from Standing at the Gate

The late July midnight sat on New Orleans like a suffocating toad as the old poet stood on the street corner waiting. He reeled from side to side, belched the taste of red beans and gin, shook his head, and shivered. He was waiting for the angel, a mousy little man wearing a woman’s overcoat. He was waiting for prophecy; waiting to hear his words come back in the language of the dead. He could hear him singing from the cemetery and was trying to remember the name of the song. The voice was clear and sweet as it echoed off the cemetery walls. It was difficult to just be quiet and listen to the night. There was a sudden sound of cats fighting, then a low harmonic bellowing of ships’ horns echoing across the neighborhood. He heard a door slam some blocks away, angry voices passed without words. A glass broke, and the singing stopped as a car started and drove away.

Now it was silent. He listened to the buzzing of the streetlights and thought about what it meant to be a poet. “Why me with this curse?” he whispered. “Don’t others hear the ship horn symphony? The crickets and the humming lights? Hush —the angel is singing again.” As he puzzled over the name of the song and where he had heard it before, his thoughts drifted to his time in university. “Distinguished Lecturer,” He whispered... “Professor of Howling Debauchery, Lover of Co-eds, Raper of Grade Averages, Killer of Dreams. It’s not my fault. I knew people, I was Distinguished, better than the rest. My translations were published by Penguin, and my poems by New Directions. I chased after youth like I could bite its moving tires. I suckled their high pigeon tits and let them believe they were my muses. But that was you. I walked across the park every day thinking of you, standing on your toes, nude in your red-towelturban, our café on the coast of Portugal, watching you in your studio painting, the time the hummingbird drank from the flower in your hair.

Everything beautiful was what you brought to the table, and I could see the sounds as patterns and poetry flowed because writing was easy when I could read aloud to you. I was going to get old and settle in with you. I was going to love you just like I promised. Then you were cut like a line from my life. Somebody edited you. A red line on the sidewalk. An exclamation point in your heart, for thirty dollars and an emerald ring.

In that darkness, there were not enough stanzas to hold my grief so I looked for a bottle that could. And I got old anyway. And when I became too mean to suck up and too drunk to put out, they decided the time for grieving was over. The New Guard was at the gate, but I was ten years deep in grief, still searching for you between the ice cubes.”

He listened harder to the song. It was old, he had heard it many years before when she was alive. He could almost remember her singing it. There was a clicking. It was getting louder, but he couldn’t tell from which direction. Then it stopped. The old poet walked around the corner to see the sound. Halfway down the block, he could see a silhouette of a deer, the long neck, the antlers outlined in the yellow streetlights. When the buck caught sight of him, it ran at top speed toward the old poet who stood there astonished by the majesty of his hallucination. As the buck ran around him it stepped on a patch of broken glass and lost its footing. It hit the concrete with a thud and slid on its back along the sidewalk off the curb and into the street. Then, fast as that, he was on his feet and gone. The old poet laughed a bit and said a breathless, “Wow!” as he watched the buck disappear into the night.

The thief slid her hand through the crack in the tomb and gently fished around for the slender bone she could see from the outside. When she tried to pull her hand out, the crack became a monkey trap, her hand only fit through empty. She laughed at herself for a moment then threaded the bone up her wrist and out the crack retrieving it with her other hand. “Hello.” She said to the lonely ulna, “My name is Abbey.” She held it a moment then slipped it back in the tomb and wiped her hands on her jeans with a shiver.

Kennis could hear her coming closer, so, he made himself small in the dark corner of the mausoleum praying silently and kissing his St Dymphna medal. The iron gate squeaked, and he watched in fear as the flashlight shone over his nest, his collection of things, then on to him. “I am so sorry.” She said, turned off the flashlight and backed out into the light. “I didn’t mean to walk into your home. I mean I kind of knew you live here. I am friends with the old poet the one who talks really loud late at night. I was kind of hoping to meet you… but honestly, I didn’t mean to walk right in your home.” Her voice was soft, her apology sincere even though Kennis knew “I didn’t mean to walk right in your home” meant –“I didn’t mean to walk in when you were home.” He lit a candle and said, “Best forget that.” Abbey walked in and sat down. “My name is Abbey.” She said trying not to sound like she was talking to a child or a pet. “I’m Kennis.” He replied looking at her in the candlelight.

Kennis saw people in terms of danger and safety. Women were safer than men but not all. Old men were safer than young men, young women were safer than old women.

“You have many beautiful things she said looking at his collection: a large black beetle, three small antique bottles each holding blue jay feathers, 7 bird skulls, pottery fragments, piles of string and rubber bands.

“You clepta? Take all them beaucoup-pretty crap them pitch like fat turds.” Abbey thought about the word clepta for a moment… clepta... kleptomaniac then replied, “That is right, I steal things nobody wants cause they are beaucoup-pretty.” she reached into her bag and produced a small box of rusted springs and shook out a few in his hand. Kennis looked at them like jewels. “Ooo, that’s crazy shit, alright.” he said and tried to give them back. “Oh no.” She said, “It is a gift.” and handed him the box. It was old and fragile with the words Dixie Mill printed on it. He accepted it as a thing of great value and importance carefully setting it down and placing a bird skull on top.

Father Pace had explained to Kennis that If he smelled too bad, they would put him back in the white room or the clean cage as Kennis called the hospital in Latin. So, Father Pace arranged for him to bathe at the YMCA on Tuesdays. The smell of the Mausoleum, however, was making Abby sick “It was lovely to meet you.” She said as she rose to leave.

Kennis took out a tin can that had been decorated by a child with crayon, glitter, and cotton balls, and handed her a small pink matchbox printed Petunia’s Restaurant, New Orleans. Inside was a tiny perfect gecko skeleton. “You want to bring home the dead. Him small... but him dead.” ###

The summer before Mrs. Capaci got sick was dubbed the Ice-cream Summer. Her youngest daughter Genevieve was almost eleven and had learned her 5th grade Latin lessons well, she earned ribbons for reading out loud, grammar and vocabulary. She taught her best friend Cecile and it became their secret language. They would talk in the garden and whisper in the pews. On Sundays, the girls were allowed to walk the 5 blocks to Angelo Brocato’s Gelato by themselves, and Genevieve was given enough money to get ice cream for her sister Juliana and her mushy boyfriend Vittorio, that’s what she called Victor in her journal. “Et osculare eum?”

Genevieve said with a giggle “I told you, I seen em in the garden just kissing away, they was touching tongue and everything.” Cecile replied. She felt sophisticated when she could listen in one language and respond in another.

“Volo eam ad ubera effundet super eam.” Cecile didn’t quite catch that, something about spilling her boobs, so she laughed. “Girl, you dirty.” The Ice-cream Summer passed with the girls spending every night camping in the courtyard or in Cecile’s room in the old slave quarter building behind the big house. Cecile’s mother, Astrid, told her that it wasn’t proper for her to sleep in Miss Genevieve’s bed, but really, she didn’t want her sleeping anywhere near The Devil.

After the last storm of summer passed Genevieve could hear her father shouting at Victor and Victor shouting back. Her sister was crying in her room and her mother could not get out of bed. Astrid brought her to the kitchen and ladled out a bowl of gumbo “Now don’t you worry about grown folks stuff, I know your mamma is sick and you all tied up about that, but you gonna be alright. Me and Mr. Otis is right here we ain’t goin nowhere. Now you have some gumbo I made that special for you.”

“Is my mother going to die?” Genevieve asked, reaching for the butter.

“We all gonna die, child, that’s just the way it is.”

“Soon, is she going to die soon?”

“Only the Good Lord knows that now.”

The next year Genevieve Capaci turned twelve. She made new friends. She earned more ribbons.

Victor joined the army and Juliana cried for a year. When the word came that Victor was not coming home, she stopped talking, slept in her mother’s bed, and did not look up from her journal for the nine months it took to become a novitiate of The Poor Clares cloister.

Genevieve listened to her mother’s short, labored breaths gurgling through the wall as her father lifted the sheet and the devil climbed into her bed.

Episode 20

Boss Tully killed her every day. He was sitting under the umbrella talking to the young detective as the smell of boiled seafood, roasting coffee, and mule piss blended with his five-dollar cigar. The young detective talked about his progress finding the Knucklehead Derrick Grainger as Tully arranged three beignets in a line like vertebrae, secretly dreaming of her pigeon-toed death. The voice droned on as images of hands and necks paraded behind his eyes. Eleanor Frith died before she could scream, Tully thought, remembering the egret snatching the green lizard in his dream. The killer’s precision was a thing of beauty, flawless and painless in its execution. The hard part was getting her down that hallway.

Was she seduced? Did he convince her there was a lost puppy? A sick mother? Why would she leave the safety of the sidewalk? He chatted her up a thousand times. He became her lover, her pastor, a stranger, but he couldn’t get her to leave the sidewalk at 7:00 a.m. It didn’t make sense. The scenarios played out behind every thought and every interaction. They went on continuously… holding her at gunpoint, seducing, tricking, cajoling, coercing, drugging, but they all ended in a how could? Or a why would? Tully wanted to just let her die.

Murder always seemed so simple to him, someone wants something or wants something to stop. Someone is mad about something or has something to hide. He thought about the Knucklehead and how maybe he took that time in prison to fester a murderous rage. No, that pantywaist isn’t gonna do much besides disappear into a bottle. It has to be either completely random or somebody else with a mighty big beef. That’s the kind of rage you build up to, the kind where there is no more rage at all, just that cold knife in the back and move on. Then why the arrangement? Why the parted hair, the open blouse, the head cocked just so? Tully imagined a rage so deep and so personal it grew as hard and fast as a thrusting bird beak, no hot need for explanation, no quixotic fire of revenge, just a quiet empty gesture of the inevitable.

The young detective was going on about his trip to St. John the Baptist: how the girl in the flower-print dress told him where to find the Knucklehead and the road up to the syrup mill, and how “there was an alligator in the little pond right there with the crushing machine and the huge kettle of syrup, cane fields for miles in all directions and there’s a damned alligator in the pond. Boss the damned thing was five feet long. It wasn’t the biggest that ever was, but just the same. I mean how do the fish get in there? Anyway, so the Knucklehead knows his rights, but the Sheriff in La Place wanted a warrant, and the judge wanted some evidence and…”

Tully caught a snip of the monologue and interrupted saying, “The Knucklehead didn’t do it. I mean yeah, go find him and all, but he didn’t do it. He ain’t got the balls. What about the deacon’s wife? You said she hated him alright, then it goes to follow that she hated the kid too. I mean she didn’t do it herself, but that church has got some secrets. Ya heard me?”

“You mean like maybe the Knucklehead ain’t Eleanor’s daddy?” The young detective replied. Boss Tully wanted to slap him for being stupid but instead cocked his head, opened his eyes wide, and said: “Damn. You are a detective.”

Tully looked at the three beignets arranged on the napkin in a line to the cup, like a spine to a skull, and picked the one in the middle.

###

The car wreck that left bone fragments in Brian’s brain changed a 22-year-old electrician’s apprentice with a rock band and a pretty wife, into an unassuming simpleton, disheveled and smelly with a withered hand and a limp. He walked up to Eddy wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a black Rush 1981 concert tour t-shirt. His words came slow and deliberate; just like his speech therapist taught him. “Can I help you, Mr. Eddy?”

“Sure, chief. So, Brian, how long you been married?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been married five years now.”

“Does she come to see you?”

“I got the keys, remember?”

“What?”

“I go home and see her.”

“My mom brought me a radio.”

“Cool. What do you listen to?”

“News.”

“News?”

“Yeah, I like to keep up on current events.”

“Yeah? So, what’s happening in the world today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you listen to your radio today?”

“Yeah, I listen every morning.”

“So, what’s happening in the world today?”

Brian looked at him with a sly smile and said, “I don’t know... You got da keys, brah.”

John Tory was a small man with a thin dishwater blonde ponytail hanging from the back of his balding head who wore wire-rim glasses and shaved his wispy beard into a soul patch beneath his lip. He lit a joint and passed it to Sam. “So read us a poem.” The old poet said. “What is it called again? The form you do.” “Jueju.” He replied. “What is that?” Sam asked, holding his toke. “It’s from the Tang Dynasty it is basically a Chinese quatrain… four lines of five syllables.” “Read the fucking poem.” The old poet said.

Then We Burned The Village

A meditation of ragged mud-men the living the dead the last black lily

John Tory looked at the old poet and said, “I’m going to find my friend, you coming?” “No, I gotta stay here but my boy Sam wants to go on an adventure. Don’t ya Sam?” “Sure,” Sam said with a laugh I never miss an adventure. Where are we goin’?” “We’re going to find my friend.” John Tory replied with a sly smile. Sam had been warned. The storm was coming, and he could feel the pressure starting to drop.

The two men walked in what seemed to Sam to be a completely random direction turning onto smaller and smaller streets until they reached a neighborhood completely covered in vines. The old two-story townhouses were overwhelmed by a thick cascade of yellow blossoms. A pair of junksick zombies were walking in toward them but knew better than to ask.

John Tory walked up to a house and kicked in the door. Sam followed him in. The front room had turned columns and peeling wallpaper. The ceiling had caved in leaving a pile of rubble and a view all the way to daylight through the vine-covered roof. John Torry opened the dust cover on the upright piano rotting against the parlor wall. He played a soft improvisation, melodic in its awareness of the piano’s lack of tune. His playing built to a hammering howling state of ecstasy as Sam wondered What is wrong with me? Why am I so uptight?

John Tory stopped playing. “He’s not here. Come on, let’s go.” As they walked Sam listened to the stories of burning villages and the pacifist medic killing one man to save another. He talked of how they were in Cambodia in ‘67 three years before Nixon announced the invasion. The fact that what he had done was illegal made him feel less like a soldier and more like a murderer. “I’ve seen villages burn, no shit, I’ve seen fucking villages burn.” Sam could feel the world start to spin but he couldn’t puss-out on the adventure, so he walked along and listened.

The next stop was a neighborhood bar called Peppermint Lounge. “I don’t think we’re welcome in there,” Sam said.

“Don’t worry I come here all the time. Just don’t act stupid. Ya heard me?”

The bartender looked at them sidelong but took their money. John

Torry put two quarters in the pool table and racked the balls as Sam tried not to look at the huge black man staring at them and whispering to his friends. As he watched him walk across the room Sam could feel what Miss Odette had called the hurricane coming for him. Here it comes he thought as the big man walked up to them. “What the fuck are you doin’ in here?” he said, making sure everyone could hear him. The gesture was so fast and so automatic no one saw it. Suddenly the little man had the 45’s muzzle right up the big man’s nose looking him straight in the eyes and saying softly, “I’m looking for my friend.” “I hope you find him.” the big man replied.

“Good. So, I am going to finish my drink and we’re gonna go look someplace else. Alright?”

“Alright.”

John Tory holstered the pistol and drank down his beer as the big man walked back to his friends.

“What the fuck was that shit, Dewayne?

“Fuck if I know. The man said he was looking for his friend and I said, “I hope you find him.”

Everyone in the bar laughed as Sam and John Tory walked out to the street.

Contributor Notes

Poems by Jonathan Bracker have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, and other periodicals, and in eight collections, the latest of which, from Seven Kitchens Press, is Attending Junior High. Bracker is the editor of Bright Cages: Selected Poems of Christopher Morley (University of Pennsylvania Press: 1965; reissued 2018); co-author with Mark I. Wallach of Christopher Morley (Twayne: 1976); and editor of A Little Patch of Shepherd’s Thyme: Prose Passages Of Thomas Hardy Arranged As Verse (Moving Finger Press: 2013). He has lived in San Francisco since 1973.

Floyd Collins has both an MFA and PhD from the University of Arkansas. His PhD dissertation was published by Delaware UP, and he has published five books of poetry, most recently What Harvest: Poems on the Siege and Battle of the Alamo. His collection of critical essays titled The Living Artifact was published by Stephen F Austin University Press in fall 2021, and his poetry and essays appear regularly in The Arkansas Review, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review.

Malaika Favorite is a visual artist and writer. Poetry publications: ASCENSION , Broadside Lotus Press 2016, Dreaming at the Manor (Finishing Line Press 2014) and Illuminated Manuscript, (New Orleans Poetry Journal Press, 1991). Her poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including: you say. say and Hell strung and crooked (Uphook Press), Pen International, Hurricane Blues, Drumvoices review, Uncommon Place, Xavier Review, The Maple Leaf Rag, Visions International, Louisiana Literature, Louisiana English Journal, Big Muddy, and Art Papers.

Passionate about great stories and good causes, Randy Fertel has taught the literature of war since 1981 at Tulane and the New School for Social Research. His award-winning 2011 memoir, The Gorilla Man and the

Empress of Steak , unspools untold tales as he tries to makes sense of his parents—and himself—in a colorful, food-obsessed New Orleans. Novelist Tim O’Brien calls his award-winning new book, A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation, “a stunner of a book—smart, jarring, innovative, witty, provocative, wise, and beautifully written.” He founded the Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-telling in memory of his friend, whistleblower and investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour. He is Trustee Emeritus at The Kenyon Review. His new book Winging It: The Secret Power of Spontaneity is forthcoming.

Charles Franklin was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, moved to Fayetteville and then to New Orleans in the 1970s. He is a musician and former filmshoot technician as well as a lifelong photographer, now living in mid-city.

Juyanne James is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Holy Cross. She is the author of The Persimmon Trail and Other Stories (Chin Music Press, 2015), her debut collection of 17 stories in which she interprets the African American experience in Louisiana, as well as Table Scraps and Other Essays (Resource Publishers, 2019), a memoir about growing up in a troubled home. Her stories and essays have been published in journals, such as The Louisville Review, Mythium, Bayou Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Thrice, and Ponder Review, and included in the anthologies New Stories from the South: 2009 (Algonquin) and Something in the Water: 20 Louisiana Stories (Portals Press, 2011). Her essay “Table Scraps” was a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2014.

Since receiving his MFA in storytelling from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago Jonathan Kline has performed in NYC, Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans, Dublin and Cork Ireland. His performance monologues include Conceptual Cowboy Yodeling,

Stories My Mother Told Me Never to Tell

When I was 20, and The Terminal Hotel. He has been a visiting artist at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Tulane University, and New Orleans Center for Creative Art. In 2011 he was awarded a residency by the Santa

Fe Art Institute. His stories have been published in The Xavier Review, The Maple Leaf Rag and Indigent Press. His poems have been published in Tribes Magazine, Big Bridge, Yawp, Cocktail, The Maple St. Rag, and The Journal of American Poetry. The Wisdom of Ashes a short sort of novel was released in 2013 by Lavender Ink and the sequel Standing at The Cloister’s Gate is going to be released by Lavender Ink in October 2022

James Nolan’s James Nolan’s thirteenth book, Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans, will be published next year by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, and a new version of the City Lights anthology of his translations of the Spanish poet Gil de Biedma is forthcoming from Fonograf Editions. Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy (University Press of Mississippi) won the 2018 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Memoir. His fiction includes You Don’t Know Me: New and Selected Stories (winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Gold Medal in Southern Fiction), the novel Higher Ground (awarded a Faulkner/Wisdom Gold Medal), and Perpetual Care: Stories. The collections of his poetry are Nasty Water: Collected New Orleans Poems, Why I Live in the Forest, What Moves Is Not the Wind, and Drunk on Salt, as well as a volume of Neruda translations, Stones of the Sky. He has received an N.E.A. grant as well as a Javits and two Fulbright fellowships, and taught at universities in San Francisco, Barcelona, Madrid, Beijing, and Florida, as well as at Tulane and Loyola in his native New Orleans, where he now lives.

Tim Skeen is the author of three books of poetry: Kentucky Swami, winner of the 2001 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry; Risk, winner of the 2013 White Pine Press Poetry Prize; and Reward, published by Finishing Line Press. He teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State.

Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter. Since finishing his MFA in Poetry at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he spends his spare time apprenticing as a gold- and silver-smith. His first collection How We Bury Our Dead by Cobalt Press was released in March, 2015, and Conflict Tours (Cobalt Press) was released in 2017.

A. P. Walton is a poet, writer, and critical researcher whose works include Diorama Appalachia (2011) and a study, Toward Innumerable Futures: Frank Stanford & Origins (2015). He has been on the move since infancy and lives, writes, and conducts critical research in northern New England.