Madeleine Eggen

Pencil Poem

between a buttered spoon and half measure I tell her that change is the human condition and my hands are never in the right place. she’s washing and that’s real love. I think it is easier to type it because you don’t have to face the marks you made, plus cruel looks much kinder in pencil. let’s kiss in the front basket of a bicycle or much too late, dry mornings turn damp elbows and a blueberry buckle, folded summer jeans that billow behind me.

I am a very good woman who was an even better girl with a virginal pen, these pages, I hate you so we paint chapters on the wall. lately I have knelt against the earth, both of us wet, in my morning cup I ask for a coincidence. see us bare-bodied on the dead rooftop garden, a dangling secret and felted breath that carry in from the creek, we brush noses, grandmother clogs. late afternoon is winter magic that stretches thick black wool shadows, a breathing life curling in on itself and I am her gray-winged messenger, lying until wake.

Fronia Kemper

Lemon Drops

When my brother and I go to the hospital, we walk the halls like models practicing their runway poses. We walk the halls like middle aged women who jog with little pink weights, and we chat about our imaginary teenage sons who vape at school, spend all their time in their rooms, and don’t talk to us. We get in the elevator and push all the buttons.

We go to the hospital gift shop. We try on pairs of reading glasses. We try on hats. He tries on a puffy black hat that makes him look like a train conductor. When I take a photo of him wearing it, it makes him look like a train conductor who does not want his photo taken. I have a thing about lip balm. I like the ones they sell at the hospital. They smell like grapefruit and the good ones are soft. The bad ones are waxy and taste like strong honey.

I have a thing about lip gloss too. I buy several. Glittery, pink, gritty, and chemical. They come in fun containers shaped like fruit. One looks like a hard plastic cherry. Another is apple-shaped, and that one tastes really sweet. You have to put it on with your fingers.

My brother drags me to the cafeteria and we pick out gumbo, cornbread, pizza, sushi, chocolate cake, chocolate pudding, chocolate chip cookies, Dr. Pepper, iced tea: sweet, iced tea: unsweet (by accident), and sometimes a few bags of chips. We try it all, and make faces, and I remember how Mom said, it’s a hospital, the food shouldn’t be good, it isn’t the most important thing. It’s not the priority here. Maybe I wish the hospital was a restaurant instead.

Sometimes we save the iced teas for walking. They come in plastic bottles, slippery with condensation, a bit square. We walk with them in our hands, pumping them like little pink weights. We call each other Darlene. We discuss the PTA.

Sometimes we go to the skybridge and look out the big windows. We see the sky, and the brown buildings. Other hospitals, all around us. A sea of hospitals. An army of hospitals. It doesn’t feel like there’s anyone inside of them. It doesn’t feel like anyone is in our hospital either. We brush he says. Then he sees what we’ve done and curses loudly, then rushes out again. Once he’s gone we burst out laughing. I want to run after him and hit him. I want to run after him and fall on my knees.

We have a photoshoot. We are models, in the hospital. I take pictures of my brother with the statues of the children outside. The children are supposed to be playing, but they’re so still that they look scared. My brother pretends he’s talking to them. He daps them up. He takes pictures of me on the suitcase trolleys (the hospital has them, like it’s a hotel or something). I’m wearing my white dress with little red flowers on it. I post the pictures on Instagram and my friends tell me I look hot.

We go to the giftshop again. My brother looks through the socks. He buys cool socks, popcorn socks. They are striped red and white, like a bag of popcorn, and they have the word POPCORN up and down the sides. I buy a bag of lemon drops. They’re not for me. I consider buying a tiny sewing kit. That would be for me. I don’t buy it.

There’s a Starbucks, but it’s always closed. We walk past it. I say, hey, what if that was open? He says, yeah, what if it was?

Sometimes we sneak down hallways we aren’t supposed to see. It isn’t really on purpose. We get lost. Then the walls are yellow instead of white, and plastic sheets, or plywood, cover the doorways. Sometimes it’s an unfinished hallway, with the plastic and the plywood, but sometimes it’s just empty. It doesn’t feel like a part of the hospital. It doesn’t feel like the place where you go to get better. It feels like the place where something has already died, and now it remains, lingering. My brother always wants to look around, get into it. Usually, we split.

We go to the cafeteria again. I drag him there. He says no, I don’t wanna, but he follows me. Earlier was lunch. Now, we eat dinner. Dinner is always smaller. We remember lunch, and are not eager to repeat it.

By now, we are bored. We sit in the middle of the floor. We make the doctors and nurses and patients walk around us. We sigh, like we can’t believe this is the hospital, this is all there is to do here.

This is how my brother and I go to the hospital.

When Dad goes to the hospital, he sits in bed and watches baseball on television. He wears a blue gown over his clothes. He eats a fruit cup. When he tries to sleep, doctors come in and wake him up and ask him questions, or someone places an IV wrong and gets blood all over the sheets, or he can’t sleep because his stomach hurts, or he can’t sleep because he’s infected this time, or he can’t sleep because his head is cold, or he can sleep, and he does, and he wakes up to a bag of lemon drops on his tray table, looking at him forlornly, all yellow and small.

This is how Dad goes to the hospital. We’ve all got it down pretty good.

Kate Williams

We Were Kids

Back then, the air was smoother and colors were brighter. Long before right and wrong were canyons carved away by experiences, back when we were still drawing conclusions with sticks in the sand. Then––way back then––we did not waste our breath on work.

We fought over serving sizes of ice cream and gave our mom headaches. We ran until our lungs burned and danced to The Boomtown Rats half-naked on table tops. We were a bunch of billy goats: mean, dirty, and funny-looking.

Everything was not enough. Not enough tastes, not enough hugs, not enough love. We were a litter of puppies howling for a mother who’d been bred too many times to be able to tell our screams apart.

We waged wars in the woods. We fought dirty. We threw pinecones and mud and the occasional treacherous stone. We lapped at our open wounds, swallowed blood, stuck our cherry red tongues out at each other, we looked like wild animals.

We made finger paint masterpieces and popped tar bubbles until our hands and feet turned black. We made mosaics from broken chalk. We played Hunger Games, Monopoly, Charades, Crazy Eights, 54-Card Pickup. We bought fake cigarettes to puff on and pretended to be PI’s, like in a Prairie Home Companion.

We loved our mom with all of our beings. We loved her smell, the way her jacket retained the cold winter air and froze our tiny faces when we buried them in her stomach to snort up her perfume. We loved her hair, her voice, the way she wrapped herself around us. We were safer on her lap than any other place on Earth, and we gazed at her belly with nostalgia and longing.

We wanted to crawl back into her, we wanted to be always with her, we wanted her to sit on the end of our beds and read us bedtime stories. We wanted all of her, all of the time, all alone, all to ourselves. We shared these wants like we shared life, we knew how soft our neediness made us, so we mocked each other for it.

We spoke broken, we said things wrong, we shouted instead of talking. We ran on our hands and knees, bore our bony spines toward the sun. We chased cars, hooted and hollered after them while pounding on our naked chests. We had no inside, we lived on the outside, and we used our voices accordingly.

We got dirt under our fingernails from digging holes in search of treasure and killed gods with our bare hands. Our naked bodies were everything we needed: finger forks, palm goblets, bony elbow bludgeons, teeth like daggers, long toe grabbers—we knew how to adapt.

We drew up maps, declared territories under our names, christened ourselves kings of everything. We owned the world as we knew it. We cut ties, disowned one another, we watered down our blood. We made peace.

We were witches, librarians, warlocks, heroes, firefighters, villains, astronauts, monsters, teachers, angels, rogues, ruffians, riff-raffs, we were misbehaving. We were acting out, running late, almost done, doing well, doing bad, being loud, playing rough, dirtying up, we were children.

On summer afternoons, we were sticky from the humidity, angry from the heat, suffocating from boredom. We became bandits, a handful of thieves rifling through our mom’s purse for pocket change. We’d steal silver coins still cold from the shadowy corners of her leather tote and stuff them deep into our pockets with deep-seated shame and anxious excitement.

We’d take out Dad’s bike, the nice bike, one of us perching on the handlebars, one of us dangling off the back, one of us pedaling the impossible weight, and two of us jogging alongside. We’d sing made-up songs, tell each other stories, and pretend we were pilgrims.

We overstayed our welcome in the drugstore that still sold penny candy. We’d touch everything, soak up the A/C, and ask to try ice cream we couldn’t afford. We’d sit on the floor and count our loot, we’d promise never to loot again, we’d cross our fingers and our bare toes.

We’d stretch eight nickels, three dimes, sixteen pennies, and two shiny silver quarters into Twizzler ropes, Swedish Fish, and Now & Laters. We got grabby with our treasure, we said thank you to the judgy shop clerk because we were thieves with good manners. We sat outside and divided it all up, we were vultures, and we cried when we got less.

We’d bike back home, loud and happy with pinkish cheeks from the sun and mouths agape, smacking our sugar-laced lips together.

We’d contemplate Christmas lists, Halloween costumes, Lord of the Flies, what it would be like if we were rich and had our own rooms. We’d call dibs on seats in the car, push, shove, scratch, and squeal, we’d hit each other and claim ownership over each other’s ideas. We’d cry together, make amends, and swear on pinky fingers. We broke oaths.

We wrote plays, drew pictures, made movies, designed outfits, sang songs, started empires. We were sons of sailors. We lied, we stole, we cursed, we made crude jokes, we resorted to violence.

Sometimes, we’d be overlooked. Sometimes, we’d be convicted of crimes we didn’t commit. We’d get punished: spankings, lashings, wooden spoons on open palms. We’d shriek and sob and wail and sink into embarrassment. We’d fight back for each other, take blame, share penances. We were young then, real young.

We held our breath when things got bad. When Mom got quiet, when Dad got red and his eyes got bulgy. We liked it best when he had rum, when he had us place our tiny feet in his palms so he could lift us up into the sky. We soared like Jesus on the cross, our arms outstretched, our smiles so wide we feared we’d rip open at the seams.

On hazy mornings when it was warm enough to go barefoot, we’d make fairy houses out of twigs and rocks with moss roofs, and we would never wash our hands before breakfast, even when we saw deer droppings. We ate like we were proud of it, quick and fast and loud. We spilled cups, we knocked over trays, we put our elbows on the table and shared toothbrushes.

We made boats from beer cans and twine. We sunk battleships and broke bones. We made bandaids from cobwebs and saved up box tops. We started fires with magnifying glasses. We opened our eyes underwater even though it burned. We doggy-paddled, drowned each other, made mud pies, carved pumpkins, and cooked the seeds with olive oil and salt.

And when we limped back home from afternoons spent doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, our mother still loved us with her entire being. We basked in the warmth of her undying, unfaltering, unconditional love and knew that if there was a God, he was made in her image.

We borrowed cups of sugar, used neighbors’ phones to call our mom and ask her when she was coming home, and walked down to the end of our lane to wait for her. We dreamed of her smell and her smile while we sang songs and taunted our monstrous shadows. We made trees into urinals and picked apples, peaches, pears, and mulberries. We ate honeysuckle, plain popcorn, and generic brand popsicles.

We got sunburns, more freckles, and natural highlights. We shared secrets, names, stories, and clothes. We held hands, cuddled after nightmares, clung to each other when it was cold, clutched our sweaty-sticky-dirty hands together in a long daisy chain to cross the street together, each one of us looking in different directions for oncoming cars.

Our shoes had holes, our hands were dirty, our smiles were semi-toothless, our legs maps of bruises and cuts, our arms covered in mosquito bites, our hair scented with soil and crowned with sticks, our knees knobby, our fingers cold to the touch, our hearts overflowing with everything.

We were happy, we were mad, we were sick, we were lost, we were funny, we were sad, we were kids.

Motherhood

Summer evenings on the back deck, my dad chips golf balls to his mini green Black Keys, Born Ruffians, Bob Marley: three little birds. Two little bats sleep upside along the roof of my house, as the sun sets they glide over our heads, dropping down to us like fallen leaves. Mom said there were billions of raspberries in the garden today. I shove handfuls in my mouth, bright warm red, my lips bloody sap. The white pitbull used to chase the golf balls down the grass. The brown one sat on the edge of the deck and barked her encouragements forward Too old, too tired and too fat to participate. I can still hear their phantom barks, and if I squint my eyes just enough I can see wagging tails peeking around corner walls. Dad loved those dogs, mom secretly loved them more. I told them when the dogs died I would probably die too, but I didn’t. I said it again when autumn came, but the trees died instead. Mom picked zucchinis from the garden and made zucchini bread. Dad said the Jets are gonna do better this season, And I’m feeling optimistic because I’m gonna be twenty-one next month. Twenty-one things I’m thankful for:

Zucchini bread.