NERVE
writers in the attic
Selected by KERRI WEBSTER Edited by JOCELYN ROBERTSON With an introduction by BRITT UDESEN
This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 www.thecabinidaho.org Š 2014 The Cabin All rights reserved. Book design by Jocelyn Robertson. Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 100 copies.
CONTENTS Introduction • 1
PULSE
MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK In the Jefferson County Historical Society and T.V. Museum, with Double Homicide • 7 L. HILDENBRANDT KAHN Under the Spell of the Empire of Nature (Though She Would Never Admit It) • 10 MEGAN WILLIAMS Kale with Gorgeous Insecurity • 13 DAPHNE STANFORD Nerves, Ending • 14 JAMES ARMSTRONG Synapse • 17 HEIDI KRAAY news • 18 EDVIN SUBASIC Emergence • 20
GRIT
TIM RUSSOW That was the time • 25 MEGAN WILLIAMS Self-Performance with Permission • 26 MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK Medieval • 29
CHRISTIAN A WINN Molly Ringwald • 30 ELIZABETH T WOODRUFF ME • 33 MEGAN WILLIAMS Advent • 35
SINEW
DIANE RAPTOSH Five Poems from AutoFill: Ishmael • 39 ANITA TANNER my husband’s cancer • 51 CATHERINE KYLE The Red Sea • 53 MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK The History of Love • 54 MEGAN WILLIAMS Limerence Poem • 59
NETWORK
JANET SCHLICHT Orange • 64 CHRISTIAN A WINN San Francisco, girl • 63 HEIDI KRAAY like a dusty Sarah Kane collection • 67 MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK Thanks, Henry Ford • 68 CATHERINE KYLE Costs • 73 TIM RUSSOW If only the cloud could retaliate • 75
COURAGE
CHRISTIAN A WINN Four Steps in the Long Walk Downtown • 78 SHEILA ROBERTSON Tormentia 777 • 80 CARRIE SEYMOUR The Nervous Child Grows Up • 82 HEIDI KRAAY whiplash • 86 SIERRA BURLEY Incisions • 89
MARY ELLEN MCMURTRIE Silence • 91
INTRODUCTION The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver. — VIRGINIA WOOLF The Cabin’s mission is to inspire and celebrate a love of reading, writing and discourse. With this small, beautiful book we are jumping right into the celebration part. Some of these writers have taught classes for The Cabin, some of them are brand new to us. All of them bring a wisdom and nerve to the page that I can’t wait to share with you. Maybe you bought this book because your sister or your teacher is published in it. I ask that you keep reading and discover how rich Boise is with storytellers and poets. — BRITT UDESEN
1
NERVE
writers in the attic
PULSE We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. — JOHN MUIR
MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK
IN THE JEFFERSON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND T.V. MUSEUM, WITH DOUBLE HOMICIDE Rigby, Idaho Winter camouflages itself as spring, spruced in plumage of February blue. The liberated air carries a tang of diesel and thawed manure. Muck on shoes, I enter with small daughters, four and six, who sing the joys of free soft drinks and snacks. For one day, the fugitive world has fixed, with the warm weather, simply everything. Burritos are on sale in the drive thru. Among my stray thoughts are Edmund Husserl and Freiburg crew in chummy kaffeeklastch, convinced that consciousness could not unfurl without a perfect subject-object match; a bunch of chukars, plump as Jesuits, that skied across a field of flawless drifts then scattered in pale sky like fighter jets with black-barred sides and feet of tough coral. (I had to pull the car over to watch); and the woman who snapped after midnight last week, stormed in a house two blocks over from here, hoping that with dark luck she might stab ex-husband and his live-in lover. The report said she dialed 911 7
from a Fastop convenience store, cold, stunned, festooned in speckled tufts of blood. Someone heard her say, “How did I get drenched in it?” Somewhere, the weapon lies unrecovered. Inside, we find rare genealogies of dusty bric-a-brac in blunt cases. There’s a shrine to the work of Philo T.’s genius, geodes, the freakish Medusa’s head of a Frederics hair wave machine. My girls curvet and clap from one station to the next, peering at moon rocks, fashion dinosaurs, old Dalkon-Shield IUD’s, and two Sheik condoms. I screen their faces. The point comes when we say we’ve seen enough. Discovery sheds its glow, and we tire of young Farnsworth’s “Image Dissector,” of sailfish jaws, and fourteen styles of barbed wire. I question this invented screen’s glory that between Stalin documentary and crass sitcom now airs nightly stories of women slashing up men like roast beef. On the way out, I take a free flier. Outside, we leave a trail of taloned shoe and boot prints in the mud of the season. No archeologist will comb them through. Driving, I balk at being liaison between good and evil for my two chicks. From the lisping philosopher’s mind tricks do I stop their ears? Do I try to nix the darkness? Preserve their pure eyes from true life, the killer facts saved for a reason? 8
The answers wait in the chukar covey. Now we drift toward becoming artifacts. Someone puts us aside, calls us relic. We huddle up under the pellet hail of the elements or, panicked, blindly whirl in a trice and decimate the flock. The earth keeps open hours, checks the clock. Love’s spring turns winter. We flutter or sail through the static of the storm’s long wail.
9
L. HILDENBRANDT KAHN
UNDER THE SPELL OF THE EMPIRE OF NATURE (THOUGH SHE WOULD NEVER ADMIT IT) It started with those two-toned tulips at the corner of Shicks Ridge and Shafer Road taunting me with their blinding-bright yellow and red-dipped edges. Trapped by tulips—groveling for my attention everywhere I turned as if I toddled around outside trolling for tulips all the live long day. Last Tuesday? Ha! Strolling down Cartwright Road, walking stick in hand, what do I encounter but a near-infestation of lavender- colored lilacs— their frilly heads sashaying right along the top of that hay farmer Bancroft’s weathered fence tempting me to bend over, no mind to my aching back, and sweep up that sinful scent. Talk about indecency— what about those empyreal lemon- yellow forsythias (forsythia x intermedia to those know-it-alls) with their lacy blossom-speckled branches leaping towards the sun everywhere I swivel my head to avoid them along Maple Grove? And never even in my own spring dreams had I been ambushed by such a batch of irascible irises itching for my attention— amethyst, amber, azure. And ginger. 10
Thought I’d fallen into the holy grail of sunsets. Strewn along Dry Creek Road, strutting like fancy peacocks fanning out their peacocky tails (What do these irises think— that they’re courting me?) And spied at the end of Upper Ridge an entire colony of lilies of the valley ringing that huge maple tree, two feet deep, bold as bandits, shiny green leaves sheltering tiny cascading rows of Lilliputian lily-white bells looking the picture of innocence. Eve’s Tears my mum called them. Seductive. Deadly is more like it. Deadly poisonous. And yesterday morning while hiking in the foothills? Ambushed. Ravished. Blindsided. Like a meadow at Yosemite in the approach of summer an entire field aflutter with white and purple lupines as if the gods had nothing better to do than sprinkle seeds all over tarnation. Haven’t they more tawdry tasks to tend to than making the world ridiculously beautiful? (Don’t tell a soul but I lay down in that lush field and pretended to be a lupine.) Simply scandalous these blooming things, causing all this hullabaloo and hubbub. Do they think I wait around all winter for them to flagrantly show off their dazzling selves, as if I have little better to do than waste away hours staring mouth agape, drooling like a two month old? Oh my, mustn’t dally a second longer…my neighbor’s peonies are about to bloom.
11
MEGAN WILLIAMS
KALE WITH GORGEOUS INSECURITY This post-breakup garden will contain the best loved kale in America. Kale better than pregnancy after one-last-time sex. Better than his credit card behind mine so he’ll have to come for supper. My kale will eat only the most organic fertilizer, I will buy it a trashcan composter & will refuse to allow other kale to decompose in order to avoid cannibalism. When I eat other kale I will think of all the times I bit his shoulder, the times we cooked kale together. All the slaws, all the knives, all the woks, onions diced. Come harvest, every recipe will seem inadequate for my kale & it will brittle on my pillow, smell like his feet after rubber soles & I will learn to love it just as much.
13
DAPHNE STANFORD
NERVES, ENDING I am a woman who yesterday killed a goose. That is, I walked through the middle of a flock causing them to take off flying, all up into the air, the entire flock, from the movie theatre parking lot. But there was one goose who flew straight into a telephone pole. It flew straight into the pole—or perhaps the line, because geese know to not fly into trees—and then fell. The goose landed (thwack!) flat on its back in a snow bank: neck twisted under, kicking legs as it watched me: honking incessant. Its pain seemed excruciating. I lacked the nerve to watch; I left before it could die, unable to bear witness to life fallen to ground, so easily. Someone must have buried it, or maybe it got up on its own. Either way, when I returned to the same spot, it was gone. Usually I bury the dead. This time I didn’t. It hadn’t died yet, and I didn’t want to stick around to see if it would make it. I wanted it to survive, but I couldn’t bear the thought of having been responsible for its death.
14
I don’t want to do the same thing with you if we are dying. I want to sit, watch it finish kicking it webbed feet, masked neck twisted sickly to one side, broken, while the beads in its dark eyes watch me as it honks soft and helpless, increasingly more peaceful—yet no less futile, panicked—till the noises dissipate into winter air and the fading light of the afternoon is finally enough, closing its eyes to pass from existence into the next: one of the earth, of being buried in it.
15
JAMES ARMSTRONG
SYNAPSE The poet returns between phrases That punctuate the downspout’s trickling rain Hollow metallic gurgling, scratching, ticking Pausing in spaces before clauses Where itsy bitsy spider hovers And I, present at 3 am, Listening to the drip, drip dripping Unaware of waiting a poem’s arrival, The inevitable thread of meaning Weaving its dark way up the waterspout.
17
HEIDI KRAAY
NEWS is this what you get when you make plans? snap pull throat pencil stab oof I don’t want to be pregnant ‘lectric pulse orgy energy fetus Sweeny Todd state of mind 16
17
SATs
Ivy
Leagues
rebel short hair homeless outfit
nailgun outlook
claws, rib bones pass out oomph
black out
in my heart of hearts, I want to leave and I want to stay hair smolder fingers fetch foster legs try look back think
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escape future
purchase basements open push take it
wounds razors
dirty wail back
boom splash
19
EDVIN SUBASIC
EMERGENCE Go home – I heard them growl silently they came out of their little good old heads I painted a suitcase and an airplane
a bus and a town
I drew tiny faces in the airplane and the bus and brick houses with old chimneys green trees and children playing football out in the fields behind the houses old people in front of a little cafĂŠ
20
sitting smoking tobacco playing chess and cards I listened to their deliberations their sluggish lips narrate about past always-ideal memories or myths I grew in a hurry while whispering to myself in thirty seconds I let my painting dry outside in the sun I shredded it in little pieces let the wind pick them up scatter them forever I turned around and talked back this time Thank you – but I’ll stay another day or two 21
GRIT I thought I was bulletproof or Superman there for a while. I thought I’d never run out of nerve. Never. — EVEL KNIEVEL
23
TIM RUSSOW
THAT WAS THE TIME I made a fast break on my tricycle to the sandbox to dig tunnels and dream big dreams | when a short circuit left me dangling heavy electric | even the thunder was too much to bear and the lightning | surely my life would end at that very moment and yet here I am | as bold as the day I sat near the edge of the roof and wondered where this was all headed | maybe it is more like a night at the Improv | or when the man sitting in a chair drooping at the sides | overalls blue turns and says “hey, kid c’mere” | only nerves left to make me run | where the smooth sharp edge of living is much like the space behind the break | as small as we are in network | a factory custom tucked away | the audacity of the here and gone |
25
MEGAN WILLIAMS
SELF-PERFORMANCE WITH PERMISSION White dress— unreasonable for this bike ride. Hips hugged, I carry my father,
size medium belt.
phantom to the right of where the hymns reign, skull-bound— I apologize, again, for wanting For wanting to escape
to mean. To mean “I”.
this closed system— For wanting you to have me. Thought my parents would teach me how to do this: what to say at the pharmacy when retrieving prescriptions, what to say when I bleed on expensive bedsheets, White dress
not my own—
unreasonable for zazen, doesn’t
scaffold me. I don’t sing
in elevators & the shower, the pretense I don’t drink alone. 26
always missing.
Crotch remains too eager & visible. I have a puppy between my thighs— how can you ignore me? I will be an embarrassment until you tell me what to do.
27
MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK
MEDIEVAL Lord, help me understand the wave of teenage geeks who in an era of Air Force drones and nanobots lay siege to Smith Park on the first day of spring in bathrobe cowls and duct-tape barbutes. Why do they fight progress? Remember in thy mercy the debate club president in jester’s costume, face lacquered with black cherry acne, who films. Pardon the cross-eyed video game addict with tinfoil misericorde, late for dinner at his grandmother’s mobile home. Under a hex of blindness, they shun the cheerleaders and varsity track team embroiled in ultimate Frisbee on a sunny Bosworth’s Field of little league diamonds and picnic shelters. Alliances aside, spring pitches us against a battering ram of bleak yesterdays. Getting out of bed becomes our Agincourt. You would know. All crusaders gulp from the tankard of self-loathing then skewer others, or impale themselves on the Bec de Corbins of their sexy bodies. Nothing—not April’s barbaric magic, the silken spear of the bloody crocus— can pierce the cardboard armor of the skin. Modern war demands that with a howl of rage you turn and forget which century you’re in. 29
CHRISTIAN A WINN
MOLLY RINGWALD Twenty-five years later I’m watching Pretty In Pink on Christmas afternoon while my sister sleeps on the suede couch behind me, our parents gone off to church, her daughter in a side room talking to her new American Doll. It’s raining hard all over So Cal, and the season seems remotely complete – with me here alone, again, and now the television singing and whispering, disappearing the years as I sit up close eating red M&M’s understanding scene by scene that I will never get over Molly Ringwald, or those OMD cassettes, or that fat spraypaint graffiti head shouting at Duckie while he’s down and wading in his love for Molly beside TRAX, the Smiths record store. I mean, the way she bites her lip, and sneers at James Spader in his white linen sport coat. The way she’s smart and precious and a little too thick at the ankles – I love her, too, Duckie, I fucking love her. We’re all still in the middle of it, those Psych Furs and New Order songs and Harry Dean Stanton waving surrender, surrender, I gave my life for you – it’s what you wanted for breakfast, right? Somehow I got lost in all that Midwest urbania, lost in the dim hopes of big hair and the tiptoe prom dance where the Pogues played the purest future on a three-string mandolin and nothing was easy, but dying was impossible, and I was with you Molly, walking the looming echo of the high school midway and running hallways past the locker bays where Duckie drew blood for you, Molly, because he couldn’t imagine his future self without you, and we, all of us, couldn’t imagine anything but the joy of the bell ring and the next slow-dance.
30
Here, the knuckled palm trees sway across the sliding glass, and ocean clouds build towers above the canyons. My sister snores against embroidered silk pillows, and I remember how she wore imitation pearls and checkered Vans and her hair like Molly’s that one year – lopsided and coifed – and I wonder if she ever thinks how I hugged her one morning, told her she was cool, which meant that I loved her, wanted a perfect, kind life for her. I didn’t yet know this was impossible. I wanted it though, more even than Andrew McCarthy does for Molly, who he takes to that shit party where everyone is shirtless, and drinking scotch despite the fact they’re in high school, and Molly’s upset because she doesn’t drink like a rich kid. Molly frowns that round red mouth. Molly tosses insults and takes a stand. And my sister rolls over, ignoring my niece’s back-room whimper, waking only to point at the television and smile above the pile of used ribbons glinting in our dim afternoon. Years fold. And I don’t recognize how the one life became the other. Or, what happened to Molly’s mother? And did Harry Dean ever get that job? What happened to the way we once loved all this bolo-tie menace and our pony-hair shoes? And fuck, John Hughes is dead, and he left his cities full of taffeta, left his houses’ back doors wide, where someone like me might stumble in to steal his creepers and dance like 1986, live forever on clove cigarettes and mopey antiheroes, and Molly. But that was only Christmas. It rained all week.
31
ELIZABETH T WOODRUFF
ME Today I say I want Sage advice, but I don’t want you to tell me To put my shoes on I want to walk barefoot in the snow And tell you How badly my feet hurt.
33
MEGAN WILLIAMS
ADVENT Let’s make an emergency trip downtown— I need q-tips & coffee. Need substance to save me from the Marie Claire that claims I cope like the Highly Sensitive Person. Years of subway weather delays have armed me with skills to tromp whatever’s unshoveled while wearing this skirt. Let’s imagine how I would look in controltop pantyhose, my ass smooth as plastic Jesus in the church’s early crèche. Let’s eat gas station sausages & give thanks our families stayed on the other side of the storm for the holidays. Connect over our father’s love for Karen Carpenter & our love of Jean Genet. Q-tips sometimes feel better than sex— let’s clean our ears. My bed, built for me & my body pillow— is it ready to enter this meaningful roomateship? Snow fills the grill. Mercury’s not quite in retrograde & birds have appeared on fire their feet feel colder than mine.
hydrants. I bet
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SINEW Prayer is the slender nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence. — MARTIN FARQUAR TUPPER
DIANE RAPTOSH
FIVE POEMS FROM AUTOFILL: ISHMAEL xxvi I don’t quite get the difference and the eternal now
wedged between this instant
but that never-quiteness
pent in trying to remain right there And isn’t being a brand
I find sexier than hell.
penned by ether, time and skin of spaciousness—
kin to coming into strengths human pinkie,
this quiet workout and balance inbuilt in the
though I can’t say quite exactly how?
Perhaps all of the above is
but a lowly instance
of the humblebrag.
is not a nice person myself.
but hear this:
I was out walking the dead to me
I’d no idea
whose
Exhibitionism I have been through
when it occurred body I was even in.
Bees thought
my face was a coneflower,
begged to say
she said hi,
rattled its red eyes in me.
Beauty
this glad albino deer As you begin to approach 39
rapture you start to hear note once claim. sounds
more sounds,
I’d overheard a written
I scratched it into my Square Deal. The
of a male mosquito’s wingbeats
help him to catch the whine
of a flying mate. Most days I so love
heavy leavened things
I have to lock myself in a lime-colored room in order to seize the feel.
Someone
somewhere
is think-singing.
Listen!
I can make a baby
from null-space
dressed as the crook of my knee.
I had a high head at term, you. Hold still. tooth.
40
You’ve got a dab
I’ve had my days of purely of dino kale
being
on your eye
xxvii Begin to think of these leaves a setting where thoughts
sizzly igloo.
as phrontistery—fireside seats,
may loose their own thinking: one
Inglenook. Take off your shoes.
Fear’s cure is to toss oneself
Tibetan-like into the will of chod—
nourish both
god and fiend equally. wise. Fact:
to offer one’s flesh to
Frightened, you’ll cease to be
Formal reason judged separate
from passion’s acumen So stated late Justice
threatens due process ideals. William J. Brennan. He had to
close his eyes so he could vision this— blind, while Lady Liberty isn’t.
Lady of Justice allegedly
Now that I’ve got you 41
under my aegis, I will grant this:
I’ve had to let go every man
I’ve ever loved
in order stay wedded
to my life. I have to
scratch my back against the
necks of horses just so certain
truths can come through: I’m not quite proud of this state but I’m not not too—
recall any rogue body
planemo
still aflare from the heat
of its own figuration: that new object dubbed Orphan of Dorado afloat and unmooned amidst a pack of blue stars: Who wouldn’t want to be that? hormone stored in the pancreas, retina,
unerring igloo kin—
Maybe I’m short on empathy’s
pituitary gland. Pray tell,
does this make a difference at all? When I set out to walk the dog I drape the leash around my neck? 42
xxviii Here is another day to remind us there will come a day another one won’t come. My leaves are full of lawnmower— Life out shining its bike— and I would like a dress of water on fire pinned to me, shoulder blades agleam near the back darts, the unseen blurbed to the world by the seen. Even Zennists with clear eyes cannot save themselves pointblank. I walk in tightly packaged ways yet know to enlarge the breath’s world beyond the lair of sidewalk, hummock herbage. You might say I’m already 43
living a little on the afterside, and my dog Marvin respects me enough to see me simply as one of him. What’s more, I have always already been spoken for by emblazoned zones. By the hope of sounds. Keen reader, bashful and kind, I hear your notes and assume it’s o.k. to tell you all this. It may be a bit of a chore to say you’d believe in the ghostliest hums as a means of retreading the world. So think of your favorite civic adjectives and together we’ll begin to draft a better system in scratchitti on the sides of trains. The tools to do this: Box cutter. Pumice stone. Lava rock. affectionate
helpful
Keys. Scissors. Screwdriver. Exacto knife. Drill bit. 44
kind
warm
tactful
empathetic
xxvix But what can I do tonight about the fish farm being run sub rosa from that 14th-floor Bronx apartment? Or the fact such farms might stretch longer than four football fields, cramming over a million fish together in floating pens? Let us begin by looking at data on adat: Islamic-Malay law risen from the verb to appertain, be proper. The Minangkabau, of West Sumatra’s highlands, see their women as center where fish nets meet. Spouses or lovers stay only overnight, a pact tagged visiting marriage, each member of the clan expected to guide—not lead—horizontally, as well as to enact good mothership. Closer 45
to home, my neighbor who plays bagpipes snipped his pup’s vocal folds, and the mandarins of national power stand at the ship’s wheel barking absurdisms. Remember Tiberius? Trained young boys dubbed minnows to romp beside him in the waters, SS Rome slowly going down? Oh and how Cicero, for candor, was stalked—head and hands lopped off. . . . Maybe living is mostly for the weak. Maybe the most we can do is to leave the world little by little in order to stay here at all, waiting to put the goods in the hands of a new clan mother.
46
lx Today, this message on my office computer: The trust relationship between this work station and the primary domain failed. I scratched that into my Square Deal and kissed the laptop on its left right angle. Tenderness can take a number of snap turns, and hell yes I’m man and girl, three parts machine, as well as this sound of seeing things in your head but no one fanatically. I’m in a full-time relationship with the world, and sometimes it’s good to lay your riven body in the death position then just walk away, wonder how other people are doing grouped in their secluded nerves. Thus might we finally come to
47
tongue the aftertaste of some fine blend of shared umami whose sense of furriness in the mouth we’d be crazy not to take to mean full detailed forgiveness of every anyone—even for giant fuck-ups. Because why not. Because the space of the thinkable’s so much larger than the frilled lean-tos daily dispensed to us. The hand purrs as it rakes through its box of 5,000 puzzle pieces. Those possible junctions—the inclines, the earthlike arcs! As for the chance, preened reading doves, sweet-temped whatevs, to consensual ending,
48
|| of our arriving someplace akin
ANITA TANNER
MY HUSBAND’S CANCER stigmata in the center of my palm paper cuts in my entrails gasping for air three times under in a sulfur swimming pool a decapitated chicken being gutted out on the kitchen counter branding iron cauterizing cattle hide front-end blunt whack as a dog runs across my car’s path scalded throat taste after I regurgitate wheelbarrow tire flattened when I’m pushing a load of stones cat shut in a microwave and someone fingers five minutes barbed wire tightening around my torso a bat hung upside down when the ceiling collapses
51
CATHERINE KYLE
THE RED SEA Ever since parting the Red Sea Moses, wrapped up in his warm robes, cannot find sleep. The image of Egypt, floundering, smothering, sucks at his mind through a venomous straw. The war spears, nullified, spinning in quick circles, darkly chewed and swallowed by the acres of black waves. The horses, tunnel-nostriled, hoofing caving ocean, muscles vibrating, adrenaline spent. The face of his brother, reviled and cherished, slowly succumbing to the dull crosshatch of cold. It sank, a bronze mask, through the spiraling silence, startled eyes fastened on the bitten, half-used moon. The trumpets and outrage, second thoughts and torture tools, nestled all together in the shared bed of bright sand. Moses prods at the dead flesh, leaves supper early; the servant children whisper as his gray hair goes. He stands at the window, accusing the starlight, fingering the peacock shell of a vacated beetle. He does not drink water these days, only wine, hoping for forgiveness from the crushed and running juice.
53
MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK
THE HISTORY OF LOVE Do majesty and love go well together Or linger in one dwelling? Hardly. —Ovid Tonight, the history of omnipotence and omniscience includes the glowing marquee at First Presbyterian Church of Pocatello, which, four hundred years and three thousand miles from Plymouth Rock, trumpets Come and See What the Lord is Doing! Despite the holiday ambience in the empty dining room at Remo’s, you can’t help but wonder if the Lord can see and do anything about the two waitresses who conspire in the bar like government informants, chatting about their new push-up bras and the latest staff weight-loss tournament while, somewhere, your Halibut Oscar and your wife’s Pasta Combo Platter grow as cold as a pew of Puritans. How long should we try to measure human progress? How much true-blue transcendence stretches from Berkeley Plantation to this railroad town in which the soupy-eyed offspring of immigrants flee the frosty mythology of November 54
by flicking away cigarettes and flocking into Karnation Intimate Apparel like zealots charging through a portico of neon hatchets to become martyrs for Our Lady of Electric Sex. If we are God’s children, he can’t be happy that we’ve spent the shot glass of genius he’s given us on inventing piña colada glow-in-the-dark body paint, or that the first thing you do after getting off early at the fertilizer plant is rumble in your fenderless clunker to Silver Fox Novelties and claw through the bargain rack for some thong underwear with a jumbo candy-stripe phallus that you can sling from your dong like a stocking of Christmas joy before stuffing your lover’s turkey full of thanksgiving. No matter your sympathies, love is a religion that crawls from Enlightenment to Renaissance to pure perversion. Each Ice Age washes ashore another gaggle of Separatists who shimmy like exotic dancers going for big tips. Eternity is a preacher hawking ecstasy. Still, our foremothers and fathers might have done themselves a hogshead of good had Myles Standish saved a few of Massasoit’s g-strings, had Anne Bradstreet’s daughters hid some skimpy cherry leather numbers with chrome propellers in their armoires 55
with Pilgrim’s Progress. The history of love is open twenty-four hours. This day and always, it shepherds the holy, the base. It includes the funeral in which I sit and hear the seventy-year-old man at the pulpit relive how he survived the car crash that killed his wife near a place called Last Chance. It recalls how when he was nineteen, and she was fourteen, her Catholic parents would only let her ride his bike handlebars to the movies in their tiny Montana town. It covers their eight children, two deceased, her father, who was the town sheriff, and her maiden name: Paradis. It ends and begins with all the children and grandchildren in the church knowing she was a walking wildflower and butterfly encyclopedia who spoke Russian and sang lullabies. However evanescent, the history of love marks the moment winter unrolls a bright liturgy of sugar beet furrows and slumped barns over the sordid legend of the earth on my drive home, the glazed pickets of cattails in the bronze ritual of riverbends that scroll through black cows and transfigurations of sunlit sage, the Fort Henry monument on Trapper Lane. All of it, a parable for how love is not sudden rapture or fields of gold after a long separation, but looking down on ourselves to see what we are doing. 56
MEGAN WILLIAMS
LIMERENCE POEM I can’t keep my heart shut today. Everything wears the light foam of sadness, every action ever for the sake of dopamine, my deity packed between my bones future cabinetry if converted
believe me, everything like a vintage television
correctly, everything in service of an individuated veneer. Everything always a generalization. & if I introduce you into this language you will create a desirable tension. Dopamine derived from romance, my favorite cupcake.
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NETWORK [It would not be long] ere the whole surface of this country would be channeled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land, making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country. — SAMUEL MORSE
CHRISTIAN A WINN
SAN FRANCISCO, GIRL One black morning in a distant year I will still be looking for you in this alleyway off Powell Street where Joy Division always seeps from the clubs, where the asphalt always smells like mud and restaurant butter, where the clockwork will always be off. There’s a whole fucking city out there – lights, trolleys, restored Victorians, bridges over bodies of water – where I imagine you are hiding, have hidden all these years, not remembering how you left your voice in my skin, your skin in my mouth, your eyes in my hands, your breath at my feet.
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JANET SCHLICHT
ORANGE Through mazes of dendrites axons synapses experience gets stored as memory in the hippocampus. So I am told. All bits of my life secure in this space the size of a pearl. Catalogued and filed: alphabetically? chronologically? topically? at absolute random? I only know for sure that the nearly invisible vapors of the orange I am opening send some impulse bolting down the network to the pearl (to the file marked O, for oranges?) and I am sitting with you in the cedar grove and you place an orange with this exact fragrance 64
sectioned and sweet in the white bowl with the blue band around it and the air is replete with the shuddering immensity of your long ago laughter.
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HEIDI KRAAY
LIKE A DUSTY SARAH KANE COLLECTION get him to pay your life act desperate anyway drizzling wind towering
knocking upside downside
TOOTHPASTE ON TOES RAZOR TOO CLOSE DON’T QUALIFY NERVES BANG UPTURNED NOSES TRY TOO HARD BATTER BEAT EGGS REPLACE MEAT FRIED HAIR SOGGY CAKE ICE CREAM FART BURNT BUTTER GOBSTOPPER JAW BREAKER TAFFY TOOTH PULLER stumble on stage sour stink slouch SCHEDULES DEADLINES APPOINTMENTS MEETINGS EXPECTATIONS DRAFTS REVISIONS EDITORS MILESTONES PRODUCERS MANAGEMENT as if you don’t love it as if you a regular stiff works hard as everyone as if s’posed to struggle like before disheveled after class dogged in the bath 67
MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK
THANKS, HENRY FORD Thanks, Henry Ford, for head-on collisions. For black ice, teen pregnancy, three dollars and fifty-seven cents a gallon. Oh, and the carjacking at Big Discount on Reed Canal Road that whisked eighty-two-year-old Frieda Sanchez to the hospital in Daytona Beach after she offered a ride to the woman who became her assailant. Thanks, Henry, for the spike in hit-and-run incidents in Anne Arundel County, the librarian crouching to help fix a flat, the Bulgarian college student—a lifeguard—pedaling to a pool of happy shouts, for fifty Egyptians, mostly schoolchildren, whose bus popped like a party favor of screams and pistachio worksheets when a train punched through it in Manfalut. Thanks for drunk driving. Share our nod of gratitude with the Germans and Russians and Kentuckians and Jamaicans who brewed and stewed the dreamy daze of the varsity cheerleader from South Fremont who in the cranky tank of her mother’s orange Oldsmobile shot her heartbeat of moonshine through the black valentine of a Mack truck under a winking red light on the night of her breath’s last dance. While we’re at it, thanks, Montgolfier Brothers, for the Hindenburg. McNamara and Schneider for bankruptcy. Ts’ai Lun for papercuts. Mesopotamia, bike theft. Phoenicians, hate speech. Tang Dynasty, school shootings. Venetians circa twelve hundred, body dysmorphia. Edison and Farnsworth, sleep deprivation. Gillette and Colt, suicide. Bell, telemarketers. Aztecs from the third to tenth centuries, diabetes. Gutenburg, astigmatism. Watt, my scalded finger when I ironed my favorite nutmeg corduroys before work. Les Paul, the break-up of The Beatles. Marconi, that stupid Katrina and The Waves song on autoloop in my head since I taxied my kids to school this morning.
Thanks. Bill and Steve, don’t forget your special award for every time I want to wrestle or play catch with my three-year old son, my only boy, and he shakes his head, staring at the screen’s rainbow eye, his wrist manacled to a mouse’s endless tail, his ankles sinking in a slurry of cybersand. Is love an innovation? Bernoulli, thanks for buckling a chrome jet back on the backs of Icarus and Lilienthal and Howard Hughes, for roaring an international chorus of fiery pain and fuel through the twin steel gleams—one for Orville, one for Wilbur—in the eyes of William Le Baron Jenney, with a lilac-perfumed note of appreciation to Mohammed and Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and Jim Jones and Zoroaster and Swedenborg and Constantine and Mary Baker Eddy for stitching the hides of holy books into boxing gloves so we can pound each other to bloody ash every Wednesday and Saturday and Sunday. Thanks, Henry Ford, for the woozy tire grooves of lavender moonlight in the snow at the intersection of Garfield and Avenue C, the sandy body of Millie, our family’s peekapoo, flopped on her side like a mailbag the night I returned home from the Burley game, the only time I saw my dad cry. Thanks for Lyl, our delivery room nurse, with her buttercream voice and hands of magic, the way she calmed my wife in a way nobody had before, who coaxed our fourth daughter into this world of scorched popcorn and slander and bewitched robins slamming into windows and the next week, in her driveway, backed over her two-year old girl and sent her to wait in a sky of statistics.
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Thanks, Henry, for the time I drove solo across America in three days, starting in the leafy heart of Pennsylvania. For the musty patchwork quilt my mother sewed from swatches of my old H.A.S.H. jeans, which I slept on in the back. For James Earl Jones reading Native Son on audiobook. For the thunderstorm that rattled me awake at a Conoco plaza outside Kansas City at 2:00 a.m., the throbs of purple lighting that shook trunkloads of costume jewelry to the wet asphalt, the mom-and-pop campground past Golden, Colorado, where I stripped to my shorts and washed the chalky highway from my body in the river then stretched like a penitent of summer on a picnic table in a cathedral of grandfather poplars to read the love epics etched in the wood while the sleepy sunlight and the gaze of a fly fisherman lifted veils of mountain water from my shoulders. Thanks for the pelicans that sailed like origami gods across a mirror of water and how I inhaled deeply when I stopped to watch. Thanks for the golden eagle, as big as ten Augusts baled for burning, that I startled into the air at Starvation Reservoir, whose talons scraped the guardrail of rippled steel at takeoff and carried the bitter blue of juniper berries into a blaze of red cliffs. Thanks for the way I watched until its flight shrank to the size of the most primal word invented by language, which at the moment, with nobody to say it to, seemed to be thanks.
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CATHERINE KYLE
COSTS An inestimable weight, these costs of daily living: the resistance of gravity, thresh of tangled will. The company of ashtrays, sordid clothing wrinkles bang at the bars and demand to be fed. Hours unfold like clean origami, their shape disappearing, creations unmade. On the eighth day God said let there be dearth, and it filled up the banisters, leaving just bones. Then there was a remarkable silence where heartfelt words once stood—an endless procession of clumsy-armed jugglers, monsters in tutus, and mute tambourines. The head of significance sat on a scepter wielded by a court jester, conducting the cavalcade onward to sandwiches, smoothed curtains and swept stairs. 73
TIM RUSSOW
IF ONLY THE CLOUD COULD RETALIATE Much like a placenta from within We used to think a craw was something More of a kink than a crow in the neck Of reality where we sail and soar Unanchored however restricted or distracted From graphite and paper: we are digitized And lost floundering from olfactory delights We are left plastic on a slope sticker Than a freeway in winter the splinter effect Coded, tattooed and numbered: the cooling Uncharted pheromone — this is where we live: In a tumult network shimmering Bold as the look on my face
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COURAGE If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ — RUDYARD KIPLING
CHRISTIAN A WINN
FOUR STEPS IN THE LONG WALK DOWNTOWN 1 In the mornings I really just wanted bread and coffee but no one could figure out how to hand it to me, so I kept looking into the mouths of girls tasting precisely of blood, of gin. On the street old men kept talking about weather, about death – it was all travelling fast, inevitable. I walked quickly by, the coiling glow of winter at the seams, the faith of years in the blaring compression of trucks up and down 9th Street. 2 This was in the aftermath of Pete from the coffee shop having a heart attack and dying a week before his 70th birthday. I used to see him Mondays, during that time of the year when I was getting out of bed early and doing some clear thinking before 10am. He was always there at dawn, drinking black coffee and telling Sara behind the counter how he was going to marry her one day, how he was going to make an honest woman of her.
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Sara got herself fired two years ago, moved west, and now Pete was dead, and everyone was remembering how Sara held her smile out to Pete, her freckled hand reaching to touch his cheek, and tell him have a good day, have the best day. 3 Down on 13th the Baptists were throwing another wedding, this time the bridesmaids wore purple and shouted over traffic when the deed was done. 4 For me it was degeneration all the fucking time. That was the word in the mornings. Falling down. Rising. Drinking water. Wishing for orange juice and wealth. Rain sat dirty against the windows above my bed. Bobby-pins on the flannel. Cold coffee in the sink. Analogue. Sacrifice. It was Sunday again, and I still hadn’t made it out, which let me understand there was nothing but this wanting and wishing – the wanting to get out, the wishing to return, the wishing you were here, the long walk downtown.
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SHEILA ROBERTSON
TORMENTIA 777 Mom is sobbing about dolls floating in ditches. Zippers that won’t zip. Doctor’s orders. We are topsy-turvy. I am “mother.” She is my charge. I threw her aluminum percolator in the trash. “Aluminum,” the doctors say, “aggravates neuron plaques.” My daydreams for our future never included the fretwork of brain plaques. How do I embrace the bizarre? Let go of a mother who still breathes? Who will keep our family traditions? Gather us home to celebrate on Christmas? How will I learn to love this madness exiting south “off” the “on” ramp in a Safeway shopping cart? She’s a phantom picking up speed, brandishing a joystick to hell. She waves bye-bye jumping the guardrails. Paramedics find her up the hill, mashing the mayor’s gazebo. And I wonder, Did Mom ever feel the Guilt
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I feel? Did she want to run away from cleaning oatmeal flung across the room? I want to forget embarrassment when she shoplifts toys. I want fear of smashed glass and fires set on the rug to go away. In the looped tangles and knots of my own genes, I wonder what genes came from Mom. Will we share some perverted final madness? I watch my mother trying hard to recognize the stranger who inhabits her. The one who laughs and taunts me from Mom’s fragile shell. She defiles the sweet memory of a Mama who loved me. I shake and pour our coffee into chipped cups as the three of us sit at the table.
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CARRIE SEYMOUR
THE NERVOUS CHILD GROWS UP 1. I say keep your nerve when the least likely thing is any form of comfort. Stare straight into the light because looking away won’t ease the worry and you’ll be left with a blind anxiety, like when the mail hasn’t come but still you know that the letter from your lover, from the Peace Corps, from the fucking president will not arrive, leaving you the same as you were yesterday, and that is a truth that only bourbon can soothe. 2. My mother tells me that I was always a tightly wound child, as if I wasn’t there, as if I didn’t wish for the kind of mind that wouldn’t spin. Now that I’m older, I know she thinks I should have outgrown it, should have become someone more stable, less apt to bolt. I don’t bother her with the genetic implications as she busily chews her nails and paces the rooms of her house. 3. At Glacier National Park, the hard stone and stubborn glaciers help ease the need to answer all of those unattainable expectations, there where we can allow ourselves a kindred stasis, a time to stand firm and stoic against the wind and warming temperatures, knowing the outcome will be the same, late or soon. 82
4. I become unreasonably agitated on late fall days, worried that I have so little time to take it all in before the deep red of the sugar maple and the yellow of the ash give way to winter’s sepia tones. It is a relief when January comes and the memory of the vivid colors has faded into a gentle absence. 5. The central nervous system causes our minds to think and feel while it takes care of the ordinary stuff, like breathing. We are given no choice in this matter. 6. The equations: .05 mg. Xanax + 30 min. meditation = slow/calm 1.0 mg. Xanax + 30 min. meditation = slower/calmer 1.0 mg. Xanax + 1.0 mg. Xanax = sleep in the storm 3 glasses of Four Roses neat + 3 glasses of Four Roses neat = oblivion 7. You tell me that sex would calm me down, like maybe I could fuck it out of my system. Touch me when I’m like this and find out what it might be to bed a chainsaw.
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8. They don’t call them nervous breakdowns anymore. They don’t lock you up and they don’t strap you down. I wonder if having it named would be easier than the bumbling, medicated movements toward an anonymous recovery. 9. I’ve been told that life is too short to be so stressed, that maybe I should drink less, exercise more, stave off the hypertension. I’m told this in case it hadn’t already occurred to me. 10. The sharks are hungry this year. One diver killed today, others torn and broken all season long. Still, a swim in the ocean might be the best way to gain some perspective when the disappointments pile up and an unpredictable sea offers the best reminder of how quickly the odds can change. 11. We talk about a fall from grace, speculating about the shape it might take, like a fist to a face or a grainy mug shot. And the sound could be a window breaking, or a rifle crack, or a scream. Sitting here tonight, I think it is likely something more subtle: a key in a lock, a full ashtray, a calm and empty face.
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HEIDI KRAAY
WHIPLASH veins run body length barracudas stem tree spines brainwaves beep catastrophe seizures abandon hearts lick a battery throat pipe tells me bite my lip jump out window bark two stories red cheeked electrodes tingle feet hot air balloon shrieking in fire city on fire ocean on fire hopeful expression sincere reflection the news: open gums stop pretending you know better i don’t know numbers bold head pig head bald face shut pores escape black heads in blackface find tongues lashing holding dad’s rehab hand snoring first sleep all day
nerves sting jellyfish crawl under skin groan under seat burning gas i don’t want him to die i’d rather walk to Sweden
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SIERRA BURLEY
INCISIONS It starts with a thin needle A small thorn Pokes into the skin No feeling Then The scissors cut A knife through my soul There is no numbing No consideration About my pain The doctor makes a second incision Four shots Then scrapes Not yet numb Tiny daggers Tear across my nerves The doctor Blood on his hands I am finished The doctor cleans up I am laying there Tired and in pain There is still blood on his hands
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MARY ELLEN MCMURTRIE
SILENCE My ear against the hive box I heard the bees warming their queen and their babies even in record lows. Today it is silent. I shovel snow back anyway. White on white it stands a tombstone now. Although I won’t know for sure until spring. If I could lay my ear on my own breast would I hear the cancer cells’ stealthy invasion? Record lows. I weep for the silence of bees.
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