two years.

One of the most recent to die is Holli.

Like me, she was worried about leaving her children motherless. She came to hear me read poetry. We ate Middle Eastern food together. Holli was almost six feet tall with a tall woman’s laugh. We bonded in that quick and intense way that soldiers are said to become friends.

These women—Holli, Kristin, Paula, Lori, Ishiuan, Julie, Deborah—never really leave me. When I sit alone in a room waiting for a scan, I call them to me. I feel their spirits like gentle hands in my hair. If you had told me, before I got cancer, that I would feel the spirits of the dead, I would have laughed and rolled my eyes. Primitive superstition, I might have scoffed. But now the line between the living and dead has

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shimmered and turned a bit transparent, like the way people with cataracts see light, ballooned and misty.

Being dead, these women know more than I do now. But I still have the power of the word, which I now dedicate partly to them. They were my community when they were alive, and I will join them when I die.

So I write about their experiences, their suffering, their persistence, their joy.

In her poem “Fortunes of Men” from Scriptorium, poet Melissa Range asks, “must one sing of this? One must: / to a certain one is given the harp.” I don’t want the harp. I don’t want cancer. But God has given me no choice about either, and neither have the dead.

ANYA S I LVE R , M A C ON, G A

In 1977, I moved to New York City and experimented sexually with men. Six months later I thought I was losing my mind. I never wanted to be gay, and I hated (strong word) fairies (bullying word). I believed I was going crazy because 1) James hates fairies; 2) James is a fairy; therefore 3) James hates James. I was a mess.

The man I was dating at the time, and shortly thereafter no longer seeing, advised me to speak with a therapist. Having grown up believing anyone who is in therapy is crazy, I was convinced that he believed I had flipped out. This man was generous yet had an abhorrent abusive streak. It was the initial love I felt for him, combined with his offensive behavior, that led me to question my existence. In the final analysis, I owe him my gratitude for having recommended the specialist I saw.

She opened the door wearing love beads and sandals. I thought she was having a bad hair day. I had hesitations yet felt

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desperate. She ushered me into a private room of her ground floor apartment. Her treatment space contained a single bed with oversized cushions used as a sofa, an afghancovered club chair, and a coffee table with a box of Kleenex.

“Why are you here?” she asked once seated.

“I think I’m going crazy,” I whispered.

Without hesitation she spoke the words that saved my life: “You’re going sane.”

I had taken the first step to sanity by coming to her. Instantly my shoulders relaxed. I had come to the right place.

Seven years later I cut the umbilical cord and walked away smiling. Most of those years had been horrifying to navigate through, yet I survived. She facilitated my discovery: James loves James.

J A MES S TA CK , A N D O V ER, V T

“The clay reflects you,” says my instructor.

“If you have a hard time centering the clay, ask yourself if you yourself are feeling off-center. If it feels hard and difficult to shape, where are you being stubborn? If it flops, where are you abandoning your own boundaries and self-care? Over and over again, your clay asks you to pay attention.

And at the same time, it shows you how.”

I came into this class to meet people. I am new in this northern Colorado town, and it’s been hard to make friends. After most of my life living in the Southeast, I am used to invitations to dinner and “Honey, I’ll make you a pie.” Everyone here is friendly, in its most superficial form. They will chat about the weather or hold the door for you at the grocery store. But no one seems to actually want to be friends.

People out here are harder. They’re tougher. Many of them have grown up on

readers’ notes

these dry, high plains, worn by weather and work. They are kind. They are polite. But they are not soft. When I go for the occasional hike, aside from a few undergraduates from Colorado State, I am the youngest person on the trail. Sixtyyear-old women, far fitter than I’ve ever been, pass me with a smile and a nod and a spring in their step. My husband’s climbing partners are both retired, ropy men in their sixties. I want to be like them when I’m sixty. Hell, I’d like to be like them at forty.

But I’m not. In many ways I feel like a fish out of water.

Coming from the coast of North Carolina, softened by salt winds and too much fried food, I think of how this land shapes the people who live on it. How the rock and wind and sun temper them—temper me. Gone are the marshy swamps that gave with every step, Here, there is no water, no marsh, no swamp. There is rock. And thinner air. And brighter sun. And bluer sky. I can feel the land—and the people—resist me. At first that discouraged me.

But instead of breaking me, it has made me stronger. I learn to keep my own counsel.

I learn to breathe and let the earth—the clay—myself—speak. I place my hands on this spinning pile of mud, and I pay attention.

me to speak up. With friends and family, I’m a college graduate with no “important” job to speak of, no “impressive” anecdotes to share at parties. But behind the register my voice is high and confident, a train conductor calling all aboard. It’s not a conscious choice, not a favorite shirt I slip over my head in the morning. All I can say is when I see a customer, I hear a high pitched greeting fly from my mouth, and I feel a white picket smile on my lips. I am both ventriloquist and dummy. I am magician and mystified.

I would tell you I hate talking to strangers. I would tell you I have difficulty looking people in the eyes. But not behind the register. Here I’m a pleasant young lady. Here I’m delightful. Here I lug heavy groceries to cars and smooth wrinkles from foreheads with my words. I lead the lost down aisles and into the light, and here I always know where I’m going.

Once after helping an old woman, she was so grateful that she leaned over and hugged me, and I would tell you I hate hugs, but when she folds me in her arms, I do not fold into myself. She is so grateful for something so small, and in turn I feel responsible for something so large, and for a moment in this hugging I am not what I would call me.

CHRI S GU P P Y, F ORT C OL L I NS, C O

L A U REN MO O RE, S CH EN ECTA D Y, N Y

I grow a new voice when I work at the grocery store. My normal voice is low and shy, a mumble that compels people to ask

And the whisper comes. That which has formed you IS life. All of it. The laughing and the crucifixions and the inspiration.

BET H CH RI S T I E, BU CH A N A N , MI

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13

I was three weeks into my clinical rotation in obstetrics when I found out I would be a father. This turned out to be an appropriate place to be as I tried to wrap my head around us becoming parents: I learned about pregnancy and witnessed many women give birth, each time surprising and joyous. I was granted the humbling opportunity to deliver a child, and I tried to understand what it meant to bring life into the world and to imagine that soon it would be my child.

Although I felt, even then, a longing to hold my son and look at him the way those mothers did, it did not immediately feel real. My wife could feel her body changing, but I could not. Seeing her abdomen fill and begin to rise was not enough either. Even seeing him shimmering and twirling on the screen at the doctor’s office didn’t make it real; I had seen many before, and I couldn’t believe that this one was mine. Then one night soon after, she took my hand and held it to her, and I felt my child move.

Physicians call this first sensation of movement the quickening, from the lesser used definition of the word “to spring to life.” Before ultrasounds, it was the first sign that the baby was viable, and it remains a measure of fetal health. But it represented, for me, something more than that. With my hand resting on him, through layers of skin and sinew, he flipped or kicked in some tiny, human way, and I sensed a similar stirring in myself. My desires sprung to life: to be a good and honest man, to raise a family, to treat people with kindness, to be a good father.

This was my quickening.

In the 1960s, Robert Coles was the child psychologist who treated Ruby Bridges, six years old, black, integrating a white elementary school in New Orleans. He would hate my use of the word treated.

Rather, he listened to Ruby’s story of integration during the civil rights movement. Today, I am reading his book The Call of Stories. What if, he suggests, we don’t jump to conclusions trying to fix others? What if, instead, we “listen carefully, record faithfully, understand as fully as possible?”

In the same book, he talks about the novels that formed his childhood—not the ones he read, but the books his parents read aloud in the evenings. What a boring thing to do! When the young Coles pressed his father about why he and his mother read and discussed Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, his father explained that these stories held reservoirs of wisdom. “Your mother and I feel rescued by these books.”

After reading Coles’ book about learning people’s stories, I talk on the phone with a friend. Conversation turns to the national climate, and I tell her how I feel so troubled.

She surprises me: “It’s all the books we read growing up.” We were formed by fiction, by the practice of putting ourselves, as it were, into the stories of others. Other people’s stories are covered with fear, danger, and injustice. But if I ignore them, if I stop being formed and informed by the lives of others, what is left? Coles quotes William Carlos Williams: “Their story, yours, mine—it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.”

BREN T SC HNI P KE , DAY TON, OH

REBECCA D . MA RT I N , LYN CH BU RG , VA

readers’ notes

One sense at a time. After he left, my body had resorted to this way of existing.

Activities—like a new dinner date—required constant shifting, making me pause to collect, to remember to eat the food in front of me.

“You’re very particular about the way you eat your food.” I glanced up from sifting rice and beans through my spoon to see him watching me. It was a kind and amused observing, one that made me realize immediately what I was doing.

“No one has ever said that to me,” I replied. “I’m not really a picky eater.” I’m just learning how to be alive again, I should have added. And it’s hard.

I keep candles burning in my bedroom and office and bathroom and living room to remind myself that I can smell. I take ballet classes and hike into high altitudes and drink wobbly air until my lungs hurt.

And I keep thinking about “Sojourn,” a poem by Nayyirah Waheed. She writes about how we’ll always “wear” in our skin both the people who have stayed and left. Nayyirah said it right. It’s the primary thing I feel most days, my skin waiting for his hand. I wear that absence every morning, and it doesn’t wash off at night.

Maybe that’s why feeling the breeze from an open window on my neck surprises me.

I forgot skin was used for that, forgot that my skin could feel anything but his nonresidence.

This reentry is shrill and crashing. But I need these reminders of what life is. That every sensation is not recalling him. That

life is not real unless I am doing it in this body. That the world has more to offer than his absence. And that I will learn all my senses again, and they will speak love to me.

D EL A N EY K O CH A N , CO L O . S PRI N G S , CO

There have been strangers, people I don’t know. They show up in random places, out of the blue. And I never see them again. At a football game. Walking through the parking lot of a strip mall. Waiting at a bus stop.

They don’t know that I feel sad, depressed, alone. Or do they?

I’m not sure. But they say what I need to hear. I’m not alone. I have a purpose. And I am loved. On this road, you have to stand alone, sometimes. No fanfare. No applause.

No awards. Just waking up and trying to do what’s right.

Then, when I feel exhausted, when I feel like giving up, someone comes and walks alongside me for a moment. I can take another step. I’m stronger than I thought. I can make it.

To all of the strangers, nameless, thank you.

ERIC JACKSON, JACKSONVILLE, FL

To my delight, an intriguing notion about how we are formed appeared on my desktop today at precisely 8:00 a.m., when eight double-edged words attributed to a 19th century Indian monk leaped out at me. The Swami had put it simply: “We are what our thoughts have made us.”

ANN COTRUPI, BURNT HILLS, NY

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My mom and I are more than lumpy. I got my lumps from a strict diet of sugar, but my mom got hers from a deep ravine across her lower abdomen—the result of a traumatic surgery that left her without a colon.

Months after surgery, when Mom had made enough progress to go home, I traveled home to be the helper. It’s always different than you imagine: There’s less fetching peanut butter and a spoon for your convalescing mother and more being unable to sleep. One night, about 3:00 a.m., I saw a light on. Turned out Mom’s colostomy bag was leaking and needed to be replaced. I kept her company and provided my unusually warm hands when the time came to seal the wax ring around her stoma.

Later, I returned to Missouri as a visitor.

Mom and I went and bought a few yards of a black and red brocade and a pattern to make me a shirt. She sewed it partway, then tested it on me: too small. Like any good fat lady who accepts her unique body, I burst into tears.

But I was not the only lady in the room with a hard-to-dress body. “I have a literal sack of shit on me,” Mom said, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Then she added gussets at the sides like the expert she is, and the shirt fit.

St. Paul says in Romans, “Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?”

Somewhere on that spectrum, my mother is the seamstress extraordinaire jar, and I am the helpful insomniac pot. Mistake us not for mere lumps.

CHAN DL E R B U L L I ON, D E NTON, TX

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We both have a physical sameness, petite with black curly hair. We love mac and cheese, puppies, Zumba. She is a forty-yearold with the fresh polished skin of sixteen and the sagacity of a ninety-year-old. I, double her age, I am her mother, caregiver, ally. At the time of her birth, I was an ambitious woman with a mighty plan. Today, I am child-like, she points at a butterfly that is flying fifty feet away . . . and I applaud my gift of seeing.

Many times I ask myself, “Am I now the one I was supposed to be?” She can’t say a phrase longer than six words, but she knows the exact moment to tell me: “It’s okay, Mommy.” Insight thrives in the temple of her mind.

At the time she was conceived, I already had three bouncing children while trying to survive a drowning marriage. She wasn’t planned. She wasn’t wanted. She wasn’t in anyone’s future. Reluctantly, I kept her.

After her birth, at the news of her disability, my life tilted like a broken vessel in an already frenzied sea. I floated, swam, and kept afloat with strength I never knew I had. As the years went by, as my other children grew up and left home, she and I became ligated by a seemingly invisible umbilical cord—a connection that sometimes I greet, and sometimes, at the high of the tide, I just float.

N A N CY CREA G ER, BREMERT O N , WA

J O S EPH T RU S CEL L O

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my cousin Luca overdosed. To this day, Nonna tells the story every time I see her. And she tells it as if she’s never told it before, as if she’s trying to convince me it really happened.

Here is the story, as I understand it. Nonna had a stomachache because she ate too much apple pie, and after spending an uncomfortable hour in the bathroom, she walked into her dark living room and found blue and red lights intermittently coloring the lace curtains. She looked out the window and saw two cops emerging from a squad car with flashlights in hand. They didn’t go to one of the neighbors’ houses, as Nonna expected.

Instead they walked toward the alleyway that led to Nonna’s small, fenced-in backyard.

Nonna put on her housecoat and went to the back deck. She looked down from the second floor. The two cops and two other shadowy figures were huddled over a supine fat man wearing nothing but swim trunks. Nonna tried to tell herself the fat man wasn’t Luca, but then one of the cops shined his flashlight right on Luca’s face. Nonna claims he was smiling. She ran to the downstairs apartment and woke up my Uncle Pete and Aunt Connie (Uncle Pete on the couch, Aunt Connie in bed). She told them what was happening and they ran outside to check on their son. Nonna went down to the basement, where TJ, Luca’s kid brother, was asleep. She woke up TJ and told him that Luca was out cold in the backyard, surrounded by cops. TJ, fifteen at the time, looked scared.

“Where’s he keep his drugs?” Nonna said.

TJ shrugged. I don’t know what all TJ knew, but Nonna doesn’t think the boy had a clue his big brother was a junkie.

Nonna went to Luca’s bedroom and rifled through his drawers. She wanted to flush his stuff down the toilet in case the cops looked through the house. She didn’t find anything.

IT’S BE E N SEVE N YE A R S SI NC E

for dinner. Just the two of us. She’s drinking coffee and watching me eat the manicotti she made but won’t eat, since she doesn’t like pasta.

“Your father he says you won an award,” Nonna says.

I explain that I did and it’s no big deal.

“Your father he says you won’t tell him what your fancy shmancy award-winning story was about.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I feel kind of funny about it.”

“Why?” “Ah I don’t know, Nonna. It’s full of grown-up stuff.”

“Grown-up? Your father’s sixty years old.”

“I know, I know. I just feel weird. I don’t know why—you know me and dad. We don’t really talk about certain subjects.”

“What’s the story about?”

I think for a second. I figure I’ll keep it vague and thematic.

“Sex and death,” I say.

“Good boy,” Nonna says.

She pats me on the forearm and smiles proudly. Her wrinkled little hand is warm, which surprises me. For some reason I expect old people’s skin to feel like a corn flake— room temperature, crusty—but every old cheek I kiss and every old hand I shake is warm I’M AT NONNA’S

17

and damp, as if protesting my assumption that the skin doesn’t contain a living thing.

“Sex and death,” Nonna says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I’ve been thinking about sex for eighty-five years. Nobody wants to hear that from a little old lady.”

I chuckle. I have no idea what to say.

“See,” she says. “I can see you don’t wanna hear it.”

I want to correct my meek reaction. I want to show her I don’t mind.

“Sex,” I say. “It never goes away, huh?”

“It gets worse,” Nonna says. “And then you feel stupid for thinking about it because you’re old as dirt.”

“Ah,” I say. “No use feeling stupid.”

“There’s some use,” Nonna says. “Feeling stupid keeps you from acting stupid.” the ambulance with Luca. I can’t imagine what that ride was like for my aunt, my godmother. I can’t pretend to conceptualize what she felt while looking at her shirtless son on a gurney, his body totally at the whim of gloved hands.

Uncle Pete, TJ, and Nonna followed the ambulance. None of them spoke for the entire ride. And not just because Luca was dying. Nonna and Uncle Pete were on bad terms ever since Uncle Pete filed for divorce. It wasn’t just that he was breaking up the family, leaving Aunt Connie behind. It was the way he was doing it. A year prior, Nonna had sold the house in which they all lived—a tall, slender structure with an upstairs and downstairs apartment—to Uncle Pete and Aunt Connie. She gave it to them for cheap. Really cheap.

Practically free, when you considered what the house was worth. Not long after he got his hands on this big asset, Uncle Pete got weird. He distanced himself. He stayed out late.

Eventually—predictably—he started seeing another woman. Nonna said she saw no sign of trouble until she’d sold the house.

Anyway, I don’t really know if Uncle Pete decided to leave because he saw dollar signs or if the marriage had been deteriorating for a long time. But I do know Luca didn’t deal with it well. He was eighteen then, and he’d often come upstairs to Nonna’s apartment and talk sadly about how happy his family used to be. He’d detail his parents’ arguments, which became more and more frequent. He’d recount trips to the Jersey Shore and get teary eyed. He’d say he wished he was a little kid again. He’d tell Nonna about how he wanted to kick his father’s ass. Nonna would feed him and listen.

AUNT CONNI E ROD E I N

“YOU GO NNA M A K E a story out of us?” Nonna says.

“Oh I don’t know if I know enough about you to write a story,” I say.

“You could just fill in the blanks with fake stuff,” she says.

“I could, couldn’t I?” “We won’t know. We don’t read.”

I laugh.

“Sex and death,” Nonna says.

She sips her coffee and thinks.

18

“Well,” she continues. “We don’t have much sex since we’ve all rotted into ugly people.

But if you’re going to write a story about death, our stories are good.”

“Are they? I couldn’t tell grandpa’s story if I wanted to. And everybody else lives in our stories.”

“For now,” Nonna says.

He was in a coma for three days, and everybody thought he was either going to die or come out a vegetable. I never visited him. I couldn’t stomach the thought of him all plugged up with tubes and potentially retarded or dead. I mostly cried and prayed. Back then I could pray and believe it. When Luca finally came to, he was his old horrible self.

Apparently he was an asshole at the hospital. He called his mother a bitch and his father a scumbag. He told my Nonna to get out of his fucking face.

Nonna was surprised when we found out it was heroin. She knew he’d OD’d on bad stuff, but heroin—to Nonna, heroin was practically a fictional substance, something reserved for movies she didn’t like to watch. In every iteration of the story, Nonna pauses to say, I thought worst case he was sniffing the cocaines.

LUCA L I VE D.

“YOUR C OUSI N LU CA he’s mad at me,” Nonna says.

“How come?” I say.

“Last week I called him a bad penny.”

I blink. I’m waiting for more, but Nonna doesn’t say anything.

“And he’s mad about that?”

“Yeah,” Nonna says. She stops pouring her coffee so she can think better. “But first he was sad. He even cried. A lot, I think.”

She finishes pouring. I’m holding a fork full of manicotti an inch below my lips.

“Cried?” I say.

“I didn’t know he was upset till the other day. He don’t say nothing about it. He plays along like he’s fine. But his mother she says to me Luca’s been all worked up about being a bad penny.”

I store the manicotti in my cheek before I respond.

“What’s this bad penny thing even about?”

“I’ll tell you,” Nonna says. “When he first told me he’d be moving back in downstairs, this’s gotta be two months ago now, I says to him, ‘You’re like a bad penny, I can’t get rid of you.’”

I put down my fork and shake my head. Luca, twenty-five, had moved out of the house and only lasted a month before he came crawling back.

“I don’t get what all there is to cry about,” I say.

Nonna sips her coffee twice and then adds cream.

“He’s sensitive, your cousin,” Nonna says. “He says to his mother I don’t appreciate him.

He says he thinks I’d be happier if he died that time.”

“Christ,” I say. “You were just busting his balls. He don’t gotta go and be dramatic about it.”

My accent surprises me. I always match the sound of my family when I’m near them.

19

“That’s Luca,” Nonna says. “He’s always a story.”

“Yeah,” I say, forking another mouthful. “A bullshit story.”

“Stop,” Nonna says. when Luca overdosed. In the years since, I worked as an auditor in Manhattan and a schoolteacher in Connecticut; then I wanted to be a writer, so I followed some funding down to Virginia. I only see Nonna during the summer and Christmas holidays, when I can spare a weekend to drive to Jersey. I try to visit as much as I can, but really I don’t know what it’s like in Nonna’s house. Aunt Connie moved out years ago; she lives with her boyfriend nearby. Luca and TJ live below Nonna. They drink a ton and host parties. Nonna, an insomniac since birth, spends her nights watching game shows one floor above thumping music and god knows what else. The cops often show up to clear the place out.

I WAS IN C OL L EG E

when Nonna sold the house, and she got it in writing: Uncle Pete and Aunt Connie couldn’t sell the place as long as Nonna lived there. Ever since the divorce, Uncle Pete has lived in Trenton. He’s been supporting Luca, TJ, and Aunt Connie, sending money for groceries, employing Luca and TJ whenever they’re between jobs (i.e., always), paying his alimony and then some. He wants to keep on decent terms, my Nonna claims, so he can get Nonna, his ex-mother-in-law, to agree to move out.

That way he can sell the house sooner rather than later. Fat chance. Nonna’s not going anywhere. Plus, where would Luca live? Nonna fears he’d crumble anywhere else.

TH ERE WAS ONE ST I P U LAT I ON

“I’M SUR P R I SE D T HE crybaby hasn’t made an appearance yet,” I say.

“He don’t come up to eat with me no more,” Nonna says. “You watch; he’ll come up at two, three in the morning and eat all the leftovers.”

“Least he can do is eat with his grandmother,” I say.

“It’s okay. He’s tired from work. He don’t wanna talk.”

“You call what he does work.”

“He’s a supervisor.”

“Supervisor.”

I spit the word. Luca works for his father’s HVAC company. Words I know but never use pop into my head: nepotism, sinecure.

“Luca’s a good boy,” Nonna says.

I have nothing to say.

“He don’t like to come up and talk because he’s ashamed of himself all day every day.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’d be, too, if I were him.”

Even though Nonna is shaking her head no, it’s clear she agrees.

“He moving out soon or what?” I say. “How long’s he gonna be in your business?”

“Oh. Maybe a while.”

She says it intentionally tentatively, to indicate that something’s up.

“Don’t tell me Uncle Pete gave him the boot.”

“No,” Nonna says. “No he’s still got the job.”

20

“Well, what is it?”

Nonna levels me with her eyes.

“He’s gotta pay the state,” she says. “He got another drunken driving.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Nonna holds up her hand, but I keep on.

“What about his girl?” I say. “Why don’t he go stay with her?”

“That’s a whole nother story. You don’t wanna hear this.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t make a fuss.”

“What is it?”

“Your Aunt Connie isn’t too happy about it.”

“What is it?”

“The girlfriend, she moved in with him. On Saturday. She lives here now.”

I’ve never met the girl before, but to move in with Luca she has to be bat shit.

“That’s just what you need,” I say. “Another drinking buddy downstairs for Luca and TJ.” I wait for Nonna to speak. She just shakes her head at her coffee mug.

“It’s gonna be a disaster,” I say. “The three of them partying all night, keeping you awake.

Those drunks are gonna take over the whole building.”

Nonna reaches across the table and slaps my wrist.

“Don’t you call them drunks,” she says.

“They’re drunks,” I say.

“They’re your family.”

“Shame you don’t get to choose your family.”

Nonna stands and walks to the cutlery drawer, from which she removes a long wooden ladle. I smile. When Luca and I were children, Nonna would threaten to beat us with the wooden ladle, but she’d never actually go through with it.

Nonna grabs me by the collar and lifts the ladle above her head like she’s going to hammer it down on top of my skull.

“Take it back,” she says.

I wait two beats.

“I take it back,” I say.

Luca telling Nonna all about that night he nearly got himself killed. I picture them in the kitchen, eating pasta, sipping coffee, talking. It’s a beautiful thing to envision, but it’s not the way Luca is. He’s twitchy, shame-driven, defensive. I’m sure he’s concocted some narrative about how his overdose was everybody’s fault but his. He’s been that way since forever. He was one of those kids who every teacher had a problem with, and somehow it was always the teacher’s fault. Then he grew up, and the people who “picked on” him were police officers.

SOMET I M ES I I M AG I NE

changes over time. Nonna acquires details. I don’t know if she’s making them up or what. For a while, Nonna didn’t know much about how Luca got into drugs. Then all of a sudden she knew. She claimed he started sniffing the cocaines during TH E OVE R D OSE ST ORY

21

his freshman year at Bergen Catholic. She said Uncle Pete should’ve never sent him to that terrible, expensive school because all the rich kids had an infinite supply of poison. At some point she added the detail that Luca had been at a barbecue the night of the overdose.

There, he met two smackheads—druggie guys, as Nonna called them—who took him to Newark to purchase the goods; then they smoked a ton of weed—marijuana joints—and drank a load of vodka and snorted up the heroin. Why not needles? I asked once. Your cousin Luca he’s too wimpy for needles, Nonna had said. After filling their bodies with junk, the three doped-up stooges went into the Jacuzzi Uncle Pete had purchased even though he could barely afford it, and the heat was too much for Luca. He puked, according to Nonna, in the water. He climbed out, stumbled, and hit the ground. How Nonna knows this, I have no idea. The only two people who witnessed Luca’s literal downfall were the two smackheads, and nobody’s seen those guys since that night seven years ago. All we know about them is that they called 911. Nonna loves them, whoever they are. They could’ve left him, she always says. ruminating over the event and fabricating the details. I imagine she thinks about the details so intensely that she starts to believe them. I like this idea for selfish reasons. It makes Nonna a fiction writer, like me. It connects us, and I fear I’ve severed most of our connections with distance and neglect.

I IMAGINE NONNA

“I

smelled gravy.”

It’s Luca, standing at the top of the stairwell, grinning at me.

“Come on, Nonna,” Luca says. “How’s it you fix Mr. Big Shot gravy and pasta every time he shows his face? You only make scraps for your bad penny.”

He’s gotten even fatter. He wears a black Metallica T-shirt and royal blue basketball shorts that cheaply sparkle. His facial hair is patchy, thin—pubescent almost. On his calf: a new tattoo, an outline of the state of New Jersey. On his head: a funny little black beanie, way too small for his enormous dome.

“That hat,” Nonna says. “You look like a Willy off a pickle boat.”

“What?” Luca says.

“A longshoreman.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Nonna says. “Come here let me fix you a dish.”

“Don’t get up,” Luca says.

He leans over the stove and sniffs.

“I’m gonna take some to go,” Luca says. “Ash is gonna be home soon, and I told her I’d watch Jeopardy with her.”

Ash? Ash, the bat shit girl. Living in my Nonna’s house.

“So you’ve got her living here too, now,” I say.

“Yeah,” Luca says, transporting manicotti to a plate. “Just for a hot minute.”

“That’s good,” I say. “Real good.”

I feel a pulse somewhere near my clavicle. I always want to tell Luca to straighten himself out or find his own life, away from our grandmother, but I never say it.

TH OUGHT I

22

I sit still feeling like a flushed child.

“Yeah,” Luca says. “Way I see it we can take a few months here. Save up some money.

Then go someplace nice.”

“Smart,” I say.

“Not smart like you,” Luca says, pointing at me with a fork. “You’ve got your shit figured out, cuz.”

“Ah,” I say. the point where Nonna can’t bear to look at the apartment downstairs. There are fist holes in the walls and sticky beer stains all over the kitchen tiles. Food crusting in the carpets. A broken microwave. A broken toilet seat. Broken dishes. Broken chairs. Broken everything. And who broke everything? Who had Luca let into the house? What kind of characters had snorted and fucked and passed out beneath my Nonna? It’s a miracle the whole mess of Luca’s life has remained on the first floor, that strangers haven’t ascended the stairs and trashed Nonna’s warm home.

Maybe they have, though. Maybe Nonna has secrets. Maybe she is protecting her Luca by not telling anybody what is going on in that house.

The truth is, I’ll never know.

I’m the one who left town. The storyteller. Mr. Big Shot. The grandson who will forever be nothing more than a visitor. I will not be the subject of one of Nonna’s stories like Luca.

He is so important. He is the great problem of Nonna’s life. When she talks about him, all I hear is love, and I’m jealous. Not because she doesn’t love me. She does—unquestionably, eternally. But her love for Luca is essential to her. It keeps her going.

TH ESE DAYS I T ’S T O

“YOU GOT A NY bread?” Luca says.

“Garlic bread’s in the oven,” Nonna says. “I didn’t want it to get cold.”

Luca pulls open the oven. It creaks. He tears off a piece of garlic bread and throws it on top of his manicotti. He closes the oven too hard. The whole thing shakes.

Why don’t you sit the fuck down and eat, I think.

Say it. Say it. Speak up.

I cough. I’m nothing but my heartbeat.

Luca leans over and kisses Nonna on the head, and my anger morphs into a kind of feverish nostalgia. Luca’s lips sink into Nonna’s short pompadour, which is a wig, and I’m reminded of how, as kids, Luca and I would steal Nonna’s wig while she was napping. We’d wear the wig around the house, laughing hysterically and silently, trying not to wake her.

It always astounds me how quickly I can feel like a boy again when I’m around Luca. Even though we’re nothing alike. Even though, at this point, I don’t even know him.

Luca punches me in the shoulder. It stings.

“Be good, Big Shot,” Luca says.

“Yeah,” I say.

Luca stomps downstairs.

Nonna stares blankly at the staircase.

I want to know what she’s thinking. I want to apologize to her. For what, I’m not even

23

sure. For being a non-entity in her life, perhaps.

It’s quiet for a minute or so.

“You still hungry?” Nonna says.

“I’m stuffed,” I say.

She leans across the table and peeks at my plate.

“You licked it clean,” she says.

“It was good.”

“Have another plate.”

“I can’t. I might pop.”

“You’ll have another,” Nonna says, reaching across the table, grabbing my plate.

“Alright fine,” I say.

“Good boy.” me perfect. We were exchanging messages on Facebook; I was drunk, and I’m pretty sure he was under the influence of something, too. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been talking—not because of some grudge, but because we had no use for each other.

Anyway, Luca said he totally fucked up his life. And I said: Nobody’s perfect. His exact response: You don’t understand man. You’re perfect. You got your college degrees and your jobs and you always have a story to tell. You don’t know how it feels to be a fucked up loser.

I only told him he was being ridiculous. I didn’t mention that I was insulted. Luca didn’t know I was a depressed drunk. I wanted to enlighten him. I wanted to remind him it was difficult to be any person, me included. But he wouldn’t have even heard that. He would’ve said, I know I know, and immediately gotten back to lamenting his life. If I mentioned my problems, my imperfections, Luca would’ve outdone them by enumerating his. Like every junkie I’ve ever known, he walks around with blinders on, and in his narrowed field of vision he sees only himself.

And anyway, I wasn’t about to start whining at him. Who was I to tell him he wasn’t the most fucked-up loser who ever existed? I didn’t know how it felt to crave heroin in my body.

I couldn’t wrap my head around that need. I could easily imagine ruining my own life, but I couldn’t—and still can’t—imagine needing something badly enough to ruin the lives of those around me. The only time Luca ever described his addiction to me, he said: it’s like every vein is a dehydrated mouth, and you know there’s a full body drink of ice water out there.

LUCA ONC E CA L L E D

“YOUR UNC L E P ET E just turned fifty-nine,” Nonna says.

“He’s getting up there,” I say.

“I know.”

“You gonna outlive him?” I say.

“I hope so. I don’t want him to liquidate my house.”

“No way he’s got ten years left in him,” I say.

Nonna thinks for a few seconds.

“In the end it’s all a tie,” she says.

I smile. She’s right.

“But still,” Nonna says. “I’m gonna win.”

24

full body drink of ice water—I made that up. Luca never said it. I think I heard a junkie comedian use the description, or something like it. Perhaps I read it in a book. I don’t know. But Luca never said it to me. We’ve never discussed his drug use in any terms besides innuendo. And even then, we touch the subject and run away from it like it’s a grenade with a pulled pin. If you want to know why I made up that line, here: while I was typing it, I really thought Luca said it to me. I imagined something so clear—Luca and I sitting in Nonna’s kitchen, talking calmly and openly—it felt like a memory.

TH E BI T A B OU T T HE

I’M UNC OM FORTA B LY FU L L , but it’s time for dessert. Nonna slices into the apple pie

that’s been cooling on the counter.

“Worst night of my life,” she says, looking at the pie, digging into it.

And here comes the story. The hinge of my Nonna’s twilight years. The event that seemed to symbolically put a nail in the family’s coffin. An apple pie. A bellyache. Police lights. Luca in the yard. Those shadowy boys who called for help. A silent car ride to the emergency room with Uncle Pete and TJ. Luca in a coma. Three endless days waiting for him to wake up.

I wonder what wrinkle she’ll add to the story this time. Whatever it is, I know it’ll be something gritty and believable, something too specific to deny. And I know why she’ll do it: to make the story more real, or at least more comprehensible. When I think of my Nonna thinking about her Luca, I see an old woman staring at a kitchen table full of puzzle pieces. And the puzzle pieces are her family. Only each puzzle piece has no image on it, but Nonna sees images on them. She grabs a pencil, takes one blank puzzle piece at a time, and draws intricate little components of her family. And she draws them real. She doesn’t falsify. Even if the details are imagined, she makes them true to the people she knows. Luca’s the toughest to draw, so she works overtime on articulating him. She knows she’ll probably never get him right, but she’s going to try. She imagines that if she does Luca justice, she can piece the picture together, frame it, mount it on her wall, and say to herself: this is what my family looks like, and I am not ashamed.

25

MELI SSA R E E SE R P OU L I N

Translations begin with gone dig a shelter from the avalanche of not here, not here don’t write when words only swim on the page tell me my sorrow with sounds like sparrow or wheelbarrow carry this wing or make it earthy, make me a body I can keep here, make me a house inside death where the walls won’t cave in, breathe me a name and speak me a new language watertight enough to hold me in

26

JASON TA NDON

Christmas Morning, After Illness Down by the water sitting cross-legged on the bank, the grass white with frost, bunched and lumpy as an unmade bed, I hear my son’s voice muffled, his hands slapping glass:

Look at me, Daddy.

Daddy, look at me.

27

JOHN GOSSL E E

The Sacred Spaces Are Full of Pills and Smoke The oracle doesn’t know it’s the oracle, it just knows it’s empty until the voice passes through it.

The spirit tosses like hair in the wind and I pull it out of my eyes into a bun, saying, this is not a part of me in the choppy water, but I’m trying to understand, to love the language of the country of yourself. * The buildings are the buildings and something else, but the names of things aren’t what they are in the mouth, their shape before and after the speech grips the air like a mountainside after an echo.

It’s humid from the storm and I wonder if my shirt is wet because I walked in the rain, or because I chose to wear a shirt. * No one sees the root of the tree until the dirt around it is washed away.

No one thinks of me now; something passes through my gate.

It’s all a kind of heaven and being is the only answer to every needle forcing its path into the body.

28

LANG

and

DRAKE F O RT U N AT O S A L A Z AR

29

for my mother—a lifelong atheist—an awkward silence grew more awkward. The mourners had been asked to step forward to testify to my mother’s boundless charity and grace and selflessness. Finally a man I didn’t recognize rose in the rear of the hall and I held my breath.

The stranger described himself as the supervisor at the public library where my mother had volunteered. He’d known her only a few months, but he had an anecdote, which he preceded with a few brief clauses of vague praise. The anecdote itself could not be described as vague. The supervisor told how my mother visited his office to inquire about a library policy that my mother considered unfair to financially disadvantaged patrons. My mother and the supervisor engaged in a lively debate, to underscore one point of which my mother took hold of a statuette of Sir Francis Drake on the supervisor’s desk and pitched it at the supervisor. It just missed him.

Now I recognized the man. Not the man himself, but the man as an example of a familiar category: persons at the other end of points underscored by my mother. I was genuinely moved. I’d been in that category once, I shared the category with the supervisor; we weren’t strangers, we shared a bond. We were connected by my mother’s fondness for underscoring.

AT TH E FU NE R A L SE RVI C E

WH EN I WAS FI FT E E N , my mother taught me to speak the language of the King James

Bible. My mother, who took her atheism seriously, not only had kept me out of church, she’d forbidden me to read the Bible, any version of the Bible—she would let me read the Bible when she was good and ready. When I turned twelve, she led me by the hand to the plaza where she went each morning for coffee. She placed a copy of the New Testament between us.

It was the Greek New Testament, but I knew Greek, I’d been tutored in Greek by an atheist friend of my mother, a Dante scholar.

So began my schooling in the New Testament. Each morning my mother brought me to the plaza and sat us at whichever table was furthest removed from the many worldly distractions of the plaza. Limos pulled up at the curb and drivers stood in the warmth of the sun as the plaza regulars made no fuss over celebrities or their entourages. From time to time paparazzi gathered at the sidewalk to await a starlet who would do a catwalk exit into the sunlight. We weren’t in the sun; we were far back in the chilly shade, and I was assigned the chair that faced away from glamour and temptation.

My mother tended to be sullen in the morning, terse. I ordered our coffees, a treat for me, taking my place in line with adults. I started looking forward to our lessons. The Greek text was easy going, basically the same Greek that I’d learned from the Dante scholar, only with certain quirks. I needed always to bear in mind that the object was to learn the language of the King James Version. The trick was to stay alert: a word popped into my head, I would have to bite my tongue, remember that in this unfamiliar language the word my mother would allow was “brethren” not “brothers,” the correct word in the language of my lessons with the Dante scholar.

So much distraction! My eyes wandered, I eavesdropped on a married couple trading accusations of infidelity. Even in our lonely corner screenwriters were at work, annotating dialogue on their laptops. Sometimes the screenwriters were also actors, tall and pale and freckled, in short shorts and platform heels and sheer blouses, or yoga pants, or whatever they’d slipped into that morning so as to challenge my vigilance.

30

of drizzle we sat inside, at the windows, the domain of the hardcore regulars, all-day coffee drinkers. My mother started our lesson a third of the way through John—the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus teaching at the temple. I should have been on guard, as the day before I’d been stumped by the Greek word for “tabernacles.” Outside, the heavy mist accumulated into rivulets which flowed with distracting velocity toward the grating at the center of the plaza. Each rivulet chose its own distractingly unpredictable path to the grating. No alarm went off when I reached the proper noun that in Greek straightforwardly means “Greeks”: people who are Greek. I spoke aloud the verse in what sounded to me like proper King James. But I’d blundered. Distracted, careless, I’d let the wrong word slip off my tongue.

I remembered what the right word was (“Gentiles”) the instant that my mother glared at me and seized hold of the statuette of Fritz Lang. Each table indoors honored a famous director or producer from the past. My mother raised the statuette. She didn’t aim it at me. She thumped it down, hard, against the well-worn tabletop, accomplishing a nearly unprecedented feat: everyone looked up.

ON ONE R A R E M OR NI NG

forward from the rear of the hall and told his own statuette anecdote, I was happy to recognize my mother and her underscoring. All through her harrowing last weeks it had been difficult to find my mother in the frail yet volatile woman who irrationally insisted upon the charity of donating her organs. Her organs couldn’t possibly be donated; they were riddled with cancer. Minute fragments of the tumor in her lungs had spread—“dispersed,” a word from the same verse as “Gentiles”—throughout her body; in her brain, the fragments impaired her clarity of thought. No one, not I, not my sisters, not the hospice nurse, dared convey this fearsome explanation to my mother.

Up until the very end she held to the certain fact that her boundless charity and grace and selflessness would live on in the bodies of eternally grateful believers and nonbelievers.

WH EN T HE ST R A NG E R CA M E

31

artist’s statement L U CA S MO N EYPEN N Y

is to have humanity coexist with the divine in one relationship. My practice is a personal attempt to investigate concepts and ideas that explore this relationship. The conversations are complex, honest, and often change multiple times in a single image. This body of work uses my own private struggles, hopes, and desires, which allow me to culturally place my beliefs and my self through the act of painting.

Painting is a medium that has a spiritual and religious history. I am interested in the religious works of Medieval, Baroque, and Renaissance artists and the conceptual ideas of the Abstract Expressionists and Islamic art. My philosophy is to meaningfully engage and incorporate these historical influences; thus, my paintings are a rendition of representational and abstract subjects.

The figure provides a body language for a spiritual state. I rely heavily on the historical associations of the figure in art to guide the emotional narrative. The patterns of color act as a figurative element generated from fabric and pattern to portray the ethereal and tangible. Occupying these spaces are organic elements from nature collaged to construct an environment. A growing tree, moving water, or changing light all exist both independent of and in relationship to humanity’s influence. If left alone these attributes erode man-made objects. This relationship between humans and nature serves as a vehicle into a spiritual world.

It is my objective to experience faith in the act of painting and to provoke curiosity and lasting engagement within others and myself about aspects of spirituality. I am not comparing and contrasting spirituality with humanity nor condemning one or the other.

Rather, I am looking for ways to represent them both in a painting referring to the larger narrative of human experience.

TH E PUR SU I T OF T HI S WOR K

32

LUCAS MONEYPENNY. Inaugurated Eschatology 2. Oil on Canvas. 49 x 55 inches.

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LUCAS MONEYPENNY. Baptismal Pool. Oil on canvas. 72 x 50 inches.

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LUCAS MONEYPENNY. Son's Lament. Oil on canvas. 66 x 72 inches.

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LUCAS MONEYPENNY. The Onlooker. Oil on canvas. 67.75 x 73.25 inches.

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LUCAS MONEYPENNY. Lover Beloved (secondhand). Oil on canvas. 68 x 71 inches

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LUCAS MONEYPENNY. Thicket. Oil on canvas. 56 x 60 inches.

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LUCAS MONEYPENNY. Untitled (transformation 4). Oil on canvas. 59.75 x 71.75.

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LUCAS MONEYPENNY. Inaugurated Eschatology 1. Oil on canvas. 56 x 60 inches.

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CHARNE L L P E TE R S

When the Good Lord Willed the Creek to Rise he sent a white man angel / to tell a white man / to save man / and all the white men / worked on a boat / and the white women / joined them two by two / and they fished / the dark people out from the water / and fastened them in / so they wouldn’t fall out / and took them back and said / Lord it is finished / and the Good Lord / willed the creek to die down / and the black men and women / were happy to be saved / so they worked the land / to pretty, deep songs / and lived in their own small wooden boats / all the black men and women say / their children / fall out the boats and drown / and it makes them sing deep, long songs / but the white men say / the Good Lord said / no creek shall rise again / no one can be drowning / just look at the rainbow / in the oil by your feet

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ELI ZABETH A C E VE D O

Laying on of Hands He never went through confirmation. A wild boy. Type to make you sprinkle the floor with salt before murmuring his name. The smack-dab in the middle brother, and nobody was gonna make him do shit he didn’t want to do and he didn’t want to take Christ, let that water sprinkled on his infant forehead be enough to usher him good. Or let it not. A laying on of hands. He wasn’t no rosary wearing boy, no bible verse boy. He did rock gold crosses that he iced out, boy. A laying on of hands. He never said ghost. Never said his dreams had grown limbs. Never said church, heavy with incense, moaning old women, men with twisted tongues, was what he lived daily in his church of a body. I believe now. There be a pulpit somewhere inside of him, a pool of holy water. He floats upwards, glinted. This is why he’s always smiling. A laying on of hands. His body decorated in mosaics, stained and glass behind glazed eyes, my brother be holy, he be fast spinning to his heart tambourines.

He sees demons sometimes. But he can’t hear the weeping. Has a congregation clapping, singing, Alleluia! in his sternum. Allelulia to his sternum. To the space behind his teeth where a thousand candles flame, and he be praise and praise and all bread and wine, unlined with pews, kneeling to this god. Himself.

Some days, it’s like I’m waiting to feel his palms on my forehead. Hear prayers laced between his questions. As if he’s ever going to ask me: What’s hurting you, Liz? And heal.

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ELI ZABE TH A C E VE D O

Medusa Teaches La Negra to Pray Because she doesn't know how else La Negra opens her mouth.

Medusa knows about split tongues.

Do you see the sand? The dust of sugar?

Coiled orange peels? The carvings?

The bundled knives. The oxen?

Medusa puts her ear to La Negra's lips.

There. The border. The black. The blind.

The bound. Smell it! The blood.

Medusa shakes her head no.

La Negra pulls out her own teeth.

Sometimes monsters need an offering.

Tell me how. Don't you see my limbs have grown hands?

And those hands have grown hands on the palms?

And those fingers—all of them—figuring how to carry a damned island: I am a starving beastling. But no matter how much I feed my skin grows tight and tight. A noose made of my own leather.

Tell me how to shed. Or if not, how to survive.

But Medusa gives the bloody teeth back. She doesn’t have these words: You want the Gods to claim you as their crossbreed, you want your people to build pews for you instead of stoops.

But Negra, you must grow your teeth back.

They're the only thing that will save you.

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JASON W. SE L B Y

June Bug Penumbra I cannot hold this vision in my hand.

Remove it from my chest.

Allow the scalpel to calm the atrium clouds on the elevator’s ceiling.

Speak to the blue spruce, said Grandma.

After enough of this, time is a time when bobolinks fret in turkey claw & yellow foil. Behold the hay rake following rows of clover, swallows weaving through locusts kicked up in motes of dust. A hawk devoured mice once Grandpa mowed the field.

White German shepherds masticate the rest.

Look at them chasing Grandpa down each track. He & I are dead.

The German shepherds can shake your hand & scratch cuneiform into the porch door.

My ribs are empty where they weighed the tumor

like a newborn, bloody and on stainless steel scale over eight pounds, before a bison tapped up, a bullet in its head, & ate from our kitchen table.

Grandma will be mad if you are late.

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She's made iced tea for the linden. Bone china & arrowheads, the coroner’s stethoscope, rubber tubing cracked

its binaural rusted nestle behind the breakfront glass.

The oak ledge burns white from rain because she forgot to close the window.

Now there's no screen to keep pests on one side or the other.

The June bugs don't care, as they mumble in search of whatever they've lost.  

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1.

For a long time, I didn’t say anything. Refraining from speaking was a form of survival. The common style of communication at home was: don’t complain. In a house full of stoics, what else was there to do?

The quiet, silent girl was a role I took on.

2.

In my earliest years, I placated everyone and tried to be “wonderful” most of the time.

This style of communication, if you can call it that, was unbearably stifling.

Who on earth can sustain a thing like that?

3.

In my late teens, I made it a point to offend anyone and everyone. I cut all my hair off and chewed with my mouth open. I wouldn’t wear deodorant. I spoke out against authority and raged against “the system.” Somehow, I imagined this newer, cruder style of communication rendered me “authentic.”

This was just another role—another persona.

4.

In Murray Stein’s book, Jung’s Map of the Soul: an Introduction, the author describes the persona as “the person-as-presented, not the person-as-real,” and goes on to state, Jung chose [the term persona] for his psychological theory because it has to do with playing roles in society. He was interested in how people come to play particular roles, adopt a conventional collective attitude, and represent social and cultural stereotypes rather than assuming and living their own uniqueness.

Certainly this is a well-known human trait. It is a kind of mimicry.

Maintaining a cohesive, unfragmented persona has always been challenging for me.

Because persona and communication are so inextricably intertwined, I tend to experience high levels of social anxiety when talking to people. Stein refers to the persona as “the psychic skin between ego and world,” while Jung envisioned the persona in the psyche as “a sort of bridge into the world.” Whichever metaphor you choose, though—skin or bridge—the persona represents that point of contact with others.

The persona is the mask, presented to the world.

5.

When I discovered acting, I realized I had a lot to say when it was “through a character.”

Later, I became a playwright, and was able to access my voice—again, as long as I was speaking “through characters.”

Both these activities, acting and play writing, quelled some of the many voices in my head.

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6.

My friend Hedy once said to me, “I’m either from Vienna or Poland, depending on who I’m terrorizing.” Hedy was an acting teacher, one of the best I’ve ever met.

She was also a Holocaust survivor, and knew a great deal about being terrorized, firsthand.

7.

In a chapter titled, “The Revealed and the Concealed in Relations with Others,” Stein states, “the persona must relate to objects and protect the subject” (emphasis mine).

Without a reliable, cohesive persona, I often feel too exposed, too unprotected in social interactions.

8.

God forbid anyone is the least bit uncomfortable for even a second. If there is a silence, I will rush to fill it.

Is this my way of protecting the unprotected?

9.

C.G. Jung, in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, wrote that he, like his mother, had two distinct personalities. He called them, respectively, “No. 1” and “No. 2.”

Between my mother and I, we have about fifty-three.

Of course, I’ve never counted. The number “fifty-three” just sounds good. (But fiftythree, I’d wager, is probably somewhere in the neighborhood.)

10.

When my mother spent the afternoon with an older woman with a limp, she came home limping. When she saw the movie, Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman starring Cicely Tyson, she talked “black” for several hours, although my mother is not remotely black, and never will be. When she attended the bat mitzvah of a friend’s child and was very moved by the ceremony—in particular by the sense of roots and community—she became convinced that her father, a French-speaking Catholic auto mechanic from Southern Belgium, was in fact a Jew who had concealed his Jewish identity. This is highly improbable, even silly, considering my grandfather’s sister, Irene, obsessively prayed the rosary whenever she was in an automobile driving at high speed, which is, all things considered, a pretty Catholic thing to do.

But whether my grandfather was Jewish or not, is not the point; the point is my mother tried on new identities like other people try on sweaters or shoes. She had no one unified persona she could grab onto; hence, she had no one unified style of communication.

This, the woman who taught me how to speak.

11.

For a long time, I tried out a different accent, intonation and attitude with each new person I met. Often, I took on the other person’s characteristics—that is, their manner of speaking (or not speaking), and their manner of gesturing (or not gesturing)—without even 48

thinking. This mirroring was an instinctual, involuntary response.

I knew I was fractured in my identity, that being a chameleon was a survival tactic, but still, I couldn’t seem to control it. Mirroring another person when in conversation was the only solid thing I had to grab onto. Without doing so, I felt nothing but uncertainty—and uncertainty felt threatening to me.

But what if uncertainty is, in fact, the key? (Or, at least a key—one of many?)

12.

In his essay, “Psychotherapy and Spiritual Tradition,” from the anthology Awakening the Heart: East/West Approaches to Psychotherapy and the Healing Relationship, A.C. Robin Skynner muses on the paradox that, “when I am sure of nothing, I am yet most deeply confident of the possibility of understanding. . . . Like water welling up from a stream, I am new every moment, appearing miraculously from some source hidden deep within the ground of my being.”

Perhaps if I can learn to tolerate the uncertainty of “knowing” or of “being somebody”— or, as Skynner puts it, “to be right, to be good, to know, to change, to be normal, to be successful—or alternatively, to be bad, rebellious, a tragic failure, a pathetic victim—but one way or another, always seeking to preserve some experience, like a butterfly gassed in a bottle and pinned to a board”—and dip into uncertainty like a well with the intention of honestly examining and exploring it, the problem of maintaining a coherent persona will fade away, and the uncertainty will become the thing of substance, the cornerstone.

Hopefully.

13.

For a long time, whenever anyone asked me about myself, I’d quickly turn the tables and ask about them.

I learned how to do this seamlessly from my dad, a polio survivor, who believed that if people knew what he was truly feeling at any given moment, they would no longer want to spend time with him.

Which would have been unbearable; he was an extrovert.

14.

When I work as a journalist, I find creating rapport with the subject the easiest part.

While this skill is useful in gaining access, it’s also the same quality that makes me least trust myself.

Years ago, I read a satirical horoscope in an alternative, hipster newspaper which gibed, tongue-in-cheek, that people born under my astrological sign of Libra tend to make fantastic prostitutes.

Unfortunately, when I read that, I knew exactly what it meant.

15.

A friend from a former era, Deborah K., once kicked me in the shin with her cowboy boot. At the time, I was being adorably neurotic and self-deprecating in conversation.

Yeah, it hurt—it was a cowboy boot.

Later, it dawned on me: she kicked me because she was exasperated with my schtick; 49

what she needed was a strong ally—not a self-deprecating, adorable comedienne. She needed a friend who would stand up for herself without apology, since a person who stands up unapologetically for herself is more likely to stand up for a friend, as well.

When Deborah K. kicked me with her cowboy boot, we were in my studio apartment on West 42nd Street, in the late ‘80s, and Deborah K., a starving actress, had just bought $200 worth of bread, peanut butter, and jelly to make sandwiches to pass out on the streets to homeless people.

Also, it was Thanksgiving.

Kicking someone with a cowboy boot isn’t the nicest way to communicate a profound, deep-seated yearning, but the truth is, I’ve never forgotten it.

16.

Maybe it’s not possible to be 100% truthful when interacting with another person.

Maybe there’s always some element of illusion involved. Perhaps all the efforts at talking are, in the end, completely futile.

I think the only time I feel truly connected with someone is through physical contact (as in sex—or as in the case of Deborah K., violence), or in total silence.

In other words, without words.

How very odd then, that I became a writer.

17.

When you change identities frequently, you tend to move a lot. There are so many new locations, all the time, so many new cities.

In my life, I have lived in twenty-seven different places. And I am fifty-three.

18.

(Fifty-three: there’s that number again.)

19.

I feel a bit unstable at times—but on the flip side, life is rarely boring.

20.

When I lived in Mexico for four years, I had a working grasp of Spanish, but I was by no means fluent. Jokes, double-entendres, and nuances were out of my reach.

Is it a coincidence that those four years, when language eluded me, were the happiest of my life?

If it isn’t a coincidence, what does that say about language?

21.

I don’t have a problem interviewing people for the paper. Being a journalist came naturally to me. I make subjects laugh, I look like a dork, I come across as off-balanced and goofy.

I’m willing to go in and interview, less willing to be interviewed.

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22.

There are two people in the world I can really open up to. And both of them are cousins, blood relatives. Some days I think, Two confidantes is not many.

Other days I think, What a miracle I have two.

23.

In the parking lot at the El Cerrito Rec Center, I pulled into a convenient spot, switched off the car engine, and was suddenly overtaken with a headache and an inexplicable desire to fall asleep on the spot. I’d driven 30 minutes to get to the pool and had been hell-bent on putting in an hour of swimming laps—but the second I cut the engine, I couldn’t move a lick. I pressed my forehead hard against the black rubber of the steering wheel—as if the cool surface of it might absorb the pain if I just pushed hard enough. I stayed like that for ten minutes, absolutely paralyzed, unable to move my head, or open my eyes.

I thought to myself, What is going on?

Finally, I forced myself up and out of the car—move, or you will have driven all this way for nothing, I told myself. Get up, get up, get up! I felt heavy-headed, intoxicated, as if drugged. It took nothing less than a Herculean effort to force open my leaden eyelids.

When I finally did manage to heave the car door open, and stand upright in the parking lot, I happened to notice an ambulance and a police car, yellow lights flashing, about 30 yards away. A crew of paramedics were wielding a stretcher. They surrounded a woman splayed out on the ground in the middle of the yellow, zig-zaggy crosswalk, merely inches from the curb. As the paramedics flocked around her and transferred her onto the stretcher, they took extra precautions with her head and neck, stabilizing those regions with sturdy, black restraints—immobilizing her head.

When I asked the lifeguard manning the gate of El Cerrito Rec Center pool, he told me the woman’d been hit by a speeding car while crossing the street. Upon being told this, my headache immediately lifted.

Did I pick up on this woman’s pain, telepathically? Writing that now, it seems like utter nonsense, but—when I saw the woman lying on the ground, paramedics painstakingly examining her head and neck—that was the first thought that went through my head.

24.

In a radio interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, screen and TV writer Aaron Sorkin laughingly remarked that when he’s on a writing streak, he typically takes about six showers a day.

Aaron Sorkin channels a myriad of different character voices when he works.

What does compulsive showering have to do with styles of communication?

You tell me.

25.

Was that last fragment somewhat impertinent?

If so, I apologize—I’m just trying to communicate.

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WI LLI AM KE L L E Y W OOL F I TT

A Great Emigration Comes and Camps Near Humboldt Lake after Life Among the Piutes by Sarah Winnemucca The women are grinding ricegrass seeds when they hear the owl-creatures coming, beard faced, white eyed, beautiful, the eaters of men. Some women cover the seed, some leave it to the wind. They take the children. They run.

One ties a baby to her back, grabs a small girl by the hand and drags her until they reach sagebrush, greasewood, where the girl stumbles, bangs her knees. The mother chooses the baby on her back. She crouches with the girl, helps her scoop the sandy earth, dig a shallow slot: rough groove: length of the girl who lies in it as the mother sweeps and packs the loose earth, covers the girl feet to chin, arranges sticks to hide her face.

She tells her, don’t cry or stir, the owl-men might hear.

The earth presses the girl, she’s a seed in a warm hand: she can’t turn, can’t move, but she is unafraid: the earth holds her fast, stores her, will not give her away.

52

MI CHAE L M L E KOD AY

Cutting the Good Rosemary means taking from the bees, the butterflies, for they know medicine better than us, so I look for a bush less populated.

Maybe I’m just afraid of getting stung, my body so removed from its history, it thinks the bee’s poison a poison. Or maybe this fear means, secretly, I want it, the throbbing Freudian kiss of my ancestors, my allergies a kind of purgatory meant to prepare me for becoming animal, again. Either way, I go to the darker rosemary instead, in the shade, unbothered by the other pollinators, and draw the stone arrowhead I carry on my person at all times, and take, I think, only what I need.

53

MI CHAEL ML E KODAY

Ode to Compost, Beginning with Three Lines by Ellen Bass Bad things are going to happen.

Your tomatoes will grow a fungus and your cat will get run over.

Not so bad for the fungus, I suppose, or the vultures. Relax.

Watch one body become many, muscle become a hundred maggots, bone crushed to dust borne skyward inside the stretching limbs of the plants.

A so-called secular humanist says the best refutation of God is the predator, the parasite, the insect which does nothing but burrow through the brains & eyes of children.

I’ll bet, though, the deeply religious eye-burrowing insect hums lifelong praise songs to that god.

Here I am, anthropomorphizing again, dreaming the insect dream, calling on the moths with percussive breath magic or nonsense, pretending this communion isn’t terrifying.

Last year, I, an asthmatic city kid afraid of everything, moved to a region of California where people have died from an undiagnosable fungal infection of the lungs. I dreamt that everything I touched was covered in mycelial webs.

But still, here we are, eating the mushrooms that may one day eat us, a role reversal,

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putting the analyst on the couch and nodding, I see, the understudy practicing her eventual revenge, the whole empire in a grain of sand in the belly of a worm, if worms have bellies, waiting to be reborn something small & dark with the future.

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artists’ statements C H A KI L A L . HO S K I N S & CA RO LYN MO U N T

writes: “Since 2011, I have been creating a body of work that describes my journey to be closer to God. I am currently learning about semiotics, the theory and study of signs and symbols, and applying it in my artwork. Semiotics uses communication, which requires a sender, a message, and an intended receiver. I have been creating pieces that focus on the inclusion of all people because I believe that art should be obtainable and enjoyed by everyone. I have established a special interest in the visually impaired community. Braille is a tactile media form of semiotics. My use of biblical scriptures and poems in Braille is a means for the visually impaired to connect with my art.

I have also used motifs that thematically represent eternal life, including the butterfly, peacock, and jellyfish. North American indigenous peoples consider the butterfly a symbol of eternal life. In Christianity, the peacock is a symbol for eternal life. Biologists have found that the Turritopsis dohrnii (immortal jellyfish) is a particular jellyfish that transforms back into a juvenile polyp state after reproducing.

Through my journey I have learned that the Lord has given us gifts, and He not only expects but requires us to develop those gifts. According to Pope John Paul II, ‘Artistic talent is a gift from God, and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.’ Therefore, it is my obligation as an artist to improve my God-given gifts one artwork at a time. I intend to continue uniting visual and textural art as well as the sighted and unsighted into a spiritual path that can be experienced as one.”

CHAKI LA L . H OSKI NS

writes: “They live under the kitchen sink or in the basement amongst the paint and shoe polish. Once worn with pride, or used to cover our tender bodies at night, these rags reveal the history of routine and labour. Cloths that once covered, now reveal the beauty that hides underneath dirt and grime. Likewise, our scars and our body’s worn out places speak to the weight of hopes, grief, labour, love, and loss. Our intentions, our prayers, are woven throughout our days, the work of life and love that we attend to.

These explorations give voice to our inner knowing through quiet moments of honoring, drawing us in to a deeper, richer way of being as one connected to another.”

CAROLYN M OU NT

56

CHAKILA L. HOSKINS. Contemplation with Expectations. Oil over acrylic on panel. 80 x 120 inches

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CHAKILA L. HOSKINS. Visitation. Oil on canvas. 36 x 96 inches.

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CHAKILA L. HOSKINS . Visitation (detail). Oil on cnavas. 36 x 96 inches

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CHAKILA L. HOSKINS. Transformation (Metamorphosis). Oil on canvas. 36 x 96 inches

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CHAKILA L. HOSKINS. Regeneration. Oil over acrylic on panel. 72 x 60 inches.

61

CAROLYN MOUNT. Work as Prayer, Prayer as Work #1. Dish rag, thread. 10.2 x 11 inches

CAROLYN MOUNT . Work as Prayer, Prayer as Work #1 (detail). Dish rag, thread. 10.2 x 11 inches.

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CAROLYN MOUNT. Work as Prayer, Prayer as Work #5. Dish towel, thread. 25 x 14 inches

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CAROLYN MOUNT. Work as Prayer, Prayer as Work #4. Cloth, handspun wool, thread.

8.6 x 7.5 inches

CAROLYN MOUNT. Work as Prayer, Prayer as Work #4 (detail).

Cloth, handspun wool, thread. 8.6 x 7.5 inches

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Angel of Ashley P lace by KA R O L I N E S T RI CK L A N D

ANGEL of ASHLEY PLACE KA R O L I N E S T RI CK L A N D

65

listening to the houses.

She did it every afternoon, sitting out on her front porch next to her blue and white bowl, rocking, listening, munching. They weren’t pretty houses. People in Ashley Place had better things to think about than curb appeal—things like scraping together their monthly rent—and so the houses sagged at the seams, prolific begetters of weeds and crickets and rusty bicycle parts, slowly cycling and recycling scraps of trash that blew from yard to yard in fitful winds.

People left, but the houses stayed. She knew them all by now, the garrulous ones, the prissy ones, the ones with dirty minds, the ones with empty hearts. People talked about haunting as if it were an exceptional thing, when what they were really trying to say, if they just knew it, was that some houses are more awake than others. Some sinister. Some lonely. Some downright cruel. But they are as various as people, if you just know to listen.

Today she was listening to the old house behind her, cocking her head, grumbling a little through her chewing. There was something nasty in the wind, coming from that house.

Something directed straight at Mama Ruth.

“Mama Ruth, you got popcorn up there?” That was Jeremy, weaving a little on a rusty bike as he waved. “You having a movie night without me?”

“That’s what you think,” she answered, through a mouthful. “Watch where you’re going, young fellow. That gravel won’t feel too good, and you don’t want to show up home all scraped and bloody.”

He’d corrected his course and kept going. Good thing. His house was the next street over, and she’d seen it licking its lips. She didn’t like to think what would happen if he walked through that front door bleeding. Doctors would have scratched their heads, medicated him, sent him for tests. Chuckleheaded lot. She’d avoided them like the plague for over eighty years. They’d have never asked about his house, never warned him there are unhealthy places where you never get better, just linger and shiver while the walls around you feed on your vitality and sap your strength, blur you into bloodless shadow.

She’d seen it happen. Seen it almost happen too. Years ago there’d been a girl down in the cul-de-sac, little and blond with a sweet, timid face. Mama Ruth had noticed her getting pale, blurry around the edges like an unfocused photograph. It had puzzled her for a while. There was no domineering boyfriend, no aggrieved mother, no thankless child, none of those leech-like creatures at the bottom of most troubles like this. So one day she went and sat on her porch while the girl was off at class. She’d figured it out then, listening with closed eyes, rocking herself back and forth on the front step. It was the house. It was a starving husk, hungry for every scrap of human feeling and feminine warmth that poor little girl possessed. It was plundering her for it. Poor child—she was open and defenseless as a baby. She didn’t know how to stand up to people you could walk away from, much less walls and doors that met you every night and watched you while you slept. So Mama Ruth had given it to that house straight.

“All right, you talk to me. Not Claire, she’s not old enough to hear you. Might never be.

But I’m eighty-four years old, and what I haven’t seen ain’t worth seeing. You talk, and then you listen, and then we’ll see where we're at.”

So every day after that she’d sat on that front step, listened, fed it bit by bit, healed it from the inside out. When Claire graduated two years later, she was rosy and plump and happy, just as she ought to be. She used to thank Mama Ruth, though she didn’t know for what.

MAM A RU T H WAS

66

Folks were like that. They knew more than they’d let themselves know. Little Claire, she knew she owed her happiness to Mama Ruth, but she couldn’t explain how.

Mama Ruth closed her eyes and rocked some more.

Little Claire. That had been a good story.

The house behind her—that story wasn’t so good. It had stayed empty these past three years. That was no accident. There had been an old lady there, years ago. Still was, though most folks couldn’t hear her. Today, she was hollering at Mama Ruth’s house. She could hear her as she rocked.

You put me here. You left me here. You were supposed to help me.

Mama Ruth tried to take care of these houses, tried to take care of the people inside who were welded so tight to them without knowing it. But once a house and a soul consumed each other, it was too late. All that was left was to burn the house. Or exorcise it. Either was risky. You were playing with poison. And she was more tired now than she used to be.

I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been waiting a long time for you. I got something for you.

Git over here and get it. Face old Betty! You afraid? You should be.

“You okay, Mama Ruth?” It was one of the schoolkids on his way home.

“Don’t you worry, Timmy,” she said, without opening her eyes. “I ain’t dead yet.”

They had a name for her around here. Guardian angel. Maybe she was. In her own small way. She had a great respect for angels. They were messengers of God, and when you met one in real life, they weren’t as cute as they were on Christmas cards. The Bible told about people who fell down like dead when they met an angel. She was no angel, but maybe she was a guardian, a guardian with a message for something most people never think about.

Still with her eyes closed, she reached out and patted the siding behind her. She’d known as soon as she set foot in this house that it was a keeper. A real lady. The kind who never gossiped, never went back on her word, and listened more than she talked.

“We make a good team,” she said. “Been a good life with you.”

Listen to her getting sentimental. Maybe she really was getting old. These days, she found herself saying goodbye whenever she left her house, like she wasn’t sure she was coming back. Truth to tell, she wasn’t. But that was none of her business. Her business was the houses. The good Lord would sort out minor details like births and deaths, things He didn’t give you much choice about.

She heaved herself out of her chair. Reached for her walker. Straightened her old back.

“Time to go,” she said, and looked out across the rows of houses. “Coming, Betty,” she said.

67

NATALI E HOM E R

Dust on Horses Dust on horses. On the tack room mirror. Something to run a finger through, something to shine in the ocher light, motes like tiny suspended jellyfish.

Something to settle on a spectrum of dirty neon wraps, on the pinned ribbons curdled white.

Something to choke on, in the heat, while the sun cuts and runs, leaves me pressed like a bluebell, between Lamentations and Ezekiel, to wither and dry.

Alternately,

the light

in gradient

Daisy Chains

Butterscotch Silk

labeled like a paint chip:

Honeysuckle Bareback Queens

Golden Braids

Sweat. The opposite of dust. A clean, tingling smell, alfalfa rain.

A shining undulation that swells and melds across legs, rumps, sides.

Pharaoh was not mine, you said, and were right.

I snapped a carrot in half, pretended it was your neck.

Such is the unabashed violence of childhood.

Yesterday someone told me, “Your instincts are more important than praise,� and last night I dreamed of a hoof pick and a black leg, the hollow heart scraped clean, how the body balances,

how it sways.

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NATA L I E H OM E R

Glue Market and how raw the sunlight was sky full of spurs fluted, marrow-sucked bones its loamy shoveled holes

at hoof harvest chipped crescent moons the dogs carry away to gnaw

how do you like the summer now covered in webbed afterbirth dirty mirror, rotten apple canter canto contrapasso evening comes on like a stiff lasso

so what do you care your pinned blue ribbon mare all swivel ears and velvet veins invisible lunge lines broken legs

red rover red rover send Pharaoh right over

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Fear and trembling

JOHN KI M M E Y

N onn a's Story

Fear and Trembling

J O H N K I MMEY J O H N K I MMEY

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much to do with my father until he took me one October weekend to New York for a 1936 World Series game between the Giants and the Yankees.

And that weekend never seemed especially significant until I became older and looking back realized what happened changed the relationship between us. We would never be as we once were.

Although I saw him every day, he rarely spent much time around the house. Always down at the bakery, even nights and on Saturdays. Founded in 1883 by his father, who died in ’29 just before the Crash, and once the biggest and most modern in Albany, New York, the first to have sliced bread and wrap loaves in wax paper, it was struggling to survive. Mother said poor Ralph has a hard time competing with companies like Ward and Continental coming up from New York and giving grocers free bread for a couple of weeks to win their business.

A reserved man, stocky, dark, and grave, he never said much and seldom smiled or laughed and most days wore a brown suit with a vest to work. Affectionate toward Mother, kissing her when he left for the bakery in the morning and when he came home for supper with a loaf of Holsum or Kleen-Maid yet distant from Marjorie, Ruth, Jane, Ellie, and me.

The few occasions that brought us together were casual enough and didn’t seem important. One evening (I must have been eight or nine) hearing the front door open, I ran into the hall and tackled him, his overcoat covering me and his fedora scattering along with the blue and white wrapped loaf of Holsum. After we got up off the rumpled rug, he asked why I did that. I couldn’t answer. Then one night several years later when I was in bed ready to go to sleep, he stopped by and ordered my hands out from under the covers. I obeyed and again didn’t understand.

Just prior to that World Series surprise, we had as it turned out our most crucial contact. Mother thought I should begin shaving and urged Ralph to teach me. So early one Saturday morning we went into the bathroom together, the first time we had ever been intimate like that. While he was demonstrating at the sink how to lather with a brush and use a regular razor, I couldn’t help noticing his straight one lying on the back of the toilet with the blade open. It resembled a knife designed for cutting someone’s throat rather than scraping a face. The sight of the dreaded thing made me wince.

For some reason, I tended to feel uneasy around him, probably because he never paid much attention to me, never took me to a movie, played golf or tennis with me, and when I was on the football team at the Academy he never came to see me play. We seldom had a conversation about anything. Once again I didn’t know why, and the distance between us increased. All that led me to worry more and more about our sleeping in the same room in New York, maybe in the same bed. He hardly ever called me Jack the way everybody else did including Mother, and I can’t remember ever calling him Dad. Then there was the mystery why he didn't bring me to the bakery to see how bread was made when everybody assumed one day I would be running the company that bore my grandfather’s and my name. Or why he didn’t take me to The True Church of Christ where he went every Sunday while I attended St. Andrews with Mother and my sisters.

What an odd church that was with only twenty in the congregation, all family and all at least sixty-five, the age requirement for being a member. My father in his fifties was a hearer. It broke away from the Dutch Reformed years ago down the river in South Bethlehem. No organ or piano, prayer book or stained glass windows, only pews and a platform. The minister was his cousin Harvey, the millionaire owner of a plumbing company that installed the first flush valves east of the Mississippi at the Gideon Putnam Hotel in Saratoga. You had to confess to him to be one of the elect. He taped his two-hour GROWI NG U P I D I D N’ T HAVE

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sermons with the expectation they would be played after his death. Gracious and even obsequious when he came to the house to talk to my father about the church or took my parents to Keeler’s downtown for a lobster dinner but a tyrant at home. A widower, he forbade his two daughters to read the funnies, see a movie, or play cards on Sunday. They couldn’t even date in high school. The younger one, tall and sharp-faced like him but a sexylooking redhead, he threw out when she was nineteen because of an involvement with her sister’s husband who lived in the father’s house after the marriage and was the plumbing company’s manager. There were rumors she was spotted down in the South End on Green Street, the heart of the red-light district.

Every week my father not only went to the service but also to Sunday school. Then during our customary one o’clock roast beef dinner he would point out with wry humor Harvey’s sermon mistakes such as confusing Esau and Jacob. According to Mother, Grandpa on his death bed made him promise to support the church even though he wanted to join the First Dutch Reformed down on Clinton Square, the oldest in the city and where Melville once lived. I suppose he made him also promise to stick with the bakery, too. I don’t think they ever got along. When Ralph was set to graduate from Albany High, he asked for a new suit. His father refused to buy him one, and he refused to go to the graduation. And when he finished Albany Business College, his father didn’t take him into the bakery. So he went to Brooklyn to work in the Naval Yard only to come back to Albany when his father got sick.

I guess there was the same sort of lack of rapport between them as between us except they never had a weekend in New York together.

Despite being uncomfortable driving down the Hudson on that mild October morning, I couldn’t help feeling excited. My first World Series and my first major league game. The closest I ever came to anything so momentous was watching the Albany Senators in the International League play at Hawkins Stadium with my best friend, Rip Riedy, and his father, head of the United Traction Company that operated all the buses and trolleys in the Capital District.

Best of all I would be watching the Giants, my favorite team, and two of my favorite players, Mel Ott, who hit thirty-three homers that year, and Carl Hubbell, who won twentysix games with his screwball. Then there were all the Yankees I had bubble gum cards for: Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Lefty Gomez, and the sensational rookie outfielder from California who replaced Babe Ruth traded to the Boston Red Sox, Joe DiMaggio.

Unable to contain my enthusiasm, I started raving about the Giants winning the first game 6-1 behind Hubbell and lamenting about losing the next 18-4 with Tony Lazzeri of the Yankees hitting only the second grand slam in World Series history. He listened but remained silent. Baseball wasn’t his sport. Whenever he went to New York, it was either to take Mother shopping and see a musical with Ethel Merman or to attend a heavy weight fight with some friends such as the Schmeling-Louis championship bout in June that the German won.

Actually, he didn’t have any strong interests outside the bakery except stamp collecting or any strong passions except disliking Roosevelt and the New Deal, one night at dinner threatening to move to Canada if he beat Landon in November. All he ever seemed to read was the Bible. Usually it was after he came home late at night looking tired and after the eleven o’clock news that most of the time that year featured the presidential election and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Mother said his favorite book was Job. The first thing to hit me when we walked into our room at the Woodstock on 43rd Street was the double bed. No twins as I had hoped and even prayed for. All he mentioned about

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the hotel was the fact he and Mother stayed there. We unpacked and I noticed his putting the straight razor in the bathroom. I didn’t bring along my regular one. He never changed his clothes, keeping on his brown suit minus the vest and pocketing a couple of Peter Schuyler cigars in his top coat. The one he smoked in the Dodge coming down almost made me sick. He indicated we would be sitting with some men from Albany, no doubt the same ones he attended the fights with.

After lunch at an automat we took the subway to the Bronx, my first ride underground, as it was my first time in New York or in fact anywhere outside of Albany except for Camp Zakelo on Long Lake in Maine. A short, stout man sitting across from us abruptly stiffened and had an epileptic fit. Right away two guys accompanying him jammed a stick in his mouth. A blind beggar with dark glasses shuffled through the car tapping his cane and shoved his mangled wrist and a tin cup in my face. Not long after he moved off into another car, a couple of men passed each other in the aisle exchanging briefcases without stopping, speaking, or even acknowledging each other. I nudged Dad. He didn’t react. I was certain they were spies.

Our seats in Yankee stadium were ideal, right behind the first base line. I couldn’t get over the enormous size of the place. It reminded me of the sepia picture of the Colosseum hanging over the Philco in the library at 540 Myrtle Avenue. Dark in some parts of the stands with all the iron posts, but bright on the spacious green outfield.

He introduced me to his friends already seated. I forgot their names, but I assumed they were all connected with the Hagaman, Freihofer, and Harlfinger bakeries in Albany. They shook hands smiling but didn’t ask which team I was rooting for. They obviously were Yankee fans and tended to converse among themselves right away leaving my father and me alone as if we had a lot to say to each other, and they didn’t want to interfere.

An uneventful game, with “Fat” Freddie Fitzsimmons giving up only four hits but losing to Bump Hadley who won 2-1 on Lou Gehrig’s homer in the second and Frank Crosetti’s RBI single in the eighth. Although disappointed by the score, what softened the loss was seeing the players I not only had read about in The Albany Evening News but also on baseball cards with their pictures and statistics that came with a package of bubblegum. Bill Terry, the Giants’ manager and first baseman, tall and stocky with a tanned round face, especially impressed me along with Gehrig and DiMaggio and little Mel Ott in the outfield, my favorite.

Eager to start a conversation, I pointed out in the program he bought for twenty-five cents the record of some of those on the two teams. DiMaggio hit .323 for the season and Gehrig 59 home runs. Hubbell in the ’34 All-Star game struck out in a row the five best American League hitters, Simmons, Foxx, Gehrig, Cronin, and Ruth. He glanced at the pages but didn’t comment while continuing to smoke his cigar and watch what was happening on the field, which wasn’t much, wishing I bet he were back at the bakery writing in the ledgers.

I couldn’t tell whether he was nervous, restless, or just bored. Occasionally, he would turn and say, “You all right?” Ask if I wanted peanuts or a Coke. I was okay and I wasn’t, on edge as the innings ticked away and the game became close, standing up for the seventh inning stretch and rooting for the Giants to get some more runs and at the same time worried about sleeping with him.

That evening we had dinner at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on Broadway across from Madison Square Garden. Everybody acted the way they did at the stadium. The main difference was the men drank highballs instead of beer and smoked cigarettes rather than cigars and talked business. Again, my father didn’t contribute much to the chatter. I hardly

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opened my mouth. A new person joined us, Joe Brennan, a Fleischmann’s Yeast salesman, a little bald man with a puckish face. He perked up the conversation with humorous stories while we were waiting for our steaks.

When out of nowhere a tall, skinny guy resembling a basketball player appeared and said hello to him. As he grabbed a chair from another table to sit with us, one of the men told Joe to get rid of the kid. Just like that he vanished. Who he was and why he upset everybody no one explained. I thought he must be a son or relative. My father acted the most disturbed of all as if ready to challenge the salesman with “Why did you invite him here?” The bakers looked as if they supported his disapproval, and the life of the party didn’t say much the rest of the meal. The conversation became quieter and my sitting there more nervous.

Afterwards we went to the Imperial Theatre on 45th Street to see the musical comedy On Your Toes with the dancer Ray Bolger. Joe had gotten the tickets for the five of us. The plot was hard to follow. It seemed to concern a character named Junior, first a student, then a professor of music, finally the member of a Russian ballet troop. He had a couple of love affairs and a quarrel with a jealous member of the troop who hired a hit man to kill him while he was dancing in the ballet, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, about a murder. The first shooting misfired just as the other one exploded during the climax of the performance. The moment it occurred I jumped as if a firecracker had gone off and grabbed Dad’s arm. He pulled away and looked at me as if to say “Why did you do that?”

What I liked best was Bolger’s dancing reminiscent of Fred Astaire’s and the song “There’s a Small Hotel/With a wishing-well,/I wish that we were there together.” The words and the melody kept running through my head even during the intermission when everybody drifted into the lobby to smoke, and Dad and I stood apart trying to think of something to say. Once again, I felt out of place as I did most of the time at dinner, the only kid my age in sight and people gawking at me wondering what I was doing with a bunch of men.

After the show we walked a few blocks back to the Woodstock. It wasn’t only sleeping with him that bothered me but also his having to babysit a teenager in New York on a Saturday night when he should be out drinking with his friends at a bar or going to a club.

They asked him to join them. I should have told him I’d be fine. I brought along a book of Conrad’s stories we were reading for English at the Boys’ Academy: “Youth,” “Typhoon,” and “The Secret Sharer” just in case he did leave me alone.

He didn’t comment on the musical, only mentioned he liked it, which I doubted since he rarely laughed or clapped the whole time. Plays, novels, and concerts weren’t for him just as the True Church of Christ and the bakery weren’t for me. Once I sneaked a peek at one of his ledgers open in the stamp room, green-lined sheets filled with tiny neat numbers in ink for Production of Bread and Rolls for a week along with things like Cripples, Samples, Route Stales, Plant Stales, Donations, Unaccounted for, Total Losses. There were also things like Retroactive Wages, Materials, Accounts Payable. It was the closest I ever came to the bakery except during dinner eating Dad’s bread.

“Well,” he said standing in the middle of the floor, “Want to go first? Take your shower?”

“No, you go, I’ll wait. I don’t mind. That was a swell song, wasn’t it? You know, ‘There’s a Small Hotel.’”

He didn’t answer and went in the bathroom after hanging up his coat and taking off his shirt and tie, pants, shoes, and socks. Coming out a few minutes later in a nightshirt down to his knees, he looked older and slightly slumped over. I had never seen him undressed before. It sort of shocked me. And he acted so tired, those bags under his eyes seeming bigger.

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More than anything at that moment I longed for a bed of my own and wished we could stay up a little longer and talk about the game or the bakery or his church. Still nothing but a few fumbling words followed by one of those awkward silences that unnerved me.

Once he got under the covers, his graying head on the pillow, I went in for my shower, more apprehensive than ever about lying beside him. Conjuring up what would happen if I hit his arm or leg or turned over and found him breathing right in my face and me in his.

Would I end up sleeping on the floor?

Switching off the table lamp, I settled on my side and shut my eyes. Everything from the drive down and the game to the dinner and the musical with that song about longing for a small hotel with a “bridal suite” became jumbled in my mind. The room was no place “soft and sweet,” not even close with an old dresser, a threadbare rug, and yellow rings in the tub. Hard to think of my parents choosing this hotel every time they came to the city.

Somehow I survived the night by remaining stiff as a soldier at attention and ignoring his snoring. Tempted to nudge him but unable to make the move and longing for daylight.

When it came, I couldn’t wait for him to get up and go to the bathroom and start shaving.

The moment he did I developed this sudden urge to relieve myself.

Sitting up on the edge of the bed, I kept staring at the door listening to the toilet flushing, the water running in the sink, and finally that straight razor scraping away on his skin.

No sound of loud breathing or any movement. All the time struggling to hold in what was ready to pop out. Tightening my buttocks and straining to prevent the stuff from exploding and making a mess.

“Dad, I’ve gotta go,” I kept repeating to myself. “Please hurry.” It wasn’t just the embarrassment if he didn’t finish soon that made me anxious. It was also the shame of going in there smelling up the place, rousing his anger at being interrupted.

So I waited for him to appear while squeezing my cheeks together to prevent anything from escaping, gritting my teeth, mumbling to myself, “Just a few more minutes and he’ll be done. He can’t stay in there forever.”

Becoming more and more impatient, I yearned to shout, “Dad, Dad, come on! You almost through?”

The need for relief intensified. I reached the point where I had to barge in. The agony was killing me. He gave no indication of putting down the razor and getting dressed. He had brought with him underwear, socks, pants, and a shirt. What was he doing in there?

I stood up and walked around the room hoping he would hear me, even rummaging in my suitcase for clothes expecting any minute for him to call, “Be out in a minute.” Nothing.

Unable to bear the pressure any longer, I dashed to the door, flung it open. There he loomed in front of the sink wearing only BVDs, his legs skinnier and his chest hairier than I envisioned, looking different from last night, heavier, taller, more intent. One part of his face white with cream, the other dark.

Startled, he jerked away from the mirror to confront me, raising that straight razor in a menacing way, his hand shaking. My body stiffened waiting for the blade to strike.

I slammed the door shut and backed away, the tightness loosening, a soft glob dropping in my pajamas followed by a trickle of urine sliding down a leg. Standing stark worried about the mess falling to the floor. The discomfort abated though the sight of that steel poised to strike lingered.

When he emerged clean shaven and mostly dressed, I couldn’t get over how different he looked.

“Okay, all yours,” he announced in a cheery tone. “Sorry to take so long.”

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I ran in holding up my pajama bottom with one hand and shutting the door with the other before he had a chance to get a whiff of the BM. Quickly I dumped it in the toilet bowl, cleaned myself off, and washed out most of the brown stain in the tub. Noting when I finished, his razor lying open on the sink, the blade dotted with specks of cream and blood.

I went over and picking it up gingerly pricked my cheek, then wiped away the red spot with toilet paper. Why I did that I don’t know. The impulse just seemed to come over me.

“Had an accident, didn’t you, Jake?” he said smiling when I came out with a towel wrapped around my waist and the pajama bottom wadded up in my hand.

“Yeah, gosh, Dad, sorry. Smell bad? I washed it. Too wet to pack.”

“That’s all right. We’ll wrap it in a newspaper and put it in the trunk.”

“Telling Mother?”

“Don’t worry.” He continued looking at me, our eyes meeting for the first time. I expected him to scold or even kid me for behaving like a three-year-old. Instead he acted as if it were nothing unusual, and I felt more at ease for the first time during the whole weekend.

We never mentioned the incident at breakfast or during packing or driving up the Hudson Sunday morning. And I started rattling on about the Giants, hoping Prince Hal Schumacher and King Carl Hubbell would win the next two games. He said he hoped so too in that laconic way of his, though not talking as curtly as he did coming here, seeming to be more relaxed. Smoked a Peter Schuyler, but this one didn’t make me sick.

Whether he told Mother what happened was never clear. At least she never let on he did.

She simply remarked with a grin after seeing the condition of my pajamas in the laundry, “You had a little mishap down there, didn’t you?” I lowered my head. She noted how much my father enjoyed the weekend, his first major league game and his first World Series. He thought I did too. She hoped we’d do something like that again.

We never did. The bakery failed. He died. I became a professor. The World Series turned into one of those boyhood memories you can’t resist introducing at family gatherings.

Whenever recounting the bathroom scene, however, I avoided describing his holding the razor over me and my waiting for it to knife into me. Stressing instead how funny he looked and how dumb I behaved.

Although the fear and the trembling faded that Sunday morning driving home up the Hudson in the black Dodge, when we got back to the old routine on Monday nothing appeared too different on the surface except the tension was gone, and it felt more natural being in the house with him. He kept busy with the bakery, I with my school work, then on to college, graduate school, and teaching.

Just before his death, he wrote how proud he was of my family, four children, and of my accomplishments, a PhD, a professor, a writer. Still I couldn’t help wondering why that time in New York continued to obsess me. Why my father suddenly decided to take me to the World Series when we had so little contact up to that point. Was it mother’s idea, not his?

And why there didn’t appear to be any connection between us in New York. Everything felt more like an ordeal than a bonding. Thank God, nothing similar ever occurred with my two sons whom I played golf and tennis with all the time and took everywhere. Strange how that weekend continued to haunt me over the years as maybe coming down from the mountain in Moriah, bloodless and unbound, to live with his father, continued to haunt Isaac as he grew older and started asking questions about why they went up there in the first place and why what happened was so different from what they each expected.

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BRI TTN E Y SC OTT

When I Am Finally Gone and You Are Waking Up the bed is a pressure point on the curve of your back road that lifts me out of the mountains and into the sprawl ing city which wakes up without you and beyond that you rot because the overripe lust between us stained nothing but bare mattress you never even met my dog never pressed a thumb to the white diamond of fur at his chest remember the story you told me about the falcon landing close enough to stroke his feathers you didn’t flinch you thought he would perch on that ledge forever but love they see field mice from great distances hear them calling in the downs he rose to the clerestory reaching for a heart beat ing in the dank grass it beats fast

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BEN JAM I N H E RTW I G

The Liturgical Leap into Monday i. one Sunday after your or my war you leapt across the grave— clear across, black robes flapping like a bird. this isn't a metaphor for resurrection: the grave was real with a body inside. you were presiding the liturgy. the grave was collapsing. you didn't wish to fall in. you leapt. these are stories. I have never seen you run or leap. you were old before I was born. a few weeks after the service a second widow stops to ask a question: when you bury my husband would you leap across his grave too? you did not laugh, though maybe you wanted to: you did not tell her that leaping is not part of the liturgy for the dead. ii. when I was twelve we came upon your car in the ditch— the blue sedan flipped like a beetle on its back, tires spinning you crawling out the window with a finger of blood on your forehead and a face flushed and pale as marbled beef. you lived, though you prophesied death every Sunday. first from the pulpit, then standing on the porch, waving us into the gloam.

this is the last you'll see of me alive—a mantra as familiar as the pallet bloom of Indian paintbrush in late summer and the tiger lilies you told us not to pick because they only grow once. week after week I sat in the back seat and your son, my father, honked the horn in farewell, backed out onto the highway where logging trucks kicked up dust and gravel until fifteen years later the road was paved and you were in the hospital.

I think you were afraid.

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iii. on Oma's eighty-sixth nativity you are supine, surrounded by family. she is absent, she recalls little now. not how you slept in separate bedrooms or your voice like smooth liquor and afternoon Kafe, hearty as Nusskuchen. how you spoke often but mumbled and muttered more than you spoke. iv. with your grandchildren you are gentle, not always with your children.

AN

Schlaf schön, träum gut und Gott beschützt Dich.

you make the sign of the cross on my forehead. your touch is light, like a child's.

AP R ON

v. on Sunday they take you off life support, leaving only the leap, the cadence of your speechless breath.

MA RY L O T Z

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TARA MA E M U L R OY

Twins how were there two of you when there was none before when tears could not reach the shadows of that sorrow why is it such a longing to be filled while others say I would rather throw myself off a cliff and others have said my life is complete without building it is building a knitting how is it that one body can knit two separate hearts how is it that one body can contain three whole hearts at once in the last ultrasound the technician said who knows if they can see one another in the dark we always make love with the lights on but our children reach for each other in the darkness is it fear or love will we ever know

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MAYBE WE WERE GOD IN THAT TIME AMB E R M V

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street in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, Beautiful, where there wasn't anyone to help you put groceries away because you lived in a shelter for kids just like you. You got on a waiting list for a bed, they called you up, said, “you can come over now,” welcome home for a while. There aren’t enough beds in this country for everybody who needs one. There’s too many beds for sale in stores but for every one offered up in the Land of Liberty’s shelters there’s a dozen more on the streets. Think you’re gonna make it?

Tens of thousands of people on couches. Beautiful, you’re one of the lucky ones. The statistics keep changing but whatever they are you don’t want to “end up” one of them.

As if death is it, just the last thing, like not being remembered or having nowhere to sleep, which makes you want to sleep forever. You nearly did. But that’s not the end.

You went to the shelter to find others like you, to not be so alone where it’s normal to be a girl with a shaved head and no money, Beautiful. Trying to get going in The City of strangers, you at least had a little help from relations, more than some kids could say.

Looking back from the vantage point of survival, but maybe not yet deliverance, that’s gotta include some success of your own making goddammit, give yourself a break for once.

Just stop with believing the abuse. Just because your mom was drunk when she screamed in your face that she wished she had an abortion and she wished you were never born doesn’t mean you should die. Look, just hang in there. I promise you're Beautiful.

The words, you thought they’d never come, but they’re coming now as you tell the story, let it out about that one night you took a bus to The City and got off with only a backpack and a satchel in the dark in the middle of downtown when only the living dead were awake.

Nobody was with you so you walked quickly but trying not to look scared so you wouldn’t look like a target. You ring the bell at the door. Night staff lets you in, says they’ve got a bed just for you, young American, trying to save yourself.

The point is you set a load down on the plastic-thin bed that makes crinkly vinyl sounds.

You’re in the company of other young women trying to save themselves and most of them are doing that by presently sleeping. But you’re all together. And looking back how far you have come because you're still alive, Beautiful. Some of the other girls didn't make it.

Drugs or the law or suicide took them because one day they just couldn’t pull through, or they disappeared by somebody’s hand. Remember them all, all who were Beautiful who the world didn't see.

Your companion now is a black girl with old eyes troubled because she’s seen some things. She’s seen some shit and done some shit and you both are nineteen with short hair just looking for love in the world, Beautifuls, and you both bond over this. For a little while everything else melts away—your depression, her criminal record: she doesn’t hide it because what the fuck else was she supposed to do when the fucker had a gun in her face?

It was his life or hers, she’s still alive, at least last that you saw her. But now she's done time and you're both here and you two cuddle up side by side and whisper your stories and laugh, and it’s good and in this place you are free. Love is the only thing worth a damn in the world.

The staff are nice folks, they don’t bother you too much at night. Most aren’t more than a decade older than you and through the years and the haze you can’t remember their names, but you remember they kept the lights on for you so you wouldn’t have to be afraid IT WAS D OW N ON T HAT

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of the dark and someone was there at all hours to open the door when you came knocking.

Maybe we were God in that time, who comes and stands at every door and knocks, wants to be poor young women like us, young people of color and young men with no prospects.

God wants to be close to us, wants to become us, that’s what I know, Beautiful. God wants to whisper, “I found you, I love you,” from the cracks in the pavement or the sound of a piano ghosting in through the shelter from up on the other side of a brick wall.

So you and your roommates take each other in arms before parting because when shit got stolen a miracle dropped from the sky when nobody fought about it. You’re free now and have been given a new chance to live, to build by your flame a life of your own and you will have people to share it with. Food is provided. One night the fountains were glowing and it was only people like you awake and about and you wander your part of The City before bedtime so you don’t lose your bed. You go down to great City Hall in the shadows of statues and streetlamps and now it is mostly empty and quiet where by day the Big Guys who are big and important occupy large marble chairs but right now they are gone to their yellow-lit houses. And you are here in their stead, Underworld chairwoman. This night is considerably misty and you can hear and feel and smell the great black lonely ocean to the south of The City, the waves lapping at the line between mansion and cardboard. You had dreams for this place, this city whose arms never opened to you, Beautiful, women unknown. How many young hopers and dreamers come down this way, packs on their backs, just looking for a place to belong? But this night is yours and your friend’s, this time a skinny blond boy and only twenty himself. You’re in love and of course it'll go nowhere but the etchings of these things keep their apparitions in concrete inlaid with luster, occasional compasses pointing the way. You’ll leave in two years, wondering what all that was about, what was it all for, but somehow your lives were all saved even though some didn’t make it and you’ll never see each other again.

San Francisco, you have always been a city of dreamers. American Paris at war in the bookstores fighting for rent control and eight people shoved into a house with a ninth occupying a closet, what was there to see in you but dreams? I only longed for salvation, the element of belonging, of place, of home. Not to be found here, so many wander a lifetime in this city. I roamed your streets of murals, refried rice at community centers, free lunch and STI testing and a ticket to community college, remember? Trolleys of such charm, shoulder-to-shoulder on buses down to the ocean, throw my arms open to let out the pain and let in the sun, the sky, the green life and all I can lay claim to. It couldn’t last, let the salt wind beat my wet eyes under the Golden Gate Bridge. So many migrant dreamers and suicides come over this way. In my mind I go back there, say, I want to tell you I love you, but instead the sea takes you, city of fault-lines, there in the corridor of tender meat where young adults with only their lives to lose come to be God’s body here in this city of dreams.

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contributors

holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland and is a National Poetry Slam Champion, Cave Canem Fellow, CantoMundo Fellow, and participant of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop. She has two collections of poetry, Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths (Yes Yes Books), and is the winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize 2016 Medusa Reads La Negra’s Palm (Tupelo Press, forthcoming). She lives in Washington, DC, and her current Netflix obsession is The Get Down.

ELI ZABE TH A C E VE D O

edits PANK, Fjords Review, and directs C&R Press. His favorite magazines right now are Prelude and NOUS. Project notes can be found at johngosslee.com.

JOHN G OSSL E E

is a former soldier, treeplanter, and bike courier whose writing has recently appeared on NPR, in the New York Times, Word Riot, Pleiades, Geez, and the Literary Review of Canada.

His debut poetry collection, Slow War, is coming out with McGill-Queen’s in 2017.

BEN JAM I N H E RTW I G

is an MFA candidate at West Virginia University. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Salamander, the Lascaux Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and others. She enjoys rain, cats, and catching up to the person who cut her off in traffic.

NATALI E HOM E R

is an artist from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She began honing her God-given talents at Grand Rapids CHAKI L A L . HOSKI NS

Community College where she received her AFA (2009). Hoskins continued her journey earning her BFA in painting and minor in drawing from Kendall College of Art and Design (2012), where she recently received her MFA in painting. Hoskins’s work focuses on themes of spirituality, eternal life, and the inclusion of all people, particularly the blind and visually impaired. More info can be found at divineartistries.com. writes: “I am an emeritus professor of English at the University of South Carolina. I have four children, a doctor, lawyer, social worker for mental health, and a retired respiratory therapist. I also have ten grandchildren, one a lawyer who has spent the last eight years in China.

I also have seven great-grandchildren. My wife and I have been married seventy-three years. I still play golf and publish. My novel about my war experiences is The Poet in the Code Room.”

J O H N K I MMEY

is the author of The Dead Eat Everything (Kent State University Press, 2014) and is a PhD student in literature at the University of California, Davis. He makes a mean tomatillo soup.

MI CH A EL ML EK O D AY

graduated with his BFA from Grand Valley State University. His personal experience with faith and religion influences his artistic investigations.

Inspired by religious works of art, he attempts to discover their relevance to the human narrative through contemporary art making. Currently he lives and works at the Interlochen Center for the Arts as a L U CA S MO N EYPEN N Y

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residential manager for the academy.

Despite this being his primary vocation, Lucas equally values his identity as an artist, striving to balance and blend the two. More info can be found at lucasmoneypenny.com.

Drawn to the stories and histories that tie one individual to another, C A R OLY N MOUNT works to reveal the interconnectedness that shapes our world.

Utilizing a variety of tools and mediums including drawing, printmaking, ceramics, textiles, or relational means of expression, Mount gives material form to our social or personal experiences. Since her mother died a year and a half ago, Carolyn has embarked on a new career in palliative care, working with and supporting the spiritual needs of those who are dying or in the end stages of life. She has found her second vocation.

More info can be found at www. carolynmount.com. holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she worked with Robin Hemley, Bret Lott, Sue William Silverman, and Philip Graham. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Fourth Genre, Riverteeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.

Currently she’s at work on a collection of essays with photos. More info can be found at https://newplayexchange.org/users/2981/ kerry-muir.

KERRY MU I R

is the author of the chapbook Philomela, released from Dancing Girl Press in 2014. Her poems have been published in Third Coast, CutBank, Juked, Waccamaw, The Journal, and others found at taramaemulroy.com. She currently manages Nightjar Review and teaches Latin TARA MA E M U L R OY

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at a private school. Her boy/girl twins, Jack and Lily, suffuse her with joy everyday. holds a BA in English from SNHU, where she wrote stuff for a degree and is a graduate of Anake Outdoor School in Cascadia where she got not a degree but a rite of passage in nature, culture, and the soul. Proud to be from Fresno, California, she considers the Sierra Nevada mountains to be made in the image of heaven. A stint in the San Francisco Bay Area caused her love for inland California to increase manyfold.

A MBER MV

is from Kokomo, Indiana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee, Public Pool, Relief Journal, Puerto Del Sol’s Black Voices Series, Fiction Southeast, and Cleaver Magazine, among other places. She is pursuing an MA in media and communication at Bowling Green State University, and she loves brave, honest stories.

CH A RN EL L PET ERS

is a poet, essayist, and freelance writer. Her most recent work appears in Hip Mama, Mothers Always Write, and In Good Tilth. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter. More at melissareeserpoulin. com MEL I S S A REES ER PO U L I N

lives in Los Angeles; his newest writing is forthcoming in PEN America, J Journal, M-Dash, Amtrak's The National, and elsewhere.

F O RT U N AT O S A L A ZA R

refuses to fix her bad teeth in some classist attempt to blend in with the academic community. Her first collection, The Derelict Daughter, won the 2015 New American Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the Joy Harjo Prize for Poetry, BRI T T N EY S CO T T

as well as the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, the New Republic, Narrative Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Linebreak, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She homesteads on seven acres in rural Virginia.

is the author of three collections of poetry, including Quality of Life and Wee Hour Martyrdom. His work has recently appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Poet Lore, the Laurel Review, and Mudfish.

J A S O N TA N D O N

teaches writing at Virginia Tech. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Arcadia Magazine, BULL Men’s Fiction, Saranac Review, and Bartleby Snopes, among others.

J O S EPH T RU S CEL L O

JASON W. SE L B Y ’s

work has appeared in the North American Review, Zone 3, Boston Review, War, Literature & the Arts, and Sugar House Review. A black belt in Taekwondo, he lives in rural, southern Iowa with wife and fellow writer Jennifer Pruiett-Selby and their five children. He is editor of the Times-Republican newspaper.

Jason's father is a veteran of the Vietnam War and a victim of Agent Orange, while his brother died of a rare thoracic cancer at age forty. lives with her husband and two young daughters in Raleigh, North Carolina. She has spent thousands of hours in tiny practice rooms in front of a piano. She sometimes wonders what happens to walls, and to people, who listen to that much music. She studied English and music at Campbell University and sometimes writes about the things she wonders about.

KAROL I NE STR I C KL A ND

is the author of the poetry collections Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014) and Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016). He edits Speaking of Marvels, a gathering of interviews with chapbook and novella authors. His poems and stories have appeared in Blackbird, Image, Tin House, the Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Epoch, and other journals.

W I L L I A M K EL L EY W O O L F I T T

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last note ON F ORMI N G O N E A N O T H ER

What formed me and helped to form others: My soon-to-be wife writing me in college before I joined the army and telling me, ‘I’m in love with a man not a boy.’ WWII. Being married for seventythree years now. Teaching and learning how to engage students while balancing scholarly and creative writing. Raising four children. Becoming a grandfather with ten grandchildren and seven greatgrandchildren. Continuing to write.

JOHN KI M M E Y, NONF I C TI ON

What is intimacy? In my mid-twenties, I loved someone I barely knew, or saw, or spent any substantial time with. We met, for years, in secret impersonal places, briefly detached from the details that made up our daily lives. I did not know his mother’s name or his brand of shampoo, but could count his moles and fillings.

Is intimacy those details, the moments, which we only show to a select few? Is intimacy, then, the privilege to view that which is hidden? But what is intimacy without knowledge? What is intimacy without time? Intimacy deceives us, in the way time deceives us. We perceive it as moving, as something blooming into fruition, but it’s only an illusion. Intimacy is there, always. It is not there, always.

BRI TTN E Y SC OTT, P OE TRY

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To truly belong to a people and place is among the most unappreciated human needs in conventional society. Chronic is the rootlessness of our time, and cavernous is the fearfulness of what may become of us all.

But I am glad to be here, Beautiful World.

May you continuously break concrete with unfaltering roots, reaching up to anchor these our mercurial lives. Be our place of belonging. Show us that we are small.

Remind us that culture is not separate from nature. We need our people. Who are our people?

A MBER MV, FI CT I O N

My father walked point in Vietnam at the height of Agent Orange’s dispersal. Some believe each human, animal, and object contains a spirit, and if so, dioxin was a perversion of the natural order. Survivors speak incantations to exorcise this ghost.

My brother died of cancer in 2011, and the tumor the surgeons removed weighed over eight pounds. Survivors possess a different vision of inheritance. It is a curse science cannot lift—the solution goes beyond time.

When my father died of cancer in 2016, I had lost the last ancestor who worked our farm together. My grandfather’s white German shepherds scratched the porch door to be let in, and past death we drink iced tea in the Dreamtime.

J A S O N W. S EL BY, PO ET RY

last note

The more time that passes and the more I know, there seems to be less variety in object and place, but more nuance than I’d thought as a child. Everything that we know is basically composed of water, dust, and light, which is so simple. When we look at the complexities of mass and magnetism, quarks and dark matter, the veil of simplicity is permanently removed and the great mystery of being is clear.

It’s apparent that our family, friends, and culture at large affect our feelings and orientation in small-particle, probabilistic fashion. I don’t really understand what’s happening in so many ways, but I know that it works and that’s surprising and awesome (in the original, actual sense of the word).

So, maybe the only point is to intentionally affect. Intentionality is a luxury that we have.

When I returned from Afghanistan, I was messed up—feeling angry, misunderstood, anxious. At one family gathering I started and couldn’t stop crying. No one knew what to do with me. My stooped Opa stopped me in the hallway. He put his arm on my shoulder, gently. It’s ok, he said, I know. He didn’t ask any questions, and he walked back into the living room where he picked up his cake and sat down.

A few years later he passed away, and I recognized how much that moment of connection, of understanding, meant to me. He was a complicated man and also damaged by war. I felt that a poem was a way for me to understand him better, so I wrote “The Liturgical Leap into Monday.”

BEN J A MI N H ERT W I G , PO ET RY

JOHN GOSSL E E , P OE TRY

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CAROLYN MOUNT. Work as Prayer, Prayer as Work (detail). Dish towel, thread. 25 x 14 inches.