The Battle in the Pictures

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The Battle of the Pictures

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The Linnet's Wings

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ISBN-13: 978-1537785547 Fall 2016 First Edition

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Other Publications by The Linnet´s Wings Classic: The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ISBN 13: 978-1480176423 Classic: Randolph Caldecott, The House that Jack Built ISBN-13: 978-1483977669 One Day Tells Its Tale to Another by Nonnie Augustine ISBN-13: 978-1480186354 About the Weather-- Spring Trending by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick ISBN-13: 978-0993049330 This Crazy Urge to Live by Bobby Steve Baker ISBN-13: 978-0993049-0-9 "Disabled Monsters" by John C. Mannone ISBN-13:978-1522869504

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue: xiv Epigraph: xvii Epilogue: 130 SHORT STORIES THE SONG OF ALL SAINTS BY MICHAEL CAMPAGNOLI 3 My Mr. Keats by Eleanor Pilcher 51

CREATIVE NON FICTION

CLASSIC

MICRO FICTION Changing the Baby by Sandra Arnold 1 Razorwire by Barry Charman 20 Instant noodles by Kirsty Gillies 58 Monday’s child is fair of face by Kate Garrett Merboy in Red Swim Shorts by Jane Burn

FLASH FICTION

LIMERICKS

POETRY Editorial A Mother Knows by Oonah V Joslin I Who Lost a Brother by Tom Sheehan Glossary by Jenni Bravo The Sky is a Snail by A.J. Huffman A poem given on a bike ride by Gregor Steele SPANISH TRANSLATIONS Familia Biológica by Catherine Zickgraf viii The Linnet's Wings

The Battle of the Pictures by William Hogarth

translation by Randy Z. Chavarria) 21 La Llamada by Catherine Zickgraf 24 (translation by Catherine Zickgraf 24 SPANISH NEW WORLD POETRY NEW WORLD POETRY ESSAY AND TRANSLATIONS Gabriela Mistral by Stephen Zelnick 25 TRANSLATIONS “Los Sonetos de La Muerte” 28 “El Pensador de Rodin” 30 "La Mujer Fuerte" 30 "Credo" 33 "Al Oído Del Cristo" 34 "Piececitos" 36 "La Casa" 37 "Apegado a Mí" 39 "Con Tal que duermas" 39 ix The Linnet's Wings

"Ocho Perritos" 41 "La Copa" 43 "Ausencia" 45 "La Fevorosa" 47 PS: MLF, Swimming Lesson

PHOTOGRAPHY

CLASSIC ART

Art: Compostion by Wassilly Kadinsky 1 Art: By the Stream, Autumn by Paul Gaughin 3 Art: Floor Polishers by Kazimir Malevich 19 Art: Carnival Evening by Henri Rousseau 23 Art Celtic Tale by Paul Serusier 57 Art: Virgin of the Annunciation by Antonello Da Messina 60 Where Have All the Flowers Gone: PS MLF, '16

CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS Adam Kluger

PHOTOSHOP

ART:Deaga Detail, PS MLF, 2016 21 Street Scene Phtotshop MLF '16

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Schoolroom 28 A Young Beauty by Eugene de Blaas 30 The Poet's Window Overlooking Rob Roy's Castle 74 Girl Reading at Stream, 83 Babbling Stream 97 Soldiers' Song 102 Tears in Spring 117

Editors for the Issue Managing Editor Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Senior Editor Bill West Fiction Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Bill West

Offices: Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. Ireland and Motril, Granada, Andalusia, Spain Online: Zoetrope Virtual Studio and The Linnet´s Wings Design: Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick 2016

Poetry Oonah Joslin Spanish Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Photography Maia Cavelli Web Database Peter Gilkes

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Compostion by Wassilly Kadinsky

Changing the Baby by Sandra Arnold

T

he nurse held the baby up for her to see. “You have a fine boy Mrs Harris!”

She turned her head away and wept. Years of football matches and muddy knees stretched in front of her. Toy trains and trucks. Snotty noses and spiky hair. She’d dreamed of dolls and dresses.

“Well, you know what they say, Mrs Harris, ‘A daughter’s a daughter until she’s a wife, but a son is a son all of his life.”

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Yes, but the version she’d heard was the other way round. And she’d been so sure it would be a girl when she chose the name.

“Well, at least your husband will be pleased. Men like having sons. And the name you’ve chosen can be changed to a boy’s name just by altering one letter.”

At first she did it only once or twice, but when complete strangers complimented her on her pretty baby she did it more often. Unfortunately, Ralph was at the front door one day when she pushed the pram back down the path and when he saw his son he asked her what the hell she thought she was playing at and did she want Frank growing up to be a cross-dresser, or worse? He wasn’t particularly soothed by her assurance that she’d made the dress for his sister’s baby girl and she just wanted to see what it looked like on.

When Francis announced at the age of 21 that he was going to marry Sam, she offered to make the wedding dress. Nope, he said. It would be a registry office affair. Sam was pregnant.

At the wedding Sam’s mother commented that she really hoped the baby would be a boy.

Boys were so much easier. Her husband had kept his Hornby train set all these years and had already brought it out to polish it up.

At the hospital Sam’s parents were looking flustered and fidgety. That meant it must be a girl, she whispered to Ralph, even though Francis had refused to tell them the results of the scans and when he rang to say the baby was born he said ‘it’. Her heart soared when she looked at the tiny being in Samantha’s arms, then plummeted when she saw the grey blanket it was cocooned in. So... had they picked a name?

Harper.

Harper?

They were not going to assign a gender at this tender age, explained Sam, hence the gender neutral name. They would not use gender specific pronouns. Their child would play with gender neutral toys and wear gender neutral clothing and colours. In time, added Francis, the child could make its own decision which gender, if any, it wanted to identify with. This was a winwin all round, yes? ###

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THE SONG OF ALL SAINTS BY

Michael Campagnoli

By the Stream, Autumn by Paul Gaughin 3 The Linnet's Wings

New Orleans, 1952 And Grandmother said, “He has that way about him,” and her face turned into a sour knot. “You know what I mean? They all do.” She was talking to my mother about my father, and my father’s family. Mother just shrugged. “They’re . . .different—than we are,” Grand continued, “Don’t you think?” She straightened up and gave mother an imperious glare.

Mother couldn’t meet that glare—cowed by Grandmother for many reasons, not the least of which was marrying a man Grand despised, and eloping with him at that: one hot summer evening when she was just a girl of sixteen, literally climbing out her bedroom window at the appointed hour, down a ladder to where the young Marine stood with bated breath in his dress blues.

“Oh,” Mother would say, “but he was a handsome man.” And she’d look up with a glow in her eyes, pausing, remembering, I assumed, that muggy August night so full of stars and dreams and expectations.

But now, while Grandmother Gertrude worked on her, she could barely lift her chin. She fretted as she moved the needles, head bowed, mouth pursed, and nodded submissively.

Grandmother swelled. She knew how to take advantage. She disliked my father. Had always disliked him. She had her reasons—some of which I knew, some of which I didn’t know, but would find out later, and some, I suppose, that she took to her grave. She was an old lady, even then, when I knew her as a boy, and never very charitable.

(Winter Dreams. . .)

In half-light, I pull covers to my chin. Shadows lurk. Darkness is a greasy film cut by a single sliver of light; a refracted slash that expands but grows weaker the further it stretches from the barely cracked door. Down the hall, I hear a television (a Western it sounds like, with Indians shouting and cavalry shooting their guns). Each time we watch High Noon, Nonno tells me he wants to go West, get a horse, become a cowboy. An Italian cowboy. Gary Cooper, he is not. The grey light flashes, flickers 4 The Linnet's Wings

in the hall, and I hear Nonno snore.

His real name was Michele (pronounced with a hard “c” and a long “e”, like “Mee-KELLlay”), Alfredo Mee-KELL-lay Cantata. For much of my short life, I’ve feared him, shamed by his dark skin and broken speech, but in time I will come to call him Nonno, like the Italians.

His house is strange. Not like the apartment I share with my parents. There everything is neat and clean, spartan and sun-drenched. Almost ascetic. A furious white Calvinist light pours in on bare polished floors, hot and uncompromising, filling every corner, every crevice; leaving no penumbra, no shadow, no place to hide. The receptacle of all that which is comfortable and familiar and certain, but so unremittingly grim and judgmental.

Nonno’s house reminds me of the Catholic Church where he took me once: dark, foreboding, lighted by candles, full of shadows and colored light, the frightening priest in his black dalmatic robes, the clank and smoke of the thurible.

He lives on a narrow street in a neighborhood of working-class houses similar in design and shared proximity. A modest grey structure, outwardly plain and unexceptional, but inside a welter of intricate detail.

Thick maroon curtains cover the windows. Old stuffed furniture (saturated with dust) engorge small rooms. Enormous lace doilies refuse to lay flat, crowd tables and shelves. The walls are cluttered with pictures of people with almond-shaped eyes and olive and yellow skin: Mary and the baby Jesus, Victor Emanuel, Garibaldi; also cathedrals in Florence and Venice, the invisible glory of Il Duomo.

Then there is a cross with a sad and suffering Christ. This Christ looks Oriental, Semitic and mournful.

Not like the one at the Baptist Church where my mother takes me. There the Galilean is pale and smiling, looks something like Tyrone Power with blue eyes and long hair. (“Ours is not a DEAD Christ hung on CRUCIFIX,” the Reverend Longsleeves cries, “HE IS RISEN! Our cross is EMPTY. PRAISE THE LORD!”) And there are odors in Nonno’s house, strong and unfamiliar: rich cheeses, dark wines, garlic (sometimes he kisses me on the nose and the stench fills my nostrils for hours, for days it seems like), and the stale smoke of stogies and pipe tobacco.

And the old man, himself, is strange. Exotic. Not like other adults. Even the smell of him is something somehow alien. There’s the manly smell of sweat and rich black earth (that from his garden), but something more. . .a faint, elusive emanation, a kind of ethnic incense that rises up from deep within.

You can smell it when you’re close or sometimes on his clothes later. An animal musk. A DNA. It insinuates knowledge. Not wholly offensive, but it stings me. A sort of initiation. An ancient odor—wild, pagan, profane—full of strange incantations, intimations, tainted with the ritual and violence of blood.

It is late at night in winter and the television hums static. I taste the grit of my own strangeness and dream of lives unlived. And in the living room, dreaming of horses and cattle drives and barroom brawls for meager wagers, the Italian Cowboy snores.

(A Question of Taste. . .)

Grand rolled her eyes and frowned.

“Must he remove his shirt?” she asked, fanning herself. My father, working in the garden, held a long-handled shovel, turned clods of rich black earth, pried rocks the size of loaves of bread. He 5 The Linnet's Wings

glistened with sweat (“Perspiration!” Grand would have corrected). His broad shoulders rolled, the tendons in his arms twisted and pulled.

“In this heat, Ma,” my mother answers, “it’s more comfortable.”

Grand rolled her eyes again, large eyes and expressive, but wherever her they momentarily rest, they immediately thereafter return to the narrow waist of father, sweat dripping from his black curly hair, down his forehead, off his nose. Her head shakes. She smiles at me—a fake china-doll smile that invites complicity. “What can you do?” she says, sweet like some poisons are sweet, as if that lean figure in the garden were not my father, but some sort of lower primate.

When Momma and Poppa were courting, Momma had to sneak out of the house to meet him. Grand would yell after her, “I know were you're going---you're going to meet that dago. Well, don't bring him around here. I forbid him to step foot in this house.” After Momma and Poppa eloped, Grandmother Gertrude disowned mother, would not speak a word to her, even admit of her existence for five full years after the marriage.

When I was born, my complexion was ruddy, my hair thick and black, already so long it had to be cut in the hospital. According to Momma, the nurses crowded around my crib, thought me cute, but Grand's only comment was, “He looks like a little mon-key,” tendered with just the inflection to make her intent unmistakable.

On the few occasions when Grand was compelled to be in the presence of my father’s family, she spent the entire time with a horrified smile frozen on her face. The discomfort was palpable.

She’d hover over my grandfather, a bronze-olive skinned old man who could barely speak English, as if he were feeble or moronic. When he quite sensibly resisted her attentions, she’d roll her eyes, shake her head, and smile regretfully. “What can you do?” she’d say.

(About Grandmother Gertrude. . .)

“You ask too many questions,” Mother said.

“Did she have brothers and sisters?”

“I told you.”

“How old was she when her parents died?”

“1907, I think. That was her father. Her mother died when she was little.”

“How old?”

“Oh, I don’t remember all that stuff. Maybe 16.”

“When her mother died?”

“No, her father. If you’re not going to listen, I’m not going to tell you.”

“But you said she got married when she was 16.”

“That’s right.”

“The same year?”

“Yes.” “Pretty quick, wouldn’t you say?”

“Don’t be fresh. She was an orphan. Didn’t have anything. No one to protect her.”

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“But still. . .”

“She got a job. Then she met your grandfather.”

“Where’d she work?”

“D.H. Holmes. Then later, Maison Blanche.”

“What was his name?”

“Walter LeFurge. French. Isn’t that pretty? It’s not good to get married that young, but back then, they did it that way.”

There’s a family picture of a petite, round-faced salesgirl standing behind a counter, staring back at the camera with such blank and innocent intensity, as if she were searching for a smile.

Once, not long after Grand died, I found a box of pictures in a lower drawer. Inside, tied neatly in lavender ribbon, was a packet of letters. Love letters. I didn’t get very far before my mother stopped me, but I read enough to know (even as a young boy) that Grand was not the prude her daughters were.

She liked to have a good time. Right to the end, she took “excursions” with her “friend,” Charley (“Cholly,” she’d say) Kruger. A tall, big-bellied florid man with a red-bald head and the booming gravel voice. He was a tugboat captain. When asked what he did for a living, he’d grandly point to the huge barges moving up and down the Mississippi and announce, “I keep this town alive.” It was an occupation, to a young boy like me, of considerable romance and charm. When he was younger, he told me he was a bootlegger. “I’d run a launch across Pontchartrain down in the Industrial Canal and out into the Gulf where a schooner from Cuba would wait. Raw alcohol. We’d bring it back to the Eye-talians and they’d turn it into bourbon and scotch.” That’s when he’d pinch me on the cheeks until they almost burst and call me “Pasquale.”

“You don’t think they stayed in separate rooms?” my father would ask.

“Don’t be disgusting,” Mother would answer.

Unlike my Baptist mother and her Baptist sisters, Grand played cards, danced, and was not opposed to a cold beer on a summer’s day. And she had a laugh. A hearty laugh. A lusty laugh. She came of age in an era when the tinkling bells of horsecars still filled the streets of New Orleans and she considered herself a “lady,” no matter how tough and pragmatic she needed to be or how powerful her appetites. Her relationship with God may have been uneasy, but she believed in manners. Manners were her morality.

The way a gentleman bowed or a lady held a fan. She was a person accustomed to certain prerogatives.

(Semper Fi. . .)

“I heard about Uncle Norman.”

“What about him?” Mother asked.

“You know. That time Poppa beat him up.”

“What?” Mother said. “When was that?”

“You know. I heard you talking to Aunt Evelyn about it once.”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it getting beat up.”

Norman was Grand’s favorite. The first child. Her baby boy. But he thought he had a right to slap the girls around. One day my mother called my father. This was before they were married. Before he joined the Marines. He worked in construction, played football for the Stapleton Indians, boxed semi7 The Linnet's Wings

pro. He had heavy hands, like stone, big-shouldered and thick-necked. He yanked Norman from the house. Taught him about consequences.

“Oh, Norman was just a big tub of lard,” Mother said.

“I know, but big. Wasn’t he 6 feet 4?”

“Violence never settles anything.”

“Did he hit you again?”

“Your father should be ashamed.”

“Why? He didn’t tell me. He didn’t say a word. It was Johnny Keller.”

“Oh, that Johnny Keller. He should keep his mouth shut. Just one bully beating up another.”

Grand was outraged. She tried to have Poppa arrested, but the judge said he’d drop the charges if Poppa decided to join the Marines.

(On Sunday afternoons. . .)

On Sunday afternoons, Nonno gave me a quarter to crank his old Victrola. The music was strange, but I didn’t mind the cranking. He’d direct, how fast, how slow. He’d hum, gesture, motion to speed up as the music soared. “Veloce! Più velocemente!” would come the command uttered with eyes shut tight, the veins of his wiry neck swollen, and one hand extended.

Not a big man, but, even in advanced age, strong. A body capable of tremendous leverage.

His hands were large, muscular, deeply creased. Dangerous hands. Even in repose, they carried the threat of violence. Once, I saw him knock a stranger out with a single blow. The stranger was taller, but the punch broke his nose like a rock crushing a biscuit. There was the crack of bone on bone, the snapcrackle of collapsing cartilage. The stranger’s eyes rolled up in his head. He fell to the ground with a thud. There was shouting. People running. And blood everywhere.

But as I cranked, the unquiet hands would be at ease. Amid the rise and fall of Verdi and Caruso, he’d soak peaches in his wine, dream about the Old World and a wife already dead from consumption. A thick, calloused finger would trace the outline of a black, gilt-framed photograph and he'd tell me of summer nights when he was young, courting Nonna Raffaela beneath a moonlit Florentine window, playing a borrowed mandolin, singing “Che Gelida Manina” and “Maria, Mari!” Or the passionate, “Una Furtive Lagrima.” Serenading. As his father before him, and his father, and his father’s father.

The scratchy music would play. Nonno would lean his head back. The white mustache would shine in the receding light. The sad, dark eyes would close. And he’d look old, fine-boned, and frail.

Respighi now, I think. A favorite. The music would sail and the old man, would dance and sing along in a raspy thin Italian. . .

Dell'aere ai morsi crudi gli addolorati tronche offron predgando i bronchi nudi.

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How cold I am! How alone; through the grey sky a sigh flies up from the dead.

It calls to me: Come, the valley is dark.

Oh sad, unloved one, come! Come!

His crooked figure would sway gently in the dying light. The hardened, ominous hands would gesture plaintively, delicately, with a wild, knotted, sinewy grace. The final crescendo would burst, pierce the air, followed by a solemn coda. “Basta,” the old man would whisper, “basta.”

When it was done, I’d wait.

I would not move or speak.

Those hands, those dangerous hands, would be poised an arm’s length above me. Head bowed, I’d close my eyes and feel his gaze upon me, the intensity of his heart. A moment would pass and I’d look up, tentative, silent, almost mournful, until, neither he nor I, could stand a moment more, and the old man would grab me in a rush and send me squealing in the air.

(Fuoco: Into the Fire. . .)

“And do you know what I said?” he says.

It’s a summer night and I’m very young. We’re sitting in lawn chairs out back by his garden, watching the shore traffic below on Route 61. It’s hot and he’s drinking wine from a long-necked bottle.

I don’t like it. It scares me. My mother has filled me with stories of what happens when men drink. I have a Cott’s Cream Soda with ice, served in a tall glass that once was a jelly jar.

“And do you know what I said?” he says again.

I know what he said. I’ve heard it a thousand times.

In the dark of night, the S.S. Anglia glides past Battery Park, approaches the Lower East Side. Below decks, a young man peers from the black steerage into the black of night. His wife and infant child huddle nearby. Before them sprawls a catacomb of tangled streets, crowded tenements, airless sweatshops, a panoply of factories belching heat and light. The young man looks at his family and thinks of Dante as they enter the rain-wet New World.

“No, what did you say?” I say, pretending.

He looks off, far into the evening sky, above rows of houses, the endless lines of cars and grey exhaust.

“Non so come,” he says, “si puo vivere in questo fuoco.”

And he waits, knowing that I will ask. Does he forget that he’s told me so many times? Or does he like that it’s become a ritual? Our ritual. So, I ask.

“What does that mean, Nonno?”

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He looks at me gravely. “I do not know how,” he says, “it is possible. . .to live in such fire.”

He shakes his head.

I shake my head, too.

And the two of us sit, the man and boy. (“Ah-meddy-ga. . .”)

This is the pamphlet they handed Nonno when he got off the boat:

A Welcome to Immigrants & Some Good Advice

In America you need not be rich to be happy and respected. In other countries the people belong to the government. They are called subjects. They are under the power of some Emperor, King, Duke, or other Ruler. If the Common people of other countries had faith in each other, there would be no Czars, Kings or Kaisers ruling them under the pretext of Divine Right. In America there are no bosses.

The People are the boss. You need only to be honest and honorable, decent in your talk, and clean in your person. Those who behave themselves will have no problems.

America will welcome you.

Nonno Michele came to this country in 1908. He was educated. An artisan, the member of a guild. He did not believe in the stories of easy wealth and streets of gold. But he did believe in the promise, the dream, the sogno bello. What he found was the jeers of “dago” and “wop” and “greaseball.” He was handed a shovel and called a “giny” ditch digger. Eventually, he practiced his craft (in diminished capacity) as a carver of gravestones, water fountains, the sarcophagi of rich people’s mausoleums.

My father told me about the day he watched Nonno, eyes fierce and brokenhearted, tears cutting his cheeks like acid, as the cold chisel edged the names of his wife and only female child. A week apart. A bleak December day. Though America broke its promise to him, he remained faithful. He pronounced it, would always pronounce it, Ah-meddy-ga, with a certain gossamer lightness, as if the word itself, “Ah-meddy-ga,” were dream enough.

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(The Secret. . .)

“Efva you be-a-gude boy,” Nonno tells me, beleaguered by a vowel-deficient language, “den-ah-ma goan to buy you a pony.” He tells me this when he thinks I’m about to get restless. His eyes shine when he says “pony” and he smiles like a young boy. I smile too.

We’re in a bar called the Royal Cafe. I'm five, maybe six years-old and the bar scares me.

These are workingmen. Tough. Hunkies from the docks. Pale, not dark like Nonno. They wear layers of clothes, flannel shirts and long underwear, King ‘Imperials,” The Aristocrat of Overalls. They call the bartender, “Murphy,” but his real name is Hymie Zelkowitz.

They like Hymie and they like Nonno, too. They smile, buy him rounds of drinks. Nonno nods, returns the favor. We can’t stay long. I’m glad. The Royal is dark, dirty. It has a pool table and jukebox in back.

Out in the brightness of the street, we walk maybe half a block before a cablecar stops to give us a ride. The conductor won’t take Nonno’s money. He shakes his head, “No suh. Not good heah, suh.” He calls Nonno “The Mayor of Decatur Street.” We stop in front of the Silver Fox. Inside are pine paneled walls and much more light. There are tables and chairs and women, too.

"Such a doll," a blonde one says, approaching us. Her skin is clear and very pale, but not pasty like the others. It almost glows. Her green eyes are flecked and transparent. She wears dark eye make-up heavily applied and her coarse, semi-bushy hair is left unkept. It’s as if she tried to brush it, make it nice, then pushed it to one side and said, “Ah, the hell with it.” When she smiles, I can see that one front tooth is chipped and the other capped. But she’s nice, attractive, in a damaged way, and I like her.

“Nippo-TEEN-no,” Nonno says. He pronounces it as if the word has volume, texture, ripe like a juicy piece of fruit.

“You can sure see the resemblance,” the blonde answers. Her name is Carol. She brushes back my black hair, chucks my cheek. “Looks like Dondi,” she tells Nonno. I blush from shyness. I’m not used to the attention of strangers. I sit on the bar between them and close up, it’s clear Carol didn’t sleep too much last night.

“Hey, Paradowski,” a deep male voice calls from across the room. Carol turns. She squints to find it. He’s a husky brown-haired man in a frayed blue work shirt and heavy boots. “One’s higher than the other,” he calls, one hand cupped to his mouth, then both cupped on his chest. Carol looks down and checks herself. The men laugh. They all laugh.

“Oh you!” she scolds.

“I always get her with that one,” brown hair boasts. “Always.”

Carol frowns and shakes a finger.

He ducks his head and laughs.

“Excuse me,” Carol says and sashays over. She flashes her bright eyes and damaged smile, one hand resting on a hip. The men laugh, leer, nudge each other.

I begin to fidget.

As we walk down the street, Carol waves from the door. A solitary figure, tiny, lost, and all alone.

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(Little Palermo. . .)

Streets are lined with trees. Outdoor cafes have vined trellises and red tablecloths. People wave and smile. Vendors cry—their pushcarts full with fruits and vegetables, shiny silver-scaled fish, black mussels, clams, piles of grey oysters in their rough imbricated shells. The vendors sing—bright tenors, basso profundos.

Storefronts are draped in red and white and green. Huge rings of sienna-crusted bread, rows of provolone hang from ceilings, cylinders of “moozzarel” are stacked on shelves like an armory of high caliber artillery shells. And there are bars. “VINO! VINO! di California, di Italy—Beer and Whiskey for Sale!” The doors are propped open and I see perspiring men in the muted light, sitting at tables in shortsleeve shirts and baggy pants. They’re playing cards, drinking beer, mopping their brows with blue bandannas. When they see Nonno, they laugh and shout, greet by hugging. Some even kiss him on the cheek. They gesture with their hands, speak Italian. Gandmother Gertrude’s sigh is almost audible. I cling to Nonno’s hand. They feed me sausage and spumoni while they fight over boccie.

On the way home, we eat sticky ciambella and sweet clouds of zeppoli. “Our little see-cret, no?” Nonno says with a wink and smile. If Momma found out there’d be hell to pay. She thinks if you take one drink, you’re an alcoholic.

(On Why Momma Hated Drinking. . .)

“Oh, it was d-i-s-gusting. I don’t even like to think about it. But you should have heard him play the piano. And the organ! I-tell-you, it was something.” She was his favorite. Out of six his favorite.

“But why did you have to clean up after him? Where was Grand?”

“She was asleep. It was disgusting. He’d throw up all over everything. I’d wake up and have to clean him and the bed.”

“You mean he slept with you?”

“When he was drunk, he did. You don’t think Grand would let him near her then?”

“But why’d he do it?”

“I don’t know.Wish I did know.”

She was ironing one of Poppa’s shirts. Beside her was a bowl of water. She’d sprinkle the shirt with her fingers, then the iron would thump and the steam would hiss and rise.

“He had a very good job—bookkeeper for the Cunard Line—then he just started drinking.

It was after the accident.”

“What accident?”

“Down on the loading dock. He hurt his back. I don’t remember how it happened. Laid up for a year. And there was no Workman’s Comp in those days. Grand had to go out and get a job. Back then that wasn’t too easy, believe-you-me, for a woman to find respectable work. Things changed after that. They were never the same.”

“Maybe that’s why he started to drink.”

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“No excuse!” The blue eyes snapped, harsh with judgment. The iron thumped and wheezed.

“And then one day, he goes out and never comes back. No goodbye, no I love you. Nothing. ” The pain was still palpable.

“I thought Grand threw him out.”

“Who told you that?”

“Poppa.”

“Ha! What would he know.”

“He said Grand drove him out.”

“He doesn’t know anything. I was there. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“You mean he just left? You never saw him again?”

“Never. . .thirteen and never saw him again. .”

“Is he alive?”

“Gerry hired a private detective, years ago—I don’t remember how that ended. Living up north, I think. Probably dead. Probably drunk himself dead. But I hope it’s something you never do. . .drink. Can’t stand it. And they act so strange. . .”

“When Poppa drinks, he gets happy.”

“When’d you ever see your father drink?”

“That Christmas. . .”

“What Christmas?”

“That one that Mrs. Keller brought the cider that was old. Poppa kept shooting the bulbs off the tree with my pellet gun.”

“Oh, that was different. He didn’t even know.” She started to laugh. “But that’s one thing I praise the Lord: your father’s not a drinking man. People can say what they will, but he’s not a drunk.

And he’s clean, very clean. I’ve always said that. He has good personal habits.”

I like it when she says something good about him.

It doesn’t happen very often.

(A House Divided. . .)

I was raised in an atmosphere where elevating your voice, expressing anything but diluted emotion, was a serious and embarrassing lapse of etiquette. A sign of weakness. My father’s family seemed ignorant, even disdainful, of these significant virtues. They were loud, boisterous, openly affectionate. Even violent. Not unlike characters in the operas Nonno Michele loved so well. They often disagreed with sudden and frightening intensity. “Don’t be like that,” Grand would tell me, “Don’t be like your father.” I knew what she meant. She taught me to feel shame for my shared inheritance: dark hair and eyes, the ruddy complexion, the least display of anger. They elicited a raised eyebrow, a look of disgust, as if she could taste and smell the contamination. I came to fear the Italians—their swarthy looks, the perplexing language, musical and vaguely threatening, the puzzling village ways, the crowded, powerful emotions, the complex labyrinth of their gestures (each it seemed with a secret meaning). The existence of blond, blue-eyed cousins served only to demonstrate my obvious inferiority and a feeling of utter isolation.

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(When Grandmother Gertrude came to live with us. . .)

I’d run errands for her: fill her water glass, carry her dinner tray, fetch a magazine or book, change the channel on the TV. She complained a lot. It was hard to please her. But then, there were other times when Mother wasn’t around. I’d pass Grand’s room and she’d hiss at me (a gap-toothed hiss through yellowed teeth and loose, distended lips), gesture me in. “Pocketbook,” she’d say, impatient, a bony finger pointing across the room. I’d retrieve it and she’d rustle around in it (for it was an enormous thing) until she found her change purse. Casting furtive glances—first left, then right—she’d withdraw a quarter or fifty cents and thrust it into my hand.

“What’s this for?”

“Just take it and be quiet.” She’d smile ominously. “You deserve it. Don’t tell your Mother.” She would roll her eyes in wide arcs. A grand conspiracy. The two of us against the world.

She calls mother her “jailer.” “Now, be on your way,” she’d tell me and hustle me out of the room.

An hour later, I’d hear her complaining about me again.

Telling mother I was lazy.

A spoiled brat.

Toward the end, she lost control of her bowels. Crazy with pain, furious with life, she lashed out at everyone. “Don’t pay attention,” mother told me, “she isn’t herself.” Once, before they took her away, but close to the end, she hissed at me from the darkness of her room. She looked fierce, wild, like a madwoman, smelled sour, acrid. She grabbed my arm, hard, and in a desperate whisper said, “I loved you best. . .You were always my favorite. . .Do you understand?”

Then her eyes clouded over and she fell back, exhausted by the effort.

A little later, they came and took her away.

(At the End. . .)

She got bloated and pale. Her hair was cracked and dry. It stuck out from her head. And she screamed sometimes, leaning up in bed like someone was twisting her arm behind her. It started low, then got very high. It made your ears hurt. A cry that cared for nothing nor nobody, only her own pain and her own dying. That’s when they came and took her away and Momma sat around and cried all the time and Poppa looked mad. It wasn’t a good time. We lived on the Rue St. Ann and I got in a fight with an older boy named Albert and bit him in the back.

(A Force to be Reckoned with. . .)

“She’s a tough old bird,” father would say and he was right. Grandmother Gertrude was a substantial Victorian matriarch—imperious, pale, green-eyed—who did not suffer fools idly. A look that withheld: approval, mercy, affection. You might receive a hurried, wet, old lady kiss but never an embrace. Her disapproval of my father’s family was more than simple prejudice. There were other, darker, reasons.

When Poppa was growing up, the Cantata’s lived above a butcher shop on St. Peter’s 14 The Linnet's Wings

Street. In the late afternoons Grandmother Gertrude would visit that shop and spend a disproportionate amount of time in the back room. Nonno had knowledge of this, couldn’t help but have knowledge of it.

The big-mouthed German butcher, with red-soaked apron and wet rope of cigar, was not discreet.

Furthermore, Grand knew that Nonno knew. It was one more thing she held against him.

But no matter what, she was always a force to be reckoned with.

“When Grand dies,” Poppa would say, “God will have to leave heaven. They both can’t be boss.” She raised a family of six single-handedly (after her husband ran off with a cashier from D. H. Holmes), supported them, kept a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and clothes on their backs—even in the depths of the Depression. Obdurate and single-minded, she competed fiercely in a man’s world long before it was fashionable. Lying about her age, she worked well past her seventy-second year, conquered then only by the bumbling ineptitude of a country doctor (who mistook dyspepsia for coronary thrombosis and administered a near and ultimately fatal dose of narcotic drugs). But even then, she did not go gentle into that good night, not her, she fought and wept (her liver-spotted hands clawing the empty air) and prayed and cursed (the hot spittle dripping from her chin, spouting from her lips) and howled her rebuke at the finalities of death.

When the end came, she sat straight-bolt upright, one palsied arm propped behind her, and reached out with her left hand, gently gesturing with her fingers, as if she were trying to grasp something infinitely small and delicate. Her sagging bloated face turned briefly coy, suddenly girlish.

The fleeting averted eyes of a young coquette. Then, without warning, as if she spied some grotesque apparition, her mouth dropped into a large black “O.” She screamed—a scream that raked the air like huge nails scraped slowly down a blackboard. “No,” she cried, “NO!” then collapsed back upon the mattress. A half-hour later she gave one, final, convulsive quiver and was gone.

There was that girlish face, so inestimably vulnerable, ripped from the protection of her parents, educated in the ruthless and impersonal vicissitudes of an unwelcoming world at an age that other girls worried about what dress to wear, what ribbon to choose, what date to take to the social. Never enough. Love, security. Never enough. Food, care. Never enough. So with life she made sure. Her presence filled our apartment, could only be fully calculated in its loss. Each word, each gesture, each idea filtered through her critical eye. A part of everyday experience, tanglible as bread, basic as air, ubiguitious as the sun.

She was gone. Just-like-that. Gone. And at eight years old I was left to ponder the meanings of finality.

(Autumn Song: ripeness is all) It is my sixth birthday.

A warm night for the first of November.

Mother clears the table. No one speaks. Poppa sits at the head. He stares straight before him, past Momma’s empty chair, out the open screen door of our second floor landing. His Marine Corps pose—ramrod straight, chest out, chin tucked in—stone faced. The rules of combat: no quarter given, none accepted. Momma tries her best pretend smile, but Poppa will not be moved.

Opposite me (and the reason for Poppa’s vigilance) is Grand. Her cheeks are puffed and 15 The Linnet's Wings

round, a Cheshire cat, like she’s hiding two or three biscuits in each of them. Both elbows rest on the table. Her hands are folded together, clasped to the right of her chin, her chin is tucked into her right shoulder, like Sugar Ray Robinson in a defensive crouch. It shields her from my father’s glare. She knows how to use his best impulses against him. And she’s smiling. Smiling sweetly! As if she were a girl.

She’s trying to get me to play along. If I return that smile, the conspiracy will be complete; he’ll be alone in his anger. But I’m having none of it. I know what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling. “Like a bull in a china shop,” he’d say, but it’s worse: a feeling like you don’t belong—anywhere. Everything she says has a double edge, meant for a certain part of his anatomy.

When the plates are cleared, Mother walks mysteriously out of the kitchen. Moments later she returns, holding a cake with candles burning bright. Momma sings, they all sing, “Happy Birthday. . Happy Birthday to YOU!” Poppa grunts more than sings, sneaks suspicious looks from the corner of his eye. Grand enjoys his discomfort. She sings gaily, triumphantly, gestures broadly with her hands, allows her thin soprano to crack. Rubbing it in: he’s not important enough for her to fear embarrassment.

The cake is put before me. “Make a wish! Make a wish!” I blow the candles out in a single breath. They applaud. “Did you make a wish?” Poppa smiles proudly, pats my head. His eyes acknowledge my loyalty. Neither woman will ever understand the irreconcilables that exist within his blood, nor will I until I’m an adult and a man, myself.

“What a beautiful cake,” Grand says as Momma slices the first piece, “don’t you think so, Freddy?”

She’s pushing her luck and knows it. Trying hard to create an incident. He hates the diminutive. His real name is “Alfredo.” He nods grudgingly. Grandmother, her face strategically propped behind her shoulder, rolls her large eyes slowly up to the ceiling and down. A flamboyant gesture. She purses her lips. “See,” she seems to say, “you can’t have a nice time around him.” Poppa glares. He knows what she’s doing with her nose in the air.

Mother puts a big slice of cake before me. And we all hear a loud, “clump, clump, clump,” on the back stairs. An unusual sound. No single person could make a sound like that. We look at each other. Mother stands over the cake with head cocked to one side knife poised in mid-cut. “Clump, clump-clumpity-clump,” the noise grows louder. Already, we can tell, at the first landing and heading up. Poppa squints like he recognizes something. Then we all hear it: A familiar voice. Sometimes singing, sometimes implorative, gently urging, somewhat slurred, definitely inebriated. We sit motionless. Mother looks to Poppa, then to me. An expression that says, “What the devil ?”

“CLOMP, CLOMP, CLOMP,” thunders up the final steps.

The whole house shakes. Suddenly, the screen door is flung open and the head of a fullgrown horse is thrust inside. We jump and yell. The head’s enormous, fills the entire doorway: long and flat, with nostrils flared, black eyes wild with animal fear. It sneezes and sprays us all.

Mother screams and drops the knife into the cake. Poppa looks ready to spring. Grand’s mouth is open so wide that missing molars can clearly be identified. Then Nonno’s head pops in the door, squeezed between the frame and the skittish, swaybacked horse.

“Buon Compleanno, Antonio!” he cries. “See-a what I bring-a you!” His voice is alive with laughter and he wears an old slouch hat cocked rakishly to one side. He sings, “Happy Birthday,” in Italian. The horse stomps, snorts, starts to enter. Saliva drips, drools greasy from its wizened muzzle.

“No you don’t!” Mother shouts, recovering herself, “GET THAT ANIMAL OUT OF HERE!” 16 The Linnet's Wings

She advances on the hapless creature armed with a broom.

“Don’t hitta-da pony,” Nonno pleads, “Don't hitta-da pony.” He throws himself between them. But it’s no use. Momma’s barrage rains down on them both. “I begga-you. . .” Nonno cries, retrieving his hat. He feints and dodges Momma’s relentless attack. I recognize the “horse” now. It’s Genco Cubelli’s old swayback, long retired, used at one time to deliver ice.

“GET—IT—OUT-TA. . .HERE!!!!” she roars, huffing and puffing as she swings. The noise and confusion is terrible. Neighbors lean out their windows, have gathered below. They line the stairs, peer in from the landing. They “Ooou—“ and “Ah—“ and cheer.

The terrified beast is finally extracted, but not without mass confusion and collateral damage. Even Grand is hit by an errant blow and now her hair is all pushed up on one side, pitched like the list of a sinking ship.

Out on the landing, the horse pivots abruptly. His hindquarters knock Nonno over the railing where he teeters precariously, flailing his arms for balance, watching the unforgiving ground two stories below.

The crowd roars.

Nonno catches himself.

They cheer.

Only to lose his grip, once more.

They “Oh-h-h” and “Aw-w-w.”

He begins to slide.

They scream!

But, in the last second, catches his foot in the banister. He pulls himself up.

They yell and applaud.

The horse and Nonno perform a kind of dance, until he finally gets the mare turned around.

I run to the screen door just in time to see Nonno holding the reins in one hand as he triumphantly doffs his hat with the other and bows to acknowledge the crowd. It is then that the spooked creature exacts his revenge. He butts Nonno from behind, launches him up and out through the air like an acrobat shot out of a cannon. The crowd roars again and Nonno lands in a sea of upraised arms and hands.

Momma yells, “You get BACK HERE!” as if Nonno’s departure were planned. “GET THIS HORSE OUT OF HERE!” The confused creature bumps Momma with it haunches, then snorts on her head. Momma’s eyes narrow. She reaches for the broom and threatens the horse. The neighbors prop Nonno’s hat on his head and lift him up to the second landing and deposit him with a cheer. Nonno corals the horse. Momma turns to find me beside her. “Inside!” she says, opening the screen door and pointing.

When I return to the table, the air’s so tight we can hardly breathe. Poppa bows his head.

We all do. We can feel Mother’s wrath above us, her blue eyes burning, daring anyone to contradict her anger. We can hear Nonno’s singing.

Momma looks around, daring us to even smirk.

I peek at Poppa. He’s staring straight ahead. Marines know how to do this. Then we hear Nonno singing, happy joyous, receding down in the alley. Poppa forces the corners of his mouth down, rigid, and lowers his chin to his chest. I try to hold it back, but my body begins to shake. My shoulders bounce silently up and down. Mother narrows her eyes at me, still full of rage. I stifle my air. We can hardly hold it. I let out a little snort. I feel like I’m going to explode. Then Grand makes a small giggle.

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“Mother!” my mother shouts and we stop. For a moment, all is silent, then we can’t help it. I giggle.

Momma glares. She’s still holding the broom. Then Grand can’t breathe. She expels pent up air through her mouth. I begin to giggle. Even Poppa, who holds out to the last, expresses a great blast of air and begins to laugh, too. Finally, Mother’s anger deserts her. She starts to chuckle. We peek at each other.

And we laugh.

We all laugh—loud and full and overmuch—and the the tears come down our cheeks and the laughter ripples around us, surrounds us, travels in expanding circles, out into the ripe, warm, autumn air. And I think, why can’t it always be like this, and Nonno sings. It is “La Danza” from Rossini: Mamma mia, Mamma mia, già la luna, già la luna Frinche, frinche, Frinche, frinche, La-la--RA, la-la--RA, L-a-a. . .RA! It is my sixth birthday, and Nonno sings. ###

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Art: Floor Polishers by Kazimir Malevich

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Razorwire by Barry Charman

T

he wire in her hair tugs, the little girl cries – she doesn’t understand – her mother pulls her free. She urges her, on on on. They can’t stop. She thinks of the doll they dropped all those weeks ago, how the girl had cried, but they couldn’t stop, couldn’t look back. They had struggled to the shore, the cold air rushing towards them, like a mocking embrace.

Now, she sees the fence looming ahead, in her dreams it was shorter. She never imagined the wire, they’ve already crawled under one sharp coil, now they must do it again. She wants to stop running, yearns for it all to finally stop. A new home. A peace. A pause, at least. The girl is sobbing. The tunnel beyond the fence is a yawning mouth, she feels it will swallow them whole, but she will do anything to keep her baby safe, she scoops her up, rushes forward – The night is suddenly alive with tension. Hands have her. There are voices, whistles.

She falls to her knees, her baby girl tucked up between her legs, as safe as she can be.

She holds her tight, sobs, waits for more men to come.

Waits for it to end, so it can all begin again. ###

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Familia Biológica by Catherine Zickgraf (translation by Randy Z. Chavarria) Naciste en nosotros.

Eras lo que fuimos por sólo un minuto.

Un niño para mis hermanos, otro para luchar.

Los ha hecho tios pequeños.

Una muñeca para mi hermana. Ella garabateó las veces que contraje ese otoño—ella tenía nueve años.

Y todavía tengo el papel en su letra de tercer grado, cronometrando contracciones por un reloj que marcaba demasiado rápido.

Fui al hospital contigo.

Después de dos días, me fui sin ti, ya que nuestro tiempo juntos había terminado. . . porque no pudiste ser nuestro. Naciste para otra.

Hijo amado, dijo el aviso de la adopción.

En la única foto de tu y mi padre, sus lentes brumosos se resbalan por su nariz.

Mi madre. Mi madre, ella te cargo primero, y un pedazo de su alma te ha protegido desde entonces.

Seis de la mañana, su cumpleaños decimoctavo: encontré mi cara en la suya en una búsqueda de Myspace.

Y me diste las gracias por darte vida, aunque era niña, y por demostrar que te amamos más que a nosotros mismos.

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Birth Family by Catherine Zickgraf You were born into us.

You were who we were for just a minute.

A boy for my brothers, another to wrestle.

You made them tiny uncles.

A doll for my sister. She scrawled out times I contracted that Fall—she was nine.

And I still have the paper in her third-grade handwriting timing contractions from a clock that was ticking too fast.

I went to the hospital with you.

After two days, I left without you, since our time together was over. . . because you couldn’t be ours. You were born for another.

Beloved child, said your adoption announcement.

In the only photo of you and my father, his foggy glasses slipped down his nose.

My mother. My mother, she held you first, and a piece of her soul has guarded you since.

Six a.m., your eighteenth birthday: I found my face in yours in a Myspace search.

And you thanked me for birthing you, though a child myself, and for proving we love you more than ourselves.

ART:Deags Detail, PS MLF, 2016 22 The Linnet's Wings

ART: Carnival Evening by Henri Rousseau 23 The Linnet's Wings

La Llamada by Catherine Zickgraf Un ruido desde la bosque dice, sígueme por las hojas como manos, déjalas tocar tu alma.

La luna como una aceituna sueña en su oceano envuelta en su manta del hielo.

Pero bajo los árboles nada como los algas que brotan a traves del suelo de la tierra.

The Call by Catherine Zickgraf (translation by Catherine Zickgraf) A noise from the forest says, follow me through the leaves as hands, let them play your soul.

The moon like an olive dreams in its ocean wrapped in its mantle of ice.

But below the trees it swims like seaweed that sprouts up through the earthen floor.

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NEW WORLD POETRY

Gabriela Mistral By

Stephen Zelnick

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Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga in 1889 in Vicuña, Chile, daughter of an Amerindian father and Basque mother.

Her father, an amateur musician and itinerant teacher, was a professional drunkard and abandoned the family when Lucila was three. Her mother became a seamstress, and Lucila’s older sister, Emelina, an unlicensed schoolteacher. “Gabriela Mistral” was Lucila’s invention, a claim to being the divine herald (Gabriela) and the sharp northwesterly wind that sweeps down into southern France before the spring warming (Mistral).

She named herself and educated herself and pushed her way to prominence in a culture that had no place for her.

[Mistral was raised in a small village located east of La Serena towards the Argentine border. Chile, pinned to a narrow strip against the Pacific coast, stretches from the mountains of Peru and Bolivia far to the southern jungles at the tip of South America, a distance of over 3,000 miles. Chile’s population was 17.76 million in 2014; Santiago has more than 6 million residents; Chile’s President, Michelle Bachelet, is in her second term; Chile boasts two Nobel Prize poets of the 20th C., Pablo Neruda, from Temuco near the southern jungle, and Gabriela Mistral, from the Andes, far to the north.]

She grew up nearby natural splendor, in Montegrande, in the Elqui Valley of the Andes, a remote and chilly paradise.

Despite its grandeur, the townspeople were enslaved to the nitrate mines established by European investment. Her family could not afford proper schooling for Gabriela, but assisted by Emilina, she read widely. Her reading in classics and Old Testament shows in her poetry. At twelve, she was a teacher’s assistant and soon gained attention for her verses. Gabriela worked in a dozen local schools, battling authorities unwilling to respect her uncredentialed gifts. Luckily, an educational innovator helped her to significant postings throughout Chile, including in Temuco, where she briefly mentored the young Pablo Neruda. She continued her brilliant career in early childhood education well into her forties. Today, there are primary schools named in her honor throughout Latin America.

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[This ethereal image of the Elqui Valley differs little from the many photographs that capture the beauty and grandeur of this, the largest valley in Chile. Vineyards abound as do wandering herds of alpaca, sheep, and goats. Surprisingly, Gabriel did not write nature poetry, and rarely mentions the Elqui Valley.]

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Mistral published four volumes of poetry during her lifetime . Her four volumes are: Desolation (1922); Ternura (1924); Tala (1938); and Lagar (1954). Her poetry varies in subject matter, style, and outlook – from lullabies and nursery tales to harsh comments on social cruelty; bitter comments on religious hypocrisy to ardent prayers and imaginative retellings of biblical tales; personal exaltations to grinding laments of defeat. From the first, Mistral was recognized for her originality and power, capped by the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945), the first Latin American author to receive the honor.

[Desolacion (1922), was Mistral’s first published volume and more of these poems are anthologized and featured online than from any other collection.]

Desolacion collects some of her earlier work, including “Los Sonetos de La Muerte”. Mistral led a discrete personal life, including love alliances with both men and women. The story of a young lover who died tragically is customarily associated with these sonnets. Though pained and grieving, the speaker is tough-minded and shockingly unconventional: Del nicho helado en que los hombres te pusieron, te bajaré a la tierra humilde y soleada. lower Que he de dormirme en ella los hombres no supieron, Y que hemos de soñar sobre la misma almohada.

Out of the icy niche men put you in, I will you into the humble and sunny earth.

I will sleep there, a place people do not know, where we someday will dream on the same pillow.

Te acostaré en la tierra soleada con una dulcedumbre de madre para el hijo dormido, y la tierra ha de hacerse suavidades de cuna al recibir tu cuerpo de niño dolorido.

I will put you to bed in the sunny earth with the sweetness of a mother for her sleeping son, and the earth will become a comforting cradle to receive the body of its child of sadness.

Luego iré espolvoreando tierra y polvo de rosas, y en la azulada y leve polvareda de luna, los despojos livianos irán quedando presos.

Then I will powder the earth with rose dust, and with pale blue moon-dust, those weightless spoils imprisoning inmates in their cells.

Me alejaré cantando mis venganzas hermosas, ¡porque a ese hondor recóndito la mano de ninguna bajará a disputarme tu puñado de huesos

I will hush my songs of sweet revenge, because hidden deep there no hand descends to fight with me over your fistful of bones!

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The sonnet is formally precise, stately and slow, each line poised on an artful caesura. The rhymes are perfect. However, its drama of love, grieving, and defiance is odd. The poem opens with a shock… the beloved’s body preserved in a frozen chamber, only then lowered to the dark bed beneath the sunny earth. No angels, no flight to heaven, no celestial choirs greeting the deceased.

Instead, the poem insists on the body, even previewing a shared lovers’ pillow in the grave’s close confines. The mother putting her child to bed aches with tenderness.

The first tercet retreats from pain into cleverness, colored with “rose and the light blue dust of moonlight”, and the fancy that these powders weigh down corpses that would otherwise escape.

But the final stanza is angry and hard-hearted, the speaker satisfied that the lover is hers alone, that she possesses and is possessed by the corpse below. One clever rendering of “disputarme” translates the last two lines as, “no hand comes below to cast dice for your handful of bones.”

The speaker has a mad fierce thought that the dead lover is hers, alone, forever.

“El Pensador de Rodin” meditates on death, imaging Rodin’s famous statue as itself a poem:

[Auguste Rodin’s (1840-1917) created several of the world’s best known sculptures, including “The Thinker”, “The Gates of Hell”, “The Burghers of Calais”, “St. John the Baptist Preaching” and “Monument to Balzac”. These and other re-creations appear in Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum.]

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EL PENSADOR DE RODIN

RODIN'S “THE THINKER”

Con el mentón caído sobre la mano ruda, el Pensador se acuerda que es carne de la huesa, carne fatal, delante del destino desnuda, carne que odia la muerte, y tembló de belleza.

With chin cast down upon his rough hand, “The Thinker” accepts that he is mortal flesh, fatal flesh, naked to destiny, flesh that hates death, and trembled in the face of beauty.

Y tembló de amor, toda su primavera ardiente, y ahora, al otoño, anégase de verdad y tristeza.

El "de morir tenemos" pasa sobre su frente, en todo agudo bronce, cuando la noche empieza.

He throbbed with love, all his burning spring, now, autumnal, he drowns in truth and sadness.

The "of death we are" passes over his forehead, all in witty bronze, as night sets on.

Y en la angustia, sus músculos se hienden, sufridores.

Cada surco en la carne se llena de terrores, Se hiende, como la hoja de otoño, al Señor fuerte

And in anguish, his muscles swell, expanding.

Each groove of flesh fills with terrors, swelling like an autumn leaf; the powerful Lord

que le llama en los bronces... Y no hay árbol torcido evokes him in bronze… there’s no tree bent de sol en la llanura, ni leòn de flanco herido, by sun in meadow, no lion with injured flank, crispados como este hombre que medita en la muerte. cast like this man who meditates on death.

“The Thinker”, a god, accepts mortality to experience the pulse of feeling. He gains the ecstasy of beauty but at the cost of death’s terror. In his youth he shook with desire, but now autumnal, he muses on mortality.

Rodin, providing his creation phenomenal strength and fragility, evoked in “witty bronze” this eternal symbol of our mixed being. The statue is familiar, but Mistral’s interpretation is original. She insists on the physicality of the object in precise detail, mixing a sculptor’s awareness of mass and expression with the fixed process of seasons entering the poignancy of awareness.

LA MUJER FUERTE

THE STRONG WOMAN

Me acuerdo de tu rostro que se fijó en mis días, mujer de saya azul y de tostada frente, que en mi niñez y sobre mi tierra de ambrosía vi abrir el surco negro en un abril ardiente.

I remember your face noticed long ago, a woman with blue dress and dark features, who in my childhood in my land of ambrosia, I saw opening a dark furrow on a blistering April day.

Alzaba en la taberna, honda, la copa impura el que te apegó un hijo al pecho de azucena, y bajo ese recuerdo, que te era quemadura, caía la simiente de tu mano, serena.

In the tavern she drank deep from a dirty cup as a child clung to her orange blossom breast, and with these burning memories of you came the image of your serene hand.

Segar te vi en enero los trigos de tu hijo, y sin comprender tuve en ti los ojos fijos, agrandados al par, de maravilla y llanto.

I saw you mowing your son’s wheat in January, and without understanding I have a magnified image of your glances of wonder and grief.

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[The unusual photograph of Mistral shows her stern determination. Mistral’s Amerindian features stand out here. She was also of Basque ancestry, and fancied herself Jewish on the basis of her responsiveness of Old Testament stories and poetry.]

Y el lodo de tus pies todavía besara, porque entre cien mundanas no he encontrado tu cara ¡y aun te sigo en los surcos la sombra con mi canto!

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I still kiss the clay of your feet, because in a hundred worlds I have not found your face yet shadow still your dark furrows in my song!

I suspect this poem evokes Mistral’s mother. It begins with the physically precise image of a woman the poet chanced to notice. The woman is an earthy heroine, capable of hard labor, boisterous living, and nurturance. She digs deep, resisting the “blistering” heat, and then drinks deep, disregarding the dirty cup in the raw tavern, even as she nourishes her infant at her sweat-perfumed breast. It’s a titanic image of earth-mothering force noticed by a girl looking on at life. The remembered image evokes the woman who carries her grief in wonder, a meditative woman who reflects life’s glory and misery. In harvesting wheat not her own, she wins the poet’s devotion. The girl who looked on becomes the poet, bearing the force of strong women, in lines like furrows cut in the hard turf of memory.

Mistral, though spiritual, shifted religions throughout her life. Born Catholic, rebellious and a poet, she fell out with the nuns who demanded obedience. Gabriela fashioned her version of God, of Jesus, to her imaginative liking. She delighted in Old Testament stories and insisted that she was Jewish, somewhere hidden in her Spanish/Basque heredity. At one point, she became a Theosophist and accepted official guidance. Later in life, Mistral rejected formal religion but never put aside herspirituality; like many, she proved too religious for standard pieties.

[ Mistral’s best known image is this strong, smiling woman in the rakish beret, depicted here on the cover of one of the many collections of her poetry.]

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“Credo” is almost traditional, though even here, her images prove more poetic than devotional: CREDO

CREDO

Creo en mi corazón, ramo de aromas que mi Señor como una fronda agita, perfumando de amor toda la vida y haciéndola bendita.

Creo en mi corazón, el que no pide nada porque es capaz del sumo ensueño y abraza en el ensueño lo creado: ¡Inmenso dueño!

Creo en mi corazón, que cuando canta hunde en el Dios profundo el franco herido, para subir de la piscina viva recién nacido.

Creo en mi corazón, el que tremola porque lo hizo el que turbó los mares, y en el que da la vida orquestaciones como de pleamares.

Creo en mi corazón, el que yo exprimo para teñir el lienzo de la vida de rojez o palor y que le ha hecho veste encendida.

Creo en mi corazón, el que en la siembra por el surco sin fin fue acrecentando.

Creo en mi corazón, siempre vertido, pero nunca vaciado.

Creo en mi corazón, en que el gusano no ha de morder, pues mellará a la muerte; creo en mi corazón, el reclinado en el pecho de Dios terrible y fuerte.

I believe in my heart, that with bough sweet-scented, my Lord, like a waving frond, perfumes all life with love and blessings.

I believe in my heart, he requires nothing because He is capable of the great dream and embraces in the dream all he created: ¡Great Lord of all I believe in my heart, that when he sings God washes clean the honest hurt to raise up, from life’s pool, those born again.

I believe in my heart, He rouses the heart -as He did when He stirred the seas, He that orchestrates all life, like a mighty tide.

I believe in my heart, it is He I express when tinting life’s canvass, both vivid and pale, and that He made it draped in fire.

I believe in my heart, that He sows seed in that endless furrow, always increasing.

I believe, though always pouring out, his sack of seed is never emptied.

I believe in my heart, that the worm does not bite deep, but nicks us to death; I believe it in my heart, the heart that rests in God’s chest, awful and mighty.

This god of poets, is a fount of sensuous gifts. He gifts the world with aromas and song, and fills hearts with compassion and forgiveness. He is the source of renewal, of movement and change stirred by turbulent power. He asks only that we use his gifts well. He needs no prayers, offerings, or religiosity.

The artist knows God as she tints her canvass or voices the poem being born in her. He doesn’t say “no”.

Mistral’s credo flashes with humor and with delight in our creative fire. In “Mis Libros” (my books) Mistral wrote: “you hold in the Psalms fierce hot lava/ and in that fiery river my heart is set aflame!”

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[This Bohemian portrait of Mistral -- with arched eyebrow, dark-framed face, and high turtle-neck -- is an unusual presentation of her personal style and values.]

Mistral explodes in exasperation at the spiritual flatness of her times, the dead souls wandering around her, and unresponsive to the power of Christ’s teachings. “AL OÍDO DEL CRISTO” is a series of sonnets assaulting this pallid nonchalance.

AL OÍDO DEL CRISTO

HEARING FROM CHRIST

!Cristo, el de las carnes en gajos abiertas; Cristo, el de las venas vaciadas en ríos: estas pobres gentes del siglo están muertas de una laxitud, de un miedo, de un frío!

Christ, he of the flesh opened in gashes; Christ, he of veins emptied in rivers: the poor souls of this century are dead from lassitude, from fear, from cold!

A la cabecera de sus lechos eres, si te tienen, forma demasiado cruenta, sin esas blanduras que aman las mujeres y con esas marcas de vida violenta.

You are at the headboard of their beds, if they’ll have you, a shape too bloody, without those softenings women love and with these scars of life’s violence.

No te escupirían por creerte loco, no fueran capaces de amarte tampoco así, con sus ímpetus laxos y marchitos.

They neither spat upon you for being crazy, nor were they capable of loving you, And so it is, with their lax and pale impulses.

Porque como Lázaro ya hieden, ya hieden, por no disgregarse, mejor no se mueven. ¡Ni el amor ni el odio les arrancan gritos!

Because like Lazarus now swollen, yes swollen, but not disintegrating, it’s best they don’t stir.

Neither love nor hate tears cries from them! ** 34 The Linnet's Wings

Aman la elegancia de gesto y color, y en la crispadura tuya del madero, en tu sudar sangre, tu último temblor y el resplandor cárdeno del Calvario entero,

They love the elegant gesture and bright color, of the construction of your wooden beam, and your bloody sweat, your final spasm and the lurid radiance of the Calvary scene,

les parece que hay exageración y plebeyo gusto;…

seems to them a crude exaggeration of plebian taste;…

Mistral is bitter here at those not touched by Christ’s fire but ruled instead by conventions and fearful of feeling anything deeply. Christ is right there, at their headboards as they lie down. But Christ is fearsome, a bloody image of life’s violence, and not the soft image most prefer. He lacks the elegance of gesture and good manners the squeamish delight in. Mistral’s reference to Lazarus is venomous, Dantean… corpses so swollen with death, they cannot move without spilling their foul torpor out into the world.

[One of the many portraits of Mistral with children, here in Mexico where she made important contributions to education by establishing schools and training hundreds of teachers.]

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Mistral’s religious commitment grows in part out of her sense of social injustice, as depicted in the suffering of children and the poor: PIECECITOS

LITTLE FEET

Piececitos de niño, azulosos de frío, ¡cómo os ven y no os cubren, ¡Dios mío!

Tiny feet of a child, blue from cold, how can they see and not cover you, My God!

¡Piececitos heridos por los guijarros todos, ultrajados de nieves y lodos!

Injured Little feet by all the pebbles, abused by snow and dirt!

El hombre ciego ignora que por donde pasáis, una flor de luz viva dejáis;

The blind man ignores what passes by, a flower of living light, you might disregard;

que allí donde ponéis la plantita sangrante, el nardo nace más fragante.

where would you put this bleeding little plant, no rose is born so fragrant.

Sed, puesto que marcháis por los caminos rectos, heroicos como sois perfectos.

Just so, you might walk along the right roads heroic as can be -perfect.

Piececitos de niño, dos joyitas sufrientes, ¡cómo pasan sin veros las gentes!

The child’s little feet, two suffering little gems, and people pass by without seeing!

Mistral writes complex lines, with caesural balance and engaging syntax, but several poems have this telegraphic punch and irregular movement, as if to say the point is clear without explanation. Terseness isolates the image and forces the reader to grow fragments into thoughts and fix phrases in memory.

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[A mural identifying one of the several schools in Puerto Rico that bear Mistral’s name.]

“The House” addresses the world’s injustice.

LA CASA

THE HOUSE

La mesa, hijo, está tendida, en blancura quieta de nata, y en cuatro muros azulea, dando relumbres, la cerámica.

Esta es la sal, éste el aceite y al centro el Pan que casi habla.

Oro más lindo que oro del Pan no está ni en fruta ni en retama, y da su olor de espiga y horno una dicha que nunca sacia.

Lo partimos, hijito, juntos, con dedos duros y palma blanda, y tú lo miras asombrado de tierra negra que da flor blanca.

The table, child, is set, in soft creamy whiteness, and the four light-blue walls reflect in ceramic.

Here is the salt, there the oil, and in the center bread that almost speaks.

No gold is prettier than the gold of bread, than that of fruit or grain, and sends forth its odor of harvest and oven, a joy that never ends.

We share it, little one, together, my hard fingers and your soft palms, and you stare amazed that black earth yields white flour.

Baja la mano de comer, que tu madre también la baja.

Los trigos, hijo, son del aire, y son del sol y de la azada; pero este pan "cara de Dios" no llega a mesas de las casas; y si otros niños no lo tienen, mejor, mi hijo, no lo tocarás, y no tomarlo mejor sería

Pause before you eat, as your mother does.

The wheat, child, is from the air, from sun and from the hoe; but this bread, “the face of God”, does not just arrive to our tables; and if other children do not have it, better, my child, not to touch it, and better yet not to touch it 37 The Linnet's Wings

con mano y mano avergonzadas.

Hijo, el Hambre, cara de mueca, en remolino gira las parvas, y se buscan y no se encuentran el Pan y el hambre corcovada.

Para que lo halle, si ahora entra, el Pan dejemos hasta mañana; el fuego ardiendo marque la puerta, que el indio quechua nunca cerraba, ¡y miremos comer al Hambre, para dormir con cuerpo y alma!

with hands of embarrassment.

Child, Hunger, with grimacing face, turns the unthreshed wheat in a mill, while Bread and hunchbacked Hunger seek but fail to find one another.

So might he find it, when he enters, the bread we leave for tomorrow; as the burning fire lights the door the Quechuan never closes, so we might watch Hunger eating, and sleep at peace, body and soul!

* En Chile, el pueblo llama al pan "cara de Dios."

*In Chile, the people call bread, “the face of God”

“The House” is a stern lesson in saying Grace, requiring attention to the poor. We eat our meal in shame if others go hungry, though we must eat our daily bread. But if we leave a portion and the door unlatched for those who might stop by the well-lit door, we may sleep peacefully.

Mistral filled her second volume, Ternura (Tenderness), with poems conceived from the child’s view. Mistral introduced nursery poems and lullabies into Spanish poetry, furthering her commitment to children’s education and helping parents and teachers engage the very young:

[Mistral’s second volume, Ternura (1924) broke new ground in Spanish poetry, with 109 poems organized into sections – “Canciones de Cuna”, “Rondas”, “La Desvariadora”, “Jugarretas”, “CuentaMundo”, “Casi Escolares”, and “Cuentos”.]

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APEGADO A MÍ

HERE BY ME

Velloncito de mi carne, que en mi entraña yo tejí, velloncito friolento, ¡duérmete apegado a mí!

Fuzzy fleece of my own flesh, that in my womb I wove, little chilly lammikin, sleep here by me!

La perdiz duerme en el trébol escuchándole latir: no te turben mis alientos, ¡duérmete apegado a mí!

Partridge rests his head in clover listening to the throb: my anxious breaths will ne’er disturb you sleep here by me!

Hierbecita temblorosa asombrada de vivir, no te sueltes de mi pecho: ¡duérmete apegado a mí!

Little grasses gently trembling amazed to be alive, don’t you leave my cozy breast: sleep here by me!

Yo que todo lo he perdido ahora tiemblo de dormir.

No resbales de mi brazo: ¡duérmete apegado a mí!

I who lost all in life’s struggle now tremble just to sleep.

Please don’t slip from my embrace: sleep here by me!

Like all good lullabies, this depends on 4/3 meter. But sparkling images and unusual turns of thought thread its simplicity. “Lamb fleece woven in the mother’s womb” is Shakespearean; and “little grasses amazed to be alive” though extravagant, is tenderly inventive. However, the turn in which infant comforts mother is unexpected and strikes with truth.

CON TAL QUE DUERMAS

IF ONLY YOU WOULD SLEEP

La rosa colorada cogida ayer; el fuego y la canela que llaman clavel;

Colored rose picked yesterday; the fiery cinnamon called carnation;

el pan horneado de anís con miel, y el pez de la redoma que la hace arder: todito tuyo hijito de mujer,

baked bread with anis seed and honey; the fish that flashes in her bowl; all is yours childling of woman, 39 The Linnet's Wings

[“Bisabuela” (2010) by Puerto Rican artist, Edna Santiago, depicts Santiago’s grandmother at peace with her great-grandson, David.]

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con tal que quieras dormirte de una vez.

if only you would sleep nod off just once.

La rosa, digo: digo el clavel.

La fruta, digo, y digo que la miel;

Rose, I say; I say carnation.

Fruit, I say, and honey, too;

y el pez de luces y más y más también, ¡con tal que duermas hasta el amanecer!

the shining fish and much more also, if only you would sleep til daybreak!

This humorous parent’s prayer mixes sweet with bitter. Comforting a restless infant drives the mother to extravagant bribes: “¡con tal que duermas” becomes more urgent as the mother pleads to quiet the baby and sink into her own oblivion.

Another treasured child’s poem – and not a child’s poem at all – is the rollicking “Eight Puppies”: OCHO PERRITOS

EIGHT PUPPIES

Los perrillos abrieron sus ojos del treceavo al quinceavo día.

De golpe vieron el mundo, con ansia, susto y alegria.

Vieron el vientre de la madre, la puerta suya que es la mía, el diluvio de la luz, las azaleas floridas.

The little puppies opened their eyes between the thirteenth and the fifteenth day.

In a flash they saw the world, with anxiety, terror, and delight.

They saw their mother’s belly, their door, which is mine, and a deluge of light, and flowering azaleas.

Vieron más: se vieron todos, el rojo, el negro, el ceniza, gateando y aupándose, más vivos que las ardillas; vieron los ojos de la madre y mi grito rasgado, y mi risa.

And saw much more, everything, the red, the black, the ash, scrambling up and pawing away, more lively than squirrels; they saw their mother’s eyes and heard my rasping cry and laugh.

Y yo querría nacer con ellos. ¿Por qué otra vez no sería?

Saltar de unos bananales una mañana de maravilla, en can, en coyota, en venada;

And I was wishing to be born with them.

Could it not be so again?

To leap out from among some banana trees one wonderful morning — as a dog, a coyote, a deer; 41 The Linnet's Wings

mirar con grandes pupilas, correr, parar, correr, tumbarme y gemir y saltar de alegría, acribillada de sol y ladridos hija de Dios, sierva oscura y divina.

to gaze with wide pupils, to run, stop, run, and tumble, to whimper and jump with joy, riddled with sun and barking, a child of God, serving, humble and divine.

“Eight Puppies” is an exuberant account of being “born again”, the viewer casting herself freely into new forms. Her language catches the play and runs with it: “gateando y aupándose, más vivos que las ardillas” and “correr, parar, correr, tumbarme /y gemir y saltar de alegría, /acribillada de sol y ladridos”, recreating the thrill of finding the world anew.

This theme is more severe but no less liberating in “La Copa” -- from Mistral’s third volume, Tala (Felling; 1938).

By then Lucila had experienced the world and felt its fatality. The fall of Spain to Fascist terror; the death of noble friends; fears for the future, as idealistic credos had given way:

[This poster, one of hundreds of brilliant depictions of the Spanish Civil War, celebrates the fighting spirit of the early days of that doomed struggle – the common objective, “to crush fascism”.]

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LA COPA

THE CUP

Yo he llevado una copa de una isla a otra isla sin despertar el agua.

Si la vertía, una sed traicionaba; por una gota, el don era caduco; perdida toda, el dueño lloraría.

No saludé las ciudades; no dije elogio a su vuelo de torres, no abrí los brazos en la gran Pirámide ni fundé casa con corro de hijos.

Pero entregando la copa, yo dije con el sol nuevo sobre mi garganta: -"Mis brazos ya son libres como nubes sin dueño y mi cuello se mece en la colina, de la invitación de los valles."

Mentira fue mi aleluya: miradme.

Yo tengo la vista caída a mis palmas; camino lenta, sin diamante de agua; callada voy, y no llevo tesoro, ¡y me tumba en el pecho y los pulsos la sangre batida de angustia y de miedo!

I have born a cup, from to isle to isle, without awakening the water.

If I spilled it, a flat betrayal; even by one drop, the gift was tarnished; totally lost, the owner left to weep.

I celebrated no cities; spoke no elegies to flights of towers, never opened arms to the grand Pyramid, nor founded a household cheered by children.

But bearing the cup, I said with the new sun on my throat: “My arms now are free, unowned as clouds, and my neck turns towards the hill, invited to look up from the valleys.”

That lie was my alleluia: look at me.

I gaze at my palms; I walk slowly, without the water’s sparkle; I go quietly, bearing no treasure, as my blood, filled with anguish and fear, subsides, beating in my chest and in my pulse.

“La Copa” (from Tala -- “felling”, as in a tree’s felling) was published in 1938. These were hard years, especially for Hispanics, who mourned Spain’s devastation. A simpler world had passed away, and simpler faiths lost their diamond sparkle. A world’s efforts, carefully guarded rectitude, and sacrifices -of travel, the whirl of cities, family and household delights, all set aside for a higher purpose – now appear an empty bargain. Instead of noble purpose, anguish and fear, isolation and panic.

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[This photograph of Guernica after German bombing, shows what the ensuing decade was to make familiar in Europe and elsewhere.

Picasso’s renowned mural alerted the world to Spain’s suffering.]

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“Ausencia” from the same volume, continues these themes: AUSENCIA

ABSENCE

Se va de ti mi cuerpo gota a gota.

Se va mi cara en un óleo sordo; se van mis manos en azogue suelto; se van mis pies en dos tiempos de polvo.

My body, drop by drop, leaves you behind.

My face, now a dulled oil painting, does so too; as do my hands, in loose quicksilver; and my feet, in dust twice over.

¡Se te va todo, se nos va todo!

Se va mi voz, que te hacía campana cerrada a cuanto no somos nosotros.

Se van mis gestos, que se devanaban, en lanzaderas, delante tus ojos.

Y se te va la mirada que entrega, cuando te mira, el enebro y el olmo.

My body abandons you totally, abandons us!

My voice shuts down, like a silenced bell, now we are not ourselves.

My gestures, raving madly, they go, too, shuttling back and forth before your eyes.

And the glance that occurs looking at you, the juniper and the elm tree, goes.

Me voy de ti con tus mismos alientos: como humedad de tu cuerpo evaporo.

Me voy de ti con vigilia y con sueño, y en tu recuerdo más fiel ya me borro.

Y en tu memoria me vuelvo como esos que no nacieron ni en llanos ni en sotos.

I depart from you still with your own breath: that humid vapor of your body.

I leave you with wakefulness and dreaming, and now recall more faithfully your blurred image.

And in your memory I become like those not born in meadow or thicket.

Sangre sería y me fuese en las palmas de tu labor y en tu boca de mosto.

I will have blood-stains, in my palms from your labor, and in your grape-stained mouth.

[Mistral’s darkening world finds expression in this stark photograph. Between the disappointments in love, the horrors of history, and the personal tragedy of the death of her beloved nephew, Mistral’s hopefulness dimmed badly.]

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Tu entraña fuese y sería quemada en marchas tuyas que nunca más oigo, ¡y en tu pasión que retumba en la noche, como demencia de mares solos!

Your inner core will be burned in your journeys and I will hear nothing of them, nor of your passion that rumbles in the night, like mad lonely seas!

¡Se nos va todo, se nos va todo!

Everything leaves, it all goes away!

Mistral guarded her personal life, so we know little about her loves and lovers. “Ausencia” treats love’s loss, a personal cause for her mature years’ desolation. The poem displays Mistral’s later oblique style, where experience comes as an inventory of impressions, their order obscure, and for that reason intense. A familiar paradox, the poem lists all that will be left behind, and thus creates permanent traces. Even things no longer shared will be imagined, their flavor deep-imprinted. Love assures no absence: separation’s pain is that nothing leaves, not even the humid vapor of a lover’s body!

An event in August, 1943 shattered her. Her seventeen-year-old nephew, whom she considered her son, killed himself.

She suffered, too, from WWII’s horrors and the quick arrival of the Cold War, so disappointing to her hopes for a world united in peace.

[In 1954, soon after the publication of Lagar, Mistral returned to a joyous reception in Santiago, Chile.]

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Her final collection, Lagar (“wine-press”, suggesting last leavings, 1954) retrieves an unconquerable spirit from history’s derangement and personal loss. Her health was compromised by diabetes, and in 1957, Gabriela succumbed to pancreatic cancer, her last few years spent in Hempstead, New York. In her life, Gabriela was a poet, diplomat, educator, reporter, and a leading humanist of her generation. In 1954, she returned to Chile at presidential invitation and was met by a crowd of 200,000 come to hear her speak; 45,000 children filled Santiago’s stadium, singing her poems, set to music.

A collection entitled Madwomen (2008), with Mistral’s “Locas Mujeres” poems, mostly from Lagar, offers a gallery of personages reflecting her fragmenting inner life and aging wisdom. The poems have titles “The Fugitive Woman”, “The Ballerina”, “the Abandoned Woman”, and “Antigone”, and “Elektra in the Mist”. These astonishing poems, among her most accomplished and difficult, are represented here by “La Fervorosa”, fitting testament to a passionate life of the imagination.

LA FERVOROSA

THE FERVENT WOMAN

En todos los lugares he encendido con mi brazo y mi aliento el viejo fuego; en toda tierra me vieron velando el faisán que cayó desde los cielos, y tengo ciencia de hacer la nidada de las brasas juntando sus polluelos.

Everywhere, with my arm and my breath, I have lit the old fire; In every land, they have seen me tending the pheasant that fell from the heavens, And I am skilled in making the nest by gathering its chicks from the coals.

Dulce es callando en tendido rescoldo, tierno cuando en pajuelas lo comienzo.

Malicias sé para soplar sus chispas hasta que él sube en alocados miembros.

Costó, sin viento, prenderlo, atizarlo: era o el humo o el chisporrogteo; pero ya sube en cerrada columna recta, viva, leal y en gran silencio.

No hay gacela que salte los torrentes y el carrascal como mi loco ciervo; en redes, peces de oro no brincaron con rojez de cardumen tan violento.

He cantado y bailado en torno suyo con reyes, versolans y cabreros, y cuando en sus pavesas él moría yo le supe arrojar mi propio cuerpo.

Sweet is its cooing in spreading embers, tender when I start it in straw sticks.

I know tricks to blow upon its sparks until it rises up with wild limbs.

Tough, without wind, to start and stir it: it was all smoke and sizzling; and suddenly it climbs in a solid column upright, alive, faithful, in great silence.

There’s no gazelle that leaps the torrents and scrub-oak thickets like my mad deer; in nets, no golden fish have thrashed red from their shoal with such violence.

I’ve sung and danced in its ring with kings, verse-makers, and goatherds, and when in cinders it was dying down, I knew to toss my body in.

Cruzarían los hombres con antorchas mi aldea, cuando fue mi nacimiento

At my birth, men with torches must have passed through my village 47 The Linnet's Wings

o mi madre se iría por las cuestas encendiendo las matas por el cuello.

Espino, algarrobillo y zarza negra, sobre mi único Valle están ardiendo, soltando sus torcidas salamandras, aventando fragancias cerro a cerro.

or my mother roamed the hillsides lighting clumps of brush.

Hawthorn, mesquite, and blackberry burning over my special valley, unleashing their twisted salamanders, and throwing out fragrances from hill to hill.

Mi vieja antorcha, mi Jadeada antorcha va despertando majadas y oteros; a nadie ciega y va dejando atrás la noche abierta a rasgones bermejos.

La gracia pido de matarla antes de que ella mate el Arcángel que llevo.

My old torch, my wavering torch goes on waking sheepfolds and hills; it blinds no one and leaves behind the night, striped with vermillion rags.

I beg for the grace to kill that night before it kills the Archangel in me.

(Yo no sé si lo llevo o si él me lleva; pero sé que me llamo su alimento, y me sé que le sirvo y no le falto y no lo doy a los titiriteros.)

(I don’t know if I bear him or he bears me; But I know I call myself his food, and I know I serve him without fail and don’t surrender him to puppeteers.)

Corro, echando a la hoguera cuanto es mío.

Porque di, ya nada llevo, y caigo yo, pero él no me agoniza y sé que hasta sin brazos lo sostengo.

O me lo salva alguno de los míos, hostigando a la noche y su esperpento, hasta el último hondòn, para quemarla en su cogollo más alto y señero.

I run, tossing what is mine on the bonfire.

Since I gave all, now I carry nothing, and I fall, but he does not pester me and I sustain him with all my arms’ strength.

Or something of myself saves him for me, harassing the night and her own terrors, down to the farthest depth, to burn her on its peak, most high and solitary.

Traje la llama desde la otra orilla, de donde vine y adonde me vuelvo.

Allá nadie la atiza y ella crece y va volando en albatròs bermejo.

He de volver a mi hornaza dejando caer en su regazo el santo préstamo.

I brought the flame from the other shore, from where I came and to where I return.

There no one stirs it, yet it grows and takes flight like a vermillion albatross.

I must return to my foundry, there laying down the sacred loan upon its lap.

¡Padre, madre y hermana adelantados, y mi Dios vivo que guarda a mis muertos: corriendo voy por la canal abierta de vuestra santa Maratòn de fuego!

Father, mother, and sister gone ahead, and my living God who holds my dead ones: I go running through the open channel of your holy Marathon of fire!

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Gabriela Mistral arranged to be buried in the Elqui Valley and dedicated the proceeds from her publications to the schoolchildren of Montegrande

[This UNESCO poster reminds us of Mistral’s life-long passion. She was a force in founding this United Nations agency, one of her many contributions to a world devoted to its children.]

All translations by Stephen Zelnick, Emeritus Professor, Temple University Bibliography: Mistral, Gabriela. Desolacion; Ternura; Tala; and Lagar. Introducción por Palma Guillen de Nicolau.

Editorial Porrua (Mexico, 2006). This one volume paperback edition collects the poems from all four of Mistral’s published volumes and also the poetry from later collections. The introductory essay is helpful, and the book’s apparatus allows readers to observe the poet’s output, organized at a glance.

Desolacion (1922) Ternura (1924) Tala (1936) 49 The Linnet's Wings

Lagar (1954) Escritos Politicos. Selección, Prologo y Notas por Jaime Quezada. Fondo de Cultura Economica, USA (2000). Wide range of selections from Mistral’s voluminous essays and reportage on political and cultural topics.

(Chicago, 2009).

Madwomen, Edited and Translated by Randall Couch. University of Chicago Press

Selected Poems. Translated and edited by Doris Dana. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1971. Excellent translations and comments from Mistral’s close friend and companion of her final days.

Texas, 2004.

Online Resources:

Selected Prose and Poetry, edited and translated by Stephen Tapscott. University of

Poemas del Alma site online offers numerous titles

in Spanish: http://www.poemas-del-alma.com/gabriela-mistral.htm

The Poetry Foundation online site offers an excellent brief biography and translations: (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/ poets/detail/gabriela-mistral University of Chile site online contains many poems, correspondence, prose, etc. http://gabrielamistral.uchile.cl/poesiaframe.html

“Neruda Seminar” is a Facebook group devoted to New World Poetry. If you would like to join, contact stephen.zelnick@gmail.com. Membership is free.

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My Mr. Keats BY

Eleanor Pilcher

The Sleeping Beauty Design For Scene IV (The Awakening) by Leon Bakst

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'A thing of beauty is a joy forever: It’s loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness’ but still will keep a bower of quiet for us, a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.’

“What are you reading Kitty?”

He had finally stirred after sleeping through breakfast, lunch and Mrs Slater’s afternoon tea. It was six o’clock and dinner would be served soon.

“It’s poetry. Master Johnny.” I said, standing from my perch on the floor. The only proper seat in the room was by the window but a draft was coming in from under the splintered frame and within minutes of sitting there I had been shivering. The floor was uncomfortable but I was able to sit by the fire, warming myself and keeping it stoked for Master Johnny without having to lose my place in my book.

“Just Johnny, Kitty,” he reminded me, for the second time that week. “Can I see?” he asked. I held the book tightly to my chest, the binding was time wearied and the pages dog-eared from the use it had seen from the last four years. I was very protective of my book: the last present Papa ever gave me.

I crept forward ever so slightly, Master Johnny was use to my shyness, always managing to over-come it within a few minutes but always having to over-come it every time I came to sit with him. He was always sleeping of late but when I was first sent up here, when Mama became housekeeper, he was always awake listening to the wireless, which had since been removed by his domineering mother. I was terrified of him: of his skeletal body and his pale skin. His arms were so thin, they were like the lower branches of willows sleeved in frost.

He never smiled. In all the pictures of him in the house, in the grand drawing room and on the mantelpiece above the great fireplace, he was always smiling widely; as though he were a part of a merry band or a joke of some kind. He had a girl on his arm, a girl I used to see coming up to the house a lot when I walked to work with Papa, but now she is never here. I wondered if that was why he didn’t smile, as she was very beautiful, but Mama says it’s because he’s seen too much bad so now he’s forgotten how too smile.

He did not look angry or frustrated as I crept around his bedframe, careful not to trip over the chamber pot on the floor or the eiderdown that had slipped off him as he slept. I handed him the book timidly and found myself holding my breath as I did so.

His fingers gripped hold of it lightly and without malice. He opened it and flicked through, glancing at the pages but not seeming to see anything. He shut it again and turned it over in his feeble fingers, his long nails dragging against the red hardcover creating a low hum of sound which he seemed to enjoy as he kept doing it. Again and again, he dragged his nails over my book. I didn’t mind as much as I thought I would, I quite liked the sound it made. A gentle but hollow sound, like a gust of unexpected wind coming through a tree.

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Master Johnny stopped suddenly.

“Sorry.” he murmured, handing back the book to me.

“Papa gave it to me,” I found myself saying as I took the book back into my arms and stood at Master Johnny’s side. “Before he went to war.”

He nodded once. “I liked your Pa. He was a friendly man.”

“He liked you to. I think. He never spoke much about your family, always saying ‘my work stays at work’ whenever he came ‘ome. But sometimes he’d say nice things.” Master Johnny nodded again.

“Do you like Keats?” he asked. I smiled widely, I did like Keats, but I was surprised Master Johnny knew when the book had lots of poets in it.

“How’d you guess?”

“The pages were marked.” he said simply. I felt my cheeks flushing, I didn’t seem to get embarrassed or blush as much with anyone else as I did with Master Johnny but I had never had to sit in a man’s room, alone, before. I was only meant to sit with him and make sure he had everything he needed, not to bother him but sometimes he liked to talk. “O, what can ail thee, Knight-at-arms, alone and pale loitering? The sedge has wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing.”

My cheeks became very hot and I could feel my heart beating wildly as I smiled at him. “That’s one of my favourites!”

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” he said fluently.

“What does it mean?”

“Hmm?” His eyes were beginning to droop again. “The poem?”

“No, the title.” I hurried to find the page in my book, easily done once I found the mark. “La Belle dame sans merci? What does it mean? I can’t speak French?” He took the book from my hands as I leant in closer to him.

“It means ‘the beautiful lady without mercy’.”

“Is Keats writing about a mean lady then?”

“Yes. A lady of destruction.” I looked at him plainly as I didn’t understand. It was a beautiful poem about love, I thought, not about destruction. “This ‘Belle’ is without mercy, she destroys men because it is all she knows how to do.” He closed the book and placed it in front of my nose - that was how close I had come to him. I leant back, taking my book again.

“I don’t believe you.” He laughed darkly, but still without smiling.

“What do you think it is about?”

“I think that a knight falls in love with a beautiful lady, but they can’t be together as she is a fairy and so, whilst he loves her, he knows that they cannot be together. It is a tale of heartbreak…but not because of the lady.”

“No? I think that this lady – this fairy – is evil nonetheless. She lets him love her knowing that she cannot love him back, tricking him and teasing him only to forget him. Isn’t that cruel? Isn’t that ‘sans merci’?” His voice had darkened suddenly and it darkened more as he started to cough.

Instantly I fell back into the task Mama had instructed me to do: to make sure that Master Johnny always has a drink, that he doesn’t cough himself dry. To keep him from being cold but cooling him if he becomes feverish. And if anything seems to get very bad to fetch her and the master’s mother as soon as possible.

I got him his drink and handed it to him, his fingers slipping over the glass for a moment so that 59 The Linnet's Wings

the water splashed across his bedclothes. He swallowed a large gulp as he continued to wheeze. For a moment I swear I saw some red on his nightshirt sleeve but he pushed it up before I could see.

He guzzled down his water and lie breathless for a moment, as I quietly hovered over to the bell by the fireplace wondering whether to call or not.

“I’m fine,” he murmured quietly. “I’m better now, I’m sorry. I got a little over-excited.”

“About the fairy and the knight?” I asked, my voice equally as quiet. He nodded and lay back against his pillows, re-aligning himself in his bed so that he was sat up rather than laying down. I stayed where I was, wondering what to do.

I held my book behind my back, feeling the warmth of the fire which I stood too close to. The cinders would creep onto my dress and I would be stained with soot. But I didn’t want to step forwards, to the cold young man with the cough as dark as charcoal and the skin bruised yet translucent, like patches of mud surfacing through the snow.

“Should I ring for someone…sir?”

“No,” he tilted his head so I couldn’t escape his eye. “Read me something.”

“What would you like -” “Anything!” I jumped and opened my book to the first page it fell upon and read the first words I saw.

“Dearest Kitty, a happy eleventh birthday to you. I hope it brings you a year closer to your dreams and your happiness and an end to this war. I’ll be home soon, but all my love for now. Your Lucky Papa.”

I closed the book as I felt the lump gather in my throat. I stared at the floor, looking anywhere besides his face, finding the lines where the floorboards met and the patterns on the swirling woodwork.

The fire, dimming as it was, caught the shapes in dancing lights making them move beneath my feet, like a shadow box show at the fair. Although I hadn’t been to the fair since before the war…

“I’m sorry Kitty,” he said finally. I licked my lips and sauntered my weight from foot to foot, watching a flickering swirl by the leg of his bedframe move up and down. “How old are you now?”

I inhaled deeply. “Fourteen, nearly fifteen.”

“Why aren’t you in school?” I looked up and shrugged, rolling my eyes slightly. I never cared for school, I only enjoyed reading what I wanted to, not what the teachers prescribed, and I was terrified of mathematics more than I was of the Boche invading England.

I didn’t say anything but Master Johnny seemed be studying me, his eyes gently going up and down as though he were watching a bee jump from plant to plant.

“Your father was killed early on?” I stepped forward, needing to put the book down and find a task to distract me.

“1915 at Ypres.” I went to the windows to close the curtains, shuddering as I saw a wisp of breath escape from my nostrils at the broken window frame.

“Unfortunate.” I moved to the fire, stoking it with kindling to keep the room lit rather than warm, knowing that it would make Master Johnny sleepy again. “I wasn’t at Ypres. I was too young in 1915.” I took his pipe off the bedside table, filling it with tobacco ready to ease his throat should he develop another cough.

“When did you go? When did you fight?”

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“I didn’t get to the front until December 1916. Missing the big push of course, for which I’m grateful.”

I nodded, only having faint memories of the big push since Papa was already gone, but I remembered the excitement that quickly turned into to a deep melancholy. “I was at the front until Guy Fawkes Day – didn’t need fireworks in the trenches.” I smiled briefly but I couldn’t tell if he was joking or being deadly serious. “Then I spent Christmas in a POW camp.” I held the pipe out to him, readily stocked.

He paused, staring at me blankly. I pressed the pipe into his hand, not sure why he was so confused by the pipe when he seemed to be hanging off the end of it every day.

“Was it a nice place?” I asked, searching his bedside cabinet for the matches.

“N-no.” I found the matches and stood again, swiping one with ease and lighting the innards of the pipe, waiting for the waft of smoke and the sickly smell of menthol and tobacco.

“Lady Keighley told Mama that you were convalescing in 1918.” He scoffed and bit the end of the pipe, the smoke circling his head like a figment of a ghost.

“Did she,” he puffed. The fire began to flicker as the ends of the kindling caught. “Turn the lights on!” he said suddenly, gasping so that the pipe smoke stuck in his throat. I walked around the end of his bed hurriedly. “Please – sorry…The camp wasn’t much of a holiday though...” he continued. I pressed on the light switch gently, still afraid it would shock me like Mrs Slater had warned me when I had first come to the big house. I sighed with relief as the lights illuminated the room without a shock, turning to see Master Johnny calming himself down as the fire’s flickering faded with the false light of electricity.

“You clearly didn’t get any better in the camp.” I said quietly. He shook his head at me.

“You’re not meant to get better in a P-O-W camp. You’re not meant to do anything.” I didn’t understand. “The Germans would feed us, occasionally, we would sit around fires – if we could make them – we’d talk, if we were allowed.

We’d sleep when they told us we could. We drank from streams and wells, whatever was nearby. Some of the lads didn’t even have clothes -” He stopped as he saw me shrinking into myself, grasping the sleeves of my cardigan and dipping my chin into my chest. “Sorry.”

He glanced at the fire again. “I wasn’t much of a soldier.”

“Not like the brave knight?” He shook his head, the fire reflecting in his pale eyes.

“I didn’t do much fighting. Not like the typical tommy, but…I was brave. Any man who was in a POW camp had to be brave.” I sucked at the inner lining of my cheek.

“I don’t – I don’t know what a P-O-W camp is for?”

“Prisoners of war. Captured soldiers from the opposite side.” He coughed and inhaled deeply from his pipe, coughing again as he released the smoke. He leant forward suddenly and spit over the edge of the bed, red spittle rested on his chin, I crept forward with my handkerchief to wipe it away.

“They’re bad men.” I continued. He shook his head ferociously and spat again.

“No, they were doing what they were told. There was hardly any food left by the end of the war, all the armies were surviving on rations. There was hardly enough to feed the solders let alone the prisoners, and that was what I was: a prisoner. A slowly tortured prisoner.”

He sat back.

There was more blood on his chin, and his skin was the lightest I had ever seen it. He spluttered again and more blood came up but he made no effort to spit or wipe it away. It fell off his chin in a long line of thick mucus, onto his stained nightshirt.

“My mother – my mother put me in the guest room.” His eyes fell on me. “You only put people in the guest room when you know they’re going to leave.”

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As he stared at me I couldn’t even find a shadow of the boy that was in the pictures on the mantelpiece as the spluttering suddenly turned to gasping and the blood came up as thick and fast as vomit.

“I need to call someone.” I whispered frantically, running for the bell, pulling it thrice with as much force as I could muster, hoping that Mama was in the kitchen and not in the drawing room.

I stood with my back pressed against the wall, flickering my line of sight from Master Johnny to the door.

“Touch has a memory…” he began, tears streaming down his face as like a baby he sat forward and spat, his arms outstretched before him as though he were reaching for an embrace. “…O say, love say, what can I do to kill it and be free!”

---

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Celtic Tale by Paul Serusier

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Instant noodles by Kirsty Gillies ow long it takes for three inches of water to boil. Years watching the bottom of the pan, waiting for a change in temperature. The pack is unsealed in readiness. A crisp block, cartoon-like. Unreasonably yellow. Stiffer than its own packaging. You're in your dressing gown, making instant noodles, but you haven't given up on life. Those two things aren't related. Plus by this stage, when the water is starting to warm, you know there's nothing wrong with eating in bed (only with society).

Know this, noodles a little longer than an instant. There’s time for a prologue and a biographical note.

The water rolls into life, and is ready to receive its blessing: a yellow rectangle half in, half out of the water like a sinking gun boat. This is an undignified stage. Mercifully brief. At first unchanged, reluctant, keeping its corners intact… then the block starts to kink, rows of knit, swiped from a needle, Celtic patterns spreading. Though it starts to unfold itself, it’s still dense, reluctant to separate. The moment of separation can't be seen by the naked eye.

Look away now, remember the woman at the Dead Sea who couldn't get in no matter how her husband coaxed her. She couldn't give in, allow herself to be held. It’s strange when you tip yourself onto the top of the water and don't sink at all. When you can't turn onto your front, without being flipped onto your back by an unseen power, when things you rely on don’t behave as they should. But with enough practice, you can learn to swim anywhere.

Now it's just a pan of noodles, leaking starch into the water, all memory of its squareness gone. It moves freely, like seaweed, appearing to swim in shallows, it remembers its original state. Strong still. Delicious.

Fleetingly so.

Haven’t you learnt they’ll bloat and whiten, break down into mush, in the time it can take you to ready a sieve or lay out your favourite green bowl? ###

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A Mother Knows Editorial review by Oonah V Joslin for" The Linnet's Wings"

've never been to Mexico City and I am not a mother. Perhaps that is why “A Mother Knows” grabbed me by the throat and will not let go. Sometimes that which is most alien to us is best understood through poetry. Poet Pippa Little's son Jack lives, teaches and publishes in Mexico (Ofi Press) and so she has had ample experience of the sensory onslaught or as she calls it the 'mad life which makes living contagious.' – Ex Voto, Pippa's chapbook “our lady of the iguanas” is one of the biggest little books I've ever read. It samples the rich and colourful life of Mexico – its culture, food and magic. Magic permeates these poems, magic and myth. Perhaps that is because Mexico's culture is a product of syncretism – a laminate of new ideas over old.

In these poems we find ourselves inhabiting a land of relentless stimulation as in 'Metro/Bus'.

Ancient and modern ritual are at once, familiar yet strangely changed as in 'Day of the Dead' and hideous – yes hideous contrasts emerge from the pages, as when Santa Muerte, stubs out her cigarette in an ocelot made for a human heart in 'Zocola'. We are bewildered by these emotions, and like Pippa, we too become the Mute stranger in the middle -- 'Hen Party'.

There is birth, life and rejuvenation in these pages – and spoons. Art and absence. Sometimes a sense of nihilism leads to the almost suicidal celebration of life described in 'Cliff Divers, Acapulco' and Quetzalcoatl is never far away in modern Mexico as is evident in 'The Alarma!

Man and Me'. Underpinning life it seems, is death, and over all presides the mother figure – our lady – often transmogrified into whatever face she needs to appease the practises of more ancient rituals.

In 'But The Poor Remain And The Sky' a poem title quoted from an essay by supreme nihilist Albert Camus, we are reminded of the Absurdist view of God and the Devil. This is a land of great beauty and struggle as in Camus' works – a world where death awaits from the moment of birth and where light may clarify but also deceives. The gods are cruel.

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A Mother Knows La Santisima isn't soft brown as a blown rose, all Virgin of Guadalupe: she is white bone.

Skull and skeleton, womanised by tumbling horsehair she carries a razor-sharp scythe and full set of teeth bared in a grin. They dress her in lace and gold silk, layer after layer. Fold upon fold, surround her with lilies but she is not beautiful, nor does she want to be.

It is not beautiful to be hungry, to sleep on the street, to rob at gunpoint, to crave the sad dreams of solvents.

She wants you to come to her on your knees, offer what is most necessary to you – tequila, cigarettes, money, anything is acceptable but shame. I will give you a good death she whispers through clenched jaws. Die hard and slow, alone, or die with me. A mother knows.

What does a mother know? The glib answer is 'best.' But this mother is never glib. She's deadly serious. In this case, knows the truth, the always brutal truth, about how wonderful and terrible life is and that joy and suffering are integral to life. A mother especially knows her children are born to die. She knows the vast absurdity and the yet utter worth life. And whilst one feels prickles of nihilism here, what ultimately comes across, is a kind of courageous realism that is always part of Pippa's palatte.

This is accomplished not only in words but in sound. In this poem the soft and hard stand side by side in s's and b's La Santisima isn't soft brown as a blown rose The Lady of Guadalupe referred to here as the blown rose, cured the sick. She is all about life.

No, this is Santa Muerte – the lady of death – a skeleton which must be womanised and that is achieved verbally by language as languorous as it is soft.

They dress her in lace and gold silk, layer after layer. Fold upon fold, surround her with lilies They dress her. This is church-dressing, spiritual dressing, grave dressing. She is clothed in the non-indigenous veneer of comforting Christianity. but she is not beautiful, nor does she want to be.

Muerte is the lady of the poor, the underprivileged, the hopeless. And as Pippa points out

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It is not beautiful to be hungry, to sleep on the street, to rob at gunpoint, to crave the sad dreams of solvents.

Soft sounds contrast here with harsh life but there is no sense of self-pity or of these people being victims. Note that these are not people who are robbed at gunpoint but who 'rob at gunpoint'! They are survivors. They do what they have to do, get on with life, like Camus' poor who are left in the city in the summer – for whom the brutal heat is an inescapable reality. Nor is there any hint of shame in being poor. Indeed anything is acceptable but shame There is contrition. There is a price to pay for this cold comfort offered by the church and it is in the recognition that all must die and Santa Muerte offers no escape from that.

She wants you to come to her on your knees, offer what is most necessary to you and she whispers the words, as in a confessional – soft words with a very hard message: Die hard and slow, alone, or die with me.

Nor does she offer salvation. All she has in her gift is a good death.

So I ask again – what does a mother knows? Well this one's a skeleton – she knows how to die. She's done it. And isn't there a hint of Eve about this knowledge? It carries with it the loss of innocence, her testimony to the naked truth. She bares witness that life is a struggle and that we have no choice. This is one of the bravest of the brave poems in this book. They are poems you can live in. You may believe Pippa – she's a mother. “our lady of the iguanas” is published by The Black Light Engine Room 2016 12 Harrogate Crescent Middlesbrough TS5 6PS UK theblacklightenginedriver@hotmail.co.co.uk

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Where Have All the Flowers Gone: PS MLF, '16

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I Who Lost a Brother by Tom Sheehan and nearly lost another remember the headlines, newsreels, songs of bond-selling, gas-griping, and movies too true to hate.

The whole Earth bent inwards, imploding bombs, bullets, blood, shrieking some terrible bird cry in my ears only sleep could lose.

Near sleep I could only remember the nifty bellbottom blues he wore in the picture my mother cleaned and cleaned and cleaned on the altar of her bureau as if he were the Christ or the Buddha, but he was out there in the sun and the sand and the rain of shells and sounds I came to know years later moving up from Pusan.

I never really knew about him until he came home and I saw his sea bag decorated with his wife’s picture, and a map and the names Saipan, Iwo Jima, Kwajalein, the war.

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Glossary by Jenni Bravo We have had to redefine okay, because people keep asking if we are, or will be, and I am not allowed to bite them and it is frowned upon to scream that okay tastes like formaldehyde on my tongue and it has dried my eyes until I weep salt and sand and okay is not and won’t be again because we burnt it, and all the flowers are there to cover the reek of rot as what is left of okay is coughed up and spat out and scraped into something I can wear on a chain around my neck, this new okay like a curse, like a warning, like they smell it coming and I want to tell them may you never be okay

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Monday’s child is fair of face

by Kate Garrett and she hides her silver-trick light – eleven hours behind a virtuous sun and the sun shows gold for pyrite in late afternoon and rescues hoodwinked fools who only trust the moon but she never claims she will not change.

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Merboy in Red Swim Shorts by Jane Burn Hair, light as lichen frames his ceiling bound gaze.

Surface tension strives to reunite waters broken by his half submerged, moon reflection face.

Gently I float him, cradling my hands under the sealskin of his back. A passing swimmer’s careless wave floods his nose - he kicks his legs, breaks my hold. Chlorine drops anoint his shining head as he pushes away from the cool tiled side, ungainly but determined.

PS: MLF, Swimming Lesson

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The Sky is a Snail by A.J. Huffman

after Perpetual Revival by Vladamir Kush

Without a shell, I wander, stepping on pebbles that feel like mountains.

They pierce my fragile skin.

I am unprepared for this life. Two tears escape from tiny eyes, all that was needed to dissolve my will. Happily, I wither away in the wind. ticking in incremental countdown towards dawn. I sometimes believe I am the ghost of a clock, trapped in human body. Condemned to continue tracking hour after hour, I have become metronome of deprivation.

My only regret is that my dream of complete combustion at stroke of dawn will never come true. I cannot think of a better end to a bitter existence than instant incineration, triggered by obligatory cliché of rooster’s crow.

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Street Scene Phtotshop MLF '16

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A poem given on a bike ride by Gregor Steele Sometimes on a ride, when breath comes harsh And the body burns though cold rain stings A poem comes - the words not mine They come from those who made with stone The farms that gift each line a name Hyndshaw Spoutscross Summerside Winterhill Hyndshaw Spoutscross Summerside Winterhill Hyndshaw Spoutscross Summerside Winterhill And later if the fire dies down And breathing softens, the rain just mist Still, now in a whisper (Hyndshaw) The song of of names (Spoutscross) Is sung from the stone (Summerside) And carried by the wind (Winterhill)

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The Boy by Jenni Bravo I am staring at the boy who plunged a needle in the North Star and flooded it black, his wrists jutting from sleeves someone bought him before the final gasp of puberty I wonder when this boy with sharp shoulders wore his suit last, who starched it for him, called him “baby” and meant it the way I meant it for you You said he was beautiful He cries into my neck, I tell him he can still prove you right

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My Mind is a Bomb by A.J. Huffman ticking in incremental countdown towards dawn. I sometimes believe I am the ghost of a clock, trapped in human body. Condemned to continue tracking hour after hour, I have become metronome of deprivation.

My only regret is that my dream of complete combustion at stroke of dawn will never come true. I cannot think of a better end to a bitter existence than instant incineration, triggered by obligatory cliché of rooster’s crow.

Art: Paris Under Occupation, The Line For Milk, Edgar Chahine

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Naked by Bill West You sit in your director's chair in front of the gilded mirror that dominates the room as if it were in a doll's house. You ring the crystal bell and watch the maid walk in behind you and place a silver tray with water and biscuits on the small table at your elbow, a service she performs every day at this time. You like the way she moves, the line of her back as she bends, and wish you could lift aside that lock of black hair, and trace her cheek with your fingers without feeling like the lecher you suspect you are.

You watch the door close and you stand up. You consider crossing the room to lock the door but decide against it. You wonder what she would think if she returned now as you take off your clothes. You would explain that this is not a sexual act but something you do every night, before sleep. But here, downstairs in this public room, you feel this act might reveal to you something about the man you have become in the past seventy-three years. You stand, pale in your nakedness, observing how your skin hangs, unfamiliar on your familiar frame.

You sit, pour a glass of still water and drink.

Art: Nude Child, Mary Cassatt

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Life by Doloroes Duggan In a grove, deserted, alone, A tall, dead tree Blackened and afraid; One tiny green sprig Eyes the world from The bark.

The lovers cling and caress, Leaning against the Gnarled giant plant.

Their hands interlock; Mouths pulse with passion.

A furtive look then A long goodbye kiss Takes their breath away; As tears fall quickly Onto the small sprig below.

The evening chill causes Shivers and they pull apart To leave in separate cars.

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Twilight by Doloroes Duggan The moon over Lough Atalia shimmers on the frozen water of winter.

Dark, black, long-winged birds preen on the jagged rocks as The Dublin-Galway train rumbles to a stop in the distance.

Its sombre horn calling into the dark night alone and sad.

Distant hills of Kylemore and Inagh born from melding rock.

Heather and sheep lie together abed, sheared by weather and men.

The coral colours of sky and cloud collide into watercolour painting; Lost in the moment underneath the mourning mountains.

Azure sea and spring tide; salty smells Waft over the bog, coating hills and houses alike.

This lonely, beautiful land changes as each season passes; Life enfolds us all to her smooth bosom and therein we stay.

Art: Sunset over the Sea by Ivan Aivazovsky 84 The Linnet's Wings

Art: The Beethoven Frieze: The Longing For Happiness Finds Repose In Poetry.

Right Wall, Detail, Gustav Klimt

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CHEMISTRY OF HAPPINESS by RK Biswas Unhappy children do not make happy adults. This is common knowledge rarely acknowledged.

Happiness is like Calcium.

You’ve got to bone up on it when you are young. And then when you get to the age of petrification, the hardening of gristle and tissue, you have to keep dosing on it. Keep topping it up, so you don’t get bankrupt.

Happiness is a free radical. It reacts with all kinds of things and in equal measure. Memory is a catalyst, so remember with care. Words are the binders. They are viscid. Beware!

Our earth has many places where happiness is stored. But only the intrepid traveller knows how to find it. Travelling by the way has little to do with transport, and hotel rooms and package deals.

Travelling is similar to happiness, a chemical thing.

Get your chemistry right. And you can straightaway become a happy traveller, even if it means just going to the front door of your house and back.

Happiness is like that.

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ART: White Line by Wassily Kandinsky

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FESTIVAL FEVER by Jim Hatfield The heavy operational chop, as helicopters drop off and take Away headliners (days of gigging in a Transit van long gone) To and from the jamboree that kicked off last night, Arrests my ears as I paint the front wall white.

Revellers, wisely kitted out for every clime, who utilise The village streets to avoid a hefty fee for the official Park & Ride, embark upon a three mile hike to the hallowed site.

Exchange nods with me as I paint the front wall white.

Thoughts of the throng 15,000 strong, of queues for loos, Of trekking until morning dawns between venues, far too Numerous from which to choose, bring memories to mind Of quite minimal delight, as I paint the front wall white.

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slightly tilted by Margot Brown in aisle one between shredded wheat and breakfast bars ripe bananas hung interlopers from produce ready to turn she gripped the handle of her cart feeling inexplicably homeless in aisle six and wondered who would take care of her cats as she mined for Friskies pate like a truffle dog in Provence

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Inflorescence Of Banana Maria Sibylla Merian, PS: MLF

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A Moment Before Dawn by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson Sleepy fog wafts over cold droplet-dotted grass, licks slick streets.

We breathe in its vapor, breathe out our own mingled mist.

Sun creeps up, sends faint beams through our cloud cocoon.

The groggy fog insists on laying low.

Sometimes I prefer this shadowy vision, this ethereal state, this space between what I dream of and what is.

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Art: Small Dream In Red by Wassily Kandinsky

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The Bird Lady by Catherine Power Evans My gaze locked on the mess of porridge oats slovenly strewn across the spreading waves of patterned block paving.

She cut a singularly odd sight, that figure feeding sophisticated urban birds: St. Francis of Assisi without the doves.

Puffed up pigeons studied us, beady-eyed.

Each strutted the mossy mosaic of a church roof, whitewashing sanctified slate casually and without shame.

A coat, in Hunter Green, covered elegant shoulders and long-loved clothes.

Former glory wafted, volatile as her age-spoilt Chanel No. 5.

In a passer-by précis, she related her seven decades.

Fascination held me there, curiosity had a price though my leisure time was arbitrary – I’d only have bought another handbag.

Rich tones unravelled her daily ritual in that secluded square, A breath’s separation from the glazed shopping centre that struck a garish juxtaposition among timeless, Viking-boned walls, and open-all-hours, cooing, wooing residents.

A man, from a Mediterranean metropolis perhaps, sat not ten yards from her across the street.

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Their worlds tangible, yet mutually incomprehensible dimensions.

Hungry, he begged.

As I threw him change, the dark eyes And exotic tongue sang unfamiliar thanks.

I chuckled—not unkindly—as I pondered The absorbency quotient of oats (I’m peculiar like that; it's a flaw).

Maybe I should have warned him an umbrella might be prudent for the impending rain of bloated, exploding pigeons…

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Skin of the Rose by Jade Milburn The skin of the rose, opening to the light, unfurls and grows, an image in a petal, delicately yearning the sun cast sky, reaching, surging with a beauty and mettle.

It elegantly waves, akin a lady at the races, subtly dressed in her green gown and red hat, It joins the gentle rhythm of its neighbours, Swaying in perfect balance, observing that which surrounds its beauty and vast home, Its delicate veins carries life around its world, A champion, a beauty, furled or unfurled.

Art: Roses in a Champagne Glass by Edouard Manet

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A Change of Profile by Gregor Steele Why change your picture to a flag?

Perhaps because you have laughed, over a cup of tea, With someone who walked in that park.

Or perhaps because some who lived under that flag Are now part of the story Of the country whose flag you call your own Or perhaps to remind you That flying higher than any flag Is the innocence of a child on a swing.

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Marriage, Mariage, Matrimonio by Irena Pasvinter Don't buy me gold and precious stones: The wedding ring is quite enough.

Get me a course by Michel Thomas -Now, that's a token of true love.

I also wouldn't mind Pimsleur For German, Spanish, French or Greek...

Rosetta Stone is too expensive.

Not sure if it does the trick.

No, I don't need this stylish gown.

I'm allergic. Perfume -- no.

Yes, I can buy them on my own, I always do it, as you know.

Sophie Marceau? You need translation?

Bien sur, I'll tell you what she said.

Italian wines degustation?

Ma certo, we can handle that.

Yes, that's for me, this heavy package.

Why Arabic? Well, just because.

No, not too much. No brain damage.

Translate Patrick Bruel? Of course!

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Cloud Lake by Pippa Little The day I fed from your hand like the wild creatures I remembered coming through the lake shoulder-deep raising their huge heads over us so we offered them what we had in open palms – they ate, sweeping their lips across our skin so my whole arm tingled as if from cold – then stood a while, looking, and only an hour later the surface of the lake was its old grey lilt again as if those wild souls had never come, or gone: my hand only, when I pressed my nose in it remembered them: prickle of sunflower sleeves and their own scent, green shade of a new-mown damp: but the day I fed from your hand I nipped your skin with my teeth, an animal’s warning you didn’t notice, the kind like scraps, rags, anything that gets lost and catches in fences, but only for a while.

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Nequaquam Vacuum by Jeff Jeppesen Nodules of reality blink in and out of existence in the void which makes it not really a void but a froth. The universe exists for us to observe exists because we observe changes when we observe.

Here at the endpoint of smallness light acts as we wish; wave or particle.

But for God’s sake don’t ask the cat about probable events versus real outcomes.

So so beautiful but the stars cease when we look away.

Like me when you turned away cast your gaze elsewhere refused to look at me.

And I had no voice to plead because I was no longer there.

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CIRCLES BY

Mark Mayes

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I

i

don’t know where to begin. What happened to me is probably quite unbelievable. I try not to believe it myself, but I know it happened because I’ve still got the marks.

If I lift up my fringe you can see two spots on my forehead. About five inches apart, roughly the size of a penny. It’s why I let my fringe grow out. They are way paler than they were. That’s where they connected the apparatus. I don’t think they burned the skin, they just changed its colour.

My main concern is that they left something inside my head, inside my brain to be exact, that they bypassed the bone without breaking it and, what’s the word I want? Injected me. Yes. Injected something into me.

I’m an ordinary person. I’ve got a crap job and a sometimes crap boyfriend. I’m nothing special, so why did they choose me? Maybe it was because I am so ordinary. Miss Average. Not thick, not a brain box.

I’ve put off seeing Pete, that’s my fella, for a coupla weeks now. I think he’s coming to the end of his rope. He’s probably shagged someone else already and I wouldn’t really blame him. I’ve told him I needed a bit of space, blamed it on my gran dying. Truth is, I was never really close to gran cos of how she treated my dad. She was Mum’s mum. She used to take the piss out of my dad and I hated her for it.

Foundation covers the marks but I know they’re there. Pete would know something was up because I’ve gotten very self-conscious of anyone looking at me, and I know I keep putting my hand over my forehead. Sophie, my mate, mentioned it when we went shopping last week. We were in a café.

‘Why are you covering up your head?’ she said. Someone on the next table turned round. ‘I’m not,’ I said. She didn’t mention it again.

It happened just over six weeks ago. A Thursday night. I’d watched a bit of telly, rang Sophie, texted Pete, which he didn’t reply to, as usual. Just an ordinary night. I make a rule of staying in week nights. I don’t count Friday as a week night. I went to bed about eleven. Mum and Dad had already gone up. Still living at home, see, bit embarrassing really. But the rents round here. Astronomical.

I set my alarm, turned out the light and got into bed. As I always do I tried to imagine what Pete was doing. Whenever I wasn’t with him, which was most of the time, I was convinced he was with someone else. And not his mates either. He bought me this toy rabbit. I have it on the pillow next to 102 The Linnet's Wings

me as a rule but because he hadn’t texted back I’d banished it to the floor. What good are presents if there’s no trust?

Then I must of drifted off.

I’ve had all sorts of dreams, like most people, ones where you can fly, ones where you can be both inside and outside yourself, ones where you try to scream and no sound comes out, I even had Dermot O’Leary in one dream, I mean I met him. He was selling ice cream from a van. I bought a 99 with two flakes. That was all right that was.

But I knew quite early on that what happened that night was not a dream.

When my eyes opened I knew straightaway I was somewhere else, somewhere foreign. I tried to sit up but I couldn’t. I could turn my head a little bit and I saw that I was on this white slab. A very smooth white it was, shiny, like a type of marble. Around the slab it was dark. Pitch black. It was absolutely silent where I was. There was no smell. I was naked.

The slab was warm, a bit like the warmth of a sun-bed. I couldn’t move my feet or hands or anything. There were no straps holding me and I didn’t feel numb. My body just didn’t respond to any of the messages I sent to it. I could poke out my toungue and open and close my eyes, that’s about all.

I could breathe, obviously.

At first I reckoned I was asleep, in a dream, like you would. I had to get out of it. Will myself out. Nothing helped. And then I realised that it was real. Somehow I knew it. I called out something.

Not a word. A sound. It sounded like me but very hollow. It must have been the room I was in. My mind went beserk trying to work out how I’d got here. Had I died in the night and this was heaven, or elsewhere? Had I been drugged and taken from the house by a gang of sex-traffickers? Was it some hallucination brought on by…? I don’t know what would. Had I gone nuts?

Then I shouted out things for a few minutes. Who’s there? Where am I? What do you want?

What’s wrong with me? Why me? Where are you? Like anyone would. My voice didn’t carry, it just fell like a dud firework against what I suppose were the walls. I went to a recording studio once, we went with college, this place had that same dull sound. It ate up the sound and left it nowhere.

The slab must have given off light because I could see myself. I could see along the line of my body to my feet. Just couldn’t move anything. Am I in a hospital? I thought, or I might have said. I believe I called out Mum. I heard a panel or something sliding across. Still no light. And I sensed someone enter the room, a definite presence. As they got nearer I could hear a faint hum. I couldn’t make out a shape but they were there. A few feet away, I guessed. I supposed they were darker even than the dark. I strained to see any kind of shape. Who are you? What are you going to do? Please. Please say something. Nothing back. Just this faint whine or hum.

A loud buzz came from above me and a blinding pale blue light came on. I had to shut my eyes.

I opened them but the light was too fierce. It stung. Please, I kept saying. Please. But I got no response.

I sensed then that something above me was getting lower and lower. Some mechanical thing. I opened my eyes but they were forced shut by the glare, worse than looking into the sun.

Then two things touched my forehead. They were warm, not hot, rubbery circles. They forced my head down. They made my head and face vibrate. I thought they might be drilling through my skull. I was waiting for pain but it didn’t come. They got hotter but didn’t burn as such. I just let it happen. Well, there was nothing I could do. I had the idea that a very thin liquid was passing out of the 103 The Linnet's Wings

circles and soaking through my skin and then through my skull, and pooling behind it. I saw it as a white liquid, like non-fat milk, but I can’t say why.

After some time, I can’t say how much, the two circles pulled away from my head, my skin stretched with them a bit then disconnected. I could see through my eyelids that the blue light had gone out. I sensed the machinery had lifted away from me. The hum from whoever had come in was nearer though. I thought that if I opened my eyes now I would see its face, or his face, it felt male but that feeling might be wrong. So I both did and didn’t want to do that. I felt the face of whoever it was was right over me, studying my face, studying my body.

From further off I heard an engine, something like one. It must have been from outside the room.

It was deep and powerful and complicated. I believe the room was moving at that point. Or what the room was in was moving.

I should have looked at what it was, but I was frightened to. Now I wish I had. For some reason I played dead, even stopping my breathing, as if that might make them not do anything more.

The hum moved away again, so perhaps I was right, and I felt the eyes of whoever it was leave me.

Then the sound of the panel sliding back and I was very sure I was left alone after that.

A strange amount of time went by. I couldn’t say how long. It was murky time, slipping away and coiling. When I found the strength, or returned to the idea of opening my eyes, I couldn’t understand what I saw.

I couldn’t understand it because it was so ordinary. I was in my parents’ kitchen. My hands were leaning on the worktop next to the sink. I was leaning like I was out of breath. The kitchen light was off but some moonlight came through the window. I saw the moon. Then the ticking of the kitchen clock came in as if it had just started. It said four in the morning. I looked down at myself and I was still naked. Quickly, I crept upstairs and back into my room and into my bed. I tried to sleep and eventually I did. ii I’ve done something terrible. I stabbed Pete. I think it was me. We were round his flat and he was cooking. I’m no good at it. A text came through for him. His phone was on the sofa, so I had a look. I probably shouldn’t have, but in some ways it brought it all out in the open.

Then I take the phone through to him, I have it behind my back at first. He’s putting some pasta into a big steaming pot. ‘All right, duck,’ he says. He’s from Manchester originally, but his mum moved down south when she split from Pete’s dad.

‘Who’s Rebecca?’ I say to him.

He drops the pasta in and goes to his spice rack. He loves his spices. The sauce is cooking away as well. ‘What ya going on about?’ He doesn’t look at me. ‘Oregano, I reckon,’ he says. He says it like Americans do. That annoys me even more.

‘Thanks for a wonderful night, hope we can repeat it. Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss.’ I show him the phone.

He laughs. ‘Wrong number, you daft apeth. It happens all the time.’

He reaches out to hold me. I pull away and let the phone drop to the floor. The back comes off.

I know he’s lying. I always know.

‘What the fuck did you do that for? That’s a three-hundred quid phone is that.’

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He bends down to pick it up.

There’s a chopping board on the side, where he’s been chopping onions. A small knife is on it.

I picked up the knife. I pick up the knife and jab him with it. In his back. He shouts. He’s got a white Fruit of the Loom t-shirt on and the blood is already coming out around the knife, which is still sticking out of him when he gets up.

‘You bitch, you bitch,’ he says. His face is full of pain. ‘Pull it out. Pull the fuckin thing out.’ He can’t seem to reach it himself. Then he raises his hand to hit me but I run out through the kitchen door, then out the front door, then down to the communal stairs, then away.

I went home after that. I walked all the way. Over three miles. It was raining. ‘You’re soaked,’ Mum said when I got home. ‘Have you both had another falling out?’ She can always tell. Mother’s can, so they tell me.

‘It’s over,’ I told her as I went up to my room.

‘You said that last time,’ I heard her say before I shut my bedroom door.

And then I sat there and waited for the police to knock or ring. They didn’t.

About three in the morning I was woken up by my phone. A text from you know who. He calls me every name. A neighbour had taken the knife out. He’d been to A and E. ‘You could have killed me!’ he said. ‘You’re sick in the head. Sick!!’ he said. ‘Something evil must be in your head. I never want to see your ugly fat face again. You’re lucky I’m not reporting you. I still might.’ Then he writes a few more names. Tells me how ugly and how shit I am.

I turned my phone off and threw it under the bed. Then I got up and went to the bathroom. I pushed back my hair and looked at the two circles where they’d put the apparatus. They’d got darker again. I knew that much. iii I lost my job. It wasn’t much of a one but it was better than nothing. They said I’d taken money from the till. Mr Franks brought me into the office and showed me the film they’d taken. He told me he couldn’t make an exception. Company policy. No need for the police, he told me. But it was unlikely I’d get a reference. He told me how shocked he’d been, how he had been thinking of making me a supervisor. He said he was sorry, but once was once too much.

I watched the film and had to admit what it showed. It showed me taking some notes out of my till and then turning away to the cigarettes. When I turned back I had nothing in my hands. I had no memory of doing it. I had no memory of having extra money from anywhere.

I cried on the bus. An old man asked me what was up, and straight out I told him that I’d been sacked for stealing. He had a very kind face. ‘You’ll put it behind you,’ he said.

I looked out the window of the bus and caught my reflection. But if it’s in me, I thought, You can’t put behind what’s inside.

The circles got darker towards evening. In the morning you could hardly see them. When they were at their darkest they felt warmer than the skin around them. I felt like taking some scissors and cutting them out, cutting out whatever they’d left behind. But that might not be any use as it might have gone into my whole system by now.

Weeks went by, I started losing weight. I didn’t see anyone, except Mum and Dad and once 105 The Linnet's Wings

Sophie came round but I was in bed and told Mum to say I couldn’t see her. We texted a bit. Then she stopped texting. Her last one said to call her as she would always be there for me. I didn’t feel I had the right to ask anything of anyone. And, truth to tell, I began to wonder if I might actually infect someone, if they got too close. Either infect them or else hurt them in some other way.

Both Mum and Dad started going on about me seeing the doctor. ‘They can give you something,’ Mum said. ‘You just need a pick me up,’ Dad said. They didn’t have a clue. How could they? I refused.

I shouted at them to back off, to get out of my head. There was enough going on in there as it was.

One morning, a Tuesday I believe it was, the door went and mum answered. I was in my pyjamas watching telly. Mum brings this bloke in, big toothy smile, goatee beard. Who’s this? I thought.

‘This is the nurse,’ Mum said, then looking at him oddly.

‘CPN,’ he said.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Mum goes on. ‘Your dad and me, we just thought it might be an idea to chat to someone about…?’

‘About what?’ I looked at the nurse and refused to smile at him, which made him smile even more.

‘Well, I’ll just leave you two to have a chat,’ Mum said. ‘Cup of tea?’

‘No thanks, Mrs Harris.’

Mum went, then he sat down and opened this thin briefcase he had, got out a pad and a pen. ‘Right then,’ he said. ‘It’s Julie, isn’t it?’

I looked at him, then I looked back at the telly like he’d not said anything. Cash in the Attic was on. Why should I be bothered by some bloke I don’t know?

‘My name’s Jake. I’ve come here today because your parents are both a bit worried about you. Do you feel yourself that there’s anything the matter?’

I looked at the glass ashtray, a thick heavy one. Dad gave up smoking years ago but they still kept it on the magazine table. I turned off the telly. ‘I’m fine,’ I told him.

‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘That’s excellent. No feelings of sadness, or anxiety then? Nothing in particular worrying you?’

Like I’ve gotten used to doing, I covered my forehead with my hand.

‘Are you getting any headaches? Other pains?’ he said.

‘I’m good,’ I said.

‘That’s good, then.’ He smiles again. He’s not bad looking, probably gay.

‘Are you gay?’

‘Why do you say that, Julie?’

‘You just seem gay to me. Soft. Not in a bad way. I don’t know many gay people. There was one at work, where I used to work, but he left to go to Australia.’

‘That’s a long way to go,’ he said, like it was a joke.

‘Yeah.’

‘I know this sounds a bit personal but your parents are concerned that you’re losing weight, you’re not going out of the house at all, and that you’re not really taking care of yourself. Bathing, that sort of thing.’

‘That is personal, Jake.’

‘Yes, I know. We’re not here to judge in any way. Sometimes we can experience changes in mood, which are really more than just the normal ups and downs of life. Do you know what I mean?’

I’d had enough. ‘You mean I’m depressed or bi-polar or schitzo or some other bloody thing.’

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‘I certainly don’t…’ He went a bit red.

‘What do you then?’

He shut his pad. ‘I’ve just come to see how you are, to give you the opportunity to engage with our services if you feel that might be helpful to you. There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘It’s a trap. If I told you what was really wrong you’d have me in one of them hospitals like a shot, you’d drug me, hold me down. I’ve seen a programme about it.’

‘Those days are gone,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘All right, then. I was kidnapped by aliens, taken up to their spaceship, they strapped me to a marble table and injected me with evil milk. Here, and here.’ I lifted my fringe to show him. ‘Come on, get closer.’ He didn’t move.

‘Okay, Julie.’ He gave this little sigh. ‘I think you’re basically okay. Clearly something is troubling you. But who doesn’t have troubles? Nothing much more I can do today as I can see you’re not overly keen to engage.’

‘You think I’m taking the piss?’

‘I think you’re working through some difficult stuff.’ He got up. ‘It was good to meet you, Julie.

I do recommend a trip to the GP, though. They can give you something to settle the agitation. Or you could try some counselling, bit of a wait but…’

‘What agitation?’

‘And lift your mood a little, get you back,’ He stopped.

‘Back to what?’

‘You take care now,’ he said. He raised his hand in a weak sort of way and left the room. I heard him and Mum nattering about something. Then I heard her let him out, thanking him as if he’d saved someone’s life. Mum came back in and stared at me. She had her pained face on. I felt like a little girl again.

‘We’re trying to help, you know.’

‘I need to get away for a bit, Mum. Can you lend me five hundred quid?’ iv I’d read about this place on the internet. I never imagined I’d come somewhere like here. It wouldn’t have been me.

You can look out across the fields and not see another person or a house or even hear a car. They’ve made me feel really welcome. I’m helping out in the kitchen, and despite what Mum says I’m not a terrible cook. It all depends on who teaches you, and Tamsin is really patient with me. Today we made bread and biscuits and a vegetable curry. I’ve already put back most of the weight I lost. I help out in the garden as well. Richard showed me how to double dig, ready for the potatoes to go in next month. It’s cold at night, but the good kind of cold where a warm bed makes you feel all protected. They even have real fires.

Philip seems like he’s the head of it, but no one is above anyone else, he says. We are all giving what we can. And he’s right, when people don’t expect things of you, you end up giving more, and it seems like what you could give would never run out. It’s like a well, I suppose.

I’ve been here thirteen days now and I haven’t even thought about the circles. Much. I don’t hold 107 The Linnet's Wings

my hand in front of them and no one has noticed anything, or at least they haven’t said. There’s people here from posh backgrounds, there’s ex alkies, there’s a few as old as Dad. There’s a Polish girl as well, and a guy from Canada. Clark. He’s nice looking but a bit quiet. Still, I’m not here for that. I’m here to get a bit of space. In no way is it religious, thank god. We have meals together at this huge wooden table, twelve of us. I almost feel happy.

I’ve contributed most of the money Mum gave me. But when that runs out they said I can still stay, that I can sign on in Yeovil. A few of the others do that and they’ve been here over a year, or else they come and go. I’ve not rung home and I do feel guilty, but then that guilt is fading like the circles have. If I go back I reckon they’ll flare up again, darken, and other bad stuff might happen, a vicious circle, you could say. Two of them.

Late one evening it’s just me and Kasha, the Polish girl, in the common room. She’s reading a book and I’m lying on this battered old sofa, half asleep. I’m letting the sound of the fire take me places.

I go into a wood and feel I’m trying to get somewhere, a place where I’ll be made whole. I’m not asleep.

I reach a hut in the woods. It looks dark inside but I still knock on the door. Then the door flies open and I step back. I can’t see anyone inside but then I look down and see this heavy pink thing on the floor of the hut. No shape to it, just like a lump of pink meat. I stare hard and I see then that it’s breathing.

‘You okay, Julie?’ says Kasha.

‘Yeah, why?’

‘You making a strange noise. I think you dreaming.’

I sit up. ‘No, I wasn’t. I was just imagining things. It’s nothing.’

‘May I ask you a question? Why you here, Julie?’

That was the first time anyone there had asked me anything like that. It seemed to be an unspoken rule not to nose into people’s backgrounds or their reason for coming. So I was shocked.

‘Same as anyone else,’ I say, for want of anything better.

She has put the book down and is looking at me. ‘I think you are like me. I think you running from something. Something inside.’

I think, I don’t have to answer that. I don’t have to let anything infect now. ‘What’s inside you, Kasha?’

‘Fear.’ Then she laughs in an odd way. ‘I’m going to bed now. Good night, Julie.’

I watch her leave the room. One hand is behind her back and the fingers are in a funny shape. For a moment I wonder if she’s giving me a sign. Then I think I’m being stupid.

When I go up myself I check in the little mirror over the sink in my room. The light is pretty dull.

Still, there they are. Very clear. The colour of two spots of cigarette ash against my skin. I want to punch the mirror to death. I want to cry but I can’t. So I go out into the hallway and find Kasha’s door. The men sleep two or three to a room and us girls get a room each, poky but better than sharing. I knock very quietly, more a scratch. I hear her getting out of bed and walking on the creaky floorboards, then after a few seconds she opens the door a tiny bit.

‘Can I come in?’

She moves back and I step into the room. There’s a faint smell of incense. She turns a small lamp on. It’s got a red bulb. The room is like a cavern of blood. I try not to think that. ‘Look, here, Kasha, on my forehead. What can you see?’ I’m holding back my hair. I’m only a few inches from her. She doesn’t answer so I repeat the question.

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‘Nothing,’ she says, eventually, but her voice feels calculated. I know she’s lying, and even enjoying it somehow.

‘This isn’t a game, Kasha. Tell me what you see on my head.’

‘Skin,’ she says. ‘The skin of your face.’

‘Fuck you, Kasha,’ I say, and go to slap her.

She must have sensed I was going to lose it. My hand misses her face and she backs off and gets something out of a drawer by her bed.

‘Put the knife down, Kasha,’ I say. ‘I’m not going to do anything.’ I realise we’ve both been whispering through all this.

When she steps nearer I see it’s not a knife but a cross. She holds it up at me as if I’m a devil or a vampire. I nearly laugh. ‘You go. You go now,’ she says.

I stand there not knowing what to do or think. ‘You saw them, you bitch. Why couldn’t you give me that? Why?’ ‘You go,’ she says.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I thought I could trust you.’

Then I go back to my own room, get into bed, and lie awake most of the night, thinking, planning. v I left before breakfast the next day. I didn’t say a word to anyone. I heard Tamsin calling after me, but it was all too late.

A truck driver picked me up and took me most of the way home. He had a red blotch on one side of his face, like beetroot, you couldn’t help looking. He must have gotten used to that over a lifetime. I caught a bus from where he dropped me and arrived a bit after lunch. Mum let me in as if nothing had happened, as if I’d stepped out for ten minutes. She looked like she was past caring, but I knew she wasn’t.

‘We thought you were dead,’ she said, ‘or you’d joined some cult.’

I told her I’d gone to Cornwall and stayed in a bed and breakfast. That I’d met a bloke down there, a surfing instructor, unemployed during the winter. I gave him a name and a description, the lot, said we were keeping in touch. I even started to believe in him myself. Troy, his name was. Abs you could grate cheese with.

One night, my dad came upstairs and just held me, for at least three minutes. He hadn’t done that since I was a girl. ‘You’ll always be my girl,’ he said. There were tears in his eyes. He laughed to cover it up. As he turned away I noticed how old he’d got, as if I’d suddenly just seen it, and seen as well that one day he wouldn’t exist. I wondered for a moment what all this being alive was for, but I didn’t carry on down that road. Too much thinking gets you in trouble.

I started volunteering in a charity shop. Save the Children. I started eating a lot of chocolate but I didn’t care. It was no pressure, the shop, and I used to like sorting through the stuff people donated, designing window displays, interacting with the customers. Most smelt like the charity shop smelt. Most had a lost feeling about them, but maybe that was me. I was the lost one, or at least the drifting one.

A young guy came in one day, long black hair, unshaven, a studenty type, I reckoned. He caught me looking at him. You have to watch some of them or they nick stuff, especially some of the foreigners.

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Anyway, when he saw me he covered up his forehead with his hand and looked down. I began to wonder. He tried on a couple of shirts in the changing room then brought one of them to the desk where the till was. A horrible flowery one it was. Big blue flowers on a cream background. Nasty.

‘Fancy dress, is it?’

He gave me a glum look. ‘No. Why?’ ‘I just thought…never mind. It’s very colourful, you can’t say it isn’t.’

He paid me the three quid and all the while he had his fingers over his head, his forehead, and the more he did that the more I wanted to see.

‘Have you got a headache?’ I asked him.

I thought I could see some mark between his fingers, some darkish grey circle. Since I’d been home, touch wood, mine had almost cleared. There was the faintest outline, that probably only I could see, because I knew what I was looking for. So this bloke then, I thought I’d chance it: ‘Did they take you up as well?’

He backed away from the desk. ‘Leave me alone,’ he muttered under his breath, but I heard it.

Then he walked quickly out of the shop.

Yvonne, who’s got anorexia, and volunteers with me on a Monday, came over from sorting out the men’s trousers. ‘I saw that. What you say to him? He’s left his shirt behind.’ She was smiling but there was something else there, too.

‘Oh, I just asked him out, Yvonne. I’ve got a way with men.’ I winked at her.

‘Yeah, right.’

She went back to sorting out the rail. We’d get trousers for fat short men or tall thin men, but not much in between. That’s life, I suppose.

I don’t know if the student had been done or not, he might just have had a nervous thing going on, or some shyness. Whatever. And as time went on I began to let even my memory of the circles fade as the circles themselves had. I began to say to myself that perhaps it had been a bad dream after all, a sort of mini breakdown. But in my heart I knew I was forcing myself to believe that.

I got a part-time job in a call-centre. We’d call about people’s TV licences. No one was pleased to hear from you, I can tell you that much. Still, it was a start for me and it built my confidence. I went out with one of the team-leaders, Grant, a few times. Then I found out he was the controlling type, so I dumped him. He wanted me to tell him everywhere I’d been and who I’d spoken to. At first I was flattered but then it gave me the willies. He moved on to another girl and I thought I was well out of it.

That last night at the commune, as I call it now, I’d been planning to burn the place down. I didn’t, as it happened. Which hopefully goes to show that the power of whatever they put in me has kind of got diluted. Maybe over time it goes thin or evaporates, or your own better self takes back over.

I was never a bad person. I know I can be a bit of a bitch, but only if pushed. Nothing ever violent.

vi I started jogging a while back now, well a mixture or waddling and limping along. Round the block a few times at first, then further. It’s killing me but I’m enjoying it. I was always getting out of games at school, forging notes. I was never a team player, although you have to say that you are when 110 The Linnet's Wings

you apply for jobs. I just couldn’t be arsed to chase a ball or win a game. What’s the point? I’m an individual.

When I eventually lost a stone and a half, I bought myself a swish new tracksuit and some flash running shoes. Every girl needs a treat. I gave up the call centre job and now work full-time for the council, in their refuse department. It’s boring as hell but it’s full time. I go out once or twice a week with a coupla girls from work, just the pub mostly, or the flicks. They’re ok, Kelly and Sam, but I can’t really get close. Closeness is overrated.

Sophie and me don’t really talk any more. I’ve come to the conclusion that most friendships have a limited shelf life. Once the sell-by date is past it just goes from bad to worse, it might even get poisonous.

Maybe relationships are like that, too. I’m still single, looking for mister wrong. I saw Pete from a distance a few weeks back, outside Cinderella’s, he’s put on a lot of weight, fat bastard. He was with a group of blokes I’d never seen before, common sorts. He didn’t see me.

I’m still at home but I’m not bothered about that, plenty my age are. Who can afford a place on their own these days? And I’m not gonna get pregnant just to get a flat either. I’ve started an OU course.

I’ve begun thinking that I’m destined for something different, and that I’m on the edge of discovering what it is. I realise now, maybe for the first time, that I’m not like most people I know, and not like my family, that’s for sure. I used to be but that was some kind of act, a lie, to tell the truth.

There’s only one potential cloud on the horizon. I had the dream again. Last Wednesday night.

I do think of it as a dream now, I have to or I’ll crack up like last time, and I’ve worked so hard to overcome it. Everything happened exactly the same, I checked in my old diary where I’d written about the first experience. The slab, naked, the not moving, the thing or whatever it was that came in, the darkness, then the machine and the round suckers, the heat and the injection of something. Like a second dose. Then losing time, weird, liquid time. Then waking up naked, but not in the kitchen like before. And I suppose this is more worrying in a way. I woke up outside. At the end of our road. I was by a traffic bollard, my hands resting on it, against the cold concrete. Then I started to shiver. It was the dead of night, and the moon was out, just like before. I had a feeling I was being watched but nobody was about. I went back to the house, dreading that someone would see me, some neighbour or someone coming home late from somewhere. All there was was a cat.

The front door was locked. The last thing I wanted was my dad to see me naked. Or my mum, come to that. I went round the side of the house. Thank God, the back door was open, I must have come out that way. I grabbed a jumper off the radiator and made it back to my room.

‘Is that you, Julie?’ I heard my dad call. He’s terrified of us getting burgled. Keeps a baseball bat by their bed. There’s been a spate of break-ins round here. Then I heard my mum’s voice say something I couldn’t make out. I think she was telling him off for waking her up.

I lay very still for about a quarter of an hour. Then I turned my side light on and got a mirror out of my bag. I looked at my head, and there they were. Not dark like last time, but white, as if the colour of my skin had been bleached away where the machine touched it. White as milk.

I make myself believe that the marks are the result of the dream. My mind affecting my body.

I’ve seen a programme where people under hypnosis can be told a coin in their palm is red hot, when it’s only normal temperature, and cos they believe it is hot a big red welt or a blister forms on their hand. Just through belief. The mind is that powerful. Or someone gets told an onion is an apple, and you see this bloke on stage taking this great big bite out of an onion. The hypnotist can do that, and the audience is in fits. That’s what my mind is doing, hypnotizing my body. The dream must be that 111 The Linnet's Wings

strong. It must be that.

I turned off the light and lay there, not ready for sleep, and not afraid of it exactly. I tried touching myself, but the mood didn’t come. Somewhere outside I’m sure I heard glass breaking. Could be anything.

If I stay calm, I thought to myself, the marks will go eventually, like before. Nothing bad will happen this time. My life will stay on track. All I have to do is nothing. There’s nothing inside me but me.

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113 The Linnet's Wings