Xavier Review 37.2 Fall 2017

R XAVIEREVIEW 37.2, Fall 2017

XAVIER REVIEW

Xavier Review, a journal of literature and culture, is published twice a year. Š Xavier University of Louisiana.

Ralph Adamo Editor Katheryn Laborde Managing Editor Thomas Bonner, Jr. Editor Emeritus Thomas Bonner, Jr., Biljana Obradovic, James Shade, Oliver Hennessey Robin Vander, Mark Whitaker, Nicole Pepinster Greene Contributing Editors Bill Lavender Graphic Design Editors, Xavier University Studies, 1961-1971 Rainulf A. Stelzman, Hamilton P. Avegno, Leon Baisier Editors, Xavier Review Charles Fort, 1980-1982 Thomas Bonner, Jr., 1982-2002 Richard Collins, 2000-2007 Nicole Pepinster Greene, 2007-2011 Managing Editor Robert Skinner, 1989-2010

Unsolicited manuscripts may be submitted in typescript or by email attachment with a brief letter of submission and a self-addressed envelope for reply to the Editors, Xavier Review, Box 89, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA 70125. Essays should conform to the MLA Handbook for Writers with parenthetical citations and a list of Works Cited.

Manuscripts accepted for publication will be requested as electronic files. Subscriptions are $20 for individuals, $25 for institutions. Editorial inquiries may be addressed to Ralph Adamo at radamo@xula.edu. All other inquiries may be addressed to Katheryn Laborde at klaborde@xula.edu. Xavier Review is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse, as well as other indices.

Xavier Review is supported by the Xavier University Endowment for the Humanities. www.xavierreview.com www.xula.edu/review ISSN 0887-6681

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Editor’s Note

For me, every issue is different. Xavier Review operates on a thin string

of faith and hope, rarely looking very far ahead, open to whatever comes pouring in, sometimes solicited, more frequently a surprise. Our very strong line-up of review essays, each by one of my Xavier colleagues, is a case in point. I asked Jeremy Tuman for a review of a book and he delivered something more; Tom Bonner thought a new book on one of this magazine’s long-time interests, Andre Dubus, was an item he should take a look at; and Ronald Dorris, with whom I deposited a couple of interesting looking novels from small presses, responded with an essay that, once again, goes way beyond mere reviewing.

Similarly, I asked the excellent fiction writer, Tom Andes, to have a conversation with Jim Sallis, a writer whose prodigious body of work crosses every boundary of genre. But then the poet-essayist Philip Kolin presented me with a compelling interview with a poet, Joseph Ross, whom I knew little about. So we have two outstanding interviews, when I had only planned on one.

Meanwhile, both Rodger Kamenetz and Richard Katrovas—two very different, multi-talented writers associated with New Orleans but never before with this magazine—presented me with interesting new work. Kamenetz’s dream-like creations seem to mark a profound departure from his earlier poetry. Katrovas, known chiefly as a poet, comes to us here as both a story writer and an essayist. In the latter capacity, he makes provocative inquiries into the fashionable idea of ‘local poet.’ In so doing, he cites an example close to my own heart and to this magazine/press and university’s history, the late poet Everette Maddox. Admitting to not knowing him well, Katrovas none-the-less offers analysis and commentary that—while I do not always agree—makes for interesting reading. I had intended to write a response to some of that essay, some counter arguments and even a factual correction or two, but have decided to let it ride, and welcome instead any response readers of this journal may have. (Though, for the record, I have to note that Richard’s speculation that Maddox may have survived on ‘family money’ is iv

as far from the mark as it could be; Maddox survived on fumes, as he would be the first to admit.)

In the area of poetry, this issue is full of exciting work, bearing the marks of no specific poetics or school of poetry. I’m proud to say that many of these poems would not get along with one another if they met in a crowd; their clash of sensibility is part of what appeals to me. Herein is a sampling of the great diversity of contemporary American poetry. I would like to note that we accepted poems from Dylan Krieger before the New York Times reviewer anointed hers the best book of poetry yet in 2017. As a fan of Giving Godhead, I don’t disagree with the notion that it is an exceptional collection, but the dangers of such designations become apparent when one considers, among other 2017 debuts, the profound, complex achievement of Rodney Jones in Village Prodigies. But Krigier’s success both as a writer and then in being noticed as a writer, is heartening, and deserves our congratulations. Among other poets in this issue, we welcome back Tom Holmes and Ace Boggess, as well as Julie Kane, co-editor of the Xavier Review Press book Umpteen (about Everette Maddox). There are too many good poems and poets to point to all of them here, but please read and enjoy. And we can look forward to the book that will finally result from Jeff Newberry and Justin Evans’ experiment in epistolary poetry, sampled in these pages.

Finally, an unusual number of the stories we are publishing, are about, or reference, the relations between parents and children, a subject that actor-writer Henry Hoffman claims is the basis of most fiction and dramatic literature.

That may be the case, as the drawing together of these stories—related by such a theme—is entirely accidental. I might have said that Tom Andes hardboiled fictions are an exception, except even one of his falls within that thematic category. John Talbird has graced our pages before, as has Andes.

I am especially happy to note that Eric Paul’s story represents a debut, and Sharon LaCour’s a first professional publication.

Xavier Review congratulates contributing editor Biljana Obradovic on the publication of a major anthology she co-edited, Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry (Diálogos), a long-time labor of love, and on her new collection, Incognito (Wordtech Communications). v

Xavier Review 37.2, Fall 2017 Editor’s Note — iv Tom Andes An Interview with James Sallis — 8 Kathleen Galvin Five Poems — 18 Thomas Bonner, Jr. Andre Dubus: the Language of Memory, Pain, Faith, and Hope — 25 Julie Kane St. Joseph’s #2, New Orleans — 30 Dylan Krieger Two Poems — 32 Vincent A. Cellucci jaws of life — 34 Richard Katrovas Happy Girl — 36 Daniel Brusilovsky Arkhangelsk — 54 Ronald Dorris History and Memoir: Intertextuality in Literature on the Delta and Lower Piedmont — 55 Jeff Newberry Letter to Evans: Like Waves Breaking — 67 Justin Evans Letter to Newberry: Solving for x — 73 Sharon LaCour The Seawall — 77

Philip C. Kolin An Interview with Civil Rights Poet Joseph Ross — 88 Joseph Ross Three Poems — 106 Rodger Kamenetz Four Poems — 112 Tom Andes Two Short Fictions — 116 Eric Paul Girl in a Yellow Dress — 129 Ace Boggess Why I Can’t Write This Poem — 134 Natalie Crick Two Poems — 135 Anis Shivani Confessions — 138 Jan Wiezorek Bedroom Before Sunrise — 141 Tom Holmes What I Knew Before I Knew: Pecha Kucha for Birth Mother — 142 Richard Katrovas Local Poets — 146 Marley Stuart Ducks in the Park — 155 Jeremy Tuman A Song of Himself — 156 Stephanie C. Smith Two Poems — 162 John Talbird Wheel of Fortune — 164 Contributors — 169

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Tom Andes

An Interview with James Sallis

In a literary world wedded to the academy, James Sallis—author of

sixteen novels, seven collections of stories and poetry, and seven volumes of criticism and music scholarship, including a highly regarded biography of Chester Himes and a history of the guitar in American music—seems a throwback. A one-time professional book reviewer who came to teaching late in life, and an accomplished folk, country, and blues musician, Sallis has always worked outside the university, and for several decades has made his living with his pen. He is known principally as a writer of crime fiction, especially for the six Lew Griffin detective novels, which are set in New Orleans, and Drive, which was adapted into a 2011 movie of the same name starring Ryan Gosling. Insofar as it’s possible for a writer to be both canonical 8

and an outsider, Sallis has achieved that status.

Like Drive, the Lew Griffin novels seem inspired as much by the experimental fiction Sallis used to review for the Washington Post as they are by classic crime writers such as David Goodis (who—along with Himes and Jim Thompson—Sallis has written about in the soon to be reissued Dangerous Lives). Remarkably for a genre that thrives on gritty realism and streetwise vernacular, Griffin also teaches French literature as an adjunct at Tulane University. Like Roberto Bolaño, whose love of detective fiction and the avant-garde Sallis shares, or like fellow Arkansas native, the poet Frank Stanford, Sallis has created a body of work that seems of a piece, each book a facet of a larger whole. Lew Griffin, Driver, and Sallis’s other great series character, ex-Memphis cop Turner, don’t necessarily inhabit the same world, yet a similar consciousness speaks through them. Sallis’s narrators look unflinchingly at evil, yet they insist on the necessity of joy.

His latest standalone, Willnot, set in the aftermath of a grisly discovery in a small Arkansas town, begins as a police procedural narrated by a country doctor and evolves into a portrait of a singular community. Equal parts crime novel, rural yarn, supernatural thriller, and even—perhaps—science fiction, the book seems as much a map of the literature Sallis loves as it does an elegy for an America that no longer exists, that perhaps never existed: a “good place,” as Sallis says in this interview. Yet, while the novel seems to affirm the best in us, it also recognizes the power of those sinister forces that operate just outside our field of vision to shape our lives.

Born in the Mississippi Delta town of Helena, Arkansas, Sallis has lived all over the United States, and (in the late 1960s) in London and France. Though he currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona, he spent a significant amount of time in New Orleans, and the city “still feels like home,” he says. I was fortunate enough to meet him and his wife Karyn when they visited for Bouchercon, a crime-writing convention named for critic Anthony Boucher, in September 2016, and we conducted this interview by email over the months that followed.

TA: Reading Willnot, I’m struck by how you float between genres. The book opens like a police procedural—which is to say, with a crime, the murder 9

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scene—but while the crime forms one of the threads in the novel, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily the focus. Rather, the novel ends up being a portrait of this place, and of the way the people there relate to your central character, whose voice is so beautifully rendered. I might also call elements of the book supernatural, psychological suspense, or even—possibly—science fiction.

Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to genre, both in this book, and in general? Do you know what genre you’re writing from the outset, or do you discover that as you write?

JS: I love that word “float,” Tom. How I’d love to be weightless. But to respond as honestly as I can (to a question that might easily elicit days of discussion) I’ve little or no thought as to genre as I write. I’m doing my best not to be boring and continually to surprise myself while allowing the story to develop organically. A lot of that is just quietly listening, to find out what’s in there.

Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and dozens of Sturgeon stories are every bit a part of my literary world as are Faulkner or Nathanel West; Robert Creeley’s and Cendrars’ poems are with me as fully as stories and novels I’ve read. Two of the first things I remember reading are the story “Born of Man and Woman,” about a vampire-like child, and Albert Camus’s The Stranger, both pilfered from my brother. At this point, I believe, I was ruined for life. (Apparently the books ruined my brother as well: He’s now a philosopher.) I made no distinction between the two.

Nor do I make such distinctions now. As critic, from the first, I’ve lobbied against genre designation as delimiting to both writer and reader. Literature is not a chest of shutaway drawers, it’s a huge buffet table loaded with all sorts of wonderful things. We walk around freely, take what we want, what we need.

I come back again and again to Martin Amis’s statement that all writing is a war against clichés. And to the thought that clichés come in all manner of shapes and forms: clichés of character, clichés of setting, clichés of structure….

A good writing day is one in which we win a skirmish or two.

Most of my stories, poems and novels begin with an image or with a voice in my ear. I want to know why that image, and just what it intends, what it beckons me towards; I have to know who is speaking to me, and what it is 10

that the speaker so wants to tell me.

TA: I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how Lamar’s voice developed for you. He shares certain qualities with Lew Griffin—empathy, compassion, and a willingness to care for the people around him—but he’s also distinct among your protagonists. What was your sense of him when you began the book, and how did that evolve?

JS: The novel began in my mind with what now takes place in the fourth chapter, the comic reversal in which the parents are disappointed their son wants to be, not a wondrous bohemian, but (gasp) a doctor. Then the questions began: Who is this guy? Who are these parents? He’s both (in who and what he has become) gone away from and (living now where his family lived, recalling his father’s work) returned to his upbringing. Most of my other characters have been rather dark; I wanted this time to write about a man with little of the dark within him, a good man in a good community he helps remain so.

I worked for many years in critical-care medicine, where I learned much of what I know—and have used in my writing—about people at the very edge.

It came to me that the intense struggles these people face are, while utterly real and physical, emblematic of all our struggles—of how our small, intimate lives are disrupted by huge, impersonal, often impalpable forces. And yet we go on. In my poem “To a Russian Friend” from one earlier, politically troubled time, I had written Andrei: my children, or theirs, vow they will kill yours. Two poets, we sit here like old men, muttering, as terrible engines and agents go over our heads.

I wanted to write again about those terrible engines, as always trying to get as much of the world as possible in every sentence—tucked away almost out of sight in the story’s corners and seams. Those folded truths that give dimension to our writing.

Once I had the voice, Lamar’s voice, in my ear, and once I knew what I was in a deeper sense writing about, I had mostly just to listen carefully as I stepped from sentence to sentence.

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TA: Would you say the political times have changed—considerably or at all—between when you wrote that poem and when you wrote this novel?

How does the texture of the novel change—if at all—when so much of the darkness is located not within, but outside the characters? (As compared to Driver, say: a character not lacking in darkness, who nevertheless charms us.)

JS: I think that was a large part of what I was fumbling my way towards, Tom: registering all the weight that steadily bears down on us from above and outside our ken, beneath which we go on eating breakfast, doing laundry, loving others. That weight, the darkness, is always with us. So I chose to begin with discovery of the bodies, knowing this coloration would hover over every page, every reading of the novel.

There’s little doubt the political situation has deteriorated, with so many of our difficulties as a nation (almost purposefully, it seems) self-inflicted: undeclared rogue wars, bailouts, obstructionism, unspeakable disparities in wealth, corporate greed and corporate exception…. Democracy is by definition a clunky, staggery wagon, hard to manage; but now we seem to have lost even the will to keep it rolling down the road.

I’m a southerner. I grew up sir-ing and ma’am-ing, standing when elders entered the room, speaking quietly. It’s heartbreaking to me that nowadays there can be not only such lack of, but such contempt for, civility. The calland-response of media, whether professional or “social,” has pounded us down to a thin gruel. The worst of what we can be has been called forth.

Much of the challenge in writing Willnot lay in finding and maintaining a balance between daily life and that terrible pull of forces at work just—or almost—out of sight. But in a real sense this is what stories do, this is their job description. They serve as counterweight to the dailyness of our lives.

They can give our lives substance, lend our seemingly random experiences form. They can make our world large again. But they can also, if depthless and reaffirming rather than complex and challenging, make our lives still smaller. So it behooves us to have a wide variety of stories available, and to choose carefully which stories we clamp capolike to our lives.

TA: In your biography of Chester Himes—and in other interviews I’ve read with you—you talk about the relationship of the writer to an audience, 12

the necessity of the work mattering. In some respects, this seems a great time to be writing, as we have a vibrant, engaged literary culture—yet as far as I know, at least, there are many fewer paying markets than there once were.

Not that writing has ever been particularly remunerative. But I was wondering if you could talk about the importance of recognition, of trying to find an audience, and even possibly of compensation. What kind of negotiations does a writer have to make in order to survive, and how has that changed while you’ve been in the business (or perhaps I mean game)?

JS: How have things changed? When I began publishing, it was possible to make a living writing at every kind of level, even writing just short stories; dozens upon dozens of magazines paid well for fiction. And if you published a novel or two you were presumed to have a career ahead of you. Newspapers all published book-review pages or sections, covering a wide range of books and paying reviewers well. Much of that now is, of course, laughable.

There is, as you say, a tremendous amount of new writing out and about in the world. So much, so many magazines and venues, and such fracturing, that it becomes difficult to find the work. How is a new writer to gain a foothold when the waters run so fast and relentlessly by? How can he or she attain visibility while publishing with a journal, perhaps online, read for the most part by its other writers, or with a small press that has limited distribution?

Never mind paucity or lack of payment, it’s the great silence from without and the frustration from within that too often bring a new writer to hit the off switch. That’s always been true, it just seems more pronounced—rawer, gamier—today.

Luckily, some of us are just too damned stubborn to stop.

I’ve always felt myself to be working from quite a particular place, some interstice or crawlspace between the literary and the commercial. I can’t really define either of those terms, but that’s where I live, kind of like the town where one side of the street’s Tennessee and the other’s Kentucky.

My first publications, within weeks of one another, were poetry and science fiction. The same summer that I finished The Long-Legged Fly, my first crime novel, I published a story in The Georgia Review. I reviewed foreign and experimental fiction in the Washington Post, LA Times and Boston Globe, 13

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and currently write a regular books column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I have worked with some great editors. But the bulk of my fortune in finding a place to stand owes expressly to independent booksellers who handsold the books and to readers who have passed word along. The readers I have—they’re a marvel.

TA: In the introduction to the Himes bio, you talk about how you ended up in effect living with him while writing the book. One of the things that struck me about that bio was the extent to which you were sometimes hard on your subject, or at least, you didn’t shy away from talking about some of the less savory aspects of Himes’ character—or in fairness, the toll his marginalization took on him. Did you find yourself reading his work differently when you became intimate with the details of his life?

JS: One attempts to keep the work and writer, or at least one’s judgments about the writer, separate. This isn’t always possible; leakage and stains occur.

There are writers I admire tremendously, people like Chandler, Sturgeon, Joyce, with whom I would not want to spend five minutes alone in a room.

It’s the work that matters, even if in this celebrity-centric culture someone like David Foster Wallace may be more written about than read.

Did intimately knowing Himes’s life change the way I approach and receive his work? As reader, no. As critic and self-interrogating writer, yes.

I came to a sense of new connections, deep tendrils reaching out, gaining purchase—came inches closer to the source of art, of what we do day after day, how we do it, and why, against all adversity and good sense, we go on.

TA: You say above that you spent a lot of your life working in critical-care medicine. At least in my lifetime (I was born in 1975), people have tended to associate writers with the university system. I know you’ve done some teaching, but I don’t associate you with that world. Do you see yourself as an outsider, in that regard?

JS: Absolutely. I came to teaching purely as a working writer, quite late in life. My relationship to the academy, and especially to MFA programs, might best be adumbrated in Cocteau’s comment on Gide: “My gravity is not his.”

TA: Your art seems both intensely self-referential—I’m thinking of the beautifully curated page on your website that lists the ways in which the 14

Lew Griffin novels refer to others of your works—and hermetic in the way experimental fiction can be, yet, as you say, you generally write in one of several popular forms. I think of Burroughs writing seemingly without regard for who ever read his pages. I think of Graham Greene setting out to write what he called “potboilers,” many them his best work. At the end of the day, for whom do we write?

JS: By comparison ask: For whom do we play music? For others much of the time, of course, and wonderful to have people out there listening—but also for ourselves, for the pleasure or fulfillment it gives us, one that’s extremely difficult to put into words.

The world comes streaming at us. We tear off some small part, shape it in our hands, and send it back. It comes back to us. We shape it again…

As artists, whether musicians, dancers, painters or writers, what we are is compulsive pattern makers. We walk around the doctor’s office as we wait, straightening pictures, plaques and diplomas. I don’t much care if the doctor notices, and can ignore odd looks from staff and other patients, but I find great satisfaction, a satisfaction I can find nowhere else, in having, for that moment, in that enclosed place, brought the world (knowing how transitory this is) to some sort of order.

TA: I was wondering if you could talk about crime fiction, politics, and the avant-garde. You helped introduce me to Jean-Patrick Manchette, who wrote what I’ve heard referred to as “Situationist noir.” In your own novels, you achieve a remarkable degree of grittiness and verisimilitude while maintaining a sense of playfulness and invention. Not that those qualities are opposed, of course. But I was wondering if you felt like Himes and Manchette had any particular truths to tell us? Do they warn us not to fool ourselves about the progress we’re making, against getting too comfortable?

JS: At the heart of much crime fiction is the eruption of past into present: the damage done, along with a possibility of new understandings. Largely true of a great deal of fiction, of course, but in crime fiction, or so it seems to me, this undertow lies very close to the surface. So, yes, crime fiction has an agenda of discovery, of peeling back layers of civility, glitter and glibness to the rawness beneath. Look for a moment at the classic detective novel: 15

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The detective works his way through webworks of lies towards some (often partial or provisional) truth. Gide: Every character is trying to deceive all the others, and the truth slowly becomes visible through the haze of deception.

Edmund Wilson noted in a piece from the 1940’s that the American detective story doesn’t concern itself with puzzles and solutions as did its British counterpart, but with a profound malaise that gets conveyed to the reader, a sense of conspiracies and corruptions—evil, if you will—surfacing everywhere.

Many of us believe that all American crime fiction extends in a fairly straight line from Red Harvest, and that this novel is in fact a cornerstone of American literature. The whole of our literature is founded upon, and not too far removed from, our frontier literature. The cowboy—forever an outsider— rides into town to set things right, then lights out for the wilderness. The detective emerges from his shadowy life to seek for others the redemption he will never find for himself.

TA: Did Manchette inspire the Driver novels?

JS: As for Drive and Driven, I’m not sure there’s any direct influence—I set out simply to write a contemporary version of a Gold Medal novel, to tap into that extraordinary momentum and muscularity—but certainly I was reading Manchette by then and finding in him, as I had found in Sturgeon, Queneau and Vian in earlier years, a kindred soul, someone whose ear caught the same elusive tones I half-heard in my own.

TA: You play in a band, Three-Legged Dog. Music seems an important part in your work, especially in the Lew Griffin cycle. I was wondering what the relationship between American folk and blues traditions and jazz and your writing is. Is music merely a soundtrack to your process, or does it help you locate the voices of the characters?

JS: The music to which I am most securely drawn is that of the American outsider: blues, old mountain music, early country, the stories of which seem quite close to the bardic, to folk tales that resound through culture after culture, to narrative and emotional archetypes that may well be hardwired into us.

That a human life can be conjured up, can actually take form in the air before us, in a dozen or half-dozen three- or four-line verses—this is something 16

miraculous. And I’ve tried to carry this forward into my poems and fiction, that authenticity, that compression, true rhythms of our thoughts and lives.

For me, it’s almost always about voice. I want, in the first sentences of a story or novel, in the first lines of a poem, to have a sense of someone leaning close to speak into my ear that he or she has something important to tell me.

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Kathleen Galvin

Five Poems Author’s Note The following poems adapt language and imagery from the wartime journals of my late father, General John R. Galvin (U.S. Army, Retired).

An officer and infantryman, he served two tours during the Vietnam War, from 1966-67 and 1969-70, where he earned the Silver Star and other commendations. My father made a career in the military, retiring in 1992 after 44 years and a final assignment as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, head of NATO forces, then several million troops from 16 member nations.

The two of us worked nearly a decade on his fourth and final book, Fighting the Cold War: A Soldier’s Memoir (University Press of Kentucky, 2015). In that time, I came to know my father’s mind and papers intimately. When he died, I delved further into this remarkable trove, embarking on a posthumous continuing collaboration.

My father had a writer’s eye for telling details of combat and deployment.

These poems meld language and imagery from his entries in dozens of small, tattered notebooks. They represent a vicarious experience of war—essences of battle and tedium, fatigue and uncertainty.

They also reflect tension in one man’s struggle to understand, accept, and work within a flawed system—pained by experiences he also relishes. His memoir includes an excerpt of notes he scribbled on the plane home from his second tour. “For the most part,” it reads, “I did what I had hoped to do. Whatever happens from here, I am at the high point in my life, although I know, and it’s painful, that we have failed in what we as a country set out to do, which was to contain communism in this part of the world, and we wrecked Vietnam in the process.”

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Mortars First round like a door slamming hard, second much closer, felt in the ground, a metallic slam and sound of fragments tearing through high canopy, third, the loudest ever heard, a noise that rang and speared through eardrums as ground lifted and metal sang everywhere Someone screamed—Crash! —the next must have been right on top of him, didn’t know a sound could be so loud: an unbelievable fury of pressure, fire, metal blocking out everything, devastating, jumbling all thought and action—Crash! —lifted and blown down the path, rolling, burning with some kind of weakness—hands won’t close, won’t hold, can’t pick up—a stinging and the ringing, ringing, ringing And then he lay there in thought: I am a believer, a believer that no matter how hard it gets, it can get worse. No matter what you do, there is nothing to stop that, if it wants you. Strange, this knowledge of unseen people drawing nearer and nearer. Completely helpless, only one wish: Please, you guys out there, don’t do it again.

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Say Again Flat, featureless, the only landmarks bends in the river and small open areas Tangled, crowded frequencies, maps become unreadable, muddled grease-pencil marks merging Pull from acetate, continue in pencil ground unit locations encoded— BIGSTOMACH, STONECIGAR Request smoke and coordinates drift Half-second glimpses Flares and confusion, retransmission All exhausted, distracted, difficult to reach, resentful of repetition. Change after change to pictomaps—codebook by Coleman lantern— checking, rechecking Midnight: codes change. Say again your location.

Send again ammo status. Cutting out. Say again last transmission. All night, voices hoarse, strained, sometimes whispering. Listening, logging, passing radio orders for daylight And all earlier notes, mud-streaked pages no longer apply. Growing uncertain of moves in and out of code. Map worn through where it matters most, changed for another, moving back and forth across frequencies.

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Casualties growing, for hours, medevac and resupply the main concerns. Sweating these and still falling asleep twice—once more than an hour— then airborne again with first light, confirming positions.

Never certain enough.

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A.P.O. Shoeboxes for letters, she says.

Toothpaste, Oreos, notebooks, pens, envelopes, pencils, pretzels—He missed a lot of meals! —homemade cookies, pictures, cards from the kids.

Everyone watches for the red mail bag being unloaded from the Caribou— first thing that goes on helicopters headed for the outposts.

Ammo boxes for letters, he says.

Rucks, dirt, sweat, sores, towels (always towels)—not jungle-wise, just amateurs existing, surviving—ponchos, photos, daydreams.

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The Jungle Infinite in its intricacy, hallucinatory as the mind. What is seen, smelled, felt is no more tangled, matted, confused than the arabesque of images, cross-currents of feeling and mood, depths and levels of thought, millions of competing images combining, recombining, transmitting in surges a variety of realities impossibly mixed and incoherent. How much of the jungle is a creation, spun out of the mind’s own jungle?

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Disabused A strange euphoria about death he could not reconcile, refused to admit, even to himself.

Not loss but importance— it made this and everyone in it more important.

That was how he saw death only a few days ago.

But this was different. Something groped for him, searching, moving closer.

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Thomas Bonner, Jr.

Andre Dubus: the Language of Memory, Pain, Faith, and Hope An essay-review of Moving Toward Redemption: Spirituality in the Late Writings of Andre Dubus (1936-1999), by Andrea Ivanov-Craig. New York: Peter Lang, 2017.

Disasters marked 1986 for the world and for short story writer Andre

Dubus: the space shuttle Challenger explosion, the nuclear melt down at Chernobyl, the 1,700 deaths from carbon dioxide at Nyos, Camaroon, and on July 23rd of that year, Dubus lost one leg and the use of the other as he was hit by a car when he stopped to help two disabled motorists on a highway in Massachusetts. The loss of natural mobility and a continuing decline in his health affected his life, that of his family, and his writing for the next thirteen years. Despite his continuing medical and psychological difficulties initially contributing to a drought of two years from writing, Dubus produced a book of short stories Dancing After Hours (1997) and two collections of nonfiction, Broken Vessels (1991) and Meditations from a Movable Chair (1998). In his descriptive bibliography of Dubus’s writing in Andre Dubus Tributes, Robert Skinner also documents more than twenty publications by him in periodicals in the years following the car crash, all of these occurring as his third marriage ended in divorce and his having lost custody of two daughters.

In Moving Toward Redemption, Andrea Ivanov-Craig examines this latter period of Dubus’s life and writings, for they are intensely intertwined with both his spirituality and disability. Volume 24 in the Peter Lang monograph series Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory, this 130-page volume carries much intellectual and literary weight well beyond its small size. It is the second monograph devoted to Dubus’s writing, the first being Thomas E. Kennedy’s Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction (1988), which examines the writing before the accident. It is important to note that Ivanov-Craig gives 25

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major attention to Dubus’s essays, linking them both to his fiction and his life.

Ivanov-Craig, Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, continues and expands Kennedy’s emphasis on Catholicism, offering wide ranging contemporary contexts and studies of faith and religion as windows into Dubus’ writing. She successfully uses St. Paul’s approach to suffering (Romans 5:35), which brings about endurance, character, and hope in people of faith; and Northrup Frye’s approach to comedy being “completed tragedy” as unifying critical focal points (7). She observes three “thematic discourses” in Dubus’s writing: “the Catholic Church as center of meaning and value, the symbolic and healing power of rites and ritual on the human heart, and the ethical and spiritual dilemmas that drive human experience”(1). In the move toward redemption, Dubus emphasizes the role of sacraments as a means of obtaining grace. Ivanov-Craig explores lucidly Dubus’s plastic sense of sacraments going beyond the traditional ones and being expressed, as she points out, for example,” in the character Edith from “Adultery,” who makes cooking for a dying man into a Eucharistic “gift” (6). Also in the story “Sisters,” IvanovCraig sees, as Paul J. Conino has indicated, “‘ family unity’” in the context of “communion” when the two women “raped by the same man” achieve a wholeness in their sisterhood of experience (44).

Closely intertwined into Ivanov-Craig’s study of the sacramental lives of Dubus’s characters is the role of disability, a generally new approach to criticism and theory. Anchored in his own crippled state—a term Dubus used—his fiction and nonfiction carry an intensity of its consciousness in his stories and essays. While Ivanov-Craig provides a substantial introduction to this critical and theoretical approach, using material from Rosemarie GarlandThomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997) as well as others, she observes that Dubus’s writing differs from Tobin Sievers’ position in the essay “Disability Aesthetics” (2004 PMLA) in that “the aesthetic in Dubus’s writing is less radical in formal aspects, and much more dependent on a combination of secular modernist formalism, Christian ethics, and Catholic theology” (75). Ivanov-Craig quotes Dubus from his essay “Song of Pity”: “To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement of how plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while 26

the boys and girls march in parade off to war” (75). In “Letter to Amtrak,” Dubus makes a complaint about his own negative experience on the train and an appeal for others who share his disabled situation. Ivanov-Craig notes that this essay puts Dubus “in line with the political goals of the disability movement” (75). The stories “The Colonel’s Wife” and “Dancing After Hours” have protagonists who have had sudden and traumatic injuries disabling them.

Ivanov-Craig explores how they face “forms of social violence” as a result (77) and writes in her concluding chapter, “Because most people in the world were, and still are, blinded by prejudice and their own sight, Dubus uses the disabled body as a trope to mediate a transformative, aesthetic vision” (91).

In her carefully structured and substantiated approach to Dubus’ later writings, Ivanov-Craig also examines the relation between the pre-accident father stories, especially the widely circulated “A Father’s Story,” and related post-accident essays, including “Broken Vessels”; the effects of rape in the earlier story “The Curse” and the later “Sisters”; and the “LuAnn cycle,” including “Falling in Love” and “The Timing of Sin.” The motif of interposing one’s self in violent and conflicted situations to prevent harm to another is nearly as much Dubus’s “once a Marine always a Marine” attitude as is his muscular Christianity. Dubus’s personal experiences and those of his family and acquaintances have nearly always embedded themselves in his writing; reading the exegeses of these stories and essays emphasizes this intense life-in-art presence.

Dubus’ characters are nearly visceral presences during and after reading his fiction and nonfiction. Throughout this study Ivanov-Craig responds to the characters Dubus created: Paul Clement, who is “unable to convey the fervency of his love for his father” ( 94 ); Matt Fowler, who slays the murderer of his son; Peter Jackman, who suffers from being separated from his children; Kathryn Dubus, who “prayed for her rapist but avowed her willingness to kill him” (96); Adrienne Beaumont, who urges the young Lily to pray “not to hate or desire to kill” (96); and LuAnn Arceneaux, who is “driven by lust, fear, and the desire to survive” despite her love for the Catholic Mass (96).

Ivanov-Craig concludes correctly, “Redemption in the sense of being made whole or perfect is never completely attained by the characters in Dubus’s 27

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late writing,” but she acknowledges that, like the writer himself at his writing desk, “moving toward an ending” (109) is a movement toward redemption.

Ivanov-Craig begins her conclusion with the statement, “The time for studying Dubus has never been better” (93). The same could be said simply about reading Dubus, but the road to this point has been long and hard despite his having won significant literary awards and his stories having been published and anthologized in significant periodicals and books. In 1988 Thomas E. Kennedy gave a significant push to Dubus’s reputation with Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne). During Dubus’s life time—even today—his readership has constituted largely what has been described as a cult group. He was fortunate, blessed, in his vernacular, to have David R. Godine publish his writing for many years, and after his accident to allow larger and more lucrative publishers Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage (a Random House imprint) to print and distribute his writing as a means of helping him financially. When Ken Lopez, the rare books dealer in Hadley, Massachusetts, began selling his manuscripts during this difficult period, Robert Skinner began to acquire what he could for the special collections at the Xavier University of Louisiana Library, as Dubus fit the collection policy with his being a Louisianan and a Roman Catholic. In correspondence, Skinner reflected on the acquisitions (Collection Number 158: three document boxes and three half boxes): “I felt for Dubus and knew he must be desperate for money to part with his manuscripts and I wanted to help him. I hope we did, even in a small way” (26 Jul 2017).

At the United States Air Force Academy, Donald Anderson and I led what was likely the first seminar wholly devoted to Dubus’s writing. From that experience came Anderson’s Andre Dubus Tributes (Xavier Review Press) in 2001 and in 2003 Ross Gresham’s Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking (Xavier Review Press). Two literary conferences focusing on Dubus, the first in 2002 at Loyola University-Maryland and the second in 2010 at St. Anselm’s College (also with attention to Andre Dubus III) led to special editions on Dubus in Religion and the Arts (2002) and Xavier Review (2010) respectively. In 2013 Olivia Carr Edenfield published Conversations with Andre Dubus (University Press of Mississippi), a near replication of Gresham’s 28

Leap of the Heart, and this year Understanding Andre Dubus (University of South Carolina Press). Ivanov-Craig’s Moving Toward Redemption reflects the first published use of Dubus papers (MS-5152) from the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas-Austin. The twenty-three document boxes and two over size folders were processed by Bob Taylor in 2012. IvanovCraig acknowledges the increased acceptance of faith-based and centered scholarship as evident in the twenty-first century thus far, and the current attention to Dubus argues well for his having a wider popular and scholarly readership in coming years.

From his father’s and mother’s families, Dubus has blood-related writers who continue publishing today: his son Andre III, his sister Elizabeth Nell Dubus, and his cousin James Lee Burke and daughter Alafair Burke. In addition, Dubus shares a literary kinship with southern and Catholic writers Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, both of whom endured physical ailments that had an impact on their writing. As Ivanov-Craig emphasizes the role of nonfiction prose in the aftermath of the accident, clearly Dubus’s tendency toward this genre relates to the power of explanatory and reflective prose in Percy’s essays and O’Connor’s letters. In Moving Toward Redemption, Michele MacDonald’s photograph (31) of Andre and Andre III, the father’s arms circling his son’s shoulders—used also for the cover of the special edition of Xavier Review—projects elements of Ivanov-Craig’s argument through the images of father, son, and wheelchair as well as the impact of a specific year on a man’s and writer’s life.

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Julie Kane

St. Joseph’s #2, New Orleans (Gregory Browne, d. 6 Sep 1878, and Kate Manning Browne, d. 5 Sep 1878)

Dealers are trilling their lookout alarms As I enter the city of the dead: Row after row of gleaming marble tombs In the middle of a bad neighborhood.

I am looking for Kate and Gregory Browne Who died a day apart of yellow fever Vomiting blood as black as coffee grounds On Bourbon Street in the French Quarter.

Gregory was thirty, Kate twenty-five.

They would have been married two years at Christmas.

No record if they left behind a child, My flesh-and-blood raised by charity sisters.

What drew them to this fever-ridden port, Far away from any relative, Doubly displaced from Galway and the North?

I had the excuse of marrying a native.

Foolish of me to think I’ll find their names Among grand temples to the Creole French.

Immigrant victims were dumped in mass graves, Stacked in cheap coffins in shallow dirt trenches.

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Better get out of here before I’m robbed Or find my Prius with the windshield smashed: Not even rented space in oven-vaults For poor Irish victims of Yellow Jack.

A pity no one searched their rented room, Found an address, let distant family know.

All those years believing I was far from home, So close to my great-granduncle’s bones.

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Dylan Krieger

Two Poems the hole that cannot hold you following the far stars with my little finger, i say every wedding i’ve ever attended was spent “wincing the night away” and drowning my liver, no longer convinced a kiss contains more medicine than virus—a megadose of noxious constellations molting their own mundane extinctions into silence. lost eternally in the darkness of arkansas’s undaunted maw, i’m GPSing the coordinates of your particular enigma, crooning blue lullabies to calm my smoke-addicted fidget, pissing behind the abandoned fast food drive thru, just beyond the highway’s climbing diametric line of sight. you ask me to define violence in this circumstance, but alas, too bad i can’t. after 13 straight hours of driving, i’m mostly made of motion, sweet with the lesions of blight at its finest, a future unfevered by meat hooks and beamers, deathly jealous of georgia, or wherever you were last when you still made believe that a handful of ash could glow anew with just a passing glance

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noble roman they say the noblest of roman centurions gladly “fell on their swords” upon failing the emperor, as if it weren’t fully on purpose but rather natural process, as if the only catalyst actually needed for my own swift death by kitchen knife were newtonian gravity—along with the will not to stop it, of course. the shore blunts the sea’s rage with each widowing grain. our instinct, in this case, is to do just the same. to baby-cradle the eggshell-fragility of our skeletons from the elements and scuttle to safety uncrushed at the abdomen. to layer concrete over our nameless chain-linked openings before they can acquire language and call attention to their colony. along the farthest edges of the empire, the celtic damsels of my ancestors are raped over and over by roman soldiers folding to a different kind of sharpened mettle, and the weight of the ancient multiversal what if pulls their footfalls past the concord of the sand banks—to the cliffs

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Vincent A. Cellucci

jaws of life I went owl picking this morning. The first one I plucked out of the feathered grass was enough.

Its petal eyes and pollenated mask were so recognizable. I could crush him and fold him into my pocket. To find many years later. This boy on a highway. Locked inside the backseat of a sheriff ’s car like a criminal, crying to be let loose, crying for his mother, crying to also be lifeless in the jaws of the serpent— life to finish loss, as if it was not needed for survival—to finish pain, like it could be consumed and digested whole. As if the world could keep going by feasting 34

on its inhabitants.

Earth holds out, in its hands an abandoned sacrifice, because of a lack of faith or the ability to protect what we create—mistakes.

We bury them, bury their mothers, and bur y our bearing into a soil you can’t slither out of, only plant yourself into.

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Richard Katrovas

Happy Girl “Happy Girl,” like all of the stories in my collection-in-progress The Great Czech Navy, is set in post-Velvet Revolution Prague. With the exception of this one, all of the stories center primarily on American expatriates. This once centers on a young Czech woman who discovers that her biological father is a semi-famous New Orleans jazz trombonist. Indeed, throughout the collection there are links drawn between Prague and New Orleans.

2011

In addition to the obvious, the only thing Alena Pechová’s American

father gave her was U.S. citizenship. She hadn’t even known that she possessed dual citizenship until she’d happened upon a U.S. passport, sporting the photo of an infant, while spring-cleaning Uncle Petr’s summer house. It listed her birth date and first name. Confronting her mother, she’d learned that her father had not died of testicular cancer, and that indeed he was American.

Her father had been born and raised in the American city of New Orleans, not in Slapy, thirty minutes outside of Prague. The passport had expired many years ago, but proved remarkably easy to renew at the embassy in Prague 1.

Her American name was Alena Rheams.

Her mother had wanted to protect Alena from the unsavory truth of her origin. But she finally relented, one stormy evening in autumn, and told Alena the story of her conception. Síma Pechová met the American in a jazz club on Narodní Divadlo, a couple of blocks from Tesco, in the fall of 1991. It was a time when the city was filling with young Americans; they rode the muscular dollar through Prague’s serpentine streets “like drunken cowboys,” Síma recalled. Alena’s father played trombone in the excellent quartet booked for that month. Síma Pechová was out with her girlfriends, trolling American expat hangouts.

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They had an affair. He returned to Prague as Alena was born. Bob Rheams acquired for his Czech-American daughter a U.S. passport then left for good.

Alena of course wanted to know why her father had even bothered to return for her birth, but Síma could not or would not say.

Though Síma made her living interpreting and translating from Czech into English, sometimes though rarely the other way, Alena had heard her speak English only curtly and on two or three public occasions. Alena’s own English was halting; she was an average student but an avid reader. Sima, too, was a reader. So much of Alena’s childhood had been in their quiet flat in Smíchov, Síma reading in her black rocking chair, Alena splayed on the old red paisley carpet, usually on her stomach, her chin in her hands, a book held open below her by the pillow upon which she rested her elbows.

Alena grew up hearing her mother curse most things American. Americans are arrogant. Americans are the world’s bullies. Americans are hypocrites.

Americans are fat. Alena had met only a few Americans, but had seen them in throngs near the tourist zones of Prague. She’d recently snuck off to see new American movies, but hadn’t liked them much, or had found the process of reading subtitles annoying given that her humble grasp of English created a distracting dissonance between what she read and what she comprehended aurally.

An inordinate percentage of females in the Czech Republic are, by any standard, beautiful. Why this is so is a mystery. There seems not to be nearly as many beautiful females, in the aggregate, in Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, and certainly not in Germany, and surely the same gene pool feeds into all of Central Europe. Sima and Alena, often mistaken for sisters in public, were so beautiful even other women stared at them. Alena had acquired while quite young her mother’s unease at being gawked. Sima was self-conscious about her beauty, uncomfortable in her beautiful skin, and so her daughter.

Alena took for granted her mother’s inscrutable nature. She had traced, so many times as a little girl, with her pointing finger, the tiny red swan tattooed onto Síma’s left shoulder, but had not inquired as to the occasion and reason for its existence in more than a decade. Her mother was a repository of secrets.

“Where do we go when we die?” Alena was five.

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“It’s a secret,” Síma told her.

“So you know?”

“Perhaps.”

Uncle Petr was no blood relation; he was Síma’s best friend since childhood, which is to say before anyone, even he, knew he was homosexual.

He was the man in Alena’s life and she adored him.

Petr and his current friend Ogden, an Englishman whose Czech mother made sure he spoke Czech growing up, had a happy fire going in the pit. Ogden did not speak Czech particularly well, but he communicated well enough for campfire chatting. Síma brought a plate of sausages, cut to be cooked, from the little country cottage in the front of the property that was framed on the east and south by woods. Everyone skewered a wad of meat and held hers or his over the flames. There was rye bread, wedged tomatoes, sliced cucumbers in vinegar, a crock jar of mustard and, of course, beer.

“So, Uncle Petr, when are you getting your puppy?” Alena asked. She’d been asking since she was five. Petr had been promising to get a Lab puppy for thirteen years.

“When America wins the World Cup.” He turned the skewer deftly. Alena had dreamed of that puppy into adolescence. This was the first time Petr had put it out of reach.

Ogden chuckled, but of course didn’t understand the context. “The Yanks are getting better, chum.”

Sima poured everyone more beer from the porcelain pitcher she’d given Petr for his birthday fifteen years ago, when he had hair. “Yours is done, my seedling. The charred skin is full of carcinogens.”

“Everything is a little bit poison, Mama. Let the girl eat a proper Czech sausage in proper Czech fashion.” Petr had given up long ago trying to mediate seriously Síma’s controlling of every aspect of Alena’s life, but sometimes he would joke such as to let Alena know that he was on her side.

Alena smiled a little wickedly and twirled her sausage in the middle of the flame. Petr and Ogden simultaneously withdrew their skewers. Ogden dollopped mustard onto both their plates. Petr readied their skewers with more of the fatty meat.

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Alena grew up spending weekends and holidays at Petr’s country place, his chata. She’d planted and tended a garden there as long as she could remember. Those tomatoes they were eating were her tomatoes, and they were perfect. The cucumbers were hers.

In fact, the whole place would someday be hers. All her life Uncle Petr had reminded her that when he passed from the earth she would own everything, and he was a modestly wealthy man. He was restituted the apartment building in Smíchov where he and Síma had grown up and where Síma and Alena had lived all of Alena’s life. And he owned the land and the two little log cabins that constituted his chata. Alena knew every square meter of that patch of land, every root of every tree. The tableau of her and Petr and her mother, sometimes a current “friend” though often not, roasting sausages in that fire pit ringed by the same smooth, gray stones all of Alena’s life, was the essence of familial calm and happiness.

“Do people have chatas in England?” she asked Ogden.

“Only the very rich,” Síma answered for him.

“Well, some regular folks have modest summer homes, though not usually on this much land. The Czechs are particularly fierce weekend relaxers,” he added.

“What about America?” Alena asked.

“Some folks have something called time shares,” Petr used the English phrase; his English was poor, not even as strong as Alena’s, “but there it is almost exclusively the wealthy who have second homes.”

The yappy little dogs two lots away began to bark and Petr rolled his eyes.

Usually, when they got started after sundown, they would not quit for an hour.

“If you had a proper big dog, Uncle Petr, we could arrange to have her eat them,” Alena smiled.

Dogs don’t eat dogs,” Petr rejoined stone-faced.

“But they do! The Americans have a saying, ‘It’s a dog eat dog world,’” she said in English, and it took Petr a moment to comprehend.

“Do the British have that saying?” Petr asked Ogden.

“I suppose one hears it, but we could have imported it from the Yanks, for all I know.”

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Alena was getting a little tipsy from the beer. She’d fetched it two hours ago from the pub a half-kilometer from the main road that ran the length of the river. It had been her job to fetch beer since she was physically able to transport full pitchers. She poured half a glass more; it was still chilled, effervescent. Síma was on the porch of the front cabin, talking on her cell.

It was probably a lover, Alena judged from how her mother moved as she spoke; she was almost dancing. She always seemed to dance when she spoke to a lover on the fixed line at home or on her cell. Alena rarely heard her mother’s end of such a conversation, and hadn’t met any of Síma’s lovers in years. When she was young, occasionally a man would stay the night, but as Alena entered adolescence Síma stopped bringing men home.

Czech identity is grounded in irony, though it being so was not an original intention. The hegemony of the German language, German culture, in the Czech lands, was as an overbearing husband and father who did not at all understand the nature and effects of his power over a woman and children, could not imagine, even, another paradigm of familial power. The Czech national movement, like all national movements, was propelled by fathers, stern, paternal, more-or-less enlightened Nineteenth-Century men like Josef Dobrovský and Josef Jungmann who centered identity upon a language, a Slavic dialect that thrived primarily due to the tenacity of rural grandmothers, their grandmothers and thousands like them, practical, physically strong women who ruled hearths. Through the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth, all significant, urban business got conducted in German, but cows got milked, chickens got killed and plucked, in a Slavic dialect so resplendent with diminutives that Poles to this day call it baby Polish.

“Did you meet my father, Uncle?” Funny she’d never thought to ask.

He’d played along for years with Síma’s fiction of a dead Czech father.

“Briefly.”

“Is he handsome?”

“Quite.”

“Did you hear him play?”

“No, Noodles. I saw him on the street with Síma once. That’s all. I think it was in front of the Slavia. He was tall, very good looking. A little Italian 40

looking, something Mediterranean, anyway. He wore a blood-red shirt and jeans. And a wedding band.”

This was new information. “Are you sure it was a wedding ring?” Alena was a little startled.

“Yes, love bug. The fact that he wore it either speaks well for him or not, depending upon how you look at the situation.”

“Mama dated him knowing he was married?”

At this Petr laughed, snorting. “Sweet, your mama prefers married men.”

“Why?” “Ask her yourself.” Síma arrived, smiling, her love dance finished.

“Mama, Uncle Petr says you prefer married men. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Síma answered, not missing a beat.

“Why?” “Because they have someplace to go.”

The Party controlled the cities, but it could not control the personal lives of Czechs who fled the cities on weekends and holidays for their chatas. In the country, even twenty minutes outside of Prague, one could relax, feel rapturously hidden from Big Brother. One could eat and drink. One could have sex. Unfettered by religious mores, being demonstrably the least religious population, large or small, on the planet, Czechs responded to the Soviet invasion and the subsequent period, hideously dubbed “Normalization,” by having more sex, much of it, most of it, outside the bonds of marriage, especially if one were married. They had always been notoriously promiscuous, but following the squelching of the Prague Spring a kind of libidinal frenzy compensated for civic oppression. The intrigue of affairs was a kind of narcotic.

Síma had seen this in her own parents, even her grandparents. After her parents’ divorce when she was eight, an unraveling that followed a series of half-heartedly hidden affairs indulged in by both progenitors, there marched a parade of her father’s women and mother’s men that continued into the present. The only survivor of her grandparents was her paternal grandmother, a petulant woman who had buried three husbands in addition to Síma’s grandfather, a man who had achieved considerable rank within the StB, the Czechoslovak secret police.

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In fact, both sides of her family had been high-ranking Party functionaries (a penchant for sexual intrigue had been a common feature of the lives of Party members and dissidents alike, as well as everyone occupying the “gray area,” as the Czechs called it, in between): her mother and her father, all four grandparents. In college in the late 80s, she, indeed, had been an enthusiastic, highly active member of the Communist Party. In the fall of 1989, the world turned upside-down. Her path to a shining career got decimated.

As kids, she and Petr argued politics with the passion of beloved, hardheaded siblings. The communists took away the building from his family, who were permitted to occupy a modest flat in a building that his paternal grandfather had had erected with hard-earned resources. Síma’s rejoinder was the routine Party pap regarding exploitive landlords, the good of the many, etc. That they were always able to compartmentalize politics and everyday life insured a lifelong friendship.

“My father didn’t really leave without a trace, did he, Mama?” Her head was spinning a little, but not unpleasantly.

“You know this is not a subject I wish to discuss with you, my seedling, and certainly not in the presence of Uncle Petr’s new friend,” Síma intoned coolly, knowing that indeed having witnesses was precisely why her daughter felt emboldened.

“It’s a perfectly legitimate question, old girl,” Petr breathed, leaned his back against Ogden’s knees. Ogden kneaded his neck and shoulders.

Síma never grew angry when pressed, but she never gave in, either. There was information she kept under lock in her heart and she clearly had thrown the key off the Charles Bridge years ago. Indeed, her equanimity could be infuriating, though it simply made Alena sad.

“You lied to me for years. I’ve known for less than a month that my father is not dead, or at least likely is not, and that he’s an American who actually returned to Prague for my birth and to claim me as a U.S. citizen.

I turn eighteen in nine days. If you will not tell me what I want to know, I will go to New Orleans and find my father. I will find the truth.” Alena could scarcely believe that the words had issued from her own mouth.

A Google search had dredged some information, mostly mentions on club 42

websites advertising performances. There were pictures of this or that band, but without their instruments, so Alena had tried to find the one she most looked like. She remembered a tall, swarthy, handsome fellow who probably was he, given that the others were black or short and bald.

Síma took a moment to process. “You don’t have the money to make such a trip,” she stated serenely.

“Sure she does!” Petr exclaimed.

Alena’s heart quickened. Síma’s lips grew thin.

“You would give her the money to travel to an American city filled with doped-up blacks who carry pistols?”

“Filled?” Petr sighed.

“That’s a bit of a stereotype, Síma,” Ogden wrinkled his brow.

“And more than a little racist,” Petr finished. “But, yes, I wIll give her the money, darling.”

“Well, it would be for nothing. He died several years ago. In Houston.”

“You’re lying, Mama! I’ve seen him!” Well, she thought she’d seen him.

She hoped.

“What do you mean you’ve seen him?”

“On the Internet. I’ve seen his picture.”

Petr’s face turned quizzical. Alena had just queried him about her father’s appearance. “Your description of him makes me certain,” Alena answered his puzzlement. “I even have his email address,” she added.

“Nothing good will come of your contacting that man,” Síma sighed.

“He’ll only break your heart.”

“Did he break yours, Mommy?”

“Your mother’s heart is made of titanium!” Petr joked, but an uneasy quiet followed his words.

“No, darling, he didn’t break my heart. He wanted to take you from me.”

The fire crackled. A light breeze rolled through the woods and the pit momentarily flared.

Alena was speechless. Was Síma telling the truth? Pressed, would she offer details?

“You can’t say such a thing,” she finally responded, “and just leave it 43

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at that.”

Síma gathered soiled dishes, utensils, and with unnerving equanimity turned and walked to the front cottage.

“Oh, my God, what do you know about this, Uncle?”

Petr drew three deep breaths in succession. “He wanted to take you back.

That’s all I know. He held you hours after you were born—men were not allowed in the birthing chambers back then. He passed me in the hospital corridor as I waited my turn to see you, hold you. He didn’t recognize me from our brief encounter on the street, but I certainly recognized him. He had tears in his eyes.”

“Why is Mommy such an asshole?”

“Síma is fiercely loyal and stronger than any man or woman I’ve ever known. She loves you fiercely, like a lioness. She is simply a little bit amoral.”

“How can someone be a little bit amoral? One is either moral or amoral,” Ogden chimed.

“You say this because you did not live here before 1989,” Petr rejoined.

“I’m no philosopher, but I fancy there is a difference between immorality and amorality. The first is a path to evil, the second has simply to do with believing that the end justifies the means. Or something like that.”

Síma was on the phone again. Silhouetted by bulb light, again she performed her little love dance, this time in the window of the chata.

Carmen rolled up on her bike as stars filled the deepening dark; Alena could barely make her out, though she could hear Zima, Carmen’s seven-yearold jet-black toy poodle, whimpering with joy. Carmen’s parents’ chata was a couple kilometers south, on the river. She and Zima would spend the night with Alena, as they often did. Síma and “the boys,” as Petr and whatever man he was with were referred to by Alena and Síma, would sleep in the front cabin, Carmen, Zima and Alena in the rear. This had been the arrangement since the girls were eight.

“Hello, Car!” Síma yelled from the cabin; she played cards with the boys, a game Alena had no interest in, a game for which losing hands compelled the losers to knock back shots of Slivovitz; a farting polka issued from an ancient transistor radio, and there was much frivolity wafting from the front cabin.

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The embers in the fire ring throbbed as breezes slid across them. Alena lay on her side, transfixed by the glow. Zima scurried at her feet, then to her face, licking her cheeks and nose.

“Hello, cunt,” Carmen greeted.

“Hello, cow.”

Carmen lay down on the grass, spooned Alena. “I think I’m pregnant,” Carmen breathed.

“You’ve never fucked.”

“A boy,” Carmen corrected.

“It’s only fucking if a penis is involved.”

“So boys can fuck girls, and boys can fuck boys, but girls can’t fuck girls?”

“Precisely.”

The little dogs two lots away started up. Zima, to her great credit, curled into Alena’s belly rather than responding. “I hate those fucking dogs.” Carmen held Alena tighter.

“No clouds,” Carmen whispered.

“The stars fuck the darkness.”

“So the stars are boys.”

“Yes.” “So we’re darkness.”

“Yes. But there are no boys.”

“No stars.”

They rose. A door opened two lots away, and the yelpers entered the yellow light. The door closed. Carmen grabbed her backpack and Zima followed them toward the rear cabin. Alena veered five meters from the door, pulled down her sweats, squatted, peed. Carmen opened the knotty-pine door, flipped on the light.

As always, and most intensely for a day or two after a hard rain, the cabin smelled of mildew and mothballs. There were two narrow cots; the girls pushed them together, as they’d done for most of their lives. A poster of a young Karl Gott hung on the wall by the door as a kind of joke. Opposite Gott was a poster in which a cartoon soldier shook hands with a cartoon farmer; it was a propaganda poster from before ’89, and was also a joke, at least to 45

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the girls if not to Síma. On the broad wall facing the window hung a framed black-and-white photo of a young Madonna, naked. The girls’ ritual was to kiss their fingers and touch the photo upon entering the cabin.

There were eight candles scattered about; Alena lit them and switched off the light. Síma called immediately to remind Alena to blow out the candles before going to sleep.

“No, I think I’ll forget and burn down the cabin with us in it,” she sassed playfully. Zima curled at the foot of the beds, in the seam between them.

“Did you write him yet?” Carmen asked. Her name was actually Jitka, but she’d fancied being called Carmen for the past three years, since seeing the famous opera at the National Theater with her grandmother.

“I’ve started a letter, but I’ve never written anything in English. It’s very difficult. I’ll finish it and send the email when we get back to Prague. Mama knows I’ve found him, that I’m writing him.”

“I can’t believe Síma lied to you for so long.” Carmen stepped out of her panties and Alena gasped and giggled. Carmen had shaved. “Everyone’s doing it now. Didn’t you know that? Bush,” she said in English, “is so 90’s,” she finished in Czech.

“I’ll keep mine, thank you. I’ve heard that shaving just makes it come back thicker.” She stepped out of her panties, climbed under the sheet.

“Good day, Mr. Vaculík,” Alena chimed. The old, famous dissident looked up from the dirt he was tending with a rusted spade; he was shirtless and gross, intent upon his gardening. He smiled and waved at the beautiful girl he’d watched grow up from a distance but whose name, Alena assumed, he could never recall. He waved again then continued turning the dirt.

He wrote feuilletons, little ironic essays that had appeared in samizdat, the underground literary network, before ’89, but his writing now appeared in Lidové noviny. What he now wrote was grumpy and small, Alena judged. She hadn’t read his samizdat writing, though Petr said that that work was edgy, funny, relevant. Síma, of course, found the early work boring and what he was writing now just silly. He was old and ugly the way old people just are.

He was a little sloppy fat, but somehow regal. Yes, he was like an old king, 46

an old lion. A chain-link fence surrounded his property. He had numerous fruit trees and his vegetable garden was twenty meters by twenty meters. All her life Alena had glimpsed that old lion working in his garden. All her life she’d known that he was famous, at one time a famous opponent of the old regime, a way of life Uncle Petr, and almost everyone else she’d known who was old enough to remember, loathed, but for which her mother was nostalgic.

She passed the pitcher to the somnolent bartender, plopped a hundred and twenty crowns, in ten and twenty-crown coins, on the counter.

“That’s one beautiful chick,” she heard a male voice say in English.

What’s a chick? She ignored the voice.

“Good thing she can’t understand you, asshole,” another male voice answered in English. What’s an asshole? What’s a goodthing?

“Hey, girl, can we buy beer for you?” someone asked in bad Czech.

The bartender, Květa, let the foam settle before pulling the lever again.

He was an affable idiot who stared at Alena’s breasts and was otherwise no trouble.

She turned. Three American boys in the rear booth. What were they doing in Dobřichovice? No Americans ever came here. They were dressed like Americans. They had American smiles.

“Why you are here?” she asked in English.

“We are here to visit my babička, my grandmother,” the one who had spoken bad Czech answered.

“I know what mean babička,” she responded, Idiot implicit in her tone.

“Your English is good,” a redheaded, freckled but otherwise pleasant looking fellow said.

“You lie,” Alena responded.

“We’re from America,” the little dark-skinned one said.

“You think I cannot see you are American?”

There was half a glass left over. Alena knocked it back. It was cold and excellent.

“A girl after my heart,” the dark one laughed. What did he mean by this?

Why did he laugh saying it?

“I am American,” she boldly asserted, and didn’t know why. She could 47

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never explain what she meant to these American fools. She grabbed the pitcher with both hands. The redhead leaped from the booth and opened the door for her.

“Thank you,” she breathed in Czech. For that second she forgot the English expression, but then recalled it. “Thank you,” she repeated in English.”

May I walk with you?” he asked.

He wanted to accompany her. He was asking permission. “Yes.” Perhaps he would carry the pitcher.

“That looks heavy,” he said as they turned onto the kilometer-long, twenty-degree incline back to Petr’s chata. What is “heavy”? How can a pitcher “look”? “Allow me,” he said, and carefully gripped the pitcher from the bottom. She let him take it. “So, you’re American?”

“I am here all my life. My father is American.”

“Cool. Where’s he from?”

“New Orleans.”

“Totally cool. I love New Orleans! I did Jazz Fest this past spring.”

Jazz was the kind of music her father played. What is a fest? Cool is good, she knew. “My father is jazzman,” she asserted with a pride she didn’t quite understand. “I do not like boys,” she blurted.

The redhead wrinkled his brow. “My name is Link,” he said.

“My name is Alena. I like girls.”

“Well, we have that in common,” he said, and smiled bemusedly.

She didn’t understand, though she found his smile funny, and smiled back.

“I’m glad it’s not hot today,” he said, but she didn’t immediately understand his pronoun reference, but then did.

“It is good day,” she responded, knowing that most summer days she’d be sweating at this point in the climb back to Petr’s.

Will you have someone to help you drink this pivo?” Of course this was the only Czech world an American boy would know.

“My mother and uncle will drink. My friend will drink. She is naked in sun.”

“Tanning?”

“What do you say?”

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“She is pretty with no clothes on?”

“She is beautiful always.”

“What does your father play?” Children play, but she recalled that one plays a piano. She gestured sliding.

“A trombone! Very cool.”

A hard breeze rustled the trees. A storm was rolling from the east. Alena smelled rain. “You must go,” she said, halting. She reached for the pitcher.

Link relinquished it, then dug into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, plucked from it a card that he presented to Alena. She could not hold the pitcher with one hand, so set it on the road and took the card.

Link Browning, Esquire Cool Dude link.browning@gmail.com “I’m an exchange student at the Anglo-American University.” What was an esquire? What was a dude? She’d heard of Anglo-American University.

It was respected. What is exchange?

“Thank you,” she smiled formally and slipped the card in her pocket.

Then she stooped to lift the pitcher.

“You are very beautiful,” Link blurted.

“I know,” she said, rose, and walked on. The clouds were pushing in, and the first small thunder rattled the air.

Sir: My English is not good, but I will try to say to you what I need to say. I think you are my father. I think I everything have seen of you on Internet and you are that man. If I am wrong please tell this to me and I bother you no more.

I am good girl. I am not grate student but I love books. Sumday I want to right a book but I don’t knowhat about yet. Soon I will eighteen be, but not sure what to do after school. I am full of question marks!

My mother Sima is good but maybe little amoral. You problemly know this if you made me with her.

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Mama said my father died from cancer when I was baby. I discovered you in recent times. I have a wonderfull uncle that is not my uncle but he love me like he is my uncle. He is Petr, and I much love him.

When a little girl I want father very much. When little I want a father to read to me and hold my hand and walk with me in park. I guess I want you, but I did not know you, but may be some way I did.

No matter how much love, uncle is no father.

I can not belief you American! my mother not like Americans.

She some time say terrible thing about America.

I have courage to write this to you because my uncle told you wanted me. Did you want me? Just to know you want me when I was baby will make me happy girl in Czech Republic!

Alena Rheamsová

Alena couldn’t send such a missive to her father. She knew it was full of errors, that she would embarrass herself. He would think she was an idiot.

But Simá certainly wouldn’t edit it for her, and she didn’t know anyone else whom she trusted and whose English was good enough to help her make the letter good.

She printed it out and read it over several more times. She was able to make a few corrections. She changed “right” to “write,” put in some articles, which is always tricky because Czech doesn’t have any. She understood the difference between the definite and indefinite article, yet still found it difficult to know when to use which. And she understood that Czech being a highly inflected language does not require as heavy a reliance upon syntax as does English.

Alena wished profoundly that she had been more serious about studying English, that she had read more English, especially. No, she could not send such a terrible email letter to her father.

She recalled Esquire. She raced to her room and pulled the jeans she’d been wearing at the chata from the floor of her closet. The card was in her front pocket.

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Dear Link Browning, Esquire I need help on letter for my American father. I said to you I not like boys but it is difficult. Please come to Bohemia Bagel in Smíchov.

Americans like it and is close to university. Please come 14:00 tomorrow.

Alena, the girl you did meet in Dobřichovice.

He hadn’t written her back an email, as she’d thought he might. She arrived fifteen minutes early, purchased a cup of green tea. She brought the letter in an old school valise. She was nervous.

He arrived exactly on time. He was dressed nicely, for her: a black shirt and jeans, black shoes that shined. He had groomed: His amber hair, medium length, shined, too.

“Ahoy,” he said, reaching to shake her hand.

“Dobrý den,” she answered, and inserted her hand limply into his.

“Gimme a second,” he mumbled, raising his index finger. He strode to the counter and purchased a double espresso.

“You live around here?” he asked.

“I live close. With my mother. Where in American you live?” she was being polite. She didn’t care. He seemed nice enough, but what she wanted from him was his English.

“I’m from San Diego. Do you know where that is?”

“It is south to Los Angeles.” The Czech schools teach geography very well. “On Mexico.”

“I’m impressed. Before I came over here, if you’d asked me where Olomouc was, I’d have been clueless.”

She wasn’t quite certain what he was saying. “I don’t understand, Link Browning, Esquire. Will you help me on my letter?”

“Not much for small talk, heh? He grinned and shook his head. “Let’s see it.”

She pulled it from the valise, handed it to him. As he read, his brow 51

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furrowed.

He took a deep breath. Stared off. “No,” he finally said.

“No? I will pay you!” she blurted.

“Your letter is beautiful. I’d only fuck it up if I edited it. It’s authentic.

The emotion is real and honest.”

Alena’s eyes watered. “You will not help me.”

“You don’t need help, is what I’m telling you. If I edit your letter, what will you do when he writes back?”

Funny that she had not considered this simple, extremely important point.

“My father will think I am stupid.”

“You’re wrong! You told me the guy’s a jazzman. Plays slide trombone.

He’s from New Orleans, for chrisake! That letter of yours is going to sound like a beautiful solo.”

“You are crazy,” she said. She’d never seen such red hair. His eyes were light blue, expressive. She wasn’t certain what he meant, but he seemed sincere. “What do you study?” She was genuinely curious.

He smiled hugely. “Literature.”

“You read poetry and novels?”

“Something like that.”

“Do you want to write books?”

“No. Well, yes, I want to read books then write about them. So, you’re not attracted to guys?”

“It’s difficult.”

“Do you mean complicated?”

“Yes, I mean that word. Complicated.”

“Will you go to a movie with me?

How many times had boys and men vied for her attention? How many times had males fawned over her? “What movie?”

He said the title of a recently released American movie that was showing with Czech subtitles. “Okay,” she said. “But I will not do sex.”

He seemed taken aback, flustered. “Of course not,” he managed to stammer.

She told him she’d meet him at the Angel Mall theater complex at six 52

o’clock tomorrow. She slipped the letter into the valise, rose, nodded to him, and exited the shop.

She walked down to Kampa. Stared into the Vltava. Ducks gathered, anticipating bits of bread. She would make a friendship with Link Browning, Esquire. If he would not edit her letter, she would use him to improve her English. He was nice. She could tell that he had a good heart. Carmen would like him.

She was not unhappy. She loved Prague. She loved her mother, though couldn’t wait to get away from her. She loved Uncle Petr. She loved Jitka, who was like an intimate sister. She loved the Vltava, its ducks and swans.

But there was a part of herself she did not know; it was a huge mass of information that was her birthright. It was powerful and sinister. It was open and sustaining. It was a source of books and movies and bad television shows that got dubbed into Czech. It was fast food and religious fervor. It waged wars and liberated. Too many of its people were fat. Too many knew nothing about the rest of the world. It stretched from ocean to ocean. It was a place of much laughter and hope. It sent people into space, to the moon. It was where girls were free but not safe. It was a place for starting over, being new.

She was Alena Pechová. She would craft an Alena Rheams. In her heart there was velvet darkness, and upon it there were stars.

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Daniel Brusilovsky

Arkhangelsk The piece is inspired by Soviet executions of dissidents at the Solovki prison camp in the years leading up to World War II. The gulag was located on the Solovetsky Islands in the Akrhangelsk Oblast.

All through the winter, we made snow angels in the overgrown courtyard

behind the barracks. Once, the space had been used for running drills and football, but we had the gymnasium for that now. The snow made it less an eyesore, leaving only the yellowed dried out stalks of weeds poking out through the snowpack to remind us that come spring, our backyard was to become a mosquito ridden fen again. With the bodies left to rot, spring would also bring a fresh rush of the black flies that for our division were true herald of the thaw; if birdsong had ever been heard here, five years of firearm drills had convinced the migratory species to simply stay wherever they’d fled for the winter.

December was the easiest, because it was the earliest. Each advent morning after drills, some souls traded blanks for live rounds at the quartermaster’s, and marched to the back. There were never volunteers, not then, and the squad was always different. It didn’t really matter who was holding the rifles. The sergeant called it horticulture, pulling weeds to let the garden grow. I could never tell if he actually believed it, or just used humor to cope like we did.

The rest of us saved the jokes for after, though. Killing was a quiet thing.

Lead the day’s dissenters to the former ten-yard line. March them to the edge of the trench. Step back. Open fire. Watch them fall. Queue more up.

Reload. Make snow angels, rows of bodies prostrate, beautiful.

The days with fresh snowfall were my favorite. Under storm clouds, we’d do our work, and watch nature tuck them in, vanish them under a blanket of fresh flakes like shrouds. We could go back to the barracks feeling clean, like nothing had been done. Teeth chattering, we’d laugh and talk of other things, any other things. Cracking jokes and filling the frigid air with overloud voices, pulling on gloves over trigger fingers.

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Ronald Dorris

History and Memoir: Intertextuality in Literature on the Delta and Lower Piedmont

In 2016 two books that imply engagement of a sense of time and place

were published, The Sharecropper’s Son by John V. Amodeo, and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham. Minus a human face, a picture of a sharecropper’s shack bordering a river in the background graces the cover of the Amodeo text. The Lanham text is adorned with photos—a single shot of himself as a child, another as he and a little sister hold hands, one as a teenager, and another as an older adult; a bird perched on a log also is in view. Both works were received in the mail at the same time. Immediately, a reader may be struck by how the works suggest intertextuality.

In the first three lines of the Acknowledgements in The Sharecropper’s Son, Amodeo states his case and interest: “Writing a historical novel about the Jim Crow South was a challenge that I enjoyed. Getting information on actual events and applying them to a fictional character was an enjoyable and learning experience” (n.p.). A first rule of introducing oneself and/or one’s work to the public is never to tell on self, but to let what is transpiring connote what is being delivered. The author’s confession to convince us of his enjoyment raises a red flag of doubt. If the task were enjoyable, at some point in reading we should be able to rise on our own initiative and say, ‘That artist was really enjoying what he was writing.’

Focus on any character in the opening of the 191-page work by Amodeo seems sacrificed to the delta as theme. The delta is not framed in its natural state nor thematically, given the author’s claim that he has penned a historical novel. Rather than the delta framed as a setting for a period of history, social commentary surfaces which, in turn, is overshadowed when proselytizing dominates center stage. From an invisible pulpit, we hear the sermon of 55

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an invisible preacher. “Never straying far from home, the poor blacks and whites in post-Civil War America had a wretched existence…There was no escaping the delta’s tight grasp. Powerful and uncompromising, it would make or break you” (1). The delta is not a person, so it cannot make nor break anyone. People in the delta can make and break themselves; and certainly their lives can be impacted by negative outside adversary. “Generation after generation depended on the land. Nothing seemed to change. The land seemed to be in charge, and the elements of sun, wind, and rain dictated one’s life” (2). Neither sun, wind, nor rain dispenses dictation. Individuals and peoples who understand, accept, and embrace they cross-fertilize with nature dispense dictation relative to self as an individual, or as a member of the collective.

As we are pushed at galloping speed through the delta, we come upon characters in waiting. Instead of being accorded space to see them on our own, they are “delivered” to us by the author. “The Hayes family was one of the many who were a product of the delta and beholden to its grip—a family consisting of Jeremiah and Lula Mae Hayes, and their two sons , James Moore Hayes and Nathaniel Jesse Hayes….A typical, poor, black family in the delta….Good people, they expected nothing and remained a close family” (3). Are they typical because they are poor, typical because they are black, and/or typical because they are poor and black? That which is typical is ascribed to the nature of a type; representing something by a form, model, or resemblance; emblematic; prefigurative. The Hayes are prefigured to resemble a type who or what?

Framing trails toward James Hayes as a possible protagonist. But for him to assume center stage in this respect, we must see him evolve, and how he projects instead of being type-cast. “His fate, like so many before him, had already been decided by his place of birth” (5). Place of birth is not a human being, so it cannot make a decision for anyone. “Deep inside James desperately wanted out and longed to break free” (6). We need a platform that launches us to fly on more than a wing and a prayer stemming from a blind faith statement in order to see James’ depth. “James had a dilemma, knowing he wanted out of this meager existence, but he felt loyalty to his kin” (7). Were James allowed to project by way of action, we should be able, 56

at some point, to determine whether or not James has a dilemma.

Figuratively speaking, James is aligned with being rescued by a date.

“October 7 started off like any other date….And this was destined to be one of those dates that demanded and got attention” (5). It is amazing that a date is accorded power as being in command of destiny, and can demand attention. After we have been informed about the enjoyable that has been enjoyed, and introduced to proselytizing, making and breaking, and character delivery trailing from the typical, the reading audience probably is spinning in a whirlwind. The general store is the community meeting place, sort of like a Gertrude Stein literary salon, but in the bottom of the delta. Given hardly an individual present in the mixed crowd can read or write, they rely on the white storekeeper to read their letters to them in order to deliver breaking news. “Within a few minutes, Jane Hurley would take center stage and give her performance, like it or not. She was the center of attention and would give the news to her concerned customers. Theater mixed with melodrama was the rule of the day” (32).

By the time we are in chapter 9 of The Sharecropper’s Son, continually we have been asking self what is the story line. Other than 61 pages of a telltale account of the delta, who or what occupies center stage? On October 7 eighteen-year-old James Hayes receives notice that he must appear at the draft board, takes a physical, and learns that he has been conscripted to participate in World War I. Before his departure, a gift from his mother moves us away from theater mixed with melodrama, and now we starkly are aware that what conceivably might continue to hold story line is intertextuality aligned with Shakespeare’s Othello.

His mother wanted him to take a memento—something that had remained in the family for many years. She gave him a linen handkerchief that had been handed down from his grandmother in slave days. Lula Mae was given the handkerchief when her grandmother died and had kept it wrapped in the family Bible. Since she had no daughter to give it to, she always said she would give it to James’s wife when and if he married. But the moment was ripe. Deep down inside, she hoped her son would come home from the conflict 57

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alive and well. Yet, with the war with its ever-mounting casualties, she felt it imperative to give him something that had not only a history to it but also had endured devastating episodes (65).

Conceivably, enmeshed in an Othello story-line, will a Desdemona surface to augment or enhance the plot. Two symbols give rise to this supposition: the mother’s handkerchief, and James’s dream at interval of a woman in a white dress. James leaves the delta by train and is sent to Camp Funston at Fort Riley, Kansas for basic training. Frank Lawson, commander of the black barrack to which James Hayes is housed, along with drill sergeant Henry Ham, take note of the eighteen-year-old recruit and summon him six days later. Hayes is placed in charge of the mile run and calisthenics for his platoon under Sergeant Ham. Inspired by how others see his capability, that night in the barracks James has a dream.

His special angel in white dress appeared to him, smiling. She said nothing, but her radiance and light and beautiful presence were a sign that all was well. He had such dreams back home, and now here. He took it as a sign to get on with the job he would soon be assigned.

The angel in white had reappeared in a dream. Pointing to her heart, the message was clear. “Go with your heart, and follow your heart.”

Faceless and yet radiant from the light, she seemed to tell him all would be well. (78).

In Shakespeare’s version of Othello, the namesake in the play is a Moorish general in the Venetian army. Brabantio, a Venetian senator, is the father of Desdemona. He accuses Othello of witchcraft for winning his daughter’s interest in marriage. Othello explains to the Duke of Venice and the senate that Desdemona became enamored of him because of the sad stories he told of his life before Venice. The senate is satisfied once Desdemona says she loves Othello. By order of the Duke, Othello leaves Venice to command the Venetian armies against invading Turks on the island of Cyprus. He is accompanied by his new wife, his lieutenant Cassio, his ensign Iago, and Iago’s wife, Emilia, as Desdemona’s attendant. Othello gives Desdemona a handkerchief from his mother, and wants this sense of history guarded at all 58

cost. Unaware, when Desdemona drops the handkerchief and it is retrieved and planted to suggest her infidelity to Othello and carelessness relative to his history, he strangles her. An anxious reader may wonder who is being set up to be strangled.

In The Sharecropper’s Son, James Hayes, an intertextual Othello, is transported by the American Expeditionary Force to Europe as a member of the Ninety-Third Division that becomes part of France’s Fourth army during World War I. Extraordinary contribution from the war trenches in Europe is heard about on both sides of the Atlantic, and Hayes’ name is not left off the glory roster. When the war is over in November 1918, he decides to stay for a while to visit Paris, and to see if he could make it as a singer.

While the conceivable Othello story-line is sustained in The Sharecropper’s Son, another parallel story-line is operative. Not only is James Hayes projected as a disciplined, formidable and responsible soldier in battle; he also is profiled as a pronounced singer whose music is instrumental in breaking down racial barriers at interval at home and abroad. His name and his action as artist calls to mind two accomplished musicians during that era, James Reese Europe and Roland Hayes. Europe was director of the regimental band of the 369th during World War I, introducing jazz to France, Germany and others parts of Europe. [James] Hayes is sketched as having trained at Camp Funston and, when entering with the black soldiers a movie theater in Manhattan, Kansas is barred by the manager. James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle, his next in line with offering music and assistance to the regimental band, actually trained in Spartanburg, SC at Camp Wadsworth, which was set up similar to the French battlefields. When they entered a store to buy a newspaper the manager refused to comply, and asked them to leave.

James [Hayes] also seems modeled after the accomplished musician Roland Hayes (1887-1997. Born in Curryville, GA, Roland studied at Fisk University. He traveled to London in April of 1920. King George V and Queen Mary summoned him to give a command performance at Buckingham Palace.

He returned to the USA in 1923. Roland made his official debut (classical music) 16 November 1923 as the first African American soloist to appear with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1924 he received the Spingarn Medal, 59

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the highest award presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In The Sharecropper’s Son, which tale mirrored by the fictional [James] [Hayes] takes center stage: the life of James Reese Europe, the life of Roland Hayes, or the life of Black artists/expatriates on stage in France during the 1920s. All development is enmeshed within the fold of the plot that weaves Othello by William Shakespeare. Thirteen times the white linen handkerchief is referenced in the novel. The night before it will be announced that World War I has end, the other symbol calling to mind the Othello story-line takes center stage in the novel.

James had one of those dreams again on the night of November 10.

It was the faceless angel with the white dress. A red sash around her mid-section, she smiled at him. She had beckoned at him, motioning with her hands for him to come up to a stage she was on. She seemed to be performer—perhaps a singer. The room was smoky, the haze of smoke making it difficult to see where he was. But she was there, glowing, radiant, and warm. Like most dreams, it was flashes. But this dream had recurred for many months from the time he was stationed at Camp Funston, aboard the ship, and even when in the barracks at Brest for the three months there and now here on the front. With the death of Duggers [a close friend] still a problem for him that kept him up—some nights, he saw it as an omen. What kind of omen—good or bad? The faceless woman in the white dress was on stage—was she a source of good? James hoped so (133).

Once the war is over and James Hayes finds his way to Paris, plot development in The Sharecropper’s Son moves with lightning speed. James becomes an overnight singing sensation at the Paris bistro Le Chat Noir (the Black Cat). Three years later, a French father and his Egyptian/French wife bring their twenty-three-year old daughter Marie Benoit, to see James perform.

“When James looked at her, he nearly let out an audible gasp….Marie Benoit had a new white dress with a red sash that she had purchased just for this occasion…James and Marie started to become an item in Paris” (163-64).

A year later, James and Marie are married. Seven months later, he receives a telegram to come home immediately because his dad has been diagnosed 60

with terminal stomach cancer. Over dinner that night, Marie encourages James to return home, but to take strength in returning safely back to Paris because she is pregnant. Forty-eight hours after he arrives in the delta, James’ father dies and is buried. After a fine Thanksgiving dinner, the following night a friend with whom James had been in the army overseas gives him a ride to the station for the train north to New York so he can connect to the liner headed for Paris. At the train station, three passengers are in the white section, and James and a mother and her two children are in the colored section. The train will be delayed for three hours. James steps out into the darkness and walks a few yards to get a bottle of cola when he sees a neon sign at a one-pump gas station. Three white drunken teenagers who had been brewing and are drunk from moonshine show up and point a gun to rob him. He starts running. The boy with the gun falls, and the bullet discharged pierces James in the back and he is killed. “When they removed James’ body, he had his hand in his pocket.

He had just wanted to touch his handkerchief” (190). He had safeguarded his history to the end, although it had been unable to offer him protection. “His mother made sure that the handkerchief was sent to Marie. She kept it for her newborn son, James Marcel Hayes, born on June 2, 1925” (190), Intertextuality also surfaces in The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. In a four and one-half page opening scripted as “Me: An Introduction,” author J. Drew Lanham asserts his cross-fertilization with nature: “I AM A MAN IN LOVE WITH NATURE. I AM AN ECOADDICT, consuming everything that the outdoors offers in its all-you-cansense seasonal buffet” (3). Given ties to a profession and family, Lanham informs, “I am an ornithologist, wildlife ecologist, and professor. I am a father, husband, son and brother” (3). Within the next second we are drawn into a spectacle of living color. “I’m a man of color—African American by politically correct convention—mostly black by virtue of ancestors who trod ground in central and west Africa before being brought to foreign shores” (3).

An “inkling” of other backgrounds are thrown in as “a part of the whole,” and the author provides an account of immersion in the landscape inhabited: “My plumage is myriad. I am a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest blue of despair and darkness. All of these hues are me; I am, in 61

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the deepest sense, colored” (4).

The Contents page lists that The Home Place is divided into three sections—Flock, Fledgling, and Flight, which calls to mind by Richard Wright the three sections of Native Son—Fear, Flight, Fate. From the subheadings in the stark “me” introduction, one wonders if they will be able to keep up with the author on the home front of Edgefield, South Carolina surrounded by foliage and wildlife of the lower Piedmont. Lanham shares his design: “This is a memoir, then, but it is also the story of an ecosystem—of some land, the lives lived on it, and the dreams that unfolded there. It is a tale of an in-between place and its in-between people. And I tell it with a sense of responsibility…I simply hope those words inspire you, too, to see yourself colored in nature’s hues” (7).

Fear, part one of Native Son, opens with four people in a room awakening to the ring of an alarm clock which startles not only them, but also a huge black rat. The room, not fit for human habitation, constitutes the entire apartment for Mrs. Thomas and her children, Bigger, Buddy and Vera. Their lives are encompassed by an urban asphalt jungle. There is no land on which to grow food, no fields to roam under healing sunlight, nor a night sky with bright moon, cooling clouds nor stars that sparkle like a million diamonds.

Everything natural is blocked out by the intensity of urban sprawl. Here dirt is not a fertilizing entity, but an encroachment of germs. There is no privacy in the one-room apartment. Whenever the mother and daughter and then the boys are ready to dress, each group must turn their backs on the others. The only fun that Bigger thinks he can have with his siblings after he kills the rodent is to dangle the rat in front of Vera, who becomes so frightened she faints. He is scolded for being irresponsible, and the destruction he seems headed toward.

Flock, part one of The Home Place, does not open with regimen whipped in shape by the sound of an alarm clock in a cramped urban cell. Unlike Bigger Thomas in Fear, part one of Native Son, who feels trapped and hunted by crime and poverty on the south side of Chicago, the lower piedmont encompasses most of Edgefield County in South Carolina where J. Drew lives. Surrounded by nature, he focuses on his own sense of empowerment.

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“I hope to some I am a friend. I bird. I hunt. I gather. I am a seeker and a noticer. My being finds its foundation in open places” (3). Yet, like Bigger Thomas, J. Drew is not oblivious to those who have sought and continue to seek control of others. “Edgefield has been less welcoming of—and less of a refuge for—human diversity…the power base in Edgefield kept things stuck in a state of antebellum stagnation, separate and nowhere near equal….But Edgefield was still my refuge, primarily because it was and is a sanctuary for creatures that aren’t subject to the prejudices of men” (17-18).

A human network for Bigger Thomas in Native Son consists of three siblings and a mother, and a three member street crew—Gus, Jack, and G. H. In The Home Place, J. Drew has a wider human network. At the Ranch are his schoolteacher parents, and his three siblings—Jock, Julia, and Jennifer.

Not far away down another road is the Ramshackle, the home of his maternal grandmother, Mamatha. J. Drew remains on loan to his grandmother until he is fifteen. He serves as a replacement in her life, given one year after his birth his grandfather died. Via this arrangement, we learn about Joseph Samuel Lanham for whom Joseph Drew Lanham is named. There is nothing for J. Drew to fret over because he is surrounded by so much positive reinforcement.

Intertextually, the heading Fear can be regarded as having been ascribed to part one in Native Son because not only is Bigger Thomas aware of who and what he fears, but also those who fear him. Conceivably, the heading Flock is ascribed to part one of The Home Place because there is nothing for J. Drew to fear, given continually he is reinforced by the flock that surrounds him, both humans and wildlife, especially the birds he hears singing to him.

After Bigger has frightened Vera and she faints, he leaves the apartment to meet Gus on the street. They notice an airplane write out an ad in the sky in white smoke. With conviction Bigger discusses how he could fly a plane if given a chance. He wants to leave ground zero where he is never able to soar above all that limits his life and advancement. But he understands how others who fear him on ground also fear to let him soar. In the second chapter under Flock, “Mamatha Takes Flight,” sketches how in 1903 when J. Drew’s grandmother Mamatha was a little girl, she was amazed to hear that “some crazy white men in North Carolina are flying like birds—but in a machine 63

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made of wood and cloth….Less than a decade later…Charles Lindbergh has flown an airplane across an ocean she’s never seen…simply another thing done with too much time on their hands” (37). Intertextually, Bigger engages in discourse on flight as advancement and escape from all that holds him back, whereas J. Drew is inspired by how the mind of his grandmother takes wings.

Part two of the The Home Front, under the section heading Fledgling, centers on J. Drew receiving additional care from others, and caring equally as much for himself with all that he learns to bring to his aid, given his continual flight emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically. In book two of Native Son, under the section heading Flight,” we are well aware that nothing has reinforced Bigger Thomas, and conceivably will not until he develop his own wings to soar. He is in flight, on the run for having killed the daughter of white people for whom he works; and he has killed his black girlfriend as well. Whereas J. Drew feels his life is in his hands for positive interaction with self, others and nature, Bigger feels that he now has placed his life in his own hands for eradicating the fear that has held him back. He now is in charge of his life, and must advance every act to get himself to the next step.

He has given flight to his life to get the world to address how he soars. Now people are reading about him, and think they know something about him.

His action takes center stage to tell his story.

Part three of The Home Front comes under the heading Flight, which serves as the heading for part two of Native Son, and the heading Fate governs part three of Wright’s novel. Bigger is defended in court for the murders of Mary and Bessie by a communist lawyer identified by the Communist boyfriend of the slain Mary. In jail Bigger is cut off from day and night, now housed in silhouette of no-man’s land. He is at peace with himself because he has learned and continues to hold on to his understanding that the minute he took possession of his own life and acted, he empowered himself He also understands that his sense of empowerment will get him electrocuted, now that his sense of fear has been buried. The lawyer Max tries to get the jury to understand this sense of resolution on the part of Bigger, and then hopes he can turn the tide by asking can if they render a verdict of guilty against a socially constructed being invisible to them.

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“The Bluebird of Enlightenment” is the first sketch under Flight in part three of The Home Place. Unlike Bigger in Native Son, J. Lanham in The Home Place reaches a sense of resolution not central to fate, but to flight.

He offers a different exposé on having been relegated to confinement: “We humans put ourselves on a pedestal. The imperative is the same, though: survive, eat, and reproduce. Throw in emotion and things get complicated. We judge and stereotype and hat and love. I’ll never be completely wild, never truly leave the domesticated world where expectations and feelings rule.

But I try to live half wild, not judging, skirting convention and expectation.

I spent too many years inside four walls. I have little blue thrushes to thank for my release” (142) In addition to the intertextuality central to The Sharecropper’s Son and Othello, and The Home Place and Native Son, alignment surfaces relative to the Amodeo and Landrum texts. Is this striking parallel coincidental relative to a work published by a press in Minnesota and the other in Indianapolis.

The frontispiece in The Sharecropper’s Son proclaims To the people of the Mississippi delta. The frontispiece of The Home Place proclaims For all who wander and love the land, and Lanham states in the Acknowledgements at the end of the text, “This work is dedicated, foremost, to the land that nurtures me” (213). Certainly the range is wide enough for us to say that we see intertextuality relative to time and place. Yet, setting enjoined in each text is laid out in a way that seems to leave each story largely untold relative to a respective angle of consistency.

Amodeo has written a historical work with a fictional character supposedly in a leading role. The sense of history that comes through is the framing of Black soldiers in World War I, but inadequate framing of a character who is narrated into existence throughout the text. From the delta to Paris, protagonist James Hayes is presented as someone who is in charge of his own life. Yet, his failure to project that sense of command in the delta when after the war he returns for his father’s funeral is what gets him killed, and everyone else in the delta comes off as accomplice. It is the 1920s in the darkness and woods of the delta. On his way to the station to take the train to New York, and then the boat to Paris, it is not believable that James would be lured by 65

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a neon light to chase a cola in the woods. Here history ends.

James is not real; he is fictional. The story ends without James Hayes having the last word. His replacement arrives in Paris five months after his death, at a newly named jazz club—Jimmy’s Place. “She stepped to the microphone. She had on a white dress with a red sash. She composed a love song entitled “Jimmy Hayes.” Her name was Josephine Baker” (191).

The novel has been a build-up for her to take center stage once the fictional character has been inked to death on paper and buried, similar to how the real James Reese Europe, six months after the war ends, is stabbed in the throat with a pen knife while playing music at a New York night club, and later dies that night due to loss of so much blood.

Where lies the last word for ending of The Home Place. Two and one quarter pages before the ending of the memoir, Lanham confesses: “I’m not overly optimistic that the happy Home Place of my childhood will ever be anything more than a good story gone sad. It’s a hard truth that’s settled in over the years. Mentally I’m moving on. In the three and one quarter page Acknowledgements at the end of the text, Lanham thanks the many people who were instrumental in providing inspiration as he struggled to engage the writing of his text, as he says… “a testament of gratitude to dear friends and kindred spirits for stoking my wild heart’s fires” (213). Inaugural engagement of the process shed it many colors at a writing workshop in Vermont. After thanking editors and the publisher, Lanham extends a special debt of gratitude to the individual “who in the end artfully shaped a lifetime of memories and eight years’ worth of writing into a better story” (215).

The Sharecropper’s Son constitutes engagement to burst through historical writing overshadowed by the presence of a fictional protagonist. The Home Place serves as effort involving a story with a heartbeat that lurks under cover of the darkness of print as an effort to soar. Each work is a call to those who grab hold only on the surface, as well as to those who go beneath in search of a respective angle of consistency.

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Jeff Newberry

Letter to Evans: Like Waves Breaking It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

—Leonard Cohen What if God kept a secret?

—Mark Jarman

This poem is from an as yet unpublished book-length collection of epistolary poems entitled Cross Country, a collaboration between Jeff Newberry and Justin Evans.

Dear Justin, I just watched my daughter vomit up a dinner of hot dogs & graham crackers.

Standard toddler stuff—congestion & mucus have clogged her system for three days now.

The story I write is different: Spina Bifida.

She was born with a hole in the base of her spine.

An internal tube drains fluid from her brain to her abdomen. A clogged shunt can kill, cause brain damage. One sign of a shunt malfunction? Vomiting. Every childhood scar or stumble leads me back to her disease, my unease knowing her this way—not a child, a disorder, not my daughter, a future in a wheelchair, should her legs one day seize. A one-day-this-could-happen.

A vision of bowel management enemas, 67

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of self-cathing. Not of school plays.

Not of girl slumber parties, whispered secrets around a backyard fire. Not of dance camps or track meets or dances or homecoming queen.

It all mutates into one phrase: Spina Bifida.

I’m trying to push the dreams into place, the way you might shape dough, knowing that if you handle it too much, the butter will melt & the biscuits won’t rise.

Listening to her breathe on a monitor, I take each breath, willing my lungs do the work for her. She sleeps & I sleep.

Tomorrow, we will do this all again. * They said my son would be deformed.

They said he was too big for my wife’s womb.

They told my wife they had to induce her.

That night, after sixteen hours of labor & an emergency c-section, he came into the world, a screaming mass of flesh.

He was undersized & I laughed at worried doctors who saw my girth & assumed a colossus of a fetus.

His eyes were blue like marbles.

I didn’t know all baby’s eyes are blue.

I thought he’d always have eyes like a cat.

Later, the color became river water.

It’s too easy to say he’s just like me, too easy to say he’s a better version.

He’s child of God, just like you or me.

The Bible teaches me we’re born under a curse.

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To breathe, it seems, is sin. He stumbles through life, my clumsy boy, nine-years-old, silly in the way boy children are. He laughs at everything from internet fodder to his friends’ drawings of oversized faces.

I gave him a child-sized guitar when he turned four. He swung it like a battle-axe & it broke, denting the Sheetrock in his room.

He tried piano & it didn’t take. His voice, though, sounds like a sparrow at dawn, high-pitched as though fluted through glass.

It weaves melodies, finds harmonies, never flattens or sharpens outside his will.

He sings like his mother, with the ease you or I have with words. That’s a lie, right? Our voices on the page come from silent muses who communicate when we’re not listening, who urge us with hand gestures and mute head nods.

Maybe that’s the real talent. It comes despite the rough work. I’ve spent half my life scribbling words to make the world make sense. The night he was born, they wrapped my son in a blanket & put him in my arms. Finally, I thought, someone who will mourn me when I’m gone. Finally, someone who will know how to sing my song. * In a graveyard in Southwest Georgia, a four-by-two headstone reads 69

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“Laura Suzanne Newberry” with a single date: December 28, 1982.

Beneath the date: A little bud of love to bloom with God above. I never knew my sister. A tangle umbilical cord wrapped her neck in utero, dooming her birth, killing her the day she emerged in our broken world. My father alone made the journey from North Florida for her funeral.

The rest coalesced in our rented home, huddled near a gas space heater my mother swore would one day blow us all to kingdom come. My father told me a few year later that months after her death, he walked along the shore of Cape San Blas, angry with God, & had a vision of—something. I don’t know. He didn’t say. He couldn’t say.

I just knew that I’d heard & seen God he told me. Eight years later, his heart gave out, clogged from decades of cigarettes & nightly twelve-packs.

There is no other way to say this: he was not a good father. He hit my mother, hit his boys. I used to blame him for Laura’s death. God had used her to show him the spring ice fragility of life. Then I blamed God. I spit venom at Him for years. I used to lie awake in college & dare Him to face me, to explain Himself to me, to make His will perfectly clear, if only once.

My sister had red hair, my mother says, 70

long red hair. I can picture it if I try.

When I close my eyes, though, the first image is the tombstone, cold & silent. * I worry about blood pressure, worry about weight.

I think about the growing uric acid in my blood, the pain in my feet & knees. I picture a brown-black coffin where some undertaker will lay me.

He’ll fold my hands over my spent heart.

My wife will tell him I look natural & good.

I’ve never wanted to be buried. For years, I’ve said I want cremation. I want my ashes scattered in the Gulf of Mexico, to return to the salt waters from which I emerged.

Our bodies are water, Justin, but not living water.

You can’t drink salt water. The earth is 70% water, too, & the tide’s rising as we abuse our world.

You can’t drink most of that water. Imagine dying of thirst on a ship in the silent Sargasso.

Imagine looking out at the acres of blue, the clusters of clouds, & going mad, taking draughts from cupped palms, knowing that the salt will suck your insides dry, that even as your parched lips burn, you’re dying. Christ called himself “Living Water,” said his people were to be “Salt and Light,” & I’ve got half of that right.

I dream of a ship sailing toward the east, laden with spices & cargo, me at the stern, finding my way home one more time.

Leonard Cohen sang that Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the ocean.

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I’ve spent many years in my own lonely wooden tower. I sing broken chords in broken words.

I cling to splintered driftwood in a hurricane, feeling the water swirl around me, waiting on the tide to take me down.

I remain your faithful friend, Jeff

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Justin Evans

Letter to Newberry: Solving for x 1. Problem There is always the rock:

That, first and last, to remember. —William Kloefkorn

Dear Jeff: The more I read the more I worry because the more people dig the more I realize it may all come down to mathematics—some not-so-random sequence of numbers & letters I parted with decades ago, after years of struggle like an empty hourglass trying to tell time.

People talk, and I have heard how nature can be found in the golden ration, how fractal patterns are found in all nature.

I simply lost my way and now I am fearful I will be forced to find my way back into that world. My father once tried to explain to me the calculus, how finding the area of a circle is impossible, but through the act of dividing parabolas into smaller and smaller segments a person could come very close to doing just that. After twenty minutes I stopped his lesson; told him I was far more interested in the debate over who invented calculus than in any set of numbers, variables, or formulae.

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For me there is elegance in the way Newton schooled Liebniz, correcting his mistakes in public, something you cannot find in any equation. In college it took two attempts & my wife’s tutoring for me to sneak through, and when I took analytical statistics in grad school I literally counted beans for my grade.

2. Potential (Schrödinger’s Cat)

In the beginning God created

the heaven and the earth —Genesis 1:1

In my dreams, earth is the constant— God hath made it so—but I am still unable to solve for x. I want birds to teach me the geometry of flight, but they scorn me for attempting what is not within the domain of man, and I am left alone to ask if there will always be expressions I will never understand if there will always be some value that escapes my grasp. There, in my sleep I want to extrapolate extensions for all the variables in my life. I want

to reveal it’s practical applications, tell me why the cat can be alive, dead, even alive and dead at the same time, yet I never can have the answers I 74

need in any condition. Perhaps I need to seek a different reality, trade the one I have for a multi-dimensional system where I can exist in a reality where I am not limited by someone else’s imagination. Whenever I wake from this recurring dream of aborted flight I mourn the loss of something I have never had, and I spend my remaining hours, resisting re-entry into a world without new ambition.

3. The Deepest Cut

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. —Walt Whitman Sunrise. The world is still working like it has for more years than anyone can count. All my anxiety fades, as the words of Occam echo in my ears, remind me any answer I really need will eventually make itself known, or I will find a way to the other side.

Sunrise. The world still circles our closest star, dictates for us the constant of time, recorded in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years; each a solitary manmade unit bound to our reconciliation with the eternal, for each unites us with the universe but 75

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remains subservient to the moment which escapes limitations or laws.

Sunrise. Everything is more than the mere sum of our parts. We are like the sun, both made of the very same atoms, growing and giving of ourselves to the earth and each other with every word we speak, & every breath we take in our lungs.

Sunrise. My son is already awake and walking to his early morning AP Calculus class he takes as part of an honors program. The world he sees is much more than the one I knew at his age, and after I have left this life behind he will still move forward into what is both known & unknown, perhaps solving for what equals x in the life he has lived.

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Sharon LaCour

The Seawall

She knelt on the scratchy green vinyl seat of the car and leaned out of

the window, squinting against the wind which blew her long hair into knots.

“Sit down Cricket. You’ll fall out the window or worse, fly into the front seat and upset my cup of coffee.” She stayed a minute longer like she hadn’t heard him. “Colette. You heard me?”

Leaning back against the seat her legs stopped short and left her feet dangling over the front edge. She scratched a mosquito bite on her left knee.

“I can’t see like this.”

“We’re going four-forty, Collie, forty miles an hour, all four windows down,” an excitement in his voice.

“Six windows, Daddy, there’s six.” The smell of fresh baked bread wafted into the car for a moment, and she lifted her nose up toward the window.

“How do you figure that?” He gazed at her in the rear view mirror.

“Those little ones up there, the triangle ones. Can I come sit up there and use the cranks?” Raised up again on her knees, she peered over the seat past her Daddy’s reddened neckline.

“Okay, you are right. Six. No, you can’t.” He raised a plastic cup to his mouth, blew on it, and sucked in a long sip.

When he’d leave her in the car sometimes to stop at the gas station or to talk to somebody, she’d climb in the front and turn the cranks of the vent windows and watch them open and shut. They were the neatest part of the new station wagon, that and the big back area where you could lie down and look out the windows.

Sometimes, he’d let her ride in the front seat and give her sips from his salt-covered icy beer cans. On those days, he’d be whistling or humming a tune real low with a beer in one hand and a Camel in the other. Today he wasn’t whistling or singing. They’d had time for a couple of glazed donuts from the bakery on the way; Mama, still sleeping when they left, would not 77

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have approved of the donuts.

“Why does the car say mouth, Daddy?” She felt very proud this spring, finishing up the first grade and able to read so many words. Mrs. Petrie from church had told her mother the other Sunday that Collette had an advanced vocabulary.

“What? Say what?”

“Mouth,” she had to talk above the wind rushing into the car. “M-O-UT-H. Right there on the steering wheel. I have an advanced vocabulary, you know,” she yelled.

“Not mouth.” He laughed, to her dismay. “Plymouth, it’s the name of the car.”

“Oh, well, it’s still mouth,” she said to herself.

The family had all piled into the wagon when he brought it home from the used car lot, the little kids into the back where they could lie down and look out the sides and the big back window. Mama had seemed happy and not so tired that day. They had driven around by the lakefront, past the Beach and the seawall, over that high bridge with the train trestle and past the little airport where you could hear those purring engines, way over to where the camps stretched out into the lake one after the other, with docks lining up like rungs on a huge floating ladder. They had poured out to show Aunt Edith and Uncle Walter the new car. Edith had very red hair. Collette always wanted to touch it to see if it would burn her fingers, she had very red lips too, and fingernails, none of which her Mama, who never wore makeup of any kind, had. Walter liked to pick her up and toss her in the air, which she thought she was getting to be a bit too big for. They all commented on the beautiful seafoam and cream paint job and the tiny stars on the headliner, the nice wings in the back.

She stared at her Daddy’s neck, the smell of the lake getting stronger and stronger. “Can I have another donut?”

“No more donuts. We’re here.” A moment later he pulled up the car and stopped.

She scrambled to her knees and gulped in the lake air, thrilled as usual at the sight of the lake. All sky and water as far as the eye could see, twenty-six 78

miles across of water, the thin silver sliver of the causeway bridge shining in the distance. Behind and on both sides of them the city nestled into its bowl between this lake and the Mississippi River. She was aware of the city being there and yet it felt like another world here by the lake, like a far, away, remote place, only twenty minutes from their door.

She waited for him to open the door, jumped down and ran to the seawall and counted the steps down to the water—her ritual. When the lake was high, like the day they came down to look at the waves before Hurricane Betsy, you could only see three or four steps. Her Mama had objected, but Daddy held her tight that day as her brothers ran around in the grass shrieking into the tropical storm force winds. Waves would travel around the wall, one at a time, licking the steps until a curve stopped it and another wave would follow.

Today the water mirrored the placid sky, flat glassy with few ripples, the color of a green coke bottle, or darker, and murky. Eight steps showed above the surface of the water with more below. She would go down as far as he allowed, the steps being slippery and the lake not safe here for swimming.

Then you could see below the surface to the bright green moss swaying on the bottom steps and figure out how many more steps continued under the water.

The light changed suddenly. Huge pillows of cloud lumbered past and the sun opened up. The green moss gleamed and undulated, like a creature or a hundred creatures forever stuck to the disappearing concrete steps. She shivered, remembering the time she went too far, how the moss had felt on her bare feet, the slippery, shiny wetness of it.

She smelled his smoke behind her. “How many steps, Baby?”

“Eight.”

“Eight showing, so how many are below?”

She took out her fingers. “Eight-nine-ten-eleven,” touching each one with the pointer of the other hand. “Four.”

“Four.”

“That makes twelve.” She lifted her hand to shade her eyes and gazed along the length of the seawall until it disappeared from sight. “Why do they call it that?”

“Call it what?” He sat on the top step, unraveling the string of the crab 79

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traps. The cigarette hung from his lip.

“The sea-wall. It’s not a wall at all, it’s a stairway.”

“It’s a wall made of steps, very long steps that go on for miles, way to that lighthouse over there. I guess they call it that because it was built to be a wall to keep out the sea. To keep the lake from flooding the city.” He continued working on the traps, separating them one from the other by holding their metal rings. “Look, that way, at West End, the lighthouse, you see it? The steps go about that far.”

“The lighthouse where Mama went swimming when she was a little girl?”

This story she loved to hear as many times as they would tell it. Her mama’s aunt and uncle lived at that very lighthouse, tended it, turned on the light as needed to bring ships to the dock. And when her mama visited, she and her sisters dove from the lighthouse platform into the lake to swim.

He flung a trap to one side, laying them all out in a straight line, and reached into the ice chest for a chicken neck. Behind him, a car of teenagers had parked and leaned against their car smoking and listening to music.

“That’s the one. You have a good memory.” He tied the shiny chicken neck to the string at the bottom middle of the trap, stood up and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his blue work shirt.

She climbed up to the top ledge of the wall of steps and walked along its edge in the grass, counting the number of footsteps it took for her to get from one section to the next. Each section of concrete steps had a straight crack running all the way down to the water. In these cracks her Daddy would secure the ends of the crab nets before he tossed them into the water.

The steps took a curve that jutted out into the lake. As she followed it she heard her Daddy’s voice calling her name. She turned to look back, and had lost him from sight so she ran back around the curve until she could see him again. “You going too far, young lady. Get back here.”

She ran back to him in the grass, his voice reaching her like a faraway echo, and his body looking small next to the oak tree standing on the grassy area between the seawall and Lakeshore Drive. The sun slipped back behind the clouds, giving some respite from the heat and glare. “Stay close, Cricket, where I can see you.”

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“Okay.” She watched him tossing the wire and string nets one at a time into the water just a short ways out, where the crabs waited on the bottom of the shallow lake. “How deep is it, Daddy?”

“Deep enough to cover your head. Deep enough to cover mine, too. These nets settle on the bottom where the crabbies hang out, having their crabbie parties.” He smiled at her.

“Crabby parties?” She giggled. “You mean they’re crabby so they have parties to stop feeling crabby?”

“Yep. Crabby, crab parties for crabby crabs.” He pounded another wooden stake into a crack and lifted the net about shoulder level. Collette watched it soar into the air and fall gently.

“You brought your colors?” He set up a lawn chair and pulled a beer out of his cooler.

“Yeah.” She had little enthusiasm in her voice for coloring. What she wanted was to go closer to the bottom steps again, put her feet into the water and look for little fish and shells stuck in the moss.

“I brought you a root beer. You want it now?” He stood over the ice chest.

“Uh......”

“Come on, the ice is melting here.”

“No, I’ll wait.”

“Go to the car and get your colors.” He sat down in his chair and lit another cigarette, took out the newspaper.

She dragged her feet over to the car and opened the back door. Across Lakeshore Drive the teenagers had settled in on top of a picnic table, three guys and one girl, laughing and joking. Colette thought the girl certainly attracted a lot of attention from the boys who seemed to hover around her like yellow jackets in August. The girl seemed a little sad because she didn’t laugh with them, but looked straight down at the ground. The entertainment they provided appealed to her much more than her color crayons and princess coloring book, so she dawdled by the open door of the wagon and stared across the street. She retrieved her red plaid satchel from the back seat and sat down on the curb of the parking area continuing her vigil. The concrete curb scratched at the backs of her knees. Ants crawled anxiously around the 81

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barrier of her feet. She squinted up at a loud blue jay screeching at her from the trees beyond the picnic table. All of a sudden some loud music came out of the car, a lady singing in a deep voice.

One of the boys reached into a grocery bag and pulled out a bottle which they all passed around and drank from, all but the girl who shook her head.

The boys tried again to offer it to her but she refused. “Collette, time to pull up the nets, come on, where’s my helper.”

She turned back to her Daddy for her favorite part of the outing, forgetting the girl and her problems across the way.

“Here, you help pull up this one.” He let her hold the strings and feel some of the weight as he pulled it up. “Pretty light, what do you think?”

“Nothing there.” They tried to guess how many, if any, crabs would be in each net. Then they’d add up all the crabs from all the nets. Daddy would boil them in the backyard when they got home and sometimes her cousins came over to help eat them, depending on the catch. If the catch was big, she got to see her cousins, and to eat the juicy, spicy crabmeat that Daddy cracked open for her.

The net came up empty, the chicken neck waterlogged and tattered. “Let’s go on.” They crossed to the next one. “This one feels more promising, Collie.

Here.” She pulled on the string after he’d released it from the bottom of the lake. “Two or three.”

“Females or males?”

“Which ones are the fat ones again?”

“The females.”

“Hunh. One of each then.”

They pulled up the string together, and indeed there were three bright blue crabs in the net. “You are getting good at this,” he said. “Go get the hamper.”

She ran up the steps carefully where the woven reed hamper sat empty next to the lawn chair. Two of the boys across the street were climbing a tree while the third one sat next to the girl, his arm around her shoulders, as she took a sip from the bottle that he held to her lips.

“Collette!”

“Coming!” She had to maneuver the steps slowly going down. “Here, 82

Daddy.” She held the hamper as he dumped out the net, the animals clinging to the string with their claws. He pushed them off with a stick.

“That’s a male, that’s a female. Can’t see underneath the other one, but it’s smaller.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Two males, one female. Let’s keep going.”

Six crabs came up in all, the chicken necks still intact, for the most part, so he tossed them all back in.

“Can I go down a few steps?”

“You can go down six, no more than six. Okay?”

“Okay.” She made her way slowly down the steps and sat down with her knobby elbows resting on her knees just below the cuff of her red short pants. Her chin rested on one hand, and she squinted down into the water. A mullet jumped right in front of her. “Daddy! A mullet!”

“Count the jumps.”

“One.........two........three.......... Three!” She yelled.

“It’s almost always three. Lucky if you get one that does four. Good luck.”

He sat down again the lawn chair and pulled up the paper.

They both heard the scream. Her Daddy turned around in his chair and gazed across the street. Collette ran up to look. “Stay right here.” He set the paper down with his pack of cigarettes to hold it. “Don’t wander off.” After waiting for a car to pass, he started across the street. One of the boys held onto the arms of the girl a little too tightly, Collette thought, while another held the bottle to her mouth. The boys let go when they glimpsed her Daddy marching over there.

Collette heard a sound behind her and turned to see another mullet jump, one...two...three....She wandered down towards it as she counted, three......

It disappeared for a few seconds, then it came up again. She looked over at her Daddy to tell him, but he was talking to the group of kids. Could it be the same mullet, jumping over and over again, she wondered? It stopped and so did she, then again, one.....two....and Collette went down two more steps.

Three more times the mullet jumped, this time a further distance out. By the time he disappeared for good, she felt the water splashing her feet in her pink flip-flops. The hairy green steps sat only inches away from her feet; the step 83

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she was on being mostly dry and free of moss. Three steps were visible, each one less and less so as they extended underneath the murky lake. The water felt cool on her feet. She glanced up; her Daddy had not returned, and she reached down to remove her flip-flops, dipping her toes onto the green step below, rubbing them in the silky mass. Again she shivered at the touch of it, slimy and forbidden, but cool and soft too. Her bottom touched the step behind her and she leaned against the edge of it with her toes hanging over into the moss.

Another mullet jumped up not two feet away and startled her, making her lose her footing. She felt her feet then her legs slide against the mossy concrete, bumping her head against the top one as she slid down into the dark water. There was nothing to grab onto, although she flailed out her arms in an effort to find anything to keep from sliding. Her whole body bumped along the edges of the three concrete steps, the water not deep enough over them to keep her buoyant or prevent scraping the backs of her heels and legs until her head went under and she felt her body sink to the bottom with the crabs.

The water felt as warm as when the hose has been out in the sun for a little while, very warm at first, until her feet approached the bottom where it became cooler. The backs of her legs burned where the steps had brushed them and as she looked up and saw the light of the sky a long way above her head, she panicked. Her stomach convulsed in fear with the desire to breathe and knowing that she could not do so. Feeling her toes touch the sharp shells and sand, she pushed as hard as she could against the bottom. This propelled her up quickly and allowed her to gasp at the top and take in some air, even to try to say his name, before she sank again. This time the bottom came sooner, and she repeated the process of bouncing up to the top, gasping, and calling, “Daddy,” once more. The third time her legs felt not so strong, but she made it up the last time.

She heard it then, her Daddy’s voice, “Cricket!” but far away sounding, then louder, “Cricket, Jesus!” In moments she felt her body lifted up in his arms; she sucked in as much air as she could, until she began to cough. He carried her to the top of the seawall, set her down on the grass. She sat upright, coughing, dazed, her legs and back aching, breathing in deeply.

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“What the hell were you doing? I told you not to go down that close to the water. ” She started crying then, at the anger in his voice, and shivering, felt colder than she ever remembered. He grabbed her up in his arms, rubbing some warmth into her small body. “Honey, I didn’t see you. I couldn’t see you. It scared me to death. Then I saw your head come up. Jesus.” He shivered then himself. “Are you hurt?”

The tears became whimpers as his voice softened and her head fell against his warm chest. She shook her head, no, then nodded yes, pointing behind her to her back and legs.

“You’re all scraped up, aren’t you, poor Cricket. I’ll be right back.” He set her down and jogged to the car. She watched him, missing his warmth.

That’s when she noticed the girl standing next to the car at the top of the seawall. The girl from across the street.

He returned with a towel and his raincoat, rubbed her gently, took off her wet t-shirt and quickly draped the coat over her bare skin. “I think you could use that root beer about now, hey kid?”

She shook her head, coughing. He held her again, setting the root beer down.

“That’s the girl from across the street.” She craned her neck to see.

“Yes, we’re going to give her a ride home. I forgot all about her.” Calling up to the girl, “There’s a root beer in the cooler if you want it. You can come on down here if you want.”

“You ready for some now?” He opened the root beer and offered it to her.

She nodded and accepted tiny grateful sips of the cold sweet bubbles as he rubbed her back and shoulders. “You had me scared for a minute there, Cricket, but I knew you’d come out of it. Yep, you’re pretty strong for a cricket, aren’t you? Now, let’s get some more crabs so your cousins can come over tonight.”

She sniffed and nodded again and sat on the ledge watching as he pulled up the strings alone one by one, dumping out the crabs, chatting with the crabs and with her, until he’d made a round and came back to sit next to her. The girl stayed up next to the car, her arms folded, looking away down the street.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, honey.” He pulled her dry t-shirt over her head.

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“That girl is just standing up there.”

“Yes, she is. We’ll get going soon.”

“Daddy?”

“Yeah?”

“I lost my pink flip-flops. You think Mama’s gonna be mad?”

“No, I think she’ll be just fine. We’ll get you some new ones. Don’t worry.” He started to go up to the ice chest for more necks.

“Daddy?”

“Unh-hunh?” He paused, turned toward her.

“It gets cold at the bottom.” She wiped her nose on his coat.

“Yeah. How about that?” He changed his mind about the necks, sat down and pulled her on his lap.

“Cooler. For the crabs. I think they like it cool.”

“Yeah? Yeah. I bet they do, honey. Today you got to visit where they live.

Not everybody gets to do that.”

She nodded.

“Not as much fun for people down there, is it?”

“Nope. I like it better up here in the sun.”

“Me, too, baby, me too.” He held her, a little too tightly, his rough cheek tickling her smooth one, and breathed a warm tune in her ear.

After a moment, “Daddy, I’m worried about that girl.”

He laughed. “Just like your mama, worried about everybody. Okay.” He set her down. “You stay here, we’ll close up shop and go home. We can buy some crabs on the way and your cousins can still come over.”

The ride home was quiet, with the girl sitting in the front seat. “You and your brothers go to St. Alphonse, right?”

“Yes, sir.” She stared out the window.

“Couple of them play football?”

“Yes, sir.” She looked at the nails of one hand.

“I know your Daddy. He goes fishing with my brother-in-law. How’s your Mom?” He glanced at her.

“Fine.” She sighed and twisted the ends of her hair.

“I have a dog.” Collette piped in a loud voice from the back seat. “She’s 86

as old as the hills.”

“I used to see her at Schwegmann’s but I haven’t seen her in a while.”

He turned the corner near the bakery; Collette smelled cake this time.

“She’s been kind of sick.”

“My mama’s sick too.” She spoke louder since no one had responded to her earlier. “She sleeps a lot.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. She seems like a real nice lady,” he slowed the car down to a crawl.

The girl pointed toward the end of the block. “It’s down there on the right.”

He pulled the car over and stopped. “You be careful about who you hang around with. I know one of those boys, he’s up to no good. You don’t want your mama to be worried about you.”

The girl pushed open the car door and turned around to look at him for the first time. “My Mama doesn’t care what I do or where I am. And I don’t know why you would either.” She slammed the door shut.

“Thanks for the ride.”

He watched her walk up to the house. Awnings and dark drapes shrouded the house in shadow. A few scraggly shrubs struggled against the house, the lawn was dry and brown and old newspapers piled up on the steps.

“That’s a sad house, hunh?” Colette sat up on her knees.

He sighed. “A sad house, yeah, baby, it is.”

“At least our house is only sad sometimes, it doesn’t look sad.” She felt pleased that her grass at home was green and trimmed, and she had a swing hanging from the tree in the front yard.

He looked at her in the mirror for a moment as though he couldn’t decide whether to say something or not. “Sit down, Collie. Let’s get on home. Those crabs can’t wait for us to eat ‘em.”

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Philip C. Kolin

An Interview with Civil Rights Poet Joseph Ross

Joseph Ross, a Washington, D.C. based poet, has published a “trilogy” of

books—Meeting Bone Man (2012), Gospel of Dust (2013), and most recently Ache (2017)—all of which focus on the Civil Rights Movement, including heroes and martyrs, major events, and historic changes. His impassioned poetry, usually written in short, stabbing lines, combines satire with the blessings of justice. Many of Ross’s poems take readers into the nightmare world of shadows and bigots to lament the horrors of racial crimes. Among the celebrated martyrs Ross has written about in his first two books are Emmett and Mamie Till and the heroic challenges Mamie faced and overcame as a mother to show the world what a hateful Mississippi had done to her son. In Ache, he again turns to the Tills but now includes a major section on Trayvon Martin’s tragedy as well as a series of poems on George Zimmerman and his villainous role in it. As part of a grand cycle of poems on Civil Rights, Ross also includes, in Ache, haunting medleys on African American jazz musician John Coltrane, on Henry Tanner, the first African American professional painter, and on contemporary rap and graffiti artists.

But one of Ross’s many strengths as a poet and a chronicler of Civil 88

Rights is reaching across boundaries and continents, as well as decades, to link, embrace, and lament global sins of prejudice against people of color.

In Ache again, he introduces poems about Nelson Mandela and, fictively, his relationship to Trayvon, Emmett and Mamie Till, and other American Civil Rights martyrs. One of his most powerful poems presents Mandela as a father figure giving Trayvon consolation and condolences. There are poems in Ache on the stinging hurts of Mexican and other Latin immigrants as they make their way to the United States, a medal of a famous Mexican martyred saint pinned to their shirts. Ross’s global view of Civil Rights violations further helps to define and denounce the crimes against people of color, no matter where they reside. His poems speak powerfully about the kinship of pain and prejudice.

Ross’s poems have appeared in many national publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Poet Lore, Drumvoices Revue, and he has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. He has recently served as the Poet-inResidence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society in Howard County, Maryland. In addition to his poetry, Ross is a nationally acclaimed blogger (JosephRoss.net) and teaches English and creative writing at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C..

What follows is the first extended interview with Ross, conducted through email exchanges in May and June 2017. Here he discusses his introduction to Civil Rights history, the ways he sees the Movement at work globally, the difficulties in writing about figures like George Zimmerman or Till’s killers, the linkage of African American art and music to his poetry, the influence that Roman Catholic ritual has played in his work, and the lessons his students have taught him about Civil Rights and poetry.

PCK: How did you get interested in writing political/social conscious poetry about Civil Rights victims?

JR: I grew up in Pomona, California, just outside Los Angeles. My parents always taught us to see society from the bottom up—from the perspective of those who don’t have much. My parents worked very hard and were careful with their money. My father, who had been a steelworker and then an organizer 89

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for the United Steel Workers in California, told stories about strikes, unfair labor practices, and poor working conditions. He always taught us to side with people who suffer. This approach to life and politics took root in me.

I didn’t study the Civil Rights Movement until the 1970s when I was in college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Although I attended both public and Catholic schools, the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t part of my education. But when I began to learn its history—its leaders, victims, victories, setbacks—especially the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., I was haunted by it. Some of the Civil Rights heroes became an important part of my second book, Gospel of Dust, which includes a poem about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four little girls. My poem, “Our Lady of Sorrows Comes to Birmingham,” didn’t come easily. I tried for a few months to write it, with little success. But when I realized the bombing took place on September 15th, the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows on the Catholic calendar, I had the opening into my poem. I grew up with images of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, the mother witness to injustice.

Connecting her, my faith, and my parents’ ethic of standing with those who suffer, I knew how the poem could work.

I also learned about two teenage boys martyred in Birmingham the same day in 1963: Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson. I was struck by Virgil Ware’s story through a poem by my friend, Randall Horton, “Caught in a Whirlwind of Hate” from his book Definition of Place (2006). This seized my imagination and I wanted to know more. Virgil was 13, and murdered by two white boys while he was riding on a bike with his brother. Another Black teenager, Johnny Robinson, was killed the same day by a Birmingham policeman. Despite their enormity, I was shocked that their stories were nearly lost to history. People knew the four girls, but few knew the fate of these two boys. I felt obligated to remember them in two poems in Ache—“Requiem for Virgil Ware” and “Requiem for Johnny Robinson.”

PCK: Why did you feel obligated?

JR: Their lives matter. Their possibilities, their hopes, their loves, who they might become—all of this matters. One role poetry can play is that of telling the untold stories. In American culture, built on wealth and celebrity, 90

there seemed little important about these boys’ lives. But to me, and anyone who treasures humanity, their lives matter and their stories deserve a hearing.

Poems can remember and return someone whose story has been lost to us. I know in your book, Emmett Till in Different States, there is a poem on Virgil Ware and so I am happy his story is gaining more well-deserved attention.

PCK: Your newest book is simply entitled Ache? Why and how does this title sum up your purpose?

JR: When I looked at the poems I’d been writing for the last few years, I realized they all had something in common—a strong sense of yearning, deep longing. Some poems longed for justice, some for recognition, others for love. The voices of Civil Rights victims cried out to me—their history, their contributions to justice. I began to organize them into possible book sections and realized at their heart was an ache, which seemed like just the right word because it has so many layers—aching for people we’ve loved and lost, for outcomes we desperately want, for justice, honor, and respect.

My poem, “George Zimmerman’s Trial,” closes with these lines: “Every courtroom is guilty. / Every testimony / an ache.”

Not surprisingly, the word “ache” shows up in several poems in the book.

In the book’s opening poem, the “ache” represents yearning for a love: “… as if someone / were playing a cello in the / distance. As if I had forgotten / the song’s name but not / its ache.” In the poem “Coltrane’s Breath” his breath becomes “…a swirl / around the instrument’s bell and out / into the aching world.”

PCK: How do your poems capture these layers of meaning?

JR: I try to capture various layers of “aches” in several different types of poems. In “For Gilberto Ramos,” about an immigrant boy found dead in the Texas desert, I describe what his mother did before he left for the journey north. “Before you left, your mother / draped you with fifty Hail Marys, / a rosary of white wood, / a constellation she hoped might / guide you.” Imagine the “ache” of a mother whose son is identified by the rosary she placed on him before he left home. This poem also speaks of a brother’s ache. “His prayer meant ‘brother,’ a word / he kept moist, just beneath his tongue.” A brother’s ache also cries out in “Requiem for Virgil Ware”: “…you needed 91

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your / brother’s breath for yourself now. / Until you wanted these crucified seconds: / his face, his sweat, his breath / to last forever.” Readers can also see Mary’s “ache” in “On Henry O. Tanner’s ‘Annunciation’” and Mamie Till’s “ache” in “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God.” PCK: The cover for Ache is distinctive, even terrifying. How did it evolve?

JR: An artist friend, Jefferson Pinder, created the cover art. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and creates beautiful and provocative work. After he read the manuscript, he immediately suggested a simple image of burning—smoldering—and told me he was especially moved by the poem “Nelson Mandela Burns His Passbook,” chronicling one of Mandela’s first acts of civil disobedience—burning his passbook, which Black people had to carry with them at all times in apartheid South Africa. To burn it was to confront the government and be at risk. There is a famous photograph of Mandela burning his passbook, the flames slowly engulfing the small paper booklet. (He burned his passbook during the 1952 Defiance Campaign. This photograph is housed in the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa.)

I love the idea that when an ache burns slowly, it smolders. This captures an experience of pain, a slow but growing hurt that can create a new reality.

PCK: That’s a powerful point. How do the poems in Ache create a new reality?

JR: Any poem can create a new reality if it causes a change in the reader.

When a poem moves the reader, it can spark a new way of thinking or living; it becomes a catalyst for change and motivation, for new efforts and habits. I know this idea gives poetry a lot of power but I think it’s true. A good poem has the power to change us.

PCK: How does Ache fit in with your two previous collections of poetry, Meeting Bone Man and Gospel of Dust?

JR: Meeting Bone Man and Gospel of Dust also deal with a hunger for justice and in doing so they explore human mortality. Ache continues both themes. I think of them as a trilogy, since aching for justice runs through many of the poems. In Ache, I dwell mostly on the suffering of those cast aside by society, whether those struggling for racial justice, those crossing borders in search of peace, or artists like John Coltrane and Henry O. Tanner. In Meeting 92

Bone Man, I composed a series of persona poems about refugees from Darfur, and another series of poems about Cool “Disco” Dan, a Washington, D.C. graffiti artist whose art sometimes elegizes murder victims. A poem “The Silence of Lawrence King” recalls a fifteen year-old boy killed in his junior high school because he was gay and out. Gospel of Dust continues this theme with poems about Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, and David Kato, a murdered Ugandan Gay rights activist. In these poems, I try to honor the witness of these individuals who sought justice for those whose lives didn’t matter to people in power.

The cover for Gospel of Dust shows a photograph of the stained glass window in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where the face of Christ was blown out by the bombing. When I first saw it, I knew it would create the perfect cover for Gospel of Dust. With help from Jeff Bridgers at the Library of Congress, we were able to find and secure the photograph.

This cover stands between the human skull cover of Meeting Bone Man and the smoldering burn on the cover of Ache. The three work together illustrate various elements of the human ache for justice.

My poem, “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God” serves as a centerpiece for Gospel of Dust, using a religious litany to explore the courageous decision Mamie Till made to have a glass cover on her son’s casket so the world could see his body. The Civil Rights martyrs celebrated in Gospel of Dust are celebrated in Ache, too. Ache continues to remember those who suffered with the stories of lesser known heroes such as: Virgil Ware, Johnny Robinson, Willie Reed, or even the graffiti artists DEMZ and REEFA. In this, all three books do have a life together. Aching for justice is a theme I have explored many times. I’m sure I will continue to do so.

PCK: I was struck by the Langston Hughes quote for the epigraph in Ache—”Poets who write mostly about love, roses, and moonlight, sunsets and snow, must lead a quite life.” Why this epigraph? Don’t you write about love and sunsets in Ache?

JR: I love nearly everything Langston Hughes wrote—especially that sentence. When I look at the world, I don’t see mostly love and sunsets. I see immigrants fleeing violence, trying to find peaceful homes. I see people of 93

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color murdered by the police. I see poor people languishing on the streets in our cities. Of course, I see good things, too, but the injustices of our world are the most urgent. They pull at my heart and mind. Their stories need to be told. My poetry intends to shock and confront readers by bearing witness to these injustices. Langston Hughes did this in his poetry. Writing about the Black experience in America, he gave readers a clear view of what needs to be changed and healed in America.

PCK: You have written on Emmett and Mamie Till before. How do the poems in Ache compare with and continue your mourning for them?

JR: I have written many poems to honor Mamie Till and her son, especially “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God.” From there, I explored her plight further in “Nelson Mandela Speaks to Mamie Till.” I also honored her by remembering Willie Reed, an 18-year-old sharecropper, who testified against the men who killed her son, and had to leave Mississippi and move to Chicago with FBI protection. Perhaps her courage also inspired Willie, who summoned up his own courage in testifying against her son’s killers.

“When Your Word is a Match,” “Eighteen Years,” and “You” all tell Willie Reed’s story. While they don’t explicitly mention Mamie Till, were it not for her courage, there would have been no publicity around her son’s murder.

Willie Reed even had to change his last name to Louis to hide his identity.

Emmett Till would have been lost to history like countless other nameless Black children, were it not for Mamie Till’s courageous decision in showing the world her son’s mutilated body—that changed history. Thank God she did. By deciding to show the world her murdered son’s body, she confronted America—and the world—with the brutality of American racism.

We are all better for knowing her story and for knowing what happened to her son. I want to keep telling her story because we need it. These lines in “Nelson Mandela Speaks to Mamie Till” underscore my mission: “You knew walls too: wooden / walls of barns, where screams / could not be seen, transparent / walls of coffins, letting a country / see what it had to save.”

And in “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God, ” from Gospel of Dust, I link Mamie Till with God Himself to promote justice and eradicate hate: “If Mamie Till was the mother / of God / every coffin lid would be / glass, so even God 94

could see / how baptisms are done / in Mississippi.”

PCK: So many of your poems are ekphrastic—those on John Coltrane, 19th century Black artist Henry O Tanner, Langston Hughes, even graffiti artists. Do you see them as guardian angels, influences?

JR: Yes, I do see them as guardian angels. Maybe even as patron saints!

As “those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith.” They found such beautiful ways to speak to the world.

PCK: Explain how you have personified Coltrane’s instruments and music to express your ache and anger at today’s Civil Rights violations and sympathy for today’s martyrs.

John Coltrane’s work moves, soothes, and yet confronts me. The richness of his saxophone, its honest melancholy and tender joy help me consider and ponder the world around us. Henry O. Tanner’s religious paintings are so human, so humble. Langston Hughes’ poems, in their craft and their courage, always move me. These artists composed their work in dialogue with the world around them. I try to do the same. Listening to Coltrane, I can’t help but link his lament for the four girls killed in Birmingham to the death of Trayvon Martin. If Coltrane were alive today, I am positive he would have composed a powerful elegy in Trayvon Martin’s honor. In Ache, seven poems focus on Coltrane songs. One is “Alabama,” written in response to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. This song, an instrumental, beautifully and paradoxically, captures the horror and sorrow of that event and urged me to act and breathe in the sadness that our fears often create. In the last year of his life, Coltrane wrote “Reverend King.” He had a clear sense that his music needed to address the social injustices of the 1960s. “Alabama” even echoes the cadences of Dr. King’s homily at the funeral for the four girls.

I think Coltrane used his music in some of the same ways Hughes used his poems—to bear witness to the injustice of racism in America.

PCK: Would it be fair to say that you write “jazz poetry”? If so, how do you see your poems comparing with those by poets Sterling Plumpp or Sonia Sanchez?

JR: I don’t think I write “jazz poetry.” But I do write poems about jazz—without using jazz rhythms as Langston Hughes did. I’m writing about 95

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the ways that certain jazz songs, especially Coltrane’s, move me. His great praise song “A Love Supreme” is an epic. A poem about that song leads the section of poems about his songs. I think my poems respond to jazz, but I’m not sure I’d call them “jazz poetry.”

PCK: Why and how did you include poems on Henry O. Tanner’s paintings which ostensibly do not touch on Civil Rights violations as the rest of your poems in these collections do? Henry O. Tanner won acclaim as the first professional African American Artist (of the 19th century) but not as a Civil Rights proponent, excluding perhaps his portrait on gratitude for a meal.

JR: In 2016, one of my English Department colleagues pointed me in the direction of Tanner, especially his painting “The Annunciation.” I knew about some of his more popular works but not his religious works. When I looked at his paintings, I was moved by the yearning, the ache, present in his characters. In “Annunciation,” Mary sits on the edge of her bed looking frightened and fascinated at the same time. She “aches” to know what this calling is, what this light and presence means. That longing touched me too.

His religious paintings might seem a world away from Civil Rights struggles, but they aren’t distant at all for me. They motivated me to name, bear witness, and to let my writing voice the ache for a more just country. Tanner strives, like Hughes and Coltrane, to tell a sacred truth in his paintings.

The Tanner poems fit perfectly into the theme of Ache. The figures of Mary, Nicodemus, Martha, Mary of Bethany, and Lazarus all ache for something new—for life, fulfillment, a Messiah, a way. These Biblical figures were also victims of injustice in their own times. Women were held in very low esteem in the time of Jesus. So Mary, his mother, and Martha and Mary of Bethany, his friends, having lost their brother Lazarus, would have been women without a man—a precarious place in first century Israel. God’s decision to incarnate his son through a virgin in Nazareth is quite a decision from the margins. God chose Mary, a young woman engaged to a carpenter. Similarly, in raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus restores family and security to Martha and Mary. Nicodemus had an “ache” for the message Jesus preached but, like many of us, he was afraid for what it might mean in his own life. He comes to Jesus under cover of darkness, wary and fearful of an unjust government 96

that oppressed the weak and vulnerable. Considering Tanner’s paintings in relation to Dr. King, Mamie Till, and Nelson Mandela, Tanner’s paintings complement the verbal icons appearing in my other poems.

PCK: One of the most striking features of Ache is the way you so effortlessly leap over centuries and countries to find kindred spirits, e.g., Nelson Mandela mourning Trayvon Martin. How did this come to you?

JR: We are all connected. The divisions of history and country are not entirely exclusive. Nelson Mandela would certainly have mourned Trayvon Martin, and would certainly speak to Mamie Till, to Hector Pieterson, to Tupac Shakur. No doubt he would connect his own struggle against apartheid to the American Civil Rights Movement. I believe poetry empowers us to make those connections, to cross centuries and countries. Poetry empowers us to hear Mandela’s voice across continents and decades. From prison on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela wrote that Hector Pieterson’s mother was a hero, and thanked her after her son had been killed in the Soweto Youth Massacre of 1976. But surely he would rather have called her “grandmother”—meaning that he really yearned for Hector Pieterson to have lived, to have a life and a family for himself. Mandela asks “Why can’t you chant a psalm / of stones to shield you?” In the same way that Mandela plays a paternal role to Hector Pieterson, it is not inconceivable that he would befriend Mamie Till: “On some August nights I think / every mother is a martyr.” Grieving over South Africa’s young men being slain, Mandela would surely have been in sympathy with Trayvon Martin’s parents. As a father himself, he would likely give Trayvon Martin the chance to be a boy: “I am not sure how / to greet you so I look / at your wet, grass-stained shoes, / then back at your seventeen- / year-old face. I say: / ‘Come in, out of the rain.’” With his keen sense of justice, he was always in conversation with people who suffered in other countries. My poems in his voice stand as a protest against human rights violations across the world. Overall, I hope these poems help readers see key relationships: Mandela to King, Mamie Till to Mary of Nazareth, Trayvon Martin to Hector Pieterson. While they led different lives, these Civil Rights icons nonetheless give voice to a universal truth—they all speak for human rights.

PCK: It’s not always easy to write about villains such as George 97

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Zimmerman or the Klansmen whom Willie Reed thought would follow him to Chicago and murder him. How have you accomplished this in your poems on these figures?

JR: You’re right about the difficulty in writing about these people. Perhaps it is my sense of history urging me to write of what George Zimmerman did.

In “Eight Ways of Looking at the George Zimmerman Trial,” I use eight snapshots to remember what he did. The poem opens with “Every murder is born / somewhere.” These awful crimes start in the hearts of people, they are not random or accidental. To ensure historical accuracy, I highlighted the choice Zimmerman made to follow Trayvon Martin by quoting the transcript of his phone call to the police department: “—Are you following him? / Yes. / We don’t need you to do that.” He was told not to follow Trayvon Martin but he chose to do so anyway. While Zimmerman did not use Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law in his actual defense, that law became part of the national discussion of Zimmerman’s actions. As such, I quote from the Pledge of Allegiance “…and to the Republic for which it stands. / We stand on ground / when we pledge allegiance. / Allegiance wears a flag. / Flags fly above ground. / Seventeen-year-old boys do not / fly.” The poem stresses the power imbalance between Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin: “his candy, your car / him walking, you driving / his parents, your parents / his skin, your gun.”

When President Obama addressed the nation about Trayvon Martin’s murder, he reflected on it personally, saying that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon. I tried to capture how Americans might feel, hearing that in these lines: “He looks like / a crime and the President / at the same time.”

PCK: How do your poems bear witness?

JR: As Trayvon Martin’s murder shows, it raises questions about race and fear in our country, which, alas, is painfully divided. What one person sees as a boy walking from a convenience store, another person sees as a threat.

It’s as though we live in the “same country” but on a “different planet.” This poem, perhaps more than others, captures my desire to bear witness to this injustice in America—that an armed man, Zimmerman, can kill an unarmed boy, Martin, simply because he is afraid. Poetry, art, and politics must help to change this attitude in our country.

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PCK: While most of your poems use short, taut, hard-hitting lines, the series of poems on the Black boys—Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson—caught up in the white anger right after the 16th Street Bombing in Birmingham are longer and follow a different poetic pattern. Why? JR: To my knowledge, only my friends, poets Randall Horton and you, had ever written about them. My three poetry collections strive to prompt readers to see history more clearly when it is presented in sustaining, epiphanic metaphors. I felt their stories were complicated, and that to bear witness to their lives, the poems needed to be detailed and inter-related. Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson were two teenage boys whose lives ended because of racial hatred. Because white privilege nurtured decades, centuries, of distrust, these two boys died—one killed by other boys being foolish—the other killed by a policeman in a vicious murder. I wanted these poems to tell the hateful history that murdered them.

Perhaps these boys’ lives were simply overshadowed by the horror of the 16th Street Church bombing. But the details of their lives and death mattered and needed to be voiced. We needed to know that Virgil Ware was “smart and skinny,” that he was alive with the “dream / about the bike you will make / your own from an uncle’s scrap yard.” I wanted to capture the joy a boy feels about his bike and the possibilities it provides—“Your eyes are oceans today.” A bike is a symbol of freedom, of possibility. Yet, racism kills him even as he is about to become more free than ever.

Similarly, I wanted readers to remember Johnny’s life in “Requiem for Johnny Robinson.” “You cannot be / sixteen years old, a boy, and Black / without knowing there is always / a gun in the back window / of a police car.”

He had plans and hopes. “You had called your sister / asking her to bring a plate / of food to the gas station. It was Sunday / after all and you and your friends were / standing at the station on 26th Street.” Continuing the mother/ son theme that occurs throughout Ache, I gave his mother a voice, as I did with Mamie Till. In researching his murder, I discovered many details about his mother’s reaction at the hospital after he’d been killed: “Your mother had four words / as she pounded here fists on / an officer’s chest at the hospital: / ‘You killed my son.’ She raged.” I hope these poems give them a greater 99

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place in Civil Rights history.

PCK: Because of their length and location in your collection, would you say these poems form the centerpiece of Ache?

JR: Yes, most definitely. You could say that the other poems in Ache ripple out from these two poems. These poems share characteristics with other poems in Ache: the specific details of their deaths, fear of the other, state violence, the playfulness of boys, and American racism. These details matter. About Virgil Ware, I write “You played tight end / in football, you knew how to extend / your arms. You knew how to rise.” Finally, “Until / the pines loomed over you, piercing the red Alabama sky like nails.” About Johnny Robinson, I learned that “You’d heard other teenagers were shouting / from cars with Confederate flags. You’d / seen the church, the smoke. You’d tasted / the silence when four ambulances / drove up.”

I include similar details in the poems about Trayvon Martin. He was a teenage boy coming back from a convenience store when George Zimmerman followed him. An all-too-common “fear of the other” played an enormous part in Trayvon Martin’s death. To Zimmerman, he was “other,” different.

These details are echoed in the the Santo Toribio poems and “For Gilberto Ramos.” All these poems seek to confront our “fear of the other,” the immigrant. The Santo Toribio poems take on the voices of immigrants, aching to get to a home, a place of peace and security. This is a deeply human desire—yet it almost seems that the fear of those who seem different is nearly as deep. This is the tragedy to which I hope some of my poems bear witness.

PCK: Comment on how your poems on REEFA and DEMZ fit into the collection.

JR: DEMZ and REEFA are the graffiti tag names of two Miami Beach graffiti artists killed by police. DEMZ was Delbert Guiterrez and REEFA was Israel Hernandez. I discovered these two young men in a very strange way. On a retaining wall alongside Washington, D.C.’s Metro, the Red Line, near where I live, there is a huge mural that reads “Film The Police.” When my love for graffiti art drew me to photograph the mural a few years ago, I noticed the phrase “RIP DEMZ REEFA” in a corner of the mural. I did some research and discovered they were both graffiti artists in Miami who were 100

killed by police. The more I read about their art and their deaths, the more I knew I wanted to write about them. The graffiti art of DEMZ and REEFA voices the “ache” so many young people feel—that they are not seen or heard in America. So, as many graffiti artists do, they paint their names or tags in larger than life letters, wanting to be seen by the world they feel does not see them. This has attracted me to graffiti artists for a long time. I have never felt so unseen or unheard that I needed to rise early in the morning and paint my name in five-foot letters. But many young people do. As such, they fit into Ache as much as the figures in the paintings of Henry O. Tanner.

Often, young graffiti artists get up at 3am to paint their names and images onto a world that does not see them. They too “ache” to be seen, just as Mary, Lazarus, and the pilgrims of Emmaus in Tanner’s paintings do. The poems about DEMZ and REEFA also tell a kind of history, hopefully a redeeming history, uncovered in these poems.

PCK: I love the way you bring in the Mexican patron saint of immigrants, Santo Toribio near the end of Ache. How do you see this young Mexican priest (I think he was 28 when he was murdered) as being a compatriot of Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, or Virgil Ware?

JR: I love the idea of the “communion of the saints”—that there are these “friends” around us, within us, watching over us. It’s a pretty compelling idea.

As a poet, I hear these voices and I feel obligated to listen to them, to voice the stories they tell. Until a few years ago, I had never heard of Santo Toribio.

My father used to tell me of his Sicilian mother pinning a St. Christopher medal to the inner lining of his coat, much as immigrants pin images of Santo Toribio today. So, these are not just American poems. They are poems that voice the hopes of people well beyond America’s borders—people who “ache” for a just and safe life, one unthreatened by gang murders or execution by a dictatorial state. Consider the suffering of immigrants who cross the desert fleeing violence in El Salvador. In “Santo Toribio: Water Litany,” we learn: “For mothers dropping / the last diamonds / onto lips of ash. Pray for us. / For throats where even / the blood has dried. / Pray for us.” In one strong sense, I want my poems to be prayers for victims and also prayers to them for their intercession and help. As I read more about St. Toribio, I learned of a chapel 101

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named for him in the Mexican state of Jalisco. In “Santo Toribio: Chapel” I wrote: “We stopped at your chapel / in Jalisco but felt no comfort / there. We had too many miles / ahead of us, too many countries. / We saw your image in the / stained glass window, holding / a canteen and a cup. But we / need the miracle, not the mirage.” These poems see the “ache” for justice as a deeply human hunger as they pick up the story of great suffering in the deserts of Mexico and Texas and bring them to our eyes, in and beyond America.

PCK: How do you relate St. Toribio to Trayvon Martin?

JR: When I think of Santo Toribio in relation to Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, or Virgil Ware, I wonder who they might have called on in their last moments. It’s a hard thought. No one wants to think very much about one’s last moments on earth, especially if they might be painful and conscious. But to have real empathy for these victims, it’s important to imagine what they suffered. As Trayvon Martin bled on that sidewalk in Sanford, Florida, who did he call upon? Probably he thought of people he loved. Perhaps he prayed.

I wonder. I feel some comfort when I think of immigrants in the Texas desert praying to Santo Toribio. But to whom would these young boys, like Trayvon Martin, Virgil Ware, or Johnny Robinson have prayed? I ache to think they might have felt a deep abandonment, but I hope, through my own faltering faith, these poems help to sanctify, even a little, of what they endured. By telling their stories, I want my poems to lift them up, like icons, like crosses.

PCK: Some recurring images in Ache are rain, walls, mansions, flames, hoods, flags and tears. How have you used these tropes in terms of aching and witnessing?

JR: Images of water run throughout Ache, all layered, I hope, with deeper meaning. For instance, in “Trayvon Martin: Requiem” I connect the rain that fell on his body as he and Zimmerman fought and as he died on the sidewalk, to holy water. Water fell on his body that night. Rain also falls in “Nelson Mandela Speaks to Trayvon Martin.” Again, I am trying to make their encounter holy. In many Christian churches, holy water is sprinkled on something to remind us of its holiness. It has both a cleansing function, and a sanctifying function. Our tears and sweat are the water that comes from within us. Tears emerge when we are moved, when we are in some liminal 102

state. Yet the sweat that Virgil Ware sees on his brother’s face suggests his brother’s love and fear. “Until you wanted these crucified seconds: / his face, his sweat, his breath / to last forever.” In a poem about Gilberto Ramos: “…desert air is thirsty / and you are made of water” emphasizes both his vulnerability and humanity.

PCK: What about hoods? They seem to be a symbol that a bigoted white establishment always associates with young Black men.

JR: In poems that deal with race and history it’s hard to avoid hoods.

Hoods protect and conceal. A hood protected Trayvon Martin from rain but it could not protect him from George Zimmerman. A hood concealed members of the Klan as they did their worst deeds. Sadly, it’s a very American image.

These images appear in “Eight Ways of Looking at the George Zimmerman Trial.” Part 7 reads: “Some nights when it rains / the cold wraps around / your neck and stumbles / down the center / of your back. / The only prevention / a hood. / Hoods are sometimes white / and pointed. / Tonight, they are not.” In the poem, “Nelson Mandela Speaks to Trayvon Martin,” Mandela muses: “I am standing / in the doorway when I see you / across the street, on the corner, / looking at me. You wear no hood / today.” Joyfully, in the magical world where Mandela can greet Trayvon Martin, there is no need for the protection or the concealment we associate with hoods.

PCK: In many ways Ache could be entitled a book of witnessing, survival, a hagiography of Civil Rights martyrs in the tradition of the sixteenth-century collections of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a book about the dead to wake up the living. Please give us some information about the background influences on your poetry.

JR: When I was a boy, I read a lot of books about the saints, especially the martyrs. While I don’t have that kind of faith, I am moved by people who give their lives for a truth. However, most of the elegies in Ache are about those who didn’t choose to give their lives. Still, when history, human choice, and circumstances merge so that Virgil Ware is killed on a road outside Birmingham, his death has meaning. He wasn’t trying to be a martyr of any kind, but a poem can make him a witness. A poem can bring him back— remember him and return him to us. I think it’s important to remember that 103

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these people became martyrs for Civil Rights and that their stories are holy, and should be remembered and revered. Your comment that my poems are in “a book about the dead to wake up the living” makes a lot of sense to me.

After reading poems about these victims, I hope readers can use their own lives to work against the racist realities in America. Perhaps that’s too much to pin on poems. But I don’t think so.

PCK: Where, and how, do you use Biblical language and characters (including Jesus Christ) to link and deepen the tragedies you write about.

JR: Religious and Biblical images resonate inside me. Biblical images are rich and often transcend cultures so they are powerful, even for people who are not religious. The Madonna and child image is one deeply religious and human image I am drawn to. “If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God” focuses on a mother’s tender love of her murdered son, which raises Mamie Till’s maternal love to an almost divine level. I also use this image in “Trayvon Martin: Requiem” and “For Gilberto Ramos.” Similarly, “Requiem for Virgil Ware” uses crucifixion images to surprise the reader. Putting these Civil Rights elegies alongside the poems about Henry O. Tanner’s religious paintings, forges another important link between the Civil Rights figures and the religious figures. I use these Christian images because they are often the lens through which I see the world. I’m also trying to show that the power and heartbreak of Biblical stories are not the private property of the past.

These stories, and the truths they carry, live in our time. If, as Martin Luther King, Jr. believed, “Unearned suffering is redemptive,” then the tragedies I write about can also have a redemptive quality.

PCK: You have taught high school English and creative writing for some time and have even written about one of your pupils in Ache —a young black boy—who was spat on by a cop. How much influence have your students played on your poetry?

JR: My students have a great influence on my poetry. As I get to know them, their hopes, their fears, their stories, I see what America is becoming.

Recently, one of my poetry students gave his final presentation to the class, discussing a semester’s work of poems. He told the class that the death of Trayvon Martin was the most formative event in his life thus far. That both 104

stunned yet made perfect sense to me. And at the same time breaks my heart.

I’m glad that young man was able to see the truth of Trayvon Martin’s death and that he was able to speak it aloud in front of our class.

I find a great deal of interest in writing poetry among the African American students at my school. While they are not the majority, they are often the majority of students involved in our poetry classes and clubs. This year our co-winners of the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Poetry Award were African American students. I am proud and grateful that they have found poetry an especially artful, safe, and effective way to voice their hopes and fears.

In the poem, “What Can Be Said,” which comes directly from an incident that happened to one of my students, I was moved and angered. With his permission, I wanted to share his story. Perhaps the poem will help others to understand his ache. I’m glad to say he is my friend today.

PCK: Thank you, Joseph, for giving us such an insightful tour of your work.

JR: You are welcome, Philip. We are all on the road together. I am grateful.

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Joseph Ross

Three Poems If Mamie Till Was The Mother of God If Mamie Till was the mother of God one of the ten commandments would forbid whistling.

No one would wear cotton clothing, every cotton field would be burned in praise of fourteen year-old boys and their teeth.

If Mamie Till was the mother of God every river would be still

so nothing thrown in could travel downstream; barbed wire could only be worn as a necklace 106

by senators.

If Mamie Till was the mother of God every coffin lid would be glass, so even God could see how baptisms are done in Mississippi.

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On John Coltrane’s “Reverend King” The tenor sax sings the concrete of Auburn Avenue, grand-parents, front porch. It whispers Morehouse and tries to read music it hasn’t learned yet. It gathers into a man’s voice to chant Boston.

The sax weaves a love song, falling over itself for a rhythm that could carry it, outlive it.

It deepens and moves South to a Montgomery of empty buses, kitchen prayers, bombs, threatened and real. Then drums rise to an angry Birmingham. The verses hum jailed, their tones are letters, grace notes, staccato police batons slice the air like the conductors of an insane choir. Coltrane’s breath rushes through the saxophone now.

The tune terrors in Vietnam. It prays scared in Selma. Its notes are water hoses, dog teeth, indifference. It sings symphony

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in Washington, chaos in Chicago. 1963 was cruel to this melody, this unfinished lunch counter where four little girls sit side-by-side and eat nothing. So finally he puts down the sax as it fills with tears, unplayable. He takes up the bass clarinet because it sounds more like fury, like staring down a President.

This song knows harmony. It is a choir called Watts. It sings riot in a new tongue: the language of the un-heard. This song swirls now, it fills the world house with a straightspined melody. This tune sings garbage men who are men. This rhythm has walked to a mountaintop. It tastes like a promise.

So it clears its throat and soars, singing: Memphis.

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Nelson Mandela Burns His Passbook, 1952 You had to carry a passbook in your own country, which meant, of course, it wasn’t. Except that you refused that meaning, it being too false to fit into your pocket, too insulting to press against your persistent skin.

But you were over the legal sixteen years of age, old enough to know just whose country this is not.

When you burned your passbook, you knelt down in good shoes, a dress shirt buttoned to the neck. You lit the passbook and held it above a cooking kettle.

You thought you might eat its ashes for dinner. The blue 110

flame, tiny and cautious at first, crawled up the paper like a well-dressed thief, about to steal what is already his.

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Rodger Kamenetz

Four Poems Autobiography of a Flower He put the side of his face against her forehead and was surprised her skin was hot.

He cried out saying please unplug the electrical appliance because I believe you are in fever. It’s possible you have cancer or need aspirin.

I don’t need aspirin she said. My head is hollow and already filled with grey green pills, several are striped.

But in that case he said, you won’t be needing my kisses right now, here let me leave a few on your cheek to dry for later.

But your kisses are very slapdash and too wet she said, fainting away on the yellow fainting couch.

Where did you get that couch he asked, is this a fainting house?

The daisies outside are fainting she answered from her supine position, due to not watering them.

But that’s the sky’s job the criminal said revealing himself at last. He was the cause of the fever. And I know the sun will take its vengeance on all flowers before long.

Before they get their seeds dry she replied. Remember, I have a fever and may be dying myself.

Then it’s the death penalty for you he said, leading the way. There’s no use in fainting.

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Words for a Dying Man for AB

If you don’t know what to say to a dying man, begin with what he doesn’t understand or can’t explain. Choose body, persona, ego, soul or God. If he believes in the body only he is doomed to be a patient. The ego is failing, the soul may be a ghost to him, your best bet is the persona, which operates on a low maintenance voltage. In the case of God speak very calmly and directly from behind your breastbone. It is sometimes better to address the dying man in the third person. Say, his soul is leaving his body, or shout: his persona is divorcing his ego! Then together you may watch the persona reading a crafts magazine, buying NiklNips in a drugstore, or learning a baseball game on a transistor radio in 1962. The persona will have its own sense of time. It will travel to its logical conclusion while you and the dying man watch together, breathing in, breathing out, meditating on the one breath.

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What About the Father?

The truth about the father is he is not an everlasting. Not a cornucopia.

There is no basket in the father. So I thought.

But when Rimbaud came out of the desert limping on one foot, when he lay down with his cancer, dry emaciated and prematurely aged, then there was no more adolescent poetry to discuss.

The waterfalls stopped laughing, dawn burrowed under a rock, and the delightful female Presence went mute. When Rimbaud died, the father did not mourn. He had long ago abandoned the family. The father begins abandoning the family as the child who makes him father appears. The father slowly senses he is irrelevant. Yes he may make up a story that wraps around him and him, but Rimbaud will burst from it like a butterfly out of thickness. Then the truth about the father can only be told in cryptic poems, so full of wings they might as well be prose. The sun illuminates them, the way voices illuminate prayers and send them flying in search of nectar. There is no nectar in the father, but he has stored a small vault of honey in the bank. —Why are you saying all these things against the father? asks Rimbaud rising from the table of death. It was the father all along I wished for he says.

Could you not see the negative image of the father in all my psalms? I was just like King David in that, calling to the father according to my own time, in which shadows had taken the place of light, and the valley of the shadow of death was more like a desert so full of painful brightness I had to close my eyes to see.

Rimbaud, I said, I am sad to have spoken against the father. Whenever I need him instead of saying yes, I automatically say no. —But out of that no Rimbaud says, you could have written a thousand brilliant flowers. No is the seed of the father.

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The Last Word The women sang gospel. I stood at the prow. My voice squeaked like a dog’s toy.

Someone said, “You will hear her last word.” I looked down on the surface of Lake Pontchartrain. A woman lay on her back. Her dreads spread out behind her head.

She floated just below the surface. Slowly she rose up until her nose and lips breached and opened her brown eyes. She sang a word then sank an inch or two.

I rehearse her motion every day. I shape my lips around the O—a buoyant vowel.

“Hope.” We will all sing together. The water will be warm—body temperature.

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Tom Andes

Two Short Fictions But She Was In Trouble, Too

Gardner didn’t have to go far to find Mary Margaret Phelps, who’d run

off with a boyfriend back in August, and even if he didn’t think much of the girl’s father—a graying state senator, maybe a closet case, despite the wife and kids, a parishioner at Our Lady of Good Counsel—he needed the cash.

He asked around Friday night. It wasn’t hard to find a white girl slumming it in that neighborhood. He walked into Henry’s, a Black bar down the street from the St. Thomas project, five blocks and half a world away from Daddy’s Garden District mansion.

When he opened the patio door, she was drinking with a couple guys at a table in the corner, chewing a swizzle stick.

He pulled out a chair and sat.

“Guy looks like you can get killed walking in here like he owns the place.”

The man on her left wore a burgundy suit, and his shaved head shone. Don’t hurt the sucker, Phelps had said, just bring my baby girl home.

Dude on her right—middle-aged, a salt and pepper mustache—disagreed.

“A room full of colored folk is the safest place in New Orleans for a white man to be. This cracker gets capped, cops’ll bust every head in here.”

“True, that.” Laughing till he cried.

A couple characters at the bar might’ve been packing heat, but so was Gardner: a Beretta he hoped he wouldn’t have to flash. Henry’s was decorated for the holidays: wreaths, a banner that said Happy 1997!

“Your father sent me to bring you home,” he told Mary Margaret.

She finished her drink, prim, like she didn’t appreciate the help talking to her. She should’ve been a sophomore at Vanderbilt. She had baby fat in her cheeks, a smooth complexion, was the youngest of five.

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“I’m twenty. I make my own decisions.”

Who could say that?

But she was in trouble, too.

She wore a turtleneck, a leather jacket too snug to zip: knocked up. He wondered if the old man knew. Sure would piss him off. Gardner laughed.

“Not the way your daddy sees it.”

“This is my boyfriend, Vance.” She pointed at the man on her left. “I didn’t catch your name.”

Gardner introduced himself and shook their hands. Good. They were going to be friendly.

Arm around Mary Margaret, Vance leaned across the table.

“Listen, buddy. Don’t know what you’ve heard about me. We tried going to her father, but he don’t want to hear it. I’ve been working as a room service waiter at the Weston, and I’m taking classes at UNO, prelaw. I’m no deadbeat.”

“Hear, hear,” said Rex, the man on the girl’s right. Giving Gardner a hard look, he applauded his friend’s speech. “Run you right out of this room.”

“You don’t have to prove yourself to him.” Mary Margaret touched Vance’s arm.

“Man, I wish it wasn’t this way.” Gardner felt like a son of a bitch but knew what he had to do. And it was right—or not right, but easier. Some things it wasn’t worth going to the mat for. The world worked the way it did.

You couldn’t fight it.

Mary Margaret made a face. “Why would my father hire a bottom-feeder like you?”

He’d been called worse.

“Either way, you’re going home. Might as well make it easy on yourself.”

“Where do you live, anyway?”

That stung. He stayed above the Hummingbird Grill on St. Charles—skid row. “I don’t see—” “Are you—” she waved, searching for the word, probably thinking of private eyes she’d seen in movies—“licensed?”

“I do favors for friends.”

“You consider my father a friend?”

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Her face let him know what she thought of that.

He hated the rich bastard, if you wanted the truth. So happened Phelps was a buddy of the lawyer Gardner did legwork for, guy named Lester.

“Can’t say as I do.”

Those men were looking at Gardner in a way that would stick with him.

Who was he to walk in there and get tough?

“Bad enough,” she said, “if the baby was white.”

Gardner drew the Beretta. Gratuitous—plain stupid. In the rest of the bar, people stopped talking. His hand shook. He wanted those men to be afraid of him—wanted the girl to listen, so he could take her back to her daddy’s place and get his goddamn money.

“If I tell your father where you are, he’ll call the cops. Might not want to, but he will. They’ll bust this place up. You know that.”

Vance: a blank look, like he should’ve known better than to expect any different.

Rex: “Ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

And the shame only got worse once he got her out of that bar.

In the cab, Mary Margaret started crying.

“You know what my father’s going to make me do, don’t you?”

She sounded scared. And yes—despite the old man being Catholic— Gardner knew.

“I suppose you know I’ll leave again.” Her voice rose—but it was an idle threat.

“No, you won’t.”

Just like he wouldn’t have walked out of that bar without her. Certain things, it was easier not to fight. He had to believe that.

Clutching her biceps hard enough to leave marks, he led her up the marble steps in front of her father’s house. He shoved her through the doorway.

In the foyer, Phelps handed Gardner a manila envelope. He counted the money—what his conscience was worth, and it wasn’t much: two grand, less his retainer of three hundred bucks.

At the door, mad enough to start throwing punches, he turned to Phelps.

Gardner wanted to say something—Vance wasn’t a bad guy, or Mary Margaret 118

knew more than her father thought she did.

“Yes?” Phelps held the door.

But Gardner didn’t see the percentage in standing up to the old man.

And couldn’t afford to piss Lester off, anyway. He had no idea what to say.

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Carpetbagger

On Gardner’s second night in the residential hotel above the Rendezvous

Tavern on Magazine Street, New Orleans, 1998, a woman was crying in the room next to his.

“Henry, don’t,” she said.

Then came the unmistakable sound of a human hand striking flesh—her face, or some other part of her anatomy—and the woman shrieked, calling Henry’s name.

“Don’t look at me,” a man said.

When he slapped her a second time, the noise the woman made sounded indistinguishable from a moan of pleasure.

Gardner rolled onto his side and closed his eyes. The bedframe next door began to creak.

The next night, they went at it again. This time, the beating continued for a good fifteen minutes. The woman sobbed. The man she called Henry went after her, using an implement that made a cracking sound, like a whip, tattooing her skin in time with grunts that became throatier.

Water stains spread across Gardner’s ceiling. The window unit rattled on the opposite side of the room, where a cockroach darted up the wall. Rust stained the sink. The toilet was at the end of the hall.

The air conditioner shut off, the fan whirring to a stop. The woman whimpered. She seemed to be lying next to Gardner. Their bed was just on the other side of the wall from his.

Gardner knocked on the wall. It had faded yellow wallpaper.

“You all right?” he asked.

The whimpering stopped. Voices, pitched low, as if in conference.

And then—silence.

When the bedframe started creaking, it sounded as though it were right on top of him. The woman might have been on top of him, too. She moaned encouragement at her partner. The bedframe struck the wall. “Henry,” she 120

repeated, as though she were whinnying.

Gardner crossed the room. He opened the bottom drawer of the desk and withdrew the Beretta, sitting to inspect the weapon. He popped the clip. A round was chambered. He reinserted the clip, toggling the safety off and on with his thumb. Just as he had last night, the man next door kept repeating the same phrase, in sync with the creaking springs, the bedframe clattering against the wall: You fucking whore.

His voice shot up an octave.

“Come, baby,” the woman told him, her voice as deep as a man’s. He squealed, uttering a string of obscenities as he got off.

Gardner placed the gun back in the drawer. He lay down but couldn’t sleep. On the other side of the wall, the woman sobbed, the sound muffled by her pillow.

He got up and put on a record—Willie Tee—to drown out the noise.

A few mornings later, after running cash to the bank for a guy he worked for, Gardner was coming up the stairs with his coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

That was what he did now: he was a fixer, running numbers. A girl of about nineteen was in the hallway. She wore a pair of cutoffs, a stained white tank top, and flip-flops, thong sandals of the variety they sold for three dollars at the Walgreens up the street. She locked the door next to his.

“You all right?” Gardner asked as she passed him in the narrow corridor.

She grinned, showing off a crooked incisor. Blood crusted one of her nostrils, a bruise turning yellow under her eye.

“I’m Lorraine,” she said in a drawl. “Who are you?”

Blood rippled across the white of her other eye, the socket and the cheekbone both blackened. Pale curls of hair fell around her chubby face.

“I take care of other people’s problems,” Gardner said.

“Is that how you ended up here?” She laughed.

“If you don’t want my help, fine.” He started to walk away, but she touched his arm.

Lorraine sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of a hand. “We moved here from LaPlace.” Her chin jutted as though she felt proud. “His dad had 121

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property, but that fell through. So here we are.” She gestured up and down the hall.

“Do you like it when he hits you?”

Her pupils dilated, like she’d seen something on the wall behind Gardner and refocused on his face.

“What’s your name?” Her lips curled.

He told her.

She cocked her head, putting her hands on her hips, her voice softening.

“Have you ever beaten a woman, Mister Gardner?”

He drank his coffee. “I’ve never beaten anybody didn’t have it coming.”

“Then maybe you like it the other way? Maybe you like getting beaten?”

Lorraine smelled like fruit candy, watermelon-flavored.

“Are you making me an offer?” he asked.

“Maybe I am.”

He shook his head. “I’m not looking for that.”

She stepped back, her eyes narrow, her shoulder blades pressed against the wall.

“Henry loves me, Mister Gardner. Maybe someday, somebody will love you, too.”

She walked down the hall.

At the top of the stairs, she looked back at him.

“Stay out of what doesn’t concern you, Mister Gardner.”

That night, in the room next to his, Lorraine initiated the action. They went at it with a vengeance. “Love me, Henry,” she repeated, and the bedframe slammed the wall.

Later, she sobbed into her pillow. Her head was no more than a few feet away from Gardner’s.

He dropped a James Booker record, Classified, on the turntable.

In the morning, Gardner sat at the bar, sipping his coffee. A man wearing a leather vest eyeballed him from the other side of the room. Scowling, he pumped quarters into the jukebox. Quiet Riot blared from the speakers: “Come on Feel the Noise.” The man keyed in more selections and returned 122

to his seat, tapping his bottle of Budweiser on the bar in time to the cowbell in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Three Steps.”

When his songs ended, he picked up his beer and took the stool next to Gardner’s.

“I hear you might be looking for a piece of ass.”

Mid-forties, with a shaved head and a black mustache and goatee, he wore cowboy boots, cutoffs, and nothing underneath that vest. On his neck, he sported a tattoo of an Iron Cross.

“I’ll let you have her for the night, only seventy-five bucks. You’d be doing me a favor, you took her off my hands.”

He poked Gardner in the ribs with an elbow.

“Hank, to my friends.” The man extended his hand. “You can call me Henry.” He laughed, high-pitched, incongruous with the voice Gardner had been hearing at night.

Henry had fat digits, half-moons of grit crusted under his fingernails.

Gardner didn’t shake his hand.

Henry’s grin faded.

“Something on your mind?” Henry asked.

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” Gardner said. “The people in the room next to mine can’t shut up about their problems.”

Henry’s jaw tightened, the ball of his chin forming a knot. “You think you’re too good to shake my hand?”

Gardner said he didn’t think he was too good for anything.

Henry spit on the floor next to Gardner’s stool. He got up, crossing the room.

Gardner followed him. He waited until Henry had turned the corner to mount the steps.

When Gardner reached the top of the stairs, Henry threw a right jab, knocking Gardner onto the landing. Panting, as though that had winded him, Henry shook his finger at Gardner. “I’ve heard you with your sweet soul music and your phonograph blues. Don’t think I don’t know what you are, you carpetbagging son of a bitch. You’re a traitor to your fucking race.”

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blood and snot into his palm. “If I you hurt her one more time, I’ll take it out of you, blow for blow. And if you touch me again, I’ll kill you.”

Henry grinned, a gap where one of his eyeteeth should have been. “You come at me, and I’ll do you just like I do her.” He grabbed the crotch of his cutoffs, thrusting his hips. He walked down the hall.

That night, Gardner had fallen asleep before the feature started in the room next to his. Lorraine moaned. Henry grunted. Someone might have been beating both of them, flailing at them with a whip.

“Tell your friend next door you how like it,” Henry said.

“Oh, Daddy,” Lorraine said.

“Louder,” Henry said.

Gardner rolled onto his side, facing away from the wall, with the pillow over his head. He got up and put on Rabbit Brown, “James Alley Blues.”

The next afternoon, Gardner sat at the bar with a stack of albums he’d bought at Jim Russell’s Record Shop and a couple dog-eared paperbacks from Crescent City Books. Leaning across the bar, Billy refilled Gardner’s cup.

“You’ve got to do something about them. I haven’t slept more than two hours since I moved.”

Billy replaced the pot on the burner. He walked down the bar, spreading his arms and leaning close to Gardner. “Her uncle’s in good with the people that own this place. Those two don’t pay anything to stay up there. What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

“You can’t do anything?” Gardner scowled.

When Lorraine came downstairs, Gardner was still at the bar, reading.

Her face brightened, and she bounced across the room, bumping him with her hip. “Hiya.” She leaned close. She had that same fruity smell.

“Hello, yourself.” Gardner marked his place with the sales receipt. He closed the book: Mark Twain’s The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Stories.

“Whatcha reading?”

“Stories.”

“Oh.” She pouted, as though that answer had disappointed her. Billy came 124

down to that end of the bar. “Henry wants to know if we can have a six-pack to take upstairs.” She stood on her tiptoes, lifting herself off the floor with her elbows on the cigarette-scarred wood.

Lighting a cigarette, Billy squinted, looking at her sideways. “Did Hank give you money for a six-pack?”

Lorraine bit her lip. “He said—I mean, I was hoping—we were thinking you could put it on our tab.”

Billy sighed.

“You know my uncle’s good for it, Mister Billy.”

Billy shook his head and walked down the bar, reaching into one of the coolers and lifting out a six-pack of Budweiser in bottles. “If he’s drinking for free, he’s getting the cheap stuff.”

Lorraine hiccupped. The bruise beneath one eye had vanished, and the bruise beneath the other eye had faded to yellow. “He drinks the cheap stuff, anyway,” she said, as though that should have been obvious, and she took the six-pack and carried it across the room. The door banged shut behind her.

“Nice kid.” Gardner finished his coffee. “Shame about the boyfriend.”

Billy lit one cigarette off the butt end of another. “Everybody else is getting pretty sick of it, too. That poor girl—I can’t stand to see the way he does her. But what I’m supposed to do? I call the cops, and half the people in here will want my head.”

After a while, Gardner asked if he could borrow Billy’s car.

Billy left the keys on the bar.

That night, when Henry emerged from their room in his underwear and started down the hall in the direction of the toilet, he found himself staring into the barrel of Gardner’s Beretta, Gardner’s face behind it as cold as that muzzle of steel. Henry opened his mouth and closed it.

Outside, a three-quarter moon shone on the shotgun houses along Magazine. The moon shone on the columns and the wrought iron scrollwork in front of the mansions where the rich people lived, too. Gardner pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the base of Henry’s skull. Unlocking the passenger’s side door of Billy’s green Datsun, Gardner lifted the handle.

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“Climb in.”

They drove up Magazine in silence, Gardner holding the pistol in his left hand and training it across his body at Henry. At State, Gardner stepped on the clutch, braking under the red light, and Henry made a grab for the gun.

Gardner caught him across the bridge of the nose with an elbow. The bone popped, blood running down Henry’s chin.

“If you bleed on my friend’s car seat, I’ll blow your face through the window,” Gardner said.

“You have no idea who I am.” Clenching his fists, Henry stared at the windshield. “What you’re about to do.”

Gardner adjusted his grip on the pistol. “Don’t bet on it.”

Henry swore, holding his nose. “You wait.”

At the parish line, the car bounced across the railroad tracks. Gardner pulled to a stop next to Jefferson Feed, setting the handbrake. Marble statuary leered in the moonlight.

Gardner walked around the Datsun. “Out.” He gestured with the pistol, opening Henry’s door.

As Henry stepped from the car, he lunged at Gardner, catching him around the midriff. Gardner fell back onto his heels but managed to stay upright, and he brought his elbows together, dropping his weight onto the other man’s back. Henry toppled face first into the dust. He grabbed a fistful of gravel and threw it at Gardner. Climbing to all fours, Henry snatched at Gardner’s ankles. Gardner kicked Henry’s head, and blood trickled from Henry’s ear.

Breathing heavily, Gardner pressed the gun to Henry’s cheek. “You can walk across the street, or you can die in this parking lot.”

They climbed the hill in front of the water treatment plant on the other side of the street. Gardner pried open a break in the chain link fence and held it for Henry. Gardner squeezed through. On the other side of the fence, Henry started running, his short legs propelling him toward the line of trees at the top of the levee. Gardner fired into the air, and Henry threw himself to the ground.

When Gardner walked up the levee, Henry approached on his knees, his hands scrabbling at Gardner’s pants. Henry tugged on Gardner’s belt, 126

his fingers fumbling Gardner’s zipper. With the heel of his hand, he rubbed Gardner’s crotch. Gardner backhanded the other man.

“I’ll suck it for you.” Henry licked blood from his lips. Turning, he dropped to all fours, and he pulled down his piss-stained Fruit of the Loom, exposing his ass, the white skin scraggly with black hairs. “Do you want to pork me?” He pulled the cheeks apart, looking over his shoulder at Gardner.

“You can go ahead and ride, buddy.”

Gardner kicked Henry’s tailbone, rolled Henry onto his back, and put the pistol in Henry’s mouth. Henry’s eyes popped, opening wide. His heels dug into the turf on the hillside. His bare feet slipped in the grass. He shook his head and gagged. The flare from the muzzle lit his head from the inside like a jack-o-lantern, silhouetting Henry’s molars through his cheeks as his brains spilled out the top of his skull.

Gardner stood in a cloud of gun smoke, wiping the barrel of the pistol on his shirttails. Smoke curled from Henry’s open mouth. The air was thick with the smell of blood and shit. Henry’s erection wilted.

“I didn’t want to do that,” Gardner said, addressing the corpse.

Henry’s eyes rolled. With a glop, a gout of blood pumped from the hole in the top of his head.

“Goddammit,” Gardner said.

Back at the Rendezvous, Billy was waiting. “I’m not sure you want to go up there.”

“The hell I don’t.”

In his room at the top of the stairs, the girl was smashing his records.

She’d started at the beginning of the alphabet and worked her way through two and a half of the three milk crates he’d brought with him when he moved.

She’d made it all the way to Wee Willie, which meant she was just about done.

She turned her tear-stained face on him. “Son of a bitch.” A vinyl disc hit the wall next to his head, and she charged, pounding his chest. “What did you do with him?”

Gardner was still holding the pistol, the smell of cordite clinging to his clothes. When she saw the Beretta, she fell away from him, her mouth opening 127

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as she took in the blood spatter on his suit. “When my uncle finds out about this, he’s going to have you fileted and split in two.” Her chin lifted. “My uncle knows some bad, bad people, Mister Gardner, and when they get ahold of you, all I can say is, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near you.”

She shoved past him, storming into the hall.

Her door slammed.

Gardner sat on the bed, the Beretta on the pillow.

“I meant to scare him.” He rubbed his temples with the heels of his hands.

“He made himself weak. You can’t make yourself weak.”

Leaning in the doorway, Billy waved. “She’s not kidding about her uncle.

You might want to get out of town for a couple months.”

Gardner’s hands shook as he popped the clip from the Beretta, and he reinserted it, leaning down and tugging his suitcase from under the bed. “His body’s on the levee, right where you told me that break in the fence was, if anyone wants to send it back to LaPlace.”

“LaPlace?” Shaking his head, Billy laughed. “Hank was from Michigan, boy.”

“She told me his father owned property.”

“He was a landlord. He didn’t live there.”

Gardner started stuffing clothing into his suitcase. He paused. Next door, Lorraine sobbed. She seemed to howl at the ceiling, and then to turn over and bury her face in the pillow. Gardner held one of his shirts, which had recently been pressed and was still in the bag from Ace Cleaners.

“She sounds like a gutted animal,” he said.

Billy lingered in the doorway. “You can’t help people,” he said. “Not you.”

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Eric Paul

Girl in a Yellow Dress

My dress is a bright bright yellow. My brown skin seems to glow against

it. I know it is just my dress making my arms look like they are going to lift in the air and keep going, like clouds. Yellow is not my favorite color, but it is pretty. My favorite color is blue but if I was wearing it right now people could see that I am sad. And I don’t want people to see that I am sad.

I am in the hospital, but it’s not me that is sick. It is my daddy. The ambulance brought him here before my momma and me came. My momma had picked me up from school, and when we got home there was a lot of people on our porch waiting for us. Mrs. Hawkins, she lives next door, ran up to the car, and she was crying and she looked very scared. My momma tried to calm her down, but Mrs. Hawkins kept crying and shaking. She told momma that daddy had hurt himself and that she saw him from her window.

She called the police, then an ambulance, and then she started banging on our front door, trying to get daddy to open it. But he wouldn’t. He started yelling and cursing, Mrs. Hawkins said. Then the police came and broke down our door, and they held him down until the ambulance came to take him to the hospital. Mrs. Hawkins said there was blood everywhere, but I didn’t get to see. Momma wouldn’t let me in the house.

I’m not used to seeing my momma scared. But after Mrs. Hawkins told her all that momma started to shake and cry. Just like Mrs. Hawkins had been doing. She started screaming and slapping the porch, on her knees. She yelled and screamed for Jesus, begging for him like she was going to die. That’s when I really got scared. Her eyes got all big and sad, and she wouldn’t look at me. Then Mrs. Hawkins got afraid. She started yelling at Momma, “You got to be strong for your baby, Linda!! Be strong for your baby girl!” She kept saying that over and over. I started to cry then, watching those two women yell and shout like somebody was stabbing them; my momma screaming for Jesus, and Mrs. Hawkins yelling at momma to be strong. It made me wonder.

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Who would make momma strong, Jesus, or Mrs. Hawkins? But somehow momma got strong and got us to the hospital.

When we got to the hospital, I really got scared. We had to go to the Emergency Room, and there was people everywhere! There was a man with big feet sitting in a wheelchair. His clothes were very dirty and he smelled.

There was this big room behind glass where people were waiting to see the doctor. Just about everybody in there was black. All the seats had somebody sitting in them, and some people were standing. Some people looked very sick, holding their heads or stomachs; some were leaning back in their chairs with their eyes closed, like they were sleeping. But at times they would open their eyes, and you could see the pain on their faces. Nurses were running back and forth behind this big wooden door. That’s where daddy was. Momma tried to walk in there, but a man dressed in black and white stopped her. And when he did, momma went off on him. She started yelling and cursing about wanting to see daddy and that nobody was going to stop her. Somehow, the man in black and white got momma to calm down. He had a nice voice, and talked to her like he was her friend. I was surprised, because when momma went off, she stayed off. Momma got quiet and listened to the man in black and white. He said he would check on daddy, and see if momma could see him yet. He walked behind that big wooden door and was gone.

Waiting for him to come back was hard on momma, and worse on me. I knew when she got to see him, she wouldn’t tell me nothing. I was too little to know about such things, she would say. I would have to guess, or listen real close if I was to find out anything. So we stood out in the hall, waiting.

I tried not to look at the other people who were in there waiting too. It’s not that I didn’t like them, or something like that, but I was thinking about my daddy, and how he was feeling. I knew he was hurt bad. I remember what Mrs. Hawkins said about all the blood. And I would never know why daddy hurt himself like that. Was he sad? Was he mad at somebody? Was he mad at momma, or me? I wanted to know, but I knew I never would. I was too little to know about such things. That’s all I would get. That’s all I would hear.

After what felt like a real long time the man in black and white came out from behind the big wooden door. He spoke to Momma real quick and 130

took her to my daddy.

The man in black and white behind the desk is very friendly to me. I watch him talk to the people who are sick. And a lot of them are mad, very mad.

They sit and wait for a while, acting all squirmy. That’s what my mother calls it when I don’t sit still. They move around in the chair like ants be biting them.

Then they get up and come over to the man behind the desk, and yell at him.

“Why I got to wait?” they be saying. “And how come he went first?” and all this and that. Sometimes they even cursed him. But the man behind the desk, he just listen to them. Then he tells them to try and understand that there are only so many beds and so many people. But they can’t because they hurt, and they sick. Some of them, some of them don’t look sick at all, like they could be home still, or any place else. And they complain and complain.

They get in the man’s face and yell and complain, then they go back and sit some more. And go back to squirming all over again.

The man behind the desk asked me if I want a peppermint. He says he asked my momma, and she said it would be okay. I say yes. But I want to ask him about my daddy, how he’s feeling, or if my momma is crying by him or not. But I know he won’t tell me if I ask. And I don’t want to make him lie to me, because I like him. He is very friendly. And if he lies to me about my daddy, I might not like him so much anymore. So I take the peppermint and suck on it and try to think of happy times with my daddy and momma, and look at the man behind the desk, and like his smile, when he smiles at me.

I saw a lot of stuff I hope I never see again. An ambulance brought in an old lady. She was curled up on the stretcher like a little baby. And just like momma had been doing, she was calling on Jesus; except her voice was so low you could hardly hear her. I wonder if Jesus did. A man came in and he was real drunk. Blood was coming out of his head and he was shouting about how some nigger had busted him in his head and how he was going to get them.

He was white, and when he said that a black security guard was walking by.

When that bloody headed man saw that guard he shut up fast. And the guard hung around for a while, giving that man the eye. Then I saw a girl from my school, Ashantala. She was with her big sister who was pregnant. I couldn’t 131

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tell who was more scared. Her big sister, who wasn’t more than sixteen, was crying and wiggling in the wheelchair like she was going to die. Ashantala and her momma were rubbing her back and talking nice to her, but she didn’t hear none of that. She just wanted that baby out of her. She started waving her arms in the air and screaming for someone to help her. That’s when Ashantala turned around and saw me. She looked scared and ashamed. She just stood there looking at me looking at her. She didn’t say a word and I didn’t either.

But I could see in her face she was thinking about us. Would this happen to us one day? Would me or her be sitting in a wheelchair, our bellies big, with tears coming out of our eyes, screaming for someone to help us. A man in white came and got Ashantala’s sister and pushed her down the hall real fast, but Ashantala didn’t see that. She was still standing there staring at me. Her momma had to pull her away, and she was mad because she had to come all the way back from the elevator to get Ashantala. But when her momma dragged her away, she waved at me. I smiled and waved back.

Once, a boy walked me home from school. I don’t even remember his name now. I guess he liked me, and he didn’t act like some of those other boys.

He didn’t try to hit me, and he didn’t talk about my pussy. He was shy like me. Anytime I tried to look him in his face, he would turn away real quick. He never touched me. He didn’t make fun of me. He just walked and talked and looked like he was real glad to have a girl to walk and talk with. He was just nice. But when we got by my house my momma was on the porch, and when she saw me walking with him she ran at us like she was crazy! She yelled at the boy to go home. Then she pulled me by the arm, almost dragging me to the house. It made me mad. She kept on saying things like, “I aint raising no ho!... Don’t be womanish!!!... You better not come home with a big belly!”

We were just talking! Nothing else. But I know she’s afraid I’ll turn into one of those girl moms. There’s a girl on our block just a year older than me with a baby. And it’s pitiful. Everybody yells at her, her momma, her daddy, her auntee, her big brother—everybody. She can hardly take care of herself and now she’s got a baby to raise. Well, help raise. Her momma does most of the raising. That’s why she’s always yelling at her.

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I was starting to get tired. I don’t know how long I had been sitting, but my legs were starting to get stiff. I wanted to get up and stretch, but I was too worried to move. I started praying to God then. I asked him to make my daddy well. I asked him to make sure nothing else bad would happen to him. I wanted everything to be like it was, when I was very little; daddy coming home from work happy to see momma and me. Have him ask me about school and if I had any boys falling in love with me, making me laugh, making momma laugh. Then he’d laugh, that big loud voice would fill up the room! I prayed to God that daddy wouldn’t come home drunk again. I prayed that the days of momma and him fussing were over. I prayed all that. And when I finished with the last prayer, momma came walking out. She came out looking for me. When she saw me sitting next to the man behind the desk, she ran over fast and lifted me out of that chair so fast I was up and in her arms before I had a chance to say anything. She had my head buried in her chest. The top part of her chest was shaking. She was crying about daddy.

She was saying something to me, but it was all messed up in her tears. I had a lot of questions to ask her, but I was afraid whatever I wanted to know she wouldn’t tell me. All I would get would be, “Not now, baby.” She might say, “I’ll tell you later,” and “Don’t worry about it baby.” It all meant the same thing—I’m not telling you anything. But I had to ask her. She knows I would anyway. So I did.

Momma looked down at me, and I could see the happiness and sadness in her face. Her eyes were all gentle and soft. She rubbed her hand on my cheek. “Let’s go get something to eat. I’ll tell you about your daddy.”

We walked out into the end of the day. The sun was almost gone. The sky was burning up with reds and yellows. Bright! Bright! Bright!

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Ace Boggess

Why I Can’t Write This Poem I’m an underqualified overachiever with slack green eyes & frizzy, swirling flagellates for hair.

I don’t fit the profile except in mugshots where I make an attractive silhouette.

I think about too many things & miss my cue, busy wondering what race cars look like in the Andromeda galaxy.

Often, I’m afraid of the sound my voice makes when it cracks the empty, quiet spine of my room.

My socks hate me.

My sweats cling like a wide-eyed ex.

This pen? It doesn’t need me, so I let it rest.

Yesterday I was watching a movie about Mars when I should’ve been here, hunched over, guarding my words like prison chow.

This page looks up to me like I’m its father, but as with fathers, the infallible illusion fades after all the times I’m proven wrong.

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Natalie Crick

Two Poems The Oldest Boy Part of me died here So another could go on.

I want to know what it is I have left, Like draining blood from a limb.

I hate Rainy days with their dark smell, The black mountains falling away.

Winter bullies me.

My lips are a feast of blue.

I lock the door to keep it out, Every curtain drawn.

His hands are small as coins.

My gaze lingered a little too long On the oldest boy.

His body became a knot in my throat.

He smiled at me.

I know, I know I’m not supposed to smile back.

My teeth sat in my mouth like gold.

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All that had been severed shone.

I watch from the lane The one lit room Slowly going dark.

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The Blossom Tree In Winter, I knew them all As the dead.

But now I love to watch them live and Blossom beautifully; Sun-blushed pinks and whites.

Their petals fall like small hands.

I lie under the tree Discerning each flower.

Mother: I am breathing, I have senses, I have you.

I want to reach out To the child listening on the stairwell In the dark.

I know you are afraid, my love.

Petals flutter down like kisses.

The first time you fall, It will be peaceful like this.

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Anis Shivani

Confessions 1.

At Lamont library once I was looking up Philip Roth’s underrated works. As an undergraduate (gagman of loose-leaf mewls) I believed in metonyms, and the art of the mezzanine. When I visited MoMA that summer, to recreate a second childhood, I ran into secret societies who had labeled me a monist (wrongly?), who knew my exact count of passenger miles.

2.

And what about Orientalism? At the bookstores in Cambridge, Mass., carving knives in hand, we decentered our loneliness in headlong hyperbole. You were there, you saw me, did I ever assault the manciples, did I act mordant for no reason? In Lowell House’s senior common room, sadism was the style among men no stronger than touch football, the women wore soiled underthings.

3.

I keep coming back to the semaphore. It is selfsustaining, it is the barrio’s foreboding, where I meet the haggadists of interference: everyone here knows everyone else’s business. I still remember the propaganda about the Scud missiles, and Bosnian immigrants when they had the air of foraging spring chickens about them.

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4.

Death is not a matter of foot-and-mouth disease getting out of control. The gray uncles had a habit of falling dead in the middle of ÊcartÊ, the poor man’s eavesdropping. At my first funeral for the dying conservationists, I recited in my cadential brain the blueprint that would guide me: it is becoming when you are dead to act like the atlas.

5.

On commencement day, Al Gore spoke of arsine in water, or was it reinventing government, and Tipper (in the row in front of me), kept her smoky head still, arterializing the opinions of the future internet in her every moviegoing spirochete. In the yard I shook hands with him, or think I did, knowing it would cost me dearly yet, this cinnamon debenture.

6.

There are times I have been so poor I have considered death a better option. But then I think of noble gas.

I never met Nkrumah but he was the pulp cavity to translunar dreams. And I think of vanishing cream, and employment agencies, and all the contingency plans for continuation. At times I have admired body bags.

But the scene of the crime is only for blowhards to see.

7.

Behavioralism has something to it, at least when it comes to other people. The finance companies know it all. My friends all went to work for the hindquarters of Goldman Sachs after studying Marx in the 139

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hippodrome, and they are anonymous now, all of them, you can’t find them in any leaks. Their monikers are what you would call negative evidence.

8.

The neighbor who wanted me to show her my stash of red flags knew of seif dunes in the Sahara.

When I touched her stonewashed skin it fell apart.

We drank Frascati and remembered Germantown.

Did I make my own exclamation points? Was connectivity a thing? Could I predict brittle fractures?

The California desert sure has flawless barrancas.

9.

When I was past the age of the bull market I had to learn my first language all over again, and it felt flattering. You bought expensive glucosamine when my knees first went gnostic, all the love beads I got for you had resolving power.

Free speech was not just for the overclass, we both lived by that rule, we went mute for it.

10.

The cat and its meadowsweet low tide. A lifespan of invertibility, silent heeltap amidst fringed gentians.

They came to teach me how to die, and their fractal développé was a help. I lost my driver’s license, but the coronary vein felt strong like feijoada, I groped it with mercuric love. We died in the shade of the frangipani watched by jumping spiders.

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Jan Wiezorek

Bedroom Before Sunrise Press wrist, dislodge shoulder, strain two Scotties who nuzzle green before color exists.

This confuses grids and locks silhouettes.

Bare self, held at breath, and arrange morning baldness with lunar gravity.

Wing double-size shadows that dwarf homeward angels.

Lightening and rainspouts cream the featherbed.

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Tom Holmes

What I Knew Before I Knew: Pecha Kucha for Birth Mother Signatory Mom says, “I won’t consent.”

I hear bubbling acid echo off calcifying tissue, then scratches with the smell of electricity.

Saltpeter They stitched mother’s lips to her neck.

I hear she asked for it because she sought legal counsel— her spinal cord leaked precedents.

Forget-Me-Knot I know there is a beyond-me, I hear scrapes. I am poked. A furrow forms along a rib. I yank a rod, twist it to a flower, and ease it back.

Lysol Her zeuto pokes my back.

I hear it crack and retract. I smell brown cleanliness. I foresee panicky fingers clasp my skull.

Journalism The doctor presses his stethoscope on mom.

I hear his thoughts through rubber tubes.

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Ain’t no more sense in lying to her, doc, I am born with agency. That is why I’ll cry.

Fingernails Today the coroner arrives, I hear the future just as well, she enters mother’s belly where I’ll etch plumes of smoke.

Dance I have a tail.

I hear it wag Before food arrives, then it curls asleep.

Laughter The light comes and goes.

I hear, “He cannot read or hear. Too much blubber in the way, too much wax.”

Strangelove She set a failsafe with her knees.

I hear them chatter before she sleeps, after they’re knocked out, I read her Arthurian dreams.

Liars At times when mom sleeps, I’m awake— I hear accountants and social workers conceive ad copy for newspapers and Time and Life magazines, other times I hear, “black market.”

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Lawyers Mother may have her doubts but I hear the newspaper boy accurately annunciate the headlines each day I do not appear in Births and Deaths.

Ventriloquist Sometimes I gesture her.

She hears what she thinks will pacify. A breakdown in our bicameral mind.

Light Through the hole in the dark I hear laughter and bored dismissiveness, I hear a window cranking open and “Let it bloom.”

Barrel Trembling fodder between your legs, I hear a blood stream. This is my egress and desire. Soon we’ll realize absence and wonder which one is missing.

Syncopation I have smooth gums, ten fingers, I hear buzzers, my pupils dilate, and my heart perfectly synchronizes with mom’s, even when she leaves.

Face I barely know my father.

I hear the same is true for her.

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My fingernails are not like hers.

He’s getting away, further and farther.

Waking She leans over and kisses my head.

I hear the smack of abandonment.

I fall asleep in her hands. Inseparable in our dreams. Insufferable mornings.

Dailies I already know when I die I’ll hear only my voice. Your muted first act was to make me loneliness. My mourning sickness.

Testament You left me with mustached nuns.

I hereby bequeath to you a razor.

You know what to do. When I’m born and before you die, cut me off.

Undetectable Do you know what it’s like when I’m here and you’re buried dead— I’m a man with a mother detector surveying Buffalo’s every graveyard.

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Richard Katrovas

Local Poets I find the term, the very idea, oddly unsettling. I’ve seen it deployed thousands of times in announcements for readings: “Local poets Bob Roberts and Dick Richards will share from their new books, both published by Funkville’s own Hangnail Press, on Friday, April 33rd,” or, worse, “beloved local poet Anna Anderson passed away on Thursday,” or, worst of all, “Local poet Ben Benjamin has won honorable mention in the Carbuncular Quarterly’s annual ‘Why I Love Southwest North Dakota’ haiku competition.”

Local accountants, local plumbers, local restaurateurs are rooted in place.

Local artists, comedians, actors and singers may be propelled to New York, Chicago or L.A. dragging behind them the quaint charms and Big City dreams of their neighbors, but local poets are like supine dogs chained to trees, beside pickup trucks on cinderblocks. Just like that.

Local politicians are another matter; most are like local poets, though at least they may harbor the dream of statewide or national office. No such pipe dreams are available to local poets and tethered K9s, no matter the length of their chains.

Are poets living in New York or San Francisco, say, local poets? Well, not necessarily. Frank O’Hara lived in New York, but I don’t consider him a local poet, the New York School moniker notwithstanding. Philip Levine, in his last couple of decades, lived between Brooklyn and Fresno, though I wouldn’t consider him local to either location, not regarding his identity as a poet, and though we associate him with Detroit, that place in his poems is more akin to a factory-centric Brigadoon than to the blighted urban “bitch” Madonna famously implored Michiganders to resuscitate: “Let’s bring that bitch back!” When I gave a reading in Detroit recently, local poets clued me that neither Levine’s nor Madonna’s Detroit will ever return, though something more dynamic and interesting is already shimmering into view. Local poets are often prescient.

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More to the point, is any poet, any writer, who teaches in a “college town,” a member of that municipality’s literary community? If so, at what phase in the individual’s absorption into that burgh’s cultural bloodstream does s/he become, psychically and according to the collective identity of that network of poets and writers, “local,” that is, one of them? Does she become local upon earning tenure? Does he become local when the concrete particulars of that place’s identity, names of streets, local hangouts—bars and coffee shops—seep into his published work? Is a local identity simply a matter of time?

Local poets are itinerant composition instructors, abysmally remunerated hired guns galloping between classrooms. They are bartenders who also work on cars and junior-high drama teachers who coach volleyball. They are trustfunded raconteurs waiting for their parents to die so that they may move into the master bedrooms. They are subcontractors staring officiously into exposed wires and poised to screw you on the estimate, and ministers torn between Sunday morning’s sacred pulpit and Saturday night’s profane open-mic. They are doctors and lawyers, bakers and janitors. They own bookstores and antique shops. They are homemakers. They are usually “progressive.” Many are hipsters, or weekend hipsters. They listen to NPR and join causes. They are readers and movie aficionados too hip ever to utter the word “cinema.” They watch TV without guilt, but mainly cable news. They are disproportionately vegan, which means roughly thirteen percent. Each has approximately twothousand Facebook friends, almost exclusively other local writers all over the country, indeed, all over the world; they are therefore paradoxically “local.”

Tip O’Neil, one of the more prosaically lyrical statesmen ever to nurture the body politic, famously declared all politics local, and though it is unlikely he had “unacknowledged legislators” in mind, the spirit of his bromide resonates through the coffee shops and independent bookstores of this great land, through the farmers’ markets and college auditoriums, anywhere local writers, local poets cavort with local pot dealers who restore, by day, neighborhoods ripe for gentrification. Local poets are salt of the earth that never loses its savor, to paraphrase the Sermon on the Mount, and they tend to be the best and brightest of their (larger) communities.

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William Carlos Williams was a local poet who dived into a black hole of provinciality and emerged oddly urbane, though this is just to say that white chickens and cold plums may placate the most discerning palate. Robert Frost, purveyor of cagy pastoral allegories, as our first (perhaps only, Whitman excepted) professional poet, was no more “local” to the hardscrabble New England farmlands than any twelve-term, agribusiness-owned congressman.

Expatriation was the Modernist rule, not the exception, and as moveable feasts follow celestial rather than fixed calendrical patterns, Paris was less a clockwork banquet than an ephemeral trough to America’s self-loathing early-century geniuses, Hemingway’s self-aggrandizing notwithstanding.

Iowa City may be to Paris what Deadwood Tavern is to Maxim’s, but culinary fame is probably a lagging indicator of a community’s literary relevance.

Handwringing over what fine-arts grads will “do” with their degrees is both hilarious and disingenuous. What did I ever do with the three years I studied Karate in Sasebo, Japan? Well, actually, I taught it, in part, to put myself through college, but, more to the point, it was a rite of passage by which I gained skills and self-knowledge that cascaded through every other aspect of my life. Could I have sustained a living teaching it? Probably not. I wasn’t that good, but when I applied for my first real teaching job, a four-and-four, all-composition, Sisyphean grind I indeed garnered, I was later informed that the committee had been impressed, and amused, when my letter of intention likened the teaching of composition to that of the kata, those intricate dances that are the aesthetic, and pedagogic, heart of Sho-bu-kan Okinawa-te.

That was my karate-callused foot in the door to the Ivory Tower, but, given how relatively few who attend graduate writing programs make careers of college teaching, how may we justify their (pick your pronoun reference) proliferation and maintenance? How many local poets and writers may any city, or town or village, sustain?

Employment and quality of life are intricately, but not inexorably, connected. Somewhere between Silicon Valley and the Rust Belt is a sweet spot where vocation and avocation become as our two eyes making one sight, to paraphrase our great and phony farmer poet. But as difficult as it may be to get the news from poetry, or skewed left or right from MSNBC or FOX, no one 148

really dies miserably for lack of what may be found in verse, free or formal.

One may die horribly, though, for lack of fellowship, lack of community, and the greatest local poet of recent years, I submit, was a beloved lush from New Orleans named Everette Maddox, who seems to have died horribly yet happily. He certainly did not lack friends, lack community. Indeed, he was the epicenter of the 80s New Orleans literary scene.

Raging alcoholic poets are so last century, and Everett was every inch a poet of that century’s twilight. I really didn’t like him, and as was true of so many of my personal judgments in the 80s, I was singular in my evaluation of Everette Maddox and kept it to myself. He was the beloved miscreant poetry saint of the Maple Leaf Bar, the barfly impresario of its famous reading series, “famous” in the sense that such longstanding and sloppily organized venues may benefit from the faint luster of nostalgia.

His fingernails were long and crusted with filth. His frayed suit hung from him as from a Halloween skeleton. His brown hair dangled past his frayed, dingy collar in greasy strings. He was shabbily genteel, a Southern gentleman Faulkner would have recognized and with whom the great writer would have felt comfortable sharing a bottle. Everyone loved Everette, found him authentic. I got along with him just fine; it was almost impossible not to. His collegiality was constant, and he hid nothing. His presence on that barstool at that bar—the sour odor of any previous night’s blues quartet or zydeco/jazz mashup hanging on the Maple Leaf air, a mix of tobacco and stale beer, clinging to that suit he’d no doubt slept in—was haunting in a way not usually associated with the living. Indeed, he seemed, through the 80s, a man freed from the exigencies of mortality. He’d decided to drink himself to death and went about his merry way doing so.

I was in my thirties, publishing books with a hotshot university press and in “national” literary journals. I loved New Orleans, but as a resident tourist.

I was no “local poet,” though I wrote poems, anecdotal lyrics set primarily in the French Quarter.

And I got so many things wrong, in my verse and my life, regarding that storied city. Did real New Orleanians resent me, my poems set in 70s and 80s New Orleans? The wiser ones of that tribe of insiders probably just didn’t 149

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care. I was innocuous, by turns a cultural carpetbagger and scallywag but, youthful bluster aside, harmless.

I sometimes couldn’t even look into Everette’s face when chatting with him; I’d avert my gaze as he drawled, with exquisite, slow, wry, deepSouthern elocution, a humorous story in which a mutual acquaintance’s miniscule misprision resulted in a bartender being late for her shift. He was a cursed soul who possessed no bitterness, no meanness, and who saw good in everyone, even me.

I recall sitting around with local writers, local poets at private gatherings or in bars other than the Maple Leaf, when Everette Maddox’s hallowed name would be invoked. More than once I’d opined that there should be some sort of intervention; the concept I don’t think was current then, but that’s what I’d meant. Someone should intervene, should take Everette somewhere disinfected, safe, and, most indubitably, healthy, somewhere he could spend some months drying out, putting on some weight, cleaning up his filthy yet elegant act.

The local poets of New Orleans, the real local poets, didn’t exactly scoff at my suggestion, though seemed to regard it, usually without much comment, as a call for betrayal, as though to intervene in Everette Maddox’s slow-motion suicide would have been to betray precisely that which was the source of his greatness.

Yes, I’ll call it that. In every neighborhood dive of every American city there are people committing suicide in similar fashion, but none that I’ve known has done so with such beatific panache.

There are many Maddox admirers, mostly other local poets, who loved him on his own terms and who no doubt hoard precious stories about him.

It is their tributes that should be run up the metaphysical flagpole. They were invigorated, quickened, somehow affirmed by how Everette Maddox was killing himself, and I offer this with no malice and only in the humblest judgment of their apotheosis of his—oh, let’s call them—lifestyle choices.

Whitman ruined us, not just poets, local and otherwise, but the entire culture, with sweetness and optimism that mitigate against our creature survival unto the final American twilight. Of course Whitman was the vessel, 150

in both senses, of our transcendence, the best container and dispenser of American Exceptionalism and the means by which we traverse the ocean of our despair. Whitman was the antithesis of a local poet, though a humble number of the multitudes he contained were indeed local bards chained to trees and howling at the moon.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Everette Maddox attended the University of Alabama when it was still Bear Bryant’s plantation, and published early in such venues as The New Yorker and Paris Review. He arrived in New Orleans in the mid-70s to be poet-in-residence at Xavier University, a very good, predominantly black, school. By the time I met him that plum gig had been long over, and how he lived, financially, from day to day, I’ve no idea, though gainful employment never seemed an option. Other local poets lead dual lives, one, jury-rigged and belching smoke, that sustains the other, the real life of making and sharing language constructs among like-minded folks doing the same. Everette, as far as I could ever discern, and I certainly didn’t pry or relish gossip that may have revealed answers, never had duties beyond sitting in the Maple Leaf Bar and presiding over a more-or-less weekly poetry reading series. Was there family money? Did family or friends marshal resources for his subsistence? Did he collect disability? Was he in any sense on the dole?

Every local, New Orleans poet with memories of that time may know the answer to the question as to how Everette Maddox subsisted, but it really doesn’t matter. He was a conduit for the kindness of strangers and admirers alike, and I certainly never recall him without a glass of amber liquid in his emaciated hand, or on the bar before him as he slowly gesticulated through a story worth hearing if only for the kindness and sincerity in his voice.

In one of my favorite photographs of Whitman his hand is extended rather daintily, and a butterfly has lighted upon his finger; on close examination one sees that a miniscule wire, or a ring of some sort tethers the bug to the bard, his preternatural connection to all things wild and beautiful a mere tableau and therefore a ruse, an advertisement for his persona. We are conditioned in our time to explore images produced by mechanical means for such incongruities; we are vigilant for tricks to an extent that Whitman’s contemporaries could not be.

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One of the tricks of greatness, in the arts especially, is to construct a persona that is itself interesting largely independent of the texts, the products that are its issue. Yes, Charles Bukowski (whose column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” appeared in New Orleans’ underground NOLA Express at the end of the 60s) had deployed his randy, alcoholic golem across the landscape of urban hippiedom; that beloved monster protected, in its fashion, the cultural ghettos of mimeographic effusion, the already decades-old bohemian communities teeming with the best minds of a generation not so much destroyed by madness as numbed by dubious relevance. Bukowski tended to his persona no less deliberately and judiciously than had Whitman, than had Whitman’s other progeny who had gathered primarily in the Bay Area, local poets and artists who, collectively, raised local status to national prominence.

In some sense, every contemporary local writers’ scene is an echo of the San Francisco Renaissance. With rare exception, every dog has its day when the tree to which it is chained acquires a golden fleece of national relevance, and that rusted truck becomes a gloriously restored ’57 Chevy.

Everette Maddox was not simply a more genteel, southern-fried Charles Bukowski if only because the latter had been fiercely ambitious, as had been Kenneth Rexroth, one of the Dutch uncles of the San Francisco Renaissance, and as had been Ginsberg et al. who celebrated an earlier generation of poets who produced towering edifices whose foundations had been laid in ideologies, paradoxically, anathema to the radical egalitarianism of the Beats. Maddox actually wrote relatively little, and if a young man’s high-octane ambition had fueled his sending poems to The New Yorker, by the time I knew him he was running on empty, but more like a mystic sage, a Zen Buddhist monk, than a combustion engine. Some of the Beats and their precursors talked a mean Eastern game, but Everette Maddox lived it. He seemed amused by ambition, all ambition, not only that which motivates a reaching for the stars, but also the reaching for a glass on a bar top, or even the drawing of another breath. I recall how, in the midst of a chat, he’d slowly turn and tilt his head, stare at his glass; he’d seem in the throes of deliberation: Shall I reach out my hand and grasp that glass? Shall I draw a breath and then lift that glass to my lips and drink? Okay. This time…which became another and another and another.

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If, as Randall Jarrell famously asserted, more poets fail for lack of character than lack of talent, Everette Maddox’s greatness was that he not only eschewed, but wholly transcended the very distinction, not only between character and talent, but between success and failure. He was a rare human creature whose self-destruction was self-destruction. If his life was a testimony to Bacchanalian abandon, it was reverie not revelry he sought from the wild god’s dominion. His significance as a poet had less to do with his poetry, which I still judge to be but two or three notches above mediocre, than with his integrity, a quality indicated by the fact that he contrived no persona yet was a caricature of himself, a man in pain for reasons he seemed unmoved to broadcast beyond the borders of his own predicament, his own calculations of not life’s, but his own life’s value.

Everette Maddox didn’t love poetry as much as he loved being a poet, and though this distinction in so many others is the essence of folly, in the context of Maddox’s life, in a New Orleans now delegated to the ashbin of pre-storm nostalgia, the distinction achieves post-apocalyptic status. The New Orleans in which he was unofficial laureate of local poets was not transformed by disaster so much as transferred from the realms of mythos to logos, from the anticipation of doom to its material realization. Everette Maddox embodied the anticipation of doom. His New Orleans was a mother’s lap in which he lay his head never to sit upright again.

I believe that poetry is a living art form as long as fourteen-year-old boys and girls hide poems of love under their underwear and socks, or sequester those tattered fragments of libidinal gibberish in the cyber equivalent of that drawer containing what the more prudish of a previous generation called unmentionables. It dies minute by minute, again and again, in the hearts and on the lips of all for whom its making and consumption is a matter of prestige. And yet how can it not be? The lyric impulse is toward loneliness, its tableau a shepherd whose audience is composed only of indifferent sheep, but its moral authority is the pedestal on which private troubles and public issues embrace. That tension between primal impulse and social imperative is located in the adolescent loins, but migrates, over time, to a rag and bone shop whose commerce is subsidized by the bankrupt state of shared memory.

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Everette Maddox’s posthumous destiny will have been fulfilled when everyone on the planet is a poet, or when poets outnumber those who are not, when the chain has been broken, and the dog roams free, which is to say that it can never be fulfilled.

Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” is hardly a how-to for career success in the arts, though it is something of a cautionary tale regarding career development: Don’t engage in anything that can be considered career development. Local poets may jockey for the inside rail toward the homestretch, but the other side of the finish line is oblivion, not a gaudy wreath of roses. Pegasus flies off the track, his jockey, yet another hungry artist, broken on the turf. “Provide Provide” for desolation’s smug purring, or simply unchain the dog and sic it on that feline nightmare of irrelevance. The only real poets are local poets; all others are mere professionals.

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Marley Stuart

Ducks in the Park We didn’t know they’d be there, so we sat on the bench and watched the way they bobbed for minnows underwater, or preened themselves, or just floated by like little boats.

We saw, too, mixed in with the panoply of ducks, other birds—herons, egrets, geese, gallinule, and one enormous swan that moved through them like a king among subjects, gliding smooth, its neck an elegant lowercase s.

We didn’t know anything about this, so when one ruffled its wings and took flight and another two followed and when the entire raft of them peeled off the surface of the water with the sound of buttons popping off a coat and the air came alive with silhouettes and flapping wings tipped white underneath that swirled around us, all I could do was squeeze your hand and whisper isn’t that something, over and over again until they were gone.

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Jeremy Tuman

A Song of Himself A review of Fractal Song. Poems., by Jerry Ward, Jr. Black Widow Press, 2016

With his latest collection of poems, Fractal Song (2016 Black Widow

Press), Jerry W. Ward, Jr. weaves a powerful tapestry of images and emotions stemming from the modern experience of witnessing injustice, hatred, and violence, through a sensibility in tune with artistic expressions of compassion, grace, and beauty. Several of the poems take as their inspiration recent episodes of police violence against unarmed African Americans, and the protests and movements that have taken place in the absence of justice. The feelings of shock, anger, horror, outrage, grief, and helplessness spurred by these events collide with the overpowering grace of art, knowledge, and truth, as expressed in the blues, in jazz, in the lives and art of Baldwin, Wright, Kafka and others, and in the lyrical beauty of the poems themselves, the words on the page.

The book serves as both meditation and balm, as inspiration and expression, as a voice for the oppressed and of one full of love, as they often prove to be one and the same.

A fractal is a irregularly shaped or fragmented geometric structure in which a certain pattern repeats across several scales within the structure, from the greatest to the smallest. The effect of the repetition is such that the physical properties of the structure behave as if its dimensions are greater than its actual spatial dimensions. A fractal song, then, might be lyric or lyrical structure whose properties repeat, and whose effect is greater than the sum of its individual parts. In the case of Fractal Song, the song could be the collection itself, the individual poems contained within repeating patterns in the form of themes, spiraling outward until the overall theme contains a greater impact, a larger force, than any individual poem ever could.

Since there is no titular poem, we are left with only the mathematical concept of a fractal, along with our understanding of the term “song,� to 156

construct an idea of what a fractal song might be, and how such an idea relates to the contents of this intriguing collection.

The book is divided into three sections, “Starts,” “Middles,” and “Ends,” each section title bearing the subtitle “Complete incompletes/ Imperatives conspire.” There is also one poem, “To Those Who Grieve the Death of a Poet,” that appears before the Table of Contents, and well as a “Postscript”

by Kalamu ya Salaam, followed by a final poem, “Fusion.”

In the first poem of the first section, the brief “Your Voice,” the speaker considers a “magic thing” that floods into memory, before focusing on a singular memory of someone, a “you,” gracefully getting “over” a deep river.

The river may be metaphoric, a troubled time, or perhaps an actual river, but in the getting over, blues are cured with “natural rhythms,” possibly the sounds of a rushing river, or possibly the rhythms of our life’s progress, as we move through time and over obstacles.

The second poem, “Open,” bears a dedication to Alice Walker, and we learn that it is she whom the speaker believes to be open, her soul “exposed.”

In the second stanza, “cold eyes” are “cast upon the patterns of your being.”

And in the third, a “castiron stove, / an eternal demon flame” rest within the “heart / of your being.” The quick, successive juxtaposition of hot and cold images working to animate the subject with life force. Then, after references to “Zora” and Marie Laveau, in the final stanza the speaker confesses to both fear and love for the subject, bringing the contrasting forces together in a similar way as the earlier tactile images.

Musical imagery returns in several poems, helping to fulfil the title’s promise. In “Moods in South Sharp,” we read of a morning descending like a “symphonic fog.” Then in “Son to Father, with Love / Graveside Prayer,” we read that the father had given the speaker “jazzspace,” explained as “a tempo for life.” Thus, music again as in the opener provides a measure for our progress through life, in addition to a language to describe such a phenomenon. The closing poem of the first section is called “Jazz to Jackson to John” and consists of three subtitled “movements.” In the first movement, a mythic origin of jazz is offered, described as “something like a vision / so blazing basic, so gutbucket, so blessed.” Movement two continues the theme 157

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with a barrage of jazz-inflected imagery, along with references to “Pharaoh jamming in the pyramid, / sketches of Spain for a night in Tunisia;” which are allusions to jazz greats Pharaoh Sanders and Miles Davis that capture the exotic and epoch-spanning nature of their lives and their work. This bit is quickly followed by a list of more greats, “MJQ” and “Tyner” among them, followed by the qualifiers “messiahs, crusading / headhunters,” thus positioning these greats and their famous recordings as fierce and cataclysmic truth-tellers.

The two-stanza “movement three” closes the poem, and the section, with a flurry of alliterations, “spirituals and the salty / sermonettes,” “junkies, the jukebox juice,” and the titular line which recurs throughout as a modified riff, “jazz to Jackson and / because we really want to thank you / words for John.”

The second section, “MIDDLES,” begins with “Opening Night,” in which a speaker address a “you” who is “schooled in this / theater of cruelty.” The nature of romance, real or fabled, is pondered in a longer second stanza, before the title shifts slightly to “opening tight” in a sexually charged third stanza.

Jazz and blues return in the brief “Kwansaba 61907,” which is dedicated to Richard Wright. In another brief poem, “A Modest Plea,” Shakespeare is humorously summoned as the “patron of plagiarism” and an “Old felon.”

Then in the middle of the section, the form of the poems shifts from mostly standard short stanzas to more experimental arrangements, including use of subheadings, along with bold font, italics, and all caps. The most striking example of this experimental form is a poem called “Blood and Black Fires,” which begins with a one-line stanza in bold, “And this is not a poem.” The next stanza continues in bold font, “I smell blood and black fire! Blood and black / fire!” The 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, is soon revealed as the poem’s subject. Michael Brown’s weeping mother is quoted, saying, “You took my son away from me!” And his killer is described as “the big animal wearing the badge of authority.” Language of Pagan society is used, “sun god,” “moon god,” and “universe god,” as are references to “running and grabbing and shouting ancient sonics,” along with Christian references to being “Washed in the blood of the Lamb’s confusion.”

The phrase “this is not a poem” returns again and once more in bold, followed by the line, “This is a eulogy for a dead rainbow.” The intensity is upped in 158

the final two stanzas that scream out in all caps what seems a dire warning of what might result from the young man’s death, followed by a question, equally urgent, of whether a “furious flower” might bloom on the young man’s grave. The effect is passionate, immediate, capturing in rhythmic verse the horror and confusion and helplessness many of us felt as we watched events surrounding police killings in Ferguson and elsewhere unfold before us on television.

The middle section’s final poem is “That Day the Rainbow Died (for people who prey darkly).” It plays with ideas of religion as ritual, possibly invested with, and possibly devoid of, larger, aspirational meaning. The rainbow in this poem is left to symbolic interpretation, possibly a symbol of hope, or of beauty, or of the possibilities a life has to offer. What we do know is that the day it died “Was not a holy day,” but rather “a cheapening/ Of experience. The four brief stanzas invert religious language: “A first supper,” and “the body and the blood” juxtaposed with “The cigar and the gun,” all in a tragic ritual “Between your segregated god/ And mine.” The rituals and representations of communion are referenced again in the closing lines, as humanity is depicted as “Severe cannibals communing/ In temporary grace.”

As in other poems in the collection, the speaker here struggles to reconcile the signifiers of the dominant culture with their ultimate lack of ability to sustain, to comfort, to explain. If our salvation cannot be found in the places promised, then where?

The final section, “ENDS,” brings us back to a recent public event as occasion of the poem “Trayvon: Your Eyes Are Haunting Me.” In the first line, the idea of compassion is personified: “Compassion, would you wear my eyes?” Is compassion in us, the speaker seems to wonder, “Leaking from the double helix of my skin?” And can the “gothic” tale of our lives be seen through it? In the second part, America is described as both the speaker’s “invisible race” and as an “old, negated rainbow,” perhaps giving us a clue to the rainbow’s meaning in the previous poem. Also in the middle, the ideas of mercy and love are personified in the same way, the speaker asking if these ideas would wear the speaker’s eyes, as if calling on these basic, vital human emotions to return to where and when they are most needed. In the last 159

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part, the speaker is haunted by the eyes of Trayvon, a reference to the black teenager whose 2012 murder, and the subsequent acquittal of his murderer, set into motion the Black Lives Matter movement.

Eyes return in the next poem, “He Has Wonderful Eyes,” where we learn through references that the “he” is James Baldwin. In this manner the poems are strung together, unfolding like the fractals of the collection title, a word, a line, a theme, repeating to to reveal a new angle of meaning. For another example, a line in the Baldwin poem reads “On the fire next time/ The flaming leaves of grass,” possibly a reference to how Baldwin upended conventions of the white literary canon as represented by Walt Whitman.

Then two poems later, in a poem called “Winter Solitude” we get the lines “Saints cut of silk, frantic like the turf,/ wanting terror to touch down,/ explore lucid leaves of grass/ evermore,/ for the asking/ is nevermore.” The reader here must consider this same reference to Whitman in a different light, in a more positive, perhaps reverential, tone, especially when paired with possible allusions to famous lines by Poe, another white, canonized poet. The effect is playful and inviting, with images and ideas spiraling outward from center, like the blue-on-black fractals of the book’s cover image.

“Reparations: a process poem” continues the play, taking the word “reparations,” which in this country will always be tied to slavery, and breaking it down in multiple ways, bringing out other ideas, like rap and rape, that speak of slavery’s legacy on the lives of African Americans, and indeed of all Americans.

The brief, penultimate poem of the section is called “Uncle Sam and Uncle Tom,” and refers to Ferguson, site of racial injustice and unrest in the late summer of 2014, where “Occam’s razor shaved Sam’s face.” In referencing Occam, the speaker posits that the simplest explanation for what happened in Ferguson is most likely the correct one: an unarmed black man, a citizen, a human being, was murdered by a cop, an agent of the state, and the murder was condoned by a racist American system. The outrage ramps up a notch in the section’s final poem, “Footnote 666,” in which “Justice is a brazen nuisance, a dangerous God-/ fearing whore.”

The book’s postscript is comprised of an essay called “The Doctor is 160

In,” by Kalamu ya Salaam, which rightly praises Ward’s poetry for, among other things, its way with rhythm: “When you say his words out loud you hear the syllabled beats of a rhythm master.” The collection’s final entry is a poem called “Fusion,” which recalls a “we” and an “us” and how “the snap/ of conversation/ polished us bright/ as boots.” The book’s final praise is to the word itself, the power of speech, of song, of conversation. Throughout the collection, Ward invites to consider this power in all its wondrous and terrifying possibility. In writing we create, in speaking we make real, and in singing we set free.

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Stephanie C. Smith

Two Poems Visitation Soon after my father buys our first television set, we gather on the brown, braided rug by the black and white fire.

Our favorites are Wild Kingdom and I’ve Got A Secret—both mysteries to me.

An antelope on a plain in Africa is murdered by lions in front of us.

There’s lots of gray blood, but I know it’s all red. My father has a secret— he’ll move out in a month, leave us the TV, become our guest star and never answer my millions of whys and how comes. At the end of a station identification, our front door bangs open and two girls, older than me, run in, big-eyed.

A man, or something, is after us.

They try not to cry. One’s missing a shoe. One’s holding a stone.

My mother turns off the dead antelope.

My father drives the girls home in his white station wagon.

I stare into the backyard through my dark window face, big-eyed and pounding.

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Shelter Aggravated rape is what they call a man with a knife and me in his truck my guts twisted and my throat slam shut so the blood won’t pour out the way he says it will so I do everything he wants and it feels like dying anyway.

Statutory rape is what they call a man without a knife and me at fourteen on a night of riding streetcars because I was aggravated and the shower didn’t help and no one’s coming home for weeks.

He sits by me and listens and takes me to his place on Adams Street to sleep with him on cool blue sheets and it feels nothing like sleeping, but that’s what he calls it anyway.

Love is what I call the many nights in his double bed, musk incense burning, listening to Stevie Wonder, Blame it on the Sun. The many mornings he drives me to summer school and buys me a cinnamon roll because I’m not eating much and he knows I like cinnamon and we kiss before I leave his car and it feels an awful lot like good luck anyway.

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John Talbird

Wheel of Fortune

When John’s mother left an iron skillet on the burner and burnt the

house down, people stepped in to help. The property-owning Episcopal priest at their church let them live in a duplex he owned—the top floor of a Victorian house—for half the usual rent. The neighbors baked lasagnas and casseroles.

John’s father and stepmother, Marion, brought John and his little brother, Danny, new clothing. Of course, things weren’t perfect. The apartment was only a two-bedroom so that he and Danny had to share a room. And John hated casseroles, hated the way the food was all melted together in some kind of cheese-and-egg glop. And the clothes. The clothes. His father and stepmother had clearly just gone to the Salvation Army and bought anything that would fit the boys, it didn’t matter how out-of-style or musty-smelling or plain butt-ugly. “Do you like your new clothes?” Dad said eagerly, sniffling from the cold he seemed to always be fighting. “Sure,” Danny said, but he was usually agreeable and anyway just eight and not going through puberty and trying to impress the girls in middle school the way John was.

It turned out that few of the clothes that his father and stepmother had bought fit John well anyway. The most presentable was a button-down checkered shirt with longish collars and a plaid pair of pants, the only, he found, that weren’t high waters—as long as he wore them with his high-top Converses—and so this is what he wore his first day back at school after the fire. If he had hoped that the other children would take into consideration his loss and show mercy at his sartorial ineptitude, he was sadly mistaken.

In addition to the unsuppressed laughter when he entered class that morning, during lunch, Dwight Conkotts hit him with a nearly full pint of milk which exploded and splattered his new-old clothes with its souring liquid. He was a nervous wreck and near tears by the end of the day. But when he went to Mrs. Jenks during last period complaining of a stomach ache, she, always a bit stressed anyway due to her rowdy eighth graders, screamed, “You’re not 164

going to get out early just because you want to!”

Like every day after school, John went to the Elementary school section of K.P. Young, the K-through-12 lab school that he and Danny attended, to pick up his brother from class. Their mother worked at the library on the nearby University of Florida campus. Some days, John and Danny would go there to do homework to wait for their mother to finish, some days they would go to the Natural History Museum to explore the fake cave and the drawers of archaeological artifacts and fossils. Today, since it was spring and the public pool was open—and, luckily, both of their bathing suits and towels had been in their school lockers and not burned up over the weekend—they went swimming, meeting friends who went to the local public school instead of K.P. Young. The boys played a game called Wiggling Worms where half the kids were fishermen and the others half worms swimming beneath the pool surface. For a while, John forgot that all of his earthly belongings had been burnt to ashes forty-eight hours earlier.

Afterward, hair sticking up in points, eyes red, skin stinking of chlorine, sun sinking low in the sky and the breeze picking up, they crouched on the lounge chairs and pavement. John groused that at K.P. Young the kids all listened to awful music: “Journey, Boston, Styx, REO Speedwagon. All that shit. Stadium rock crap with no value whatsoever.” They had all just discovered punk rock the previous summer—the Sex Pistol, the Buzzcocks, the Ramones—and now hated all the music they had listened to only a couple years earlier. Peyton McNulty, the oldest, already a freshman in high school, was the coolest of them all and knew the most about punk rock and new wave.

He had a big sister who was a bass player in some college punk band, had even pierced his ear, the left one which, according to teen lore meant he was heterosexual (“right means wrong” the kids said).

And then later, waiting for their mother outside, John bought Danny a Nutty Buddy from the van idling on the corner. And they waited, light waning, the after-work traffic picking up on 34th St. Their friend Philip’s mother offered to give them a ride home or, she corrected herself, to their new apartment, but John insisted that their mother would be there soon and he didn’t want her to worry. But she wasn’t there. Not after the sun went down and the parking 165

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lot lights buzzed on, nor after the last pool employee left, pulling down the metal door and locking it. The new apartment was only about a mile away, so John put his arm around Danny’s shoulders since the little boy was shivering despite the humid night, and the two of them walked home, even taking the short-cut off of 8th Ave. though that meant they had to go through an unlit patch through the woods where, supposedly, a neighborhood girl had been molested.

When they got to the apartment, their father—still wearing his police uniform from work—and the priest who owned the property were standing out front talking. Their father saw them and grabbed Danny by the hand, jerking him away from his older brother as if to protect him. “Where the hell were you kids?”

“Mom didn’t pick us up from the pool after school. Where is she?”

“I need you to get in the car,” he said to the boys. “Thanks, Jerry,” he called to the priest over the hood of his VW station wagon, already buckling Danny into the backseat, and the pastor nodded, making the sign of the cross.

“Where is Mom?” John repeated as his father started the car and pulled away from the curb. His dad made no answer; he seemed very angry and so nothing else was said.

John and Danny never stayed at their dad’s house during the week, only every other weekend (they had been there the previous weekend when their mother had burned down the house). When they got there, the kitchen was steamy with the lasagna that Marion was just pulling out of the oven (even more repellent than the usual version, this one made of spinach instead of meat). She seemed annoyed and unsurprised to see the boys. “Go tell Arthur that dinner’s ready,” John’s dad said to him.

Arthur was Marion’s son from a previous marriage, a taciturn teenager with discipline problems. He was sitting in John’s dad’s recliner, watching some game show on television and wearing a cowboy hat which his pet miniature pinscher, Miles, balanced on the crown of, haunches pressed against the back of the chair. When the dog saw John, it opened its mouth and gave one short little bark. The image would have been funny, the type of thing you’d take a photo of to send in to the local paper, if it hadn’t been 166

for Arthur’s intense gaze at the TV, a gaze that appeared to suggest he was searching into the idiot hilarity and flashing lights of the game show for some reality beyond. John watched the show too, trying to see what his stepbrother saw, but he felt he was watching a different program than Arthur was, that these people spinning a huge wheel, shouting out letters, wasn’t exactly the same thing Arthur was seeing.

“John!” his father yelled from the doorway. “What are you doing? Tell him,” he said, jabbing an angry finger at Arthur. “Get in here, both of you.”

They all sat at the table and ate, forks clinking against plates, food traveling to grim mouths, the air damp with steam, all spines bent to their tasks. Arthur let Miles sit in his lap, fed him pieces of food right off his fork.

John’s father stared across the table at the teenager, chewing bread, slowly drinking beer. “If you want to wear ridiculous clothes,” he said after a few minutes, “then I guess I can’t do anything about that.” He spoke slowly, taking his time as if the words might be difficult to find. John regarded Arthur to see what was “ridiculous”: sleeveless T-shirt, silver necklace, a suede vest.

He wasn’t sure he understood what his father was getting at, exactly, but felt relieved that his dad’s anger was directed at someone besides himself. “I know you think you look attractive in that getup and yes,” he said, nodding, “it might be wrong to criticize a kid for expressing himself, but as your mother would say, I’m brutally honest.” It seemed both that John’s father had no more to say and that there was some last line that hadn’t been spoken yet.

No one was eating, everyone just looked at him, waiting. “Anyway, I want you to take that damn hat off when you sit at my table.”

“Bill,” Marion said, already crying, “don’t blame Arthur for your troubles.

We’re all suffering, not just you. I’ve had it up to here,” she said, raising a hand, not that high, but shaking, “hours of your complaining about the boys’ mother and can’t take it anymore!” Her voice ended on a choked-off screech and she crumpled into herself.

Arthur was standing now and he flipped his stepdad off. “Fuck you, dude,” he said. “You’re just a tool of the system. I don’t have to share your culture!”

And with that, he left the room, the dog trotting after. A few minutes later, country music came on blasting from his room.

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Danny dug in a nostril, tears running soundlessly down his face. Marion’s crying had tapered off, but she appeared to be shaking. John so desperately wanted to ask his father again where his mother was, no, really, just wanted his dad to tell him, but he could see something happening in his father’s face.

It looked as if he were about to crack open and John was worried about what would come howling out if that happened. A deep voice sang from Arthur’s room, “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

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Contributors Tom Andes’ writing has recently appeared in Great Jones Street, Free State Review, and Guernica: A Magazine of Global Arts and Politics, and has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2012. Reviews and interviews with writers and musicians have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives in New Orleans, where he makes a living as a freelance writer and editor, plays music, and teaches for the New Orleans Writers Workshop, which he co-founded. You can find more at tomandes.com.

Ace Boggess is author of the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016) and two books of poetry, most recently, The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014). Forthcoming is a third poetry collection: Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Thomas Bonner, Jr., Professor Emeritus at Xavier University of Louisiana, has been involved with Dubus studies since the late 1980s. He has books on Kate Chopin and William Faulkner as well as essays, poems, and fiction in books, academic journals, and magazines. Bonner edited Xavier Review and Xavier Review Press for twenty years, and is currently Editor Emeritus of this magazine. He and his wife Judith are co-editing a new edition of William Spratling’s and William Faulkner’s Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles (Pelican, 2018).

Daniel Brusilovsky is from Moscow, but has lived in Pittsburgh for the last twenty years. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, he’s written in the past for The Fourth Wave, a feminist magazine. As a first-generation immigrant, he writes to reconcile the cultures that have shaped his life, American and Russian both.

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Vincent Cellucci wrote An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011) and edited Fuck Poems an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). Come back river, a bilingual Bengali-English translation collaboration with the poet and artist Debangana Banerjee is available from Finishing Line Press. A Ship on the Line, a battleship-collaboration with poet Christopher Shipman, released

by Unlikely Books was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. He performed Diamonds in Dystopia, an interactive poetry web app at SXSW this year, and the poem is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press).

Natalie Crick, from Newcastle in the UK, has poetry published or forthcoming in a range of journals and magazines including Ink in Thirds, The Penwood Review, Interpreters House, The Chiron Review and Rust and Moth. This year her poem, ‘Sunday School’, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook will be released by Bitterzoet Press this year.

Ronald Dorris is a lifelong resident of Garyville, a small sugar cane town along the east bank of the Mississippi River, in St. John the Baptist Parish 35 miles west of New Orleans. He is the author of Cane: Jean Toomer’s Swan Song (1997). His creative works have been published in Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, American Poetry Anthology,The Griot: Journal of African American Studies, Genetic Dancers, Langston Hughes Colloquy,and Network 2000: In the Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. His scholarly works have been published in Africa, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Justin Evans was born and raised in Utah. After graduating from high school, Justin served in the U.S. Army and then attended college in Utah. Later, he graduated with a Master’s Degree from the University of Nevada, Reno. His books include Town for the Trees (Foothills Publishing, 2011), Hobble Creek Almanac (Aldrich Press, 2013), and Sailing This Nameless Ship (BlazeVOX, 2013). He lives in rural Nevada with his wife and sons, where he teaches at the local high school.

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Kathleen Galvin is completing a graduate degree in creative writing. Her work adapts language and imagery from the wartime journals of her late father, General John R. Galvin (USA, Ret.), including papers that informed his final book, Fighting the Cold War: A Soldier’s Memoir (The University Press of Kentucky, 2015).

Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics and the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Cave (winner of The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013), as well as four chapbooks. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.

Twitter: @TheLineBreak Rodger Kamenetz is working on a new book of prose poems Palindromes to Harass Sarah Palin. He lives in New Orleans where his day job is to listen to people’s dreams. His essays on dreamwork and poetry appear on thenaturaldream.com and are forthcoming in Kenyon Review. Among his eleven books of prose and poetry are To Die Next To You, The Lowercase Jew, The Jew in the Lotus and The History of Last Night’s Dream.

Julie Kane, a former Louisiana Poet Laureate, is Professor Emeritus of English at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. Her work appears in more than sixty anthologies including The Book of Irish American Poets from the Eighteenth Century to the Present and Best American Poetry 2016.

With Grace Bauer, she is co-editing Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017).

Richard Katrovas is the author of fifteen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, most recently Raising Girls in Bohemia: Meditations of an American Father (essays, Three Rooms Press, New York: 2014), and Swastika into Lotus (poetry, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh: 2016). A collection of stories, The Great Czech Navy, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon. His stories, essays and verse have appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, and he has received numerous grants and awards. He taught for twenty years 171

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at the University of New Orleans, and for the past fifteen at Western Michigan University; he is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program for Writers, which is in its twenty-fourth year. Katrovas writes: “Local Poets is from a book in progress tentatively titled Name Dropping; it’s not so much about American poetry as American poets and how they are valued; indeed, with the exception of a few epigraphs, very few lines of verse appear throughout. The essays also touch on my weird, weirdly American, childhood.”

Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio picking up alien frequencies in south Louisiana. She lives in the back of a little brick house with a feline reincarnation of Catherine the Great, sings harmonies incessantly to every song she hears, and sunlights as a trade mag editor. She is the author of Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017), recently reviewed in the New York Times as “the best collection of poetry to appear in English in 2017,” and dreamland trash (Saint Julian Press, forthcoming). Her collection, no ledge left to love, won first prize in the Ping Pong Free Press and the Henry Miller Memorial Library competition this summer. Krieger’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, Midwest Review, Quarterly West, Phoebe, So and So, Tenderloin, Coup d’Etat, and Maintenant, among others. Find more of her work at www.dylankrieger.com.

Philip C. Kolin is the University Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of Southern Mississippi where he also edits the Southern Quarterly. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks and eight collections of poetry, most recently Emmett Till in Different States (Third World Press, 2015) and Benedict’s Daughter: Poems (Wipf and Stock, Resource Publications, 2017). His poetry has appeared in African American Review, Christianity and Literature, Spiritus, America, Michigan Quarterly Review, Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, Anglican Theological Review, and many other publications. He has coedited three anthologies of poetry—Hurricane Blues: Poems on Katrina and Rita (Southeast Missouri State Press, 2005), Down to the Dark River: Contemporary Poems about 172

the Mississippi River(Louisiana Literature Press, 2016), and Contemporary Poems about the Moon (forthcoming).

Sharon LaCour currently lives in a small town in northwestern Wisconsin.

She has participated in classes and writers’ groups at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota for fifteen years. She grew up in New Orleans and her newly completed novel is set there and in Cocodrie, Louisiana in the 1920’s. “The Seawall” is her first published short story. Sharonannlacour@ gmail.com.

Jeff Newberry is the author of the novel A Stairway to the Sea and the poetry collection Brackish. His writing appears in a variety of publications, including The Colombia Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Southeast Review. Find him online at jeffnewberry.com or Tweet him at @FlaExile.

Eric Paul was a member of the Congo Square Writer’s Workshop through Free Southern Theater at the age of 17, and was published for the first time in the 80s in an anthology of poetry through Congo Square group. After many years he started writing in earnest again two years ago when his daughter asked him to write a story for her. He has been writing ever since. A twentyyear employee of Xavier, this story is his first submission to Xavier Review.

Anis Shivani published Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems and Soraya: Sonnets last year. His new book of criticism, Literary Writing in the Twenty-First Century: Conversations, came out this summer. New work appears in the Yale Review, Georgia Review, Third Coast, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, New Letters, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, Iowa Review, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. This is his third appearance in Xavier Review.

Stephanie C. Smith grew up in New Orleans, graduated from McMain Magnet Secondary School, and is now living in Raleigh, NC where she manages the custody mediation program for the Administrative Office of the Courts. Her work has been published in Unsplendid, The Raleigh Review, Triggerfish Critical Review and Pinesong Awards.

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Marley Stuart is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. His fiction has recently appeared in About Place. He lives in New Orleans with his wife.

John Talbird is the author of the chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind. His fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Juked, The Literary Review, Ambit, Bull and elsewhere. His story “Situation Comedy” appeared in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Xavier Review. He is on the Editorial Board of Green Hills Literary Lantern and a frequent contributor to Film International. An English professor at Queensborough Community College, he lives in New York City with his wife.

Jeremy Tuman teaches English at Xavier University of Louisiana. His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Journal of College Writing, and Xavier Review. Jeremy plays guitar in roots-rock band Bob & The Thunder and is supported in all pursuits by his wife, their two young bgfcoys, and two brown dogs.

Jan Wiezorek has taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming at The London Magazine, Southern Pacific Review, Panoplyzine, Better Than Starbucks, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. He is author of Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011) and holds a master›s degree in English Composition/ Writing from Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago.

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