Special Issue: Happenings Fundraiser 2020 First Sketches of Future Creations

HAPPENINGS FUNDRAISER 2020: FIRST SKETCHES OF FUTURE CREATIONS

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

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

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Happenings Inspired by the “happenings� of the 1960s, where people showed up and made good things together, we decided to create our own version of this goodness! Between May 19-23, 2020, our brave writers and artists went live on Facebook and spontaneously created poetry, art, little stories, and small essays for ticketholders in our community.

We hope you enjoy these first sketches of their future creations.

Tuesday, May 19 Rachel King 8 a.m. 4 Mark Wagenaar 9 a.m. 7 C.T. Salazar 11 a.m. 10 Trinh Mai 12 p.m. 13 William Woolfitt 1 p.m. 20 Monica Jimenez 2 p.m. 22 Courtney Hartman 3 p.m. 28 Wednesday, May 20 Andrew Taylor-Troutman 8 a.m. 29 Jason Villemez 9 a.m. 31 Charity Gingerich 11 a.m. 33 Doug Cornett 2 p.m. 35 Allyson Armistead 3 p.m. 39 Thursday, May 21 Keira Havens 8 a.m. Back Cover Patrick Whitfill 9 a.m.

Kate Gaskin 11 a.m. 42 Chris Benson 12 p.m. 44 Emily McIlroy 2 p.m. Front Cover Sean Conrey 3 p.m.

Friday, May 22 46 8 a.m. Karoline Strickland 51 9 a.m. Alex Mouw 10 a.m. Matthew Landrum 11 a.m. Thom Caraway 54 12 p.m. Chaun Ballard 55 1 p.m. Lary Kleeman 60 2 p.m. Laurel Dowswell 65 3 p.m. Leslie Pearson Saturday, May 23 72 8 a.m. Anne McGrath 75 9 a.m. Josh MacIvor-Andersen 78 10 a.m. Melissa Reeser Poulin 84 11 a.m. Katie Manning 88 12 p.m. Jonathan Winston Jones 93 1 p.m. Catherine Hervey 97 2 p.m. Carly Joy Miller 99 3 p.m. Shann Ray

Tuesday RACHEL KING, 8 A.M.

1.

She arrives at the restaurant before him. She wants to order fish and chips but she knows they won’t be as good as Ireland’s. She feels hot. It is always so hot here in the summer, she thinks. She wanted to sit on a tall black cliff and smell the ocean beneath her. He is fifteen minutes late; he always runs late. She’s already ordered at the bar.

He orders a nacho and they sit by a window together. She wonders whether she should tell him about Ireland—her two charges when she was an au pair for a year, the freedom of doing whatever she wanted on her days off. She’s tried to get other friends and family members to share her enthusiasm but they just don’t get it. She asks him about his first year at college. He talks about his dorm, the friends he’s made. She tried to be interested. She is interested but it all sounds just about how she thought it would. She’s glad she didn’t go straight to college. She remembers driving around narrow roads with her charges, the kids laughing at the weird way they thought she pronounced words. Their food comes. She tastes the fish and chips and cringes. The fish is dry, the battered outside too oily. He’s mowing down his nachos. “I can’t wait till you get on campus next year,” he says. She starts. “Oh I don’t know about that.”

“You’re coming, right?” “I was thinking of being an au pair in another country. Maybe Northern Europe.” He squeezes his face together. He hasn’t asked her about her year yet at all. She remembers the conversations she’s had with locals in pubs, the times she made out with guys. The one who took her home. “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac comes on. He starts to sing it, sway back and forth, his mouth full. Their whole friend group had liked it in high school and now to her it just seems too sentimental.

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2.

I’m holding my grandma’s hand, watching goldfish in a pond. I don’t know where we are. A garden of some kind, brick walls on all sides. I remember the scent of fish too and how their skin shone, flickering off the sun. If I could go back to that memory, what would I tell that boy? To confide in my grandma when she asks me a few years later what I want to be. A cop, I should have said. I’m old enough to remember when they walked the city neighborhoods, chatted with citizens and didn’t just drive by them. There was one who always talked to the lady in the brownstone next door.

She sat on her stoop looking sad most days, but he always seemed to cheer her up.

When I got older, I learned cops did more than that—but I still wanted to be one, to protect and serve. But by the time my grandma asked me what I wanted to be, when I was eleven or twelve and sitting by the rosebushes while she trimmed them in her backyard, I said “business” because that seemed acceptable, though I knew even less about that. She nodded and kept trimming, did not seem impressed. I felt as though if I’d told her for real she’d have held me to it. She’d thought it a perfect fit. But I did major in business and now I’m a residential real estate agent. I enjoy talking with people at my job but still have a nagging feeling I’d do better as a cop. It comes to me when I’m drinking coffee in the morning on the back porch, when I’m hiking every summer in the backwoods usually somewhere on or near the Appalachian Trail. Is the thirties too old to start over? My grandma wouldn’t have thought so. She got married for the first time years after she’d had three kids in her teens, then birthed my mom, her fourth child, at age thirty-nine. I think of my grandma when I hear owls, her favorite bird, I think of her when I wish I would have confided to someone, anyone, what I wanted to be when I grew up.

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3.

We are snorkeling in the water off of Maui. It’s my first time in Hawaii, and I love it. My husband Rich and I are here for our five-year anniversary. We live in a cold climate—Bozeman, Montana—and are so glad to be away from that in late winter. I nestle into the warm water, note the colored fish, point them out to Rich. He smiles, then we laugh as he chokes on water. It’s our third day here. We haven’t been out of Montana in two full years, and I was worried something would happen before our trip to make us unable to go. But as I’m sitting in the sand that afternoon, after snorkeling, feeling the sun on my skin—I have a kind of skin I can almost watch bronze—I finally, totally, relax. I don’t think of my work as a counselor, my patients’ stories that usually swirl around my head. I focus on the blueness of the waves. Usually Rich and I are always swapping stories—he’s a high school teacher, and has so many of his own. But by yesterday, we’d shed all of those stories, and for one full day have talked about our own lives, our own marriage goals. We’re planning to go see the volcanoes tomorrow.

I’m almost asleep when Rich arrives and offers me a Mai Tai. As I straighten, take the drink, I realize he’s not smiling like earlier. It’s COVID, he says. They’re suggesting we all head home. I tighten my grip on the glass, steel my face. No, I say, I’m not going.

Be reasonable, he says. I want to see the volcanoes, I say. He tells me they might close the parks down. I sip on the drink. Will four days make a difference? I ask. Possibly, he says. I sip faster. I’m not going to go. Rich looks away, sighs. He knows that look in my eye. He knows my stubbornness. He walks down the beach and back. He tells me statistics but I simply don’t care. I might leave, he says. I might leave you here alone.

Fine, I say. But he doesn’t. He just stays inside watching the news for the remainder of the trip, reading details about the virus online. He comes out to report them to me while I stay on the beach, in the sun, hour after hour, soaking it in. In the heat of the day I swim for hours, in the evenings, I walk alone on the beach that’s almost evacuated. I don’t regret any of it now that I’m completely stuck at home.

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MARK WAGENAAR, 9 A.M.

Poem for Kristin Bussard Perhaps You sit down at the restaurant & unwrap the straw, tying the paper into a knot—one of your favorites, this little superstition—you pull the knot, & if it breaks someone is thinking of you. Today as the waiter who loves Truffaut best carries a flame in his palm across the restaurant, you pull each end, & as the knot tightens, you watch a tiny version of yourself walking down the slope of the straw, except they’re the stairs of your childhood home, & before you can ask yourself where you’re going, which is one thing we all ask ourselves from time to time, one end of the wrapper begins to give & a little bit of light shines out from the tear, out of the torn fibers, like a clearing of just-planted trees you saw once, outside of Fort Collins, & you realize the light is coming from a small projector inside the straw, as the movie of your life begins to roll—you’re walking out of this very restaurant, & you see your mother & father in the kitchen of your childhood home there on the sidewalk, your mother smiling at you, saying something just as the knot of the straw breaks.

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Poem for Audrey Perhaps Once, trying to find my way back to my car while hiking random fields in the Midwest, just past midnight, I came upon sleeping horses. Once, at Lake Dylan, I watched a storm blow in—we ran back to our cars, a half mile, & just as we got there, the storm hit—but broke apart into flurries, that were then pierced by sunlight. Isn’t memory a little like that— bits & pieces, an early memory of you sitting on a horse with your Dad— a painting by Monet on a wall of a museum you’ve forgotten the name of, but the color survives.

The brushwork. Water lilies—some almost indistinguishable from the light itself. That kept changing, second by second. What would you say to your earlier self—is this the way we remember mercy? Is this the way hope begins to build? Horses beneath fast-moving clouds, moving the way horses do, mane & tail, cirrus flank.

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Poem for Macie Hawks Perhaps This is the story: there was a halfway point between your house & Kyle’s, when you were young, at a dock. The halfway point brought you together, brought you nearer to the future— five in the morning, Kyle leaving for PT, little Claire still asleep—that there was a time when you did not know her face— that there was a time you carried her face, nonetheless, without knowing it, wherever you went. Where are those days now, at the dock, where are those waters, that bore, even for a moment, your two faces— what do the days beyond us hold.

Your daughter walks out of sleep with her stuffed dog, humming the tune to “It’s a Small World”—sound of her sleep, sound of her heart, which you pray for daily, heart of infinite staircases, heart of gentle horses, heart that holds all the days you have seen pass.

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C.T. SALAZAR, 11 A.M.

Five Charms Against Restlessness for Tammie, Kyla, Michelle, Beth, & Andrew There’s a totem we take up— I used to call it sadness but now I think it may be a strange kind of honesty: the way the chimney in the woods is honest about the house that used to be a house instead of its rubble. ::: Having a soul means it can be difficult to watch the bear leave but sometimes beauty merits goodbye godspeed spend more time with people you love (musically so) even the myths we don’t know could name us better than our bodies their odd weight ::: How do we know a place is hell?

maybe there’s a sign

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that says

you must enter alone

Maybe a cave you swear looked colder than it felt.

Before we leave here let’s leave

here—somewhere someone you’ll love in the future is having a meal with all his ideas of god

and then you’ll show up soon.

:::

The shoes we remember don’t fit but the sound of someone running

makes room in the mind

/ here’s a cup of coffee—tell yourself

it’s morning and it’s moving closer to the tide

/ to wherever you are this time wherever

the phone last had signal

here’s a garden and I’m watching the worms enact the same bliss

you promised we could hear if we listened

:::

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At our worst we’ve been dog or dagger which means the desire but the lack of language to tell it

stay safe

the sunlight

means to

say to your frame eggshell

as it may prove

to be

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T R I N H M A I , 12 P . M .

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WILLIAM WOOLFITT, 1 P.M.

Cheetah There comes a farmer, another farmer, there comes cattle grazing, grazing there comes thornbush, there comes the thickening, there comes matted trees, the cheetah tries to run, to hunt, to eat, to pass through too-much-green.

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Burrow When I try to stir him awake, offer him playground, songs, alphabet, berry juice, worksheets, he burrows deep with his toy pig, pulls up his robot quilt, knows I am a huckster, turns his back on our world that will not keep.

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MONICA JIMENEZ, 3 P.M.

Puppy at a Cocktail Party The party was loud and crowded. But there were so many smells! Jerry slipped past a young couple pausing in the front door to hand over what was almost certainly a tray of meat lasagna, and trotted into the house, tail high, ears up, his whole back end wagging. He was on a mission. The one who had called him was somewhere in the back, his nose told him. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a little fun first.

“Hi!” he said to a girl in a black velvet dress, whose shoulders were slumped.

“Parties are the best, and this party is the best, and you are the best, and I love you more than anyone.”

The girl pulled Jerry onto her lap and scratched his ears. “Look at the puppy!” she squealed. “Fuck Brad, anyway. Who needs him when this party has a puppy?”

He got a good seven to nine minutes of rubs out of that, and then he was off to the two boys standing in a corner, dark scowls on their faces. “Oh my fucking god,” one was saying loudly, “I was like, seriously? You say it again, after I already said I’d burn his house to the ground?”

“Hi!” Jerry said to the boy, jumping up and putting his paws on the boy’s legs.

“People are the best, and houses are the best, and you are the best, and I love you more than anyone.”

The argument dissolved into laughter, and a few minutes later, Jerry was on his way to the back room, trotting cautiously now. His tail dipped lower and lower as he approached the door at the end of the hall. He pushed it open with his nose.

In the bedroom, Transformer posters covered the walls. The sound of wheezing filled the room. A boy sat on the bottom bunk, holding an old brown dog, whose thin body trembled every now and then. As Jerry padded across the room, the boy looked up.

“Oh--hi. You’re from down the street, aren’t you?” His voice was hoarse, but his face was dry. “Did Mr. Jeka leave the screen door open?” His voice was flat and lifeless. “I’ll get Dad to take you back. Just give me a minute.”

Jerry put his paws on the bed and softly nosed the old brown dog. She opened milky blind eyes and sniffed him weakly, once, twice. Then her jaws closed around the scruff of his neck, gentle but surprisingly strong. She pulled him onto the bed.

“Hey, what--” The old brown dog gave a wheezing sigh, and stopped trembling.

“Lacey!”

As the boy clutched the old dog’s silent body, Jerry nudged the thin shoulder one more time. Then he climbed onto the boy’s lap, and as the first warm, wet drops fell on the top of his head, he leaned against the boy’s heaving chest, and was still.

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The Tree “Get that filthy pile of shit out of your yard by Friday or I’m calling the cops!” bellowed Sierra’s mom.

“You stop putting your nose over thus fence!” screamed Mrs. Sacra from next door.

Sierra peeked around the edge of the doorframe. “Mom?” she said softly. “Can I walk to the lake?”

“It’s still too hot, you’ll get burns,” snapped Sierra’s mom.

“Mom?” She changed what she was going to say. “Why is the sun so hot?”

“Because the earth hates us and it’s trying to kill us all. I said move that pile NOW!” yelled Sierra’s mom.

“You said FRIDAY!” roared Mrs. Sacra.

“So you CAN hear me!”

Sierra clung to the doorframe, almost went back in, but instead held on tighter. She took a deep breath. “Why?” “Why what?” Her mom didn’t look around.

“Why does the earth hate us?”

Her mom dodged a flying flowerpot, which crashed into the mailbox and shattered.

“Why don’t you ask the earth?” she said irritably.

Sierra put on her government-issued sun coat and went out to the backyard. In the yard behind the house next door, she could see a little boy huddling under the porch overhang. She walked to the desiccated little tree in her own yard. She felt a little stupid, but said to the tree, “Why do you hate us?”

“Why did you stop talking to me?” said the tree.

Sierra used to tell the tree knock-knock jokes; she remembered this now. “I don’t know,” she said. “I had other things to do, I guess.”

“I can taste the ocean salt. I can hear the moan of the mountain breeze. I can feel your heart beating in your chest. There is no part of me that is not you,” said the tree.

“If you want to know the answer to your question, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

Sierra stared at the tree for a moment, but it said nothing more. Maybe it hadn’t said anything at all. Slowly, she reached up and opicked something from the lowest branch of the tree: one tiny, withered apple. She ducked under the fence, walked to the boy sitting under the porch overhang, and held out the apple. He looked up with a tear-streaked face.

As he ate the apple with quick, ravenous bites, she stared at the tree in her own yard, and the smoke slowly rising from its branches into the sky.

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Pointing at the Moon Loud bass thumped from the low brick building, and the old man blew a cloud of smoke through pursed lips and leaned on the door of the red truck.

“Nice moon tonight,” he said.

“What?” The boy sitting in the driver’s seat, a cigarette dangling from between his fingers, had turned his head to follow the progress of a tall blonde girl in short shorts across the parking lot toward the brick building.

The old man laughed softly to himself. “What is she, the third one this week?”

“Ha ha.” The boy stubbed out his cigarette. In a second, he would yawn and stretch elaborately, make some remark about how he wanted to see the next band, and go inside. He wouldn’t come back out. The old man looked at the boy, and at the moon.

The boy opened his mouth in a jaw-creaking yawn and lifted both arms above his head. “What’s this band?” he said, nodding his head to the thumps of the bass. “They’re good.”

“Look,” said the old man.

“Look at what?” The boy was smoothing back his hair, eyeing himself in the rearview mirror.

“Look,” said the old man, a little louder.

“I don’t know what you think you’re talking about,” the boy sighed, opening the car door, “but--” The old man slammed the car door shut. The boy jerked back in his seat. The old man reached in the window, grabbed the boy by the shirtfront, and pulled him half out of the car. “Look!” he snarled.

The boy struggled. “What the fuck?” Then his eyes fell on a puddle on the asphalt. Slowly he lifted his head and looked up at the moon--big, bright, full, smoky traces on its white face, a sliver of its right side gone.

The blonde girl disappeared into the low brick building. The old man leaned against the door of the truck. Man and boy looked up at the moon and said nothing more.

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The Edge Green pastures rolled all around them as the Jeep drove down the winding road.

Wildflowers dotted the fields, sun blazed in the impossibly blue sky, and in the passenger seat, Emma blinked. The edges of things had seemed blurry all day. Maybe she was coming down with something.

“Look!” In the driver’s seat, Carlos pointed at a sign as he slowed down. “Warning: Beware of the Edge.”

The sign stood in the middle of a grassy field, with no cliff in sight. In the backseat, Tara laughed, but Carolyn looked worried. “Maybe it’s a thin place.” Carlos pushed down his sunglasses and raised his eyebrows. “You know, the line where the right and the wrong places meet--the one where you’re supposed to be, and the one where you’re not.” Carolyn’s grandmother was a draoi, an Irish white witch. “They’re all over the place on the peninsula.”

“Ooo, that settles it,” laughed Carlos. “Now we have to pull over.”

“We don’t want to get too close to the edge,” Carolyn said nervously. “Please can we just go?”

“I’ve already got the perfect caption: Living on the edge!” Carlos was already parking on the shoulder of the road. “Come on, Em. I need your eye for this shot.”

Emma’s new job at an interior design firm specializing in corporate offices started on Monday. As a kid, she’d done tonsillectomies on Cabbage Patch Dolls and pretended one of her dad’s button-ups was a white coat, but business interior design didn’t require half a lifetime of school, and carpet color would be the highest-stakes decision she’d have to make.

As Carlos got out of the Jeep, Carolyn grabbed Emma’s arm. “Don’t risk it,” she pleaded.

Emma shook Carolyn off. “What kind of designer would I be if I didn’t make my friends look awesome on Instagram?” she laughed, climbing out of the Jeep.

“A wrong place doesn’t just look wrong, it feels wrong!” Carolyn called as Emma followed Carlos across the field. “And once you stumble in, you can’t get out, and everything will feel wrong for the rest of your life!”

“Perfect, say that one more time!” yelled Carlos, who was walking backward, filming. “I didn’t catch the part about the--” And suddenly he was gone, and so was everything. The world was dark, the air filled with smoke, and Emma was covered in blood. She was wrapping a bandage around the midsection of a woman gasping on the ground. Her hands were quick and sure, and against the wail of the sirens, she said in a low, calm voice: “You’re going to be OK.”

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And just like that, the world was back, and Carolyn had both arms around Emma’s shoulders, pulling her away from the sign. “You went over,” she moaned. Carlos was on his hands and knees, head hanging, retching. “What did you see? Are you OK?” “I’m--I’m fine,” Emma said.

But she lay in bed that night, staring at the ceili And just like that, the world was back, and Carolyn had both arms around Emma’s shoulders, pulling her away from the sign. “You went over,” she moaned. Carlos was on his hands and knees, head hanging, retching. “What did you see? Are you OK?” “I’m--I’m fine,” Emma said.

But she lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling. Staring at that other world--the world that, despite the darkness and smoke, had had the sharpest, crispest lines and the brightest, most vivid colors she’d ever seen. Staring at that invisible line, and wondering for the first time which side she was on.

ng. Staring at that other world--the world that, despite the darkness and smoke, had had the sharpest, crispest lines and the brightest, most vivid colors she’d ever seen. Staring at that invisible line, and wondering for the first time which side she was on.

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An Old Dog “Just give me another three minutes. I can fix it,” Ellie said, holding onto the sheaf of papers for dear life.

“Your three minutes ended three hours ago, just like the last three minutes, and you need to give it to me now,” said Chris, pulling on the papers.

“I know I said I would fix it, and instead I added sixty pages and nine plot twists and a bunch of really bad jokes and an unnecessary explosion, but this time I really can fix it!” said Ellie, pulling the papers free and walking across the room.

“You are not going to fix it, and I am not going to work my way through ninety more pages of explosions and secret siblings suddenly being revealed and statements about the nature of the universe, so you need to give it to me now,” said Chris, following her across the room.

Ellie burst into tears. “It’s awful and I hate it and I want to die,” she said, and threw the pages at the fire.

Chris caught them before they landed. “Let’s talk this over tomorrow,” he said. “I bet there are some really good explosions in here.”

“Why do you even want it?” demanded Ellie.

“Because,” said Chris cheerfully as he walked to the door, “I’m your teacher.” And he closed the door behind him.

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Wednesday ANDREW TAYLOR-TROUTMAN, 8 A.M.

The Rhyme Driving lost through the night, the back road seems sinister, the sliver of moon just visible through the bare, winter trees.

Where is that road that he seeks?

Will the sign jump into view like deer?

Or will it ease into sight in plenty of time to turn?

How will he find clear direction?

That peace of mind, the old, familiar mercy of anticipating the rhyme.

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All He Knows The door bangs against the wall, the girl scoots through, four feet tall, with her lanky father in tow.

A fish from the tank eyes them both.

“Nemo,” she points and grins.

Daddy raises a hand. As a regular, the waitress knows the gesture and yells “The usual!” to the kitchen.

“Daddy, how many do you think I’ll eat?”

“Your age,” he smiles. “Three!”

“I’m six!” How could that be, he thinks, and before the waitress brings all the crab she will be able to hold he holds the moment as all he knows.

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JASON VILLEMEZ, 9 A.M.

Smokey Hill For a place without smoke and a place without hills, the bureaucrat who named the road by my house Smokey Hill must have been dreaming of some place else.

Maybe they recalled the North Carolina of their youth, or the forest fires in California; maybe their fondest memory was smoking a joint on a hillside, and it gave them joy to indulge in the image.

Either way, I don’t much care what possessed them to name the road such. I’m just glad it’s here.

From our house at the end of the court, it’s four more—the Wilson’s, Burger’s, Edelstein’s and Dawson’s—and then, Smokey Hill. The road goes for a long while, long enough that you can forget where you’re going if you so choose.

One time, my parents and I got stuck on it just as we entered. The ice pushed us back as if to say no, you shall not pass, not on my watch. That day, a major snowstorm hit, and we wound up staying inside and throwing pennies out the window. It remains one of the best days of my life.

Another time, near the road’s end, I saw a man sleeping against a linden tree. I asked my mother if we could go wake him, because maybe he wanted to sleep somewhere more comfortable, more safe. She said to me, no honey, that man isn’t good.

But why isn’t he good, I asked.

He just isn’t.

The lack of explanation unsettles me to this day.

Most of the time it’s uneventful. We drive down the road with the rest of the cars, one after the other, like ants going to and from the colony. Off to work, off to school, off to visit family, off to say goodbye.

But I’m always happy when I’m on it, because at Smokey Hill, one end means the world, and the other, forever, means home.

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Manila Manila will always remain gray in my memory. Like a remastered silent film, the original reigns forever supreme.

I can’t recall if the gray is from the everlasting pollution pervading the sky or merely how I felt at the time.

As we came up to my grandmother’s house, six-year-old me shouted on the inside: Get me out of here, get me out of here, there’s no ice cream man, there’s no air conditioning. Everybody won’t stop looking at me. That centipede on the floor wants to attack me I swear. I wish my mom hadn’t brought me here.

That we were treated with such reverence and kindness meant nothing to me. That the other kids wanted to play, to see how much different an American boy could throw a ball, was no consolation. They let me win the game of hot potato and still, only misery.

And yet, when I think back on it now, they were the best friends I never had.

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C H A R I T Y G I N G E R I C H , 11 A . M .

Miniature Study of Corot’s Le Passeur Four figures—two sitting, one leaning forward, one standing—are in a boat shaped like the skeletal spine of some long-lost creature. No one faces the artist, who has drowned them in the light of dreaming underwater, and I feel I should hand a bowl of figs to the man whose white hair glows like a silk cap, so he can begin his story of the trees, or passersby, which he will inevitably tell, while his companions hunch into an evening with an aching sky after a day not yet fixed in time but hunger, and home-going.

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Inscapes from the Country of Now & Then— When I’m very anxious, I read Milosz—those happy porpoises much like the Psalmist’s wings of the morning and Merton’s quiet/hot/dark, blue hills—because he saw the world burning, and lived to tell of it, and oh friend, the telling. When I feel helpless, I lay my tiniest seashells—augers, welks and shark’s eyes—in the healer’s palm, which is big enough to be its own kind of sea; and we speak of the liturgical calligraphy of old German Bible stories, where k, f, and s are a mystery, but where the man is clearly lord of the woman. When I’m angry, I read about the wench who went to the river with a message for her exiled king, and hid herself in a well with the fixings of bread at the top, after; clever girl. How many like her go unsung? When I feel lost, I want to say something important about diamonds, or the return of the monkeyface mollusk to Ohio’s rivers and streams, but that seems a familiar dichotomy, and I know more about rain, which is more charming, or the body at rest, which is more truthful. When I’m peaceful, I can go into Charles Wright’s twentieth century twilight meadow hymns without knocking over vases and lamps, though I prefer to sing my own—as at this moment—looking out at a rainswept tree, a pair of Baltimore orioles visit for the first time.

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DOUG CORNETT, 2 P.M.

The Same Old Song The order form arrived in your inbox on a Tuesday morning. For you, that was normal.

In your whole life, Tuesday morning was always when the big things happened. Births.

Deaths. Epiphanies. And so when the familiar chime signifying a new message came through, the only one of the day, you paid it particularly close attention.

The first few questions were easy. Your age. Your marital status. The general state of your health. 42. Single. Fine as far as you know.

On the second page, they became more specific. What colors are your nightmares.

What songs give you shivers? If you were trapped in your favorite painting, how long would you like to live? Do you believe in the afterlife? Have you tried your best?

And then, finally, the questions you’d been expecting. What kind of Island would you like? Large? Small? Will there be mountains on your island? Will there be predators? Would you like to see the silent black silhouettes of owls winging over the black mountains on a black night? When there are stars, would you like them to twinkle? Would you like them to flare? Would you like them to drip and smear toward the ground?

You fill out the answers, and for some of them, you close your eyes and think before writing. You are paying top dollar for this. Three months wages, to be exact. And you intend to spend some time on this island. Perhaps a lot. More than recommended.

Finally, will there be anyone else on this island with you? Yes, you type slowly, the only answer for which you don’t have to think. Your grandmother. And can you stand together, watching goldfish swim in figure eights in a tiny pond? Can you hold hands?

Can you smell the half-eaten candy cane in your pocket? The one she brought you? Is this sort of thing possible?

One week later, the headset arrives. It looks surprisingly low tech, considering. You go into your bedroom and put the headset on. At first, you don’t see anything. But you can smell something very faintly. A floral scent. Honeysuckle? It’s getting stronger.

Did you mention honeysuckle in the order form? No bother.

Once it happens, it happens instantaneously. The waves are not there, and then they simply are. They lap against the beach. Recede. Lap. Recede. You could spend a day watching. You make a note to do just that.

The mountains rise from the land like the backs of peaceful slumbering leviathans.

They might scare you, but you choose to be calmed by them. More honeysuckle. The flittering of tropical birds. You’re amazed by the depth of this world. By all the things that you didn’t ask for. You should be grateful.

In the evening of the first day, you watch the sun slide down the canvas sky from a rock face over a waterfall. You secretly look for imperfection, but can’t find any. The

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light fades and you just sit and watch, feeling no compulsion to move. The stars blink on slowly, courteously, as if not wanting to startle you.

Weeks later, you still haven’t seen your grandmother. The one thing you asked for. Perhaps this was your mistake? Perhaps the company sensed your eagerness?

Perhaps your need was off-putting? But she hasn’t arrived. No candy cane. No goldfish. But here you are, fishing on the side of a pond, listening to the dozey crackle of a radio playing. And what’s that? Something in the water? A raft? A figure? Coming toward you.

It could be. Or it couldn’t. You’ll find out soon. You can be patient. The water bobs up and down, and still the raft doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. But you can be patient. Perhaps it’s her. So you’ll just sit here, listening to the radio, waiting for something to bite. The same song crackles to a stop, then crackles to a start. You can be patient. It really is perfect. Perfect.

If only the song would change.

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The Sunflower The last question on the application was typical, like a hundred she’d seen again and again. And she’d been filling out a lot of applications recently. In this economy, finding steady work was like bushwhacking toward the lost city of El Dorado. Something in the futility of it all was getting to her. How many times could she list her strengths?

Her weaknesses? Her ambitions?

So the last question went like this: Is there anything else you’d like us to know about you?

She thought. She thought some more. The wind booooed outside her window like a Hollywood ghost. She began to write: Once, when I was in the third grade, my classmate assigned everyone an animal that fit their personality. Skyler was an eagle. Helen a tiger. Roy a panda bear. When she got to me, she bit her lip and said “sunflower.” The teacher nervously laughed and said, but a sunflower is not an animal.

But I knew what she meant. She meant that I grew toward the light. That I was always reaching toward the sun.

My first memory is my dad throwing my cat into the hot tub at a party. There was a feral whine, and I expected a splash, but it must have been silenced by the sound of the jets. To be honest, I actually don’t remember seeing the cat in the air, or in the tub, or the splash. What I remember are the faces of everyone in the room. It was like the world was suddenly split in half by some kind of cosmic cut of the deck; half the people were horrified, alarmed, disgusted, distorting their faces in sour milk lurches.

The other half, mixed in among the distressed, broke into funhouse smiles, as if their entire lives they’d been living in the lead-up to a joke, and finally, the punchline had come. Can you guess which face I made? I don’t know. I couldn’t see myself. If only I could access that moment from somebody else’s mental camera, I could understand one more puzzle piece about myself.

Another thing about myself: when I go to the beach, I stuff my pockets with sand. As a kid I did this. As an adult, I still do this. I didn’t have to hide it when I was just a little girl. It was what kids did, along with licking shells and squashing sea gooseberries under your heel. But now, I do it in secret. I do it bit by bit. I love the weight of it. I love that try as I might, I’ll never get all of those grains out of my pockets.

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The last thing. If I had endless resources, I’d build myself a hot air balloon and float over the sea. I’d let myself get swallowed by the infinite mouths of the sky. Or if not that, the infinite mouths of the sea. That’s a piece of the puzzle I never have to wonder about.

She watched the ink dry on her answer. The application was complete. She’d never get the job, she knew, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to work anyway. She wanted to go to the ocean. She wanted to stand on the beach, gaze up at the cyclops sun, and grow.

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ALLYSON ARMISTEAD, 3 P.M.

Lessons in Geography In the beginning, it seemed a faraway virus, pinpoints on a map on the other side of the world, and then the wave reached the coasts, the Midwest, and then her street, which was quiet now, and too cold for the promises of summer. There was no static of cicadas or crickets, or children laughing in the streets on their grass-stained bikes, just the kind of silence that becomes known, where electrons themselves make their dance audible.

It had been a week since she had laid her hands on a patient, her treatment table quiet and still, the white paper neat without impressions. It was strange how her fingers missed the touch of others, the flesh supple, a geometry she had grown to love.

Her hands were agitated, longing for texture and connection. She moved her fingers through the air, in that moment caught in a daydream through the grassy fields of Westbeemster Holland, the cool Netherlands current on her face.

At home, her partner, preparing breakfast, leaned over her to stroke her hair in the undulation of a wave, resting a hand on her cheek. Touch was amplified now, a silver lining of so much space in the world.

“I miss Amsterdam,” she said. “With all the planes grounded, it’s all I think about,” and while photographs of their last vacation circled them, tucked in bookshelves and lining windowsills between their various plants, she felt them an inferior substitute for the old farmhouses and towering trees, the vibrant green a shade lighter and muted.

On the table, her partner laid a feast before them, cheese and toast and coffee with cream and sugar, a fresh-pressed juice. A recreation of their Westbeemster meals in what seemed a lifetime ago. She licked the delicate cheese from her fingers, the juice cold in her throat. If you connect enough dots of a constellation the entire sky is transformed.

“I know it’s not the same,” her partner said, “but I thought it might be something,” and yet what was Amsterdam without this love and marriage before her, this sweetness of a holiday picnic, if not just a bit of geography, only land.

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Ancestry is the New Black She finds the fortune teller on the end of the street corner at King and Duke, a purple neon sign beckoning patrons, an electronic welcome mat into the afterlife. She had always meant to visit one the last time she was in Manhattan, a city that now seemed faraway except by a three-hour train ride on the weekends, and yet here she is in a different town—not Paris, not Positano, not New York City, not a city she dreams of, but a town in Virginia—to learn her future.

She opens the door, windchimes sound from somewhere inside this curtained space, and she enters the chamber of the unknown, the past, the now. It is the future she has come to ask about today, and the fortune teller, in a high shamanic voice, an ancestral and guttural call of a gypsy from a mountaintop, tells her all times are here in this time and place, so why doesn’t she sit down and just see.

As commanded, she sits on a cushion like a cat, wide-eyed, her hands—though she doesn’t notice them at first—are trembling. It is the dim lighting, the illustrious voice of this high priestess before her, the anticipation of a life better understood that make her nervous.

“Successful,” the fortune wielder says. “TV, limelight.”

“Really?” she says, and thinks of Manhattan and how she let it slip through her fingers in her twenties.

“And Iceland,” the fortune teller says. “It is the color of your hair.”

“Do you mean the blonde?”

“It is more than that. Viking lineage. You have no idea of your own power nor your beauty.”

It was true, this summation, if she was honest. She had spent three decades finding steady ground through an unfair world that revels photoshopped beauty, checkout aisles of Cosmopolitan magazine standards, a tiny ridiculous threshold of a woman’s acceptable bodily proportions—unaware that she herself was a Viking, the illumination of a Nordic moon in her veins. And here she was now, before this teller of many things, the answer to her future in the past, in some bit of geography nestled deep in the northern lights and laid bare with blue lagoons. Yet in the name of that faraway island there was also a quiet recognition, a silent belonging.

“You must go to Iceland,” the fortune teller tells her. “Not Manhattan, not Paris, not Italy. Iceland. It’s the only way to know where you’re going.”

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Windblown The wind blew open her French-style window, the trees hissed, lightning everywhere.

There were things never meant to fly, receipts and kitchen curtains and client notes and her daughter’s construction paper self-portrait, caught up in the wind as if they were escaping at last, at last, from having to be whatever they were. She followed a single piece of lined paper as it caught a current and folded itself in half like an origami creature—an eagle maybe—flying towards a new horizon. She let herself imagine flying on its back, this paper bird, wondering how her life might appear from such a great height, if it was like a city of neatly drawn squares of green and brown and roads with clear destinations or if it was an endless white canvas.

It was already 10 minutes past the hour, and she was running late. The kids were still eating their breakfast, their cereal milk had grown warm by now. There were backpacks scattered on the floor, their mouths open like hungry dogs, and work deadlines and meetings with clients—some with heavier hearts than others—and now the storm outside pelting rain like nails on tin. On some mornings, she felt she could admiral a ship at sea; on others, the children’s voices, though their little chirps were among her greatest sweetness in this life, were too much—too much of everything— and she prayed for an extension of silence. A few more moments of hands warming around a cup of coffee, buried in the aroma, losing herself in the swirl of black and cream.

She forced the kitchen window closed, tightened the latch, her hair windblown.

Paper littered the tiled floor, notes and receipts and magnets ripped from the fridge, artifacts of a storm. She had survived many of those, storms both physical and metaphorical, maybe even spiritual. She had once pulled her cousin from a strong current, that heartbeat lingering and returning somehow untarnished from the rush of cold river weight, growing warm again and reentering the world. She had been in that center ring, the eye, and she had emerged, and now sitting on her kitchen floor, ten minutes past the hour, children half clothed, the rain outside, she gathered all the debris into a neat stack and finished her coffee.

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Thursday

K A T E G A S K I N , 11 A . M .

The Owls It flew so close overhead—wingtip to wingtip as tall as a child—that, startled, my first impulse was to reach out and graze its mottled feathers.

This plainly wild thing, suddenly strange among the neighborhood’s groomed camellias and shiny black sedans parked under powerlines sagging with wisteria. Soon after, I saw its mate in the hickory tree behind our back shed.

A family, then. This was the year of illness, the year I cried as moonlight ran shadows up my bedroom wall, and then again when I woke to the same bright sun while the pair of them settled into their trees for the day, the way sadness roosts so quietly you don’t see it until it’s there.

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Raw Oysters As a girl I went with my father on vacation to Orange Beach and ate them with saltine crackers, cracked pepper, a coin of hot sauce pooling on top. I wanted to show I was brave, to bear this strange flesh by the wincing mouthful, the act of it a plea for love, a kind of tender theater.

Later, I taught my husband to love them by sheer repetition as we ate from oyster bar to oyster bar along the coastal town where we lived in that golden hour before the years of sickness descended, fear roosting over us, settling down for the long night ahead. Near our house there was a fish market that sold oysters by the briny bucketful. Here, the owner said, and shucked one behind the counter, pale tongue of meat on a stony bed. We ate them straight from their rough and brackish shells. Some years are so sharp, so raw in the mouth you can almost call them sweet.

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C H R I S B E N S O N , 12 P . M .

My Teeth Are Crumbling (lyrics) Every night my teeth are crumbling And I am running away from wizards chanting Yet somehow I am Also stuck on a volcano In the middle of an ocean And those dreams are making me so tired Asleep all day At night I’m wired I’m wired I’m wired I’m wired And I rack my jaws back and forth I get up and run up the hill and back down Make the bed and make some coffee Bring the coffee back to bed and start to feel better.

But every night my teeth are crumbling I think it’s the long silences on the phone If I’m being honest They ask: Do you have plans to come back home aren’t you worried that we’re worried about aren’t you worried that we’re worried about you?

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Alaska Wash your sadness away I’m coming home soon I’ve been gone for years and years the snow falling down breaks apart on the lake they say in the West you make your own fate Alaska I wanna go back I want to keep going until I’ve circled the earth When I was a child my family dressed up went shopping on Main Street everything was done up the lights and the buildings and I couldn’t blink the whole world was blinding and calling to me Alaska I wanna go back I want to keep going until I’ve circled the earth walking on water sleeping in sand walk in the door

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Friday KAROLINE STRICKLAND, 8 A.M.

Siren Song The neighbor children called her the water lady. She didn’t know it; but if she had, she would have been pleased. Water lady. It conjured the myths and fairy tales of her childhood – sirens, water naiads, mermaids – flitting into the mortal world and away again with their mystery and their magic intact. She had never been sure, as a child, whether she wanted to be one – or only to see one. Now, standing in the little forest stream that ran past her grandmother’s house, she knew she wanted to be like those creatures of her childhood. She wanted to follow the water as far as it would take her.

This wasn’t the first time she had known it. The first time she had been visiting her former college roommate in Alaska. Her friend was newly married and had begged Beth to visit her in Juneau, where her new husband was stationed. Saying yes had taken effort. She was not afraid of the trip – though she had never been so far away from home in her life. She had been afraid of loneliness, of feeling like a third wheel. She need not have worried: she had fallen in love the moment she stepped outside the airport and breathed in the new air. She’d never encountered anything like it. It was like breathing wine and ice; and there was a woody, wild scent – the smell – she had begun to realize – of possibility.

Nobody had ever expected Beth to leave her home town. She had been the obvious person to move in with her grandmother after she had her fall and needed help with the cooking and housecleaning. Beth had not objected: her grandmother was one of the great gifts in her life. She took care of Beth as much as Beth took care of her.

She could have stayed here – forever. But the river was calling her. An hour downstream, she knew, the placid stream ran over a shelf of rock and became a waterfall. From there it broadened, and went on broadening for miles – for hours – until it reached the sea.

“You coming inside, honey?”

She gave a guilty little start and turned, wading out of the middle of the rocky streambed and back through the trees towards the house.

“Yes, Grandma, on my way.”

Her grandmother did not go back inside. She waited in the doorway.

“You looking for something down the river?” she said.

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She did not often ask direct questions. This one took Beth by surprise. She stopped just outside the door, crossed her arms, and hesitated before she answered.

“I was looking for the sea,” she said.

Her grandmother chuckled her dry little chuckle.

“When you were a little girl,” she said, “I thought you might dive right in and swim to meet it one day.”

“What?” said Beth. “You did?”

“We called you a fish. You took to water like the rest of us take to breathing.”

“There’s a lot of water in the world,” said Beth. Her voice felt stuck in her throat.

She had just been given a gift – and she wasn’t quite sure how to open it.

“That there is,” said her grandmother. She stood in the doorway, looked at Beth with her old eyes behind their thick glasses, and she waited.

Whatever came next, Beth knew, was up to her.

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Returning The old man at the next table over was shivering. He was wrapped not only in his coat but a scarf, and only took off his gloves to hold the demitasse cup that the server brought him. This he held in two hands, like a man cupping a bird or a butterfly that might fly away any moment.

The young man with the crutch didn’t know he was staring till the man in the coat looked up and caught him at it. Then he jerked his eyes away. Too late, he realized he had only made it worse. He made himself look back and smile apologetically.

“It’s the best coffee,” said the old man in the coat. He had the accent of some southern place where the wind is rarely cold and grapes grow heavy on their vines.

The young man nodded. He’d never had it. He didn’t know.

The server brought his bowl and set it on the white tablecloth in front of him. He’d never had this before either. He’d never been to this restaurant at all. He’d intended to stay put – ignore his birthday altogether – but his featureless little apartment affected him like a prison. Going out to eat by himself was the lesser of two evils, even though he’d had to call a ride. He couldn’t drive with his right foot in a cast.

He bent his head over his bowl and inhaled.

“It’s the best, too?” inquired the old man in the coat, after a moment. The lilt in his voice was almost compassionate.

The young man with the crutch couldn’t answer right away. He had to find his way back to the cold little restaurant patio in the crowded city at the foot of the towering mountain.

“Yeah,” he said, at last. His eyes had focused again. His hands were on either side of the bowl. He was holding it the way the old man was holding his demitasse cup. That’s when he knew what the old man was doing: he was remembering. His tiny white cup took him back somewhere, like this dish was doing for him.

He passed his hand over his forehead. He was sweating. One of those little things that annoyed him since his accident – how anything that sped up his heart rate left him exhausted. Even the smell of food he’d thought was a hundred-something miles away, as the crow flies, somewhere on a mountain in the Rawah Wilderness.

Somewhere the trees were thin and straight as spears and the sky hung like a waiting crown; somewhere the air was pure and clear; where the water remembered ancient glaciers and the wind remembered the circle of the Arctic. Somewhere fire was a man’s best friend, and anyone with a backpack was free on the mountains as a king.

“It smells like – campfire,” he said. “Smoky.”

“You have the pasta?” inquired the old man. “The pasta with cheese?”

“Yeah,” said the young man. “I think there’s sausage – or peppers – or something in it.”

“Yes, that is why it smells like smoke,” said the old man.

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The young man nodded. It didn’t seem strange anymore to be having this conversation.

“Best meal I ever had” – he said – “was pasta alfredo over a camp stove. It was just out of a box. Nothing fancy. But it all tastes better out there – up there, you know?”

“Everything tastes better at home,” said the old man.

“Yeah,” said the young man with the crutch, after a moment. “That’s right.” He held up his fork. “To home,” he said.

“To home,” said the old man, and he stopped shivering, for a few moments, as he brought his cup to his lips.

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A Few Words for Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 The water poured like cream clotted and rich and sweet and heavy as blackberries on the summer vine. The pale girl stooped as she poured, each smaller pitcher welling to the top of its mouth before she moved to the next one. In the long stone room the light was so dim that the water had the brown leafy tint of a mountain stream.

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ALEX MOUW, 9 A.M.

Life Story Has your uncle ever parked two Airstreams in the driveway and left the family van on the street, vulnerable to side-swiping?

Do you have a dog gone toothless from rocks he hauls all the way from Moonlight State Beach?

If not, you probably can’t imagine my dad throwing my cat into a hot tub during a party.

You’d ask—from how high? with what decibel of shriek? and you would probably forget to wonder if the cat was orange or smoke.

Unless you’ve driven North Coast Highway 101, past the hip shops selling $40 candles beside the old building where my grandmother was a seamstress, it would be unaccountable to think of her, my cat, my dad, and me as connected by anything but genes and the sand of Encinitas. When I talked with a man who would become my husband, on the beach each night until 2 am., I was all earth, I could barely move unless tectonic plates beneath me did. I was as unprepared for my life as the wet cat I pulled from the water, whom I held as long as she would let me.

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Recalling the Street by the Riverfront, Peaceful and Amazing This is the kind of morning demanding coffee in the darkness behind one’s own eyes, the third-day-of-rain kind of morning whose spare, barely existing light you’re tired of before you’re awake, so bring the Colombian brew thick and dark.

I left my hometown with the resolve of a lobster fresh off the boat, armored and prepared to cut the red twine that held me to a whirring mobile of the babies, bones, and skins that raised me.

Reared me, I should say, because that town is always behind me whether or not I grow up.

This morning I am Orpheus screaming Duh! when Eurydice asks if I look back. I do.

I stretch my whole self back, not with ease but enjoying the pull from hips to shoulder, looking with no intention to step back.

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Stay at Home Order

a quarantine anagram

Hoarder tames toys is the dear story that met me on the sidewalk this morning a paper throat wrapped to dome to say THE NEWS IS ON AND YOU’RE a hoarder taming toys to keep your kids’ throats from dooming you to another day locked indoors.

Say you met a dear story.

Say the hoarded sun came out again.

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C H A U N B A L L A R D , 12 P . M .

[untitled] leaving and returning i took my love—i took it down that afternoon i climbed to find a mountain and i turned around turned around as some say years do and i saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills between a sort of plateau that released me ‘til the landslide brought me down from what aches oh—mirror in the sky—what is love? a valley—from where i wake—roll out of bed—ask: can the child within my heart rise above? no matter how early—late—the wade through what anchors— can i sail through the changin’ ocean tides? can i handle the seasons of my life? occasionally i’ll have all afternoon to begin mmm the slow work unwell—i’ve been ‘fraid of changin’ drownin’ the body—its slow work of process ‘cause i’ve built my life around you so much my motion settles— but time makes you bolder—even children get older and name you valley—i’ll name you valley— and i’m gettin’ older—too

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LARY KLEEMAN, 1 P.M.

Sonetto for Tom A lining, a standing, there was a redbud

and the shape was that of heaviness— a thing (this shape)

a thing to accustom one to the pocket watch of use.

What have we but a ribbon of memory

when, in the standing, in the solid use of creating something which outlasts

the morning (accustomed, bright, needful and likely).

There was a redbud without fence.

Spring, its nettle, its shape a thoughtless

opening to a thoughtful arrival.

When will we, in the midst of use,

find that which is perfect and hasn’t a need to outlast?

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Sonetto for Steve Casting out—a morning at sea—a call, to voice that which should. There. There be. A guess at anything is what would, what but you and your pottery wheel, casting the clay, some kind of slow fever before the hands, the idea, the clay dries or slows or saddens. Magpie alerts go unheard as you in your studio find a righteousness in artful guess. Morning at sea, morning at sea, should there be more care (full) more call? A voice, any voice, brings itself to smooth the uneven as touch as you may, this world becomes.

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Sonetto for Emily Dearest Emily: I shed my urban raincoat as I dream of long meadows, windflowers, the offshore mist which is open, which is you, there, there when there was every room and every room was nothing less than together. Oh juniper, oh passage through, what longing if not windflower left to less, a less that surely greens (won’t it?).

Each room, each nothing, each you in the letters not written, your smallish hands, your smile which opens a room to passage when pleasure is surely.

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Sonetto for Patrick Sawgrass (likely). Twine (a recollection). Just so you know, green inhabits like stream— well, seen another way, a there where (gazing to pine tops) one knows that a little becomes when wind chooses to think.

A recollection: You and that fence lizard.

Likely. A little boy with a rock to throw. A leaf, a little leaf (it fell).

And drip—that scene—and drip.

Opens the bright, such red was knowing.

How likely? And upon the choice, your hand, that lizard a little leaf.

Sawgrass. Twine. To escape, the frog digs deeper and sleeps away the winter.

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Sonetto for Stephanie Island, island (silly thing) that happens in a blue box, little blue box, there would not be greater—for water? for shame? No, no height but doubt and doubt is of any. Seaglass is simpler so let’s. Seaglass means placed—are we placed, are we pleased?

If it is water then surely to the table where shame is no longer. A page like this hasn’t the offering of an island— no island is as lonely and no poem as simple—but some poems you can never leave (silly things).

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LAUREL DOWSWELL, 2 P.M.

1) Birds – (for R. Wilkes) The flight of freedom is a diamond in my eyes. I dreamed of flying as a child.

I ran across green pastures and spread my arms out wide — smiling, running, jumping and lifted up into the sky and over the mountains.

As if the bird – sees me – longing to be the bird.

To light upon the world, in longing of?

Vision. Sight.

To see the things we long to see.

To be the things we want to be.

To escape the damages of the world.

In all of it – is just a chance. A chance to be.

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2) Plants – (for S. Wilkes) The leaves are green. Coming like a breath into existence.

They grow, almost invisibly, each day.

Before your eyes there’s a surprise.

Bigger, longer, softer, stronger.

They are a gift to us.

If we listen, see, touch, smell – even taste.

From succulents to the deciduous ones, they are teachers.

If we allow the lessons to be learned.

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3) Travel/Japan – (for C.A. Webb) Traveling is a launch into the unknown.

We thrive on discovery – on seeing, tasting, and experiencing new things.

An introduction, a glance of sorts into the workings of other cultures.

Their daily lives we can never fully grasp.

Perhaps, it is that seeking to know others – their experiences, their loves and struggles.

To propel connection and understanding.

How do we ever truly understand?

I also long to go to Japan.

The pink petals, Mt. Fuji, the architectural beauty.

Perhaps, someday. Perhaps.

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4) (no official prompt) – (for M. Franco) The grace of you is splendor in the grass.

By the lake – on the shore of knowing. More.

The shine of you encapsulates those around you like a reverse shadow, a bubble of warmth and care.

Dedication is not an easy ride – and it is the strongest souls that show us the deepest colors of existence.

If I drew you, you’d be a star – with radiating light and bounds of blessings.

A giving tree; a wise, precious soul.

This place of strength is where I long to be.

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(5) Solitude of the Soul, a sculpture by Lorado Taft – (for C. Cruwys) The closeness is equal to the space between.

We cling to each of those disparate spaces.

Sculpted in stone – is this our forever?

Connected together - but ultimately, irrevocably apart.

Two truths can occur at one time, and in that we live, and live deeply.

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LESLIE PEARSON, 3 P.M.

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Saturday FOR CINDY RINNE FROM ANNE MCGRATH, 8 A.M.

Green Green wonder is wonder that dazzles with heat and light. It is the wonder of star moss, wet and bright with leaves like tongues. The smell of freshly cut grass on the bottom of your feet. The taste of coconut, nutty and sweet, and often mistaken for white.

Flowers follow your spine like mala beads, glittering emerald stems arriving in bursts like fireworks in a night sky, dissipating into fog that hangs long after the light has left.

Green is the question that has no answer which is how we want it, for the answer would end the search. Green is the liminal space washing away in the sand and returning again with each wave.

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TO PATTY MCNULTY WITH LOVE FROM ANNE MCGRATH

Red Red courage is ripe and soft. It is the leap from a great height, through a labyrinth, leaving the ordinary behind.

Red is naked passion, the inner self untamed. It is the courage to sing loudly and dance alone. The sound of hands clapping. The first breath of air outside the hospital doors. The realization that the hospital ceases to exist once we leave it.

Red the velvet unconscious beyond the ego. The energy of life. It is the lava lamp blob dripping, trying to unblob itself.

Red is the fragrant part of the rose beyond the thorns. It is the realization that nothing is ours, and everything is ours.

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FOR JOSIAN CHRIQUI WITH LOVE FROM ANNE MCGRATH

Blue Blue is the glacier cascading into streams and seas where it will flow back to us. Blue is how we combat sinking, trusting we will float while acknowledging the obstacles that seek to pull us under. Blue is an explorer in the world of fish. Is it surprising that the whale fish has the biggest heart in the world, seven tons of it?

Bless our infinitesimal little hearts. We bring flowers to the school of colorful fish who have never seen anything like it. The fish want news of the world, and breaking the surface to enter their world, free of gravity, we bring it.

Blue is the Little Prince climbing a mountain so high he can view the whole planet and all the people on it. Look up at the night sky and ask yourself this: Has the fish eaten the flowers?

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JOSH MACIVOR-ANDERSEN, 9 A.M.

On Arrivals Grandma Millie, in her retirement mecca of Mesa Arizona, was meticulous in her sandwich-making. She applied peanut butter and jelly to slices of whole wheat with great thought, great care, even love. My solo trip home to Tennessee would be long, so she made a stack, individually ziplocked each, then placed them all gently into a brown paper bag.

I would be off in minutes, back to Nashville, having failed to become a missionary in California. The problem? Lack of foresight, preparation—the absence of a clue.

The US Center for World Mission was a compound, a school, and a missionary hub retrofitted onto the 17 acre campus of the former Pasadena Nazarene College. As a recent convert to brand of evangelical Christianity that was endlessly focused on reaching the unreached peoples of the world with the gospel, it was not only magnetic to me, but represented a kind of central command center for what I perceived to be spiritual battle waging through the cosmos.

I had driven out from Nashville after my parents threw me an extravagant going away party replete with a traveling troupe of South African missionary musicians. A launching. The beginning of what was to be a rite of passage, me in my Saturn sedan heading west to reach the world for Christ. My parents were so proud.

I planned to live on the US Center’s campus, adding my enthusiasm to their collective efforts, even if it meant cleaning floors or doing dishes. In other words, I had no idea what I was doing, just a sense of where I wanted to be, which was among people who wanted to make the message of an upside down kingdom manifest in the physical world.

But I was broke. And money matters, even to missionaries. I discovered I would have to go home and raise financial support in order to join the team. Everyone on staff had spent years cultivating a support base. I was deflated, perhaps a little disillusioned, but knew I couldn’t conjure $600 a month from the ether. I had to turn around to fill my coffers.

I pointed my Saturn toward the nearest financially salient family member with my new mantra: Support me! Grandma and Grandpa were the geographic first stop.

From there, I planned to drive the entire distance back to Nashville without stopping for anything but gas and bathroom breaks. I figured I had lots of work to do and, if I were to get back to Pasadena, I needed to get home fast.

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With Grandma’s sandwiches riding shotgun, I set out early in the morning, straight north for Flagstaff, where I took a right turn, pointed the Saturn east, brought her up to seventy-five, and hit cruise. The desert zipped past mile by mile, turning scrubbier in New Mexico, more tree-filled and plateaued heading into the Texas panhandle.

It’s there, as the sun was beginning to retreat behind me, that I hit a bird. At first it seemed far off, a vaguely arcing patch of chestnut careening toward the interstate, but the closer I got the more I felt in my chest some kind of imminent collision based on its trajectory and mine. I didn’t understand physics cerebrally, but I could feel them in that moment. My real-time bodily calculations were correct. The small bird flew in front of my grill as I clenched my teeth, gripped the steering wheel, and felt the thud in the front of the car all the way down to my bones. A few brown and white feathers skimmed over the hood and flashed up the windshield and were gone.

This might have been minor, but only months before I had asked God, who I had only recently been addressing, to please reach down his heavenly hand and keep animals from running under my wheels. It was a leveraging point of sorts. I promised him I would be the real deal, a conveyer of his gospel to the ends of the earth, if he could help me from killing the animals who scurried over the roads, night and day, of my rural Tennessee home. I had been hitting them a lot. The contact was turning into something like PTSD. I would panic as I took the backroad twists and turns, terrified that I’d feel another thud beneath the wheels.

The bird hit hard but I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to see. I hoped—prayed, actually— that the bird might have just glanced off the bumper and perhaps even survived its collision, shaken it off like an inconvenient blow in order to keep flying. The God I knew loved the birds and cared for them, right? Right. It was even in the bible.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?” asks the writer of Matthew. “Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”

*

I had hoped to truly launch. I was sure my quest to join the US Center was the first step toward a life of missions and service. I wanted so badly to be a good Christian, one who actually modeled his life after the radical stuff of Jesus and the notion that The End—as in: the end of the world as we know it and the emergence of some new gleaming kingdom—would only come when the gospel had reached the far corners of the earth. To feel a part of such a cosmic mandate was intoxicating. It felt like I was seeking to join the elite, the gospel special forces, but now I was heading home to worry over things as trivial as monthly paychecks.

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I arrived home to our Tennessee farm, finally, after 27 straight hours of solo driving. The surge of energy I felt having reached my long gravel driveway was enough to make me think I could keep going, perhaps veer off to Waffle House for breakfast, perhaps a leisurely circle or two around the city as the sun rose and reflected like fire on all those downtown skyscrapers.

I knew it was a temporary high, though. I knew how barely I had survived the last hours between Memphis and Nashville—having stopped at each of that stretch’s four rest areas just to pinch my eyes closed in order to make the hallucinations stop.

Mom was the only one awake in those early morning hours, as she usually was, out tending her sheep and llamas and goats. I rumbled up the driveway and sat behind the wheel for a minute or two. She made her way from the field to my car, opened the door, helped me up, and let me slump into her arms.

“Welcome home,” she said.

I just leaned there, resting.

“I’m still proud of you,” she said.

I sighed, felt like crying.

“Looks like you brought a passenger,” she added, nodding to the front bumper.

The vesper sparrow had indeed been with me the whole time, had followed me faithfully back to the beginning.

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MELISSA REESER POULIN, 10 A.M.

Apricot

for Kim Reeser “I have slow, apricot memories.”

-Gabeba Baderoon, “Hunger” An apricot seed does a good job of carrying on the traits of its parents.

Little kernel encased in stony pit Crack it tender from the stone.

You can plant it that way.

Let it grow to a height you can harvest in five years’ time or graft it scion to rootstock to speed the journey from parched mouth to sweet flesh warmed by sun.

I have slow, apricot memories.

Grandpa’s hands, rough from decades of dirt, hefting flats of stone fruit to put up in the pantry.

Grandma’s kitchen always immaculate, lining layers of rinsed strawberries with paper towels.

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As if to split us from the mess of earth of his shin bit by combine the skin mangled as an apricot pit where it once was smooth as a baby’s.

Slow apricot memories of my own baby’s peach-soft skin, commingled with earliest song: your heartbeat below my ear when I rested there.

A mixed inheritance: the traits we express, the growth we choose.

The voice in my head that says don’t stray too far from the path stay in line, the way he did.

Did you fight with that same fear?

Skin graft Tree graft See if it takes.

What you grafted in to our family tree: a string of gardens I keep making.

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Guardian

for Bryce Poulin

How did we get here?

For so long in my mind’s eye you stayed fourteen, mouth a glitter of metal, guarding the bright smile you’ve always carried. Around you the whir of friends, laughter, hurry toward the green roads of your future.

In my mind’s eye you are still somehow the sun, or a packet of Vitamin C, someone who doesn’t enter so much as invite a room, effervescing all of us into the adventure you’re having.

The dream that has followed me all of my life is that the brakes don’t work, or I wake to find myself alone in a moving car, stuck behind the driver’s seat, struggling from there to control the thing that shuttles me forward, and I remember you letting us in, the season you struggled to draw a full breath sitting at the dark wood table and letting the tears fall and how that was the moment the picture changed and I saw you as someone in the car with me, someone who could let his guard down and say, There’s so much we can’t control.

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Surfer

for Cheryl Wallick I wake up swimming through rooms of a flooded house.

Walls, windows Blue as fistfuls of blueberries on a hanging scale: my hair liquid in the currents my children sleeping in their rooms.

Some days I feel like I’m drowning.

Other days I see God has made me a fish is giving me a new element to breathe in.

Is there anything in this world that isn’t an attempt to leave home or return to it?

I say I don’t really have a hometown. I keep swimming. In the dream I remember I know how to surf.

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On Latches Lane

for Jeanne Murray Walker Three street signs spell it differently but it’s the same road winding through the same trees.

I come home and write a poem in which I spell my name three different ways.

Perhaps we are always three different people at any given time: The one others see The one our loved ones see and the one we keep hidden.

On the road to happiness (not yet) someone with empathy and moral sense is leading the country. No, I would not turn around, but keep walking toward promise, away from this hell. The one others see.

I taught the Inferno last spring, when the trees on Latches Lane were catching fire with bloom, and it’s like that this year. Rings of suffering within rings of new growth. Different ways this could all go.

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Baptism after a painting by Abdi Farah for Matthew Miller There are not many nights like this in our whole life: in the bright gree of the mountains dinner with my hand on your thigh.

If I were Orpheus, of course I’d turn around. There is never enough time to spend with the beloved. So I gulp a glass of water refocus on prayer grind coffee, savor, try to slow down.

Before we get out of the car I quote Numbers-- May the Lord bless you and keep you-- then remember I haven’t given them their three daily vitamins, then remember I never take my own vitamins.

For a long time I made art I was only half-inspired to make, But now I help my young boys across the rocks, continue along the ridges of our mountain.

Charcoal, dirt, pencil.

So much I love, so much of us that’s made of earth.

I write down fear for the waves to wash away, when it feels like we only have seven minutes left.

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K A T I E M A N N I N G , 11 A . M .

Dear Carol, Do you mind if I write you the love poem I’d write to you after your death while you are still alive? You didn’t know at the time, but you once brought my faith back to life.

In a tiny room to the side of our college’s cafeteria, you gave a talk on Julian of Norwich.

“God is also our Mother,” you said, serving as doula and midwife, inviting me to breathe.

Now Julian sits between us in the form of my four-year-old son, eating oatmeal and blueberries, coaxing you to bring him more cookies from your office, shouting in wonder at the surfers we can see from this ocean-view room, reminding us again that God is always our Mother, writing fear in the sand to wash it away.

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Love Letter from the Smoky Mountains

for Matthew Miller We marvel at the beauty of your faces when you turn them up to marvel at us, the way you glow in the bright green of our old growth forest, slowly inhaling the fog that our vegetation exhales. The black bears never look at us this way. But you, father, you are never more beautiful than when you take your small sons by the hand and lead them carefully over the boulders—the smaller versions of you slipping over smaller versions of us, but steadied again by your touch— when we see that longing in your face, the wish that you could spend more time with each child, one by one, a mountain range’s long, slow lifetime holding on to each precious one.

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Ode to My Sock Maker

for Denise Frame Harlan The sock maker hands me three bags of socks to sift through over breakfast. I’ve never shopped for socks over pancakes before, but I’ve heard that strange things often happen in Santa Fe. I quickly choose an orange and gray pair for my spouse who loves orange, but what to choose for myself? As with so many things, I want too much, and I’m so tired from making large decisions that I sometimes freeze when I have to choose something small. My coffee is getting cold.

“You might like these… some people love the mismatched pairs I make from scraps.”

She places the most gorgeous wool in my hands: the burnt oranges of the desert mountains touch the stormy blue of the sky, woven with white clouds, threaded with the wild yellows, purples, and peaches that must be us: the misfit band of writers and artists who have gathered together here for a week, who are somehow guests but also deeply woven into the fabric of this creation that is messy and so good.

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Hireath

for Michael Wells You tell me a staircase that leads to nowhere is your recurring dream just moments before you teach me the Welsh word hireath, and it’s as if you’ve used a magic spell: I now have that very intense homesickness that doesn’t translate well into English.

I see your dream staircase, or one like it, each time I go home to see my parents.

Did you know that the staircase to nowhere is in the center of the world: Felicity, California?

I’m serious. The stairs are one of twenty pieces of the original Eiffel Tower staircase, and apparently France and other EU countries recognize Felicity as the center.

The US does not. Felicity, or intense happiness, also doesn’t translate well into American English, we who are always chasing dreams that leave us breathless and far from home.

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JONATHAN WINSTON JONES, 12 P.M.

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CATHERINE HARVEY, 1 P.M.

1) Her parents never believed her about the binoculars. They didn’t say so, of course, but she knew the vocal cadence of disbelief, dismissal. “Oh really, honey?” or “Wow,” when she told them what she saw. For a while it made her very upset, but she learned to keep to herself what she saw. The binoculars weren’t old; they hadn’t belonged to a relative or been purchased secondhand. They’d come on Amazon, as a gift from her father for her mother’s birthday. When anyone else looked into them they saw exactly what they were looking for in the backyard--a small yellow bird or a squirrel dray high in the maple tree. It was only when she looked that she saw miles, miles past the field behind the house, out of town to a city several states away where people hung laundry across alleyways. She told her father about this and he said, “Wow, amazing.”

The next time she picked them up and looked the other direction she saw mountains, impossibly tall mountains with peaks obscured by clouds. This time she did not tell her mother, who was sitting beside her on the grass. She managed not even to gasp, she just looked. She adjusted the focus and there was a single pine tree, the image clear enough that she could see swaying clouds of needles hanging from its branches.

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2) “This can’t be right.”

“But the map says..”

“This is a bicycle path. European cars are tiny and all but this is a bicycle path and I’m not going any farther.”

“We have a reservation! Cliffside! Al Fresco!” She waved the printed pages in front of her brother’s nose. From the back seat of their tiny rented Fiat, their eightyfive year old mother said, “Oh, I’m sure we’ll be fine.” It was the sort of thing she said when she wanted everyone to calm down but had no solution of her own to offer, and though these sorts of statements never bothered her son, especially not now that he was fifty two, her daughter gritted her teeth and pinched her nose. “Fine, Henry, turn around. We’ll ask for directions.” Ruth told herself she would stay calm. For her mother’s sake. Her mother who would never leave the country again, after this. Her mother who insisted this trip was unnecessary but said that about everything any of them ever tried to do for her. And this, this day in Portofino with dinner at the cliffside restaurant...Ruth had spent days planning this one. She heard her mother shifting in her seat and worried afresh about the distance, the time spent sitting, whether it had really been wise to come this far in one day. She turned to look at Henry and was made only more annoyed by the fact that he didn’t seem worried about their day or their mother at all. He had the benefit of knowing she would worry and expend all the energy that comes with worry, take all the action worry prompts one to take.

Now he was whistling as he backed the car out of the bike path and reversed back down the steep hill, his arm flung over the back of her seat. Ruth opened her handbag and rummaged through until she found the print-out confirmation of their dinner reservation and read it through once more, as though she could affect some change on their situation this way. “Look, mother!” she yelled, leaning backwards out of her seat to get as near as possible to her mother’s ear. She pointed to the picture at the top of the reservation confirmation. “Cliffside!”

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3) My sister’s Honda Civic served me very well until it didn’t. It developed a phantom, undiagnosible chronic illness as I drove alone down a highway in Tennessee on my way to a session of grad school. Steam, overheating. A very kind state trooper who called a water truck. I thought that was the end, but driving up to Nashville a few weeks later to return my husband to the airport, it happened again. He would have missed his plane if I didn’t just drop him off, so I did, and proceeded to inch the hour and a half back to school in the rural highway darkness, stopping by the side of the road for an unscientifically determined period of time whenever the needle got too red. I remember it was the Fourth of July, and there were fireworks exploding everywhere in the distance as my hands shook on the steering wheel.

The next day I took it to the local mechanic who told me something about my right front wheel bearing and charged me some money. I started the drive home a few weeks later with optimism, if shaken in confidence, only to have the needle bounce upwards again as evening feel and I crossed into Indiana. I wound up sobbing outside a tiny mechanic while two very nice men debated about what to do with me at 6pm on a Friday evening.

“We could send her down that way to the…”

“Nah, there’s a meth house down there.”

They couldn’t look at my car until the next day because everything inside the engine was too hot to touch, but the next morning one of them produced my thermostat with triumph and said, “Here! It was all corroded.” I got back on the highway with considerably less optimism and once again the needle spiked outside of Indianapolis. What followed was a fifty-mile per hour trip with the windows down and the heater blasting at the highest possible level. I rolled home with a terrible sunburn on the left half of my body, hungry and thirsty as I hadn’t ingested anything for the entirety of the day, shaken by being honked at as I creeped into the left lane at my grandmother speed for a left exit.

For several years now we have had a new car, a much more reliable car. And yet this new car is a palimpsest. It is as though the old car remains underneath. I worry when we turn on the air conditioner on the highway, every time.

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4) Around the age of one my daughter started throwing food off the tray of her high chair. As she was my first child, this seemed like a problem, a problem I could perhaps look to the internet to solve. Some people said you should just put a mat down and clean it all up later. Some people said that you should get them out of the chair and have the meal be over when they started throwing the food, and they would learn that they shouldn’t if they want to keep eating. It only took a few more posts in the thread for people to start accusing each other of child abuse. I haven’t looked to the internet for this sort of advice since.

Because honestly, I need nobody’s help to accuse myself of such things--I can handle that all on my own.

It has been the most unexpectedly painful aspect of becoming a parent--fearing that with every thing I do or don’t do I am hurting them. Imagining them as adults, crying with their friends the way I cry now with mine about cruelties in their past.

My daughter who threw food off her tray at one is now seven, and this week because it is once more May we marked her height on the lintel of her bedroom doorway. And this is what I tell myself--look. Look here. Growth. Every day with no conscious input from anyone she is growing, she is thinking, she is learning to tell her own terrible jokes. New teeth are poking awkwardly through her gums and it just keeps happening, Thank God it just keeps happening and she seems...well whenever I look at her as hard as it is to believe she seems okay. She’s smiling and laughing and then she’s upset about something but it always gets better and maybe, maybe it’s going to be all right.

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CARLY JOY MILLER, 2 P.M.

E. to O. Before He Looks Back

for Katie Manning Look not behind you: The path graveled and the music grave.

The stone choir is strict in their knowledge, and make it so: A rolling under. Like a memory of the sea.

Hasn’t it always been your hand beside me?

Hasn’t there been praise for the waves at our feet?

A lunge toward land—a trust toward that solid ground.

O love, what ground is more solid than ours?

When we arrive, I will hold your face toward light.

Your face, my grounding. Your eyes, my path for the rest of our years.

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E. to O. After He Looks Back

for Kate Gaskin Look, and— now I am rid of the loud bells of living.

Goodbye, sweet silver of faith in the dark bark of trees. Farewell, dappled skin.

Now starts my affair with the dead.

Worry not: I have a mind toward shadow.

Was it not longing that brought me back here, toward the lilies, toward this opposite of light that still is light—my white, lilied sheen of silence?

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SHANN RAY, 3 P.M.

The Turn Is Late 3 Stretched Sonnets

1 / Houselife I remember days Of endless trees And birds Like undulant coils Wrapping the body Of the world.

This robe is not A spirit of despair But a garment Of praise.

And red-winged blackbirds Tilting on cattails In the marsh where the trees Used to grow, before They fly to my shoulder And say calmly, “Arise.�

2 / Robin Wide open blue, Lady slipper, lupine, wood lily And further Into the dark, Ghostpipe. What is it That beckons

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Me, always, from light To shadow? I know What it is.

The most familiar hands didn’t hold What I thought they would.

Then at a glance I caught my friend staring with such love, when she touched the back of my head in a kind of blessing my life rang with green grass and flew into the sky.

3 / Smokey Hill Road

for my father I remember days Of endless trees And birds Like undulant coils Wrapping the body Of the world.

This robe is not A spirit of despair But a garment Of praise.

And red-winged blackbirds Tilting on cattails In the marsh where the trees Used to grow, before They fly to my shoulder And say calmly, “Arise.”

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