Issue 57: Mend

MEND / 57

WINTER 2020 $15

ru’mi-nate: TO CHEW THE CUD; TO MUSE; TO MEDITATE; TO THINK AGAIN; TO PONDER

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Cover: MARK NEWPORT . Mend 9, 2016 (detail).

Cotton mending. 17 inches x 13 inches. Photograph by Tim Thayer Studio.

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staff

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

Amanda Hitpas EDITOR

Rachel King NOTES & BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Josh MacIvor-Andersen VISUAL ART EDITOR

Carolyn Mount NONFICTION EDITOR

Madison Salters POETRY EDITORS

Michael Mlekoday & Hope Wabuke FICTION EDITORS

Joe Truscello & Emily Woodworth EDITOR OF THE WAKING

Cherie Nelson PRINT & WEB DESIGN

Scott Laumann PUBLISHING & MARKETING

Natalie Peterson PROOFREADER

Alan Good TYPESETTER

Cynthia Young INTERN

Keely Turner ASSOCIATE READERS

Rebecca Doverspike William Jones Craig Reinbold Amy Sawyer Evan Senie GUEST PANELISTS

Jen Stewart Fueston Arah Ko Matthew Landrum Casey Patrick

contents

NOTES

Readers’ Notes 6

Contributors’ Notes 82

POETRY

14 The Difference Between Last 86

a Year and a Lifetime,

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski FICTION

Greetings from Salonika, 20 Peter Newall

15 Papier-mâché, Yvette Siegert 16 The Sparrow in the Banquet Hall,

Betsy Sholl 18 In Another Dream Where

My Father Apologizes, Hajjar Baban

NONFICTION

Alterations, J. C. Elkin 38

Food for Me, I Am Food, 66 Beaumont Sugar

How to Leave Paradise, 70 Charlotte Gullick

19 Proposed Amendments to the

Definition of Mend, David Wright 32 For the Millions, Suzanne Lummis 34 All Day the Stars,

Catherine Abbey Hodges 35 Postpartum, Samuel Piccone 36 The Heart As Parabola, Haolun Xu 44 Reversal, Samuel Ugbechie

VISUAL ART

46 Frequency and Pitch, Jennifer Barber

The art of Jim Melchert 49

48 Kingdom, Charley Gibney

The art of Rachel Breen 52

65 Today, Chaun Ballard

The art of Delita Martin 55

69 Mammography, Megan Merchant

The art of Mark Newport 59

The art of Pinky Bass 62

readers’ notes ON MEND

The first time I met my mother, when I was twenty, we stayed up the whole night talking and playing the piano. She could still play “Clair de Lune” from memory, and I remember her hands on the keys, how she’d placed her palms on my face when she first saw me, taking in the sight of her only child. She said she hadn’t even seen a picture of me since she’d given me up for adoption.

But when it was finally time for me to go, my mother fell down onto the kitchen floor, her legs and arms flailing against the cold beige tiles. She later said it was so I wouldn’t leave; still, I rode in the back of an ambulance with her, held her hand, and stayed up all night in the ER until she finally walked out on her own.

Before my mother disappeared again for what would be another dozen years, she stitched a button back onto my shirt.

We were in the kitchen again, and the button had just come off, like things sometimes do.

My mother said she wanted to fix it for me. And even though I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see her for a good while—finding her years later on the floor of her trailer next to an empty bottle of pills and a yellowed program from a piano recital she’d given when she was a teenager—I handed her my shirt.

Then I watched as she threaded a needle with her quivering fingers,

becoming the mother I think she wanted to be—and could have been—if only the world hadn’t been so hard on her.

For now, though, the button was slowly mended back into its place.

Where it belonged.

DAVID ARMAND, HAMMOND, LA

“It’s starting.” We’d been waiting for the project to begin for eighteen months when the excavation crew started speedwalking around at 7:30 a.m. When the kids and I got home around 3:30 p.m., the wall came down.

Our retaining wall had been failing. To replace it, the crew needed to dig out the mountain and terrace out back. We also live in a rainforest, and as soon as they had it dug out, it started pouring, leaving our house on the hollowed-out edge.

I spent a sleepless night willing the rain to stop. But Juneau received record rainfall this summer, and our then threeyear-old, Imogen, talked local flora here with such gusto it made even the most uninspired pay attention.

She asked me today if I remembered, that we liked to say it’s getting gre-en as winter made the long, arduous journey toward spring. I do remember. And yet, I thanked her for the reminder. Winter always turns to spring, even within our worries.

JAMIE BUEHNER, DOUGLAS, AK

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My filigree ring was the most precious item I owned until it wasn’t. Artisan silver, handmade in Kosovo, then crushed into gravel beneath my heel. I’ve since strung the mangled bauble onto a bracelet and now, beneath a stiff blazer cuff, it settles against my wrist bone like a talisman.

Living in a year two thermometer ticks hotter than any previous year, in a town where stormwater overwhelms shallow ditches, I’m often gripped by a panicked urge to reduce and reuse. I wrap fraying paintbrushes in wet rags overnight and stack old legal textbooks into a makeshift easel. For weeks, downy feathers floated around my bedroom, but now I’ve mended the hole in my pillow with a patch of denim, snipped from a pair of oversized jeans.

By contrast, my approach to mending invisible damage is sharp and matter-offact, like a rebuttal. Rather than agonize over complicated repair plans, I sort painful memories into wastebaskets or let them age into oblivion behind mental garment bags. With the assistance of a family court and a scholarship committee, it’s how I discarded broken relationships with my father and hometown.

My therapist thinks the row of empty seats at my swearing-in ceremony is a side effect of recovery from invisible traumas.

“It’s not your guilt to bear.”

An autumn revelation: healing the self isn’t as simple as untangling the fat knots of necklaces at the bottom of a jewelry box. Or upcycling lopsided chandelier earrings, Swarovski crystal fallen from the fluttering frames. Sometimes, to 7

restore balance, you have to leave the metal twisted. You have to whisper a eulogy for the pieces of yourself left behind. You have to let the feathers settle into dust as testament.

The damage was real, they whisper.

We were there. It wasn’t your fault.

BRENNA GAUTAM, ARLINGTON, VA

Upon our engagement over thirty years ago, we were given a gift basket filled with a variety of small green plants.

All of them died during that first year, except one. I put it in a pretty pot which it quickly outgrew. Together, we transplanted it into a proper large pot and it grew into a healthy little house tree.

Our family tree, I call it, since my vision is often dominated by metaphors.

The little tree moved with us from the house where we started, to the one that we lost, to the rentals, to the relative’s where we saved to start again.

Our daughter, then our son, moved away, perhaps before they were ready.

My husband and I argued. Jobs were lost. Loved ones died. The house plant withered. I took some cuttings and put them in a jar. They took root beautifully, but died while I was sick and too far away to care for them. We settled and recovered. The tree was barely alive. Not wanting a new one, I trimmed it fiercely, tossing out dry branches of leathery leaves as it faltered, even in the light. I freshened the soil and fed it.

Finally, some soft new sprouts are showing as I train the remaining thin trunks to intertwine with one another. A branch in the center refuses to thrive. I cut it off and put it in the old jar, changing

readers’ notes

the water frequently. I speak to it . . . stay alive. I rub the cut end between my fingers, scraping the woody bark to keep it from getting stagnant. It sits on my desk by the big window where I write and pray, weep and paint, and imagine I see a root forming, maybe even a speck of green.

JOANNA PENDLETON, NEWHALL, CA

White knee-highs ruche around my ankles and my heel and toe are rubbed raw. It is time to darn my socks. My mother tightens the cabling around the Amanita red cap minus a stem and delicately weaves the warp and weft into whole cloth again. Then it is my turn.

The blessing and the curse of a frugal mother, nothing gets wasted, not even the throwaway items of her new country.

Everything is patched, fixed, stretched until all the parts are used up.

My darn is a lump. My mother does not fix it; it is good enough, the sloppiness hidden by my shoe. That lump grows bigger each recess. It chafes the sole of my foot. I pull the heel up until it meets the edge of my shoe and the toe darn shifts to cleft where my toe and foot join.

I get a blister.

Complaint is not an option. There will be no new socks. But there is food on

the table every night, there are songs, there are library books. My mother sews clothes for my dolls and knits me a skirt.

Each pinch is a reminder that I’ve done my part. I am grateful and resentful.

Today I throw my cheap socks away but use a liberal glob of Shoe Goo on the hole in my boot and am thankful for the roof over my head.

KERSTIN SCHULZ, PORTLAND, OR

I cup my hand around the flat plane of her scapula and gently tug. It’s been six months and her shoulder remains stuck.

That’s how she describes it. Her range of motion is almost nonexistent.

“How does that feel?” I ask, pressing my fingertips into the firm tissue at the base of her neck.

She closes her eyes and nods. It is a look I recognize from her daughter’s face—when she would fall asleep as I massaged her legs. Soft lashes meeting the crests of her rosy cheeks. Twice a week, me seated on a folding chair as she rested in the hospital bed they’d set up beside her bedroom window.

“This room has great light,” I had told her on the last day I saw her. “See you next week,” I also said.

I scoop the weight of her head into my hands and slowly stretch her neck

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one way, and then the other. Something catches and I stop to sink my thumb into the meat of her upper trapezius.

“Right here,” I tell her as she winces.

“This spot doesn’t want to let go.”

We both know what she is holding onto—there’s no need to say it aloud. I let my hands do most of the talking. It will take time, my palms remind the muscles that travel along her spine. I’m here when you need me, my thumbs whisper through the tension at her temples. It’s okay to let go, my hands tell her shoulders, holding them close.

Let us rest in peace while we’re still living, my fingertips gently encourage.

Come, my hands will show you the way.

CLAIRE TAYLOR, BALTIMORE, MD

When I was eight years old, my older brother smiled like Donny Osmond and used Mom’s sawhorses in the garage to remove the handlebars from his bike and attached a steering wheel in their place.

He returned from his triumphant ride down Plum Street, incandescently proud.

His friends high-fived, cheering, but he granted me the next ride.

I pedaled hard. My little brother cheered from the sidewalk.

At the first pothole, the front wheel shuddered and wove from side to side.

I hit the big bump we used for jumps, where the bike stopped dead. Hands still gripping the steering wheel behind me, I flew forward.

Face-first. The taste of pavement, blood, bone.

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I remember being dragged toward home by my little brother, repeating “Mom.” The doctor plucked gravel, whispering that there was no skin on my upper lip to stitch. Nose, jaw miraculously unbroken under the bloody mess. No dentist for my broken teeth until the skin mended.

He settled my big, strong mom against the wall, so she wouldn’t faint. “Wait and see,” he said.

She fed me milkshakes. We watched old movies, and traded library books, and she mended cheap socks, day after day. Antibiotic ointment, cocoa butter.

Months passed. More socks. Teeth crowned with hideous silver. I never smiled. But skin mended.

My own children weathered pain. I tethered myself to their sickbed with tapestry needle, waiting, seeing. I do not have patience: I have a mending basket.

My scar grows more visible with age. I glare at the mirror. No one said it would be seamless.

DENISE FRAME HARLAN, IPSWICH, MA

Grossmama made all her own dresses, always from the same pattern—shortsleeved, knee-length, rounded neckline with a triangular window cutout, like a fang pointing straight down at her cleavage. This feature fascinated me. It was somehow daring, sexy, and utterly incongruous with my dignified German grandmother. She turned her second bedroom into a sewing room, which

readers’ notes

featured a treadle sewing machine built into a wooden table with wrought iron legs. She was fearless as her foot rapidly pumped the pedal, filling the air with its whirring, and her fingers ushered flying fabric across the throat plate. She never upgraded to electric.

In seventh grade, I took home economics: first semester—cooking, second semester—sewing. Under Grossmama’s patient tutelage, I learned the hand/eye/foot coordination necessary to power her machine without losing a finger. First assignment: make a frog. I chose a Kelly-green, polka-dot fabric.

Searching her button tin for frog eyes, Grossmama found the perfect button— wooden concentric circles of green, black, and a mother-of-pearl center, like a pupil. I was elated, but there was only one. When Grossmama miraculously unearthed a match, we cheered. She had magic in her. Forty years later, I still have my crooked-nosed Froggie.

Grossmama also crocheted, baked, and read tea leaves; but the only skill of hers that stayed with me was mending— darning socks, replacing buttons, lowering hems—the mundane stuff. All her life, Grossmama wanted to go to college, impossible for an immigrant working and helping raise four younger siblings, then her own child. When I started college, I needed costume craft for my theatre degree. By then Grossmama had died. How I longed to

be back in that sewing room, enjoying her companionship and being her eager apprentice, rather than foolishly letting all that knowledge slip away.

DIANE ENGLERT, PORTLAND, OR

The secret of concrete’s strength is the creamy middle. The center of a concrete slab takes a century to solidify. Tensile strength is the ability to resist stretching.

Compressive strength is the ability to resist—you guessed it—compression.

Concrete’s compressive strength is eight times its tensile strength. The creamy middle bears the weight of a thousand feet walking across the Roman Empire or a thousand tons of water pushing against the Hoover Dam. Even concrete cracks, but the cracks are only on the surface.

My father used to caulk the cracks shut. Lines of white silicone like kintsugi in the stone. I never understood why he cared whether the concrete carport was cracked or not.

“The cracks reach deeper every year,” he tells me, “and eventually, it’ll dry out the middle. Everything degrades with time,” he tells me, “and eventually, the concrete will too, but we can make it last longer by sealing the cracks.”

Roman roads have lasted two thousand years. The Hoover Dam will last ten thousand.

Can stone go stale? How long will the concrete carport last? The semieternal 10

memory of me kneeling in the Florida heat.

Everything degrades with time. My skin will crack in the sun; the cartilage in my knees will wear thin. My father, too, will someday die, if he is not dead already when you read this—but we last longer by sealing the cracks.

Most of all, gathering round the radio to listen to The Lone Ranger, swimming in a lake, if only once, or boiling maple syrup in a black kettle on a brittle day were the times that stitched our family back together, lifted us out of ordinary moments into extraordinary healing times.

CHARLES VENABLE, TALLAHASSEE, FL

FAY LOOMIS, KERHONKSON, NY

“Waste not, want not,” my parents would say, which seemed silly to me, since we wasted nothing and always wanted.

Mom dazzled me with her repair of a wobbly-legged chair by filling the joints with glue. Dad saved baling wire to cobble a fence back together when the cows leaned into it while reaching for tantalizing new grass on the other side. If we didn’t catch them, they would gorge and founder. Then the cows needed mending via a vet puncturing their stomachs to release gas and prevent death.

We were not so good at fixing the rents in our hearts. The Depression, war, and flint-like poverty frayed our emotions.

Add to that the unrelenting rejection from busybodies in our small town who couldn’t abide our way of life and you might have a tear in your soul that could take a lifetime to make whole.

Mending sometimes did set the world to rights. Darning shut a gaping hole in a sock to keep out the cold, tucking cardboard into a shoe to make it last until the school year ended, patching a screen to keep out tormenting mosquitoes, and repairing a bushel basket to hold fragrant apples all brought a sense of selfsufficiency and assurance that we would get through tough times.

I sat on the cold slate bathroom floor tonight. It was the same spot I sat twenty years earlier when I was drying between my husband’s toes after showering him.

He was semiconscious, chin dropped on his chest, arms dangling, spastic legs sprawled out on the shower chair.

Progressive Multiple Sclerosis ravaged his body. He had not been able to walk or take care of himself for over ten years. I remember telling God that morning, If it never gets any better than this, I will be okay.

Tonight, I wanted to revisit that moment and extend compassion to my younger stoic self. She was not okay. I gave her permission to stop trying to outrun the train bearing down on their lives. Permission to give up her frantic efforts to mend the gaping holes in her husband’s broken life and let go of the illusion that he might get better. He was dying and she didn’t know it.

When I gave her permission to feel what it was like to be her in that moment, I wailed deep wrenching sobs until I was spent. Years of grief poured out of my soul. The jagged holes in the fragile net that held the fragments of my heart were beginning to heal.

Now, I know I will be okay.

SHARON RUFF, HUDSONVILLE, MI

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Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

SPONSORED BY KIMBERLY & STEVE FRANCHINI F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

LAURA BUDOFSKY WISNIEWSKI

YVETTE SIEGERT

The Difference Between a Year and a Lifetime

Papier-mâché

HONORABLE MENTIONS HAJJAR BABAN

BETSY SHOLL

In Another Dream Where My Father Apologizes

The Sparrow in the Banquet Hall

F I NA L I STS CHAUN BALLARD JENNIFER BARBER CHARLEY GIBNEY CATHERINE HODGES SUZANNE LUMMIS

MEGAN MERCHANT BRIAN SNEEDEN SAMUEL UGBECHIE DAVID WRIGHT HAOLUN XU

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Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

O N “ T H E D I F F E R E N C E B E T W E E N A Y E A R A N D A L I F E T I M E ,” JUDGE KATIE PETERSON WRITES:

“This poem’s voice has the tender intensity of a person making music of their thoughts, singing to themselves—as much as the poem signals a kind of distress, it enjoys its ability to compare, to argue, to self-soothe. Even though ‘The Difference Between a Year and a Lifetime’ has longing within it, its keynote is actually a kind of bravado that’s centered in being present with less than perfect circumstances: ‘You can do it for a year.’ I love the combination of introspection and witty dialogue: in isolation, we have had to charm ourselves, haven’t we?”

O N “ P A P I E R - M Â C H É ,” JUDGE KATIE PETERSON WRITES,

“Among other things, this poem is a family portrait. A portrait uses a moment to make a family cohere—which doesn’t mean the picture makes sense. Here, the writer makes a fragile, surreal, dream-like unity, since we’re at some kind of end of the world. The scene reminds me of Aeneas’s departure from Troy: as he loses the people and the city he loves, he loses a language for talking about both. Here, the voice of the poem spins around the same problem, making the subject of the portrait not just the family but the words they have left. A strangely buoyant form of sorrow here, like paper going up in flames.”

Katie Peterson is the author of four books of poetry: This One Tree (New Issues, 2006), Permission (New Issues, 2013), The Accounts (University of Chicago, 2013), and A Piece of Good News (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). She is the editor of the New Selected Poems of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017). Her work has been recognized with awards and fellowships, including the Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas for The Accounts, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Davis.

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LAURA BUDOFSKY WISNIEWSKI

The Difference Between a Year and a Lifetime For a year you can exalt in a feather For a year you can forget what hit you forget the blade that cut through the turpentine of mango.

For a year you can plan the party you will throw when the year is over or plan an assignation at the corner of time and jasmine.

For a year you can read the headlines feed the sparrow, listen for wingbeats just out of earshot, beat the ground for earthworms excavate the dreams you dreamed the year before.

For a year you can be lonely as pajamas in the daytime, lonely as the doorknob, lonely as the threshold, lonely as the light shaft on the polished wooden floor.

You can do it for a year.

A year is just a door you are slowly walking through but a lifetime is this window its eye, that sky, this wind.

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YVETTE SIEGERT

Papier-mâché In the days before our leaving, everything burns. The plastic bags, my mother’s hair.

The sweet peppers, the temple doors.

We have been sampling our languages and gathering a signature palette of nouns.

A rite of passage before we can carry our words.

What will we use to say love or becoming—can we say valise for a suitcase that rattles on cobblestones, and if it is empty—and what of waves when it concerns the lapping of a lake in a landlocked country?

For father, someone chooses a luminous word from her mother tongue. Another opts for a place-word. Let our fathers be elsewhere, she says. Newfoundland, Belfast, Valparaiso.

I imagine a helix, or a rooftop brimming with mist, but how to mention this. I choose my father tongue for forgiveness and also for sun. Their origins like intertwining beeches.

My mother dabs her perfume and says, Make peace. My father says, I languish. My mother says, Strange lily. My father says, My doubt.

These sound to me like sorrow. A pelican’s beak, a toughened suffix without its word. All these things it carries. All-carried. All-carried’s eve.

For the new year, we stand around a paper effigy on the lawn. The figure of an elderly man, his neck a pox of newsprint, his forehead slick with ink and glue.

We write our sorrows down on Post-Its, in just a few words. Take them elsewhere, one of us says. She adjusts his hat and tucks her paper into the brim. Her sister ruffles hers into a bowtie.

My mother tapes hers to his right hand like a dove. My father folds his into a clot of beard. I slip my paper into the calico pocket of his coat, and then we set his chest on fire.

15

BETSY SHOLL

The Sparrow in the Banquet Hall I’d ask the sparrow why its nature is to hide from me—if it even noticed, if I weren’t a late arrival on earth, long after the little bird learned to love the deep recesses in thickets and leaves, the supple give of limbs.

And for the deep recesses my kind knows there are stories we call history about all that is lost in tangles of the past.

From centuries ago there’s the sparrow’s brief flight through the banquet hall, in one door, out the other, warm and bright for as long as it lasts, but so soon back in the long winter night, meaning where we come from, where we’re going, those great unknowns about which the angels say, Fear not, but only after we have fallen to our knees.

So many words now for those unknowns: big bang, black hole, light year, dark matter— as if they tell us any more, as if all our loves aren’t married to loss.

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Truth is, when a heartbreak song comes on, before I get swamped, I turn the dial.

And I don’t want to know if the banquet ends in a brawl, wolf dancing on the table, the king and his thanes fallen.

Oh angel-dressed-in-your-sparrow-clothes, I lean over the small pond beside your thicket and watch my face break into ripples like visible static, then dissolve.

Is this what I’m supposed to fear-not, what you’ve been saying over and over?

I looked away for just a second and when I turned back, you had flown.

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HAJJAR BABAN

In Another Dream

Where My Father Apologizes

for me, the whole world opens I say sorry, sorry, excuse me when I’m awake I’m asleep when it’s light in my room I pass Slemani’s waterfall, the sun agrees— this word in Kurdish, so foreign: after replacement

in English, no utterance of a stutter I wait by the phone He’s asleep he wades the ocean to get to me I know the world, all the language terrors no one will teach me how to look at a face to memory-wake.

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DAVID WRIGHT

Proposed Amendments to the Definition of Mend ﹘for my mother 1) On the mend, as in returning to health, as in a return to strength, as if the narrowing spine will not continue to narrow, to pinch or to twist the nets of nerves in your back, and the neuropathy will not numb your hands, fingertips so numb they they drop dumb needles, drop pens, drop the pills you intended to take and cannot bend to pluck from the floor. 2) Mend our ways, as in tend again to the mother, you, who tended to me, the one who teases too often too close to the bone, both from duty and love, my habits too tautly wound to be rent or to rend, in order to make strong again. My tone is your tone, blurting out agitation and grace. 3) To set right, to correct like a bone that is set (can a back be reset?), like a sentence revised.

But who can uncurve the sentence of an old spine? Stenosis: to narrow a passage in the body. The road to hell is wide, but the painless kingdom requires a needle’s eye, and are we too rich in worry to enter in? Your hands are too unnerved to thread a thing through, and the surgeon says it would not be wise. 4) Mend fences, which are nothing but nets of metal or wood sifting the air near the borders of the ends of us, where the worries must be kept from entering in, or where the worries you love must be kept from escaping, leaving you trapped in a small home alone. I am a sorry fence-mender, not a net-mender like the fishermen with their shuttles, their gauges, the taste for brine and the patience to restitch a bitten-through twine.

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5) From Middle English, menden, by apheresis, for amenden, to atone, for a sin or a shame, for the imperfect body, for all we have done and left, and all those we have undone and left, that cannot be intended back together again. My spine is a spine of a book of confessions, of unforgetting. 6) Mend, noun, “the woodworker’s mend was so perfect we could no longer see the damage to the table.” On the X-ray, the vertebrae are not made of wood but of light, the hollowed and hallowed cylinders of bone are delicate shadow, transparent, like ash in the sun, a gray and white text the doctor reads and repeats, “we can manage the pain.” 7) Amendment, a small change, a more accurate word, more current, the correction of an imperfection. You are sitting as upright on the doctor’s table as you can. You are clear in your words about how you must keep moving, even as your leg grows weak when your back flares. I am not listening well. But I am hearing a voice that sits in my ear, maybe Lear, telling me to mend my words. Or another voice from another script commends me.

Serve God. Or serve notice. Or serve myself a short bourbon and ice. To suffice I place my inadequate hand in the small of your small back and help you to your feet, to the car. We set you down in your best chair when you get home. The winter sun is still bright. We are not too late, amen, to (a)mend.

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M

Y WIFE KATHY and I had gone up to the Blue Mountains for a weekend

away. On Sunday afternoon, when we had intended to drive back to Sydney, bushfires had cut the road, and we had to stay in our hotel another night.

After dinner Kathy wanted to read, so I went down to the bar, a pleasantly oldfashioned, wood-panelled room on the ground floor.

I was surprised when I walked in to see James Carlisle. I hadn’t known he was staying at the hotel, but he told me his situation was the same as mine: here for a weekend with his wife, then stranded because of the fires. I had known James since university. He was in medicine and I law, but we played football together and had remained friends since, so far as our busy lives allowed. I’d probably last had dinner with him eighteen months before. I joined him at his table; he was drinking Scotch, and I ordered a Macallan.

The table was in a far corner, and a soft cone of light from a wall-mounted lamp above us lent a feeling of privacy. We spoke about this and that; I mentioned attending Kathy’s father’s funeral earlier in the year, and remarked that death in the family can cause people to behave in strange ways.

James expressed condolences, then said, “It’s odd you should say that, because I’ve just been mulling over something similar myself. As it happens, my mother died last year. It’s fine, she had run a good course and didn’t suffer. But the point is, my elder sister Judith and I then had the task of going through all her possessions. I don’t think you’ve met my sister, but I have to say, it wasn’t that there was much to sort through, nor even that we were still grieving, that made that job so difficult. It was because of Judith’s deep mistrust of everyone, her possessiveness over our mother’s memory, and her obsessive secretiveness.”

I looked at James inquiringly, inviting him to continue. There was obviously more to this story, and we had the whole evening before us.

“As and when this becomes boring, David, I beg you to stop me,” he resumed, smiling. “I have to say, this obsession for secrecy had no basis I could see. But secrecy was Judith’s passion. I mean, as an example, we were the only siblings, but she’d never given me her home phone number. I could only contact her at work, which always seemed to involve her being summoned from the depths of some compactus. She’d give taxi drivers an address on the next block to her house, and wait until they were out of sight before walking home. And she flatly refused to reveal her opinion of anything at all, from a film to a fish dinner. ‘Well, what did you think of it?’ she would parry to any enquiry about her views.

“My sister justified all this by her conviction that everyone in the town in which she lived—in a small cottage three blocks from our mother’s home—was talking about her. In fact, as far as I could tell, nobody paid her much attention. She’d never married. All her adult life she’d worked in the town library; after work she went home,

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and as far as I knew, apart from daily phone conversations with our mother, she had little personal contact with anyone.

“Right at that time I was very busy in my practice, and I was content to leave Judith to clear out our mother’s house. I told her I didn’t want anything, and she could do what she liked with the contents, provided she emptied the place in readiness for sale. Each time I rang to check on her progress, she told me it was going well, but became prickly if I asked for any details. ‘Don’t forget I’m still suffering, I’m bereaved,’ she would say, implying my concern for practicalities meant I was not sufficiently distressed at our mother’s death. I subdued my misgivings and left her to it.

“However, in September, about eight months after the funeral, I pressed for details in one of my calls, and it emerged, slowly and circuitously, that notwithstanding

The skip was nearly full, and the house seemed both bigger and smaller from the space we’d created.

Judith’s assurances, the furniture, books, household linen, kitchenware, and a host of other things all still remained. I asked whether she’d contacted the local secondhand dealers and church charities. “‘Certainly not!’ she retorted. ‘I don’t want people coming to the house. They’ll think poorly of our mother if they see how simply she lived. And they all talk, you know.’

“This conversation was quite enough for me. My accountant had warned me that if we didn’t sell the property within twelve months of our mother’s death, the estate would face what he described as significant tax issues. From an accountant those are frightening words, you’ll agree, and I blocked the next Friday and Monday out of my diary and flew up there to empty the house myself.

“I rang Judith to tell her I was coming, and that I’d already ordered a rubbish skip. I knew I’d meet resistance from her, and I did. ‘A skip!’ she said. ‘What for?’ I told her I was quite sure I’d fill it twice over. The remaining minute of our conversation was chilly.

“Early on Friday morning I sat looking out an aeroplane window at the brown and green rectangles of grazing land spread out below. A river twisted across the countryside, and dams flashed like silver coins in the sunlight as we passed over them.

The last time I’d seen all this was when I flew up for my mother’s funeral. It’s funny; I could remember vividly the view from the aircraft that day, but nothing much about the funeral, except the big wreath of native flowers on the coffin.

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“I found the house essentially untouched since my mother’s death, although the garden was as neatly tended as when she was alive. Perhaps keeping up that appearance had been absorbing Judith’s efforts. The skip was there, in the driveway.

Anxious to get the job underway, I began tossing anything obviously valueless and useless into it; piles of old magazines, slightly broken umbrellas, frayed rugs, the sorts of things that accumulate unnoticed in a home over time, giving no offense, until something changes to bring them under a different scrutiny.

“After an hour of this, having made no impression on the house whatsoever, I realized I had to approach the task methodically, room by room, or it would never get done. I made a pot of tea, then started with the bathroom, throwing its entire contents into the skip: half-used bottles of shampoo, out-of-date medicines, towels, everything.

Then I moved to the kitchen, opening every cupboard and drawer. By late afternoon you could at least see where I’d been.

“Judith didn’t turn up all day; I assumed she was at work. That evening, she phoned me at my hotel and asked what I had done. When I mentioned the bathroom, she was distraught. ‘I wanted to keep some of those things,’ she cried. ‘They have labels that reminded me of my childhood!’ All I could say to her, summoning up as much generosity as I could, was, ‘Well, you’ve had eight months to take whatever you wanted and you haven’t, so now it has to be done this way. If you really need that stuff, you can fox it out of the rubbish.’

“An even chillier atmosphere was evident when Judith appeared at the house early on Saturday, not so much to do anything useful, it seemed to me, but to hover, watching what I was throwing out, or putting on the front veranda for the secondhand furniture dealer, or piling up in the hall to give to charity. At one point I saw her taking things out of a carton I had earmarked for rubbish.

“I was determined to clear the place in the four days I had, and I went on emptying cupboards and drawers and boxes. It’s funny, I visited my mother many times, and I was always pleased that in twenty-five years the place never changed, the tea caddy was always next to the kettle, the biscuits always on the second shelf of the green cupboard.

I would have been discomfited if these things were not in their accustomed places.

But now that she was gone, the objects and their arrangement had no attachment, no meaning. They were a collection of items to be dealt with, nothing more.

“I worked all day, and Judith eventually pitched in, packing the contents of Mama’s wardrobes into big plastic bags. Evening was approaching, the garden already dark through the lace-curtained windows, when we paused to eat the sandwiches Judith had brought. The skip was nearly full, and the house seemed both bigger and smaller from the space we’d created.

“In the hallway next to the front room was a built-in linen press, which I’d almost overlooked. It contained various items of bedding, linen tablecloths in plastic bags,

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a vacuum cleaner, and on its upper shelf three cardboard boxes. In all my years of visiting Mama I had never noticed them. ‘Do you know what’s in these?’ I asked Judith. She shook her head. I took them down, getting another layer of grime on my hands and shirt. The dust I’d stirred up all day had made me tired and scratchy, and I was looking forward to a shower and a night’s sleep.”

James broke off to finish his drink, and I signalled to the bartender for two more Scotches.

“Still, I wanted to get this out of the way. Judith and I knelt on the carpet on either side of the first box as I slit the packing tape sealing it. Judith seemed more than usually on edge, twisting her fingers together in a knot. As I pulled back the cardboard flaps, she reached out as if to restrain me, then drew back. She opened her mouth to speak, but shook her head instead. “‘What is it? What is the problem?’ I asked her, and after twice saying, ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she finally clasped her hands before her like a martyr in a Baroque painting. “‘I don’t know if we are supposed to look in these,’ she said in a strangled voice. “‘Well, we either look in them or throw them out unopened,’ I said, ‘and I don’t think it’s right to do that. If Mama kept whatever is in here, it must have been valuable to her. And if it’s family history, we have a right to know.’ I began lifting out the carefully packed contents.

“Nothing remarkable emerged. Indeed, exactly what you might expect; the markers of a life. Mama’s marriage certificate, dated 1951; a small bundle of yellowed newspaper clippings about amateur plays in which she’d appeared; a folding colour postcard titled Views of Bobbin Head; a worn, cloth-bound prayer book. A muslin handkerchief, which without Mama’s memory of its provenance was just a square of fabric, rust-marked where it had been folded for so long. There was a pair of baby slippers, either mine or Judith’s, and a lace baby dress that was certainly Judith’s. At the bottom of the box was a pile of foxed sheet music. A book of Debussy preludes bore Mama’s maiden name, Mary Rose Robinson, in faded ink across its cover.

“We knew all about Mama’s life, of course. She was English. She’d come to Australia after the war, and married my father. He’d stayed with her long enough to beget two children, and for Judith and me to remember him as a laughing, fair-haired man with a square jaw, before he disappeared. Mama told us he’d gone to work in the mines, and I had a dim memory, somehow tinged with shame, of going with her once to the post office to collect money he’d sent. He never returned, and Mama went to work in the town’s department store. At school, my classmates jeered at me when I told them my father didn’t live at home with us, and I didn’t know where he was. My sister in turn was bullied by being called foreign, and occasionally wog. Perhaps, now that I think of it, this schoolyard bullying sparked her belief that she was under scrutiny.

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“I got my father’s fair complexion, and no one called me a wog. I suppose with Judith’s thick, brown wavy hair, dark eyes, and prominent nose you might say she looked foreign, but no more than Mama, who had the same coloring, and Mama was very decidedly English. Very decidedly. She’d been brought up in Kent, she told us, and she never Australianized her Home Counties accent. Throughout our childhood she taught us that England was the mother country, and that only the English way of doing things was correct, that all other nations and races were second-rate and

James broke off to finish his drink, and I signalled to the bartender for two more Scotches.

unreliable. We were given Conan Doyle and Kipling to read. We even had back copies of the Illustrated London News in the sunroom; I remember leafing through them, lying on the warm linoleum floor, during Christmas school holidays. And Mama was a pillar of the Church of England; she attended St. Mark’s every Sunday, and took an active part in every church committee available. There was no doubt about it, Mama was English.”

The bartender brought our drinks, placing the cut-glass tumblers on coasters. A couple who had been sitting at the bar left, exchanging goodnights with him. We were the only remaining guests.

“Anyway, I cut open the second box,” Carlisle continued. “On top was something rather touching; an album, dating from the first weeks of their marriage, into which both Mama and Papa had pasted theatre ticket stubs, ferry timetables, postcards, and letters they had received, inscribing beneath them the dates in careful print. It stopped, twenty pages in, about six months after their wedding. The sadness of that was only heightened by Mama having retained it all these years. On the last full page was a small black-and-white photograph of our parents together, standing in front of a Sydney Harbour Bridge pylon. They looked young and happy. Papa was wearing a double-breasted suit with broad lapels, and Mama—a full head shorter than he—a coat with what looked like an astrakhan collar and a little hat.

“Judith and I spent some time looking at the album together, and both, I think, felt somewhat chastened when we turned back to the box. We found more concert programmes, a folded sheet of tissue paper with a very dry pressed flower in it, a travel brochure advertising Jenolan Caves, and a copy of Women’s Weekly commemorating the 1954 Royal visit. Beneath all that was a manila envelope, folded

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over at the end but not sealed. Inside was a stiff gray card, on which was mounted a sepia photograph.

“It showed a man and woman, seated, in a posed studio portrait. The woman’s dark hair was bobbed in a 1920s style. The man had a moustache and a rounded celluloid collar. Their joined hands rested on his knee. I’d never seen these people before, but something about the photograph felt jarring. On the back of the cardboard mounting was an inscription in a round, feminine hand: Avraham y Mirou Modiano, Salonika, 1926.

“Turning the photograph over again, I looked at the couple closely. I realized what was jarring; it was impossible to ignore the clear resemblance between the woman in the photo and Mama, and even, it struck me, my sister Judith. The dark hair, the eyes, the shape of the nose and jaw, and even without those details, an overall likeness.

“I looked inside the envelope again. There was something else, a sheet of paper folded into four. I opened it carefully; it was thin and brittle. A letter, in small but strong handwriting, covering the whole page. I began to read it, but after a couple of sentences, I wanted Judith to know what I’d found. ‘Listen to this,’ I told her, ‘it’s extraordinary!’ and went back to the start, reading the letter out loud. I can still pretty much remember it.

Salonika, 20 April 1934 My dearest Mairy Rosa Greetings from Salonika! It is six years since we last saw each other, my daughter, and by this time you will feel at home in England. I am writing because you are old enough now to learn about your family. I speak only Ladino, so I have asked my friend Samuel Alberto Molho, a rabbi and a learned man, to write down my words in English for you.

You were born in 1924, my third child, here in Salonika. You were born one month prematurely, and you were so small I placed you in a shoebox for a bed.

The midwife said you would not live. But the doctor told me to boil milk and water every day, mix it with sugar and feed it to you. I did this, and you lived.

How great is the Almighty! The doctor also said to wrap your fingers with cotton so they wouldn’t stick to one another. I was proud when your hands turned out to be well-shaped and strong.

As to your family, my maiden name was Allatini. My father, your grandfather Samuel Allatini, died before you were born.

My mother, your grandmother Jamila, had red hair. She told me that when she was young, she used to sit on the balcony and play the mandolin. But her brothers would grab her by her hair and drag her inside, because it was

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considered improper for a young woman to sit out on the balcony playing music. She told me she had not wanted to marry Samuel, but her family arranged it and she could not refuse. In the end, she said, he was a good husband.

I had two sisters. One died as a baby, because the woman who was helping my mother fell down the stairs with her in her arms. The other is Edit, your aunt.

She lives in Chaldiki with her husband and her two children, your cousins.

You have three brothers. Solomon and Maurice you should remember. Your third brother Samuel was born after you left. About your father Avraham Modiano I do not want to say anything, because the hurt he dealt me when he left this family I do not wish to recall.

Do not blame me for allowing you to leave us. At that time, things in Salonika were very hard, and were getting worse. So when the chance came for you to live in England, I said yes. You were only four years old, and while I did not know our English relatives well, I knew they could give you a better life than we could here. And indeed things continue to get worse for us in Salonika day by day.

Mairy, you will have forgotten our Ladino language, but I beg you, never forget you are Jewish. Our people remain on the earth because we hold to our faith.

Observe the shabbat. Eat only kosher food. Say your prayers. In this way you will live long and happily.

I know you and I will not see each other again in this life, which tears a mother’s heart, but I also know your life must be better where you are, which gives me comfort.

There is only one photograph of me with your father. You should have it, so I enclose it with this letter.

Sano i rezio, in the Ladino words, farewell.

Your loving mother, Mirou Mairy Modiano “I felt as if I’d stepped into another world. This mother’s account of parting with her daughter forever, written in flat, matter-of-fact prose, was moving enough, but to see her face in the photograph made it twenty times more real. I couldn’t really imagine life in Salonika in the 1920s, but she had thought it necessary to send her daughter, her only girl child, away. There must have been good reasons for that.

“Why had Mama kept these things? At first I assumed the daughter, Mairy Rosa Modiano, had been her friend as a child in England. But then I again noticed Mama’s

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resemblance to the mother, the woman in the photograph. And the similarity in the names. In fact—the idea struck me physically; the skin on my face prickled—was it possible this Mirou Modiano was Mama’s mother, our grandmother? But the idea of our mother, the very English Mary Rose Robinson, being born a Jew in Salonika was absurd. It just could not be so. “‘What a strange story,’ I said to Judith, still staring at the photograph, ‘and it’s puzzling, isn’t it, how this woman looks a lot like Mama, and even quite a lot like you.’

“Judith was silent; I looked up at her. Her expression startled me. She was pale, and looked at me with eyes—I am not being rude, I just don’t know how else to describe them—like a pleading dog’s.

“Precisely at that moment, looking at Judith’s strained face and begging eyes, I realized it was in fact just so, that our Mama, Mary Rose Robinson, had been born Mairy Rosa Modiano in Salonika, that the photograph was of her mother, that we were a Jewish family, and that my sister already knew all this. “‘When did you find out?’ I asked quietly.

“Somehow Judith realized this was not a time to prevaricate. ‘When we moved house in 1983. You were already in Sydney. I found these things, and asked Mama; she

“How could I? It would have been like attacking Mama’s whole way of life.”

told me, but she made me promise not to tell you, and I obeyed her.’ Judith looked at me defiantly, as if assisting our mother in this deception was the proudest moment of her life. Then she went on. “‘When I asked Mama about the photo, she seemed angry for a second, you know that thin-lipped look . . .’ Judith faltered. I waited for her to continue. “‘Then she said yes, the photograph was of her parents, whom she didn’t remember, and she was born in Greece, but was brought up in England by her relatives, whom she thought were her mother and father. They didn’t do anything Jewish, she said; she didn’t even know what Jewish meant when she got this letter.

When she asked them, they told her she was English now, not Jewish, and never to say anything to anyone about being Jewish, not ever, not at school, not at church, to nobody, nowhere. Mama told me this, then made me promise not to tell anyone, including you. She said it was ancient history, it would only upset you, and it could harm your career.’

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“Judith broke off. She still looked distressed, but her face had a curious radiance.

It was a strange moment, kneeling on the fleur-de-lis-patterned hallway carpet in our mother’s half-emptied house, with this revelation—how can I put it—bursting like a firework display over my head.

“As I tried to put what I’d learned in order, beneath my bewilderment, anger began to stir. Something I should have known about myself had been concealed from me by my own family. The business about harming my career was rubbish, of course. The reason Mama didn’t want me to know had nothing to do with me, but with her. She wanted to be secure in the knowledge that everyone in the world regarded her as English. Because she and Judith were so close, she could bind my sister to silence, but if I’d known our background, I might have made it public, and the whole façade of her Englishness would come down. And she had so thoroughly trained us to regard everyone other than English as second-rate, she might even have feared our judgment on her.

“Then it occurred to me that Judith was in an even worse position than I, having known but kept it a secret all this time. “‘What about you?’ I asked her. ‘Didn’t you want to find out more about our family?

Or about being Jewish?’ “‘How could I? It would have been like attacking Mama’s whole way of life. I put the photo back, and we never spoke of it again.’

“I didn’t know what to say to that. Dazedly, I opened the third box. It was an anticlimax, holding a dozen old copies of the Sydney Morning Herald, each sealed in a celluloid wrapper. The one on top announced the moon landings. We didn’t look at the rest.

“I was suddenly very tired, and I couldn’t face any more house clearing that evening. I bade Judith goodnight. I remember standing outside on the footpath, the night quiet, no cars passing, a smell of green leaves in the air, a sickle moon low in the sky, a haze over the paddock through which the railway line ran. The light burned in the window of the front room. Judith was still there. I could not imagine what was going through her mind. I thought again about the funeral. We both said goodbye to our mother that day, but we had each been farewelling a different woman, it seemed.

“In that moment I felt a great wave of sympathy for my sister. All her peculiarities, which I’d found something between risible and annoying, became understandable.

For thirty years she’d been bound to keep a secret—not only about Mama, but about her own identity—from the world, from me, even from herself. It must have been a terrible burden. No wonder she’d developed her extreme, overblown secretiveness.

No wonder, desperate not to let something out inadvertently, she trained herself to deflect every question.

“I lay awake in my hotel room. It was too late to buy any alcohol, which was a shame. All sorts of things ran through my head. Perhaps I should go to Thessaloniki;

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there was a faint chance I might still have relatives there, although I knew the Germans had taken the city during the war. Or perhaps I should simply try to find out what it meant to be Jewish. But, then again, I had gone through more than fifty years of my life, at school, at university, and as a medico, believing I was Anglo-Australian.

Now I’d learned my inheritance was in part something else, what would I do, whatever I found out? Call myself something different? Change my habits, my way of life?

“And then I asked myself, what difference did it actually make, this discovery?

Whatever was in my blood had always been with me. I was what I was, the man my wife knew, my children knew, my colleagues knew. Whatever name I gave my identity didn’t matter. I couldn’t be a different James Carlisle, if you see what I mean.

“What I had to do was finish dealing with the house in the forty-eight hours I had left, then fly back to Sydney on Monday night, with a full day of consultations on Tuesday already in my diary, and the rest of the year’s work already mapped out.

There was no time to start some newly faceted life, even if I’d wanted to.”

Carlisle sighed, and reached for the glass on the table between us. “I’ve never told anyone all this,” he said, “and I will have to ask you to treat it as a confidence. Not for me, you understand, but for my sister. To her it’s still secret.” He drained the last of his Scotch. The bartender, in his white jacket, hovered in the muted light at the far end of the room.

“Nightcap?” I suggested.

“No, thank you, I’ll get to bed. I have to get up early to drive back to Sydney.”

“Me too, actually. Good night, Jim.” “Good night, David.”

I ordered a last whiskey for myself after Carlisle had departed, and sat over it musing. I didn’t think it so strange he had told me this very personal story; he’d wanted to get it off his chest, and he knew I wouldn’t repeat it. What I thought odd was that he didn’t want to explore his own heritage. Avraham and Mairy Modiano were probably Sephardic Jews, who as a race had a long and difficult history, a distinct intellectual culture, and even their own language. If you learned that history was running through your veins, surely you’d want to investigate it, if not for historical reasons, at least to understand yourself better.

“A newly faceted life,” Carlisle had said. I supposed if you did dive into some wholly unexpected heritage, it might compel you to a different view of your own identity. And perhaps that was the point. James—like me, like any of my friends—had been what he was for nearly sixty years. He had his own package of beliefs, manners, customs, speech, habits. Everything he’d done and said and thought in his life—his marriage, his profession, even his name—was based on that package, and the sum of all those things went to make up his identity.

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We all piece together our identities from scraps, often painfully, out of necessity.

Ultimately our identity is what we go out into the world with. It’s our armour, and it’s also our means of communicating with our fellow humans, and having them understand us. To recreate it, even to skew it, would be terribly hard. It might be romantic to discover some new persona, but at our age it probably made more sense to hold on to the one you had. Now that I considered it, I could see James’s perspective.

And I could understand his mother as well. From what James had told me, by the age of ten she had acquired an identity that served her well. The news that she was by birth something else must not have been welcome, because that inheritance and her English life couldn’t coexist. She chose one identity, and lived in it more or

We all piece together our identities from scraps, often painfully, out of necessity. less successfully. These kinds of decisions are how history gets lost, how languages are extinguished, how cultures fade away. But a person has to determine their own identity, not adopt one out of obligation to history.

It was Judith, it seemed to me, not James, who was really the grain ground between two stones. Her mother and brother at least had secure identities, whether historically true or not. But she hadn’t been allowed any real identity of her own. To keep her mother’s secret, she had surrendered the chance to explore her Jewishness, while the knowledge of that secret, and the pressure of keeping it, had robbed her of the quiet enjoyment of an ordinary Australian life. That this pressure was selfimposed didn’t make it any better. Her vigilance had raised a barrier between her and the world, even between her and her only brother.

In any event, James had made his decision, and said he was comfortable with it. And he didn’t have to investigate anything if he didn’t wish to. But he was too intelligent to pretend his antecedents were irrelevant, to pretend he could view himself in precisely the same way as before he read the letter. No doubt he would continue to conduct his life as he always had. But whatever he might say, he would think about what he’d learned. It seemed to me that James would never be unthinkingly comfortable in his identity again, which meant he could never be perfectly comfortable in the world again. And all that from reading a letter, a letter written eighty years before by a woman he never knew, sent from a city that no longer bore that name. Greetings from Salonika, indeed.

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SUZANNE LUMMIS

For the Millions Oh Best Beloved, now it’s me who can’t sleep, my brain too jammed with bits, most of them sounding out cries—animals, the farmed and the wild ones, the hunts and the hungers, coyotes—sinew and bone—stalking the nighttime streets of Northeast L.A., searching for cats.

And some troubles overseas— all seven—disturbances in the governing bodies. I hear them like troubled stomachs roiling their devouring acids. I’m sorry, Beloved, but I do! And no one, nothing out there, can I save, not Valerie Reyes, 24, bookstore clerk and “bookworm,” prone to “attacks of anxiety,” like the one when she called from her basement flat in a borough of New York where she lived alone, called her mother, shaking and crying, engulfed with terror—she couldn’t say why. For a while, she wasn’t seen around after that,

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then she was, on the side of an empty road, when a guy driving for The Public Works stopped to open a large suitcase.

Oh Best Beloved, a poem can’t pull anyone back from death into life, but it can pull the dead into a poem. Maybe she’ll be safe here, that stranger, that friend—I mean, not her, exactly, but her name. It will lie in the lines of the poem, comforted, calmed. Maybe

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it will sleep.

CATHERINE ABBEY HODGES

All Day the Stars

—after W. S. Merwin

You told me when you’re gone

you will be rain.

You said to look for Cygnus

in the ditch.

All day the stars

an alphabet of light chant in the hall,

spell the one thing.

Days ride the air

on their way away forever.

See how the stars look back

as if they weren’t in love with death.

See how the stars look back

on their way away forever.

Days ride the air

spell the one thing in the next room,

chant an alphabet of light.

All day the stars

swim hidden in the ditch.

You said to look for Cygnus.

You will be rain you said. And here you are.

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SAMUEL PICCONE

Postpartum I expected the dead bees in my hair:

a flowerbed of husk. Nothing in me took

the shape of swaddle orchid, Moses-in-the-cradle, tallgrass softer than the switch

cut from my boyhood. My father

warned me some leaves never unfurl, the blades swallow the soil like a claw

grown the wrong way.

If this failure is the earth’s embrace, there’s no need for me

to be sorry for my love,

how it forsakes blooming to rid itself of snow. Every garden is erased

by the thrum of impermanence, another hated winter praised for what beautifully flowers.

Even nature tries to hide the infirmities

it births. When your mother speaks to you of my damage, remember this.

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HAOLUN XU

The Heart As Parabola My sun. My stupid little sun, That when the light arrives, we think it’s too late, the way even time is warped upon the balcony’s bow.

Upon the twist of the ninth week, my loveliness and inexhaustible ways, become, well, exhaustible.

I squawk at my mother. I squawk at my friends.

We all test each other. On Twitter, a girl says, “if lockdown doesn’t end soon, I’m going to be shy.” I’m defeated.

My proof will be gone, but when I’m forgetting I hope no one will blame me.

Someone yells at me for being insincere. I’m sorry, kissing ass is a universal language. People can hate me or love me, this way. So respond accordingly, my celebrities and my loved ones.

My sound is incomplete. The grant money is lauding me for my uselessness.

I’m still coming up with a word.

Their voice has the advantage of the flower moon behind it.

The waves, bringing them to an empty house.

But it’s still my house, damn it.

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Can you hear me? I’m a cute cow in a cattle. Please, know the nuance in my begging. Please, please. please. I repeat this.

Practice makes perfect.

At night, my tongue is completely destroyed, and I am in full bloom.

I’m learning German today. I am covered in god.

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M

Y FINGER S ARE slow to wake up today. I lick the thread and poke at the

needle four times before I find the eye. My first project is a trouser hem, using the ugly crisscross stitch Mr. Nagy insists on. His wealthy clients prefer its security to the slip stitch my mother taught me. The inside of a garment should be as attractive as the outside, she insisted. The fabric feels oddly bulky this morning, like cotton batting instead of polished wool. I fumble a pin, prick my finger, and quickly suck on it to stanch the blood; but it’s nothing compared to last week’s sewing machine needle through a nail, a bull’s-eye bruise that’s still healing. It’s a sort of out-of-body experience to look at my hands in that moment, as if the digits are sewn on Frankenstein-style. I go and run cold water over them to shock them awake. I hate cold hands. Something I rarely have to deal with since moving to Miami. I crack my knuckles, do some dexterity exercises, and get back to work.

Today’s pile of alterations so far includes four hems, two waists to let out, six pocket replacements, and three bell-bottoms to transform into skinny jeans. Olivia Newton John’s new image in Grease has certainly been good for business, but tapering those legs is a job and a half. One of my regulars, a sorority princess, was so excited to discover this wardrobe makeover that she promised to bring in six more pairs at twelve bucks a pop. Oh, goody. I’m grateful for the work, but I can’t fathom her. She’s beyond adorable with the wardrobe she already has. Doesn’t she have anything better to do with her money?

I own one pair of jeans, purchased on clearance at Woolworth’s when I was fourteen. That was the best sixty-nine cents I ever spent, even though the pants didn’t fit until senior year. But boy, did they then! The first day I wore them to school, prom royalty asked where I got them. Of course, I was evasive.

Money. Everything comes down to money. I’ll be lucky to earn enough tuition this fall to start sophomore year in January at Florida State, even at residential rates.

The door pings open and Mr. Nagy enters, clutching a bakery box in his chubby hands. His white Guayabera shirt bears a faint stain on the tummy where grease leached through the cardboard. He sets a cream-cheese Danish next to my machine and smiles magnanimously. “Sweetsies for the sweetie,” he says in his thick Hungarian accent.

Mr. Nagy and his wife both speak a heartfelt and direct English I appreciate. I am intrigued by their sentence structure, how they mold the language, coining new words like sweetsies. But I regret having told him that Danishes are my favorite. It’s becoming a tradition. “Thanks, but no thanks,” I tell him. “I’m on a diet.”

“On the diet,” he scoffs. “You beautiful girl. Lotsa boy chase you just like that.” He stretches a hairy arm out to me as if I’m the Venus de Milo.

I remind him that I have a boyfriend.

“Yes,” he says cautiously. “You are a modern girl.”

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I ask what he means by that.

“You know. Old-fashioned girl live at home with Mama and Papa. Modern girl live with boyfriend.”

I snip and rethread the needle for the second pant leg. If that’s the definition of modern, I am the most old-fashioned modern girl I know. He wouldn’t get the distinction, though, even if I tried to explain. I’m here because I found life with Mama and Papa intolerable, and my boyfriend’s family took me in. Fortunately, I have this one marketable skill.

It all started in kindergarten when I wore a hole in my sock walking home for lunch.

My mother taught me to darn, and I skipped back to school with a bunchy patch in the toe of my shoe, but I didn’t care because sewing was power and possibility.

I was her apprentice for years. The fabric store was my favorite shop—a color wheel in kaleidoscope with the smell of factory-fresh promise. It was the starchy

She was studying to be a home ec teacher, and I was becoming that kid whose mom dresses her funny.

savor of slick magazine stock on damp fingers as I paged through the trinity of McCall’s, Simplicity, and Butterick. It was the feel of the cloth in suggestible hands: velvets and furs, prairie suedes and homespuns, sequins and lace. Snakeskin! It was that sound of worshipful concentration as patrons pored over patterns, draping the fabric just so, the seductive murmur of persuasion, the hiss of scissors cutting, cloth ripping, and a cash register ringing. It was the smiling faces of ladies, always ladies, embarking on journeys of the imagination. It was heaven at half-a-buck-a-yard, when stitching was cheaper than shopping. It was a marriage of artistry and economy at a time when many mothers still taught their daughters that marriage was what life was all about.

Each outfit brought sleepless anticipation followed by the afterglow of attention.

But as my mother became busier with work and college, she lost her tenuous grasp on preteen fashion. She was studying to be a home-ec teacher, and I was becoming that kid whose mom dresses her funny.

At twelve, I started sewing for myself and tasted command. It was a creative journey of personal growth, of finding my own style and a measure of independence.

Excursions to the fabric store became as difficult as matching plaids. Where I saw style, Mom saw indecency. The hemline was too high or the neckline too low, the

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fabric too sheer or the panty line too visible. She was as unforgiving as a bias cut on a belly, so I learned to install lining in everything. She taught me advanced techniques: French seams, blind hems, overcast buttonholes, stitch-in-the-ditch. We took field trips to Boston’s finer stores to admire the hand-picked zippers, boning, and buckram insets.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when I set out to make my first formal, we disagreed on the very notion of what a prom gown should look like. It was 1974, and Gunne Sax’s unstructured muslins were all the rage, but Mom hadn’t gotten the memo.

She still thought formal meant strapless satins and chiffons sculpted to the body.

When I seized on a pink calico and white waffle-weave cotton, she was baffled. “For a prom?” she asked. “We haven’t even looked at patterns yet.”

“No need,” I said unequivocally. “This is it. You’ll see, it will be beautiful.”

She inched toward the silks. “Wouldn’t you like a special fabric for a special occasion?”

“No one will be wearing that,” I said dismissively, holding out the brushed cotton latticework for her to feel. I’d never been so sure of anything.

“Seems a little thin,” she said, tentatively, holding it up to my bust.

“So I’ll interface it,” I said, hustling to the pattern books as she eyed the tulles wistfully.

The cover page of the formals section featured a high-waisted apron style with shoulder ruffles and contrasting bib. She looked from it to my fabric, and her face suffused with admiration. “I like it,” she mused, surprised. “I trust your judgment.”

It was the first time she said that. In this one realm of life at least, I’d earned her respect as an equal. We were out of the store in twenty minutes. It was the easiest disagreement we ever had and my toughest project to date.

Eight weeks later, it was more than a hit. It was a sensation—and the validation I would need when I became sick of my parents still treating me like a child and left home four years later, for good. Landing here.

The September sun is beating through the mirrored-glass window as the minute hand on the parrot-fish clock creeps toward the pectoral fin. Not even quarter to nine and my cheeks are prickly, hairstyle wilting.

“Today gonna be scorchy,” Mr. Nagy says, mopping his brow and bumping up the AC. “Good day to close early. Go swimming. You like swimming?”

I nod noncommittedly, dreading what is coming next.

“I have a big pool where I live. Very nice. You come swimming. Bring bikini, yes?”

It’s the third time this month he’s brought that up, even though I told him there’s a pool where I live. I don’t bother telling him I don’t own a bikini. I say I’m babysitting later, a lie boring enough that he won’t press for details.

“Other time then,” he says. “Next week. Thursday, for lunch,” he decides.

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I tell him I have to work early at the theater that day. And besides, I wouldn’t want to impose on Mrs. Nagy like that. I don’t mention her telling me that she’d be away visiting the grandchildren. Poor woman, putting up with him for forty years.

“You working too much all the time,” he says. “You young. You relax. Take a sun tan.”

I take a bite of Danish, and he gives the palm-up gesture for more. “Eat. It’s good for you.”

Customers bustle in with their laundry. This one lost a button. That one broke a zipper. A matronly lady wants a dress taken out three inches at the waist, a brand-new silk pin-dot she just bought for the weekend. Too bad there’s only an inch and a half of seam allowance.

A brash, skinny girl comes in with two pairs of polyester gabardine slacks to take in, seeming like she’s on uppers. I have her slip them on in the dressing room, only to discover later that the crotches are crusty. I hold my breath and race through the work, tag the pants for cleaning, and scrub my hands extra hard.

A girl my age comes in with her mother and a pile of back-to-school clothes just my style, modest but chic. We eye each other like potential friends on the first day of class. But I’m just the seamstress, someone she won’t see again, so we don’t talk. She needs the shoulder straps taken in on some cami-dresses, a five-minute job. It amazes me that people pay for this.

She and her mother have a camaraderie I miss from the old days before my mother became so micromanaging, grooming me to be her idea of a doctor’s wife? Or an airline attendant? I was never sure. The last time we went shopping together, the summer I shed my high school uniform, we scoured clearance racks for all-season slacks, skirts, and blouses—everything but those horrible, horrible blue jeans, as she called them. She insisted on replacing my green leather slouch sack with a goldtrimmed clutch that Corporate Barbie would envy, wearing me down with her I don’t ask for much and I’m paying for your education, after all—to the tune of her entire teaching salary, all because she refused to fill out the financial-aid forms. It’s none of their business what we earn. So much misplaced pride after so much penny-pinching.

The style at college, I would discover, was: backpacks, jeans, Fair Isles sweaters, down jackets. Once again, I was the kid who dressed funny. I was thrilled to find a shrunken Faire Isles at a thrift shop over winter break. I wore it to tatters.

The alterations are stacking up when an older man, trim and suave with Mediterranean good looks, saunters in, and Mr. Nagy comes out from behind the counter to embrace him, proclaiming that his good friend Marcello is at long last back from Italy.

Marcello asks who the lovely young lady is sitting in old Marguerite’s chair out back, and Mr. Nagy explains that Marguerite has retired but now he has Jeannie.

“Jane,” I correct him. He knows full well I prefer my real name, but he never uses it.

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“I Dream of Jeannie,” he says with a wink.

“Yes,” Marcello croons. “I can see why.” They utter sotto voce comments I pretend not to hear. Soft laughter drifts back to my work station with whispered words like young and fresh—words you see on a package of chicken.

I feel myself tense as they stroll my way. In my peripheral vision, Marcello’s linen trousers break perfectly with every step, precisely at his shiny loafers. He is tall and groomed, less a real man than the crafted image of an ideal.

Marcello wants to meet me, Mr. Nagy says. I utter hello and focus on my zipper repair. Marcello smells like the cologne counter at Jordan Marsh as he looks over

But I’m just the seamstress, someone she won’t see again, so we don’t talk.

my shoulder at the tiny stitches. Mr. Nagy, in turn, peers over his shoulder and grins proudly.

“Beautiful,” Marcello purrs, placing one manicured hand on my right shoulder and brushing the left side of my exposed neck with his lips.

My whole body quickens and I sidle out of reach, red-faced. I retreat to the bathroom, lock the door, and splash myself with ice water. Their soft laughter seeps under the door and around my feet. When it subsides, I put my ear to the crack and listen for Marcello’s departure.

Two days later, I accept a job offer from one of Mr. Nagy’s competitors, an old lady with a dry-cleaning establishment across town. I tell Mr. Nagy I have to leave soon for school, a half-truth.

“Two-week notice be standard,” he says, a note of wistfulness infecting his authority.

I don’t actually leave for another three months, but in that moment, I can tell by how he looks at his scuffed Oxfords that he knows the real reason. I am not his concept of the “modern” girl.

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SAMUEL UGBECHIE

Reversal Think, love, of the inverse of things, say an echo— that kitten of a cry, or pullet of a yell—reversing back into its song or sound and easing back into the mouth of the body that cried it, and anger— the fire in the belly—shrinking back into the moment before it: lips parted, cuss words lodged like grilled meat wedged between the teeth, belly full of air—all of which swum with grief or pain or pride, now frozen, or hanging, or stilled. Say, for instance, death is breath ceased, or breath sojourning wherever, however it deems fit, and all of this is rewound, that tumor—the size of a fist—subdued into the scar it once was, damaged lungs undoing their wreck, trauma railing down to its root, unrooted, war zones as school zones, the virus that longed to eat us up, returning through all its channels—touches or kisses, breath or sweat or wounds, back to its harmless ancestor, extant for a while, extinct forever, think of a fruit, digging up its lone seed, a violent storm hushed back as breath taut enough to tickle the dead to life. Think of all the words you wish to take

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back, and take them back tonight. Open your mouth and fill up on rain. Let words drizzle down and settle on your tongue. Pull back all the harm you mailed out to the world, and sit with me on this pill -ion of time and ride down with me to how it once was, when we were lost in sun and awe, Clementi and Bach in our ears, our first kiss spotted by a wren—love’s town crier gonging among clouds, announcing what waits ahead, preparing all this ash of mild grief and wild grace.

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JENNIFER BARBER

Frequency and Pitch One There’s a gust among the leaves reminding me of our quickened breath and yesterday’s piece on the radio about the club-winged manakins in a cloud forest on the Andes’ slopes.

The male makes a strange music.

One feather has seven ridges; the hard, curved tip of another strikes the ridges like a spoon against a washboard, hitting each ridge twice, 14 times per shake. He shakes 100 times a second—1400 notes.

The female bird thrills to the pulse.

Darwin said manakins evolved solid bones to bear the rattling.

Their flying suffered. Their music soared.

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Two Restless after you go out, thumbing through World Poetry, I find the Cycle of the Goddess Inanna: I bathed for the shepherd Dumazi, I perfumed my sides with ointment, I coated my mouth with sweet-smelling amber, I painted my eyes with kohl.

He shaped my loins with his fair hands, the shepherd Dumazi filled my lap with cream and milk.

The oaks shake their leaves a few at a time, then all at once in the window by the bed.

I think of the sliding boat our bodies made.

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CHARLEY GIBNEY

Kingdom The dead persist; they read over my shoulder. They take a cut of my excitement, but not of my exhaustion. They wrap around me sheet-tight as I sleep.

Do you remember weather?

I want to ask them, because it seems so particularly a concern of the living.

Do you remember the feeling of mist on your face, when fog closed the distance into rain?

It’s you who can’t remember, they say back to me.

You have no idea what remembering means, they say, who know what remembering means.

I once mistook a far-off row of lit office windows from a train in New Haven for cryptic words on a distant billboard.

I had almost deciphered them when I realized they didn’t exist.

In this way, I understand the dead cannot be understood.

They tell me my hands are cut paper, like a child’s folded snowflake still hanging in the window in midsummer.

The anachronistic, the misunderstandable: these are my kingdom, they tell me.

Somehow I’ve always known.

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JIM MELCHERT . Carthage, 2007.

Broken and glazed porcelain tile. 17.75 inches x 35.5 inches.

Photographed by Galen Melchert.

JIM MELCHERT: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I once asked a physicist what cracks are. He said there are two things to know about them: that they aren’t random and that they show where the bond between molecules is weak. Like rivers they find the path of least resistance. I hadn’t realized that a tile has an interior structure that can be seen when broken, until I started dropping them.

It is then that I can start to see how the shards can be reconfigured into a new image.

Carthage is one of a series for which I made a template of edges to be repeated in a fan shape across the surface. For the other two works featured here, the purpose of this work was to expose the inner structure of the tiles through working with the axis and vertex of any given fracture.

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JIM MELCHERT. Six to the East of Five, 2007.

Broken and glazed porcelain tile and copper tape.

17.75 inches x 17.75 inches. Photographed by Alice Shaw.

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JIM MELCHART. Eye Sites: Reprieve, 2006.

Broken and fired porcelain tile with graphite.

35 inches x 52.5 inches. Photographed by Alice Shaw.

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RACHEL BR EEN . Piecework; plackets, 2018.

Plackets removed from used shirts, thread. 4 feet x 3 feet. Photographed by Justin Allen.

RACHEL BREEN: STATEMENT

I am a maker, yet much of my work involves the opposite: I “unmake” things and “dismantle” ways of seeing and believing. At the core of my practice is a sewing machine, a deeply symbolic and practical object. I divert sewing’s original purpose of creating and mending toward social critique. I call attention to the stitch as a symbol of human interdependence, using it to express belief in the possibility of social change. With my process of unmaking I seek to enact what I call “public making”—encouraging reflection about social concerns and catalyzing collective action to “undo” unjust systems.

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RACHEL BREEN . Piecework; sleeves, 2018 (detail).

Sleeves removed from used shirts, thread. 9 feet x 13 feet. Photographed by Justin Allen.

Shroud invokes burial shrouds used in Bangladesh and the Jewish faith. Comprised of 1,281 white shirts, each garment commemorates those who lost their lives in the Triangle. Shirtwaist Factory Fire (NYC, 1911) or the Rana Plaza Factories Collapse (Bangladesh, 2013). I allude to the two tragedies in order to emphasize their shared commonalities. Piece Work explores the labor of garment workers hiding in our clothes. By disassembling clothes into their constituent pieces and then reaccumulating these pockets, sleeves, collars, and button-holes into sections of “like� parts, I seek to reveal the labor embedded in our clothing.

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RACHEL BREEN. Shroud, 2018.

1,281 used white shirts, thread and zip ties. 12 feet x 60 feet x 43 feet.

Photographed by Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

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DELITA MARTIN . The Waiting Field, 2020.

Mixed media. 72 inches x 51.5 inches.

DELITA MARTIN: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The masks in this work are my interpretations of the Mende mask, specifically created for young girls being initiated into Sande. These masks demonstrate that human beings have a dual existence, both physical and spiritual, and also reinforce the bonds among women, who coexist in both realms. In my previous works, the background signs and symbols helped the viewer engage with the work, but this work transitions the women and their place of residence into more of a spiritual realm: the symbolism is less defined; the shapes are more organic; and the icons are left for the viewer to ponder, creating a space for the women to be birthed into. A Mende belief says, “Wherever two or three women are gathered together, there is the spirit and authority of Sande.”

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DELITA MARTIN. Star Children, 2019. Mixed Media. 72 inches x 52 inches.

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DELITA MARTIN . Rain Falls From The Lemon Tree, 2020.

Mixed Media. 72 inches x 52 inches.

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DELITA MARTIN.

Claiming What Has Risen, 2020. Mixed Media. 7 2 inches x 51.5 inches.

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MARK NEWPORT. Repair 3, 2016.

Cotton mending. 13 inches x 10 inches. Photograph by Tim Thayer Studio.

MARK NEWPORT: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Textile and skin are intimately connected. Physical proximity causes sweat and strength, dirt and fear, love and cologne to move from flesh to cloth indiscriminately.

While cloth protects skin either can be cut or torn. Stitches are the means to aid healing and measure the intensity of the wound. But stitches pierce cloth and skin wounding again, in an effort to aid healing and minimize scarring. Scars in cloth and skin may reflect the aggression of the initial wound and/or the sensitivity of the person who repaired them.

These works begin when I cut a hole into the cloth. The hole is then filled by weaving with needle and thread. The repairs are made using traditional textile darning and mending techniques learned from studying European and American mending samplers. Whether the area of repair is immediately visible or camouflaged, mending these holes leaves a scar that speaks of vulnerability, intimacy, and futility.

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MARK NEWPORT. Mend 6, 2016.

Cotton mending. 17 inches x 13 inches. Photograph by Tim Thayer Studio.

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MARK NEWPORT. Repair 2, 2016.

Cotton mending. 13.5 inches x 10 inches. Photograph by Tim Thayer Studio.

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PINKY/MM BASS AND CAROLYN DEMERITT. Sister Synergy, 2018.

Archival print with thread. 11 inches x 10.25 inches.

PINKY BASS: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work in photography, whether pinhole or standard, has always aimed at revealing edges of the mystery of life, aging, and death, particularly in relation to the human body. Often surreal, the images that I prefer exist on the edge of the dream world.

My stitchery work began during my sister’s battle with cancer. I became obsessed with what was going on inside her body and began a series of internal organs sewn onto photographs of the human figure. In addition to my sister, my oldest son, both my parents, and a close artist/collaborator died over the period of a few years. I have done handwork all my life and the comfort of doing that on photographs helped me through a long grieving period.

Some thirty years ago I began working with Carolyn DeMeritt, a photographer from Charlotte, North Carolina. She documented the significant stages of my sister’s journey through cancer as well as the aging and disintegration of my own human form.

Her striking images are often the ground on which my threads search for meaning and understanding. Bass and DeMeritt are currently finalizing work on their upcoming book, Entwined, featuring images from these bodies of work.

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PINKY/MM BASS. Pregnancy from Contemplating My Internal Organs, 1999–2006.

Gelatin silver print with thread. 11 inches x 8 inches.

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PINKY/MM BASS (WITH CAROLYN DEMERITT) . Digestive Issues, 2019.

Archival print with thread. 12.5 inches x 9 inches.

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CHAUN BALLARD

Today my father sits on a sofa not his own / in a home not his own / watching a television that is not his / My sister calls to tell me this / perhaps to bring me comfort / perhaps to comfort herself / or in hopes that I might pass the prognosis down the communication lines / to family members / waiting to hear news of our father / who is frail / has not been well for months / & no one can see him besides my sister / who texts me a photo of a man half his weight / in shoes twice his size / Apart from this / I know he is watching a Lakers game / reruns of Kobe Bryant / & I wonder / how much he remembers: / Will Kobe pump fake / evade two defenders / go for the layup / or the reverse dunk? / I don’t want to ask / how long he will survive / not even to hear what he will say / Just the other day / it seems / I was under the hood of my first car / (a green Ford escort / given to me by a man who is like my father / but is not my father) / reattaching the battery cord / that kept it from firing like a disconnect in the synapses of the brain / when he approached my blindside / with the imperative I needed to hear / These days they say he repeats the same questions / replays the same words / like his father / but I had not noticed / This was how we spoke / This is the most we have spoken in years / All I hear is my father— / He asks me / How’s the weather? / & I tell him / expecting to hear his laugh / I ask him / How are you doing? / & the weather is always 60 degrees

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T

HERE ARE SO many things I haven’t told you, though I see you every day.

We could be comparing sleep to discover mutual dreams. I’m sure we’ve dreamt next to the same people or walked off the same job because that guy is an ass. We’ve got the same holes in our memories.

I want to tell you which baits will lure me. Tell you duck skin or corn will keep me coming around, but that I cannot abide eggs. I want to grow out of needing the pretense of a chase to believe another person wants me to be near them.

We’re always so short on time, or else the mood just isn’t right, or else I open my mouth and then shutter it again, rethinking speaking because one or both of us is getting paid, and do you even want to hear this? Because I think about telling you all the time. I open my mouth and close it again. I bet you think I look like a caught fish.

The superposition of carp on my face begins with this imitation of buccal pumping (look at me, I googled what is it called when fish open and close their mouths), and that’s on me, but over the next couple seconds you pull me from lake to boat and I become fishier and fishier. You’re onto me. Slime wrapped and stranded out of my element, you possess me. Wanting to tell you my secrets has nearly the same effect the actual telling will. Hooked and in your hand, sharp dorsal spines carefully neutralized to benignancy, I am gasping, drying in direct exposure to air and sunlight.

As my eyes are clouding, yours are rolling. I wish you thought me a fish, but I bet you don’t think of me at all. I’m not telling you anything. You don’t look like a Fish, you look like a You, whatever you are.

Whatever you are, it’s been fifteen years. I have told our story for fifteen years. In the early stages of courting any new friendship, I dust off the tale of our special day. I took the bait then, too, and still ended up hungry.

Hundreds of tears had soaked into my face and bloated it into the moon, as saltwater will do, and they, along with my hiccoughing hysterics, continued to sting my eyes. Who could be too upset for a sandwich and a soda? My friend Drew and I entered the deli where you work. My ranting and my rage entered the deli where you work, too, having followed me from the car. My heart had been broken, in earnest, for the first time.

Publicly, and while choosing hoagie fillings, I grimace, weep, and beg wellintentioned Drew to help with questions whose answers are friend to neither reason nor rationality.

I wailed at him while you collected my ham and provolone with extra mayonnaise and oil. “I just don’t fucking understand!”

Your voice cooed and bounced into my ears like the taste of peaches and made me think your name had to be something like Shirley. Syrupy.

“Oopsie!,” you bubbled, “there’s a five-dollar cursing fee in my line!”

You pulled the pin. Took the gloves off. Shook up my soda. Broke the little glass things inside the glow stick.

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“Make it ten and go fuck yourself.”

Before turning on my heel, I must’ve closed my eyes, because however you reacted to my childish outburst, or if you did at all, that memory is stricken from the record.

My stomach growled in angry disbelief, powerlessly watching me leave the hoagie on the counter to stomp out of the deli and cut my nose off in the car. People need to know how wild and untouchable I am. I trot our tale out all the time.

••• YOU COME TO ME EVERY DAY. You always want the same thing. Even though

it irritates you, I offer you something new just to see if you’ll take it. I want to know the depth of your commitment to your daily, see if I can describe a New Way so you’ll be tempted away from what you’ve slid into having every day. So far, you have not deviated from your custom. It must really do something for you I cannot see, or maybe can’t feel.

Your place in my life is daily gift-giving, obscured to you by the rest of your drive to work, during which I run into the back of house with the turkey bacon you ask me to leave off of your sandwich. We have breakfast together every morning. Sometimes I wonder if you know the turkey bacon’s already been on the sandwich. It’s already touched it. Maybe you like the taste of its ghost but fear cholesterol turning you into a ghost yourself. Maybe you’re making efforts to support animal rights, and don’t realize that buying the sandwich supports the meat market whether you consume the turkey bacon or I do.

Maybe you think about me as much as I think about you, and one day you decided, “I bet this bacon won’t be wasted if I go without it . . .” and winked at your own willingness to help the less fortunate. Now you wonder if I’ve become dependent on the turkey bacon, skipping my own rightful breakfast, preferring to eagerly but patiently wait with my tongue out for the turkey bacon which will surely pop and sizzle my direction come roughly 5:25—unless, of course, there’s fucking traffic again, and you are so tired of this shit, in which case you will come to face me nearer to 5:45, temperament and tone fouled by your incomprehensible misfortune. You’re wishing you had never begun your charitable contributions now.

By afternoon the sandwich we shared will be turning into a morning after, the saltbloat and acid reflux burning away the sleepy smiles and gentle mutual knowledge of your “usual,” which settles around the midnight dances of our early mornings, still dusky with moonlight and fog.

Even cursed by your turkey bacon, you are forgiven. I forgive you your foul attitude, I forgive you your demands for me to balk at policy, and I even forgive you your lateness. You are right; I need you—I am so hungry.

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MEGAN MERCHANT

Mammography Every hour, sirens through open windows.

I carry a worry stone in my breast— a composite of single use straws, spray cans,

plastic jammed in a milk duct.

Every hour, I press into the tissue, as if to soften

a nest, but my hands are clumsy as moths that frill though a city of open doors.

On my street, mothers bake bread to fill their houses of grief, flour lifting like ghosts from

the cutting board. Kneading with wet hands.

Bloodstone. Inkstone. Not all things heal when left alone.

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O

N TAKEOFF, MY ear hurts, so I keep popping my jaw, but the pain is like

a cattle prod; zapping, zapping, zapping. My seatmate leans away as if my behavior is contagious.

The captain announces that we’re now at cruising altitude, but disbelief stills clings, shroud-like. I will be on the eastern part of Hawai’i island for five days. My mother calls anything that isn’t a part of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ daily lives “Worldly,” and here I am, winging my worldly way to paradise—or as close as I might ever get.

I’d grown up in a struggling lumber town, with a father who’d had a mythic, volcanic temper, and a mother who still believed in a fringe, end-times variety of the Christian religion. I’d lived seven miles away from the post office, the gas station, the general store, the school, and the only two bars. As hippies and the back-to-the-landers slowly took over like invasive weeds across my teenage years, my parents dug into their disparate viewpoints. In Hawai’i, I’ll have the chance to know who I can be without the struggle of constant work or the worry of displeasing my parents.

I am only able to take this trip because I’d turned eighteen and moved three hours away to go to college. And because my childhood friend Gabby, who is not from my parents’ world, invited me and is able to pay. Instead of thinking about home and the ranch tasks I won’t be helping with, I focus my imagination on what it will feel like to float in warm water, to see lush vegetation thriving on the shoreline.

••• DURING MY FRESHMAN year of high school, thirty-nine spiritually focused

individuals moved from a rich suburb of Houston to my hometown of two hundred people. They bought acreage along the Eel River to begin their new lives in Northern California. They lived communally, in their “Eden,” following their spiritual leaders: Swami and Mother.

These two were the anchors. They led meditations, gave instructional talks, decided how the group spent their collective funds. I never exactly understood what they believed in spiritually. I had only a vague sense of their faith being rooted in some Eastern philosophy, one that possibly included reincarnation—but the more I learned about it, the less my mother would let me spend time with Gabby, so I kept my questions to a minimum.

Maybe part of me identified with the teens among Gabby’s church group. Maybe I silently said, I see you, you bunch of religious oddballs—and I understand. Gabby and I had an astronomy class together and partnered often. I studied her, wanting to know how she navigated the regular world versus the religious one. She and the other teens from the group dressed like mainstream youth, but with money: Nikes and Swatches and the United Colors of Benetton.

Gabby’s family soon realized that Leggett was within the Emerald Triangle—a region of Northern California that gave our great nation most of its marijuana in the late eighties. But as the timber jobs dried up, beer topped men’s vice of choice. There was supposed to be tough work for tough people—instead, there were hard times and

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self-medicating. Gabby and her mother were both Black, which gave them additional difficulties, America being what it is. Students said the n-word to Gabby more than once. When the three of them were together—mother, daughter, white father—they were looked at with muted disdain. My own father wasn’t exactly white—the family story passed down said he was Cherokee—but neither he nor his family had any direct

When I see Gabby’s smiling face, I’m able to stop crying enough to smile back.

relationship with a Native community, though people called him half-breed or chief sometimes. He was constantly navigating the way the world treated him because of how he looked, even more so when my mother was at his side. I wonder now if some synaptical leap happened when I saw Gabby and her parents. Even though I would never know what her life was like, I was drawn to her.

If asked to speak about her religious life, my own mother and her congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses would’ve described what it was like to go door-to-door among the meth users and the traumatized Vietnam veterans nested in the pockets of the forested, stunning hills of Leggett. My mother could’ve shared the challenges of being a spiritual minority with Swami and his flock; but then, she wasn’t one to spend time with people from another faith or to swap stories. Gabby and I were a bridge between similar, but distant worlds.

••• IT’S ONLY MY SECOND TIME on a plane. The first time had been in a small

four-seater three years before—so, maybe, I think, the ear pain is normal. But no one else holds their head the way I do, no one else has tears coursing. By the time the wheels touch down, I’m sobbing quietly. With muffled, one-eared hearing I move down the stairs, into the sticky, humid air. I cross the quarter mile of tarmac, and the ear pressure eases with each step. When I see Gabby’s smiling face, I’m able to stop crying enough to smile back.

Gabby and her parents share a home with two other families. It has two giant windows which reveal a stunning view of the Hilo Bay that spreads out toward the horizon with its enticing blue. I wonder what it must be like to see this view each morning.

Her mother prepares a heated olive-oil concoction that she pours into my pounding ear. The warm liquid drips into my ear canal, and the searing pressure stops, leaving only a mild pulsing that intensifies when I lean over. Or sit. Or lie down. Her clothes

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are cotton and loose fitting—but if I saw her out on the street, away from here, there’s nothing about her appearance that would indicate she was part of this group, this fringe community.

She pats my hand. “Do you still sleepwalk?”

I shake my head. Pain arcs in all directions.

••• IN FOUR YEAR S OF high school, I went to one party. I stayed with Gabby that

night, with cautions from my mother to not join in any of their religious activities. My mother was highly suspicious of how Swami shared homes, how they wore flowing white clothes, how they didn’t seem to work. But the group did not drink, smoke, or do drugs, so the good must’ve outweighed the bad in her decision to say yes.

Little did Mom know that Gabby only wanted the average teenager’s life, and as a Texas transplant, she was going to make do with what her new community offered: beer and rock ‘n’ roll, played at high volumes. At the party, I couldn’t believe the pointed fingers and whispers. I’d been such a nice girl, so uptight, so academic, all these years. Only my “rowdy” eldest sister had also been to such a gathering—one single time, same as me now.

I sipped a Coors—nursing it for at least forty minutes, afraid of my parents or Jehovah finding out, how I’d never live it down, in this life or the next. My mother’s God, while not present in my heart, was definitely judging me from his distant kingdom.

As Whitesnake crooned on the radio about how they were going to slide it in, a cousin of my cousin who I vaguely knew held his beer aloft, asking, “Know why you’re here?”

“No.” I felt mousy and small and so foreign in my hometown.

He tipped his Coors higher, a toast growing larger. “To get fucked.”

I couldn’t believe what he was saying—I did not come to this party to lose my virginity. I have my father’s temper at times but not his force or might, so I did what I could do: I poured my beer over the guy’s head.

His fury was immediate, and he eyed me with a razor-focus, chest heaving. He dropped his can and raised his fists—he was going to kick my ass. Hitting women was part of the culture we’d both been raised in.

Gabby slid between us. She calmed the cousin, gently pushed him back. He glared at me for the rest of the night. I hated this party and couldn’t understand why both teens and adults in my town blotted themselves out each weekend. It seemed so . . . redundant. I’d seen my father drink habitually and didn’t like it, but as the night wore on, I finished that beer, drank more, and did tequila shots before Gabby decided I’d had enough when I started toward Cousin’s Cousin to tell him off.

I don’t remember getting to her house, don’t remember falling into her fancy waterbed, don’t recall vomiting where I lay. In the morning, while I showered, Gabby told her mother I’d wandered into her room because I was a sleepwalker.

In her way, Gabby was taking care of me. This was something new, to receive kindness from someone outside of my family.

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••• GABBY GIVES ME a tour of the island property, pointing out the different houses,

the temple they’d built, the garden and the chicken pen. Here, gleaming hens and two roosters strut with more confidence than I’ve ever known.

“Let’s go sunbathe,” Gabby declares. I struggle into a bathing suit. She eyes my one-piece with a hard glance. She still might belong to the spiritual clique, but she’s looking good, curvy in her bikini, while I’m thin and pasty next to her darker skin.

She leads the way to a grassy patch where she lies on the blanket and closes her eyes. She glows in the heat, and my fears about not fitting in rise again like a small tidal wave.

I take a breath and lie down carefully. If I were back in Santa Rosa, I’d be starting the Sunday shift at Toys “R” Us: eight hours under the oh-so-flattering fluorescents, customers ripping packages of Peeps off the shelves with holy, capitalistic fervor.

But, here! Banana and papaya trees clack their leaves in a slight breeze, and once the ear pain dials back, it feels good to soak in the sun, to be free of Northern California’s rain, to be one of those girls I’d read about in books whose biggest challenges involve choosing the right outfit and deciding whether it was a tennis or a swimming-pool afternoon. But no book I’ve ever read had the presence of a Swami or a group Mother in the narrative.

Gabby talks about her classes at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo—she seems to be settling down, she doesn’t mention any parties, and the guy who’d said I’d been at the party to get fucked, Cousin’s Cousin? He was her boyfriend now; he’d joined this community.

This makes my head swim more than the ear pressure—he of all people had become a spiritual seeker? I try to imagine it but only the memory of his sneering faces comes.

It’s maybe twenty minutes before my shins begin to burn. Perhaps I only imagine the smell of frying skin. I sit up and the ear throbbing spikes. The exposed parts of my body—which are most of it—glare an irate red.

“I think I need to get out of the sun.”

Gabby sighs, as her brown skin has only turned a lovelier shade of umber. She pulls down her sunglasses to look me over. “I forgot about us being closer to the equator here.” We gather up the blankets.

Back at the house, Gabby jerks a thumb toward me. “She’s fried.” She heads off to the bathroom. Her mother moves close, and lays a cool hand so gently on my outraged shoulder. “Lime water will help.”

I stand in the bathing suit while she squeezes a lime into a glass of water. Before she hands it over, she pulls mint leaves from a plant in the garden box by the sink. She hands over the concoction. “Swami would like speak with you. He’ll be here soon.”

•••

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SWAMI TAKES A SEAT AT the room’s head, where the biggest picture of their

guru sits on a small table along with flowers and candles. On either side of the altar, two large windows face the bay and frame the background of my view. The three men who entered with Swami sit before him and settle white shawls onto their shoulders.

It’s a surreal tableau—these barefoot men in white-and-tan clothes, fabric draped over the landscapes of their backs—not my father’s brand of masculinity. A fifth man enters—Cousin’s Cousin, the man who would’ve beaten me up. He joins the others and likewise drapes himself with a shawl. Gabby and her mother enter and sit on either side of him and I’m behind them all, senses teetering—I am with them but away from

Then, he begins chanting, and the others join in, their unified voices creating a magnetic pulse.

them, keeping a distance from how they collect in a herd. Part of me hopes Cousin’s Cousin will turn around and apologize for how wrong he was at the party. Part of me hopes he will pretend he doesn’t know me for the entirety of my visit.

In all the times I spent with Gabby in my hometown, I never attended any of their services. I did meet Swami three times, but briefly, when I went with Gabby for her to ask permission for a sports trip or a school outing to the big city of San Francisco. It was my understanding then that his word had more finality, but I realize now I knew so little of how the group operates, how they relate and connect to one other.

Swami’s palms kiss each other and hold. He then bows and the others mirror him.

I think of the toy birds I saw in bars as a kid—the creature dipping repeatedly into a drinking glass.

Swami drops his hands and smiles. His radiant gaze lands on me. “While we are not Christian, we will be observing Easter with meditation and reflection. It aligns with the New Year for us—a time for us to consider our paths in life. We’re so glad you’re joining us.”

I feel overwhelmed by the heat searing through layers of my sunburned skin, my pulsing ear, and a mounting sense of bewilderment. Swami talks about the synchronicity of my Easter visit, how the sect has grown stronger and more tightly knit. He explains they’ve invested their group funds in gold but I shouldn’t tell anyone this. I’m not sure why he thinks I need to know. But I’ve never met anyone who had investments in gold or whatever else wealthy people have. I realize in this moment, with a twang in my gut, that it had been his decision to buy my plane ticket.

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It’s weird when he talks directly to me—he’d not shone his light so explicitly toward me the other times we met. His real name is so absurdly normal, so not Swamilike, that I try not to think of it in the moment—Gabby had told me, but had extracted a promise of eternal secrecy.

Now, he holds up a finger. “One note of change. Mother has been demoted to Aunt.”

The others nod. I wonder what this means to the power structure of this group.

••• THE NEXT DAY—EASTER Sunday—my skin is too small for my body. Gabby’s

mom takes one long look at my bloated ankles and wrists, then proclaims “tropical edema.” She gives me three aspirin and four papaya slices and a cool cloth for my feverish brow. Her touch calms, as if she knows exactly what I need in order to feel better. As if she’s maybe a saint.

When I get to their temple, at least twenty people sit facing a large picture of their spiritual guru, who is blissed out and bright faced with dark eyes and glistening cheeks. The man’s picture is framed in candlelight and draped in strands of red and orange marigolds. Clumps of bananas and bowls of rice line the altar. Murmurs buzz the air—collective chanting. I enter behind Gabby, aware of how large the space is. It could hold at least one hundred people—half of the population of Leggett could fit in here. Not that the loggers and tree fellers would ever be caught dead in such a place.

The blackout starts as a slight darkness at the corner of my vision, then it sweeps over me like a wave. My body hits the floor, cutting into the meditative silence with a sudden thud. When I come to, I am gently gathered by a multitude of hands and

My body flushes with heat, in a surge that passes from head to toe like stinging needles.

carried to a porch bench. My body flushes with heat, in a surge that passes from head to toe like stinging needles. Small children peek around their mothers’ legs at the outsider who made so much noise at Easter. Later that day, Gabby says that it was as if a white flood had washed through me—she’d never seen anyone ghostlier. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing.

When I feel better, everyone returns to the temple, and Swami folds himself into a cross-legged puzzle at the room’s head. He speaks of spring renewal, about the seasonal bounty, about the need to cultivate faith. Then, he begins chanting, and the group joins in, their unified voices creating a magnetic pulse. They repeat four or five

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words, and it’s thoroughly hypnotic. The words take up residence in my skull, purring there, inviting—no, beseeching—me to join in, easing the pain of the ear, of the burned body, the aching to belong. Everyone—even Gabby, even my cousin’s cousin— has their eyes closed, heads bowed, bodies curled in soft containers of receptivity. In the back, the woman who was Mother (and now is Aunt) roosts on a pillow, her white hair rippling down to her stomach. The kindness of her features remains from when I’d seen her in California; lips turned upward, eyelids laying softly closed, posture regal.

The chanting grows more narcotic. Everyone else draws inward, tunneling into a realm that’s never been available to me. I wish my gut offered a clear direction, but it stays silent, like a retired oracle. I try to push away the emptiness inside by taking a deep breath and watching Aunt. Her eyes open to stare into me. Her eyebrows are raised in a question or a request. I’m not sure whether she’s looking through me or asking for help. I turn away.

In my mother’s religion, they teach that the Devil is everywhere, waiting for moments when we’re weak, when we’re vulnerable to his influence. Meditation, yoga, even songs that use the word magic were all opportunities for him to enter and lead us away from Jehovah.

I don’t know what the chants mean but they build around me, and I feel my mother’s constant fear, that if I’m not on guard, I’ll be swallowed whole into the ever-present lull of the Devil. I know in my secret heart that I am not a Jehovah’s Witness—I’ve never told anyone this. But the residual imprint of their beliefs still has a stronghold.

Their faith and the desire to be my own person hold me back from joining in, from tumbling into the alluring rhythm of the temple.

So, I do what I think is best: silently sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

The room crescendos in group intensity, so I sing louder inside my own head: e-i-e-i-o!

I start with chickens because they are the last animal I saw and go through everything I can think of—roosters, pigs, cats, ducks, even llamas, making an imagined spit-spit sound for them.

The collection of voices climbs toward metaphysical ecstasy, and I’m convinced my ear will burst with both the growing sound and the spiritual certainty, so I let out the tiniest, “Neigh, neigh here . . .” under my breath to offset the momentum.

Finally, the chanting eases down, down, down and is over. I sneak at look at Aunt, and her face gleams with sweat, her white hair now a little stringy from the frenzy.

Perhaps I’ve just been through an important trial but I don’t know if I passed. I don’t know what the test is and what the implications are. I know I want to be free of my mother’s religion, but I also know that I won’t join another without deep consideration, no matter the appeal.

•••

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THE NEXT DAY, Gabby drives us to the island’s west side to see waterfalls that

thunder, a beach with startling sands of black, and a volcano site that punches the senses with its sulfuric smell. We sing Police songs as loud as we can, smiling at each other, and I don’t remember ever having such a good time.

On the way back, I look away from the ocean’s placid enchantment to my ankles that have become swollen, leaden things—twice their normal size. The skin there blazes with pain as liquid inside pools, stretches, torques. Although I know it’s irrational, I think my skin problems might come from not joining the chanting, or maybe from being in a pagan temple in the first place.

At the compound, I cannot walk, joints frozen with swelling. Gabby sighs and gets her mother who presses a finger into the scarlet skin, right where there’s supposed to be an ankle bone near the inside of the foot. The indentation remains for a full minute. “Your edema is worse.” She lays a hand on my shoulder. “Too much time sitting, not enough pumping of the blood.” She gently pushes me back into the car and produces a box to prop my feet on. “Let’s get those legs up for a bit, otherwise it’ll hurt too much to walk.”

She brings more aspirin, more lime-and-mint water, more cool support, the most from anyone I’ve ever met. She kneels and kneads my propped feet with a kind of oil.

It smells like coconut. The absurd thought that she’s making me into a salad floats across my brain. She smiles broadly, her close-cropped hair revealing the beauty of her head—a shape a hand could easily cup, easily embrace. I’m close to confessing that I was never a sleepwalker but instead hold my swollen tongue. I don’t want her to withdraw her comfort.

••• ON MY FOURTH and next-to-last day, the swelling has reduced, the ear pain only

a distant hum, and the sunburn doesn’t inform every moment, so Gabby declares it’s snorkeling time. Along with the sunbathing, my image of vacation includes time in the ocean, especially since it’s such a tempting turquoise right at the shoreline.

The sand beneath my feet is warm and inviting, the sea only feet away. I lay out both towels, then fit a snorkel into place while Gabby explains how to breathe through the tube. Then I’m in the ocean. It’s warm, and I’m buoyant and free. Floating is a kind of flight.

I stick the mask into the gentle surf, and panic rises when I breathe as Gabby has instructed. The sound of my own exhale is disturbing. I sputter, stand, and see that Gabby’s a hundred feet ahead, pulling herself confidently toward the horizon. I tilt my head to check the ear pain, and fit the snorkel back. There are things of the world I want to see, smell, taste, and feel—I need to break through. So much has gone wrong on this trip—I need to make up for lost time, before returning to my lonely life in Santa Rosa. I want to live a little more of the fantasy of vacations and adventures, of the best time of my life and you’d never believe how great it was.

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Again, I look into the water. A group of rocks hold anemones and spiky-looking creatures, and when I paddle forward, a school of yellow-and-black-and-orange fish shift toward the crags, then quickly bolt away in an orchestrated dance.

Five minutes later a shoulder tap. Gabby floats nearby, pointing out to sea. “There’s a storm. We have to go back now.” She moves ahead, while I look at the brewing mass of clouds, dark and moving fast.

She yells, “If the lightning hits, we could breathe it in.” She indicates the snorkel, and I imagine being struck by a bolt, the tube at the highest point on the water’s surface,

On the way to the airport, I play it out in my mind, but I can’t ever see myself moving into his lap.

electric sparks firing into my heart. I swim as fast as I can. But there’s something moving to the right, so my mask goes back in. A magnificent sea turtle glides past, an ancient following its path.

Above the water, I call to Gabby, “A sea turtle!” and point. Pain shoots through the fingers of my right hand, immediate and gutting. I don’t understand. Something horrific and probably permanent has just taken place. Gabby doesn’t look back, so I awkwardly paddle toward shore, hand throbbing in more pain than my ear or ankles.

Towel expertly tucked around her chest, car keys in hand, she says, “We’ve got to go.”

I offer the hand. “I think I was stung.” Black needle-like things extend from three fingers, the skin around the entry points already rising in furious red welts.

Gabby says, “Sea urchin spines. The local remedy is to pee on them.”

Any kind of relief sounds amazing, so I look at her with hope.

“My mom will know what to do.”

Her mother always seems to know what exactly to do—this is a comfort Gabby seems to take for granted.

Gabby gathers my things. At the house, her mother raises an eyebrow, but only has me sit while she fills a bowl with vinegar. My fingers soak while she locates tweezers and shaving cream. After fifteen minutes, she removes the spines, then rubs shaving cream on the skin to prevent infection. She turns my hand over, tracing a line that curves from between my thumb and index finger to the base of the palm. “You have an interesting lifeline, with a few sudden shifts.” We can both hear Gabby with a blow dryer in the bathroom. She isn’t here to help me navigate this moment.

“Swami wants to see you tomorrow before you leave.” She squeezes my hand. “Not everyone gets a private audience.”

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My heart gallops. He’s their leader and so powerful—what could he want? Again, I yearn for an internal directive, an arrow that says this way, dummy.

Gabby’s mother releases my hand, and all I see are wrinkles and the angry marks of an urchin.

••• THE NEXT DAY, before we leave the house, Gabby’s mother kisses both my cheeks.

“I hope we see more of you soon.” Her touch, once again, feels like such an invitation.

She looks at me knowingly but only she seems to be in on the knowledge. I thank her with a smile.

Outside Swami’s house in the car, I ask, “What’s this about?”

Gabby checks her hair in the mirror. “He’s our leader.” She shrugs. I cannot tell how seriously she takes his leadership or his teaching or even her own mother’s availability. And in this moment, I find that I don’t really know if she’s my friend.

“Don’t be nervous.”

A woman opens the door, smiling beatifically, and the smell of rice and curry fuzzes on my tongue. It’s another space full of images and flowers and mats and flowy things.

The home where I grew up was adorned with an image of Geronimo, saddles and bridles, chainsaws, and firewood and spurs on the front porch.

In the main room, Swami rises to bow.

“Come with me into my room,” Swami says.

Gabby gives a go on signal. I follow him into a nearly empty room—there is a low, simple bed. The walls are white and the carpet is beige.

We sit on the floor. His white linen pants and shirt drape over his body in soft folds—again, he is so unlike the men of my childhood. If I wanted to, I could push him over, scream his true name into his ear, and flee the room.

He brings his hands together, bows slightly, then drops them to his knees. “Have you had a good week?” His voice is warm, more inviting than it’s been.

I wish there could’ve been more time to follow the sea turtle. But there really aren’t words for the various sorts of pain and joy and confusion I’ve had. I only say, “Yes.” “Excellent.” He rubs his palms on his knees. “You know. Of all the people we met in Leggett, you were the most spiritually advanced.”

I like the sound of being “spiritually advanced.” But also it seems like a really good line.

He leans forward, his open shirt revealing a few chest hairs. I focus on them rather than the beam of his gaze. “If you were to join us, we’d pay for your classes at the University of Hawai’i, and you could live with us in our community.”

In all the time I have spent with this group, I have never seen them proselytize, and perhaps that’s one reason I felt comfortable with them. Proselytizing runs so deep within the Jehovah’s Witnesses; it is embedded in their very name.

My head almost spins. Tuition, room and board? It’s a ticket, a direction, a lifeline. I lean as he does, tugged by his offer. Gabby, a built-in friend, and her mother, a paragon of parenting, a constant source of warmth.

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Swami smiles. “I understand you’ll want to think about it. That’s a sign of your spirituality.”

I nod again. It is a sign, isn’t it? “Was this why Gabby invited me? To become part of the group?”

He only gives a slight shrug. I want more answers from him, but also from Gabby.

He lifts his arms and extends them toward me. “Come to me, my child.”

Shock or mistrust or maybe even disgust must roll across my face because he raises his hands higher, offering himself, his beneficence. “It’s all right. Come to my lap.”

Is this a question or a command? Two futures gather, calling, reeling me in: I sit in his lap: so many struggles simply evaporate, like the vinegar had quieted the urchin sting, like lime water cools sunburn.

I don’t sit in his lap: I continue to struggle, adrift in my undefined desire to have a life different than the one I’ve known. I’ll be my own rudder.

A breeze stirs outside. Did my Cousin’s Cousin move into this man’s lap? Did Swami ask both females and males to sit there?

Banana leaves clack into each other. A rooster crows. Somewhere in the distance, a door bangs shut. Is this request spiritual or sexual? I have no clear sense of it but something, a little ball of resistance, gathers in my stomach.

I shake my head, and he drops his arms heavily. He takes a deep breath, frowns. “I guess you are not as spiritually advanced as we thought.”

••• ON THE WAY to the airport, I play it out again in my mind, but I can’t ever see

myself moving into his lap. I didn’t come to the party to get fucked.

I think about Mother and her demotion to Aunt. Maybe she’s seen things Swami didn’t want to be seen. But Gabby seems happy, more in her own skin, less of a firebrand for the sake of it. Even Cousin’s Cousin seems more rooted in a positive path.

In the passenger seat, I don’t have the nerve to ask Gabby if this was all a seduction.

Right now, I just want the comfort of the possibility of friendship. What I don’t know at this moment is that she will call me in one week and tell me that Swami has advised her to cut ties with me, saying I am a bad influence.

On the plane over the teal bay, I run the scene again. Maybe I’ll never know for sure what he intended, what the offer really was. I consider the temple, the chanting, the fight for my own mind, how I created a particular kind of meditation, one rooted in my childhood, my family’s way of life.

I sense the triumph in my decision, how trusting my own gut is a way of being in the world that is fraught, but true. I’m just as adrift as when I flew to Hawai’i. Joining the community could’ve have changed so much, but it wouldn’t have given me the room to discover who I am.

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contributors

H A J J A R B A B A N is the author of the chapbooks Relative to Blood (Penmanship Books, 2018) and What I Know of the Mountains (Anhinga Press, 2019). A Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet, she is a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a current MFA in poetry candidate at the University of Virginia. You can find her work at hajjarbaban.com.

P I N K Y B A S S received her MFA in photography from Georgia State University in 1988 at age fifty-two. Her grants include SAF/ NEA, RAP, and an Alabama State Arts Council Fellowship. Bass’s work is represented in the Polaroid Collection and in numerous museums, including Philadelphia, the High in Atlanta and Birmingham. Publications include The Polaroid Book and Christopher James’s Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. www.pinkymmbass.blogspot.com

C H A U N B A L L A R D ’ S chapbook Flight was

the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. His poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Rattle, The New York Times, Tupelo Quarterly, and other literary magazines. He often finds himself distracted by grasshoppers and low-flying bats in the twilight hours. He loves eating mushrooms and watching the impressive organization and discipline of Canada geese.

R A C H E L B R E E N is a visual artist who works at the intersection of drawing, installation, and public engagement. She has exhibited her work locally and nationally and is the recipient of four Minnesota State Arts Board grants, the Walker Art Center’s Open Field fellowship, and the 2019–2020 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Rachel is Professor of Art at Anoka Ramsey Community College. www.rachelbreenart.com

J E N N I F E R B A R B E R ’ S poetry collections are Works on Paper (The Word Works, 2016, Tenth Gate Prize), Given Away (Kore Press, 2012), and Rigging the Wind (Kore Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and widely in literary journals.

She was the 2017 recipient of the Isabella Gardner Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony.

J . C . E L K I N ’ S prose and poetry, like her incessant humming, issue from a need to channel thought into sounds as persistent as the lapping waves where she lives. A graduate of Bennington Writing Seminars, she is currently working on a mother/daughter memoir in handwriting analysis. Her chapbook, World Class: Poems from the ESL Classroom, was featured on Delmarva Public Radio. Other works appear in such markets as Angle, Ducts.org, and The Old Farmer’s

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Almanac. A native New Englander, she now lives on the Chesapeake Bay with her husband of thirty-eight years and a cat of considerably fewer. To learn more, visit www.jcelkin.net.

C H A R L E Y G I B N E Y is a graduate of the

University of Oxford’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, as well as a published poet.

In past years, their poems have been highly commended in the UK’s Poetry Book Society Student Poetry competition, and displayed in the Bodleian Library. In 2015, they were a finalist for a Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer award. They live with their partner and cats in Boston.

C H A R L O T T E G U L L I C K is a novelist,

essayist, editor, educator, and chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. In May 2016, she graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with a MFA in creative nonfiction.

Charlotte’s first novel, By Way of Water, was published by Blue Hen Books/Penguin Putnam, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, Pembroke, Dogwood, Barnstorm Journal, Pithead Chapel, and the LA Review. For more information, go to charlottegullick.com.

C A T H E R I N E A B B E Y H O D G E S lives, writes,

and rock-skips on the Middle Fork of the Tule River in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada. She’s the author of three poetry

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collections, most recently In a Rind of Light (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2020). Instead of Sadness, her first full-length collection, won the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. Catherine teaches English at Porterville College, where her students keep her awake and amazed, and collaborates with musician and labyrinthmaker Rob Hodges. www.catherineabbeyhodges.com S U Z A N N E L U M M I S was a 2018/19 COLA

(City of Los Angeles) fellow, an endowment from Cultural Affairs to influential artists and writers to enable them to create new bodies of work. Poetry.la produces her YouTube series, They Write by Night, exploring film noir and poets influenced by that style and sensibility.

Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, The Antioch Review, New Ohio Review, Plume and the New Yorker. She is the editor of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series, an imprint of Beyond Baroque Books.

Texas-based artist, D E L I T A M A R T I N , picked up her first drawing pencil at age five and discovered her love for creating stories with drawings. She pursued her passion throughout her childhood and became a printmaker that utilizes a multitude of mediums and layering techniques. In her work she combines signs and symbols to create a visual language that powerfully captures the identity, spirit, and narratives of women of

contributors

color. Each work uniquely speaks to the complexity of spirit, race, gender, beauty, and in some ways deals with empowering transformations, and captivating and commanding attention. www.blackboxpressstudio.com

a popular local blues band. He has been published in England, Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia; he has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; and his story “A Box of Photographs” won the 2019 Lamar York Prize for Fiction.

J I M M E L C H E R T lives in Oakland, California.

M A R K N E W P O R T was born in Amsterdam,

He was born in Ohio in 1930 and earned his academic degrees in art and art history at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and the University of California-Berkeley. He is known for his work in both ceramics and conceptual art. His years of teaching in the art department at UC Berkeley were twice interrupted by two four-year leaves of absence, the first to head the visual arts program at the NEA, and later to serve as director of the American Academy in Rome. www.jimmelchert.com

New York. He earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in the prestigious 2009 Renwick Biennial, and the 2019 Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art. Recent awards include grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation. The Simone DeSousa Gallery, Detroit and the Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, represent his work. www.marknewportartist.com

M E G A N M E R C H A N T is an editor at The Comstock Review and Pirene’s Fountain. Her latest book Before the Fevered Snow (Stillhouse Press), came into the world in April 2020. You can find her work at meganmerchant.wix.com/poet.

S A M U E L P I C C O N E is the author of the chapbook Pupa (Anhinga Press, 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Sycamore Review, Passages North, Denver Quarterly, and The Pinch. He received his MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University and serves on the poetry staff at Raleigh Review. Currently, he resides and teaches in Nevada.

P E T E R N E W A L L was born in Sydney,

Australia, where he worked variously as a roadmender, in a naval dockyard, and as a lawyer, but has also lived in Kyoto, Japan, and presently Odessa, Ukraine, where he sings for

Y V E T T E S I E G E R T is a CantoMundo Poetry Fellow and currently a PhD candidate in

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Medieval and Modern Languages at Merton College, University of Oxford. Her work appears in The White Review, Boston Review, Magma, Stonecutter, The Scores, Gulf Coast, North American Review, Oxford Review of Books, and the Broken Sleep Anthology of Immigrant Writing. She received the 2019 Lord Alfred Douglas Poetry Prize, and her translation of Alejandra Pizarnik’s late poetry, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 (New Directions), won the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry.

B E T S Y S H O L L ’s ninth collection of poetry is

House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin, 2019), winner of the Four Lakes Prize. Her eighth collection, Otherwise Unseeable (Wisconsin, 2014) won the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Many (many) years ago she was a founding member of Alice James Books. She lives in Portland, Maine, teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.

B E A U M O N T S U G A R is an essayist, poet, and painter based in Anchorage, Alaska. They live with Penelope and Waffle, their wife and cat.

If you like what you see, more of their work can be found in The Whorticulturalist and on their Instagram: @beaumontsugar.

Contest, the 2016 Frederick Holland Poetry Collection, and his works have been recognized in awards like the ViceChancellor’s International Poetry Prize, Into the Void Poetry Prize, and others. He tweets @sugbechie.

L A U R A B U D O F S K Y W I S N I E W S K I is the author of the full-length collection Sanctuary, Vermont (forthcoming from Orison Books) and the chapbook How to Prepare Bear (Redbird Chapbooks, 2019). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Hunger Mountain Review, American Journal of Poetry, Passengers Journal, Confrontation, and others. She is winner of the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry International Prize, and the 2014 Passager Poetry Prize.

Laura lives and writes in a small town in Vermont.

D A V I D W R I G H T ’ S poems have appeared in

32 Poems, Ecotone, Image, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. His most recent collection is Local Talent (Purple Flag/Virtual Artists Collective, 2019). He lives in Central Illinois where he teaches creative writing and American literature at Monmouth College, and he can be found on Twitter @sweatervestboy.

H A O L U N X U was born in Nanning, China. He

S A M U E L U G B E C H I E has works published or

forthcoming in Ruminate Magazine, Palette Poetry, Aurora Poetry, Nottingham Review.

His poetry manuscript, Monologue of Fire, recently won the Many Voices Project Prize from the New Rivers Press, and will be published in book form in 2021. He is the winner of the 2020 Aurora Poetry Winter

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immigrated to the United States in 1999 as a child. He was raised in central New Jersey and recently graduated from Rutgers University. His writing has appeared in New Ohio Review, Ruminate Magazine, and more.

He currently reads for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.

last note

I wrote “The Difference Between a Year and a Lifetime” early in the COVID-19 pandemic to give myself and my friends courage for what I believed would be a long haul of social isolation. I started with the title and at first it just meant, don’t panic; it’s not like we have to do this forever. But then I was left with the question: what really is the difference between a year and a lifetime?—which meant trying to understand what a lifetime really means, especially in these extraordinary times.

LAURA BUDOFSKY WISNIEWSKI

I don’t know what I’d do without poems—reading them, listening for them, turning them over in my mind like stones from the river. I experience poem-writing as akin to, even a kind of prayer, in that poems call me to a deep stillness, alertness, and willingness to go someplace unexpected. I’ve learned that my poems know more than I do, and I think it must be because they come from a place that I don’t ordinarily have access to. Maybe that is what Kabir was getting at when he wrote that God can be found, when we “really look, in the tiniest house of time.” Poem-making puts me in that tiniest house, the interior of which turns out to be spacious.

Listening carefully to another person doesn’t mean we have to accept or agree with what they’re saying. We don’t have to immediately—or ever—decide if a piece of information is “good” or “bad.” We can add to our knowledge bank without tainting information with judgement.

BEAUMONT SUGAR

My father is a wonderful gardener, and of all the things I did not inherit from him, my inability to tend weighs heaviest now that I’m a parent. Whatever butterfly flower I bring home from the nursery becomes a kind of proof, refusing to grow in the little box of earth I’ve forced it into. Long before the cold snap hits, the furrows settle into barrenness, nothing yielded from the toil except toil, and it shouldn’t feel so normal, but it does.

Then winter passes, and somehow, in spite of my husbandry, there’s a child in my arms, already growing in so many ways I cannot see the root of, and the flaws I’m riddled with are not only part of him, but what made him to begin with.

What troubles me most is how meant to be it all seems.

SAMUEL PICCONE

CATHERINE HODGES

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It has come to me as a surprise that I have, in the past and now, been writing poems about my father. Perhaps this is subconscious, innate, something that poets experience, or lean toward, when they have a moment in which their parents suddenly appear. Maybe it’s simply because we are adults now. This poem is no different from the others that I have written about my father in regard to how it came into being. I had a line and an emotion (a fear) and what manifested itself was a deep reflection experienced at a particular time. There are many traditions which this poem could have engaged with when it comes to form, in effort to display the meaning behind the last line, which amplifies the repeating of words (the act of forgetting), but in the end, the prose-like block is how the poem chose to exist.

CHAUN BALLARD

I write humorous or irreverent poetry to offset my dark and troubling poetry, which is sometimes socially/politically engaged, and sometimes pertains to violence against women. I offset my comic or ironic material with dark and troubling poetry, so that readers won’t think I’m shallow.

That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but— there’s truth in it.

SUZANNE LUMMIS

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In his last years my father, a businessman, became interested in poetry and took a poetry class. After his death in 2014, when my brother, sister, and I were sorting through his books, we found a volume called World Poetry, 1,238 pages of translations from all over the world, from ancient times to the present. I’ve been reading around in it ever since. My poem “Frequency and Pitch” refers to one of the first poems in the volume, about the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her consort Dumazi, translated from the Akkadian by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer.

JENNIFER BARBER

Vote. Wash cloths in cold water. Unplug electronic devices when not in use.

Renovate. Reuse. Start composting. Use the self-service car wash. Plant a tree.

Shop local. Support publications that report on climate change. Buy vintage.

Watch Wall-E. Visit a national park.

Skip eating meat once a week. Write to your representatives. Go for a hike.

Get wild.

MEGAN MERCHANT

last note

I’m a pretty pathetic bird watcher—so often the marvelous warbler is gone before I get the binoculars adjusted.

Sparrows are more common, but they too can be elusive. So much human history and understanding is elusive; all the great unknowns—where we come from, where we’re going—are still pretty much unknown, mysteries we’ve wrapped in new language, but still mysteries. Which is why I love the story of the sparrow and the banquet hall. Why not believe as best we can, and take hope (that thing with feathers) in the mystery of it all, and in the marvelous and the common joined together?

BETSY SHOLL

The experience of going to Hawai’i when I was nineteen held such potential, and yet it was a surreal and blighted week of challenge after challenge. Weaving it into a coherent narrative has smoothed and mended the jagged points of memory so that I hold more respect for my younger self.

As “Proposed Amendments to the Definition of Mend” says, this one’s for my mother, who is eighty-five, mentally sharp, deeply loyal, and often overcome by crankiness about the ongoing pains of aging. Since my father died over twenty years ago, I’ve tried to support her through a hip replacement, a spinal surgery, and a cochlear implant, and help her transition from a house to a condo to assisted living. I’ve usually found “my inadequate hand” not enough to mend what hurts. But for me a pleasant surprise occurred as I wrote this poem, when, somehow, the rhythms and cadences took over, which I hope lift this linguistic inquiry into its own kind of music. It sure felt good to read it aloud. Perhaps, I might still read it to my mother, “blurting out agitation and grace” in a way she can recognize, in a way intended to mend.

DAVID WRIGHT

CHARLOTTE GULLICK

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PINKY/MM BASS (WITH CAROLYN DEMERITT).

Soul’s Intervention, 2018. Gelatin silver print and archival print with thread. 14 inches x 10 inches.