Crab Orchard Review Vol 9 No 2 S/F 2004

In this volume:

~ Wander This World

Migration Immigration

7

92

ISSN 1083-5571

$8.00us Vol. 9 No. 2

77108 3 5 5 7 1

$8.00

Kristin Naca Thomas O’Malley Mike Perez Sara Pipher Pamela Porter Susan Azar Porterfield Christine Rhein Roxana Rivera Jorge Sánchez A. Sandosharaj Deema K. Shehabi Betsy Sholl Lilvia Soto Susan Sterling Lynne Thompson Angela Narciso Torres J.L. Torres Beverly Tsao Heather Villars Eamonn Wall

Crab Orchard Review

9

John Guzlowski Nathalie Handal Donna Hemans Leticia Hernández-Linares Luisa Igloria Laura Johnson Fady Joudah Adrianne Kalfopoulou Holly Karapetkova Sarah Kennedy Jesse Lee Kercheval Sharon Kessler Vandana Khanna Quraysh Ali Lansana Jeffrey Levine Ada Limón Elline Lipkin Mike Maniquiz Sharon May Shara McCallum Orlando Ricardo Menes

Volume 9, Number 2 Summer/Fall 2004

Francisco Aragón Joy Arbor William Archila Sefi Atta Ned Balbo Aliki Barnstone Lory Bedikian Jenny Benjamin-Smith Danit Brown Joseph Campana C.P. Cavafy Richard Cecil Susanna Childress Kevin Craft Silvia Curbelo Bianca Díaz Ana Doina Qwo-Li Driskill Camille Dungy Phebus Etienne Blas Falconer Sascha Feinstein Teresa R. Funke Cameron K. Gearen Lea Goldberg Kevin A. González Sapna Gupta

Crab Orchard Review

Cover: Six photographs by Vagner Whitehead © 2004.

Vagner Whitehead is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

& Exile

A B ORCH A R R C D •

•

REVIEW

C RAB •

ORCH A R D •

REVIEW A JOURNAL OF CREATIVE WORKS

VOL. 9 NO. 2

“Hidden everywhere, a myriad leather seed-cases lie in wait . . .”

—“Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” Thomas Kinsella Editor & Poetry Editor Allison Joseph

Founding Editor Richard Peterson

Prose Editor Carolyn Alessio

Managing Editor Jon Tribble

Editorial Interns Allison Campbell Scott Beem Chris Dennis Jon Friedler Tim Marsh Linsey Maughan Kandace McCoy Lena Morsch Chad Parmenter Benjamin Percy Patty Dickson Pieczka Renee Wells Danny Wilson

Assistant Editors Barbara Eidlin Teresa Kramer Steven Leek Kevin McKelvey Dave Neis Mark Vannier Josh Vinzant Board of Advisors Ellen Gilchrist Charles Johnson Rodney Jones Thomas Kinsella Richard Russo

Book Review Editor Jon Tribble

Summer/Fall 2004 ISSN 1083-5571

The Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Address all correspondence to: CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW Southern Illinois University Carbondale Carbondale, Illinois 62901-4503 Crab Orchard Review (ISSN 1083-5571) is published twice a year by the Department of English, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Subscription rates in the United States for individuals are $15 for one year, $25 for two years, $35 for three years; foreign rates for individuals are, respectively, $20, $35, and $50.

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The publication of Crab Orchard Review is made possible with support from the Chancellor, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and through generous private and corporate donations.

Lines from Thomas Kinsella’s poem “Crab Orchard Sanctuary: Late October” are reprinted from Thomas Kinsella: Poems 1956-1973 (North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1979) and appear by permission of the author.

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The editors and staff of Crab Orchard Review dedicate this issue to the memory of four individuals who as students, colleagues, writers, and friends enriched our lives:

In Memoriam

ROXANA RIVERA SENATOR PAUL SIMON JEHAN VAZIRANI KOMUNYAKAA REETIKA VAZIRANI

C RAB •

ORCH A R D •

REVIEW

SUMMER/FALL 2004

VOLUME 9, NUMBER 2

FICTION AND PROSE Sefi Atta

Wal-Mart Has Plantains

1

Danit Brown

Thanksgiving

15

Sapna Gupta

Rajni Loves le Cancan

47

Donna Hemans

Harvest

61

Sharon May

April 17th

92

Thomas O’Malley

All the Way from America

99

Sara Pipher

Making Merit

125

Susan Sterling

Postcards

129

Heather Villars

For the Late-Nineteenth Century American Orphan: Travel Tips

153

Teresa R. Funke

Una Hija Americana

159

A. Sandosharaj

Several Years Before My Birth

189

Allison Joseph

Remembering Roxana

195

Book Reviews

Recent Titles by David Dominguez, Suji Kwock Kim, Shara McCallum, Jay Rogoff, and an Anthology of Latino Writings on the Sacred

232

POETRY Francisco Aragón

Viejo Mundo Exile’s Collage

27 29

Joy Arbor

Berlin Snapshots Where Are You From, Originally?

31 32

William Archila

The Art of Exile

34

Ned Balbo

White Flowers

36

Lory Bedikian

Two Open Palms

41

Jenny Benjamin-Smith Maria Liberita Graziani Beniamino Mary Benjamin, 1942 Dressing Vincenzo

43 44 45

Joseph Campana

Alexandria

72

C.P. Cavafy translated by Aliki Barnstone

Exiles In the Port The City

74 75 76

Richard Cecil

Roots

77

Susanna Childress

Santo Domingo

80

Kevin Craft

The Difference

81

Silvia Curbelo

The Visitors

83

Bianca Diaz

Halation

84

Ana Doina

Noah

87

Qwo-Li Driskill

Evening with Andrew Jackson

90

Camille Dungy

seeing what awaited her, she took the ghost path home

110

Phebus Etienne

Key Points from the Assimilation Pamphlet

112

Blas Falconer

The Given Account

114

Sascha Feinstein

Smalls’ Paradise, 1929

116

Cameron K. Gearen

Alias

118

Lea Goldberg translated by Sharon Kessler

Nameless Journey Tel Aviv 1935

120 122

Kevin A. González

Julio, El Barbero

123

John Guzlowski

Poland

134

Nathalie Handal

Baladna

136

Leticia HernándezLinares

Sweat

137

Luisa Igloria

What You Remember

140

Laura Johnson

Medicine Show

142

Fady Joudah

Travel Document Scarecrow Meheba Children

144 145 146

Adrianne Kalfopoulou

The Border

148

Holly Karapetkova

For My American Lover, Upon My Leaving

150

Sarah Kennedy

The Will of Mary Carryll: 1809

151

Jesse Lee Kercheval

The City Where—I’m Told— My Mother Was Young

166

Vandana Khanna

My Mother at JFK

168

Quraysh Ali Lansana

purgatory

170

Jeffrey Levine

Arabia Petra

171

Ada Limón

Roberto Clemente

172

Elline Lipkin

Bonne Maman

174

Mike Maniquiz

We Should Have Turned Right

176

Shara McCallum

Hanover Museum: Lucea, Jamaica, 2000 Dear History,

177 178

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Old Man Grier

179

Kristin Naca

Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh

181

Mike Perez

The Story of the Missing Fingertip on My Dad’s Right Hand

183

Pamela Porter

Checkpoint: Buenos Aires

184

Susan Azar Porterfield Lebanon

186

Christine Rhein

187

My Father Talks of 1946

Roxana Rivera

To the Xicana in the Mirror Un Cuento Tita’s Soto El Árbol Trenzas Mandas Winters Con Canela, Miel, y Fe

199 200 202 203 204 206 208 209

Jorge Sánchez

Relic

210

Deema K. Shehabi

Of Harvest and Flight Migrant Earth

212 214

Betsy Sholl

After That In a Time of Drought

215 217

Lilvia Soto

Citizenship

219

Lynne Thompson

Song for Two Immigrants

221

Angela Narciso Torres

To Return to San Juan

222

J.L. Torres

Salsa Dancing The Crux

224 226

Beverly Tsao

Midwife

227

Eamonn Wall

Reader Our Wexford People Ellis Island

228 229 230

Contributors’ Notes

246

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2004

257 268

Announcements

We would like to congratulate past contributor J. Weintraub. His nonfiction piece “My Mother’s Recipes,” which appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Volume 8, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 2003), was selected for a 2004 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award.

Beginning with Volume 9, Crab Orchard Review will publish a Winter/Spring general issue and a Summer/Fall special issue each year.

Please check the Crab Orchard Review website’s “General Guidelines for Submissions” for more information: <http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd/guid2.html>

For writers interested in submitting work in 2004: Crab Orchard Review will continue reading for our 2005 Summer/Fall special issue until the end of November 2004. The topic of the issue is “Ten Years After: Documenting a Decade 1995–2005.” We will begin reading submissions for the 2006 Winter/Spring general issue after January 20, 2005. Please do not send work to be considered for a general issue until then. Thank you.

Sefi Atta

Wal-Mart Has Plantains

THE DPS MAN ASKED why I moved to Mississippi. “It’s a long way from Africa,” he said, as if giving a friendly warning. He was wearing a wig the exact color of my daughter Rolari’s stuffed bunny, Poopy. Perhaps this was why she stared at him.

“My husband’s work,” I said with a smile.

“You military?”

“No.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Where does your husband work?”

“The community clinic,” I said.

“He a doctor?”

“Yes.” “What kind of doctor?”

“Children’s.”

He smoothed the laminate of my driver’s license. “Is he from around here?”

“No,” I said. I was getting tired of answering him.

“He’s from Nigeria too?”

I glanced at Rolari. She shrugged.

“Yes,” I said.

The DPS man narrowed his eyes. “Where in Africa is Nigeria?”

“West Coast.”

“That near the Nile or something?”

I held out my hand. “River Niger.”

“Must be real hot over there.”

“As a summer afternoon here,” I said.

I took my driver’s license from him and checked that my last name, Ogendengbe, was spelled correctly. Rolari stood on her toes and peered at my photograph. “You look pretty,” she murmured.

The camera lens had caught me wincing. I mimicked my expression in the photograph and she nudged me. Rolari hated for me to disregard her compliments. “Stop,” she whispered.

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The DPS man lifted his chin in her direction. “Was she born here?”

Instinctively, I placed my hand on her shoulder. “She was born in Nigeria.”

He noticed the drop in my voice.

“Well, have a good one,” he said.

“He has funny hair,” Rolari said before we were out the door.

I squeezed her shoulder. “That’s okay.”

She mistook my indulgence for encouragement. “But it’s true, Mama. It had bits like this and stuff sticking up…”

She ran her hands over her cornrows and slid them down to her gold hoop earrings. She was almost six and her language was not as specific as her observations.

“People here ask too many personal questions,” she said, shaking her head.

I ushered her outside before she could say any more. She’d heard that from me.

We’d been in Mississippi almost three months. I was giving up my New York driver’s license; I had no use for one. In New York, I needed a driver’s license for out-of-state audit jobs, all within the Tristate area. I told my work friends, Naomi and Sheila, who often traveled farther than me, that I was moving to Mississippi. Sheila covered her mouth with both hands: “Yikes! They sit on porches and spit tobacco!” “Girl,” Naomi said. “Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and what’s the other one?” “Tennessee,” Sheila said, shutting her eyes.

“Texas,” Naomi said. “Now, you know I’ll miss you, but don’t be inviting me.” Our boss, Jim, thought anywhere outside New York would be an improvement. “You’ll have less stress,” he said, giving a royal wave. “You’ll spend more time with your family. You’ll love small-town America. Believe me.” My job was always open, he said, in case I changed my mind. Still, within a week, he was ignoring me, and before my notice was up, he’d placed an ad in the Sunday Times: Internal Auditor. CPA Required. Limited Travel.

“Watch it,” I said, reaching for Rolari’s hand. I stepped down a couple of inches from the pavement to the parking lot outside the Drivers License Office. Her sneakers hit the tarmac and lit up.

“Ow!” she yelled.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She hopped. “I broke my leg.”

“You didn’t.”

“Really, Mama. I’m not faking.”

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Sefi Atta

She pointed at her smiley ankle socks. I summoned as much patience as I could; I’d only just picked her up from school.

“Maybe we should take you to Daddy’s clinic?”

She spread her fingers. “No! He’ll give me a big shot!”

Recently she was complaining about too many ailments, stomach aches especially. Sanwo said he had just the cure.

He came ahead of us, after his residency at New York University Hospital. Rolari and I followed soon after because the school year started early in Mississippi. Sanwo wanted her in the Catholic school across from his clinic: they had a good racial mix. His clinic catered to Medicare and Medicaid patients. He was employed there under a government scheme for foreign-trained doctors. After four years, our family would be eligible for green cards. In another five, we would qualify for U.S. citizenship. Under this scheme, I was not entitled to work for the first four years.

“I’ll die of boredom,” I said when we found out. I’d assumed I would be able to renew my employment authorization. There was no reason to think I couldn’t. The United States encouraged independence, especially for women.

The INS telephone assistant I spoke to explained that I was allowed to work as the spouse of an exchange student, but not as the spouse of a Work Permit holder. Sanwo reminded me of the mornings we left Rolari in daycare in New York and I began to cry because she didn’t want me to leave; nights she had fevers and vomited on my chest. I moved her to another daycare when she developed a diaper rash that looked like a second degree burn. She once had a cold so bad mucus was seeping out of her eyes. I took a day off to nurse her and cursed Sanwo out when he couldn’t do the same. Whenever I got stuck in traffic and I was running late to pick Rolari up from daycare, I called him, on the New Jersey Turnpike, over George Washington Bridge, saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do this anymore.”

“Remember?” he said. “We won’t have to go through that wahala again.”

“But she’s older,” I insisted. “She doesn’t get sick like that.

She’ll be in school most of the day. You’re not on call twenty-four/ seven. I have to work. I’ve always worked. Why can’t I work?”

My mother worked. She taught Sanwo when he was in medical school: pediatrics. She had four children. I was her third. Throughout my childhood in Nigeria, I was raised by nannies, drivers shuttled me to and from school, piano and tennis lessons. My father ran an Crab Orchard Review ◆ 3

Sefi Atta

accounting firm. I worked for him after I graduated from university.

Sanwo was a resident when we met and he lived in hospital accommodation. His government salary could barely afford him a suit for our wedding; I was living off my father’s generous senior staff allowance and waiting to be promoted to a manager. My father called me his accountant. My sister was a lawyer and my brothers were doctors in private practice. Like my mother, Sanwo was not interested in joining any private practice in Nigeria. He said he’d end up dispensing anti-malarials and antibiotics and probably killing patients from not keeping up with pediatrics. At his teaching hospital, patients were sent out to buy their own IV drips and wound dressings.

The medical association and nurses’ union went on strikes because their salaries were delayed. We had to leave Nigeria, Sanwo decided, after Rolari was born. “At least your mother had your old man. Look at me. Who can you say you have? You’ll lose respect for me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I immediately said.

“Don’t deceive yourself,” Sanwo said just as fast.

At the time I was paying our rent, buying Rolari’s clothes and diapers.

Sanwo’s mother had raised four children on her own. Their father died of cancer when he was eight. Sanwo was the eldest and I thought he behaved more like an uncle than an older brother, though he denied this. Now that he was out of residency, he sent money home through Western Union; I’d never had to.

I strapped Rolari in her car seat and she began to sing the song that never ended.

Fall in Mississippi was not as dull as New York, or as epidemic.

I took the bridge over Sowashee Creek to Wal-Mart Supercenter and lowered my window to let in fresh air. A white Ford pickup crawled ahead of us for most of the way. This one had a Proud Mom sticker. In Mississippi, I’d learned not to tailgate proud moms: they accelerated for nobody. I’d also learned that when vehicles pulled over on a street, without a siren to be heard, a funeral procession was approaching. Twice I’d witnessed this, and only once had I seen people sitting on a porch. That was on Old Country Club Road, where the houses were mansions. Not one tobacco chewer had I come across, but I’d seen spitters, especially at traffic lights—they stopped, opened their car doors and leaned over. This was not a small town; it was a small city, with as many trailer parks as secondhand car dealerships; as many instant cash businesses as 4 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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Dollar Stores. There was a Coca-Cola bottling plant, a cemetery dating back to an 1878 Yellow Fever epidemic, an old opera house that was being renovated, a new mall that could have been any in the Tristate. Whenever we drove around the city, Rolari looked out for the carousel horses at designated historic buildings. Sanwo was the Hummer spotter in our family; he was vicariously triumphant whenever we passed one: “Baba ke! That’s my baby!” In his dreams, I said. He didn’t gape at other women, so I was jealous of his attraction to Hummers. Me, myself, I’d stopped being surprised by the number of churches in the city. There was one with every head turn and I wondered just how many prayers were made between Sundays, and how much was collected in tithes.

I glanced at Rolari in the rearview mirror. “You want jollof rice and chicken tonight?”

She was enjoying singing so much she was rocking.

“How’s your stomach?” I asked.

She slapped her knees. “Aw! Now I have to start all over again!”

“Does your belly still hurt?”

She tilted her head. “I already told you, Mama.”

I would have to buy plantains, I thought; I couldn’t make jollof rice and chicken without fried plantains.

THE PARKING LOT AT WAL-MART was packed as usual. Rolari begged to sit in a cart and I refused. “You break your leg walking,” I said.

“That’s mean,” she said, scowling.

I smiled. “Tough.”

“Please,” she said, placing her palms together. “I won’t fall out and break my head.”

I carried her into the cart. As I pushed, she started humming the song that never ended with such intensity her nostrils flared.

“Sh,” I hissed and headed for the produce department.

When Sanwo got his job at the community clinic, I was relieved to hear there was another Nigerian there, Dr. Makanju. He had a family. I met his wife, Funke, their four-year-old daughter, Bimbo, and son, Dare, who had just had his second birthday. My first thought was that Americans would misconstrue their names. “They do,” Funke agreed cheerfully. She rolled up the sleeves of her tie-anddye agbada. “I keep correcting them. Bim-buh. Bim-buh. Da-reh.

Da-reh. They even mess up my own name. They call me Funky.

Foon-keh, I tell them. Foon…”

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Sefi Atta

I couldn’t imagine expending that much energy over names. At work, I’d used my birth name, Coker. My married name, Ogedengbe, would have been a nuisance at clients’ meetings. “Dr. Ogy-diggywhat?” Sanwo’s patients asked. Some laughed, others crossed their arms in resignation and said, “Uh-oh,” as if Sanwo were another Medicare Medicaid conspiracy against them.

I asked Funke if she ever succeeded in correcting people. “You have to be patient with Americans,” she said—as though Americans were pets to be trained. Her children were born in America. Why did she choose such Nigerian names? Bimbo especially. These were considerations any immigrant would have, if they wanted their children to go to school in peace. Funke, I discovered, was more concerned about the culinary implications of immigration.

“Mississippi is not bad,” she said. “Only I can’t eat their food. All I can say is thank God they have goat meat.”

“Goat meat?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “They have goat farms here, but they don’t kill them like we kill them at home, slitting their throat and all that. You know? You can’t find fresh fish in this city either. Fresh from the sea? Only catfish.”

“Catfish,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “And you know, catfish isn’t good for pepper soup. My husband likes his with fresh fish. He won’t eat anything else. But they have oxtails here, and okra, and yes, pickled Scotch bonnets. In Wal-Mart. Look for them in the produce section.

Habañeros, they call them. They even have plantains.”

“Wal-Mart has plantains?” I said.

I was surprised. Hispanics preferred them green, she said, rather than yellow and ripe as Nigerians ate them.

Within a day, Rolari and Bimbo became playmates. By the next, Rolari was teaching Bimbo how to behead Barbies. Sanwo and Dr. Makanju discussed medicine, CMEs, and E-trade. Funke and I talked about where to find Nigerian food: yams in Birmingham, tripe from a farmers’ market in Atlanta, goat meat from a Halal butcher in Jackson.

She and Hakeem went to the INS office in New Orleans to get their green cards. I looked after their children for the day. Funke returned with a bag of cassava meal for me, a bottle of palm oil to make black-eyed peas and chin-chin for Rolari.

Now, the Makanjus had moved to North Carolina and Funke had fresh fish. In the produce department, I spotted a basket of ripe 6 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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plantains. I was glad Wal-Mart stocked plantains. I enjoyed Nigerian food; I missed Nigerian food. I would not traverse the South in search of Nigerian food. I wasn’t one of those who made regular trips to the 42nd Street African food store in New York, either. In Mississippi, my family ate fried chicken, catfish, collard greens, sweet potato, and macaroni cheese, at Tommy’s, for less than five dollars a head, unlike the gourmet prices we paid for soul food in Harlem.

MY WAL-MART ASSISTANT was called LaShanda. I placed the plantains on the belt of her counter. She held one up. “These bananas?”

She must have had at least five hundred braid extensions and they were neatly knotted in a bun.

“Plantains,” I said.

“Huh?” “Plantains.”

She lifted a corner of her mouth. “These ain’t bananas?”

“No.” “Oh. I thought they was bananas.”

A woman behind her was holding a loaf of bread and eyeing us.

Rolari raised her hands in exasperation.

LaShanda checked her code sheet. “Plan…what d’you call them?”

“Tains,” I said, leaning over. I could not read the print on the sheet.

She found the correct code. “Oh, here. Tains.”

Rolari rolled her eyes.

“How do these um, um, plan…taste?” LaShanda asked, tapping the code.

“Like bananas,” I said.

She looked up. “Where your accent from?”

“Africa.”

“For real? Do you do braids?”

“Nah,” I said, Americanizing my voice, as if to confirm my inadequacy.

She smiled. “Who do your baby cornrows?”

“Me,” I said, patting my chest.

She smoothed back her extensions. “I’m looking for someone to do my micro braids.”

“They’re beautiful,” I said, sliding a box of Uncle Ben’s Rice toward her.

She pursed her lips. “Yeah, but they be costing me too much.”

A hundred and fifty dollars. I inquired at Y-Not-Turn-Heads Crab Orchard Review ◆ 7

Sefi Atta

salon in my first week of arriving in the city, and the hair stylist there said she could finish them in no less than eight hours. This stylist didn’t know how to twist my natural hair. “You mean dreads?” she asked. “Two strand twists,” I explained. “Uh-uh, we don’t do that here,” she said. She couldn’t trim natural hair either. I went to JCPenney to get my ends trimmed. “I haven’t seen virgin hair in years,” the stylist there said. “Y’all don’t get hair relaxers in Africa?”

I didn’t go natural until I got to New York. Malaika in Brooklyn twisted my hair and it grew long and strong, and she gave me aromatherapy scalp massages, and she burned incense to purify my spirit. I was so frustrated trying to find a replacement for Malaika in Mississippi, I asked Sanwo to take me to his barbers on Fifth Street, where my hair was cropped down to a quarter of an inch. I paid his barber, Mr. Nobles, seven dollars, and so long as I kept my mouth shut, I got to listen to Mr. Nobles’s opinions on President Bush’s first term, Shaquille O’Neal’s game, that Monica Lewinsky woman, West Nile disease, Genesis, as he maneuvered between his Martin Luther King Jr. poster and pedestal: “Eve was carved from Adam’s rib. See? Not the other way round. That’s why I believe a woman gotta stay at home and take care of her man and kids. You feeling me, sister?”

Mr. Nobles’s stomach was like a pregnant woman’s. He shaped my hair with his clippers, put a smile on my face. I looked forward to seeing him every other week. From him, I heard about the tornado season—the city had not been hit in over a hundred years. I heard about the drug dealers around, the school shooting at Pearl, a suicide ruling in a town nearby. “Valedictorian,” Mr. Nobles said. “Messing with white girls. They hanged him.” “People here love God,” he said about the number of churches around. “But they don’t love God enough to come together in worship.” It was the same everywhere in the world, I said. “I can’t speak for anywhere else,” Mr. Nobles said. “Except here.”

Sometimes I studied his features in the mirror. He had a shiny round nose, on which he perched his bifocals, and wide lips. He could easily be a Yoruba man. Was he? How would he know after so many generations? Did he care about his African ancestry? And here I was with my husband Sanwo, two Yorubas who came to Mississippi voluntarily in the year 2001, and we were grateful for the opportunity to find work. History had its twists for the African Diaspora.

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Sefi Atta

ROLARI WOULDN’T GET OUT OF THE CART until I’d finished unloading my bags. I’d promised that we’d stop at Toys “R” Us, but I ended up driving home because I had a couple of Cornish hens in my trunk from Wal-Mart.

Where we lived, a block of apartments next to a radio station, most of our neighbors were families who were on the waiting list for housing at the naval base outside the city. They were called Navy. People sometimes asked if our family were Navy. Rather than explain our circumstance, I was tempted to say yes.

At home, I defrosted the Cornish hens in the microwave and rinsed them; chopped the tomatoes, onions, and habañeros and liquidized them; emptied the liquidizer into a pot and poured in three cups of Uncle Ben’s Rice; stuffed the chickens with lemon halves and onion quarters and rubbed them with mustard. Then I dusted them with black pepper and rosemary.

Rolari watched television as the oven preheated.

“Are you playing soccer this Saturday?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” she mumbled.

“Paige’s party, is it morning or afternoon?”

She didn’t know either. The party was at a skating rink. I would have to buy Paige a present; a gift bag with a soccer theme and tissues to match. I tapped my forehead. Why didn’t I think of this in Wal-Mart?

“I think the party is the same time as your soccer,” I said, prodding the Cornish hens. “Will you go to soccer or will you go to Paige’s birthday?”

Rolari screwed up her nose. “Paige plays soccer with me.”

“What’s wrong with me today? I’d better ask her mother what’s happening.”

The onion fumes stung my eyes. I cleaned my tears with a towel from the kitchen roll and left a black smear of mascara.

Through Rolari I’d met other women. There was Paige’s mom, Lynn.

She had bangs that flipped up, walked with a boyish bounce, and always had traces of crimson lipstick. She was Rolari and Paige’s soccer coach.

“Good shot!” she cheered and raised her thumb. “Way to go!” She didn’t yell like some coaches and sometimes she even forgot the score.

After our games, she hugged the girls and handed them Fruit RollUps. “How do you manage your time, Lynn?” I asked. She was like a CEO without the fraud scandal and million dollar benefits, and she was actually busy. She carpooled, organized charity walks. She served Crab Orchard Review ◆ 9

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on the PTA and not even in a nyah-nyah way, that one might despise her. I saw her on local TV serving up at God’s Kitchen, another time she was on the news selling tickets for the symphony orchestra. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “Honestly, my life is like one big circus.”

There was Meena. Meena’s son, Ali, had a crush on Rolari, Meena said. “Every time he sees her he pedals so fast. I don’t know why, eh, Ali?” Meena was from Pakistan. She was about a decade younger than me and her hair was gray and thinning. In Pakistan, she worked as a psychologist before her family came to the U.S. Now, her husband worked for a state psychiatric hospital and Meena was at home. They lived in our apartment block. True enough, Ali worked his skinny legs on his tricycle, trying to keep up with Rolari. Rolari urged him, “Come on, Ali! Come on!” knowing fully well she was going to win their races.

Meena and I came outside to watch them play. Perhaps because we were foreigners, we had the same sense of security about our apartment block. We worried about kidnappers; we talked about going back to school. She wanted to get a Ph.D. Her mother-in-law was coming from Pakistan to help her with Ali. She thought I should consider an online MBA. “The way I feel?” I said. “Fifteen years out of college. I studied for institute exams at home, state boards here. I can’t go back to school, Meena, even if we could afford it. I honestly can’t study a paragraph.”

At her own school, I’d assumed Rolari would become friends with Kiara. Kiara had her hair pressed and coordinated her barrettes with her clothes. Rolari barely mentioned her name and I kept asking, “Don’t you play with Kiara?” “Nope,” Rolari said. Occasionally she came home and complained, “Kiara was mean. She went like this: whatever!” or “Kiara was laughing at my name. She said Ogedengbe means Big Booger.” Kiara began to bug me. Her mother, Brenda, had introduced herself one morning when I was almost late getting Rolari to school.

She was wearing a white linen shirt; I was in gray sweat pants. “Well, hello!” she said. “My husband knows your husband! Yes, mine’s a doctor too. We should get together sometime. We’re not from around here either. We’re from Atlanta.” Then she whispered before we parted. “I know people say Africans and African-Americans don’t get along, but we’re both doctor’s wives…”

I wondered—not about Africans and African-Americans getting along; that I’d heard before—why she thought we could get along because we were doctors’ wives.

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past, because I’d experienced their type of prejudice in New York, and was not about to guess whether or not they actually noticed me. Then I began to avoid Brenda, because I noticed that if Brenda had a second to spend with me, she would spend that second trashing a kid in the class, his or her mother, the teacher, or teacher’s assistant—Oh, he’s bad. Her mother should have taught her better. Is he ADHD or something? I don’t know what that woman is teaching them. The Montessori teacher was much better. Much, much better last year. But Kiara says Grandma Pigford never helps her with her reading. It’s not just white folk, now. Some of ours can be a little resentful when you’re successful. They look at women like us and think, well, she’s a doctor’s wife. She doesn’t have to work.

“Her?” she said about Chad’s mother, Dr. Evans. “She never comes to anything in class. She’s from around here. Oh, trust me, she’s definitely from around here.”

Dr. Yolanda Evans was Chad’s mother. Chad was the tallest and coolest boy in class. “He’s funny, that’s why,” Rolari said. “He makes me laugh. He says his name is African.” Rolari had a crush on him.

Chad had freckles on his caramel-colored skin and he had already lost his teeth. Dr. Evans was always in her green scrubs. She dropped Chad off every morning and zoomed off in her convertible. She was responsible for half the smiles in the city, according to Sanwo, and apart from her practice, she ran the dental clinic where Sanwo worked, plus a clinic at the city prison. How would she have time to attend classroom parties, much less worry about people criticizing her parenting? “What’s her name,” she said, and snapped her fingers when she referred to Brenda. “The lady from Atlanta? Her husband’s a doctor?”

Chad was actually named after Lake Chad, Dr. Evans confirmed on PTA Night. When she was pregnant, she saw the name on a map, on top of Nigeria. She’d never been to Africa. She wanted to, but didn’t know where to start. I promised to help. Sanwo and I sat next to her and watched that night as the PTA asked for volunteers for the Fall Fest, Spaghetti Dinner, and requested a show of hands for those in favor of a brown bag lunch on the first Monday of every month.

“Imagine,” Dr. Evans said, leaning toward me, “if this is your life.”

I laughed, then I waited until she’d left to volunteer for the Fall Fest.

I

ADMIRED

DR. EVANS, I said on our way home from PTA Night. I Crab Orchard Review ◆ 11

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was staring out of the car window at the city lights. I was trying to take stock of my life, assess where I was headed in five years, all that MBA application business; I didn’t know how. During the day, I was spending three, four hours on the Internet researching schools. I wished I was able to braid hair instead.

Sanwo asked why I admired Dr. Evans.

“The woman has no time.”

I had too much time, I thought; too much time for nonsense lately: laundry, picking up toys, cleaning baths, making beds, gossip and resentment.

“She’s divorced,” Sanwo said.

“So?” I said.

Rolari tapped my shoulder. “What’s divorced?”

THE OVEN PREHEAT LIGHT CAME ON. Rolari rolled over on her belly and pressed on the remote control. The television was too loud.

“Turn that TV down,” I said.

Rolari didn’t move.

“Baby, will you turn that down?”

She jumped up. “Oh, sorry!”

I slid the tray of Cornish hens into the oven and waited to adjust the heat. Sanwo would be back soon.

The PTA night had ended in a showdown between us. We argued even before we reached home. I could not believe he would tell Rolari divorce was ‘nothing,’ as if she’d asked the meaning of a filthy word.

“You can’t tell me how to parent my own child,” he said.

I reminded him that I barely dragged his butt to her PTA meeting.

“You’re taking advantage of me since I’ve been at home. Yes, you are.

Yes, you…”

In no time, we were yelling. At home, he was telling me he came to Mississippi to give Us a better life. I circled him as he stood under the ceiling fan. “I did not come to America for a better life,” I said.

“Hear me? I came to give our marriage a chance. That is why I moved to Mississippi. The only reason. Do you understand? What will I do here for four years?”

“We could have another child,” Sanwo said.

“We have a child. I will not have another child for having another child’s sake. I will not have another child because I’m bored. I will certainly not have another child to give my child a little brother or sister, as your mother says. I will have a child only because you and I 12 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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want another child. Hear me? And having another child will not substitute for working.”

How much did I like working anyway? he asked.

“That’s my business,” I said. “My right to hate my work.”

Sanwo raised his arms. “What do you want me to do? Tell me what you want me to do.”

I glared at him. I wouldn’t tell him if I knew. Rolari, who’d been in her bedroom, came out rubbing her chest. “My belly hurts.”

“Come here,” I said.

I reached for her and patted her stomach. Sanwo slouched off to our bedroom. He’d forgotten about her in his anger. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t stop myself from losing my temper even though I’d never heard my own parents argue. But my mother’s generation kept conflicts to themselves—as she herself advised when I asked her what to do— which was why I felt I was a horrible mother as I ran my fingers over Rolari’s cornrows that night.

She held on to a button on my shirt. “Just be happy with Mississippi.”

I bent to bite her fingers. She made a fist and hid them.

“Are you and Daddy going to get a divorce?”

I faked a laugh. “Why do you say that?”

“Chad’s parents got a divorce.”

She stood up and began to do her Shake Your Booty dance.

“So?” I said wiggling my hips. “Do I do everything Chad’s mom does?”

Rolari turned her backside to me. “You want to work like her.”

“So?” I, too, stood up. I was dancing; I wanted to cry. “Are you calling me a copycat?”

We shook and twirled under the ceiling fan and I fell on the carpet.

She fell on me and placed her head on my thigh.

“Actually, I have a very good idea,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

She was itsy-bitsying her fingers. “Well, if you look after me, at least you won’t need a work permit.”

MY JOLLOF RICE WAS BUBBLING. I checked that the Cornish hens were roasting.

“Smells good,” Rolari said and kicked her legs.

“Will you open the windows?”

Her head popped up. “Are you making plantains?”

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“Yep.” She clapped. “Yeah! Hurrah for Mommy! Savior of the Universe!”

I took a low bow. She was loving and beautiful and smart. “When we get our American passports?” she asked on PTA night. “Will I be African-American or African and American?”

As she opened the window, I said, “Glad your belly is better.

We’re over that now, aren’t we?”

She didn’t answer. She was watching the television.

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Thanksgiving

THE

NIGHT the Israeli Prime Minister was shot, Osnat dreamt one of the Chrises was shaving his legs in her mother’s shower. She couldn’t tell which Chris it was. She was on her seventh, but he hadn’t wanted to come with her to visit her parents that weekend, and anyway, he was blond, and the Chris in the dream was standing in a puddle of black hairs, his skinny legs striped white with shaving lotion. He was using Osnat’s mother’s pink razor.

“What are you doing?” Osnat asked.

“It’s because of the war,” the Chris said, “so I won’t get caught in the weeds.”

“What war?” asked Osnat. “Is there a war?”

THE PRIME MINISTER WAS SHOT on a college football Saturday. It was an important game. Osnat’s father had just bought a big screen TV, and here was reason to use it. He split the screen in two, and watched the game on one half, CNN on the other. The offense set up in shotgun formation, sweating in the afternoon sun, while in Tel Aviv’s nighttime people covered their mouth in disbelief.

“Should we tell Mom?” Osnat asked.

“Not yet,” her father said. “Maybe at halftime.”

The TV room was in the basement, and Osnat could hear her mother’s footsteps in the kitchen above, where she was making soup.

Osnat imagined going upstairs and breaking the news to her—she could feel the words rolling around in her mouth. It was what always happened when she found out about disasters—the space shuttle, the Gulf War—as if it wasn’t really a tragedy until someone you knew started weeping. It was disgusting. Even though the Prime Minister wouldn’t die until well into the fourth quarter, already she could hear herself telling the current Chris all about it: “It was hard.

My mother was devastated. She cried all night.”

“Well,” Osnat’s father said when the game was over. “That’s that.”

On TV, CNN was looping its broadcast and replaying the press Crab Orchard Review ◆ 15

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conference at regular intervals. Every time the official announced the Prime Minister’s death, the people in the room with him cried “No!” as if it were news. It took Osnat’s father—up in the kitchen— maybe two and a half loops to tell her mother what had happened, and then they both came downstairs and sat on the sofa, Osnat’s mother clutching Osnat’s father and crying into his shoulder. Her father kept saying, “Shhh.…Shhh.…” Osnat sat in the rocking chair and watched them. She watched her mother wipe her nose against her father’s shirt. She watched her father blink. She watched them both carefully, like some movie on the etiquette of grief. Her mother was devastated. She did cry all night. But although Osnat checked and checked, and kept on checking, as far as she could tell, she— Osnat—wasn’t feeling anything at all.

BACK IN CHICAGO, the seventh Chris was as hairy and blond as ever.

Usually, Osnat had a hard time saying no to sex with any of the Chrises, but luckily this Chris was short and skinny so early on she’d told him that she didn’t believe in sex without love. She thought it was a good line, that it had integrity.

Still, this Chris was unfazed. “In the end you’ll love me,” he’d said. He knew he was seventh, and thought this meant he was the lucky one. He lived in the same apartment complex as Osnat and could see her car in the parking lot. That Monday—the Monday after the assassination—Osnat wasn’t home five minutes before he called. She knew it was him even though she didn’t answer the phone, and he didn’t leave a message.

Osnat’s mother was sure Osnat was dating this Chris on purpose, but anyway, so what if she was? Chrises were much easier to find than Jews, and besides, they thought she was exotic. Plus, this way, she never had to worry about getting their names mixed up, which was a good thing since already some of them were beginning to blur—which Chris was it that gave her the necklace, and did he give her a teddy bear as well? That was the other nice thing about the Chrises. They all came bearing gifts.

FOR A WHILE, before the Prime Minister was assassinated, it had looked as if peace were breaking out. Every time you turned to CNN, there he was: signing treaties, making speeches, shaking hands with the Chairman. Or there he was: sitting under a tree holding binoculars, watching the King of Jordan fly over Jerusalem and 16 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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talking to him on the phone, saying, “I can see you. I can see you.”

Each time, Osnat’s mother called her to remind her to watch, then called her again after to make sure she did. “Did you see them?” she’d ask, her voice breaking. “Did you see them touch?”

“They didn’t touch,” Osnat said. “They shook hands.”

“Well,” Osnat’s mother said, “you have to start somewhere.”

Osnat looked at the wall. She looked at her hands. She couldn’t imagine it—peace—or what it meant. She hadn’t been to Israel in years, not since she’d been old enough to choose not to go. Still, she knew her mother was right. All the Chrises started out with handshakes too.

And once you touched them, it was hard to back out.

THE PRIME MINISTER wasn’t the only one with binoculars—Osnat had a pair too. When she used them, she turned off the lights in her apartment so that her neighbors—if they happened to look out— wouldn’t be able to tell she was monitoring their movements. To be extra careful, she kept the blinds closed and watched them through a gap in the slats.

She had forgotten all about the binoculars until she’d started dating this Chris. The telescope in his hall closet was what reminded her. Sure, he had taped a star chart above his bed, and there was a solar system mobile in his bathroom, but Osnat knew this was just to make it appear as if he had a genuine interest in astronomy. Truth was, people didn’t watch stars. They watched each other.

It turned out that when he was alone, what this Chris did was spend his evenings shifting furniture around and hanging up different holiday decorations. For Halloween, he had dressed up his couch as a ghost, the recliner as a jack-o-lantern. He had strung chains of candy corns across the room and then hosted a party in which his guests raced each other to see who could chew his way to the kitchen first. Now he was redoing his apartment for Thanksgiving: already, he had made a tail out of a bouquet of dusters for the recliner and was hard at work glue-gunning feathers to the armrests. Osnat imagined that he had a turkey defrosting in the bathtub. Osnat’s family didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. They didn’t even like turkey, and anyway, it felt silly, going through all that fuss for three people.

She picked up the phone and dialed, then watched Chris drop the glue gun, startled.

“I’m back,” she told him. “It was hard. My mother was devastated. She cried all night.”

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She waited for Chris to extend his condolences, but all he said was, “What? Why?” “You know,” Osnat said. “The assassination? In Israel?”

“Oh yeah,” Chris said. “I heard about that.”

He nestled the phone between his neck and shoulder, and picked up the glue gun and a handful of feathers. It was outrageous, the way people thought you wouldn’t be able to tell they weren’t paying attention.

“Hey,” Osnat said, “stop that. This is serious.”

“Stop what?”

“Doing something else while you’re talking to me.”

“Sorry,” Chris said. He repositioned the phone so that Osnat could hear him breathing, but he didn’t put down the glue gun. “I’m all yours.”

“Come on,” said Osnat. She used her best TV cop voice: “Put down the gun.”

“I knew it,” Chris said. “You’re spying on me.” He stood up and walked over to his living room window. “You’re using your binoculars.”

Even though it was impossible, magnified by the binoculars Chris seemed to be looking right at her. Osnat hung up, but he didn’t look away. Instead he raised his right hand as if he was about to take a pledge, not really waving, not really signaling her to stop.

STILL, THE PRIME MINISTER WAS DEAD. On NPR, commentators went over his achievements: peace, peace, and more peace. Now it was unclear whether all that peace would continue. Of course Osnat wanted peace—didn’t she have five million relatives in Israel, all of them riding buses and shopping in malls? And weren’t there new McDonald’s popping up everywhere, and a Dunkin’ Donuts right there, in downtown Tel Aviv? That, at least, was what Osnat’s aunt had reported when she had come to visit that summer. “A regular America,” she’d said, with plenty of American companies to work for, all looking for employees with “English mother tongue,” and some of whom regularly offered their workers dishwashers— dishwashers!—and portable stereos as gifts for Passover.

Osnat had been eleven when her family left Israel. By then, she was old enough to know that what they were doing was wrong. So what if there were no wars and better jobs somewhere else? You couldn’t leave the living and dying to other people. You had to do some of it yourself. Instead, she was always paying attention to the 18 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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wrong things. When she used to go back to visit, she would move her bed away from the wall. At night the sidewalks crawled with giant roaches. Sometimes they flew inside, their wings noisy like small helicopters. Maybe, if she didn’t touch the wall, they would leave her alone. One time, in college, an Israeli exchange student asked her why she didn’t go back—“You’re old enough now,” he’d said—and Osnat had told him the truth. “My God,” he’d said. “There are roaches everywhere.” Not that it mattered—Israelis were never interested in Osnat, and she couldn’t blame them. Nobody wanted to date a coward.

IT WAS STILL EARLY, there was nothing on TV, and—even though she was sure he would—Chris still hadn’t called her back, as if she weren’t the same woman that, just last week, he’d lain on top of while his couch watched them with its ghostly, glue-gunned, Halloween eyes. If she lay flat, arms and legs straight out, he could fit inside her as if she were his chalk outline at a murder scene: her body a little too wide at the torso, her arms and legs a little too long. It made her feel large and gelatinous, and glad that she was nowhere near falling in love. Still, Chris hadn’t seemed to notice: “Why won’t you sleep with me?” he’d said. “I have condoms, so why won’t you sleep with me?”

Outside, the streetlights were just coming on. For a while, Osnat drove up and down Ogden Avenue. It was an ugly street, all strip malls and apartment complexes, and the only people you saw were the ones in the cars around you. Osnat turned off onto a side street and followed it as it became narrower, the houses larger. Pretty soon, she was lost in a neighborhood where the garages were so large you could stack them two or three deep with cars. She heard an engine and, after a few seconds, realized it was an airplane, but instead of moving away, it kept getting closer. She tried to see where it was but she couldn’t. It seemed to be flying right over her. It was going to crash. She knew it. That was what planes did. When she was in seventh grade, a small plane had crashed into a house near the elementary school in her neighborhood. It was trying to make an emergency landing in the playground, but then the bell rang and all the children came rushing out. The pilot had no choice but to ram the plane into a nearby house. He died. There were body parts everywhere, but Osnat’s mother wouldn’t let her go with the other children to watch the police clean up. Now it was all catching up with her. She would have to pick up detached limbs and then find Crab Orchard Review ◆ 19

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ice to keep them fresh. Osnat stopped the car, leaned forward and covered her head with her arms, waiting for the explosion. There was none. The plane’s engine got weaker, slowed down and then stopped. Someone was honking. Osnat looked up and saw that she was blocking an intersection. On the corner, a yellow sign warned, “Danger: Low Flying Aircraft.” On the left, she saw a grass runway, lined with blue lights, and a man climbing out of a small red plane.

The big garages, it turned out, were plane hangars. The car behind her honked again. She thought maybe she would cry right then, but she didn’t. Her hands weren’t even shaking.

THE LAST TIME Osnat had been to Israel, she was sixteen and tired.

The first Chris—who was so blond he didn’t appear to have any eyebrows—had just broken up with her because a senior girl had asked him to the prom. He wasn’t anything special, but he had pissed her parents off, and right then (and for a long time afterward), it was what she had wanted to do. It wasn’t so much that Osnat’s parents were upset that the Chrises weren’t Jewish: they were upset at their failure to imagine the logical conclusion of uprooting your child and moving her to a country where being Jewish translated into sometimes missing school and refusing to participate in the annual Christmas pageant. “You lived in Israel?” the other Jewish kids asked her when they found out. “Weren’t you scared?” Not that Israeli kids were any better: “Have you met Michael Jackson? Who shot J.R.? Why are you so pale?”

Still, her parents weren’t all wrong. Whenever Osnat got tired of a Chris, all she had to say was, “I want my children to be Jewish,” to send him scurrying for cover. If he argued—“You’re the least religious person I know”—she’d pull out the ace: “So were all those Jews in 1939 Germany.” The Chris she dated in college had been skeptical—“Come on, that was ages ago”—but the rest didn’t put up a fight.

So her parents signed her up for a tour that promised inner-tubing down the Jordan River and hiking in the desert, but it took her maybe three days to realize that she hated every single person in her group, and that they hated her back, and when they went on shoplifting expeditions or took turns making out with soldiers in exchange for their uniforms, they didn’t invite her along. Instead, Osnat spent her time talking with the different tour guides, skinny guys in their early twenties who were nice enough but always ended up asking 20 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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her when she was moving back: “You’ll be eighteen soon. You can do what you want.” They always did this at dramatic moments: as they watched the sun rise over a misty Dead Sea, or as the Wailing Wall first came into view with its throngs of swaying men in black.

It was hard to resist, and sometimes Osnat tried to imagine it, coming back, but the heat made her crazy, and so did the smell of urine that seemed to be everywhere. And so did the roaches. And so did the plain truth that even though it had only been five years since she moved to America, she still had maybe only two friends—both of them from other countries as well—and now this trip too was a failure, and she was afraid that if she moved to Israel, she’d discover that really, the problem wasn’t the place where she was taken without being asked, but that the problem was her—there was something wrong with her.

If you thought about it long enough, it was hard not to feel sorry for yourself. Here was the Prime Minister, dead, and even though it really had nothing to do with Osnat, it still felt as if it did.

She was too old for the army now, but she was single and doing nothing special with her life. Her aunt was right. There was no reason she needed to be in the U.S. If she had been in Israel, she probably would have been at the peace rally where the Prime Minister was shot. She might have even heard the gun go off. Either way, she would have been doing something more important than watching football and not even bothering to turn the game off because that’s exactly how unaffected she was.

AFTER SHE FOUND HER WAY BACK to Ogden, Osnat still didn’t want to go home. Instead, she pulled into one of the strip malls. There was a Jewel-Osco, and a drycleaners and—on the very end—a small Middle Eastern restaurant called Ali Baba’s. Suddenly Osnat was starving.

Inside, there were palm trees painted on the walls. There were wood camels with embroidered saddles and brass nargillas lined up on black shelves. In one corner, a television was tuned to Roseanne.

The place was empty except for a man with a black moustache who stood behind the cash register and arranged coins into little piles.

He waved to Osnat.

“Sit anywhere,” he said. Then he called out, “Noam!”

Osnat chose a table near the television. It was the episode of Roseanne where Darlene gets her period. Roseanne was explaining Crab Orchard Review ◆ 21

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to Darlene that the news wasn’t all bad, and that three good things had come from Roseanne getting her own period: Becky, D.J., and Darlene, her children. For a minute Osnat felt weepy, but then she concentrated on unwrapping her silverware and she was fine again.

Then Noam came out of what must have been the kitchen. She recognized him immediately. She always recognized Israelis. Every hair on her body pointed in his direction. He was tall and thin and tan, with a crew cut and a half-hearted attempt at a goatee.

“Yes,” he said. “What do you want?”

She couldn’t look at him directly. She stared at the menu he handed her, but the humming she was convinced his body was making kept distracting her. She couldn’t make out the letters.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Chicken tawook,” Noam told her. “And some taboule.” He didn’t wait to see if she agreed. “Ahmed,” he said to the man next to the cash register, “tawook and taboule.” Ahmed nodded. “Ahmed’s the cook,” Noam told Osnat. “I’m just the help.”

Ahmed stopped counting the change and disappeared into the kitchen. On television, Darlene decided not to throw out her baseball glove after all.

“Yeah, right,” said Noam.

He looked at Osnat, and Osnat looked away. He switched channels and sat down at the table next to hers. On TV, a little boat was making its way down a river. Everything was silent, and then there was fire from both banks. The screen was white with smoke.

When it cleared, one of the GIs on the boat was dead. Another couldn’t find his dog. Some of the GIs were crying, and Noam was saying something under his breath that Osnat couldn’t make out.

He had pushed up his T-shirt and was rubbing his belly. There were scars on his stomach. They were like fire breaks across the curly black hair. They were still a little red. Osnat looked and looked and kept on looking.

When she was done, she said, “You’ll only catch fire in sections,” and Noam, startled, pulled down his shirt and said, “I guess I already did.”

OSNAT THOUGHT ABOUT TELLING NOAM that she was from Israel—it had been a while since she’d thought of herself as Israeli—but she didn’t know how to bring it up. Real Israelis always started talking to each other in Hebrew. Osnat had already lost her Rs and her Ls, 22 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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and anyway, how would she introduce herself? To the Israelis she met, it seemed, there was nothing interesting about another ex-Israeli.

American Jews didn’t know any better, but ex-Israelis had deliberately left Israel and chosen not to return. Plus, most American Jews thought Israelis were brave, that they risked their lives every moment of every single day. Wasn’t that what happened in wartime?

Still, time was running out. Who knew how long it would take Ahmed to make the chicken? Osnat wiped her hands on her skirt.

She wanted Noam to see through her pasty skin to who she really was, but she didn’t know how to make him look at her. She cleared her throat and opened her mouth, and waited for the words to come to her.

When they did, they weren’t what she expected: “Can I touch them?”

“What?” said Noam. He turned to look at her, and she realized one of his eyes was brown, the other green.

“Can I touch your scars?”

Noam shrugged.

“Will it hurt?” Osnat asked. “I won’t do it if it’ll hurt.”

“No,” Noam said. “They’re pretty much healed.”

Osnat scooted her chair closer to him. She reached out with her right hand, but she didn’t know what to do next. Was he waiting for her to lift up his shirt?

“Here,” Noam said.

He took her hand in his and—in one smooth motion—tucked it under his T-shirt and against his belly. His scars, when she touched them, were warm and dry. They felt like plastic. Noam shifted in his seat, and Osnat saw that he was hard. She cleared her throat again. “You want to go somewhere?”

THEY DIDN’T EVEN WAIT FOR HER FOOD. Noam followed Osnat out to her car. “Can we go to your place?” she asked. Noam shook his head no. She didn’t know where to go instead. She didn’t want Chris to see them. Finally she drove around behind the Jewel-Osco— Noam’s hand clammy on her thigh—and parked in the dark corner of the parking lot. They didn’t bother with kissing. Noam unbuttoned Osnat’s blouse, and she pulled up his T-shirt and traced his scars with her index finger.

“Can you tell when it’s scar and when it’s not?” she asked.

Noam didn’t answer. He adjusted the seat back and pulled her on top of him. He rolled up the skirt she was wearing and undid his pants. Osnat watched him kiss her breasts. His eyes were closed, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 23

Danit Brown

and he was pumping away, and there she was, on top of him, parked behind a supermarket. It didn’t seem real. Even his grunts, his hot breath on her skin, seemed fake.

“Ken,” said Noam. “Ken.” He thrust one last time, and then he stopped moving. Osnat could feel him pulsing inside her.

“Shhh,” she said. “Ze beseder.”

Noam opened his eyes. “What?” he said. “What did you say?”

When she didn’t answer, he asked, “Are you Jewish?”

“Israeli,” she said.

“Oh,” Noam said. “a yoredet.”

There was no point pretending. Noam had called her the thing she was: a person who had left a higher plane of existence for a lower one. You were worthless if you didn’t go back. She pulled away and moved over to the driver’s seat.

“What?” Noam said.

Back when she was sixteen and spending the summer in Israel, the tour guide had taken them to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. When Osnat stopped to look at some earrings, the vendor, a dark man with smooth cheeks, had said to her in Hebrew, “You like them?” Next thing she knew, she was telling him how much she hated the tour. The other girls were standing right beside her, and they didn’t understand a word. The vendor listened and rubbed alcohol onto her earlobes. Right before piercing them, he said, “I can sense things about you. You aren’t like other girls.” Back then, she had thought this was a good thing, that she was somehow special. But three nights later, when they’d returned, the vendor didn’t remember her, and anyway, he’d been wrong: she was just like all those other Israelis in limbo who refused to admit they were in the U.S. to stay. Even Osnat’s parents—when asked— still mumbled something about retiring to Tel Aviv.

And now, sitting in her car, a real Israeli beside her, the Prime Minister dead and all that peace about to end, the one thing Osnat wanted was for Noam to absolve her. She’d had sex with him— wasn’t that worth something? Hadn’t she done her part for Israel, however indirectly, by lifting the spirits of a battle-scarred soldier?

He’d given his body, and now she’d given hers. It was so noble Osnat could almost imagine it as her life’s work: fucking soldiers. She would meet them at the airport as they deplaned and take them straight to bed. They would go back to Israel and tell their friends about her, and knowing she was out there, waiting for them, would give them hope. And it would give her a reason to stay.

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Danit Brown

“I’m sorry,” she said, but Noam misunderstood her. “Shtuyot,” he said. Nonsense. “These things happen.”

She dropped him off at Ali Baba’s, and even though he didn’t ask for her number, he did ask if she still wanted her food. She didn’t. She wanted to go home. Her thighs, under her skirt, were wet and sticky, and she was dripping. She was afraid she would never get the smell out of her car. She rolled down all four windows.

It was cold out—November—but the wind felt good, like a slap.

Back at her complex, she pulled the car into her parking spot and looked up at Chris’s living room window. It was dark. Still, she went over there and knocked on his door. He’d glued a picture of a turkey onto his knocker. If he saw her, surely he wouldn’t want her to love him, not the way she was, smelling of sex, in a skirt stained and wrinkled by someone else. She felt as if she were watching a movie of her own life. What did she have in common with this woman standing in front of Chris’s door? What control did she have over this woman’s actions? This woman would go in or she wouldn’t.

Chris would get angry or he wouldn’t. And Osnat would watch the two of them. She would watch and watch, and feel nothing at all.

BUT THEN CHRIS, in striped pajama bottoms and a black T-shirt, threw the door open and pulled Osnat inside. The air was downy with duster feathers, but the recliner turkey was finished, complete with a red wattle made from a rubber glove. It was ridiculous. Osnat stood in front of it and scowled.

“Don’t start,” Chris said. “People who live in glass houses…”

Osnat didn’t say anything, so he added, “You need to shower. I can smell you.” He led her to the bathroom, handed her a towel and pointed at his robe. “Put that on, and then we’ll talk.” When Osnat didn’t move, he began to undress her. He unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it off one sleeve at a time. He stood behind her and unhooked her bra. He knelt in front of her and pulled her skirt down and then her panties. He turned on the water and adjusted the temperature.

Then he nudged Osnat into the tub. She watched his pale hands on her skin. He had long slender fingers, and the hair on his knuckles was curly and thick. She stood under the shower and waited. Chris waited too.

“I can’t soap you,” he said finally. “You’ll have to do that yourself.” He reached for her right hand and put a bar of soap in it.

It was a brand new bar. It smelled like lavender.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 25

Danit Brown

“It doesn’t make a difference,” Osnat said suddenly. “I still won’t have sex with you.”

Chris looked at her. “Fine then,” he said. “Don’t.” He turned to go.

“Wait,” Osnat said. “What if I don’t ever feel anything ever again?”

“Osnat, Jesus,” Chris said, before closing the door behind him.

“You’re feeling nothing but sorry for yourself.”

WHEN SHE WAS DONE SHOWERING, Osnat found Chris in the kitchen, making spaghetti sauce out of ketchup.

“I’m making some special Secret Love Sauce,” he said. “You’ll fall for me now, for sure.”

He chopped onions, fried them, and stirred in the Heinz. One by one, he removed small jars from the large spice rack on the wall and unscrewed the caps. Gently, he sniffed out what the sauce needed: cinnamon yes, garlic no, dill yes, oregano yes.

“My mother’s from Uruguay, you know,” he told Osnat between sniffs. “She’s three times your age, and I can tell you from watching her—this is just how things are. There is no right place, except inside your body. You’re not the only one who feels this way.”

“But you’re blond,” Osnat said, surprised.

Chris shrugged. “Sometimes that happens too.”

When it was ready, they ate the spaghetti in front of the TV. They sat in Chris’s dark living room, on the couch that was on its way to looking like a corn cob, and watched The Late Late Show. The host kept smiling at the camera as if there were only good news in the world.

Osnat didn’t even like ketchup, but the cinnamon, it turned out, was key. It wasn’t exactly the thing she was looking for, but right then, at that moment, it was close enough. She finished her plate.

26 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Francisco Aragón

Viejo Mundo after Apollinaire and Cendrars I walked around swaths of you Whose names slip my mind I’m thirsty come to me flowing Down my throat billboards posters Doorplates twittering like parakeets Through heaven came flying a thousand pigeons I strode alone through your crowds Buses in herds rolling by I stood at the counters of your bars Ate in your restaurants at night Often at long tables sharing a bottle of wine Some mornings a milkman Clinked glass along a lane In the perpetual screeching of wheels I heard a song And my ears like tail lights trail them still The great hearth of you the intersecting Embers of your streets your old buildings Leaning over them for warmth And beneath I rubbed elbows with your shuddering Metros Some of them bellowing like bulls The cry of their whistles could tear me apart The skies above your plazas Would turn deepening shades of violet And your waves of traffic footsteps and the smell already Of chestnuts roasting in barrels on corners Your parks were lungs Air crisp enough to taste sprinkled With sputtering vespas and horns Your newly scrubbed Neoclassic façades I loved looking up at And faces faces glanced or gazed at Crab Orchard Review ◆ 27

Francisco AragĂłn

Waiting for lights to change One year not sidewalks but one wide walk Cars streaming up and down both sides of it With merchant pavilions on my right and left Newsagents florists pet sellers and their chirping cages Or descending stairs for a stroll behind a clear blue Thundering sheet of water Let me remember well the white-haired man Ahead of me stepping off the plane How something in me fluttered hearing those vowels Hearing in the sounds his voice made A message Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d take years to unravel as I venture To inhabit you here your cities my self

28 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Francisco Aragón

Exile’s Collage after Saint-John Perse (1887–1975) and Philippe Jaccottet (b. 1925) Naming each shape, whispering yes, each creature, bud and rock poignant, kind in this, my advanced age, with patience, having walked, a solitary man, through decades, past foundations for the blind, enshrouded reservoirs, encaged valleys for the dead—recalling gates and lawns and all those manicured gardens whose owners left one night, aghast at the smell…I go my way with the stride of a free man, without horde or tribe, beneath steel-green clouds as on the ocean’s floor, whistling for people I still stroke with my hands, my dreams, among invisible things…

And my dog, who was spotted, more than I, than anyone I saw, was mostly human. Let him who wants to know what happens to rains marching over the earth come walk

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Francisco Aragón

in my shoes, with residues of slogans and songs. The sky descends, takes me by surprise and I continue with effort, look out at fading light—these wood-shadows timid, patient, lighter than the grass that survived my first winter before I was smuggled off the continent, are discreet, faithful barely perceptible —shadows. I live in a country of longing and distance

30 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Joy Arbor

Berlin Snapshots for my grandfather When he first returned, a war-aged twenty-four, to the streets he’d last roamed at sixteen, his home had transformed into a gas station, his parents— twin map locations. Now, a half-century later, nothing wears a number 71 on this block, nor is there an empty lot between fences.

Still standing is the brownstone he left as a boy, its face lined with scaffolding.

We fumble our way up dim winding floors.

Two flights up, I blink into the light of the planning office; he thinks he’s found the flat where he was born.

He points to a wide pane—here, in his day, a terrarium had housed red geraniums (though he can’t recall the word in English, describing its dimensions of glass walls with an engineer’s precision).

I pose on the step by the too-bright windows.

He stands back far enough to catch in the frame the empty floor where in his memory he carries a knife and is forever falling.

He says he still has the scar.

The flash doesn’t go off. But by his parents’ dull black headstones, stiff and straightbacked as he against Weissensee’s underbrush—smile now, smile— the flash singes.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 31

Joy Arbor

Where Are You From, Originally?

It’s a game children play, recounting where their families came from, locating who they are in the names of countries.

An American game—whoever stepped off the Mayflower won. Later, when we learned our white imperial guilt, we were proud to call ourselves Indian, to ferret out something in us that did not steal this land, but grew out of it, native as the plains.

Some stories were too complicated—Berlin seemed easy, but Germany was a late invention, and, since we were Jews, we had to be from somewhere else— we could trace an ancestor to the expulsion from Spain.

And then there were the shifting boundaries of Czechoslovakia, itself a postcolonial mistake now gone, how that family fled to Palestine, the British Mandate wore thin, then the War for Independence—Israel. Oh why emigrate to America then, after that language of conquerors was thrown off and entreat your children to join that history? That my father couldn’t be President and had hair that no ski-cap could tame couldn’t be mitigated by the blondest shiksa, her Heinz 57 of Quakers and Cherokee princess claims.

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Joy Arbor

And so I could not, can not name myself through nations—my family not blood American, to be Israeli is to be from somewhere else in a language I don’t know, to be a Jew is to be everywhere shuttled across borders, to meet at the borders with the family from the other side, to escape across borders—Czech, Poland, Germany, Spain.

To be half-Jewish from the wrong parent?

Hitler would round me up. Israel wouldn’t take me in.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 33

William Archila

The Art of Exile

On the Pan-American Highway, somewhere between the north and south continent, you’ll come across a chain of volcanoes, a coast with a thick growth of palm trees, the crunching waves of the shore; an isthmus Neruda called “slender earth like a whip.”

When the road bends, turns into a street, the walls splattered with “Yanqi Go Home!!!”

You’ll see a boy who is only fifteen, barefoot, sniffing glue out of a small plastic bag.

An old woman in an apron will step out and say, “This is the right street.”

In the public square, there will be no friend from school to welcome you, no drive to Sonsonate, city of coconuts, no one to order cold Pilseners, oyster cocktails, or convince the waitress into dancing a cumbia or two with you.

Instead, at the local bar, you’ll raise a bottle next to strangers, stub your cigarette butt on the floor.

You’ll watch a country ten years after the civil war: an old man sitting on the curb, head between knees,

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William Archila

open hand stretched out.

Everything will hurt, your hair, your toe nails, even your shoes.

You’ll curse the dusty streets, the demented sun slowly burning the nape of your neck, the stray dogs sniffing you to the park.

By nightfall, you’ll drag yourself back into the bars, looking for a lost country in a tiny shot of Tíc Táck.

Against the wall, three men and their guitars.

When you lie on a hotel bed, too tired to sleep, when you feel torn, twisted like an old newspaper blown from city to city, you have reached the place.

You have begun to speak like a man without a home, barefoot, on the side of the road.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 35

Ned Balbo

White Flowers What’s that shining in the leaves, the shadowy leaves, like tears when somebody grieves, Shining, shining in the leaves?

—Elizabeth Bishop On this last night in your home, in a lamp-lit dining room, future scholar of a history that’s held you in its fist, you take leave of two men— your father and this priest, exiles fled from Guatemala here to Philadelphia with what grief risen between you?

From the patio we watch now as Ignazia leaves the room, coffee pot in one hand, practiced face unreadable, precisely as your sister enters shyly, holding the violin, the shadow of the bow crossing the bright wood under strings.

Why do the men bend close and whisper, your father a physician cut off from home and country, this priest in whom he now confides?

Under the early stars that fail to guide us through this dark, you tell me what you remember.

The swing rocks while Maria plays.

On the plane from boarding school, German ringing in your ears, you watched the sea below sliding like swells of glass beneath the sky, the sudden turbulence a rocking that ended when you fell asleep, 36 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Ned Balbo

and you saw it, stuck on a branch: the iguana didn’t move for days, blinked once when water struck its scales, reptile on watch over the house, home of all that you held dear— And hours later, there it was, the real house gleaming under dew.

Why had your father summoned you?

Setting down your bags, you stepped at last over the threshold— Along the walls the shapes of photographs were burned into the paper, ghosts of crucifix and mirror, carpets rolled up, squeezed with twine— The E string vibrates, changes pitch— —so you ran to the terrace, calling while sunlight burned the tops of trees, this empty house. Your absent family— Who’d been here? Who’d taken them?

A thousand flowers on fire fluttered from the sky, and you remembered— That same terrace transfigured, darkness over all, a night when even the sky looked black, though real flowers glittered like stars that rose across the valley where moonlight broke and shook the mist, breakwater of milk, white scintillations— To a child, they looked like stars, or lanterns burning beneath black cloth.

What did your father say then as he knelt down at your side?

Look there: the stars are faint from burning all night every night. They fall

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 37

Ned Balbo

to the bottom of a well, but when the moon lifts toward the sky, the Father walks out into his world, stops to draw his bucket up. He pulls the rope— so slowly now!—while stars gleam, drying on his hands, he lifts clear water to his lips, and, as he drinks, some fly again, now more the ghosts of stars than the fires they once were, bright jewels pinned to his purple robe when morning comes...

All remembered in an instant.

—Right now, we two are the only people in the world. Then you say, as the bow pauses, “On the terrace, Maria was telling me all our father said: this week, or the next, perhaps, was safe, but soon we had to get away— and though I nodded, I still believed that even she was dead, the rest of my family ‘disappeared,’ and I wondered when someone would come for me.”

—A clapping drowns your last words, your father calls out praise—voices in Spanish, the clink of dishes, laughter reaching through French doors—Maria rushing to shut her case and flee the room— Of course, I cannot comprehend.

I haven’t seen the blood-marked walls, shattered and cracked 38 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Ned Balbo

by ammunition, I haven’t known the names of the lost or turned away from those who took them, haven’t quickened my pace before a car parked too long in one place, nor slept in the quick of a spasm, wanted to look, but looked away— But now, the recital over, your father done with his farewells, the priest retreating to the guest room, candles dying against the mantle, the cicadas’ rattle the only sound; when even Ignazia’s day is over, we set out into the night, away from this past that pulls us down—this past that shaped you, from our own past rushing to its only end— here in America where it’s safe, we believe, to walk out into a park, into the dark that shelters us until we lose all sense of place, until we could have been dropped off in blackness anywhere in the world, the feeling would’ve been the same—no time, or nothing to do with it, only a shadow of warmth to move toward, bodies floating in the night when night explodes, a burst of headlights wiping out all we see—as light drains from the skin of leaves, the car backing off in retreat, you’re still shaking from the fear you’ve left behind but still know well— We only thought we were alone— the sudden start, abrupt recoil, petals of light scattering jaggedly, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 39

Ned Balbo

falling on flesh and grass, the sound of shots, or a car backfiring?

The rest is death, and death alone —no touch, no time together any refuge.

For C.R., September 1981

Notes: —In “White Flowers,” the story of C.R.’s return to Guatemala takes place in 1979, during the brutal reign of General Romeo Lucas García. Overthrown by military coup in 1982, he was held responsible by Amnesty International for over five thousand political murders in a nation whose thirty-six-year civil war proved, by its end, the longest in Latin American history.

—The poem’s text includes lines from Ben Belitt’s translations of Pablo Neruda’s “Enigma con una flor [Enigma with a Flower]” and “Plenos poderes [Full Powers]” in Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 (Grove: New York, 1979), and one line from Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili’s translation of Lorca’s “Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejías [Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías]” in The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca (New Directions: New York, 1955).

40 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Lory Bedikian

Two Open Palms

I want to know my father so I begin to watch his hands.

They roast the almond in mid-afternoon, shave the bruised flesh of the yellow pears before his family returns from work.

He speaks of his mother, her hands taught him to pare the apple. Perhaps it’s why he speaks to the MacIntosh while peeling it before bed. His stories slice into the evening’s silence.

He brings out the quince, the orange plums to have something spin within the palm while he remembers her: a woman in the middle of Lebanon, scraping the lemon peel to scent the humid air, to rouse her swollen eyes.

With the chestnut’s shell between his hands he rubs these words and makes cadences fall onto the empty plate.

He stops when he cannot go back there anymore. Perhaps speaking of her now is not as simple as picking Crab Orchard Review ◆ 41

Lory Bedikian

the grape from its rotted, gnarled stems.

The evening quiets, a fruitless tree.

What he cannot say he carves into slices of rotted, skinned pears that he throws away. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen those bruises before piled in the bag by his feet.

I never ask him too much. Her stories come to us in portions, like the spring fruit he cannot bear to overlook.

So, instead I help him gather seeds from the heart of the pomegranate.

We choose what is ripe enough to eat.

Father and I sit, make sure to discard the seeds from the bing cherries, the fattened melon and apricot.

When his grasp loosens, tires, his fingers pause on a stem. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s then for him, for a change, that I bring out bread, cheese, and we gnaw at pits from the kalamata while laughing through our teeth.

42 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Jenny Benjamin-Smith

Maria Liberita Graziani Beniamino

You studied English sounds by candlelight; read lines until they were blurry step stones in vacant villages.

Warm and black hair fell on your face.

You practiced, coaxed the accent from your lips like an ox grinding in a fencepost.

Your litany, hoof after hoof, the weight of knowing not enough.

You sang deep brown songs of sorrow for your lost mother.

Nothing brought her back.

The hours piled into the longest nights.

Red pools groped at your eyes.

You could not forget your mother even though you spoke another language, stood on different land.

You could not reshape your mouth or the curve of your shadow in the sun.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 43

Jenny Benjamin-Smith

Mary Benjamin, 1942

It’s legal now.

The final stripping done, but this name will keep my boys safe.

Ward off hate.

Hitler’s monkey in Italy has us here powerless to defend our names and voices the smell of us.

But here we have decided to stay.

What does it really matter?

Just language.

Just names.

Here names will hurt us.

My skin’s numb.

My tongue made dumb.

I’ll think no more of this.

What I have become.

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Jenny Benjamin-Smith

Dressing Vincenzo

This tiny person before me, swinging like a chameleon on a thin tree branch, tossed by a circular wind, thrown back almost years, but there he sits, pink, then changing a deep, Italian-sun brown, squirming my patience as I try to dress his little feet in socks and shoes, hitch up the pants so they don’t sag.

I don’t have enough to feed him, too small a waist for four, and his fingernails, I think, are crumbling as sickly measures of how slowly we are chipping away.

Is that the cistern again? I hope, dripping our life blood into neat tins.

The rhythm makes me dream of home, my mother, my father so sad without her.

Rage rises in me at times I think I may break.

It is all so insufficient.

And here he twists before me Crab Orchard Review ◆ 45

Jenny Benjamin-Smith

like a new, furry animal out of the womb, shaking off the light, resisting.

I understand this, but I do not let him squirm longer.

I tug on his belt loops and say “Be still,” “Basta, Vincenzo!” with a severity he understands because he stands motionless now and lets me dress him, ready for the world.

46 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Sapna Gupta

Rajni Loves le Cancan

September 22

WHY IS IT SO STRANGE that I should want to dance the cancan and dress up in crinoline? My teacher, Madame Pauline Dubonnet, and my fellow classmates say that not only is it strange, but downright funny. The ninth grade, of which I am a bonafide member, is mounting a show called “Paris, Ville Lumière” and one of the numbers is a cabaret show set at the Follies Bergères with ten cancan dancers. I only ask that I be allowed to try out to be one of the dancers. I want to wear the crinoline, the high lace collar, the Mary Poppins boots and then kick up my legs. I dream of making exuberant, titillating dance moves. But it wouldn’t look right, say my classmates and Mme. Dubonnet. Consider the facts, they say.

Ah yes, the facts: No Indian cancan danseuse has graced les planches de Paris, as far as they can tell. And I am, in fact, an Indian girl (with the requisite chocolate skin, eyes black as coal, and yes, nicely oiled hair pleated in one long braid). And yes, I attend a French school when all the other Indian kids go to the British or American school. Another fact: we are in Kinshasa, Zaïre. Zaïre is the glorious former colony of Belgium, a jewel in the crown of King Leopold.

Given how the Belgians pretend to let the Zaïrois run things, it may still very well be the crowning glory of Belgium.

September 24 RIGHT NOW, I LOVE THE CANCAN. I love the pointy shoes, the high neck collars, the curly hair, the layers of petticoats. Toulouse-Lautrec was justly enamored of painting the dancers’ legs kicking, frilly knickers taunting the audience. There is something erotic about the frantic movements under undulating layers of fabric. Everyone (even my strict Indian mother—is there any other type?) knows I want to play a cancan dancer on the stage of the Follies Bergères in “Paris, Ville Lumière.”

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 47

Sapna Gupta

October 1 CONSIDER THE FACT, SAYS ALAIN, that France has never had a cancan dancer from India. I know that already but I hold my tongue. Alain and I are bitter rivals in several subjects in our class. It annoys him that I get better grades than him in French. Allez l’Inde, he says with a smirk. Alain est un obstructionniste et un couillon.

Indians have a fine dancing tradition, Papa says. Look at the dancing Natraj, Shiva in a circle of fire. Surely, that counts. He creates and destroys while he dances, in fire no less, and he’s both man and woman. See if the French can handle that.

It’s got nothing to do with the cancan, I tell him.

Sure it does, he’s kicking up his legs, he says. And he’s half female. The French have got to love that. Hey, you could try to be one of the Indians for the American School’s Far West review, he says. You could stand in front of the teepee while the cowboys run around.

Papa turns everything into a joke. It’s all ha ha ha to him. He never takes anything seriously. Couillon, I say under my breath. No more ha ha ha if he hears me calling him that.

October 2 IN THREE DAYS, THEY SELECT THE DANCERS. I’m happy the selection day falls on a Thursday. Thursdays are lucky days for me.

In biology class, we learn how the amount of melanin produced in the epidermis determines skin pigmentation. So look at Rajni, Alice, and Alain, says Mr. Soubeyrand, our biology teacher. Twenty-two heads turn to look at me, Alice, and Alain; we are medium brown, dark brown, and pink with orange freckles, respectively.

Rajni is brown, Alice is black, and Alain is white, says Mr. Soubeyrand, and that is because they have different levels of melanin in their epidermis. Melanin makes the skin dark and protects it against sunburn.

Until the students turn back, Alice and I avert our eyes while Alain squares his shoulders. And so it goes. Call it the white advantage. Melanin does more than what Mr. Soubeyrand says. The paucity of melanin imparts this delightful pink glow in my European classmates—and confers on them the right to get sunburned. It gives Alice and me the right to avert our gaze.

I need to clarify matters a bit: my classmates are very nice. We are, after all, in Sub-Saharan Africa and a third of the school is 48 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Sapna Gupta

made up of people like Alice and me, melanin-rich people. We go about our business as usual: we listen attentively in class, we pass notes, we smoke in the bathroom stalls (I prefer Rothmans to Dunhills, and every now and then, we smoke the unfiltered Gauloises. This is a French school, after all. Allez la France!). We get nervous before tests and recitations of poems. Monologues from Molière’s plays are very nerve-racking affairs. In principle, we are all the same. That, I know. But the business of dancing the cancan is disturbing the peace.

October 4 ALAIN AND MME . D UBONNET think they are impenetrable in their intentions and in their countenance. Student and teacher alike are mistaken. I can tell that Mme. Dubonnet’s nostrils flare when the noise level in the class gets too loud. Alain, when he’s annoyed, shuffles his skinny legs and his eyes dart around. He’s the teacher’s pet. I’m not the teacher’s pet, but she likes me despite herself because I am neck in neck with Alain in every subject and it keeps him from bragging.

People just don’t cooperate with me. Alain and Alice just are who they are, and the world takes note and accepts them. They are the recipient of a certain tacit cooperation from students and teacher alike, and I think it derives from the absence of melanin. It’s that je ne sais quoi that makes people listen to what they say, laugh at their jokes, or sit next to them at lunch. People don’t quite take to me. I am working on it, developing this je ne sais quoi, but there is the issue of skin color and all. But then again, Alice is from Chad and her dark skin does not seem to be a problem. Maybe it’s an Indian thing. Maybe it’s the oiled, braided hair.

I am working on catching up. Catching up on being accepted, catching up in fashion, hairstyle, jokes.…One always feels like one is catching up. When I am older, it won’t be a problem, catching up.

Right now, it is.

Some people don’t care if they have enemies. I do, and I think about it all the time. I don’t want to have enemies, but it seems that right now, in our composition class, Mme. Dubonnet is becoming my enemy.

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October 5 AT TIMES, I JUST WANT TO OFFER MYSELF as biology, a walking piece of flesh and not as an amalgam of hair, skin, and lips. I appear as a skinned person and compare myself to Mireille and Alain. Look, I am pointing out: we both have an esophagus, and look at the pulsating veins and arteries—it’s the same thing, non? Check out the liver: who’s white, black, or brown now? These are the impractical musings that distract me from the matter at hand.

Later this afternoon, we gather in the auditorium to start planning the program of “Paris, Ville Lumière.” Mme. Dubonnet asks who is interested in playing cancan dancers. I raise my hand.

She looks displeased. I gather the paucity of melanin in your epidermis imparts the right to dance the cancan. Cancan dancers are born, not made, I am supposed to deduce. After all, pourquoi pas? I press on and hold my hand up. It flutters up in mid-air to no avail. Somehow, the melanin has made me invisible. An unfortunate thing, this surplus of melanin.

October 9 THE FRENCH CAN BE SO RIGID. Case in point: they teach us about our ancestors, the Gauls. Ah oui, mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen, les gaulois, our glorious handlebar mustach-wearing, Roman-fighting, valiant ancestors. We do indeed have a proud heritage.

All evidence points to France, in all of its imperial and Republican glory, never having an Indian cancan dancer. But why is that a problem? We are in a French school, and all students can participate in the Fêtes Champêtres, and we all have Gauls as ancestors. Who’s French and who’s not French?

Mireille can have a wispy voice, Françoise has freckles, and they all have chauffeurs, live in homes with over-chlorinated swimming pools (you can catch a lot of infectious diseases anywhere outside clean, sanitized, orderly Western Europe). They go to the French countryside on summer vacations and come back with cute accents du midi.

My family, we do not have a chauffeur; we live five of us in one medium-sized apartment. None of the European accoutrements for us. I ask Papa how come we can’t afford to live in a house with a swimming pool. He says that’s just Karma. Then he does his ha ha ha routine. You can never tell when he’s being serious.

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October 10 PAPA CAME HOME ALL HA HA HA last night. Five gendarmes had put up a barricade on the Boulevard du 30 Juin, he said. He had to pay 100 Zaïres to get by. They pointed the rifle this close to my head, he said. He put one hand on his temple and the other hand 30 centimeters away.

They would never point a rifle if I were European, he said. He laughed. We’ve got to leave, he said. Now I’m to starting to see why everything’s a joke to Papa.

October 11 WHEN SCHOOL STARTED IN SEPTEMBER, I tried to speak with an accent du midi but Mireille laughed at me—there’s no midi in India! They don’t even speak French there! You haven’t even gone to France, she says, tu es indienne. She lets the words come out slowly, like she’s depositing them on the air between us.

I pay very close attention to my nails. They are very short and they are not clean as a French child’s would be. Ah yes, but I am not French... so the standard of French clean nails does not apply, non?

Here is the proof. Using newly acquired logic from set theory learned in our leçon de mathématiques, French equals clean nails, Indian does not include French, and therefore Indian does not equal clean nails and Indian does not equal permission to dance the cancan.

Merde. About the question of my so-called fake accent....I say— pourquoi pas? We are taught in history about the Gauls, our illustrious ancestors—NOS ANCÊTRES LES GAULOIS! I wonder whether anyone would admit to this ridiculous situation. I move amongst French folks in a country colonized by the Belgians and plundered by everyone. Even the Americans get in on the act and the Zaïrois do too (when their once-and-present colonizers let them). Indians plunder too, mind you. We all drink Coca-Cola. And we all have fierce ancestors who called Paris Lutèce.

Well, in history class at least, we are all French.

October 15 WHAT I AM LEARNING IS THIS: the French are different from the Belgians and they are certainly different than the Indians. I think Indians are different from everyone (but not on purpose—despite ourselves, Crab Orchard Review ◆ 51

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we’re different). We’re not white enough for the Zaïrois to fear us, but dark enough for me not to be allowed to dance the cancan. Dark enough for non-Indians to despise us, I sometimes think. Papa says I should lighten up. He thinks he’s so funny.

November 7 I HEAR THEM REHEARSING the cancan number every afternoon. I have been offered the part of orchestra master. I get to stand with my back to the audience and pretend to lead the orchestra, which is basically all of us who do not fit the mold (it is a very big orchestra).

We will only pretend to play. I am supposed to be a man, and Mme. Dubonnet will paint a pencil-thin mustache above my lip. The show’s in December. It will be the start of rainy season and talks of roasting chestnuts, snow, and Père Noël. I have never seen a chestnut in my life, but I hear they taste good.

November 9 I HEARD NATHALIE call me Chocolat. That’s okay. I love chocolate.

Eh bien, who doesn’t?

November 10 ACCORDING TO PAPA, we’re moving to America. His brother in Chicago filed our immigration papers three years ago. Papa says he can feel our turn’s going to come soon. We’re moving the moment our green cards are approved. I am not that surprised and more than a little pleased. Alain is going to be jealous. He loves America. He talks about John Travolta all the time.

November 22 WE ARE LEAVING IN SIX WEEKS. Papa is happy, I am happy, and Mother says hopefully, nothing bad will happen before it’s our turn to go. We go to get fingerprinted and photographed at the American Embassy.

People speak loudly and smile a lot there (at each other, not at us).

Papa and I marvel at their beautiful teeth. They don’t realize it, but Americans put on a show for each other, for the world. They can’t help it. It’s their earnestness, their optimism—they’re born performers.

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Look at these people, I know you’ll get to dance your cancan there, Papa says. I still think you should have talked to your teacher about the Dancing Shiva, he adds. He’s all ha ha ha again. I ignore him. I watch the Americans. They’re so tall and so well scrubbed. I think they shower every day. Some Europeans certainly don’t. We Indians shower everyday. But not because we’re copying Americans.

I think we are leaving as soon as Papa can bribe the Air Zaïre official into selling us plane tickets to Brussels, from where we will catch a flight to Chicago. If that doesn’t work, he’ll bribe the Air France official and we’ll fly to Chicago via Paris. See, Indians can be as crafty as the Belgians (Allez les Belges…).

We might get to leave before the show. This will be better for all of us. You see, I was planning on jumping up on the stage and dancing along when the cancan number came up. It would cause a commotion. It would be a veritable scandal (I presume). But now, I get to avoid making Mme. Dubonnet cry. I am relieved and disappointed: I made a pact with myself that I’d dance the cancan one day. Now everything is deferred.

February 22 WE ARE IN AMERICA. I speak English. Actually, I’ve always spoken it. If you’re Indian and you live outside India, chances are you speak English. That’s the way it is. It was another thing that made Alain jealous. My English was better than his.

Life’s not so bad. Papa found a job. We have relatives. They’re cool but a little uptight. Mom is coping, but not so well. She spends her days in bed.

May 2 SOMEHOW, I HAVE NOW ACQUIRED a full panoply of American slang terms. My hair is short and no longer oiled. I did that on my own.

Mom does not have an opinion, not really. She still spends most of her time in bed. She sleeps all day and hardly eats anything. Papa, meanwhile, loves hot dogs and is getting a potbelly.

People here have no idea what Zaïre is nor do they give a shit.

That’s okay. I don’t either. The girl who lived in Zaïre is another person. It’s like we have turned the corner from one hallway into another and the hallway we used to be in is gone, just like that.

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We’re here, but our past isn’t. But we’re essentially still the same (Mom not so much). Papa still cracks jokes and laughs at everything.

May 21 TIME HAS FLOWN. I am now six years older (that makes me almost 21).

I have a collection of Toulouse-Lautrec prints. I like the Jane Avril one.

They don’t give a shit about much here, but they sure like things like French posters. They say Americans love mom, god, baseball, and apple pie (not necessarily in that order). But to me, it looks like they love rock and roll, TV, and beer (not necessarily in that order).

June 24 PEOPLE SAY GEZONTIGHT (or something like that) when I sneeze. It’s German and it’s spelled Gesundheit, I’ve just learned. But that’s okay, in America, you can use words from anywhere in the world and they don’t mind, n’est-ce pas? You can chat a few times with someone at work and you can be buddies, just like that. I started working at the 7-Eleven this week, after my classes at the community college. The money’s not bad. I have nice colleagues. It’s the land of the Big Gulp and the Big Bite Hot Dog. That’s how I met George—he’s the manager. He liked me from day one, he says. George is thirty-six, wears black T-shirts that say “Born to Be Wild” or “Freedom Rocks,” and he says he likes electric guitars, beers on Friday nights, and pretty girls. Like you, he says.

He winks at me whenever our eyes meet.

George has small bags under his eyes and what he calls a beer gut. You could rub it for good luck, like Buddha’s tummy, he says.

He is divorced once from a teenage marriage (a mistake of my youth, he says) and has been the manager of the 7-Eleven for six years. I think he really likes me.

Do you like chocolate? I ask. Hey, who doesn’t? he says. He rubs his belly and says mmm mmm mmm. He smiles and his eyes crinkle. I can tell we are going to be friends.

I CATCH GEORGE lovely skin.

LOOKING AT ME .

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Have you heard of the Follies Bergères, I ask. Who’s that, he says. I explain. He seems interested.

July 4 GEORGE HAS INVITED PEOPLE OVER for a Fourth of July barbeque. I take Papa with me. Everyone from 7-Eleven is there. We eat hot dogs and hamburgers.

Aren’t cows sacred in India? George asks.

In a matter of speaking, I say.

We love cows, Papa says, with his mouth full of hot dog.

But you’re eating beef, George says.

Right you are, chap, Papa says, after he swallows.

That would make you a bad Indian, George says, with a grin.

Papa starts laughing. His eyes crinkle at the corners. We all laugh.

September 4 GEORGE AND I HAVE BEEN ON THREE DATES since I quit my job. I now work at the library. I get paid more and the hours are better. Things are looking up, I might say.

I think we have something, George says on our third date.

We might. I’m not sure.

I think we have something too, I say. He looks at me without saying anything and smiles for a long time. He’s sweet. I am not sure I am as sweet as he is.

September 20 I LEND MY CANCAN MUSIC TAPES TO GEORGE. He brings them back the next day and says he loved them and wants to see me dance. I know then that I will marry him.

October 19 GEORGE IS OPENING UP TO ME. I had a messed up childhood, he says. I have issues.

From what I can see, I think that everyone in America has had a messed up childhood.

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George says. That’s why I’m shy around the ladies, he adds. I was roly-poly all through high school. I got teased.

It sounds as if the word roly-poly means a good thing, like jolly or something. But it sounds like George didn’t like it.

But you’re a typical American, I say.

Well yeah, he says. I’m American, but not typical. I’m GreekAmerican—so I’m American with a twist. My grandparents on both sides were from Greece. My folks go to the Greek Orthodox Church.

So what, I say. You’re an American.

Yeah, but I’m Greek-American, that’s all, he says. He looks a bit pained. He can be so stubborn.

Hey, I know how to dance the syrtaki, I tell him.

What’s that, he asks.

Never mind, I tell him.

From what I can tell, Americans all have to be something. They can’t just be Americans who grew up in the suburbs, eating hamburgers and corn flakes, saying things like “uh oh” or “golly gee.…” They have to have been teased or not teased and ignored in school or they have to be something other than just plain American.

Plain American seems to be a problem. I had the opposite problem at the good ol’ Lycée Français. I was too much of something.

January 10 GEORGE AND I HAVE MOVED IN TOGETHER. He’s bought us dance lessons at the Discovery Center. I tell him I want to dance the cha cha and the merengue. George laughs out loud. You’ll do the cha cha? And the merengue? He repeats in a sing-song way and erupts in hiccupping laughter. I also laugh to keep him company but I do not understand. It’s a Barry Manilow thing, he says. You know, “Copacabana”?

I shake my head. We start class next Tuesday. That’s two days from now. I can’t wait.

January 11 I COULDN’T SLEEP LAST NIGHT. I am so excited about the dance class.

I’ve also been thinking about Zaïre some, for the first time in years.

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January 12 THERE ARE TWENTY-fiVE OF US IN CLASS. There’s Mario and Vassily, Michelle, Laurie, and Donna. There’s a bunch of other people. They look nice. Miss Tina is our teacher, and she walks in slowly, all smiles and pulled-back hair. She’s busty and she’s got on a tight, red top with long, flowing black pants. Her back is arched. Quite the drama queen and quite the firecracker, she is.

We’ll learn to waltz, salsa, tango, mambo, and merengue, she says. Tonight, we learn the beats and to step to the three beats of waltz. Her voice projects well. George says I’ve never looked happier.

January 19 I WAIT FOR THE CLASS TO END so that I can talk to Miss Tina and explain how we should also learn the cancan.

I’m not sure, she says. We kind of have a full plate. And what will the guys do?

There’s only eight guys in the class, I say. They can watch. Or we put them in petticoats and they can dance too.

Miss Tina doesn’t think that’s too funny. She reminds me of Mme. Dubonnet. They both have flaring nostrils.

February 23 WE’VE DONE THE WALTZ, salsa, tango, mambo, and merengue. Beer gut and all, George is quite the dancer. I think Miss Tina likes him.

She demonstrates each new dance with a partner and she always picks him. I don’t mind. George only has eyes for me, plus it forces Miss Tina to be nice to me. I’ve been quite the pest about learning the cancan.

I approach Miss Tina after class. She sighs. I don’t really think we need to go over this again, she says. I knew she’d say that.

March 2 WE ONLY HAVE TWO CLASS SESSIONS LEFT. One class actually, because the last class is a performance. We get to wear fancy clothes and invite friends and family to watch us dance. We put on a show. I’ve started calling Miss Tina “Miss Queena” under my breath. George Crab Orchard Review ◆ 57

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thinks it’s all very funny. He and Papa should get together and have a good ha ha ha session about this. Actually, I think they have.

(Bastards.)

March 9 THIS IS THE LAST CLASS (if you don’t count the show). There will be no cancan. Nom de dieu de putain de bordel.

March 10 GEORGE SAYS, CAN’T YOU JUST LET IT GO, this cancan thing?

Just because Miss Queena sticks her ass to yours during salsa doesn’t mean you have to take her side, I say.

Oh, stick a knife in my heart, he says. He looks hurt.

Americans have a colorful, descriptive way with words. One day I just might (stick a knife in his heart). I am kidding. But I do get a bit angry sometimes. Yes, I have an unhealthy fixation on some matters.

I, too, have issues. Welcome to America.

March 17 TONIGHT, WE DANCE. Papa even dragged Mom out of bed to watch George and I and the rest of the class. It’s all going swimmingly well. The merengue’s supposed to be the last number.

I slip out. I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. I know George’s going to look for me so I go into the men’s bathroom.

He’ll never look there. Last month, I went to Beatnix and bought myself three frilly petticoats, a corset, a high lace collar, white tights, black pointy shoes, and a froufrou-ey red dress to go over everything.

It’s all a bit big on me—the drag queens shop there. But a few safety pins here and there and it all hangs fine.

I put on the petticoats and the high lace collar. This is exactly what I had imagined. They look so good I get tears in my eyes. The crinoline petticoats swish under my dress. I clip my hair in a loose bun and smile at myself in the mirror. They’re just about done with the merengue number. George’s probably in the parking lot by now, looking for me in the car.

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appreciatively. They think it’s part of the show. My classmates are quiet—Mario and Vassily are looking at me funny (okay, they are all looking at me funny). Papa nods and starts guffawing.

I walk over to the stereo and my petticoats rustle dramatically.

With a flourish, I stick my tape in. Then I drag one of the tables to the middle of the dance floor and climb on top. I take a bow and start to dance. I kick up my legs and shake my butt. Some of the guests start clapping along to the beat. The shoes are too tight and my toes hurt. But that’s okay. So far, so good.

Miss Tina’s eyes are wide and she’s shaking her head. There’s that pinched smile that makes me nervous. I keep dancing. A new number starts and I begin a modified version of the cancan. It’s not as impressive when it’s not ten women in a row lifting the front of their dresses together and exposing their knickers. People are starting to murmur. Some are laughing. I keep on dancing and let out a resounding whoop. It reverberates against the bare walls.

It’s been about ten minutes now. If only Mme. Dubonnet could see me now. My shoes are killing me. My toes feel squishy because the little fingers in both of my feet have started to bleed. (I can hear my always-bewildered George say, it’s the little TOE, not finger, silly!) No matter. I dance. I feel heat rise from my legs, my pelvis, my stomach. It’s going to my head. I am sweating. I feel feverish, in flames and frozen at the same time. Visions of Jane Avril at the Follies Bergères dance in my head along the beat from the tape.

I can tell George is back in the room. I think I saw him bring his hand to his mouth. I start spinning and spinning in a frenzy. My hair has come loose and is matted against my sweaty temples. I spin and see Miss Tina cross herself. She’s mistaken. Her god cannot help me. The French were right. National origin trumps everything.

Biology wins. I am Shiva the destructor and I am the dancing Natraj in the circle of fire. I dance the dance of destruction. Flames have erupted inside my feet, my legs. My belly burns. I am man and woman and the fire consumes me from inside. This dance is how it begins and this dance is how it ends.

I am transported by the heat, by the blood pumping into my legs and out of my bleeding toes. I am splitting in two—like Shiva, I have become man and woman. I am entrapped in a circle of heat, passion, and madness. I catch a glimpse of George’s expression. His eyes are full of tears. His mouth is twisted. He’s such a sweet man.

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to cry and laugh at the same time. Papa is grinning so hard he looks like he’s in pain. Mom stands next to him and has buried her head in his shoulder. But I dance on, despite the silence, the shocked looks, the aghast faces. I am everywhere: on stage at the Lycée in Kinshasa, at the Follies Bergères, I am the woman in the Toulouse-Lautrec Poster, I am Jane Avril. I kick up my legs and the crinoline rustles.

Allez la France, Allez l’Inde, Allez l’Amérique…

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Harvest

MY

FATHER BELONGS to that generation of men that came of age with Jamaica’s independence in 1962. Though not officially ordained, they were the nation’s promise keepers, a group among those sons sent away—not to the cane fields of Florida, not to the tobacco fields of Connecticut—but to a life within the hurried walls of abundant American colleges. Educated by teachers who strove with every syllable, every wrist flick, every act to represent proper British ways, my father left with the dreams of a people reborn, butting almost instantaneously with an America not always welcome to the independence of blacks.

It is that image of promise that I want always to remember.

There’s a photo among Grandma’s things in which he’s suited up for his first flight, looking up and out at the camera as if his soul was bared for the photographer to see. My father stands with my mother under the shade of a towering jacaranda tree, its pale purple flowers scattered on the ground like a soft bedspread. His moustache is parted in the middle, revealing the indentation beneath his nostrils.

His hair, cropped close, is parted on the side. He is not slim, not muscular, but somewhere in between, having the body of a bookish boy, soft, but hardened still by the labor demanded by a house without modern amenities. He carried water from the spring mornings and evenings, bags of corn or yam from his father’s field miles away, and when the farming allowed played cricket on the high school playing field.

I remember, instead, 1983, “Jamaica 21” signs on billboards, light poles, car bumpers, T-shirts, hats, floating in shop windows like temporary “For Sale” signs. Flags—black, green and gold—were more abundant that year than ever before. They were hoisted proudly, saying we’re adults now. The adult nation celebrated, dismissing the political missteps of years past. That year he is forty-two and I am eight, standing beside him at a bakery counter, alternating between math and English grammar homework and separating plastic Crab Orchard Review ◆ 61

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bags for customers’ orders—beef patties, alone or sandwiched between the folds of coco bread; gizzadas; sugar buns; slices of carrot cake; a cup of fish tea. Once my homework is done, I do like he’d done and wipe the Formica counter, wiping away the sticky film from too-sweet boxed juices or aerated water that had fizzled and frothed over. I remember leaving him there as it neared five o’clock and my mother came. We left together, I with a slice of cake or a boxed juice in one hand, the other in my mother’s hand, which was sometimes ashy still from chalk dust.

I remember, too, the “For Sale” sign hanging limply, the stale odor of a locked shop, the men who came to examine the machinery, hauling and hoisting the bits of metal onto the open back of a pickup truck, the sweat slipping from their knitted brows, the clang of metal against metal. The shop, though not empty of sounds was empty still without the calls across the shop counter, the heavy coins clanging in the corner as my father made change.

“Jamaica 21” signs fading but visible still, my father returned to what he’d studied, botany and agronomy. Our yard was like the church at our October harvest service, flourishing with plants of varying species, crops of tomato and callaloo, corn, red peas, Scotch bonnet peppers, stalks of cane and corn shifting like low-flying kites in the afternoon breeze. Two miles away, sweet pepper, red peas and sweet potato flourished in a separate field. I was beside him again, sometimes at the People’s Cooperative where he weighed and released produce, and I wrote figures on a notepad. At other times, he unloaded produce at the kitchens of two boarding schools for girls, and I watched from the hot interior of the van the girls in white or pale blue dresses, never dawdling but walking always with a purpose.

That year it seemed my father had come full circle: a promise keeper celebrating the abundance of his harvest.

“THE CONDITION OF YOUR HOME reflects the condition of your finances, the condition of your life overall.” A woman in red, face rouged and softened by powder, scribbles every word I say as if each syllable, each word marks one sure step to financial freedom. Half the group scribbles, the others look at me and beyond as if they’re here by force and not choice. “If your house looks like a hurricane blew through it, then chances are your bank accounts reflect the same kind of confusion.”

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A third of the women avert their eyes, another third look beyond me still, the remaining third shake their heads in disbelief, bursting to say that no, their finances are in disarray because of the everrising school fees and the abundance of food and clothes growing children need. Another I’m sure would point to a wayward husband, sick parents. And still another would throw her hands up and say, “Perhaps it’s the will of God.” But they’re happy still with the promise that the financial freedom seminar offers. Our people, once imitators of the British, are cleaving now to something that resembles the American dream, and my financial freedom seminars styled off American models serve only to fuel that desire.

I try to believe completely in what I tell the women, and the occasional man, here. Around us, my father’s house is crumbling.

The yard, once a Crayola box of colors, is a patchwork of living and dying plants, a patchwork of red earth waiting to be tilled and planted. The cotton tree has died under the weight of vines crisscrossing its branches. Other trees are tangled too with vines sporting white or light purple flowers, which we’d pick as children and thread through long stems from the grass to make necklaces or bracelets. The house itself is waiting for the bounty of a harvest.

Water seeps through the section of the roof that’s solid concrete, not dripping onto the floor but leaving pockets of peeling, graying paint on the ceiling. My father needs to redo the roof, slope the concrete so the water runs off rather than settles. In almost each corner, there are pools of sand-like pebbles, evidence of the termites eating away the wood. Each piece of furniture is dulled by a coat of dust, and sprinkled too with the sandy pebbles.

He seems resigned, looks at even the simplest setback—a blown light bulb, a leaking tap, a blown fuse—as a major blockade to meaningful movement forward. His manner is that of a man defeated by life, a boxer battered and slowed by his bouts in the ring.

The room is empty now, and except for the whir of a ceiling fan and the low buzz of the fluorescent bulb, my breath and heartbeat are the only rhythms here. There are scattered pieces of paper, a book forgotten beneath a desk, a pen leaking ink, staining the already stained desk.

The door creaks, opens, and a woman steps into the fluorescent light. Her face is vaguely familiar, seems to be one that I would have known for a brief period of time, perhaps in my now distant childhood.

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“Mr. Clarke,” she begins and I think she must have attended a past seminar. “How you do?”

She speaks patois, dignified, forced, as if she, like me, had been schooled to forget our native speech patterns for a version of the more respected King’s English.

“Not too bad. You?” My tone and language fall somewhere between the formal one I use for students and the informal one I practice on my sister and friends, hoping that its semi-casual form will mask the fact that I’ve forgotten who she is.

“Took your seminar last year, and I just wanted to come back and thank you. You changed my life.”

I nod, wait for her to explain.

“You probably hear from a lot of people, a lot of your students, so you already know how much it can change a life to think of a job as a means to a goal, to not think of the, ah, the drudgery of it. But you know what? I realized after your seminar that it wasn’t the finances holding me back from what I want to achieve. It was this guilt that I wasn’t patriotic if I left. No where no better than yaad, as them say.”

She speaks and I think of my father and his return for the very same reasons. Once he said to my mother: “I never went to school in America so I could stay there forever. Jamaica is a country too.

When we all leave, who going develop the country? The farmer with a cow and a goat and two little pigs or the man with the first and the second degree and a little knowledge?” My father has the first and second degree, yet he’s no better off for it.

Standing in the pool of light, she looks happy. “You’re going to…?”

“Miami first. California next. Got into university there—a small Bible college, you know. They paying my way, so I’m here making plans to go abroad now.”

“Good for you. What you going study?”

“Family counseling. Maybe I’ll come take over when you retire, run seminars and offer financial counseling.” She laughs, not a feminine tinkling, but a coarse laugh, a bark, which, in another time, I would think showed her own uncertainty. “But I don’t want to hold you up. I had this written in case I didn’t find you.”

She hands me a sealed envelope, its surface roughened by the petals and natural fiber. Its delicacy suggests an intimacy that’s not present. I stand with the envelope, unopened, staring for a moment 64 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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at the empty doorway, the door slowly returning, clicking in place, and remembering then that I didn’t wish her safe travels. I slide the unopened envelope among my papers, promising myself that I’ll read it in the morning.

OURS IS A NATION OF NOMADS, restless wanderers seeking a harvest in distant cities. Sometimes I think we’re aiming for our ancestral homes, names of towns and countries unknown, but retreating, retracing the path of our ancestors. My grandfather was of that generation that migrated to the cane fields of Cuba and Costa Rica, of that generation with upper bodies muscled and hardened by the swinging of machetes up, down, left, right, backs bent as if in prayer to a god. He returned without the promised or expected wealth, heading back to the fields he’d left behind. Nearly half a century later, my grandfather spoke words in Spanish as if his life in Baragua, Cuba, had ended only yesterday, and the men and women he remembered were only steps away from a treasured reunion. He held forever his belief—and that of a people long taught that civilized nations, civilized people, were those who originated from up north— Europe, America, Canada—that he should have pushed North instead of settling into a laborer’s job in the cane fields of Cuba.

It was my grandfather’s view of foreign nations and not my father’s that I thought of as I studied after lights out for the American college entrance exams my father had promised my mother he would make me take. My mother wasn’t of the same mind as my grandfather; she wanted her children to have choices, to explore all options. She too was a nomad in search of wealth, though not in search of an ancestral home.

By then, our yard was no longer like a box of crayons but like my sister’s variegated embroidery threads—a combination of dark- and light-green leaves, red-brown earth and drying, dying leaves. My father’s harvest had come and gone, fluctuating it seemed with the value of the Jamaican dollar against the U.S. dollar, dipping, dipping, dipping, rising slightly, and dipping even further. And I thought then that he failed because he returned.

“Sonny, Sonny,” my grandfather said when he heard I was going.

One arm hung limply around my shoulder. The other rested on the verandah railing, its paint chipping and peeling like pliable bits of plastic. He seemed unable to get beyond that name he’d called me from my childhood. “Sonny. You growing up, boy.” He said nothing Crab Orchard Review ◆ 65

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more of my impending departure, but gave me my first cigarette, the one that would also be my last.

But it was my father’s view that I considered when I started winding down a life on Wall Street, selling my Brooklyn Heights brownstone: a life lived with regrets is not a life lived at all.

There’s a photo of me at the airport before my first departure.

My arms are folded across my chest, my face turned slightly away from the camera, in what I now think of as a defiant pose. My father is also looking away from the camera, but my sister, Novlette, is looking directly into the camera’s eye.

ACROSS TOWN, MY APARTMENT is empty and silent, accusatory almost.

It’s too bright, white tiles, white walls, reflecting the white fluorescent bulbs. Mine is not a life conducive to a wife and family.

I’m settled here, but, educated in American universities, accustomed to the excess of Wall Street, I feel like a migrant still, feel that I’m not yet at home in a country that’s daily adopting an American way of life. Besides, my father’s harvest dried early; I worry that mine too will dry as well and I’ll be forced to move again in search of wealth in a wealthy nation.

Almost immediately, the phone rings, and I’m sure it is my father, calling as he always does each night after the seminars.

“How was it this evening?”

“Same as always. Except a past student came to thank me, to tell me she was going abroad to study. Other than that, nothing different.” These conversations rarely vary. “How you doing?”

“Not bad. Arthritis acting up, but not complaining. I’m still better off than most.”

He pauses and it seems he’s taking a drink.

“Still coming up weekend?”

“Yes, God willing.”

Since my return two years ago, I spend weekends with my father, slowly restoring his house, cutting and sawing mahogany to make cabinets and doors, mixing varnishes to get the appropriate depth in color. My father is of that generation that seems unable to do most menial tasks without hiring help, an attitude, I think, that’s also a legacy of a colonial heritage. Growing up we had a lady coming in twice a week to wash. Another came Saturdays to clean, leaving the house smelling temporarily of floor polish and lemonscented furniture polish. My sister and I chased spiders and lizards, 66 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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stamping the spiders under our shoes and shooing the lizards through the open windows. My mother cooked most evenings, but she wished, long before she died, for a helper to come daily to take care of the household chores. Once, my father called Garth, the neighborhood’s jack-of-all-trades, to drill holes in the concrete walls so he could mount our photos. And, at another time, he called Garth to replace a lock, and mount bolts on a door.

I didn’t think anything of it then because the house was filled with lives other than our own, orders and comments, stories and laughter, the smell of Saturday afternoon soup, or spiced fried fish. Now, though, I’ve adopted the American way—do-it-yourself. I’ve bought and sanded wood, measured and hung a door, tiled a bathroom wall, replaced closet doors with doors of mahogany wood that termites won’t eat, and when I can I’ll retile the kitchen floor, replace the chipped tiles that collect bits of red dirt and dust.

THE FOG IS STILL FLOATING across the valleys when I cross Mount Diablo and the women are still setting up produce on the roadside stands. There are few children present, one or two carrying buckets of water, engines turning over as the adults start their day. But the trucks are already on the road, holding tightly to the mountain’s curves, grinding slowly.

When I arrive, my father is on his knees, peering under the kitchen sink, trying to repair a leak. I stand to his right, holding the flashlight and looking too. The pipe has long been leaking, the floor of the cabinet a dark, rotted wood.

“Let me take a look.”

He takes the flashlight from my hand and I touch the worn pipe, feeling for the place where the water seems to be emerging.

“The threading’s worn. Needs a new pipe. Let me run up to the hardware store.”

“You don’t want to eat first? I made callaloo and boiled bananas.”

“Alright.”

We sit, both hunched over plates, a thermos of hot water, a box of tea bags and a bowl of sugar between us.

“The market was up again yesterday.”

“Yes. Might be a sign of a turnaround. Just have to wait and see if it can sustain it. But you know something always comes out to spook the buyers.”

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years on Wall Street and work now in Jamaica’s financial district.

We speak instead of the broad stock market and its fluctuations, the scandals impacting American corporations, and the stocks or bonds I would recommend for clients’ portfolios. He understands as well as I do the intricacies of managing other people’s money. It’s ironic that he serves on the board of a community college, has served as treasurer for the Rotary Club, and now chairs a committee that’s raising funds for the repair of a primary school. Yet, his own resources have dwindled to nothing.

Sometimes I miss the quickened pace of Wall Street, the elation of discovering a small biotech company with an innovative drug well ahead of street analysts, watching the stock price rise as the company’s discoveries are revealed. But I prefer the slower pace here, the distance from corporate greed and imperialistic attitudes, the feeling now that each recommendation, each investment, each seminar serves only to further the possibilities of a developing nation.

My father takes the dishes through the kitchen to the laundry sink where he washes them. And I think for a moment that he perhaps has been washing dishes that way all week. When I return with the new pipe, he’s placed a bucket beneath the pipe and spread old newspapers on the floor in front of the sink. He’s also brought the mop into the kitchen, leaning it against the counter.

Once I start loosening the pipe, he stands back as he does when I move the tools from the garage to the verandah to start sawing wood, varnishing or mixing paint. I’d planned today to finish working on the room that was my sister’s. I’ve replaced most of the ceiling boards with treated wood and the closet doors with mahogany. I’ve stained the bathroom cupboard and the closet doors chocolate brown, but the ceiling and the walls need to be painted. I’d wanted to replace the bathroom sink and faucets, but haven’t yet read the section of the manual on replacing sinks or faucets. Pipes I can handle.

There’s a lot of work still to be done. My room hasn’t yet been touched. My father’s bathroom has a new shower stall, new tiles on the wall, but the termites have eaten away the doorframe, the ceiling.

Beneath the doorframe are pools of dark sandy pebbles we call “chichi” and elsewhere in the room are pockets of chichi with a color closer to that of sand. We still have to tackle the roof, slope the concrete so the water doesn’t settle and seep again through the porous material. My sister is planning to make new curtains, reupholster the living room furniture.

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Once the new pipe is fitted and tested, my father asks what I plan to work on for the day.

“Finish painting Novlette’s room.”

“How much you think will be ready by Christmas?”

Novlette has decided to return for the holidays with her husband and in-laws. We both want the refurbishing as near to being complete as possible, my father because it will make him seem successful, and I because I don’t want to see my father’s shame.

He carries the ladder up the stairs and I start mixing the paint.

Sunflower, it says. All our childhood, the walls had been off-white, the house colored only by the flowers in the vases, the purple upholstery of the living room furniture and the floral patterned bedspreads.

He takes a brush and starts low. I roll back and forth, covering the ceiling in white.

“Man to man,” he says without looking up. “If I were one of your clients, what would you tell me if I came to you for advice on leasing property.”

“Alright. Tell me.”

“Thinking of raising goats. At one time people were eating beef, every farmer was raising a cow. But people not eating beef so much now. Want to lease a piece of land, fence it in properly and raise goats. Goat meat cheap now.”

I stop rolling for a minute, dismissing what I would ordinarily request—a detailed business plan with projected profit or loss, startup costs, market analysis. My father already knows what I would ask because he’s seen some of the reports I’ve written on companies new to my clients’ investment portfolio, or development stage companies looking for investment capital.

“Who you think your buyers are?” I start rolling again, not looking down.

“Schools, restaurants. Patty shops making all kinds of patties now—callaloo, vegetable, curried chicken. Pretty soon they’re going to start making patties with goat meat. Big market for goat meat now.”

He’s speaking in the generalizations that don’t work in investments. I need facts, but ask instead, “So you think you need to lease property?”

“If it is to work, it can’t be a small operation.” He stops and turns around, paint dripping from the brush, rolling down his arm.

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for investment. My father has never asked me for money, and I’ve never given it outright. Instead, I buy groceries on my way in from Kingston, pay the utility bills electronically, and wire money directly to his savings account. He brings in money from the produce he sells, but not an amount sufficient to run a household, save for retirement.

“How many goats you thinking of?”

“It can’t be a small operation,” he says again. “Thirty, forty to start. Enough so I can start breeding them right away and have some ready for Christmas. Spoke to Neville about the property next door.

He’s putting together some numbers.”

I continue rolling, putting my body into the motion. It’s cathartic, calming. I think of the failed investments of the past, the “For Sale” sign hanging in the pastry shop window, the men moving the equipment out, the shop denuded, silent. I think of the produce supply business he’d started and the vans and farmers who came on motorcycle or on foot to drop off the goods my father purchased from them. Sometimes I held the scale, weighing the potatoes and callaloo, shelled red peas, yam and sweet potato. I remember too, my father’s truck broken, the hood left open and the shell rusting and rotting, my mother saying, “See what the man come to.”

Investor to client, this is not an investment I would consider. I do take risks. Returning was a risk my father discouraged. The economy not so hot here now, he said. People can’t spend like they used to because everything’s tied to the American dollar, he said. And when that failed, he said, “Don’t do like your father, boy. Come back when you have a whole lot more.” I could find no way to let my father know that his downfall wasn’t the result of his returning home; rather he failed because he wasn’t prepared. But how does a son tell a father he has failed?

I invested just last month in a startup company using breadfruit and cassava to produce flour, make pancake and muffin mixes. Roots, the company is called. “Innovative roots,” is its slogan. From the outset, I liked not simply the concept, the team that had been assembled, the gift basket of innovative products I received before the breakfast meeting, but the shift away from things informed simply by foreign concepts to the roots of our people.

“How much you think you’ll need?”

My father takes a while answering, reverting, I think, to his prideful self.

“Well make me a copy of your plan with the lease included,” I say before he answers.

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We continue painting, I shifting the ladder and rolling white paint, my father moving left to transform the room to sunflower yellow, a color of promise.

SUNDAY MORNING MY FATHER GOES TO CHURCH as he usually does. I give him a one thousand dollar bill. “Add this to the collection plate for me, please.” I give money to the church, but I rarely go though he’d much prefer that I go. The pride in his eyes then is unmistakable.

Today, I’ll sand more wood for new bathroom doors, perhaps apply a coat of varnish. Tomorrow morning, dew still visible on the grass, the fog still floating and slowly dissipating, I’ll return to Kingston for a meeting with a new mother, who reminded me on the phone that in nine years our nation would be “50.”

“You can believe it?” she asked. “We don’t have a thing to show for it. Dollar gone to nothing. And the debt just rising, rising. You see where I coming from. I want to leave something for my little girl. Fifty years of independence and what to show for it.”

I thought then of my father’s harvest in 1983, “Jamaica 21,” and began working on a plan for another harvest coming in eighteen or twenty years. The little girl would probably leave for a new country. Perhaps by then she would have already been gone for several years. Or maybe she would remain, stubborn and defiant.

When my father leaves, I relax for a moment, placing a chair in the shade of a guava and a mango tree. A stray vine covers half of a croton plant across from my view. That’s the way most of the plants look now. From that point the house looks perfect, sturdy. The grass is mown low, and the hedges have been trimmed. But I have in my mind a picture from my childhood, a line of what we called banana plants, with their red and yellow shoots bending to the ground, and in front of that line, shrubs of pink pineapple flowers and ball of fire.

On the other side of the house, we had orchids—purple, pink, peach, white—running on old tree trunks that had been planted into the earth.

I remember too lignum vitae plants growing near the fence, the plants’ tiny blossoms, the difficulty of growing the plants in our thick red dirt.

My father created a mixture of sandy soil and the plants grew, not as vibrantly as they do in other parts of the country but to a sufficient height. I remember Novlette and I pulling up peanut plants, brushing clumps of red dirt away, eating the nuts raw; picking cherry tomatoes, fingering the baby fine fuzz and swallowing the tomatoes whole.

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Joseph Campana

Alexandria

Mrs. Nagiya, where’ve you gone this afternoon?

The sun is slipping into a crescent of water blocks from the only pâtisserie open in town, where you dragged me, in tow, like a child, for treats.

Blocks from cafés where I lingered alone, praying for time to pass swiftly so I could leave.

Are you dancing now with the king in his palace?

You remember the palace, as a girl you’d visit when there was still a king (before everything changed).

Alexandria was Europe, but the poets were dying, leaving for good.

I remember the taxi, the train where you found me.

You tried German, then English, before settling in with stories and Paris, how you shopped like a queen: head stewardess for Egypt Air before the company cut back.

I remember the building, your apartment unused.

There was plastic on couches, no sheets on the bed.

But Alexandria was home, your family upstairs.

How you hated Cairo, chuckled, served tea.

Photos of Bangkok, your sister, her dog.

Preferences for Belgium, nice beaches, Spanish wine.

Boys in the street you shooed as we walked.

I recall they were staring, shouting at me.

Ramadan ending: feast after fast.

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Oh, Mrs. Nagiya. I remember the postcards you gave me to send from my home. They’re here in a drawer.

I remember a fever, my sweater (“It’s wool,” you admired) and my last fumbling exit as I met your mute niece.

You point, smile, nod: “She looks American, no?”

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C.P. Cavafy

Exiles translated by Aliki Barnstone It is always Alexandria. You walk a bit down the straight road that ends at the Hippodrome and you’ll see palaces and monuments that awe you.

No matter how much damage it has suffered in wars, no matter how diminished, it is always a wonderful city.

And then with excursions and books, and various studies, time passes.

Evenings we gather by the sea, we five (of course all with fictitious names) and some other Greeks, some of the few left in the city.

Sometimes we talk about the church (they seem somewhat Roman here), sometimes about literature.

The other day we were reading the verse of Nonnos.

What images, what rhythms, what language, what harmony.

We admired the Panopolitan with great enthusiasm.

So the days pass, and our stay here is not unpleasant because it is understood we won’t be here forever.

We’ve heard good news, and whether something happens in Smyrna now, or whether in April our friends from Epiros start off, our plans will succeed, and we will topple Vassilios easily.

And then finally it will be our turn.

[1914]

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In the Port translated by Aliki Barnstone Young, twenty-eight years old, on a boat from Tinos Emis arrived in this Syrian port, learning to make perfume, his goal. But he fell ill on the journey and died as soon as he landed.

His burial took place here, the poorest of the poor.

A few hours before he died, he murmured something about “home” and “very old parents.”

But who they were, no one knew, nor where his homeland was in the great Panhellenic world.

It’s better. For this way, while he lies dead in this port his parents will always hold out hope he is alive.

[1918]

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C.P. Cavafy

The City translated by Aliki Barnstone You said: “I’ll go to another land, I’ll go to another sea.

I’ll find a city better than this one.

My every effort is a written indictment, and—like someone dead—my heart is buried.

How long will my mind remain in this decaying state.

Wherever I cast my eyes, wherever I look, I see my life in black ruins, here, where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted them.”

You will not find new lands, you will not find other seas.

The city will follow you. You will roam the same streets. And you will grow old in the same neighborhood, and your hair will turn white in the same houses.

You will always arrive in this city. Don’t hope for elsewhere— there is no ship for you, there is no road.

As you have wasted your life here, in this small corner, so you have ruined it on the whole earth.

[1910]

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Richard Cecil

Roots

In Italy this old money tucked into my bedstand drawer with my first passport, long expired, got taken out of circulation between my first and second visit so that the change I didn’t leave on the table for the waiters on my honeymoon in Venice had turned into a souvenir when I returned and tried to spend it decades later in Palermo.

No Sicilian bank or store or petty thief would take these bills the color and size of Monopoly dollars that once bought cups of cappuccino.

Think of flying home with money which the airport shuttle driver gave as change when you took off but shook his head and handed back on the day that you returned.

You’d have to find a VISA-taking Airport Limo to ride home in, and the sock you stuffed with dollars and hid inside your dresser drawer might as well have gotten stolen by the burglar who broke in.

At least it would’ve stemmed his craving for crack cocaine a day or two

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instead of turning into worthless portraits of George Washington.

But money in the U.S.A.’s so durable that the first dollar I ever earned, if I’d framed it instead of buying fries and a shake, would still pay for two hamburgers on Wednesday Special at McDonald’s, and nickels are worth bending for except when my back’s acting up.

Even the pennies that I’d lay on streetcar tracks for trolley cars to mash flat when I was a child are valuable enough to fish from my pants pockets to make change while customers, lined up behind me at the check out, cough and shuffle.

Money’s why my mother’s father sailed in steerage from Palermo to Baltimore, where I grew up and fled the first day that I could— a city equally as ugly and dangerous, I discovered when I walked Palermo’s streets last year to find out what he’d left when he’d fled from poverty at the end of the nineteenth century.

The day he died his property was worth enough for his ten children to quarrel over its division and never speak again. My mother, the last to die, got not a penny.

I bought her funeral with money made after fleeing Baltimore and saved by never having children.

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and sisters and her bitter parents, then drove all day at highway speed to put that awful town behind, but as I aimed into the sun, thoughts of where I came from plagued me.

“I’m flying to Sicily,” I said, and did, taking these worthless Lire I didn’t spend on my honeymoon.

That’s the end of this immigrant’s story: I won’t go back for love or money.

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Susanna Childress

Santo Domingo

Here your language is worth nothing. Your tongue follows you hesitantly, six steps behind, conchos honking, boys on mopeds careening back and forth from the plaza. You should, you know, billow out, out to all the sights, spread a pink fan from Santiago.

You will eat mandarin oranges and fried yucca for lunch.

You will touch the bright purple flowers in the tree.

You will hold your skirt at Boca de Diablo, its terrible wind rushing out of rock, waves.

Still you will be a blank woman, unsure as your fingers counting out the soft, threaded pesos.

When the roosters start, calling to each other across the city, you open your body and fill it with their sound.

Another hour and you will hear the swung iron gates, car alarms, flurries of birds, a frenzied dog, the proprietorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s merengue, the woman who shouts from the alley, her enunciation slapping like a perch in your hand.

What will matter is the tough sun, your pineapple juice, the balcony window, barred. What will be forgotten is just beneath you, your hands limp on the sill, a sudden love for people you do not know, cannot, will never know.

Even now, memory is a broken puppet with its strings across your lap. Wait long enough, though, and the mountains come to you.

You find their green particular, held apart from the land like a mouth holds its socket of speech, its beak-full of song.

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Kevin Craft

The Difference

He was a specialist of the early hours, the fives and sixes A.M. The gray mists, the newsprint, the red-eye’s surly flight path through the dream lives of a city only half-awake: he was an adept of daylight’s darkness beginning to depart in blues behind the mountains, in flowers arched over the disorienting desert, in dewy windshields and rearview mirrors, a leading edge of red the spillover from stupendous noon in the Azores, siesta in Sicilia spouting tropospheric plumes of ash and loess.

His thesis was terminal restlessness— cloudy islands and theatrical volcanos, bays groomed by canoes and circled by float planes, the migratory stunts of coho and flycatchers, a small brown estuary in the saucer on his table. The stature of cypresses, like gaunt ministers in shadow governments, made him think twice about standing for office.

But could he be in two places at once,

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divide his time between zones and pocket the difference.…There’s heed he thought, in clockwork, in going always hence.

The earlier he’d wake, the further east he found himself, fitting out scales with blood-red oranges, preparing to duel by a misty river, deciphering dust in a cuneiform wedge. Was it hope for renewal, the way a dream could dawn on high drama, drawing semi-circular crowds?

Tragedy plays throughout the morning, backed by a chorus of stationary shrouds.

And beyond the pale, where the peanut gallery tunnels into a metamorphic hill, the rows of like-minded dead choosing sides, like flowerbeds on a window sill.

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Silvia Curbelo

The Visitors for Ann Darby They stand without pity or shame like tourists on the bridge to your next great sadness. They have been walking in bad shoes. They want a cold beer.

They’ve come with their one small suitcase, and night’s implausible laundry list. It’s late.

They’re tired of being poor.

All day the wind fails them, so does the sky unloosening its sullen Esperanto. They know the hard currency of coffee and cheap cigarettes, the accidental prayer of rain on a car roof. Priests of indecision and poor judgment, they reach into the ancient dark to pull a coin out of thin air.

Call it a gift, a simple benediction, as they move tenderly through the door of your best life, whispering Take it, it’s yours. Write this down.

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Bianca Diaz

Halation

If he were buried, she could visit, photograph the stone and place the image on her wall, as if it were a place sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never been to, as if he sent her a postcard.

Instead she is sea-bound, humming and dark in the dreams where she follows him in his realm, his underwater city.

Her grandfather, a stranger (she knows he practiced calligraphy and loved dogs), shows up each night when water becomes a continent and they walk arm in arm under latitudes of pressure and quiet.

She wants to reach out and feel the large buttons on his coat, billowing in the water like displaced smoke, but she resists.

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nod or blink. He shows her barnacles on dented slabs of metal, blazes of blue-green algae, the ascending pear-shaped clouds of sand when big-bellied fish graze the ocean bottom.

Their hands swell and the wilderness of seaweed grows taller as they walk.

Some nights his eyelashes lengthen and this means he is sad (she has taught herself the symbols).

Some nights sea urchins rise and follow him like a bridal train and this means he was not finished.

When awake, she calls herself cartographer and sews together the dream map. She does not think it fictional, it is the grid by which she charts the story.

There is the central Grey Ocean where they walk, the Bloomless Tree where the boughs, she notes, curve into empty shells rooted to the floor,

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the rippled wingspan of Lost Gulls above them, the Sudden Rocks jutting from the bottom like champagne bottles.

She remembers to plot the distance between surface light and the tops of her grandfather’s raised arms. The legend is empty except for a small cross and the words where I’ve seen a bright spiracle.

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Ana Doina

Noah …and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken…

—Genesis 9:20-21 God, there are mornings when waking up to a sky hanging heavy from above I feel as if something wrong has happened to the world.

I step on this earth as if on an ill-hearted ground different from the one I knew. There is no trodden path through the forests, there is nobody left from my past.

No one I laughed with over old jokes, no one I bickered with at the water wheel, no one I played dice with since the days of my youth. Their absence has become my future.

Heavy like a womb this earth bears new fields, new gardens, unfamiliar and foreign to me. I was the one that walked with You all the days of my life—I worked the ground and shepherded my flock and tried, tried Lord, to make me and my people worthy of Your grace.

I built the ark as you said. When the rain started the gnarled olive trees had just been picked. Figs and raisins were packed for the winter. The early rain softened the earth for plowing; but I stood in the ark, hewed by torrents of water coming from the great deep above and the great deep below. I stood in the ark while a liquid horizon covered the very last of the mountains. There was so much water each day had the ink color of a deeper wound. I stood in the ark, wishing for the silence of a solid landscape, mourning my unfenced country, my scattered pastures, my rugged moorland, the ropes and the pegs of my tent, my people, my violent people. Singing the dirge I stood Crab Orchard Review ◆ 87

Ana Doina

in the ark and tried not to judge, not to question Your deep and meaningful reason to destroy my world, my perishable garden. Yes, violent and corrupt the world is unworthy— unless it is the only world.

The rain cleansed, cleansed bare all that has ever been until all that was left was inside me: my fears, my hurting bones, the rotting mildew of despair, and this inevitable mind.

Buried in my floating tomb I watched a liquid sky as if dry land had not yet been separated from waters, as if nothing had yet been parted, although I remembered a different beginning—a place scented by a mother’s milk, lit by the story of a garden, and cursed with a previous exile.

Memories surfaced through my vigil—small details, forgotten incidents, postponed conversations rose over the drowsiness of my wake and I knew they would forever be wounds I cannot heal.

Bitterness grew on me like seaweed, stifling any will for survival, and with whatever need or wish for God remained I would have accepted the gray oppressive rain as the normal sky.

But the ark carried me through the next parting, towards the next shore: some dirt-covered ground to step on and leave a blossoming imprint of toes, of hooves, and of seeds in the mud. Bereaving I walked on the newly-shaped shore of this sepulchral sea carrying the flood inside me—its echo, its sleepless fish swimming silently through a world of forests still green, of homes still readied for the evening meal, of people still fleshed with the semblance of life, of babies cradled motionless in the silt. All that I ever knew, all that I ever was—drowned.

God, without aim I wander between madness and death drinking myself to sleep. Under my eyelids dreams go on remembered ways, just as the eyes of the dead keep frozen their lost lives. Wine, the blood of this new world pulls my people out of the flood as if out of a grave’s womb; 88 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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becomes the only medicine to wash the bitterness of my thoughts, numb their edges until they too turn into the sound of constant rain, into the sound of the many waves of a flood. Wine gives me back the Garden of Eden not gone, not drowned but bloomingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;while drunken I stumble on the washed land as a new Adam still guilty of the original sin.

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Qwo-Li Driskill

Evening with Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson walks down Eighth Avenue, passes the Circle K, walks all the way to Seventeenth Street turns right and knocks on my door.

He looks good for being dead for so long, so I decide to let him in.

I figure he’s taken everything, so what do I have to lose?

His fingers open from his rotting palm like gray dead trees.

He points back towards the street.

I walk out the door and see blood like satin ribbons trailing across sidewalks, through lawns, and down the highway he came here on.

Red lines flow from the sign at Mohawk Carpets, trickle from bottles of Arizona Iced Tea chilled on gas station shelves and curdle in the Land O’Lakes Butter in the dairy section of the grocery store.

I follow these trails past a frat boy sleeping in a Florida Seminole T-shirt, past the Super Wal-Mart, through the basement of the First Presbyterian Church where a two-year-old girl 90 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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sees my mother, hides behind the legs of her own mother and whispers, “She’s an Indian and she has a braid.”

These strands stretch on forever.

I see them creeping into my uncle’s beer cans, twisting themselves through IVs at the local hospital where a young brown man waits for protease inhibitors.

His grandmother is singing Giga Giga Anhdadi’a (Blood Blood Remember).

When I get home Jackson’s hands are rubbing together with the crack of kindling. He is thinking of so much more. He is writing a New Age book.

He is making a dream catcher.

He is mining minerals from the Black Hills.

He is leaving trails across the continent.

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April 17th

RITHY DID NOT THINK to take anything with him the afternoon Sambath arrived on a brand new Honda 50cc, eyes glassy with excitement. It was the hot season, the last day of the Cambodian New Year, and Rithy had just turned sixteen.

“Did you hear?” Sambath asked, straddling the moto and resting his feet lightly on the bare ground in front of the porch. He was older than Rithy but had twice failed the year-end exams, so they’d been in the same class before leaving school to come here to Battambang. “Do you know what’s happened? The war is over.”

“I heard.” Rithy looked out at the rice fields near the airport, narrowing his eyes against the sunlight. The sky had lost all color, transformed into a pale, inverted bowl of heat. The fields were empty now, but a few hours ago, Rithy had seen several water buffalo and skinny cows chewing on the stubble. The animals had scattered at the gunshots, which came from the direction of the airport and then spread out. Two C-130s had flown over the roof of the house, sounding like the droning of a million bees. Then his oldest cousin Channy had come outside. “The radio said Phnom Penh raised the white flag,” she’d said softly, watching his face. He told her to go back inside while he tried to think. His uncle had left the day before on a business trip after making offerings at the temple, giving silk sarongs to his daughters for the New Year, and making Rithy promise to take care of the family until he returned. Rithy had walked from the fish pond to the long thatch pig sty at the side of the yard, then to the front porch that faced the road. Several cars, motorcycles, and military jeeps had passed by, followed by two ox carts, and then it had become eerily quiet. That’s when Sambath had arrived on the moto.

“We have peace now, no more war,” Sambath continued. He opened his mouth wide like a horse and laughed, showing his large yellow teeth. Usually when Sambath laughed, Rithy couldn’t help laughing with him. “Phnom Penh surrendered.”

“I heard,” Rithy said. His mouth felt dry. “Battambang will be next.”

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Sambath fell silent.

Sweat trickled down the side of Rithy’s face and along the underside of his jaw. He looked out again at the rice stalks cropped close to the burnt ground. He wondered if he had made a mistake coming here, leaving his father and brothers and sisters in Phnom Penh. As the oldest child, he had needed to find work to help his family. His mother had died two years ago, and his father’s salary could no longer support them, because he refused to take bribes like many government workers. School was closed most of the time because of shelling. He couldn’t study, and he didn’t want to join the army like his cousins. To his surprise, his father had agreed to let him go with Sambath, as long as he stayed with his uncle. They had been here for three restless weeks so far, waiting to collect a debt from Sambath’s cousin in order to work a gem mining claim.

“Do you have any money?” Rithy asked.

Sambath’s hands gripped the handlebars, his weight shifted slightly forward as if he were ready to leave at any moment. “Well, she paid me 30,000 riels yesterday.”

Rithy thought, not even enough for food for a week, not enough for a taxi to the border.

“Do you have it with you?”

Sambath kicked the ground with the toe of his sandal. Rithy watched the cloud of fine red dust spread slowly in the air. He wondered again if he’d made a mistake coming here with Sambath.

“Where’s the money?” Rithy asked.

“I spent it all.”

“Shit. Only one day, how can you spend it all?”

“It’s the New Year. I went gambling.”

Rithy watched the heat rise in waves off the paved road. He had spent the New Year thinking of his father and brothers and sisters in Phnom Penh, and carefully avoiding the buckets of colored water that people threw on each other in the streets in celebration of the New Year.

“Where’d you get the moto?”

“I borrowed it.”

“How could you lose it all?”

“You hear that?”

Rithy followed Sambath’s gaze, looking toward the road that led from the airport to the town. He heard the static of the radio inside the house, the quiet voices of his cousins and aunt. There Crab Orchard Review ◆ 93

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was a low, far away rumble. The wooden boards shuddered slightly under the soles of his feet. Then the convoy came into view. Several tanks followed in a line, moving slowly on the shimmering road toward Battambang.

“Come on,” said Sambath. “Let’s follow them.”

Rithy called into the house to say he was going into town. Then he jumped on the back of the moto. He didn’t think to take anything with him or even to say goodbye.

THEY CAUGHT UP with the slow-moving convoy at the first roundabout.

A crowd had gathered in the gardens alongside the road, excitedly calling to the soldiers and throwing packets of rice wrapped in banana leaves. The vehicles crept along but didn’t stop. The other traffic parted in front of them ceremoniously, as for a royal procession. Rithy noticed several American-made tanks and armored personnel carriers. Disheveled Khmer soldiers perched on top near the open hatches. They looked stunned, swiveling their heads with blank expressions, as if they weren’t quite sure where they were.

It seemed to Rithy that everything was slowed down. He watched the faces of the people they passed on the street, the soldiers in the vehicles, the tensed shoulders of Sambath in front of him. Rithy did not feel panic but rather an alert sense of calm in which his thoughts moved between the present and past while he took in everything around him. The grim, puzzled expressions of the soldiers reminded him of another convoy he had seen when he was only four, in the town of Romdual near Vietnam. He remembered standing on a balcony overlooking the market, eating his favorite sweet, a round puffy cake made from ripe sugar palm fruit, which his father had given him in a banana leaf boat sprinkled with fresh shaved coconut.

He had held the warm cake in his hands and inhaled the steam, eating slowly. Everything had seemed strange to him that morning, so calm, as if the night before—when he had been woken by explosions and carried to a watery ditch where he had waited with his brothers and sisters until his father had driven them west to this town—hadn’t happened at all. As he’d nibbled the cake on the balcony, he hadn’t been sure what was real—the calm scene below him or the fear and chaos of the night before. Then he had seen the crowds part for a jeep flying the Cambodian flag, followed by more jeeps with exhausted soldiers, trucks towing cannons, and finally at the end, several armored personnel carriers sitting like turtles in the beds of 94 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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old trucks. “Look!” someone had shouted. “Aa Kwak Aa Kwen is coming!” Rithy had laughed so hard he’d choked on the cake; the way the old trucks carried the broken personnel carriers did look a little like blind Aa Kwak carrying the crippled Aa Kwen on his back.

As Rithy rode now with Sambath, he noticed how the vehicles moved at the same defeated pace of that Aa Kwak Aa Kwen convoy he had seen as a boy. Through the sweaty crowd and diesel fumes, Rithy recalled the sweet scent of the steam rising from the cake that day in Romdual. It was the last thing he remembered before they had left the town. Soon after that, Romdual was bombed by the Americans. Rithy had never gone back.

At the next roundabout, Sambath turned right, following the convoy now onto a road that passed between two high schools. He negotiated the moto through the crowds and eased alongside the first of the armored personnel carriers, which was pale green and clattered loudly over the pavement. Sambath passed it and moved up to the next one and the next, until he saw a lieutenant he knew.

Rithy recognized the man as a gambling friend of Sambath’s.

“Brother, what happened?” Sambath shouted above the noise.

“The Khmer Rouge are coming.” The lieutenant responded without the usual greetings, hollering over the rattling din. He was a thin man and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. His shirt was soaked with sweat, stained under the arms. “We have to retreat. We have no orders from Phnom Penh.” He yelled each phrase as if it required great effort, pausing in between. “We’re going to Pailin, to the Thai border.”

“How are the Khmer Rouge moving?”

“What?”

“Where are the Khmer Rouge?”

“They’re coming fast. We have to move quickly.” The lieutenant reached out to catch a packet of cigarettes thrown from the crowd, flipped open the top and pulled out a cigarette. The high-pitched squeal of the tanks—like worn brakes—made Rithy’s head hurt. “If you want to go, you can come with us now to Thailand. Both of you.”

Rithy watched the lieutenant’s hand holding the cigarette. He wore a gold band on the fourth finger and his knuckle was scarred.

Rithy was too young to have a wife, but he worried about leaving behind his aunt and his cousins. He thought about his father and brothers and sisters, still in Phnom Penh. What were they doing now?

He wondered if he should have come here with Sambath. Back Crab Orchard Review ◆ 95

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in Phnom Penh, his father had told him many times to study, but Rithy hadn’t listened. He couldn’t concentrate. Even when school was open, he ignored the lessons and stared out the window, watching the funeral ceremonies at the temple across the street. The mourners, dressed in white, walked in long slow processions, the way the convoy moved now. The funeral music had drifted through the classroom window, mixing with the rise and fall of the teacher’s voice. Instead of the blackboard, Rithy watched the smoke lifting from cremation fires. He could still remember the distinct odor of burning human flesh that rode on the wind into the classroom.

Sambath kept the moto alongside the personnel carrier and asked Rithy over his shoulder, “What do you think we should do?”

Rithy didn’t know what to say. He felt the sun scorching the back of his neck and assessed the faces of the people along the road. Some were celebrating, others looked worried. A young man pedaled a black bicycle shouting, “The war is over, the war is over!”

He almost ran into a red-faced man selling bamboo cylinders of sugar palm beer. On the corner a young woman made noodle soup, her eyes glancing to the side as her hands flew through practiced motions adding bean sprouts, garlic, scallions. Nearby an old couple stood as if posed for a photograph—brother and sister, husband and wife, or strangers, Rithy wasn’t sure. They held themselves very still, slightly leaning into each other as the crowd flowed around them.

“You must decide now,” said the soldier, flicking ash from his cigarette. “We can’t wait.”

Rithy thought of what he had with him. His shirt, trousers, sandals. One thousand riels in his pocket. The small Buddha his father had given him, which he wore on a silver chain around his neck. If he left like this, what would happen to his aunt and cousins?

Would he ever see his family in Phnom Penh?

He tried to remember the last time he had seen his father. He must have spoken to him the day he left, but he couldn’t recall it.

This disturbed him. He could clearly remember other things—the coat he sold to a rich classmate to buy the plane ticket to Battambang.

He remembered the boy had very smooth hands and was escaping with his family to France; the coat was dark blue, made of heavy wool and had gold buttons with the face of a bird. He could recall the runway at Pochentong airport as the plane taxied past exploding shells and a burning fuselage; the odd elation of lifting off away from the flames, rising into the wide, silent sky; the steady hum of 96 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the engine as he perched on cardboard boxes next to a woman praying loudly to Buddha and clutching a cage full of chickens. He could remember landing and how Battambang had seemed like another world, peaceful and unreal. But he could not recall saying goodbye to his father.

He wondered what his father would advise him now. He’d had the chance to leave Cambodia once already. A month before Rithy had come here to Battambang, his father had gathered all the children together and told them he wanted to sell the house and move to Koh Kong, an island near Thailand, so that if something happened to the country, they could escape by boat. His father had reminded them of the Put Tumneay, the Buddhist prophecy that said blood would run deep as the belly of an elephant and that the people would be so hungry they would pick the grains of rice off the tail of a dog. Rithy had been shocked. He had never heard his father talk this way. His father had always worked in the poorest, most dangerous areas of the country and had even been arrested once by the Khmer Rouge, but he had never considered leaving.

As Rithy rode on the back of Sambath’s moto, he thought about the speech he had made that day. His father had let each of them talk, all the children, even the younger ones. When it was Rithy’s turn, he had said, “Father, don’t worry. We don’t need to run away.

We can’t just leave the country. I don’t believe anything terrible will happen. Don’t think about leaving. If something happens in Cambodia, it will happen to everyone. Not only us.” In the end, when they all wanted to stay, his father had agreed. He was not like other Cambodian fathers. “All right,” his father had said, “it’s up to you, if this is what you really want. But don’t blame me, don’t blame me for what will come.”

THE CONVOY HAD REACHED the New Bridge now, which crossed the Sanker River. It was built of stone, clean and wide, not like the crumbling Old Bridge or the narrow Little Bridge, which was only for bicycles, pedestrians, and ramoks. The New Bridge was wide enough for Sambath to keep the moto alongside the tanks, although he had to swerve to avoid hitting a little girl with tangled hair, about four years old, who was crying, “Ma, Ma!” She didn’t seem to care about the convoy. She didn’t even move out of the way when the tanks passed right by her, tracks grinding the pavement not far from her bare toes.

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“Come with us,” the lieutenant urged. “We can make room for the two of you. It’s the end now. There’s no point in waiting to see the faces of the Khmer Rouge.”

“Should we go?” asked Sambath. “What do you think?”

Rithy didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. He was still watching the little girl, who refused to leave her place on the bridge, in spite of the traffic that swirled around her.

“You must decide now,” said the lieutenant, using the tip of his burning cigarette to light another one. “We can’t wait. If you want to leave, join us now.”

Rithy felt the coolness rise from the surface of the river, air gusting across his damp shirt. He thought again about the speech he had made the day his father had talked about leaving. He thought about the people they had already passed on the road—the man selling sugar palm beer, the old couple who had stood so still, the little girl. He could see her mouth opening wide now but could no longer hear her voice over the clamor any more than he could hear the river passing soundlessly underneath him. Next to him the carrier’s worn tracks revolved slowly in an oblong loop, reflecting sharp flashes of light. For a moment he felt blinded. He heard the rumble of the motors, the siren squeal of metal against metal, the crackle of stones being crushed under the rotating tracks. He tried to remember his father’s face, but all he could recall were the fine creases at the edges of his eyes.

“Brother,” Sambath asked again, slowing down as they reached the end of the bridge, “should we go or not?”

Rithy didn’t reply. He was no longer watching Sambath or even listening to him. He was looking back over his shoulder at the girl still standing in the middle of the bridge as the convoy kept moving toward the road that would turn west to the border.

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All the Way from America

THE BOY WAKES TO THE MOON filling up all the dark places in his room and for a moment he is still dreaming that his father has returned to Ireland and that any minute he will hear him coming down the lane, or his soft footfalls on the stairs come to say goodnight, but then the boy realizes that he’s not dreaming. His father is home from America, has been home a week, and with this realization comes the keen, sharp edge of pain. They did not go to the airport to greet him, nor wait by the train. Unannounced and unsummoned his father stumbled home late one night a week ago, come to settle his bank accounts he said, and auction off his share of the land. He’d already been drinking, and when he stepped through the door he looked at them all as if they were strangers—it had, after all, been three years. There was an accident; he wasn’t well, he said, and he waved at the air as if his illness defied articulation, he neither expected nor wanted their pity, or as if they were phantoms he might simply wave/sweep away—but that was before he saw how sick the boy’s mother was, before the word Cancer was uttered like a curse.

And yet still, now, the boy wakes for him, as he always has, as expectant and hopeful as he was as a child. His bones are jangling live coils and his veins feel so hot they could burn. He rolls towards the window. Beyond their field the raked silhouettes of farmhouses and sheds, the ruin of a tractor, stand as dark, sleeping sentinels and there is not a sound; no dogs bark, no cats mewl; not a single car moves on the Tullogher road—silence; and then, his mother’s sobs from down the hall. She’s been listening to talk on the wireless of the hunger strikers in the North again. A brief squall lifts a shale slate off the roof, scatters its broken remains in the lichen-bloom of cobblestone below. Rain from the night before shakes from the trees and spatters the glass.

Then there is the squeal of the rusted iron gate as it is flung wide and his father’s staggered footsteps loudly dragging the gravel.

The pubs must be closed, he thinks. Every night after midnight since Crab Orchard Review ◆ 99

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his father’s return he’s heard his drunken song of a young Irish boy dying alone and scared in a green field somewhere in France swelling down the boreen. The boy wonders how long it takes for his father to walk the three miles home from the pub on his damaged legs, his sad song drifting out across the dark, mist-covered fields, and returning just as empty and alone to his ears as he stumbles on.

But tonight his father is not singing. The boy pulls on his shorts and spiked running shoes and sits at the edge of his bed, listening to the silence, thinking of all the different ways he’s imagined his father’s death.

A kind of death his father called it once, that’s what he said it would be if he were ever to come back. The boy often found himself listening to the silence, wondering if he heard in it the same things his father did. His mother’s laboured gasps of pain as she struggled and fought against the cancer; her tears for living all the years since she had been lost to his father. The boy closes his eyes, and, listening to his mother’s tormented breaths, he wonders what ghosts haunted their separate imaginations, cunningly stole their breaths each twilight, every night they remained here, in the country.

His footsteps pad the landing and he pauses at her open door.

The air in her room is still, and stale, as if no living thing has stirred it in so long. The thick curtains admit no light; he no longer remembers what colour they used to be. Rarely does she open them, and always it is at night. Sitting before the window, she often spreads the curtains and stares out at the nitre-lit fields glowing beneath the pale hoof of the moon. The room will be dark but for a small angle of light cast across her face and lap. Her mouth will be moving soundlessly in prayer, her hands bound in tight-wrung invocation.

Now, she is a dark shape bundled beneath thick blankets, turned away on her side. The wireless intermittently spits static with news from the hunger strikers in Long Kesh. A small fire, barely more than embers, smoulders in the grate of the fireplace. He crosses the room and places a log upon it; when it flares he covers it with a shovel of coal. The flickering light illuminates the bedroom, sends shadows dancing in the corners. The boy leans against the mantel, and lowers his head onto his arms. Feeling the warmth of the heat on his legs he is suddenly tired. After a moment he looks up. On the wall above the mantel the old framed sepia-toned picture of his great-grandfather stares down. Clean-shaven as a stone, square-jawed and rugged, a wool cap pulled low over his young brow. He was interned by the 100 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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British at the onset of WWI with as many other Irish men as they could round up, and he died in an Irish Internment camp in Frongoch, Wales. His mother’s father never forgot this, and neither has she. The boy knows all the old stories of pain and retribution, of vengeance and vendetta, and he bends his back as if it aches from it all, as if he can fell the weight of history from his bones with one long shrug. He looks at his great-grandfather again: a cold and stern-looking man, someone no boy might wish to call grandfather, and yet he has the boy’s mother’s eyes, and this is why, most often, the boy considers the picture at all, even when he can no longer bear to look at his mother for fear of seeing no spark of recognition there.

Bobby Sands is on his 43rd day and has gone blind. The boy turns off the wireless, listens to his mother for a moment again, then, after closing her door softly, he tiptoes downstairs. His father is sitting in the armchair by the fireplace; half in shadow, only the glow of his cigarette tells the boy he is there. From the wireless, the closing show on Radio Gaeltacht-Éireann: more wailing, more moaning from the west of Ireland, from where his father is from. It is this that he cannot let go of. Three thousand miles away in America and still he could not let go of it. Listening to this music, the boy knows what his father meant when he said what it would do to him to return here—to be here at all, with them: it’s killing him, and the boy despises him for it.

The smell of black porter and grey smoke rising off damp, drying wool. The boy envisions a pub full of men like his father, dying in their living. In the dark, he knows that his father is staring at the pictures above the mantel but he does not know what memories they evoke, what sense of longing they instil; what it is his father is looking for but cannot find, no matter how much he drinks, or smokes, or stares.

There is a picture of his father taken in America, on an I-beam high above the Boston city skyline. His father is grinning, and fighting against the wind to keep an orange hard-hat on his head.

Beyond him, and, the boy imagines, far below, the city spreads out, the curve of a slow-moving river a bend of grey-brown rope lashed out like a whip at the sky. Next to this, a picture of them all, the time that his father had paid for them to come out and visit him when the boy and his sister were just babies. There seemed to be no end to the money his father had managed to save; his mother had never eaten steak before and though she resisted, his father laughed Crab Orchard Review ◆ 101

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and insisted she try something they’d never been able to afford. It was still something she always reminded him of, with a sad smile, as if the evocation of the memory could change all that had happened to them, and between them—and his father had hugged them all close to him at the airport, asking an American cop to take their picture and he looked so proud; so young and strong and smelling of America as if he believed nothing could touch him, or them, ever again. But that was before the mother’s illness, and, before the accident in a construction tunnel that took the best of his father’s legs.

The boy moves quietly towards the door and his father coughs.

Are you off running? he asks. There is no sound of drink in his voice. The boy stares into the blackness searching for his father’s eyes.

I am.

You’ll catch your death, Michael. I can’t understand why you do it at all.

Even the boy’s name sounds awkward in his father’s mouth, as unfamiliar as the word, Father, did in the boy’s own. The boy stares at him fretting the knees of his trousers. His father couldn’t seem to control what his hands did anymore, not after the explosion.

Y’know, you needn’t have come back, the boy says. Not for our sake, in case that’s what’s worrying you. He says this although he knows that his father is thinking of dead American men, crushed and burnt and buried men, and he among them, eighty feet below. His father is incapable of keeping such thoughts from his mind, and the boy wonders why he is being so cruel to the man he once loved so.

No, I didn’t, he begins, it’s not that. He shakes his head. Your mother, I understand, we do the best we can, what else can we do?

What else have we ever done? We do our best with what God has given us. I’ve tried to do my best—I swear to God that I have but— Michael, you just don’t know— I don’t know? The boy laughs and shakes his head. I don’t know.

God, that’s a gas, so. Of course I know. Sure, you’ve done your part, you can leave as soon as the mood suits you. Back to America. He spits the words and waits for his father to respond.—Can’t you now?

Please Michael, I’m leaving in the morning. It was a mistake me coming back, I know, but your poor mother— Don’t talk about my mother.

The boy’s exhale is long and slow and pained but he won’t relent, not now. You made a promise to me once, he says, you said I’d be 102 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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out to America to see you and everything would be better—do you remember that? I wanted so much to believe in you.

And now, don’t you?

No. I don’t.

The father stares into the black grate of the fire, at the flamescorched brick, and is quiet. If you looked long enough and hard enough you could still see some red embers beneath the black. The clock ticks over the mantel, echoing and enlarging the space of silence that remains. A gust of wind rushes down the flue and scatters a handful of ash; it brings the smell of rain and damp, moist brick.

The father shifts his legs with difficulty. The boy has to remind himself that his father is still a young man, like the man of his song, a young man dying scared and alone, surrounded by green fields, and far from home.

Even without a job, America was better than this dying slowly.

Tomorrow his father would leave as he had left before. In the beginning there would be phone calls and letters and some money but gradually they would trickle away to calls on their birthdays, cards at Christmas, and then, nothing at all.

The father’s legs are splayed brokenly before the black fire, smoke rising up ghostlike from the cigarette smouldering in his hand.

The air around him seems to lighten; perhaps it is the focus of the boy’s eyes upon the white tendril of burning ash, or perhaps his eyes have adjusted to the gloom, but he sees him better. His father is a broken, young man who can no longer stand straight and he trembles as if he might cry. The boy looks away. Did you hear anything on the radio about the hunger strikers? he asks, although he knows, being back in the country for just a week, the troubles in the North are the last thing his father cares about.

She’s dying, y’know, he says aloud although he doesn’t suppose he’s really saying it to anyone at all. He listens to the wind in the flue and the clock over the mantel and charges going off in the field to scare away crows. Finally in the silence that remains he asks, How’s Bobby doing?

Bobby?

Bobby Sands. She’ll be in awful pain if he goes, if Thatcher doesn’t put a stop to it.

The father shakes his head. It’s freezing, so it is, Michael, he says. You shouldn’t be going out at all.

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says, about the hunger strikers, something good, it might cheer her up.

The boy’s cleats clack on the worn linoleum. He is already dreading the cold but not as much as standing there talking to his father, or listening to his mother’s sobs moaning in the stairwell.

His father’s return changed nothing. His mother’s illness consumed her more and more each day while his father’s legs would atrophy to nothing. It was their hopes and dreams and promises to each other and to him and his sister that had been broken, and died long ago. If his sister and he could see it, he thought, then why not them? He resented his mother as well; the both of them deserved each other.

I’ll have a fire going for you when you get back, his father says, and the boy sees his eyes. He is staring at the boy’s legs with something that resembles longing.

Thanks, the boy says, and closes the door behind him.

HE CROSSES MURPHY’S PASTURE and runs the dark fields along the river. Like a presence beyond the dark, the air has weight and substance to it, and the boy shivers. His toes are soon numb. He clenches and unclenches his fingers. Air whistles from his lungs.

The ground falls away around him, and there is only the slightest hint of a dark sky above a darker horizon with Venus shining brightly in the east. He breathes the land in and it carries him, and he forgets that he is running at all.

At the bend of the road a trailer stands upturned, beets spilled out like severed heads piled atop one another. Their tops have been cut and the boy smells their sweetness, like rot. His father’s legs would continue to weaken. He could walk for now but soon he would not even be able to do that. Someone would have to lift him, bathe him, and dress him. He would need a wheelchair. The boy shuddered, not at what his father would become but at the fear his father would feel, must feel, with that change. He couldn’t imagine his father frightened. The thought scared him. He had heard others talk of his father’s exploits high up on the American skyscrapers. There had been a picture of him in the local paper standing on a bare I-beam some sixty stories up, a grinning devil with bushy hair raised like horns.

But since the accident his father’s hair had grown soft like a child’s, and white as down. He seemed to have shrunk while the boy had grown. His father, he imagines, dreams of the accident and in his dream nothing changes; he relives the same moment over and over. They’d been tunnelling 200 feet beneath the city and there had 104 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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been an explosion, that much he knew. After the explosion, his father woke in darkness, hearing the moans of the men around him. He couldn’t move but recognizing the voices of friends, he called out.

There was McCallister and Walsh, both Galwaymen, and Johnson from England, Lima, a Portuguese, whose wedding Father had attended and whose wife was expecting their first child. He knew all their fears it seemed, and, in trying to calm them, somehow diffused his own. He reassured them until he could no longer speak. Everything would be okay, help would come quickly, but he already knew that in breathing the thick toxic fumes, many that were not already dead would be dead by the time help came.

In the dark his friends died around him. They moaned and cried out, choked to death on their own vomit. The boy would like to believe that for the first time in a long time his father thought of his family back in Ireland, that he pressed his face into earth still warm from the explosion, and, almost in benediction, kissed it, imagining he was embracing them, and, in embracing them one last time, prayed to die quickly.

Over the years the boy had pretended that his father was dead, better to have him dead than receive no news of him, no phone calls or letters from America, as if they’d never been a part of his life, as if he’d forgotten all about them. The boy imagined his father dying in beautiful and spectacular ways, not reduced to the man he saw now.

In one imagining, not his father’s easy smile or laughter, his predilection to break up every bar fight he ever witnessed whether he knew the men or not, not his songs that could entice a barroom, nor the job hard-hat with the orange emblem of Macomber Construction could’ve stopped the iron stud that razed the bone of his skull and sheared his brain almost perfectly in half.

In another instance, his father was standing high on the cross section of two joists, the arched frame of a new American building.

The high American sky higher and bluer and grander than anything the boy had ever imagined. The building was a cathedral of arches and buttresses rising towards heaven and the sun shone on his father in golden, beautiful silhouette, the light behind him like a halo of wings above his wide shoulders. His father smiled beatific and then slipped, the crescent claws of his hammer catching the sun in glints as it spiraled, tumbling down after him. He crashed through makeshift scaffolding and forms to the new cement slabs just poured for a foundation, leaving the impression of his angular Irish face Crab Orchard Review ◆ 105

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and shattered jawline in the still hardening lime and sand. It was a face you could love and be proud of.

But his father hadn’t died in any of these ways. He had lost his legs in an accident far from home, so far away that the boy felt he had no part in the experience of that loss. Had his father’s legs been caught in a thresher as he laboured to gather in the hay of their fields, had he been aboard a local trawler and been swept overboard, lost his legs to the cold of the Atlantic or the North Sea, been blown up by a bomb or torn by a bullet in the North, it would be something familiar, something from common experience and something shared; they would be here as family, at the end of it all, together. It would mean that his father had never left them.

Running past Grennan’s fields, the hounds all asleep. Lugh, the farmer’s labourer, the boy imagines drunk and curled up in the small gable cottage by the road, gleaming with frost. Beneath the gutters, ice sheets the tops of his rain barrels.

Past the sleeping horses and by the black foundation where he’d torched Grennan’s barn to the ground the year before, through the gate, and along the old wire down to the stone walls and the small burn, barely wider than his hurdle across, cold water splashing against his calves, and on through shimmering phosphate-lit fields.

Climbing the hill, old Mrs. Kent to his left and behind her rows of tall ferns lighting the way with their bright smell.

Quickly over a stone stile, hitting the ground and then running again. Brown fields scarred by plough line mile after rising falling mile, the dim glow of the town bobbing up and down in the distance.

Cows grunting, big bay draft horses standing asleep beneath corrugated shelters, up through the woods and flying now, branches whipping past, up the rise and then the last hill before the town, up and over, slowing only slightly and the black of the river Barrow before him, his heart pressed hard and thrumming against his narrow chest.

In the town, fog shrouds the streets; it climbs the worn, slick-gutted stones along the river walls and slinks along the quay. Water slaps the rocks and a buoy clangs further up the river at the mouth of the valley towards the shallows. Gulls huddle on the roof of the river galley, tremor in and out of shadow and streetlight like a single breathing thing. Light flickers behind the red curtains of Ryan’s Pub and the boy hears singing within. He forgets that it is Thursday and everyone has received the dole money and the pubs should be closed but they’re not.

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streetcorner. A laugh. A moan. A rustle of clothing. A man and woman pressed and struggling against the flat of an alleyway wall behind the rear door of the pub. The boy sees the almost perfectly-rounded moon of a woman’s shocking white bottom trembling, kneaded like dough by large ruddy hands; the sudden, exposed, secret sliver of moist flesh and the swollen paleness of the other. He hears, Hurry, Eamonn! Hurry! My God, Sheila! My God! Someone is drunkenly singing along to “The Soldier’s Song” as RTÉ’s broadcasting ends for the night. He hears a whole country rutting in the darkness, squealing like pigs in the squalor of urine and vomit and death. And he knows what his father means when he says he could not come back to this.

A thin, local guard named Foley walks the town-front checking to see that all the drunks are home and no publicans are cheating the law. His hat is pulled tight over his head, his face hard and resolute. Only his large ears ridicule the effect. He’s had the boy’s father up on various petty charges since he’s been home and the judge has laughed at them all. Sure, we all want to go to America, the judge said. Foley sees the father in the boy, and eyes him suspiciously as he passes. The boy knows the look: there’s McDonagh’s young one. Better keep an eye on him. The boy hacks a gob at the ground before him and keeps on running.

He follows the stretch of the river and its scudded water towards the last of the lights angling through the mist towards the dark and silent country. At the far side of the river the lights cast the country’s dark shape upon the partially-illuminated water, undulating and absent of light. Sometimes he feels like running and never stopping, of hopping the nightboat at Rosslare and sailing to England and never looking back.

Beyond the quay running, to the tinkers’ campsite at the edge of town by the dumpsite. The large draft horses rattle their harnesses, move silent beyond the encampment. A large aerial attached to the roof reaches towards the signal from England; a TV flickers blue in one of the windows. A dog howls once in the dark. Beneath the last halogen lamp of the town, a girl with wild hair and a long, sad-looking face peers from a window of a caravan parked at the edge of the road. Her mouth is a wide O staring at the stars.

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against their chains to get at the boy. Like the girl, they look as if they haven’t been fed in weeks.

He cuts across the fields, muck splattering wet and cold on the back of his legs. Closely huddled cows low softly. The peak of Sliabh Coillte is a sliver in the dark of the sky to the north. Two miles of hard running across the barren fields misted with tulle-fog and he is on the hill overlooking Christchurch, his lungs burning as if they’d been blistered by a welding arc. Everything is dark and still. All the windows are dark, the pub closed, and everyone bundled up in bed.

Ryan’s coal yard with its screes of coal is a black wet sheen sparkling in the dark. Mist collects on their peaks like snow atop mountains.

There is a row of three halogens along the mainway of the village, opposite the church and the graveyard, and they cast the only light in the village. A warm circle in the centre of the road leading people home to their beds, like what the soul must look like when one gives it up to God, he imagines, a warm light in all that blackness, and in showing the blackness what it is, giving blackness back to itself because it takes darkness to see light. That’s why we keep hope in our souls. His aunt Una always used to say that, but then, she also used to say that his mother was cursed.

This is where we will all be buried, he thinks, where his uncle Oweny and Oweny’s sons and where his grandmother and grandfather—the martyr of Frongoch—were already waiting, beyond that pale amber shade, in that part of the graveyard where the wide sycamores are, their leavings stirring softly now with a hiss like the far-away broadcasts from Belfast that his mother listens to.

His father’s body will return to the west where he was born and where there is no coal, only peat. Or perhaps, he will be buried in America. It is the boy’s first real moment of considering his father, and then considering him truly gone and far away, and he wishes that he had never dreamed him dead. What kind of son is he at all, he wonders, dreaming his father dead?

He stops at a grotto to the Virgin that lies nestled in the side of a hill and like every other night before he says a prayer for his mother and his father, although he knows it will do no good. His words frost the air. The Goddess’s weather-beaten face, worn smooth and soft, shines beatific in the moon glow. Hers is a shrine of rowan branches, wild flowers and moss heather, lichen, and pools of bog-water, the type of old country shrine his mother often prays at when she can, although since her illness he’s rarely heard her use the word, God, 108 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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in any of her prayers. Wrapped in thorns yet serene and calm, the Goddess assures the boy that everything will be all right, if only he believes, everything will work out just fine. But the thing is, he doesn’t believe and yet he cannot help himself for wanting to.

His reflection shivers upon the pool’s surface, resistant and numb. Restless in the full moon, an eel slides through the stagnant, scummed water, troubling the surface briefly with a muddy cloud before sinking once more to its bottom. He tries to think of ancient things because he knows this is what his mother would do; he sees fires burning on hilltops through the nights during the harvest feasts of Samhain and Bealtaine, that old coming together of earth and flesh, of river and sky and air, of finding God inside and everywhere about oneself. His mother has always drawn strength from this, but there is nothing here but the smell of ash and loam, of rotting potatoes and cow shit. He stares into the pool trying to see the light in the darkness and the way to his soul.

WHEN HE RETURNS, the sky in the east is lightening. The room is dark but warm with coal-fire; the screen drawn to catch sparks. The clock ticking slowly above the mantel, the last of the charges echoing hollowly in the field. In the hallway, he takes off his cleats, dips his fingers into the small plastic holy water font, and blesses himself. A hot water bottle lies bloated and steaming in the scullery, a pot of tea steeping on the grill, the familiar smell of sweat and smoke and porter. Above the stairs, his father is tossing his pale head, his cheeks are damp with tears: he’s dreaming of America; and the boy, knowing that he will never see his father again, can’t help but dream for him, and fear for him waking alone in this coffin-dark.

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seeing what awaited her, she took the ghost path home Ibo Landing You arrived a day before the landing, breathing water more than air. It was the day the shackling men called sabbath, and we’d been brought into the sun and made to twist our mouths around words they taught us by the rhythm of the whip.

When I went down on my knees they laughed.

The man with the shadow of sickness always on his face kicked me in time with a push I could not stay and your head fell, like green month fruit, into the arbor of my legs.

One man said he’d had his hand inside plenty of sows.

The others stepped away, said they knew only sails and the sea, forgetting they had taught themselves to give life over to misery. I called for my sister, but the farm hand knelt almost tasting my milk while his fingers cracked around your skull and he spilled you on the bile-crusted boards not half alive.

You had too few months’ rest between the heavens and this place.

You had only watched me work answering soil for three births of the moon. Then the walking and the wailing. Then the dark place that prepared you to be born into a grave. Then the lying over water. The plenty water and still no way to wash a body. All that moving and still no place to go.

The next thing coming would be like years on years of white hands cracking on your skull. Better not to be born on soil that can only converse with your blood. Better to come early, not breathing cloud-white air. Better what you did, daughter.

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I have seen them throw back fish large enough to feed six of us below. They are hungry for something flesh can never feed.

Better you understood that early. I am coming your way.

I am right behind you, daughter, breathing water more than air.

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Phebus Etienne

Key Points from the Assimilation Pamphlet

Silence your hips when a drum solo reminds you of ceremony asking Legba for safe passage while Orion danced across your piece of sky.

When Mrs. Robinson says there is no pure water in Madame Gerard’s neighborhood, don’t mention merchants singing prices of coconut candy, bougainvilleas like gold waterfalls on stucco.

You must smell American, like dew on cedar or pioneer mountain air. Secret your individual funk.

Mute your colors. No peppermint green collars in winter or lavender window frames. Suit your rented rooms in beige.

Ignore your aunt and your “fek vini” cousin on Main Street when they greet you in Kreyol.

Agree to bleed for the stars and stripes, but accept that your O positive flow will be siphoned for rescue only if the CDC deems you worthy.

Work temp for ancestors of conquerors.

Don’t view corporate headquarters as new plantation or daydream about maroons who filleted their captors and converted white skin to parchment.

Make copies for the MBA who says with wonder I heard Haitian women are good in bed and treats you like he sketched F on your GED final.

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Émigré/refugee action points: Forgive yourself because you like sleeping indoors.

Devise plans for reparations.

Study guerilla warfare when you are off the clock.

Notes: fek vini – just come Kreyol – Language spoken by the majority of Haitian people.

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Blas Falconer

The Given Account Puerto Rico, 1510 They said they were gods, and we believed— they crossed uncrossable seas after all in ships with sails like wings—but Salcedo is dead. Pacing river shallows, turning rocks, sifting sand for flecks of gold, he cut his foot on stone or shell sending braids of blood downstream. Overhead, wind shook trees so leaves and light spilled in, catching a school of fish, a silver shimmer. I was there.

Kneeling down on the bank, I dressed his wound pressing strips of cloth to stop the flood but red spots seeped through the weave, my fingers wet with blood, his blood, no different from mine. He winced, his face paled by pain, but nothing, nothing changed, no dove, no cloud, no beam of light, and he a god or son of god? I, who came to drink, struck dumb by one thought—they bleed, they die— led him back into the pool and pushed his head below. His arms thrashed, legs kicked, lungs inhaled mouths of water. He stopped.

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not strongest, weakest or cruelest of them, did not move. I pulled him out. He hung wet and limp and heavy in my armsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; this man, this man, almost too much to bear.

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Sascha Feinstein

Smalls’ Paradise, 1929 The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all.

—F.G.L. You’d be right to imagine Lorca wild, dancing not so much the way his mother taught him— confined to her movements as he clutched her hem— but later, the Victrola’s needle struggling not to skitter and scratch, Lorca leaping to Ellington: “Black and Tan Fantasy.”

“Cotton Club Stomp.”

When he arrives in Manhattan, how can we not picture him dancing with the dancers?

You’d be right to love his love of self, Spanish passion yielding to Charlie Johnson’s Paradise Band at Smalls’, windowless and surreal on 2294 1/2 Seventh Ave., just a block and a basement away from the Cotton Club’s majesty and glitz.

Beneath the streets, the tables rock and rattle to George Stafford’s snare, to Braque-like trumpet lines— Sidney de Paris battling Jabbo Smith.

Spotlit saxophones. “Wild Man Blues”!

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It’s easy—isn’t it?—to admire Federico at thirty-one, slicked hair and ballooning pantaloons, shirt unbuttoned beneath his chin as he spins a black woman he’ll later describe as an African exile: I protested to see so much flesh stolen from paradise.

Oh, the immigrants’ cultural compromise.…But for now, what joy to be at the center of this gorgeous, fluid world.

El mundo ondulando.…

You’d be right to imagine all that, though you’d be exactly wrong.

To be true to history, hypnotize his blazing spirit, lower his head, place his arms at his side, close his eyes, have him whisper, El rítmo.…

Let him wander while he sits silently lost in the jazz club’s landscape where leopards purr and curl, where the moon broods in the wet bell of a trombone’s metallic throat.

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Cameron K. Gearen

Alias

No one in Beijing knows my number.

Start over as the daughter of missionaries? I can’t say how Saigon smells. I envy my dinner of Empty Heart Greens: hollow stalks, delicious symmetry. They call me Serene Lotus. I am not myself and Mao’s dead.

Portraited, statued, embalmed, three months a year his corpus gets refurbished and the hordes on pilgrimage can’t tell the real stiff from the fake.

Uncanny orange, both. Guidebook warns Careful who you trust. Silk Alley vendors protest too much. Real silk this way, Mrs. Can’t see eyes for the counterfeit Vuarnets. The cashiers check for watermarks under ultra-violet.

Lives lived scrolled in my bones, veracity an x-ray away. People ask: are you a mother? I say I am. Meaning I’d like to be. Can’t nail sound down.

Can’t answer a simple question. Digging for photos of my nephew. Eyes must be satisfied. Will the real Serene Lotus please stand up.

My electric skeleton concealed under seamless skin. Some say it snows a lot here. Some say dry like bones.

What do I know? Just sounds. Whistle, trill. Speak slowly, please.

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splinters a window from inside. This is his job.

Ping ping ping all morning. Glass talks straight, no garbled dialects. Clearer still, language of the bus, how its backfire reels the body back to five years old, Chicago, not Saigon, palming the sweaty nickel, grandmother sweep-washing the stoop, and before one gets to the corner, before one’s blood and bones and ears reach the corner, slam of gunfire, a man murdered, sound of his death stored in the body’s cells.

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Lea Goldberg

Nameless Journey translated by Sharon Kessler

1.

Where am I? How can I explain where I am?

My eyes aren’t reflected in any window.

My face isn’t reflected in any mirror.

All the streetcars in the city go without me.

The rain falls without wetting my hands.

Yet I’m here. I’m all here— In a strange city in the heart of a homeland of strangeness.

2.

My room is so small that the days in it are wary, dwindling, and I too live that way in the scent of smoke and apples.

At night the neighbors will turn on a light: Across the big courtyard, beyond the tall branches of birch, a window opposite mine lights up silently.

At night, it’s sometimes hard to remember that once, somewhere, was my own window.

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3.

It’s been weeks since anyone has called my name. The reason is simple.

The parrots in my kitchen haven’t learned it yet, and the people in the city don’t know it.

It exists only on paper, in writing, and has no voice, no sound, no note.

For days now I’ve gone around nameless on a street whose name I don’t know.

I sit namelessly for hours opposite a tree whose name I don’t know.

Sometimes I think namelessly of someone whose name I don’t know.

4.

I went along with the ships and stood with the bridges, and I was cast in the street with the falling elm leaves.

I had autumn, and I had a brightly lit cloud next to a black chimney, and I had a strange name that no one could guess.

[Copenhagen,1960]

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Lea Goldberg

Tel Aviv 1935 translated by Sharon Kessler The masts on the rooftops were like the masts on Columbus’s ship, and every raven perched on top announced a different continent.

The passengers’ rucksacks marched down the street, and the language of a foreign land was plunged into the blazing heat like a cold knife blade.

How can the air of this small city carry so many childhood memories, loves left behind, empty rooms?

The clear winter nights, the summer rain, the foggy mornings in distant capitals: here they are all in reverse, like negatives forgotten in the camera.

You can hear footsteps drumming from behind: a foreign army’s marching songs, and it seems that all you have to do is turn your head—and look! there’s your city’s church floating on the sea. [from The Shortest Journey]

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Kevin A. González

Julio, El Barbero

He fled Cuba in the Sixties to neighbor isle Puerto Rico and became an estadista.

You can’t blame him, argued my father, a Statehooder himself, against my claim: He should shut up, support the cause or leave. La estadidad is not an option.

The cause meant independence. I was fifteen, disciplined by my heart’s blind politics.

I’d worn the same hairstyle since six, when a phonebook boosted my face onto the mirror, a few inches off Julio’s effort to bend.

Every month he asked me what I wanted and I said the same thing, my father next in turn for the chair that had cradled him for thirty years.

At nine, I memorized Julio’s story of exile, the whisper of scissors slicing air as he paced around me.

On Havana nights, he was a tenor.

Barber by day. Deacon on weekends.

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gradually into ruin. At thirteen, I derailed our dialogue to baseball but the off-season proved a problem.

He likes the Yankees, no surprise.

In Puerto Rico he is choir director of his church. Not the same thing as a deacon or a tenor, he implies in blank stares toward the mirror.

I am older now, two phonebooks taller than Julio, still an independentista but understanding of other causes.

I am sorry for him, a life confined to scissors’ whispers and remembrance.

He deserves to talk, and I owe to listen, to sit still as when his razor soothes me— Maybe I should root for the Yankees.

I lean back on the familiar chair.

He speaks of mid-century hurricanes striking Cuba, dispelled memories.

Shreds of hair slump toward the ground.

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Making Merit

WHEN THE MEN COME TO ME I turn into a bird. My arms stretch into wings and I can fly away without moving. I fly to the ledge below the window in my room and watch the men rock into me, sweat on me, whisper softly or yell at me. Fat and round like mangos or skinny as street dogs, rich or working-class, none of the men know that when they come to me I am not really here. I am circling the room above where they lay, on feathers thick and resilient as a duck’s, and when they collapse, breathless, it is not my skin they feel, cold and perfumed beneath them, but the skin of a ghost.

They are always talking, my men, and for a long while I could not understand them. Now I have learned all the words I need. I can coax Americans upstairs with me in clear, lilting English, and can whisper promises into the ears of Thai men that make them dig deep into their pockets for coins. Wealthy Thais don’t choose me; my skin is too dark. When I first got here, a girl called Lily showed me how to rub my face and hands with creamy soymilk, but when it was rinsed away, my skin was still brown as a tamarind rind. After a while I gave up trying and secretly drank bowls of the sweet, rich milk that had been a luxury, rare as jade, in my village.

I WAS BORN IN SAI NGAM, village of beautiful trees. Many years ago, when humans first came to this land, the spirits grew angry. They did not want these people living near them, and so they played tricks on the humans. They stole a newborn baby, and blew down all the huts that the families built. Frightened, the men and women left after only a short time. Many decades later, a new group of people traveled to this same place. They built an altar between two tall trees and offered the spirits food and treasures. They asked the spirits’ permission to stay and settle, and said they would call their village Sai Ngam to celebrate the beautiful trees. The spirits were pleased, and welcomed them. These were my ancestors. They flourished in Sai Ngam for thousands of years.

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Every morning when I was a little girl my mother would wake me as the sun rose. She walked with me to the river and helped me bathe in the shallow water. While she scrubbed my toes with sand, she told me about our ancestors, who journeyed to Sai Ngam from China and wore red silk pants, even when they worked in the fields.

My mother said that in the morning, the first thing that the sunlight touched was China. But I was a lazy girl and did not climb out of bed until the sun was high in the sky and shining only on Sai Ngam.

After my bath, I would take an offering to the Buddha that sat in the temple on the hill. I knelt at his feet, holding incense and lotus flowers in my hands and praying that He would look after my family.

I would leave our offering on the altar, next to offerings made by every family in Sai Ngam.

When I was six years old, I began working in the garlic fields alongside my mother and older sister, Marina. I was too young to do the planting, so I ran messages back and forth from one end of the field to the other, or carried drinks of water from the river in a basket on my back. Some days I stayed at our home and tended the chickens.

I’d throw them bits of rice scraped from the cooking pot after our morning meal, or catch grasshoppers to feed them out of my hands.

I had names for all the chickens and would talk to them and sing to them as if they were my dearest friends. I thought it so sad that they were birds, had wings and feathers, but could not fly high enough to escape my mother’s hands, which twisted their necks on holidays.

I KEEP A SPARROW IN A BAMBOO CAGE in my room. His name is Ah-Mu. An old man on the street sold him to me. I should have released the bird to make merit for my next life, but as I stood in the market, holding him in my hands, I realized that I could not bear to lose him. For two days, until I finished making his cage, Ah-Mu flew in frantic circles around my room, bumping into walls and chirping unhappily. He calmed down when I put him in the cage. Now he sits quietly on a stick and obediently eats what I feed him. He doesn’t make a sound. Every day I feel guilty for keeping him here, but I have decided that he will be free when I am. Marina doesn’t think he could live outside a cage now. He has grown used to being fed and sitting still. She says he has forgotten how to fly.

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between his thumb and forefinger, to make them red as poppies, and slaps our backsides when we walk by him. Some of the girls flirt with Chatri, kiss him on the mouth and beg for beautiful clothes or special sweets. Marina and I stay quiet and sit in the corner until he leaves. He doesn’t like me because my skin is dark, and if he tries to grab me I pull away and stare at him with what my mother called “cobra eyes,” eyes empty of anything except hate.

When Chatri first brought Marina and I to Bangkok, he took me out one night. He showed me the King’s Grand Palace, and the canals filled with boats that wound through the city. Then he drove to a dark street and led me into a club filled with lights and music, red-faced foreigners and naked girls dancing on a stage. Chatri told me to watch the girls and study how they moved, so that I could move like they did. He told me that rich men would come to look at me, and if they liked me and slept in my bed for a while, I would make money to pay off my debt. I did not understand what he meant; we had given him so much money already. My father had given him all of my family’s savings, so that he would bring Marina and I to the city and find us jobs as housekeepers for rich families. My mother wept when Chatri took us away, but she knew that it was necessary that we leave Sai Ngam and begin careers in lucky Bangkok.

That first night, when he took me back to my room, Chatri kissed me until my mouth felt bruised and pinched at my body until I cried out. He told me that he would not sleep with me yet, that I was worth more money if he didn’t. He left me alone in my bed, where I lay shaking for hours. I wanted to find Marina and let her comfort me and tell me that we would go back to Sai Ngam soon. But when I went to her room, she had no comfort to give. Three men had slept with her in her bed that first night, two young soldiers from Germany and Chatri, who came to her stinking of whiskey and smoke.

I FEEL HAPPIER HERE NOW than when I arrived three years ago. I have regulars who come see me. They like my dark skin and the sexy things I can say to them. Some men give me perfume or clothes, and once a man brought me incense and flowers. He told me he wanted to worship me, like the Buddha, but then he laid on me just like all the others. Chatri has never slept in my bed; he has barely touched me since that first night. He likes Marina, though, because somehow, despite the years she spent in the garlic fields, she has kept her skin the color of river bird eggs. She is so pale. She looks like a photograph Crab Orchard Review ◆ 127

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of herself that didn’t quite develop. I think she has made herself sick.

She is so homesick she barely speaks. She is wilting like a flower in this city. She is not like me, she hasn’t learned to fly.

YESTERDAY, MARINA AND I received a letter from our older brother, Dang. He said that my mother and father died in an accident. They took a bus to the provincial market, and their driver, high on amphetamines, drove off a bridge. Now, Dang works as a trekking guide for rich tourists. He says Marina and I must stay in Bangkok, where there are plenty of opportunities. He says we must keep working and make a life for ourselves. He says this city is our home now.

After we got the letter, Chatri gave us bus fare and we went to the temple. I twined incense in my fingertips and knelt at the Buddha’s feet. I imagined my mother carving jackfruit pods for me and tossing me off of the footbridge into the river. I always savored that moment, just before I splashed into the water, when I felt weightless. I pictured her standing in the river looking for China on the morning of her death. I watched the spirits of my parents fly up into the branches of the two beautiful trees.

TONIGHT AS THE SUN SETS behind skyscrapers, I will let Ah-Mu go. I have just decided. I am afraid he will die if I don’t. He certainly won’t survive until I am free. I cannot imagine ever being free again.

I will open his cage and unlatch my window. I will hold him in my hands and croon to him that at last he will serve his purpose. He will help me make merit for my next life. I will stretch my arms out the window and toss him effortlessly into the air. I will not watch to see if he remembers how to fly. If he cannot fly, and falls to the ground below, he will still be freer than me. He will be reborn or he will die; either way, he will begin a new life. Then I will close my window, pinch my cheeks, lower my eyes, and open my door for the men.

And when they come to my bed, I will turn into a bird, and perhaps I will follow Ah-Mu out the window, and leave myself behind forever.

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Postcards

WHENEVER JENNIFER HAS LUNCH with other women, she brings her collection of postcards. She doesn’t mean to take them out. She firmly intends to leave them hidden in her handbag, hanging on the back of her chair. Afterwards she apologizes for talking about them once again. “I’m not really like this,” she says. “I’m not usually this way.”

“That’s all right,” the women assure her. “You’ll get used to things here. Give yourself time.”

But Jennifer doesn’t want time. She wants to be elsewhere.

THE POSTCARDS ALL COME FROM PLACES Jennifer wishes she were living now. Some depict landscapes where, in fact, she did live before moving to this mill town in central Maine. One of her favorites shows a village in Yorkshire, with stone walls separating the fields and sheep grazing in the churchyard. Pink roses climb the ancient bell tower of the church. Other postcards come from California: an orange sunset over the Pacific, palm trees, a pelican perched on a rock. There are postcards of Heidelberg, its ruined castle photographed from the far side of the Neckar River, the bridges covered with a delicate dusting of snow. Jennifer takes these cards out of her handbag, and then she spreads across the table postcards of places she has never been but would be willing to live: Paris, for example, where she can see herself buying nectarines from the fruit vendors deep in the shadows of Notre Dame. Other luncheons she imagines herself, still in Paris, living in the restored district known as the Marais. She lingers on a green bench in the Place des Vosges, watching her children build castles in the sandbox and play tag among the seventeenth-century fountains.

“I’ve lived many places,” Jennifer sighs, picking up her postcards from the clutter of the luncheon dishes: the last crusts of bread, a trace of water in a glass, the coffee mugs. “I’d be willing to live in many others, just not here.” Each time, then she details what Crab Orchard Review ◆ 129

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she dislikes: the harshness of the New England landscape, smoke rising from the factories along the river, the poverty of the mothers in the supermarket—their skin bad, their children rough and demanding.

THE WOMEN, JENNIFER’S NEW ACQUAINTANCES, do their best to help her find beauty in her new surroundings, items of interest. They drive her to the nearest city to buy books. They take her out in the country to look at the horses cantering freely about and watch the calves being born. They walk her along the river, show her the new Victorian lampposts, take her to the traveling opera and to the sea. But none of this does any good. Jennifer is bleakly thankful, acknowledges the kind effort of these would-be friends, goes home and weeps.

For days she lies on her sofa, refusing to get up, remembering the landscapes she has left, the cities where she deserves to be living now. She reads the local newspaper, which makes her sadder with its mediocrity. She feels misunderstood. No one, not even her husband, understands her sensitivity to place.

SHE MOVED TO THIS TOWN IN LATE SUMMER, in the lingering weeks of goldenrod and asters. Her husband had become a manager at the mill. But, in mourning for the life she had left, Jennifer failed to notice the leaves changing until the flaming oranges and reds had withered into the subdued browns of November. In December, she danced with her husband at the Christmas ball, but she found the decorations too garish and the band too loud. In January, when the snows piled up around the windows and the huge snowplows clanked through the night, she could only think that in other parts of the world, green now reigned—in the fields and hedgerows of England, and in the golden hills of California transformed each year by winter storms. Her children went sledding and came home with red cheeks.

“You’ll appreciate spring more when it arrives,” a friend writes, but Jennifer knows this isn’t true. What comfort would she find in a lonely purple crocus, blooming bravely by her back door?

BY MIDWINTER THE WOMEN with whom Jennifer has lunch are becoming impatient. They feel Jennifer has had time enough to be unhappy.

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overdrawn. Jennifer senses this; she feels badly about it. She wants people to like her. She makes firmer resolutions about her postcards, resolutions she finds impossible to keep. Various topics at the luncheons only remind her of what she has lost. If a friend just bought a book at the one bookstore in town, Jennifer recalls that in Los Angeles there were seven bookstores within two blocks of each other.

“But you’ve lived without bookstores before!” the friend will say. “There can’t have been seven bookstores in your English village!” At that moment what can she do but take out her postcard of the Yorkshire tea room, the daily newspapers hanging from racks on the walls, the curd tart so tasty and inviting. Much lovelier than this mill-town café. “Ah,” the other says, nodding, not really in agreement, and so Jennifer displays her other postcards as a way of convincing the women of the appropriateness of her misery.

She languishes, waiting to be rescued.

ONE NIGHT IN LATE MARCH, Jennifer has a dream. It is after midnight.

Her husband is away on a trip; her children are asleep. In her dream, a stranger climbs in the window of the bedroom where she is sleeping. The man’s dark curly hair falls down to his shoulders, and he wears a helmet with a bright red plume. A gust of wind awakens her, but she doesn’t scream. She believes she recognizes him despite a certain musty smell emanating from his body, which she had not anticipated. “Do I have time to leave a note?” she asks. “I’ve been waiting for you for ages. Where are we going?”

“Do you need to know?” His voice has a peculiar, rusty quality, as if it has been unused for centuries. The moonlight falling through the window gives his gray pants a metallic sheen; they shimmer like armor.

“Do you have a map?” Without waiting for his response, Jennifer tosses off the bedclothes and runs to the closet to get her boots and scarf. “I don’t suppose I’ll need a coat,” she says, more to herself than to him. She wraps the scarf around her neck. The man gestures toward the front lawn, where Jennifer can see a black horse tied to the maple tree, pawing at a clump of snow. She hadn’t imagined the horse would be so imposing.

At the window, though, she hesitates. Should she kiss her children goodbye? Ah, no. When she is settled, she may send for them. There is no point complicating her departure. Their father (who, after all, brought them all to this godforsaken place!) will Crab Orchard Review ◆ 131

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take care of them. She glances back at her wedding picture and feels a shiver of despair that she dismisses as an effect of the interminable winter. That part of her life is over. She hopes everyone—the women who have tried to be helpful and failed—will understand her leaving.

She doesn’t want to be gossiped about.

Next to the window stands the bookcase with her postcards carefully arrayed. She sweeps them into the pocket of her nightgown.

Where she is going, she perhaps won’t need them. Beauty and love will surround her like the golden clouds in a painting by Maxfield Parrish. And she seems to remember that in situations like hers— why didn’t she pay more attention to her childhood books?—the hero needs to travel unburdened by objects, mementos of the past.

She glances toward her knight to see if he is going to object, but he is already outside, unhitching the horse for their departure. It won’t hurt, she thinks, to have a secret talisman for luck, a souvenir. And, clutching the postcards with one hand, she climbs awkwardly over the windowsill, pulling the window closed behind her.

IN THE MORNING, THE PAPERBOY turns down the street just as the light is breaking. The air is cold and he can see his breath. He whistles, then hurls the paper up on a porch step, barely missing a rosebush.

He does not have a good aim, and it is for this reason that people miss the old paperboy, who used to place the newspaper right inside their storm doors.

The new boy is absorbed in his thoughts, and as he cuts across a yard he almost trips over a woman leaning against a maple tree, clothed only in her nightgown and a flimsy blue scarf, eating grapes. For some reason this detail so unhinges him—does he know how difficult it is to find grapes in the winter?—that he drops his papers and runs home.

Later the boy’s widowed mother will explain to her own neighbors that Jennifer would have died of exposure if it weren’t for the heroism of her son. After the doctor has left—a simple case of sleepwalking, he decides, despite the open window—the boy’s mother helps pick up the newspapers, then gathers the sodden postcards scattered on the snow. She takes them home to dry on the radiator, then tapes them up, just a little wrinkled, on her kitchen cupboards. Her favorite shows a full moon hanging over the red tiled roofs of a Lisbon street. She’s always wanted to travel.

The next week, worrying that her rescue of the cards is at heart theft, the newspaper boy’s mother buys a postcard for Jennifer at 132 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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the corner drug store. She chooses the prettiest one—the town river flowing past a weathered barn—in spring, presumably, for crocuses bloom beside the barn door. “Hope you are better,” the woman writes anonymously, then drops the postcard in Jennifer’s mailbox and returns home to feed her cats.

THAT AUTUMN JENNIFER’S HUSBAND is transferred back to the West Coast. Jennifer and the children follow him. Within a few months, hardly anyone in the mill town remembers them. It’s almost as if they never lived in Maine.

Even the women who befriended Jennifer are relieved not to have to listen to her complaints anymore. They’re glad to be getting on with their lives. Christmas comes, and Valentine’s Day, and they find themselves looking forward once more to spring. But in March, when snow still lies in dirty clumps by the roadside and mud seeps up from the riverbanks and around their doorsteps, the women grow restless. At night, they dream of postcards flying into their bedrooms through windows they’ve left open a crack. Postcards drift down on their coffee tables and under the kitchen chairs, postcards swirl around the bathrooms: from Prague and Mozambique, the Steppes of Russia, the vineyards of France. One morning after their children have left for school, the women find themselves searching frantically in their desks and bureaus. Finally they discover, in old tin boxes, their grandmothers’ postcard collections. They bring the boxes with them when they meet.

They imagine Jennifer must harbor bitterness about her time in Maine, but this is because they’ve forgotten the tricks of nostalgia.

In California now, she is sitting outside a café overlooking the sea, describing for her new acquaintances a landscape they recognize only from calendars: white steepled churches, leafy woods, lilacs blooming in late spring. “But surely the winters were long,” one says. “You can’t possibly miss all that snow.”

Jennifer gazes out at a pelican plunging behind a craggy rock.

“I had wonderful friends in Maine. They took me for walks each autumn, when the trees blazed red. And in the winter, when snow sparkled on the icy ponds.” She takes a sip of Perrier and sighs.

“It’s the one place I might finally have learned to be happy.”

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John Guzlowski

Poland

They’ll never see it again, these old Poles with their dreams of Poland. My father told me when I was a boy that those who tried in ’45 were turned back at the borders by shoeless Russians dressed in rags and riding shaggy ponies. The Poles fled through the woods, the unlucky ones left behind, dead or what’s worse wounded, the lucky ones gone back to wait in the old barracks in the concentration and labor camps in Gatersleben or Wildflecken for some miracle that would return them to Poznan or Katowice. But God wasn’t listening or His hands were busy somewhere else. Later, in America these Poles gathered with their brothers and with their precious sons and daughters every May 3, Polish Constitution Day, to pray for the flag. There was no question then what the colors stood for, red for all that bleeding sorrow, white for innocence.

And always the old songs telling the world Poland would never fall so long as poppies flower red, and flesh can conquer rock or steel.

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These Poles never learned what their children always learn, that those left behind leave the past behind. Borders stay open only in the dreams of those dying on this side.

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Nathalie Handal

Baladna

We are who we are, and home is home to keep the seasons dreaming to remind us of ahweh, zaatar, khoubiz, kaak— the common things I am no longer sure what I see: a field of wheat or a field of olive trees, a herd of sheep or a burning mountain, not sure if it matters now that I stand alone at the corner of a small road somewhere between my grandfather and what seems to be my present…

Am I as old, as young, as sad, as torn, as strange, as sorry as those I have lost?

I try to remember all that has been offered to me: wrinkled bed sheets, library passes, old passports, ports we stopped at for an hour… we are who we are; are we who we are?

We write a ballad to celebrate ourselves, baladna, and wonder is that what it’s like to dance in Arabic…

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Leticia Hernández-Linares

Sweat We’re not gonna go on a trip glorifying the pava which is a straw hat, or the guayabera which is a type of shirt, cause there ain’t no hat or no shirt gonna free anybody.

—Juan Sánchez Writing her life on a hem line Hilda watches through the door for a shift in the light windows are choked up holes in the wall that don’t let the sun through anymore and an old garage where rusted tables and tired sewing machines breath heavy all day long makes Hilda anxious for the view she’s missing of overcast sky and smog the sewing machines in unison sound like typewriters just one word written over and over and over stories stitched under seams along button holes hang in the air waiting to be worn and scraps of letters written to no one in particular collect dust on the factory floor Lupe wipes the lines forming on her forehead sews S.O.S. messages with bold color threads that imprint themselves on a young girl’s back on an afternoon when the air is wet and cotton polyester blend mixes with sweat tag sticking to her skin Crab Orchard Review ◆ 137

Leticia Hernández-Linares

reads size seven even though it’s really size one pant legs that fight her thighs and don’t accommodate her thickness are flags Made in El Salvador Made in San Francisco Made in T.J. Made in L.A. Leaning over on cracked uncomfortable slab of wood Hilda, Betina, Rosa and the women next to them follow in Betsy Ross’s footsteps except they’re missing rocking chairs songs museums statues in their honor of factory owners antique renditions of the tiny chairs clay molds of empty hands impressionistic reproductions of the stale air They are sewing for their lives flags of tiny shirts for grown bodies in red blue white their countries are discarded pieces of the past that they throw out at the end of the endless day when the crooked door has stopped letting light through and offerings in silk and cotton blue left in the dark under skeptical sewing tables read: querida santita de la fábrica please let me trade my m-a-i-d for a m-a-d-e in the u.s.a. label Hilda goes home to thirsty plants and hungry grandchildren who pass time looking through floral print photo albums with spiral binding and fading images of Hilda’s young body in hand made dresses and the El Salvador before before everything

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While everyone thinks she’s cooking Hilda studies for her citizenship exam faint melodies of the Salvadoran national anthem scorching the bottom of her pan tonight for dinner Hilda is burning pieces of her country’s flag already torn anyway made of mismatched fabrics stained with dead children’s questions hungry farmers’ dejection and in the end no one has been saved in the Valley of the Hammocks so she waits for the day she can become “an american city” as she likes to say and have a new flag a new flag to put into the flames

Notes: —The epigraph is from “Tres Banderas” (Three Flags), litografía, 1988, by Nuyorican artist Juan Sánchez (in the Printed Convictions/Convicciones Grabadas exhibit).

—querida santita de la fábrica: dearest saint that watches over the factory

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Luisa Igloria

What You Remember Ruben, 1977 After the farewell dinner, your uncles and male cousins dragged the red plastic cooler in from the kitchen, lined with bits of straw and ice chips. While the women slept, they passed you your first bottle of cerveza San Miguel, sliding the frosted amber neck between your fingers and guiding it to your lips. They gave you beer and you were thirteen? Yes, you say, five more after that one and then it was morning, melted too quickly like tunnel vision competing with background noise. The fields folded smaller as plane wings lifted and you followed, this path precise as science, trailing its burnt fuels. Twenty-three years later I ask what you remember: glass windows along a wall in Narita airport, your mother letting your little brothers pee in the shade of a potted plant for fear of missing connections. That first Chicago winter, branches caught in ice and clear as sheets of heated sugar. Tonight, your mother calls me to light the stove for tea, instructing in an older Tagalog I have not often heard: buhayin mo ang apoy—which means, to coax awake the sleeping fire. We slit open the square envelope, shake a spoonful of dried leaves into a pot, infuse the flavors from seven leaves, cardamom, and star anise. She shows me photographs from your hometown—rice wafers hanging in windows for a festival, their paper-thin tongues dyed yellow, pink, pale green. Their dry rustling in the wind, mingled with prayers. A double row in procession, 140 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Luisa Igloria

now just a darkish line across the cracked sepia print, on a road whose name she has forgotten; as well as its beginning, and where it will end.

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Laura Johnson

Medicine Show

The barker’s pitch is no light offer: oils suckled from the punishing bloom of Joshua Tree, the silver teared frankincense of Ur. He asks that they step up, ladies and men, to attempt the prophet’s cure.

When the Baptist collapsed in Jordan’s empty quarter, our herbalist’s great ancestor smeared a desert honey across the wounds and with these very aromatics, revived him.

Said with the antelope bone pointed toward her: black snake draped over the neck, the black shawl and veil, palms tilted to the sky— the charcoal outline open eye centering each.

Today she plays the desert witch.

Sweat beads beneath her breasts, this heat, like the costume, foreign to her.

Where are the rising birch stands, their attending lake and deer? A razed horizon is no Ojibwe place, footfalls at rest in mottled shadow, leaf crack and the needles under them, sounds of the body as she bends passing bottles over the wagon’s crib.

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taking the macerate of comfrey against injury, rancid bear fat scented with lavender, all the baskets of dried flowers emptied and made glad, keeping the skin supple in winter, warm against a burning snow.

They are little use to those who do not travel north or easterly, sowing their homes like hides that stiffen into ground.

The audience to which, on other days, she plays the shill stooped under a covering bonnet, come forward from their static hope in a moment of grave relief.

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Fady Joudah

Travel Document

It must be like forgetting how to die: Your grass-grown ruins, stonewalls, sadness Without eyes. The body Takes on the shape of redemption or its phantom Limbs’ pain as true account Of what happens—a woman Who’s worn the wrong size shoes All her life, her toes now crooked, And she loves the way dust falls On furniture, sliding in sunlight, flowers She calls by names you gave Then took them back.

If it’s the body you want, there is the body That couldn’t return, There is the one that wouldn’t. Sullen Vengeance, a dawn breaking dawn not night Can stay or day begin. An egg’s Invisible axis rising and sinking In boiling water, Salt as measure for pickling olives, Hands without echo’s desire To be heard. Tell me, what else Is there to say about land?

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Fady Joudah

Scarecrow

The rice field birds are too clever for scarecrows, They know what they love, milk in the grain.

When it happens, there will be no time to look for anyone.

Husband, children, nine brothers and sisters.

You will drop your sugarcane-stick-beating of plastic bucket, Stop shouting at birds and run.

They will cattle you in trucks or herd you for a hundred miles.

Old men will teach you trade with soldiers at checkpoints.

You will give them your spoon, blanket and beans, They’ll let you keep your life. And if you jump off the truck, The army jeep trailing it will run you over.

Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land.

Later, you will stand in distribution lines and won’t receive enough to eat.

Your mother will weave you new underwear from flour sacks.

And they’ll give you plastic tents, cooking pots, Vaccine cards, white pills, and wool blankets.

And you will keep your cool.

Standing with eyes shut tight like you’ve got soap in them, Arms stretched wide like you’re catching rain.

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Fady Joudah

Meheba Children

The body comes naturally to them, For each song they know A dance in a circle, the time To name flowers they cannot find.

And from their breath Comes the dust of running.

Stride for stride You can pant it with one who holds Her sister’s hand and smiles, Another grasping pencil And notebook, late for school Without desks or benches.

And for jeep ride, They’ll scream your name On henna-red roads Flanked with maize and sunflowers’ Pose of longing that never breaks.

Even the ones in cloth-sacks On their mothers’ backs and bare feet Will sometimes wave.

And every now and then A protuberant belly and swollen legs.

You will feel paraded. They know

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Fady Joudah

The flight of food thrown at them From trucks as in a half-rationed wedding, They know roosters crow Five years before slaughter, Ten crops feed a family of seven for a day.

And now and then, Shouting chendele at you From a landfill for molding clay Houses, leaping in and climbing out, Their Sisyphus joy Urging you to join them.

Note: â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Meheba is a refugee settlement in Zambia, and one of the oldest and largest in Africa, hosting a multi-national constituency, primarily Angolan.

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Adrianne Kalfopoulou

The Border

Ruska is preparing for the dawn trip to Bulgaria, years since she saw her two sons Ivan and Evgenio, but they are still small and when asked what they want for Christmas they say mother.

What Ruska fears is not the village gossip, that she has lived these years in Greece with another man, or the unemployment she is sure to find on her return, the shortness of food and freedom.

What she fears is the border.

The men at the station stop will force them off the bus in the black winter chill, decide the hours, even days, of their waiting in some infinite space of doom.

They will make fun, perhaps, of the cargo, spit slow laughter at the luggage of life so dispensableâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the packets, bags, nudged and kicked, the contents of an impossible life: Ruska who left her sons at 22, penniless.

In Greece it was possible to hope to return after having gathered the money to make a life. At this border Ruska fears the soldiers will rip through the bags, even her body, toys will spill across the hardened ground, 148 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Adrianne Kalfopoulou

tiny gold crosses will show through torn linings, clothes will be shredded, her frozen hands will gesture dumbly when crossing over into homeland would have meant making it back through so much pain.

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Holly Karapetkova

For My American Lover, Upon My Leaving

The first time I walked into an American supermarket I nearly fainted between the aisles of bread stacked above my head, beyond my reach: brown bread, flat bread, big puffy bread, tiny bread like fists, bread long and thin as arms, bread with nuts on top, bread with different fruits inside, so much bread it overwhelmed the shelves, threatened to burst onto the floor.

At home, the store shelves were empty—no butter, no cheese, no meat, perhaps a few expensive cans of mushrooms or a box of Dutch milk only foreigners could afford.

I had to wait in line just to buy a loaf of bread.

Most days they’d run out before my turn to buy.

You had never gone home empty-handed; how could I explain my first taste of freedom— not saying anything I wanted without fear the nosy neighbor would report me to the authorities, but bread I could buy and waste at will.

You wouldn’t understand the phrase too much, but I had learned to survive on hunger.

What was I to do with all of your affection?

Squander it, buy it up in boxes for fear one day your shelves, too, would run empty?

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Sarah Kennedy

The Will of Mary Carryll: 1809 In 1778, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby eloped from their families in Ireland and settled in Wales, where they lived as a couple at their home, Plas Newydd, for the remainder of their lives and came to be known as “The Ladies of Llangollen.” Sarah’s Irish servant, Mary Carryll, lived with them until her death on 22 November 1809.

A shilling each to my sisters, if they will come all the way to Wales from Ireland to fetch them. I pardon the sharp letters— I did abandon home and my nephews, but where were they when Father called me old maid? My Sarah will have Aber Adda field, purchased with the labor of my hands, big-knuckled but strong, my only talent.

To Lady B, my crucifix and chain, for remembrance of the day she laid me on their own sheets when my stomach troubles began. She is called queen by the younger maids in town, but she held my head in her hands while I retched onto the floor, and wiped my eyes to cool sleep. Also to remind her to love the other servants, even the kitchen girls and Moses Jones the drunk.

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Sarah Kennedy

a sore trial to him. Three shillings for Shanette the Witch, whose cress poultice sweetens my boils, grown putrid these last weeks. Sarah doubts her wisdom, but who among us is perfect? A cloud chastizes Lady B’s good eye, and Sarah swells with dropsy, like the childless prophet Joanna Southcott who swears she’s carrying the second Christ.

Poor hounded thing. My sweet Jesus—the world beyond our birches is a hunting field, the body a hungry animal God lures. Or drives. What token mad Mary Green, who begs on Llangollen’s streets, might crave, give before she asks. This is my testament: dispose of me, as seems good to Sarah and her Eleanor, in veneration of the Lady I have ever served, in whose universal sight I hope to rest.

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Heather Villars

For the Late-Nineteenth Century American Orphan: Travel Tips

SISTER TERESA AND SISTER IRENE are even now writing to priests on the railroad line, detailing the children in their charge: a boy, age 7, with sturdy arms and a quick wit, a girl, age 2, with eyes like the sea, a boy, age 4, possessing a mild disposition and good manners…all seeking new homes. While you wait for a response, the Postal Service stagecoaches loping their way across America, the nuns will bathe and feed you, and you’ll learn to read the Bible and to stack the firewood. Though you may be sharing a bed with two other scabby boys—one who pinches you at night and the other who keeps you awake with his crying—they will become your next of kin, training your hands in the ways of secret handshakes, and your brothers of war, complacent in your acts of truancy.

Letters will come from priests in Nebraska, in South Dakota, in Minnesota, asking for a girl with blond hair; for a boy with eyes the color of coal; for a boy with red hair and a spray of freckles to complete a family already blessed with four red-haired girls. You will be dressed in new clothing, a ribbon sewn into your collar—with the names “Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Donovan,” or “Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Davidson,” or “Mr. and Mrs. Patrick O’Brady,” all expectant foster parents—embroidered in tight, white script. A numbered tag will hang around your neck, and you will find yourself clutching a case that holds an extra outfit, one you didn’t know you had. Off you’ll go to the train station, a stern chaperone by your side.

You’ll find yourself terrified and excited—the chug of the skulking train the most thrilling sound of your short life. You’ll press your nose to the window, watching the country roll by in a blur of deep browns and mixed greens. You’ll sit tall in your chair, then sneak off to explore the length of the passenger train—all rumble and hum—until your chaperone tallies her next mental roll call, and noticing your absence, sends an older child after you, pulling you by the ear back to your now cool seat.

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At each whistle stop you’ll run in the fields—releasing all that nervous exuberance—pulling the girls’ hair or tagging the boys with a thump to the head. At night, the train’s conductor will come through to help you convert your seat into a sleeping platform, and you’ll curl up, coat around your knees for warmth, and sleep soundly, the chortle of the train a reassuring song.

When the train finally nears the depot of your stop, squint hard to see the men and women, their eyes wide with expectancy, standing on the platform. Guess which ones are yours. The train will slow to a stop and the chaperone will help you off; don’t be afraid to hold her hand. Your new parents will find you by the numbered tag, and your chaperone will look at your collar to be sure you’ve found your new family. The town priest will oversee signatures signed to papers and hands shaking in agreement, his red apple cheeks glistening under the street lamp.

Your foster parents may or may not formally adopt you, but their handshake was an agreement to treat you as they would their own children, ruling the house with equality, love, and compassion, sending you to school alongside your new brothers and sisters, teaching you manners and the lay of the farm. You will go home with them that night, awkwardly clutching the hand of your new mother, your new sister eyeing you suspiciously in the back of the buggy. Be assured that, like your unfortunate infancy, this discomfort born of new people and new circumstances will pass as well.

YOU SEE, YOU WERE THE DAUGHTER of Irish immigrants, the first born in America, land of opportunity. You were not a blessed surprise.

Your mother already had two babies suckling at her shriveled breasts and she feared for your health, finding her own sustenance so lacking.

Your father used to work at the coal mine and then in the shipyard, but he always seemed to get injured and then laid off. No one wanted a worker with a broken finger or a burned face. There weren’t any labor unions, nor any sick leave, and there were ten men waiting for a chance to have your father’s steady income. There wasn’t enough food for your family—the potatoes your mother could afford had grown eyes and shriveled, and their premature wrinkles mirrored the worry lines in your mother’s face.

You emerged from your mother a bundle of blood and energy, and she wept. “What are we going to do with another baby?” she asked your father in despair, as he held you to his chest and wrapped 154 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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you in the quilt your mother stitched during her pregnancy, sewing her fingers raw each night by candlelight.

Your father brought you, wrapped tightly, though crying and cold, to the doorstep of Sister Irene and Sister Teresa’s convent, leaving you like Moses in the basket of reeds to float on the concrete river and await the nuns. Perhaps Sister Teresa woke and decided on a quick morning walk before Mass, or perhaps she was coming out to fold the laundry dried taut on the back lines from the evening’s breeze. On her way down the steps, she heard your telltale cry, like so many others before you. She lifted your frail body and you seemed to disappear into the folds of her dark robe even while her veil snapped audibly in the wind like the wings of ravens. She brought you in, sighed heavily, and rocked you to sleep before placing you softly in the bassinet with two other sleeping infants. At vespers that night, you can be sure that Sister Teresa prayed diligently through her rosary, forcefully fingering the beads and chanting the Hail Marys, all while thinking of your small red face.

OR, MAYBE YOU WERE BORN LATER, say in 1875, a brown-toned bundle emerging from your Jewish mother with a swath of dark curly hair.

By this time, the Sisters Teresa and Irene had named their convent the Foundling Hospital and had ordered the bricklayers to fashion a sort of lazy Susan into the side of the building. When your father carried you stoically to the convent, muttering and shaking his head slowly, he was able to bend over, kiss you on both cheeks, ring a bell, and push the “turning cradle.” You disappeared from the street only to appear on the other side of the red brick wall, inside the Hospital. Sister Irene picked you up, folded you into her bosom, and never once saw the shame that burned your father’s face as he walked away.

Your parents didn’t have time to circumcise you and formally name you at your Brit Milah, but they called you David Eliel for the first two days, while your mother cried and your father paced in the tiny one-room flat. Of course, when the Sisters got hold of you, they had you baptized and named you Peter or Mark, something smacking of the New Testament. But you were an infant, and you didn’t care what they called you, you only wanted to be dry and warm and full of milk.

OR,

PERHAPS YOU WERE THE FIRST BORN

to Polish immigrants, your Crab Orchard Review ◆ 155

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mother a seamstress, your father a coal miner. Your father worked long and steady hours, your mother brought in extra money and other goods—loaves of bread or the feet of pigs—by mending the work shirts of your neighbors, helping each piece of tattered clothing to limp along one more week on the job. There was always enough coal to light the fire in the morning, always enough soup to fill your bowl at night.

Then, tragedy struck. Your father was killed in a premature mine blast: he died instantly. Your mother was devastated. The steady income disappeared, your mother made do, bargaining with the neighbors, walking into the wealthier neighborhoods to clean homes with you strapped to her back. Your grandparents were back in Warsaw; your mother’s sisters and brothers too. What family you had in town was a makeshift conglomeration of neighbors and others who had little to offer in the way of time or money.

When you were old enough, seven or eight, your mother sent you to find work. You learned soon enough that your tattered clothes and your ghetto accent weren’t going to land you a decent job. Meals became meager, your mother going without so that you would grow strong. Your mother cried instead of slept. When you turned ten, you left home, hoping that your mother would be better able to make it on her own. You spent your days wandering the cobbled streets of Brooklyn, looking for errands to run or odd jobs to complete for a meal or a few coins in payment. You learned which restaurants threw out scraps from the unfinished meals of wealthy clients and you stood in their dank alleyways, waiting for the trash to be hauled out. One day a police officer caught you with your arms in the cascade of the Town Square fountain, picking out change, and he brought you to the New York Juvenile Asylum.

Unlike the children from the Foundling Hospital, because you came from one of the hundreds of orphanages or asylums or homes or institutions set up for the bevy of New York City’s homeless children, your fate is a little less secure. You too will ride the Orphan Train across the country, but not with anyone’s names sewn into your collar. You will bear a numbered placard around your neck like a brand, not for easy recognition by foster parents, but in preparation for auction like cattle on the block. The townspeople will have been notified of your coming—signs posted at the church and at the opera house, notices taken out in the newspaper reading, “WANTED: HOMES for CHILDREN.” 156 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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The train will make pre-announced stops at towns along the way, and the chaperone will nudge you onto the platforms, chiding you to stand up straight, slicking your hair back with her spit, pinching you to pick up the pace. You’ll stand on the platform, smiling at first, watching as the mothers and fathers come around looking for children to take home. At first, you’ll be the puppy at the pound, wagging your tail and licking the palms of all who greet you. After time, if you’re not chosen at the first few stops, you’ll have memorized the drill: off the train—shoulders back, stand up straight!—onto the platform—tuck in your shirt! smile!—and down the dusty lane to the Town Hall or the First Baptist Church. There might be cookies and sweet tea provided by the ladies’ auxiliary, or there may only be the knotty wooden planks of the Hall floor to greet you. Your numbered tag will burn around your neck where the rope rubs when you walk, and as you endure the children who poke you with their sticky hands, the men who squeeze your biceps, and the women who ask all the questions, you may just turn into the vicious dog in the kennel, the one no one goes near for fear of losing a finger.

Don’t lose hope, because by the sixth stop all the strong blueeyed boys and the darling, ringlet-curled girls will have been adopted. You, the skinnier boys and the pudgier girls will become the next prized of the pickings. Remember to look your best, to show off your skills, your smile, your good side. When Mrs. Murphy asks if you like cows, answer with a confident “Yes, Ma’am,” even though none of you has ever seen a cow. Pipe up with a “That’s me, Sir,” when you overhear Mr. Johnson telling Mr. Knowl that he needs a good worker. And when Sally Timsdale begins to throw a tantrum across the Town Hall floor, spitting and cursing at her parents for daring to buy her a brother or sister, bend down to soothe her, to retie her hair ribbons. Mr. and Mrs. Timsdale may indeed be looking for a girl of your age to help calm their daughter’s raucous temper.

And when you’re finally picked, when the papers have been signed and all arrangements made, you’ll exhale a heavy breath, one you didn’t know you were holding all this time. You’ll ride home in the family’s wagon or on the tall spit-shine of the carriage, and your eyes will take in the prairie—this new vista of long lines and clean fields. Once at home, you will be shown to a room, if you have one, or perhaps a bed in the other children’s room, or a cot in the hall. Wherever your bed lay, you’ll be amazed at how spacious Crab Orchard Review ◆ 157

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this cramped farm house feels, without a thousand other boys and girls clambering for attention and filling up the rooms with all that need.

BE ON YOUR BEST BEHAVIOR. Say “thank you” and “please.” Call the adults “sir” and “ma’am.” If your family doesn’t like you, they can always send you back to New York. You’ll then have to start the whole process over, riding the train west, stopping in all the small towns on the tracks, and each time, standing on the platform for sale like so many cows at auction, the men and women looking you over, questioning you about your work habits and your strength.

But don’t ask about your parents, though they may still be alive.

Keep their memory in your mind—the smell of your father’s sweat after a day in the factory; the cool, then painful touch of your mother’s wet hand as she scrubbed the dirt from your cheeks. The people who have taken you home may not know about your parents; even if they do, they have signed an agreement never to tell you of them.

Regardless, you can feel proud of your heritage, whatever it may be, even when you are unsure. When the children at school throw rocks or pull your hair because you were once an orphan, hold your head high, for you are a part of something grand, a part of history. You are about to join the hundreds of thousands of children in their migration across the country on the Orphan Trains. And once you are in your new home with your new family and your new life, you will no longer be an orphan on the city streets.

Instead of eating from garbage-barrels, you will toil in and eat off the land. Instead of pleading for scraps, you will be fed at the tables of good men and women, and you will teach them how to give out of their prosperity and to love what they did not create.

You will learn to pull the soft teats of the dairy cows until they produce that warm, steamy stream of milk. You will drink in wide sunsets and unearth the crisp fall harvest. You will mend coveralls by the light of the kerosene lantern. You will learn to read, to swing the hatchet, to quilt and darn socks. You will learn the words family and America and love.

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Teresa R. Funke

Una Hija Americana

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN TOLD I have an international face. Strangers notice my dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, and olive complexion, and can’t help asking about my ethnic background. I am happy to answer, of course. “My mother’s Mexican. My father’s German and Irish.” Oh, I thought you were Native American, they say, or Basque, Italian, Iranian, Greek, and so on. It’s wonderful to think I could fit in so many places, that, in a sense, I am a citizen of the world.

But it’s a different feeling when I’m recognized for what I really am, a woman with strong ties to a culture she barely understands, a language she can hardly speak. Mexican people don’t usually ask about my background; they assume it. Somehow they recognize me as one of their own. And when that happens, I feel honored, embraced and grateful, but also embarrassed, reserved, and a little unworthy.

It’s my grandmother’s fault—and her gift—and I have mixed emotions about that, too.

M Y GRANDMOTHER WAS BORN AND RAISED in northern Mexico— Monterrey and Saltillo. Her father was a dry-goods merchant, her mother an industrious woman with eleven surviving children. My grandmother grew up privileged and then poor, educated and mannered, strong-willed and stunning. In Mexico she was a teacher, a lover of proper language, a fine dresser. In her early twenties, she came to San Antonio, Texas (a town with a booming Mexican population), and struggled to learn English. She became fluent, but the language never settled comfortably on her tongue.

She married the love of her life, who died, leaving her with two small children, then married again—a smooth talker who despite her protests took her back to Mexico. Though pregnant, she left him when she discovered he had another wife. Her third husband was a butcher in San Antonio, my grandfather, who died before I was born. Her doctor told her she was too old at age forty-two to have more children. She proved him wrong with twins—my mother Crab Orchard Review ◆ 159

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and her sister. Until she was three, my mother spoke only Spanish.

My grandmother’s family was admired in San Antonio, their grocery stores thriving. They were hard-working, quick-thinking, and proud. America had been good to them. They’d left revolution and poverty behind and adopted their new country wholeheartedly, even sending one of their sons to fight in World War II. And then my grandfather made a decision that changed my mother’s life. He and his brother relocated their families to Idaho in search of a better living. Once again my grandmother found herself moving under protest, leaving her well-established family and the familiarity of San Antonio behind.

Of the few Mexicans who lived in rural Shelley, Idaho, most were field workers. My grandmother—still influenced by the class system with which she’d grown up—needed her children to know they were better than field workers (though the older children did occasionally work the fields for extra money). My mother was raised to say she was Spanish, not Mexican.

“Soy una mujer moderna,” my grandmother used to tell her daughters. “I am a modern woman.” To her, this meant partly that she could put the past behind her. It didn’t appear to be much of a hardship for her to abandon so many of her Mexican ways if doing so meant moving forward in predominantly-white Idaho. My grandmother never forbade my mother to speak Spanish, for example, but she didn’t encourage it either. Mexican custom became mostly an undercurrent in my mother’s life.

Perhaps my grandmother made the right decision for her children. When the family moved to Boise a few years later, they bought an impressive two-story Victorian on a stately old street, and earned the respect of their proper white neighbors. My mother attended the Catholic school on the corner. She and her twin were shy but popular. They rarely encountered racial slurs—probably because they appeared so thoroughly Americanized. Yet for my mother there was always a sense of not quite belonging in the white world—and then again, not belonging in the Mexican one, either.

Years later, when my mom taught migrant kids in Nampa, Idaho, she was a powerful role model, a Mexican woman who had succeeded in America. Yet there was the occasional student who called her an Oreo—dark on the outside, white on the inside—and I remember how she’d come close to tears when she’d tell me about it. Mom could influence those kids in ways the white teachers could not, but she was 160 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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not one of them, and, though they loved her, they never let her forget it.

And then there’s me. One step further removed from the culture than my mother and looking a little less ethnic. My Mexican blood has always been a badge of honor, something I am inexplicably, perhaps overly, proud of.

“I AM SPECIAL DAY,” FIFTH GRADE: Many of the kids show up in athletic outfits. They are special because they’re good at baseball or soccer. Some of the girls wear aprons or ballet dresses. I wear an embroidered Mexican peasant dress, a shawl, and a sombrero. I walk with my head held high, which is the only way I have ever seen my grandmother walk. I am special because I am Mexican.

At age ten, I am mostly able to ignore the hurtful stereotypes of Mexicans in Idaho as lazy, dirty field workers or, worse yet, criminals. The racists who perpetuate those lies simply don’t know us, I reason. To me, being Mexican is being my grandmother, a woman who seems to embody pride and civility and exotic mysteriousness, a woman who makes every word count, who loves and expects to be loved in return. To me, being Mexican is being beautiful: like my mother with her long dark hair and flashing eyes, my grandmother with her silent movie-star looks and charisma, my great-grandmother with her soft almost-Indian features and gentle smile. Being Mexican is the pictures in my grandmother’s photo album of adorable girls in white First Communion dresses, a gorgeous bride in her Spanish lace veil, confident men in military uniforms and thick black moustaches, and cherubic babies in embroidered dress clothes. “Mexican babies are the cutest in the world,” my grandmother once told me, and I believed her.

IN SAN ANTONIO, WE SIT IN A RESTAURANT, my Uncle Roman and me.

It is 1990 and I am freshly graduated from college, newly engaged, and embarking on a career as a writer. I’m here to research a novel about my grandmother. My uncle will introduce me to the family— my family—for they become that the minute the door flies open and my great-aunts greet me with, “Welcome, Niece,” and throw their arms around me.

This restaurant, called Mi Tierra, is enormously popular. My uncle tells me it was my grandfather’s favorite restaurant. On the matchbook is a picture of a man beaming a huge white smile beneath his full black moustache. He wears a sombrero and a sarape and Crab Orchard Review ◆ 161

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strums a guitar. This mariachi player is my great-uncle, a oncepopular musician in San Antonio. He’s a distant relation, to be sure; in fact, he and my great-aunt divorced, yet I claim him completely.

I am looking for any ties to this city, to my birthright, and uncovering them wherever I turn.

The waitress addresses me in Spanish, and my uncle answers for me. It could be he is sparing me embarrassment, knowing my Spanish is limited to the words I learned in junior high and high school. Or it could be he’s playing his traditional role of patriarch.

From Texas, he oversees my family back in Idaho. My grandmother defers to him in many matters. She defers to no one else. So Uncle Roman holds a certain mystique for my cousins and me, those of us who know him only through his occasional visits, his Christmas Eve phone call, his money sent to help any of us in need, and his booming demands for us to respect our mothers, do well in school, and stay out of trouble.

But Uncle Roman represents something more to me. He has been my only real link to Mexican men, to how they think and behave. He can be gruff, certainly, and ar rogant and often chauvinistic, but there’s nothing, nothing, he wouldn’t do for you. I find him fascinating. In the white world, Uncle Roman has been a successful businessman, a respected leader, yet he’s still at ease here in San Antonio, in the Mexican lifestyle. He has what my mother does not: the ability to function in both worlds. It’s something I envy, as I know she must. As we eat, we talk about my grandparents, about his memories of growing up in this town, and I wonder if he realizes how lucky he’s been.

It feels good sitting here with my uncle chatting about my grandma and eating huevos rancheros. American food just wouldn’t taste right on this trip, for food is the other area in which this culture enriched my young life.

Looking back, I don’t think my grandmother enjoyed cooking, yet we adored the food she made for us, craved it as much as we craved kind words. I listened for the sounds of cupboards opening and shutting, of pans clanging, and Crisco cans sliding across the pantry shelf.

Mostly my brother and I hoped for her sugar tortillas spread with butter. She’d been making them so long she never used a measuring cup, scooping out the Crisco and sugar and flour with her hand, and later giving us each a small ball of dough to play with. Her other specialty was a heavy vanilla cookie she called a panecito. One of 162 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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my favorite tasks was sitting quietly at the dining room table helping her separate the good pinto beans from the bad and from the tiny pebbles that sometimes made their way into the bag.

I was in junior high before I realized not everyone ate egg tacos for breakfast or that most people didn’t add tomato sauce, red pepper, and cumin to their homemade chicken noodle soup. Like the language, the subtle influences of Mexican cooking worked their way into my life without my awareness.

Here in this restaurant in San Antonio, the menu reminds me of her, though she never once made tamales or chiles rellenos or many of the other dishes people associate with Mexico. Yet the things she could do with beans, stewed tomatoes, and rice were every bit as flavorful as this food that people are waiting in line for. Perhaps it is appropriate then that Mexican restaurants—as tacky as they sometimes appear with their faded paper flowers, fake parrots, and high wicker chairs—often heighten my awareness of the culture I sometimes yearn to be part of.

Here among faces that seem slightly darker versions of my own, breathing the aromas of my grandmother’s kitchen, hearing the language that so captivated my child’s mind, it all comes back to me.

I excuse myself to the bathroom where I find three girls not much younger than me changing clothes and laughing. One is obviously embarrassed. She looks at me sheepishly, shrugs, and makes a comment in Spanish. I smile and say those words I hate to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Then I catch that look I hate to see; it’s somewhere between bafflement and pity. At moments like this, I curse myself for not pursuing Spanish beyond school. I wash my hands and leave, once again reminded that I never will completely fit in here. And at the same time, I want to hug these girls. I want to thank them for trying to let me in on the joke, for including me for just a moment.

To be part of something and not be part of something—that is what it’s like to be half of a race. Like so many children of immigrants, I sometimes struggle with the balance, but like so many grandchildren of immigrants, I’ve learned to let go, to delight in being American.

BUT LETTING GO DOESN’T MEAN FORGETTING. I wish my grandmother had understood this.

“How do you say this word in Spanish, Grandma?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“Tell us about growing up in Mexico then.”

“Ay, it was a long time ago.”

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“Maybe we should all go there someday, together.”

“Why would you want to go there? This is your home.”

“Was it—bad?”

“It was calor—hot. Go outside now. Go play.”

I NEVER GAVE UP. My brother and I hung close to Grandma in the hope she’d slip and share something of herself. I asked my questions again and again and got the same brush-offs until I learned to gauge her moods. When she was humming, she was happy, and when she grew still for a moment I could sometimes snatch a nugget from her mine of memories.

It might happen on the front porch swing with the scents from her beloved rose garden drifting to us across her hand-watered lawn.

She’d get a distant look in her eye and say, “I saw Pancho Villa once when I was nine. He rode into town and killed a merchant in the street. The Federalistas were chasing him.”

“Did you know the merchant, Grandma? Did you see the body?

What’s a Federalista?”

But the moment was gone, as if my rush of questions had buried her memories. “Go get your shoes, Teresa,” she’d say. “Let’s go for a walk.”

I stole my way into her private world, though, by eavesdropping on her conversations with her sisters in Texas. She’d laugh, sigh, and often moan, “Ay, ay, ay,” and I’d wonder what trouble some distant cousin had gotten into. I’d pretend to watch TV while I listened intently.

I loved seeing my grandmother this way, hearing her this way, and it didn’t matter that I didn’t understand her words. They were beautiful because through them I could see her as she must have been in her youth. I could hear the one part of her past she could not divorce herself from, this Spanish language that filled her and gave her soul.

I realized even then how lucky I was to have another language as a musical score to my childhood.

In the end, after several strokes, my grandmother shifted from the English she’d never quite mastered to the Spanish that came so naturally.

By the time I was in college and my grandmother had arrived in the nursing home she loathed, she spoke almost exclusively in Spanish, and I struggled to understand. This bothered me most when she’d get that distant look in her eye and I couldn’t resist asking about her youth.

Sometimes she’d answer, briefly, as always, only now I could not comprehend her stories. Our last conversations are mostly lost to me.

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Her words come to me occasionally, though, as I raise my own children. I hear myself using her expressions, working the few words I know into our everyday speech, extending to her great-grandchildren that special part of my own childhood. Sometimes this is conscious; often it’s not. “¿Dónde está mi periódico?” I ask my son each morning, and he rushes to find my newspaper. “Ven acá, hija,” I say to my daughter, and she comes to me. “Muy bien,” I tell my children when they’ve done well. “Te amo,” I say. “I love you.”

EIGHT YEARS AFTER MY FIRST VISIT, I return to San Antonio—now a wife and mother and grounded in a new understanding that being “ethnic” is as much about personal experience as it is about race.

My grandmother has been gone six years and I miss her. I have come to interview her remaining siblings, to find out more about her through them. I no longer hope to completely fit in, but, as always, I am eager to learn. And I enjoy looking the part, immersing myself in the culture for a few days.

I am introduced to my mother’s cousin, the gifted artist Nivia Gonzalez, who gives me a poster of my favorite of her paintings— a Mexican woman in the market surrounded by the flowers she sells.

Like most of Nivia’s subjects, the woman’s eyes are closed. “My woman isn’t looking at you,” Nivia once said. “She is looking inward, deciding for herself what she wants to see and why.” If there is an image that represents what it means to me to be half-Mexican, it is this. I had that poster nicely framed and it hangs in my family room where I can see it every night. It reminds me of my ancestry and of a woman who seems, in many ways, like my grandmother.

In a sense, though, this figure in the painting could also be me.

The sights, the smells, the rhythms of Mexico surround her. She holds them close—as she does the flowers—yet she does not look at them, but inward at her own heart. There the best of her memories, her family, and her heritage reside, but also the best of the life she has today. Her memories shape her but do not define her. She is content, confident, at peace. Yes, she is special because she is Mexican, but more so because she used her grandmother’s gift to look inward and decide what she wants to see and why.

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Jesse Lee Kercheval

The City Where—I’m Told—My Mother Was Young

Long ago the lens of a camera uprooted this city from Sacre Coeur to the far suburbs, pressed it between the heavy vellum of memory, so to reach it is to cross a bridge much longer, much steeper than the Pont Neuf.

In this paper Paris, my mother is a young girl waiting for her lover by a stinking canal.

Or so I’ve been told by people who might —or might not—lie to my face.

I pour over Atget’s photographs, each street, each boulevard, each arrondissement falling under his care, falling into his camera and out of this world.

But photographs are illusions, devoid of both pot au feu and the garbage the cook leaves—though Atget photographed laundries as well as bordellos.

I imagine my mother leaving me a message by way of Atget. I close my eyes and think I hear laughter and telephones ringing—but I’m wrong.

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I walk over the bridge Atget made with his stiff little pictures and find myself in the Gare du Nord, all steam, white and gray.

And my mother, ma mère— is standing on the platform waiting.

She has always been waiting.

Unless—instead—she never did arrive.

Long ago this city uprooted Triste, I imagine her saying, so goddamn sad.

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Vandana Khanna

My Mother at JFK

My mother at JFK tries to pick up the cadence of the immigration officer’s voice. His intonations are blurry and abstract—quick turns of the tongue that fill the air with all the bustle and weariness of this new world, this world of thick accents and alleyways, gypsy cabs and jazz.

She learned English watching Audrey Hepburn movies where every sigh sounded like a song, words in clearly annunciated vowels and consonants stood stiff like sugar cane, like the British nuns who taught her, who rapped their culture across her knuckles like a sharp-edged ruler.

At night, all she wants is to wrap the cough and sputter of scooters, the low moan of oxen around her like her mother’s shawl, but she can’t hold back the sheer demand of horns and sirens, of America 168 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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creeping through her mind, taking root until her mouth is just throb and pulse, rhythm and rhyme.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enough to make her ears ring, make her forget the words of a mantra about new rivers and old gods.

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Quraysh Ali Lansana

purgatory after Jacob Lawrence I think slavery is the next thing to hell â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Harriet Tubman on this path of becoming shrouded by hoot owl white snake and nosy deer callous feet muster creek rock between toes that know blisters cuts fourteen and three babies people blue black night brown limbs aching amidst rusty leaves moses hushes them up the mountain half her body lost in river the other in stars her hands a basket her face grit a young man guiding wife and child through purple water looks over his shoulder at the broken ones in back ghosts rattling their bones

170 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

Jeffrey Levine

Arabia Petra

Night covered my small caravan at Jericho when the Aga took me to his hut, wished me to pass the night with him, though two horses stood in place before me, steam rising from their flanks, and beyond, the hut lay open, mere roof of branches, not a twig in front.

I reminded the Aga of an aqueduct we passed at noon, ruined convent at the mountain base from whose top the devil showed the way to all the kingdoms of the world with his withered fingers.

The mountainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s naked sides door-studded with cells of hermits, arms crossed, passing days in desolation, solitude and prayer.

Moonlight that night as I never saw before.

All the women out of doors joined arms, circled, keeping time to the music of their voices, the snorts of horses and a distant camel.

With bare hands, they brushed glowing coals from braziers, their bodies bathed gold and rust as smoke of sandalwood coiled upward into dark.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 171

Ada Limón

Roberto Clemente

Even white boys in the back of every classroom in Pittsburgh, cranked their necks and heads like you, some strange dance you did, three thousand times or more, like you had already been hung twice and survived, adjusting to the plate like you were sizing it up, like a giant, or rather like a woman, like you would a long fly ball into right, right where you were, horizontal, diagonal, vertical, anything but put down, laid out, overlooked and dismissed.

Some schoolboy bully in the press wanted to call you Bobby, but that didn’t fit with the country you wore under your uniform. You weren’t going to be a mascot, someone’s arm around your shoulder like a noose.

You’d be no starving boy at the feast, no dark back road in this America.

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Ada Limón

No, you were a man on fire, a galaxy of small acts of defiance that would make you, too soon, into something burning on the skyline.

Note: —Roberto Clemente (b. Carolina, Puerto Rico, August 18, 1934 – d. December 31, 1972) played his entire eighteen-year major league career with the Pittsburgh Pirates and reached the 3,000-hit plateau. He died in an airplane crash while attempting to take food and medicine to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1973.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 173

Elline Lipkin

Bonne Maman Kibungu, Rwanda, 1942 For my day’s first work I face the sun’s red glow, with a prayer for my mother and sister back in Belgium. I know the war is all around while I breathe a silence sewn with their missing.

Lionel is already gone to work at the hospital, and the children stay stilled only by sleep, before their shouts begin.

When I look toward the lake I think of my two, still so small, a gem’s glint, who went with such pain into the ground.

Marriage is a lottery, my mother always said, but how could I believe I’d leave her salon for this flat land, the only white woman in this village, knitting tears while Lionel nightly presses an ear to his radio and the parrot shrieks, “Tuer les Allemagnes!”

How could I know each lace round I brought would brown with motes that swim this light and yellow my hair? And in my mouth dust, spice, seed and grit that no rinsing ever gets clean. The children grow on it, and swallow the sounds I try to spit out.

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Elline Lipkin

Did I leave one pressed dress in my closet?

Sometimes I see it crisping with the years, my body’s lines lost with each child, sacks of rice and iron-tanged malaria pills that make everything taste as if it had rusted in my throat.

Chocolates, dances, tea rooms, the sleek tram.

Now, pails of goat’s milk and trays of fruit wait for the table. The morning sings to each little one running from a bed.

They’ve never yet known snow against their legs, just the nuns’ lashes when I have to let them go again. The sun pockets them like a gift as they slip into the day, its secret stores, while I stay with the cook and wave my white rag at the film that clings to each Limoges I carried.

It seeps into my skin, it fills every pore.

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Mike Maniquiz

We Should Have Turned Right

We’re lost in winter.

I wipe away the fog from the window.

Outside the passenger side, I see trees for the first time without leaves.

The confessions that need an ear: My sister says some Tagalog now escapes her while other words have gained resplendence.

Once at the mall, she heard someone say tahan na and knew it was memory calling her back.

She turned around and saw a grandfather trying to keep his granddaughter from crying.

Tahan na, or “hush now,” from which could have come tahanan: where one lives, where one stays, one’s home.

“Daddy said those same words to me right before I left for good,” she says, leaning back behind the wheel like people who end up in someplace familiar.

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Shara McCallum

Hanover Museum: Lucea, Jamaica, 2000

Stalks of cane grow without irony, scattered across the museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grounds.

Prison walls still stand though covered in mildew and slime.

The sea breaking itself against the cliff is a voice I might mistake for the past here, where prison-holds boast shackles, affixed to cement blocks and rusted to vermillion, almost beautiful.

Emerging into sunlight again, I remember the lesson of how to eat sugar cane.

The trick is to spit out the pulp before it grows reedy and bitter in your mouth.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 177

Shara McCallum

Dear History,

I could tell when the grown-ups around me stopped believing.

In the wake of their loss of faith, my parents erected new gods: Marcus, Marley, Manley—each in his own way who would desert them too, leaving them with only night to wring between their hands.

The lure of revolution is a strong one. But somewhere along the way, ideals get exchanged for smaller and smaller needs—for bread and milk, the crumbs of peace. People get tired of the fight— isn’t that the way it goes?

To be an exile, I know now, you must be willing to occupy a place where memory is a synonym for home. In this new world I have lived in for more than two decades, I have come to understand why I am here: I am here because I cannot forget.

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Orlando Ricardo Menes

Old Man Grier

Most yards in my neighborhood were patches of cropped weeds, ragged grass, some scraggy ficuses sown by birds, but Old Man Grier mowed his algalgreen lawn to astroturf perfection, every swatch wormed, weeded through a grid system, and rigged to guywires his three-story royal palms looked like cement poles.

Mothers taught sons to emulate his rigorous Anglo discipline and efficiency, how these conquered the moon, built expressways taller than roller-coaster mountains, nagged their men, all braggarts, botchers, though they resented Mrs. Grier who called us cucarachas, stomping her foot, hand gesturing fumigation, ran over any stray guinea fowl penned for Christmas Eve, rapped doors for the slightest rumba, marital quarrel. A scrawny woman who chainsmoked Chesterfields even as she ate, the stench following her like a ghost, Mrs. Grier developed acute emphysema plus angina pectoris, and he quit his job as a machinist to nurse bedridden Mildred, then after eight months inside an oxygen tent, she died from a pulmonary embolism, and the widower withdrew into a storm-shuttered house.

Miami Heralds began piling on the porch, mango sap shrouded his ’62 Buick, and in no time that immaculate yard regressed to staggerbush, ragwort, sneezeweed, and sickle-pod, land Cubans call cimarrona, maroon wild.

As molds and mosses multiplied on trim and stucco, a strangler fig took root where a tornado had cracked his bungalow’s coral gables. Slackwater frogs croaked at night by the thousands, while fighting cats wailed in sedge scrub. Rumors spread of gators and vipers.

Inspectors never cruised the barrio, too poor for bribes, but no one filed a complaint fearful that an angry widower would utter curses no white Mass can fix, but el colmo— Crab Orchard Review ◆ 179

Orlando Ricardo Menes

the last straw—were the turkey buzzards, Kolé-Kolé, the African spirit that steals souls to sell to sorcerers.

That Sunday, the strongest men came out with machetes to hack away the wilderness; others patched the house with spackle and scrapwood. Jamming the door open, they found his wife’s photographs taped to walls and doors, funereal gladioli melted into the kitchen’s formica, Old Man Grier lying on the sofa withered to bones and cartilage, his rippled, ashen skin like some prehistoric man’s thawed from glacial ice, and pile upon pile of refuse, like strata at an archaeological dig, that took one week to clean, then barrio women— old maids, widows, divorcées—filled his room with votive lights and porcelain Virgins in silk robes, goat’s-hair cinctures, tin censers that fumed boney Congolese roots. They yanked stucco flamingoes, planted a 5-foot San Lázaro with wrought-iron crutches, damask cape, carbuncle sores. Marta fed the widower chicken soup, garbanzo stews, blood-sausage omelets, Magdalena kept vigil praying the rosary, novenas too, while María revived his feet in seawater, garlic juice, wiped toes with her long brown hair; anointed callused webs, eucalyptic tiger balm mixing with lard smoke.

In the name of Jesucristo Nazareno rise, stand on your feet, María said on the third morning, and Old Man Grier rose from bed, doddered to the yard where he loaded his wheelbarrow at the tool shed, and began the lord’s work of carving mimosa hedges with stonemason’s precision, laying coral steps that meander toward grafted orchards, carambola and sapodilla, planting saplings that in twenty years will rise to high arches of mahogany and sapote.

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Kristin Naca

Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh

What use is there for describing Bloomfield’s hard-sloping rooftops this way?

Or that the church steeples beam upward, inexpertly toward God. What difference does it make to say, the chimney pipes peel their red skins, or las pieles rojas, exposing tough steel underneath.

What good, then, for Spanish, its parity of consonants and vowels— vowels like a window to the throat, breath chiming through the vocal chords.

And what good is singing to describe this barrio’s version of the shortened sky, el cielo corto—power lines crisscrossing high above, so that blue’s left to tease through them.

And what for fog la niebla arrastra, creeping down los calles inmoviles before the bank and grocery store open.

Y por la zapatería on Liberty Avenue, a lady’s boot for a street sign.

What use to remember in any language my father was a Puerto Rican shoe salesman.

From his mouth, he’d dangle a ropy, ashy cigarette.

He spoke good English and knew when to smile.

With his strong fingers he’d knot shoes like redes, knew three kinds so that women customers could buy the shoes they loved to look at but really shouldn’t have worn.

At home, Dad kept his lengua intima Crab Orchard Review ◆ 181

Kristin Naca

to himself. His Spanish not for children, only older relatives who forced him to speak, reminded, Spanish means there’s another person inside you. All beauty, he’d argue, no power in it.

Still, I remember, he spoke a hushed Spanish to customers who struggled in English, the ones he pitied for having no language to live on.

So many years gone, what use to reinvent or question him in Pittsburgh? The educated one, why would I want my clumsy Spanish to stray from the pages of books on outward? My tongue, he’d think, so unbeautiful and inarticulate. Each word having no past in it. What then? Speaking Spanish to reinvent those better times or Pittsburgh a better place. En vez de regresar la dura realidad del pasado. And, then, if I choose to speak like this who will listen?

Notes: —redes: fishing nets —En vez de regresar la dura realidad del pasado: Instead of returning to the hard reality of the past.

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Mike Perez

The Story of the Missing Fingertip on My Dad’s Right Hand

My dad passed through the Ellis Island turnstiles in January 1946.

My aunt—a G.I.’s bride—other-side waiting…all smiles —or was it grimaces? and which is which, dans ma famille? All I heard was, she stood there with requested Hershey’s bars, which mon père promptly devoured: second, third, fourthfifthsixth “…’til the chocolate came out of his ears.”

In Marseille he’d ran secrets for the Allies.

On his bicycle, back and forth, between the lines, sometimes received a piece of Hershey’s—Allez, jeune homme!—as his reward for dodging mines.

He’d never eat candy, say Muslim, or mention his father.

He never told me this story, or any other.

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Pamela Porter

Checkpoint: Buenos Aires

The accumulation we carry with us: the city bulky as a coat on the bus, the living and the weightier dead. Streets so clean of the past I believed the dead must rise in the smoke of cigarettes of twelve million waiting to cross the street, and we among them, often mistaken for Argentine.

Between us float the woman and man we are becoming as the man and woman we were disappear. She will desire only to sleep, to forget, yet so much will not allow forgetting even in sleep where the dead float, chained together as bones.

Here no one dared speak of them, not the man who took us in, not the women in the park who cooed over the children, nor of living twenty years waiting for the admiral to tell finally how it was done, how they disappeared thirty thousand: loosed to the air like a bundle of birds linked wing to wing, ebullient as ocean current.

In your pocket, notes you’d scratched on bits of paper from café serviettes so that like Hansel and Gretel we’d find our way through the brindle of streets.

The man you become will not stop searching— 184 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Pamela Porter

the spent rifle shell youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll pick out of the African soil, hold it as though its empty chamber were passage to another life. Stopped at this highway checkpoint that cannot be cleaned of the past, I remember the woman who wrote with her eyes on the walls of her cell, who will accompany me home to a country where poets hold little value; I will feed her lemons and fish in my forgotten sleep, ask her to teach me how little I need for this life.

You will fold yourself over each little paper until the lines connect and a new map forms thin and crumpled as jacaranda blossoms which birds scatter as they rise like those who have nothing left to carry.

Crab Orchard Review â&#x2014;&#x2020; 185

Susan Azar Porterfield

Lebanon

The land of the father is remembered by the child, fruited in flesh and eye, sweetmeat of fig, oil of almond pressed from skins to her tongue, blessing her back to a path lined with almond, fig, to a limestone house she’s not seen and knows as she knows the mountains at dawn, how they lift to shadow the ocean, or the breath of the Bekka Valley, asleep. That is a country of myth. The young die in each other’s arms and somewhere, a relic shoe or cane amidst ash.

That is a country called old by the father of she who longs to sail for its shores, cast nets like searchlights on water, this daughter of sesame and rose, of the cedar axed to the root.

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Christine Rhein

My Father Talks of 1946 Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble…

—Winston Churchill, 1944, after Stalin negotiated the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudetenland The Poles loaded us into the same cattle cars the Nazis had sent the other way, searched our sacks to make sure there was nothing left worth stealing.

It was August 5th. A bit of bread for what became a three-day ride.

Flüchtling— German for refugee— means one who flees, as if we had a choice, as if, after 15 months of occupation with soldiers under our roof, we weren’t relieved.

Two million German civilians died in the expulsion. Starvation, exposure, torture, murder. You never hear of it.

Churchill kept his mouth shut.

And how could Germans talk about atrocity?

I was fifteen, suddenly a Flüchtling in my own country, in a town where no one understood our dialect, knew my surname.

Imagine it, if Texas were given to Mexico, if the government delivered an El Paso mother and four children to your door, ordered you Crab Orchard Review ◆ 187

Christine Rhein

to give them a bedroom, share your empty pantry.

All I thought about was food.

Mother sent my sister and me out walking to the farms.

If they won’t give you any potatoes, ask for only two.

The farmwomen scowled, What will you do with only two? Oh here, take them!

When we had too many, we hid them in a ditch, carried a few to show that others had given.

Tante Anna (she ended up in East Germany with the other half of our village) sent me my cousin’s winter jacket. He had fallen in Russia just before the war ended.

I had no shoes. Three times a week Mother made me walk the hour to the ration office. Don’t put anything on your feet or they’ll never give you shoes.

Believe me, by November, it was cold.

I looked for grass to walk on and dreaded the tile floor of the office, the way adults tried to cut in front of me because I wanted to stand on the doorway mat.

Don’t think people didn’t look out for themselves.

One day, the woman behind the window whispered, It’s here, snuck me out the back door as she handed me the little certificate.

In the store, I picked out work shoes.

After years of Learn! Learn! my parents no longer talked of school.

Bricklaying seemed like a good idea in a land of rubble.

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A. Sandosharaj

Several Years Before My Birth

SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE MY BIRTH, my father flees the U.S. because of a visa problem. He adjusts; it is one of his talents. Ontario is colder than he had anticipated, but bearable. The snow is not new; he does not marvel at its ubiquitous, muffling coverage the way he had when he first encountered it, upon his arrival in the U.S. the previous winter, 1974.

Today, on what will be his last day in Ontario, he says a dutiful Lord’s Prayer in the sunshine splayed by the YMCA’s mammoth windows like any decent Anglophile Episcopalian. My father is thirty, recently wed, and handsome. I think he resembles Ricky Ricardo, classic square jaw, broad forehead, thick black coif gleaming with coconut oil. When he ploughs to the Consulate for the tenth time in nearly a month, he wears dress shoes; he will never buy sneakers and will only briefly own a pair of work boots. Whether flattened beneath a Chevy’s oil change or conducting the register at 7-Eleven, for a lifetime he sports only dress shoes.

Perhaps it occurs to him—perhaps repeatedly since he took flight—I should not have come. America, maybe, is not everything.

But of course it is or else he would not be here idling patiently near the border of its hospitable northern neighbor. The days are at once overcast and oddly bright, giving him the impression of being in the clouds. It is not the import of the day that propels him to rush. It is his nature to hustle. The cosmic joke of the universe, he knows, is the skimpiness of time. Decades later, disputing a heart attack in the touchup paint aisle at the Trak Auto, he will rush to purchase a tube of pewter high-gloss before the clamp in his chest fully disables him.

In the U.S., my mother’s brother awaits his return, though they are nearly strangers.

“You are feeling well?” my uncle had asked when he first arrived at Dulles International. He had arranged for my father’s “visit” to the U.S. “Yes, yes. What is there?” my father replied, using his—casually Crab Orchard Review ◆ 189

A. Sandosharaj

translated—version of the nonchalant “what’s the big deal?” At the time, he had been staring out the window of my uncle’s Chrysler, startled by how gray and off-white America was, how covered in asphalt and concrete.

No one had wanted to remain in Ceylon where riots had besieged beaches and waterfalls. My grandfather had survived fistfights. His brother had been knifed. But it wasn’t the sirens or violent chatter that drove them out—that after all was politics—it was money. A blade or a bomb could be guarded against, retaliated for: Whom do you pummel for a job?

Once in the States, he promptly applied for a working visa through the Indian Embassy. Leaving behind my mother and brother, he lived in the crowded one bedroom apartment of his in-laws. On walks with his baby niece—who both relieved and augmented the longing he felt for his son—he would smile. Otherwise, he was overcome by a general loneliness.

So this was America. Traffic consisted mostly of autos, not people, and the apartment complex in Langley Park where he lived with his in-laws was occupied not by whites as he had expected, but by blacks, Latinos, Vietnamese, and south Indians like himself. It should have encouraged him: those just like him, navigating labyrinths like the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Giant supermarket, but they only increased his desire to be home in Trincomalee, where at least everyone looked the same.

Yet on his last day in Ontario, feet already damp from his leaky walk to the Consulate, he must admit that Trincomalee, although home, is not happiness. He worries about being reunited with my mother, his still-new wife, a woman who, for whatever unknown reasons, is too miserable to take on the charging locomotive of a new family. She is, simply put, odd.

But there is no time for this messiness in an arranged marriage.

When they met briefly before the engagement, shyness and propriety had prevented him from saying much. They had the customary, concise exchange.

“You are well?” he asked.

“Yes, yes.” When she did not meet his eyes, he was pleased by her modest manners. A fortuity. A good sign.

“For your mother, I am sorry,” he offered. Some usual ailment had taken her mother early. He’d had a moment of fleeting destiny: two motherless orphans could be a strong match. “It is a sad thing.”

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A. Sandosharaj

“What is there?” she had replied.

She was hateful as soon as they wed. She was disappointed in him, she detested him, she knew what furtive thoughts crept in his head about her cooking and her plain round face.

“I hope you enjoyed your day, wandering the streets and lounging around the city, Wandering-Raj,” my mother would say in Tamil, addressing him with his first name, an announcement of disrespect.

Having bused around the city all day pleading for a job, my father was certain of one thing: this was not how a wife was supposed to behave. He went over the lecture again. Work was impossible to find. Why else did she think her brother had risked everything to go to America? It would be nearly a lifetime, however, before he conceded defeat on their happiness. At first, he volleyed silence when reason predictably failed.

“Where is the money?”

He looked away.

“Why do I go like a beggar in these cotton saris, while your cousins in Tuticorin all wear silk? That must be where your money goes.”

She rocked on a veranda swing that faced the beach.

She refused to cook, clean or wash any clothes. It was her revolt.

Instead she devoured gossip magazines, refused to bathe, hid his spectacles, and beat their son because of her temper. She was a lemon of a housewife.

“Is there nothing to eat?” my father asked.

“You hate my cooking no matter what I do,” she sulked.

I must hate the way you clean, too, he would think, although it was true she was a sorry cook.

“Here and there you eat like a pig, but my dosai and chutney you barely touch.” She dared him to respond. “My sister-in-law’s dahl is a great thing. Go eat at her house since you like it so much.”

My father had seen his own father occasionally slap his obedient mother, and although he knew men were obligated to thrash unruly wives, he was a mild man raised among many doting female cousins.

They loved his movie-star face and Elvis hair. Never had an occasion been provided for him to exercise his manly right to meanness. He held his tongue at my mother’s mouth until some outrageous accusation or hidden wallet or missing diabetic medicine spun his grip out of control and towards her neck.

Sensibly then, scowling with a black eye, her unreasonable hatred for him legitimately grew. No uncooked meal or scowl could warrant a Crab Orchard Review ◆ 191

A. Sandosharaj

smack; her womanly dignity whatever its source—instructed her of that. Unable to convince her, neither with fists nor logic, my father scooped the responsibility for frying and stewing and washing clothes outside in their well—a humiliation he hid from everyone.

It was my brother who worried him, a serene angel of a boy who incurred our mother’s wrath nearly as often as our father did. She flung magazines and can openers at him, or sat outside on the porch where she could not hear him. My father relied on optimism: his wife was young—ten years his junior—perhaps she would warm when she became accustomed to being a wife and mother. He was confident that success would change her, as if her neurosis could be won over: he was certain that money would extinguish their fights, as if her suspicions were rooted in valid gripes. Until he could provide her the success he believed would shush her, he tried other things.

He came home armed with the magazines my mother read.

“Here,” he’d echo into the silence when he handed them over.

He wished they would not fight. When they invariably did, he left her swollen and self-righteous with bruised cheeks, and then rammed his head against their cheerful pastel walls. On some days, his slightly morose sense of humor led him to chuckle at his family: a wife with a black eye, a husband with a ripped forehead, a son with a scarred ear—a family of wounds. He even left her once, marching home to complain to his father, who only chastised him.

“What is this?” My grandfather, a schoolteacher, eased eyeglasses down his nose. “Control her or she will crawl on your head.”

Even on that day, my father raced back on ferry and rickshaw in time to heat milk and uppama for my brother’s breakfast. He tried not to hear the sad whispers my mother crooned into my brother’s breezy bed, a wide cloth hung from the ceiling in a U-shape. It swayed with the hidden weight of the baby.

“If you do not love your Amma, Shyam,” she murmured, “who will?”

My father listened.

“If you do not love your mother, she will die,” she sighed.“Who will love you then?”

The tin plate roasted my father’s hands. He blew coolness onto the small bites he handfed Shyam, waiting for my brother to cry out if they burned his mouth.

BY THE TIME MY FATHER REACHES THE CONSULATE there are long lines— 192 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

A. Sandosharaj

or queues, as he calls them, British vocabulary trickling down as far south as the rural schools in Trincomalee. He has returned to the Consulate repeatedly and has been confused each visit. He flounders, submerged in a Swiss-cheese legal system with pitfalls and landmines— so much so that all advice, even from the most expert source, even from the administration itself, has proven to be unreliable to the point of being treacherous. A pronoun or misplaced prefix is all it would take to send him directly back to his wife and son as a failure.

The Consulate’s waiting room was bursting, so my father leans against the wood paneling until it is his turn to speak with someone. In the office, he picks the chair that allows him to conceal his deaf ear.

“Since you came to the U.S. have you had any employment other than clerking for the Indian Embassy?” The skeptical man leans forward on his elbows over a metal desk. The lighting is unflatteringly fluorescent, the walls eggshell. Outside it begins to snow again.

“No, sir,” my father lies. “No other job.”

“Are you sure, Raj?” the man prods. “The Embassy isn’t paying you much.” He glances at the pile of thin papers in his grasp. “I’m not sure how you could survive on this.”

Although he fears it will make him appear lazy, my father replies again, “No, sir, I am working only at the Embassy.”

My father does not inform the man that he also shuffles fried foods at Gino’s Chicken, mops at 7-Eleven, or that he borrows my uncle’s Chrysler to deliver the Washington Post to three neighborhoods back in Langley Park. He only confirms clerking for the Embassy and taking a few classes at a school for car mechanics. There is no format to give the man any evidence of his diligence, his ambition. He is embarrassed by the lie.

“Do you have a social security number?” The man, who has not introduced himself nor made the point of the interview clear, keeps his gaze fixed.

“No.” “Are you sure?”

My father irritably thinks of the blue card he was coached to acquire back in D.C., the one with nine numbers typed across its face. He hopes they cannot trace it. He thinks of the Washington Redskins jacket he purchased for my brother, a varsity-style winter coat with the Skins’ logo emblazoned on the right breast: the profile of a Native American Indian warrior. It is a good gift, perfect for the blustery winters of this hemisphere.

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A. Sandosharaj

“Yes, I am sure. No card, sir,” my father answers. He tries to recall whether eye contact is polite.

“Do you know that an A-2 Permanent Visa is not a work permit?”

My father sits stunned, then recovers. He swivels his head to hide his astonishment. Yesterday a staff officer he spoke with had said that it was.

“Raj?” “Yes, sir, I understand very much,” he answers, comforted at least by the familiarity of his uncertainty. Surely, he thinks, tomorrow someone will tell him something else, anything, as long as it contradicts what he was told today. Sensing that the meeting might soon be concluded, he succumbs to a grandiose vision: my mother smiling proudly on their cement stoop, waving the blue tissue-soft aerogramme announcing that he is settled in America and will send for her soon. He pictures my brother, no longer a baby, nearly four.

“I have a son, too,” my father says, nodding at the solitary photograph on the man’s desk. A blond toddler waves, pink from sun.

“We all have families,” the man answers, suddenly frosty. The framed memory must often be mistaken as an invitation to chat.

“Someone from the Embassy will be calling on your behalf after lunch,” the man says vaguely. He reorders the stack of papers and pushes them towards my father. “If he makes a good case for you, we should know soon.” Despite what he says, he does not sound optimistic.

“Thank you, sir,” my father says, trying to gauge whether the exchange is over, whether it went well or poorly.

The man nods and turns his back, my father’s signal that he should leave.

On his last day in Canada, on his cot at the YMCA—what he calls a hostel—my father readies himself to wait. He should nap.

Despite the wet chill, he leans his head against the window where beyond there is whiteness and the infrequent dark streak of a tree trunk or branch. He urges his mind to go blank. He eyeballs a few swirling flakes, but it is useless. Accustomed to working nineteen hours a day, this is what is most difficult for him, what will always require the most effort: rest.

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Remembering Roxana

THIS IS THE ESSAY no professor ever wants to write about a student.

For writers who teach, one of the chief joys of the profession is seeing students progress in their poems and in their lives. I live for the days when poets I’ve known, cared about, and worked with hand me copies of periodicals with their poems featured inside, the moments when I hear that they’ve won a contest or a prize, the days when manuscripts begun in one of my classes become books. Roxana Rivera, a poet of compassion, skill, humor and passion, was my student. For a very brief period in 2003, I was able to read her work, hear her talk, to know her laugh and smile. I was a witness to her growing poetic mission: to document her life and the lives of her Mexican immigrant parents and extended family, to give voice to a mélange, a mixture of English and Spanish that became, in her work, more potent than either language alone. Now Roxana is gone too early at 26, killed in a car crash. I share the poems that follow with you as evidence of the woman I knew, the poet whose artistry I wanted to nurture.

Roxana came to Southern Illinois University from California eager to learn, to get the most out of the MFA program here. I had questioned her about this, letting her know that Carbondale was the least metropolitan of places, that it was remote, out-of-the way, so off the beaten path that we could barely find our way back to the path itself. Didn’t she want to go to some place more sophisticated, more urbane, more multilingual? Yet Roxana saw something in Carbondale that made her feel that it would be the place where she could write the book I was certain I’d be holding in my hands a few years later, the place where her poems would become her destiny. For Roxana, it was a long way to go to get to what she was all about. But Roxana was wise enough to know that she could only become the poet she was meant to be in a place like Carbondale, a small college town so unlike the huge sprawling Los Angeles she’d come from.

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Roxana was a member of would meet in a tiny classroom in Faner Hall, a concrete slab of 1970s architecture that doesn’t easily lend itself to poetic creation or contemplation. I remember Roxana’s presence in that class—questioning, thoughtful, yet unafraid to use her characteristic sass and common sense to deflate pretension.When it came to her own poems, Roxana wanted practical feedback. She wanted to know about the efficacy of particular lines, of phrases, of images, of stanzas. She wanted to know if her two languages, English and Spanish, could commingle in poetry, and whether we, a group of non-Spanish speakers, could feel the tension of the burden and blessing of her two dialects.

And I remember the young woman who, on a campus of sneakers and practical shoes, wore high-heeled boots that echoed to announce her presence when she walked down the maze-like corridors of Faner Hall. I remember her laughing about our silly Midwestern ways, such as the penchant of SIU undergraduate students to wear shorts no matter how cold the autumn weather. I remember a woman who wanted to stop me with a poem after class was done, a different one from the one we’d discussed in class. What did I think, she always wanted to know. Where could this poem go? She was sweetly tenacious, and I didn’t refuse her. After all, she’d come all this way to know what I thought of where her poems were going.

One of my favorite memories of Roxana comes from her appearance at a local coffeehouse during Hispanic Heritage Month. Many of the students reading poetry that night were undergraduates reading in front of an audience for the first time: nervous, unsure, tentative. Not Roxana.

She stood in front of an audience in a small-town coffeehouse and read poems that made people stop drinking their overpriced coffees and start paying attention. She read poems imbued with a fierce longing, a vibrant humor, a sharp intelligence that wasn’t merely just “attitude” or posturing—in short, she rocked the house. She was the last reader in a long evening, but people stood, applauded, asked her to read more. Starstruck undergrads asked her what classes she taught—where could they sign up? Someone even asked for her autograph. I left the coffeehouse that night sure in the knowledge that Roxana’s poems were going to take her places; I was happy knowing I was there at the beginning and was eager to see just how far she’d go in the future.

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helping to write an obituary for the local paper, refusing to go out to the spot where the accident happened. I didn’t want or need confirmation of the person I’d lost. I didn’t want to feel this new, unfamiliar kind of grief: I’d mourned relatives and friends, but never before a student. I kept thinking of phrase from a poem Roxana had shared with us in class: no te vayas. Don’t you go. I kept thinking of Theodore Roethke’s poem “Elegy for Jane,” his eloquent expression of there being no place for a teacher’s grief: “I, with no rights in this matter / Neither father nor lover.” What place is there for the pain of losing someone on whose poems I had written my advice and approbation, my questions and praise? I’m still trying to figure out the place for this particular kind of grief. I still have the copies of the poems she turned in that semester, my scribbled comments all over them, inky evidence of a connection between us that grows both more tenuous and more sharp as the days pass. Often, I think, as Roethke says in “Elegy for Jane,” “if only I could nudge you from this sleep.” If only Roxana had gone to UTEP or Arizona State instead. If only that country road hadn’t been that treacherous in the early morning. If only that 90 degree turn hadn’t been there.

But after all the questions have exhausted themselves, both my grief over losing her and my pride in her poems remain.

Roxana will never walk up to me with a new poem again. She will never ask me about this word or that phrase, this image or that stanza. The next best thing I can do, as her mentor and friend, is to present her poems here, in the pages of Crab Orchard Review, the journal she so much wanted to work for. She had wanted to work on this issue in particular, with its emphasis on Immigration, Migration, and Exile. Certainly these are themes that are present in her poems here—the landscapes of Mexico and the United States, the complicated legacies of family relationships, the history of Spanish conquest and colonialism, the bilingual nature of urban Chicano life in the United States. And because Roxana was in the midst of her writing life, we present two versions of what we think are the same poem—“Un Cuento” and “To the Xicana in the Mirror.”

Because this is a writer’s life cut short, we can’t be certain which poem was the definitive one, the one that would have been her final say. Both poems are reprinted here.

In the end, I’m grateful for both the grief and the pride, the loss and the laughter, the hours in the classroom and the hours outside of it. I am proud to have known this woman and this poet, and in the Crab Orchard Review ◆ 197

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spirit of that pride, I present her poems to you. I don’t know what sort of poet she would have been at 36, at 45, at 57. But I can imagine her, a little older perhaps, handing me that book with her name on the cover and the spine. She is smiling, yes, as she gives me that piece of herself. And I am smiling, too, looking at the curvature of her name in print, her two languages entwined for all to read.

Acknowledgments on the Poems: —“Tita’s Soto” was first published in Dánta 2 (2003).

—“Trenzas” was first published in RipRap 23 (Spring 2001).

—“Mandas” was first published in Music from a Farther Room (Spring 1998).

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To the Xicana in the Mirror

One day you open your eyes and find the story in the mirror.

Your body, the fractured labyrinth between conquered and conquistador, tangles jungle with ocean in its darkest corners.

White sand and red clay mold into a sharp nose, and high forehead.

You see the truths of conquest blur with tears; they ripple the cafentzĂ­n in your Spanish eyes Con el tiempo, the flood of words and voices that pours onto a page at dawn helps this story breathe: it presses its leaves against your chest pulsing your lungs open with a storm.

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Un Cuento Nemechtlajtlajtowilis ikwento Voy a contarles el cuento I will tell you the story We are all one flute in a long line of reeds and pipes silenced and pitched by the submission of a muse, or the breath of Coatlicue carried in a southern wind.

El dia de tu primer llanto, we sent your name into the air.

Like the song of a hummingbird it filled your father’s ear and gave us a new beginning.

You opened your eyes and we watched the truths of conquest blur with tears; they rippled the cafentzín in your Spanish eyes.

Con el tiempo, you found the story in the mirror.

White sand and red clay molded into a sharp nose, and high forehead.

Your body, the fractured labyrinth between conquered and conquistador, tangles jungle with ocean in its darkest corners.

Ompa, Allí, There the flood of words and voices that pours you out of bed at dawn

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helps us breathe: it presses its leaves against your chest pulsing your lungs open with a storm.

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Roxana Rivera

Tita’s Soto

Tita hangs East L.A. Augusts on her walls: paleta de coco running down my hand freezes in a frame as I stand outside her door in my underwear; using my tongue, I keep the coconut juice out of my toes. Tita waters the garden woven into her fence, off the corner of Michigan and Soto, filling the grated concrete with the smell of rain. The days she doesn’t pack teddy bears in a factory, Tita laughs as she pours me into the aluminum tub waiting with water outside her screen door. Sávila spreads its arms sunward for her, ready to cool my burns, as she flushes dirt, leaves and cobwebs out of a toilet forgotten in the alley. She’ll pluck poppies out of this porcelain bowl until glaucoma cages her into the dark casita that was once her son’s garage. She’ll tuck her smile into the palm of her hand and I’ll crave the carcajadas that once slipped through her fingers.

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El Árbol

My uncle hands me his grade-school version of our family tree.

He stands alone in a picture pasted to a cardboard trunk.

Out of his back spread two wings of branches with mono-chromed portraits above Ermenegildos and Atanasias: so many syllables to stuff my mouth with, every name, a tiny map anchored to the patria of another time.

Church weddings hang from the branches like Christmas lights, they raise halos above legitimate faces, and darken the space secreted around bastards.

My father was conceived into a long line of abandonadas. Bars, death, and El Norte etched bitterness around their mouths and battered riverbanks into their eyes. So many whispers cling to my father’s branches that the names on my mother’s side, those candles guiding my climb to a Muslim Spain, become a plague of fireflies tangled in a web.

A civil wedding carved my name into a branch twenty-five years ago. Now, stories and photos tighten my grip as I dangle from my parents’ branches.

They let the sun burn through the shadows that hover around me every time I kick dead wood out of my way.

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Trenzas

I. In Juárez, Abuelita unties the flannel-sheet curtains framing her window and sunset pours shades of red across La Ciudad del Niño. I smooth the wrinkles off her hands, watching her lips string Ave Marías to the Sorrowful Mysteries with the beads of a rosary.

As the candles on a night stand warm El Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, I stroke her braids until we fall asleep cooling my foot with concrete floor.

When Abuelita turns 98, the prima who opened Fantasy Hair Salon will give her a tight perm and cut her hair too close to her head. The kitchen streaked yellow by chain smoking will reek of perm solution as my Tía Rosa sweeps away Abuelita’s hair: the scattered ashes on her linoleum smothering the sting on the stove of chile con queso.

Some of them will fly right into the trash, others will hide in the cracks on the floor, out of the broom’s reach.

II. I dream that Abuelita and I are both sixteen. We slide under her bed to teach me how to read. Away from brothers beaten by tequila and work, we bruise our shoulders shooting their rifles. We break in horses on the green curb of the río, and join la revolución. With an X of bullets across our chests, we burn amber points in a haze of cigar smoke. As she braids my hair under clouds of stars, we drink a bottle of peachflavored Cisco. Listening to mariachis in velvet suits the color of wine, I watch the light of the camp fire bounce off the spurs in her boots.

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III. I look beneath my bed for her braids before I sleep to feel the ripple of a rosary and horse whip, to catch the scent of river-water and blood, to steal her hair away from the linoleumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s corners.

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Mandas

I. “Mija, just be happy” Abuela says between mechanically mumbled rosarios.

“Mija, turn to God” she whispers on knees black from dented pews.

With blistered fingers she listens to the Padre Nuestros bouncing back to her off marble walls.

II. Mija stares at the 3-D portrait of the Virgen Mother from a doorway. She shifts between bedroom and hallway watching for the moment it melts into the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

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that sweetens prayers to rot before the wax melts, overflowing with roses the Holy Mother that chips away in the garden behind the nopales.

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Roxana Rivera

Winters

I. The first time I tasted snow, I was in Mexico.

In a cocoon of sweats, thermals, and nylon, I tipped onto a mound of soft ice nestled at the dead end of an alley. I wiggled angels into jumpsuits instead of robes as snowflakes melted on my tongue.

II. Tía Manuelita says, “Mira, it gives God such happiness to see you here with me, He’s crying.” Through the stars I drew on her fogged kitchen window, I watch ducks shake off tears as they paddle across the small lake gathered on a dirt road.

III. By two in the morning we sang bi-lingual duets into a hairbrush. My Mexican prima, Crí-Crí, between sips of spiked cider, and I, the manly Cowboy Mouse, caught like a trout by the buzz of tequila.

IV. A gentle drumming on my lover’s window kept us in bed all of a Sunday. I fell into a sleep without dreams in that gray as his heart beat into my back and promises trickled into each other’s skin.

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Con Canela, Miel, y Fe

Mamí gives up on the clink of spare change as it hits the wood of a box behind San Martín de Porras: an allowance for his prayers to bring her marriage back.

She works the saints now, burns a yellow candle for Oshun.

With faith and cinnamon sticks she turns marriage into honey, pours him back to her bed. She makes it warm again with ashé, the divine power of God in their names, that ties him to her.

She warms La Caridad del Cobre crossing her name over his with lead. Letters, those braided vines on a piece of paper bag, soak in honey and drown in a wineglass to flush the sweat of la otra off his shoulder, off his tongue. With cinnamon, honey, and faith his fingers will ache to part her hair and brand cariños on the lines he engraved en su frente with the nights he got lost in the arms of the silence after the third ring.

Note: —Our Lady of La Caridad del Cobre is a representation of Ochún, the Yoruba goddess of love. She is often sought after to solve marriage problems.

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Jorge Sánchez

Relic

Somehow I found a twenty centavo coin from Cuba, from before the revolution, from Nineteenfifteen, when the republic was just twelve years old. I wasn’t even that old when I found the thing my dad called a peseta. It’s the Cuban version of the quarter, he told me, and it made sense. About the same size, about the same heft, except on one side was El Apóstol, José Martí, in George Washington’s place, and on the other was the Cuban coat of arms, complete with little red cap atop the shield, the freedman’s cap, the ubiquitous Latin American symbol, a token of the newly-freed slave in Roman times. I was told by everyone who knew about it that this coin was special, that I should hold on to it since the coins made now were different.

Until my great aunt came to visit I didn’t know what the new ones looked like. Lourdes, my grandmother’s sister, brought some coins with her and I saw that the main difference between the old coins and the new was a lighter heft, a fake, almost plastic texture, and a different motto: where my coin said Patria y libertad —fatherland and liberty—Lourdes’s 210 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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pesetas had stamped on them a strange and deadly ultimatum: Patria o muerte, they said. Fatherland or death.

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Deema K. Shehabi

Of Harvest and Flight

Beneath a wet harvest of stars in a Gazan sky, my mother tells me how orchards once hid the breach of fallen oranges, and how during a glowing night of beseeching God in prayer, my uncle, a child then, took flight from the roof of the house and how the vigilant earth had softened just before his body fell to the ground.

There’s no succumbing to flight’s abandonment; our bodies fall on mattresses; piles of them are laid out on living room floors to accommodate multitudes of wedding visitors: the men in their embroidered gowns taunt roosters until dusk, while women taunt with liquid harvest in their eyes, and night spirits and soldiers continue to roam the house between midnight and three in the morning.

On the night of my uncle’s nuptial, my mother passes a tray of cigarettes to wedding guests with a fuschia flower in her hair…

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in the waiting to be scattered.

Behind them, the Potomac readied itself for the festival of debris.

Those were the years of curtains drawn tightly over windows to shut out the frost world; years bent over a radio sifting through pieces of news, as though each when found became a story and within it a space for holding our endless remnants.

But tonight, I only want to know how a daughter can grow beyond her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s falling.

Leaning over me, she points to the spot: the unbolting of our roots here, beside this bitter orange tree.

And here is the crumbling of the house of jasmine arching over doorways, the house of roosters and child-flight legends, this house of girls with eyes like simmering seeds.

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Deema K. Shehabi

Migrant Earth So, tell me what you think of when the sky is ashen?

—Mahmoud Darwish I could tell you that listening is made for the ashen sky, and instead of the muezzin’s voice, which lingers like weeping at dawn, I hear my own desire, as I lay my lips against my mother’s cheek.

And when I kneel down beside her, I recall her blistering pleas the day she flung open the gates of her house for children fleeing from tanks.

My mother is from Gaza, but what do I know of the migrant earth, as I enter a Gazan rooftop and perform ablutions in the ashen forehead of sky?

And when the sky is ashen, my soul journeys and wrinkles with homeland.

I could tell you that I parted with my mother at the homeland of skin. In the dream, my lips were bruised, her body was whole again, and we danced naked in the street.

There is no child who understands absence past the softness of palms.

As though it is praise in my father’s palms as he washes my mother’s body in the final ritual.

As though it is God’s pulse that comes across her cheek and vanishes.

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Betsy Sholl

After That

In Lakewood, New Jersey, they’d rock all day on the porch of the old Jewish hotel—women sputtering like those newsreels of Europe, where they must have trudged through snow in battered boots with newspaper socks, looking for streets that no longer existed.

Back and forth they’d rock, muttering like pigeons, old women who rolled their stockings just to the knees as if that was dressing enough.

And they’d huff themselves out of their chairs as if rising even a little was more than too much.

All through childhood’s eyeglasses and cavities, through first pumps with skinny five-inch heels and pointy toes, I couldn’t walk fast enough past that chorus of mourners lined up, davening in wicker chairs as the floorboards groaned, unstoppable clocks, cradles endlessly rocking the world’s woes, dividing who saw from who shut their blue eyes. I thought they only stopped the heavy beat of their grief when I walked past. New shoes dyed to match a prom gown, new lipstick, blush—I’d swear they looked and scoffed. But what if, as I think now, they didn’t notice at all?

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to give them something, anything at all, those fierce widows rocking forever on the guest house porch, refusing to enter, refusing to leave, having outlasted whole cities.

What would you ask for after thatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Some bright pleasure, a new truth?

Loden green pumps with stiletto heels?

That the world end, that the world continue?

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In a Time of Drought

Are there languages in this world with forty different names for the ways rain falls? Could tongues stiffened by English, used to drizzle and mist ever loosen enough to learn liquid vowels and clattering consonants?

Are there names for rain that stays in the clouds like a sullen adolescent, and garrulous rain, yakking all the way down, rain heavy as sheet metal, darning needle rain, rain berries on twigs, rain without a country to fall on?

My young friend is a husband without a wife, having married by proxy his girlfriend, who still lives in their native land where rain is tropical and thick, surging in on dark clouds each afternoon, crashing down like buckets dumped on the jungle, then rising again in green steamy veils.

There, our tight-roofed embassy won’t give visas to anyone intimate with downpours: no deluging immigrant rain washing out coastlines as citizens board up their windows. But what if thunder means more than we think, and lightning’s electric cursor will someday write in the sky the questions we fear: Citizens, were you plenteous as rain, did you pour

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down on the needy, run through the streets in torrents, like mercy, did you fall on the just and the unjust, on thatch and plastic tarps, were you slow and easy entering drought-hard ground, or did you drop your relief and roar off?

Rain rushing the drains, mobbing streets, rain with its delicate beaded curtains, with its scepters of light, acid rain, seed rain, rain runnels and scum— it isn’t this that is ruining my friend’s dream of balloons at the airport, his bride materializing like showers coming down from the sky, sunlight in her train and watery diamonds shining on wires and trees.

American rain? African rain? Rain moving across the oceans between, falling and rising again, is it falling now on the documents a young woman clutches to her body for shelter as she waits in line outside the embassy of iron gates and drenching overhangs with its official indelible stamps the rain can’t smudge? Rain without borders, needing no permission to fall: fall now on the eyes of the civil servants, dampen their stiff resolve, let them see this woman dripping from her eyebrows and braided hair, holding her rain-dimpled papers, for the third time standing before them requesting permission. Let them know how it feels to kiss a young man under wide tropical leaves, and laugh when they tip like saucers dousing you, as you pledge your steady and intermittent, your stormy and soft, your scattered and lavish, bank-breaking rain.

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Lilvia Soto

Citizenship As a barbarous village Tends to weave A rope of dogs Against the stranger —Luis de Góngora They build our houses and our pools, beautify our gardens, clean our schools.

They pick cotton for our clothes, harvest lettuce for our tables, cook our meals and wash the dishes.

The work is hard; the pay is low.

We don’t want to do it, but we don’t want them here.

They care for our young, our sick, and our old.

They ease our conscience, permit us to boast of diversity.

The work is hard; the pay is low.

We don’t want to do it, but we don’t want them here.

We will not open the door.

They have to earn their way, prove themselves.

We will build walls, put up barbed wire, hunt them down with our dogs, with our vigilante gangs.

We will send them back.

Time after time after time, we will send them back.

For we don’t want them here.

But they are hungry and keep coming back.

Time after time after time, they keep coming.

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Millions strong, they keep coming.

They walk through stagnant waters, jump over fences, crawl through barbed wire, tunnel under earth.

They pay the coyotes, hide in freight trains, crawl in trunks, suffocate.

They walk through one hundred and twenty Yuma degrees, through freezing winter nights.

Our desert is strewn with their jackets, their sneakers and their bags, and the empty bottles they abandon when the last drop evaporates with the first mirage.

Our desert is strewn with their trash. It is littered with their bodies (one hundred and sixty-five so far this year).

And we blame the coyotes, the heat, the desert, their stubbornness, their lack of prevision.

On the news, we hear of each body, or we hear of eighteen bodies at a time.

We hear, and we forget, for we hear it every day.

We feel sadness for a second.

We are busy, have no time for sorrow.

And they are aliens; they bring it on upon themselves.

They are countless and persistent, and they keep coming every day.

If they live through the migra, the barbed wire, the scorpions and the dogs, the javelinas and the rattlesnakes; if theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re strong and survive the freezing cold, the suffocating heat, the hunger and the thirst; if they outsmart us and the Sonora desert, we will fly them to a distant desert to fight another war.

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Lynne Thompson

Song for Two Immigrants for my parents I thought I knew you. To me, you were the Grenadines, the Anglican Church and a cricket match every Sunday and every Sunday, you were Fort Charlotte, the Vincy Mas and blue tidepools. You were Awaraks sailing into Kingston Harbor. You were English and French patois, rainforests, regatta and a Congo snake, whelk, rotis, lobster and rum.

Yet, here you are in a yellowing photograph snapped in the Mojave or Death Valley, CA—looking like deserters from an American war: her, every bit the boy—hair slicked, leather jacket cinched at her throat, one tiny foot on the running board of a black ’37 Ford coupé—and you, looking nothing less than the black Clyde Barrow, flicking the butt of your Lucky Strike while checking out your boys playing in the dirt wearing short pants and high-tops, everyone looking for all the world as if the Caribbean were a dream, a far yesterday away, and it was, and it’s clear that I did not know you.

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Angela Narciso Torres

To Return to San Juan

What ocean liner, which bus station to the loam that bore the imprint of my first patent leather shoes. How far to the cogon grass that watched my shadow lengthen to the frayed edges of day.

To know the gaggle of school children stoning mango trees on Pilar Street. To feel the white heat of hand rhymes, mayflies, a piano scale spiraling from a small window.

To enter the blue-roofed house, eyes smarting from the sputter of onions in Juanita’s blackened pot. Awakened by rain on the low eaves, to inhale steaming pan de sal, the grainy crust soaked to sweetness in cacao, dark and smooth, the bitter end like a refrain one tries to forget. To hear the soft slap of hemp slippers on stone, where evenings brought the smoke of burning leaves, softening the eyes with welcome tears. There was always too much to remember of San Juan—summer, a river, songs the women sang. A shaft of light leaning into Tía Pacita’s rooms at dusk.

The night Benny shot the Dizons’ dog with his bee-bee gun, as it stretched on the carport scratching fleas, only the tadpoles saw, and none but the stag beetles heard. And the chimes of Mary the Queen still pealed mornings at seven like the frogs returning with the monsoons, chanting devotions to the jasmine stars. Come nightfall, to sleep as fishermen sleep, sun-browned and satisfied with the day’s catch, as a mother croons 222 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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to her baby, casting dreams through open shutters in the milk-white light of a coconut moon.

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Salsa Dancing

I never learned the intricacies of salsa dancing, or the syncopated mincing cha-cha steps.

But my body drew power from notes quivering from the tumbao, the beat fluttering over my skin, a loverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s breath.

With the lights flashing history rolled like a newsreel.

And I was there, bending knees, hip-shaking, battling the drums; a flute solo filled the ballroom, danzas during tiempo muerto; trumpets heralded the cafetales bursting with harvest, the coro narrated the struggles across an ocean as feet shuffled over wood to rhythms of clinking chains.

Heritage embraced me, the lost relative who could not dance, witnessing boricuas work the floor in ways alien to our past.

Flaunting fashion at the expense of food.

Vanity creating islands on a restless sea of rumberos.

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uttered split our tongues.

Every drink abetted our amnesia.

Lotus-eaters with rhythm sliding across the floor, lost but beautiful to watch.

Barrio streets appeared distant; in the dark all bruises disappeared.

The loud music drowned out slashing words, the bright lights made invisible unopened bills on rickety tables, mice hunting under a moon-hungry night; drinks numbed the trucks’ wailing another lay-a-way day.

I hated the scene as I glowed in the comfort of rhythms spinning my head, melodies ripping my chest.

I spotted a couple dancing, sensual like fog floating across the cordillera—and I, too, am up, stumbling and faltering, but dancing, dancing.

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J.L. Torres

The Crux

These crosses along the road stake out final claims of men rushing to smash a face.

Their legs heavy, the tires free them on a binge to find answers in cement and gravel.

Those crosses sprout along the lawn, merge into a blinding white mass.

Blood money for frequent-flyer miles, lives sacrificed on foreign altars, buried before picking up a rifle.

The islandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s somber migration leaves us lingering for answers.

The students pencil crosses on exams to light the way for success; instead they carry them across the pond, and back again, belts tightened; or they place them alongside shattered glass or near the casket, or raise them like tenements in cities where they will taste vinegar, and weep for their children.

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Beverly Tsao

Midwife When my grandmother was young, her mother told her, “Trust no man, and stay out of the woods at night.”

—for Elta Toole, exile of Northern Ireland They call her name, wearing agony like a housecoat.

She strokes their wet hair and rubs their bloated bellies with oil, singing an old Gaelic ballad from memory.

When the poor infant slides out, she cuts the cord, forcing her breath into the limp, gray body, knowing the cradle will be a coffin before spring.

She is so weary of the women’s pathetic prayers as if God could transform their threadbare lives into something precious no grave could claim.

And the men. She resents their vulnerability, the way their callused hands seem to wither like fallen apples without an axe or rifle to hold.

She washes the blood from their worn sheets then buries the afterbirth in pristine snow, but the wolves will smell blood on her hands.

They follow her into the night like starving children begging for milk. She tells me even today she can hear the muffled crunch of their footpads behind her.

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Eamonn Wall

Reader

Gather close, dear reader, my tidy narrative goes like this.

Eight stowaways in the hold of the Dutch Navigator died.

Lack of oxygen, the cause.

They were five men and three children who had paid to stow some harmless hours from Zeebrugge to Dover.

Like misfiled papers, they were loaded in error with new Italian furniture for Wexford Business Park. Sailed for two days on an unkind sea to dock at Belview Port, Co. Waterford, near to where in Norman times, Strongbow had married Aoife. A painting of this event hangs in the National Gallery on Merrion Sq. In time, these foreign Normans became Irish giving Wexford our castle at Ferrycarrig, as, long before, fierce Vikings had given us our name.

In Wexford, the refugees met the trained gloves of Dr. Harbison, Chief State Pathologist. Driven from port to business park, enjoying a Model County funeral prior to an accounting of their arrival.

One hundred hours contained in all.

Great hatred, little room, out of Algeria, Albania, and Turkey they had come. Had they ever heard of Wexford, where for centuries we have watched hardy commoners and hale kings disembark?

“They met what I can only describe as a horrific death,” the Irish Justice Minister explained. They had encountered smugglers and thieves in the biting corner of a dangerous town.

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Eamonn Wall

Our Wexford People

Abdullah Ocalan held in prison they had known from tale and Turkish papers. Eight swallows would enter Wexford coffins never having heard, not once, of Martin Storey or Billy Byrne. Dead in winter, they would never grace the marina in May in the full dream light of early summer as the harbour emerged again from the sallow shadow cast by the mailboat train. Once, it had promised employment, if not salvation, to our own broken brothers and sisters looking for starts in a downpour outside Ward’s of Piccadilly. Remember for us deoir equals tear and deoraí equals exile. For eight swallows, theirs could never be the last door locked at bedtime, that click which bade Model County barley sleep. Where sea water meets the spotted fields, a young Kurdish arm would never unhook the window handle to admit the opening fragrance of honeysuckle. Our Wexford people would never eat our strawberries, drink our tea.

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Eamonn Wall

Ellis Island

Like thin battered barrels rolled to ground, the Irish.

Stunned families driven into first light in Sunday clothes.

Turned stomachs, stern medics, New World elders. Stern inspection.

America offering, in equal measures, forgetfulness and food.

On panel 573, I note these names: Michael & Anna Wall.

Early hopefuls rushed to the pushcart streets of downtown New York, Coming under the ambivalent gaze of Henry James.

America, we braved your disaffection with such raging genius That soon you hardly knew our faces from your own.

Worldwide, children cower under growth.

Jeeps roar through Villages. Crops fail and coyotes pocket coin.

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Eamonn Wall

Here on holidays. Two Nigerian women purchase drafts For remittance home from Enniscorthy.

Disgraced Okonkwo, When sent from home, tended to his motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s soil, drank the palm Wine of her trees. Though they merrily cross the Abbey Square, How strange this drab November day must seem to these Nigerians.

So quickly for each immigrant all can fall apart in fits of panic and dismay.

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Book Reviews

Dominguez, David. Work Done Right. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2003. 66 pages. $15.95.

David Dominguez’s collection Work Done Right is the odyssey of Abraham, a young man of Mexican descent whose experiences crash head-on into the wall that separates the underprivileged and impoverished of the world from the so-called “American dream.” The narrative sequence of poems that make up the book brings the reader into Abraham’s life and face-to-face with the obstacles he must overcome if he is to find some dignity in his search for opportunity and redemption.

In the opening section of Part One, “Mi Historia,” Dominguez writes: My red pickup choked on burnt oil as I drove down Highway 99.

In wind-tattered garbage bags I had packed my whole life: two pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts, and a pair of work boots.

My truck needed work, and through the blue smoke rising from under the hood, I saw almond orchards, plums, the raisins spread out on paper trays, and acres of Mendota cotton my mother picked as a child.

But just around those orchards that remind Abraham so much of his childhood, he is about to find his reality in the grim “railroad and concrete” of “industrial Del Sol.” Here, he finds work at a factory, Galdini Sausage. It is not quite what he had in mind: I wanted my own history—not the earth’s, nor the history of blood, nor of memory, and not the job found for me at Galdini Sausage.

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Work Done Right is infused throughout, both on the conscious and subconscious levels, with the desire for escape, the desire for something better, the desire to hit the highway and never look back.

But Abraham’s is a world of confinement. He barely makes enough money to make ends meet and his truck is in need of major repair.

When finally Abraham saves enough to have the truck repaired, he sees his chance to get away in the last section of Part One, “Red Pickup Truck,” his chance to move on toward a better life: I wanted to drive and after fifty miles stop and call Galdini Sausage, say I quit, then drive on toward Yosemite and the white dogwoods drooped over soft rotten logs where I’d sit and ask the cross-shaped blooms for their perennial secrets.

And that is just what he sets off to do, screaming along with the Beatles as he drives “…until the lyrics filled the cab like wind / pushing the truck afloat across the 99.” He sees “the currents of the San Joaquin River rolling along,” just like he wants to be, but soon Abraham’s truck breaks down again and he finds himself “…stranded in the parking lot / of a bar called El Gato Triste,” eating—ironically— from a box of Galdini Sausages he had loaded into the back of his truck. Dejected, he must return to the factory and the “nicked-up knuckles of work.”

While Abraham finds his physical escape impossible, he begins to see his surroundings in a new way. He begins to appreciate the dignity and art with which his co-workers carry out the dead-end, menial labor that has become a mainstay in their lives. In “Contigo,” Dominguez introduces the shift leader, Mamas, one of the strongest of these figures of dignity and labor: Mamas could work hot links for hours.

I watched the old woman, liver spots and wrinkles deep, and her fingernails, filed, polished, and painted lavender, flashed with silver scissors.

At first, Abraham is frustrated by his own “pockets full of mistakes,” Crab Orchard Review ◆ 233

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and thinks of this labor dismissively as “‘Woman’s work,’” but as he watches “Mamas move her hands with grace”: And soon I remembered the slender hands of another woman who did another kind of work I also watched.

Abraham’s memory of his mother at work deepens his respect for the women and men he sees working around him.

Through the actions and example of his friend Guillermo, Abraham learns the cost and value of labor that goes beyond a timecard or a paycheck. In one of the last sections of Part Three, “When the Machines Stopped at Galdini Sausage,” Abraham comes to understand: Guillermo worked like a man who, up before dawn, read the paper over juice and toast, and then, as he walked the empty streets toward a factory that offered nothing, realized there was nothing but work done right.

Though Abraham will eventually escape the dim surroundings of “Industrial Del Sol,” he will take with him the lessons learned, lessons every bit as important as those passed down by his grandfather and mother. These people, the workers whose lives go unnoticed outside the factory, have shown Abraham through the grace with which they approach their lot in life how to look beyond the seeming hopelessness of the situation and see the spiritual marrow buried beneath the bruised knuckles.

Work Done Right, David Dominguez’s first full-length collection, is an impressive achievement. While there are echoes of Larry Levis, Philip Levine, and B.H. Fairchild present, the voice is ultimately unique and, at the same time, extremely confident and mature for such a young poet. This is a work that finds the spiritual in the harsh realities of a modern industrial world and one that will speak to the multitudes who have found themselves stranded on their own “Highway 99” in search of the rumored “American dream” that remains so elusive for so many.

—Reviewed by Danny Wilson

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Kim, Suji Kwock. Notes from the Divided Country. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. 74 pages. $15.95.

In her first collection of poems, Notes from the Divided Country, Suji Kwock Kim gives voice to Korean immigrant family members in order to tell their stories ranging from khimjahng—khimchee making—to the Japanese invasion of Korea to the Forgotten War— the Korean War. Kim also gives the readers an honest look at the divided self—a self full of grief, curiosity about history and life, and a longing to know the bonds between mothers and daughters.

In the book’s first section, the poem “The Tree of Knowledge” examines the an older sibling’s struggle with and self-accusation of her younger brother and sister, who are born with severe mental and physical disabilities. The older sister confesses what she believes to be true: I ripped her womb being born.

For weeks she bled so much she asked the doctor what it meant.

—Nothing Bleeding is normal after delivery It’ll stop.

In subsequent lines, readers learn why the mother’s womb shrank too small to hold her future babies: “Unchecked the lacerations never healed properly. / Unstitched the uterine tissue jagged and scarred, scarred and shrank.” Kim relies on the senses to create a hospital of dread rather than hope: “the scrape of hinges as the door swung shut,” “rubbing alcohol and sick-sweat in the corridor,” “the clattering of gurneys and IVs on wheels below / like the rattling of chains.” The poem concludes with an address to the brother and sister in a near prayer revealing the older sister’s guilt: O ghost-brother, ghost-sister. Silence like nothing but not nothing. Dream-vowel. Implacable O. Lie to me. Say you forgive me for being born.

Two of the cultural treasures immigrants bring with them to a new country are their food and folktales. In “Translations from the Mother Tongue,” Kim describes the Korean practices of Khimjahng, khimchee-making, and P’ansori, story-singing. “There must be hunger in these rhythms, / if not happiness,” Kim writes, aware that the woman is without her sisters or mother while carrying on these Crab Orchard Review ◆ 235

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traditions and is “starved for the taste / of home” in America. In a story-song, the mother sings of “bamboo flutes and barrel drums, / clapping as your village celebrates the birth of a child, / red peppers spread out on straw mats to dry.” The daughter listens to her mother’s voice for resemblance to a grandmother’s, a voice she would not recognize. If it’s true that not much survives between generations, Kim still wants to know what does survive: “what’s handed down / from mother to daughter, if anything is, / bond I cannot cut away, that keeps apart what it lashes together.”

In the book’s second section, the poem “Borderlands” gives voice to a woman who relives her memory of watching a childhood friend dying on “boot-blackened ice” during the Japanese occupation of Korea. “I saw men and women from our village blown to hieroglyphs of viscera, /… // why did I survive?” she asks, thinking of “each body with its separate skin, its separate suffering.”

In “Resistance,” the poet/speaker reaches back into family history to a scene where a Japanese soldier is beating her great-grandfather, who was later imprisoned, the soldier “a man who looked like your brother, / as like you as you were to yourself.” The poet isn’t afraid to present a bold question addressed to the great-grandfather: “What was worse, his beating you / or your seeing them see you beaten, humiliating you beyond reason.” Later in “Resistance,” Kim lists the tragedies that took place in Korea for acts of resistance during the Japanese occupation: “Bless the deported who refused to pray to the Empire’s gods,” the old men “thinking ‘anti-Imperial thoughts,’” and “prisoners arrested for speaking Korean.” In the final two couplets, we are shown in powerful imagery what the great-grandfather and many others saw: “Bodies hung from trees on the sides of the road, swaying.//…/…the corpse-forest.”

The final poem in Kim’s collection, “The Korean Community Garden in Queens,” is a poem about rebuilding, and a hopeful nod toward the future as Korean immigrants plant a garden in a vacant lot.

Kim has a finely-tuned ear for music: “Knuckles of ginger and mugwort dig upward,” “…hydrangea and chrysanthemums burst / their calyxes, corolla-skins blistering into welts. / Today jonquils slit blue shoots from their sheaths.” As these Korean immigrants carefully work in their adopted garden, they are in fact mirroring their lives— “…ripped from the native / plot,” they will grow and survive.

Suji Kwock Kim’s poems retell the history and the stories of her divided homeland and her divided self through vivid language 236 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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rich with music and Korean culture. Kim’s poems will ask questions, however unpleasant, however painful. Suji Kwock Kim’s Notes from the Divided Country is a beautiful balance of Korea and its immigrants’ history and future. Her poems prove that something does live on from one generation to the next.

—Reviewed by Melanie Martin McCallum, Shara. Song of Thieves. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. 72 pages. $12.95.

Shara McCallum’s Song of Thieves is a spare but rewarding book of lyrical poems examining place and identity. McCallum creates a world that ventures into the dark and light territory of a Jamaican woman’s heritage. These poems are loving and resilient, rhythmic and confident, without falling into the realm of sentimentality.

McCallum manifests the magnificence of her heritage, which wholeheartedly celebrates her paternal, as well as maternal, Jamaican roots. What might be considered a fast read should not be misconstrued as a work with no substance—these poems are full of richness. The opening poem, “Now the Guitar Begins,” has eleven sections. Section three, entitled “Fate,” plucks with cohesive lyricism and strums with a chord-like dissonance at the complexity of a father and daughter’s relationship: Under the shadow of the banyan, I see our lives revealed.

Dark and light twinned within each cell, I was born with a truth even he could not bear.

Even with this “twinned” nature, the daughter feels disconnected from her father. The voice in “Fate” also reveals an exile from the land as well as from the father: And for that, I have been cast out.

Beloved before any other, I was once the brightest star

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in his heavens.

How does he think— now exiled—I can live?

There is a helix of adoration and loss between the father and daughter, and the daughter knows she can never escape this complex love. These poems are sparks of crystalline light in the sand, sparkling in the abundance of so much more. They rejoice in the wisdom of a woman and a poet.

The collection is divided into five sections. Section two is immersed with musical, folklore-like mythology. The poem “Wolves” is reminiscent of an elder passing down an oral folktale.

“The Story of Tanglehair” is a prose poem that skillfully portrays a child who must deal with the consequences of her actions— “…Remembering the pain before, Tanglehair ran far into the woods and found herself in a thicket, caught by her roots.” These roots are the roots of Tanglehair’s locks and are also a clever metaphor for the daughter’s heritage.

“The Land of Look Behind” is a wonderful long poem in section three with musical allusions to childhood songs, and the poem captures the physical beauty and sounds of Jamaica juxtaposed against the inner isolation of an expatriate: In my own land, I have become a tourist, a visitor from foreign. But once, as a child in my grandmother’s garden, beneath blossoms, I would spin.

The whole world tilted toward me then…

At one time the daughter was a part of everything around her. She was carefree and had a connection to her family and land: Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower so sweet.

But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

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How do you become what you are when you are dislocated from where you are from? This is a hard question to answer, but McCallum answers it by examining the daughter’s history and how that history motivates the daughter to address her place in the world.

Section four illuminates ties that cannot be broken. In “Planting,” “Granny says the land’s memory / is long. And a land that knew terror / will yield no fruit.” And in the poem “Facing It,” McCallum compels us to see the ties to history are universal, when she writes: “And we were, she and I. / And I believed in the night / more fiercely, believed / in my mother, my hand wrapt / in her skirt, moving back and forth / across my face, her face.…” These are small ubiquitous silhouettes of a mother frozen in her child’s memory. “Catechism” elucidates how a mother’s obligation to nurture her daughter dirties her vision of life due to her daughter’s maturing: “Her mother watches with an air / of disbelief, already hears whispers / of her daughter’s name / in the mouths of passing men.” It is safe to say she fears her daughter also “hears” these “whispers.”

In section five, Song of Thieves culminates with “My Father’s Words,” where a daughter embraces the past to regain some of the loss in their relationship: Once my father was a bird with wings of longing and despair, a field of words blossoming in my ear, telling me: my child, this is all there is.

McCallum’s poems are symbiotic in their joy and pain. Their dual nature gives these sparse gems opulence and depth. There is no fat, here; no room to finagle. Shara McCallum’s Song of Thieves bravely elucidates exile and loss, celebrates life, examines hurt, and delineates the true identity of a soul searcher.

—Reviewed by Curtis L. Crisler Rogoff, Jay. How We Came to Stand on That Shore. Montgomery, AL: River City Publishing, 2003. 97 pages. $20.00.

Jay Rogoff ’s collection How We Came to Stand on That Shore is an intriguing poetic exploration of the history of a family of Jewish Crab Orchard Review ◆ 239

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immigrants and their struggle to acclimate to America culture while preserving their own cultural identity and values. Along with the poet’s other explorations in this collection, the reader is treated to a world in motion through Rogoff ’s vision of the past and its place in his observations and understanding of the present.

The first section, entitled “How We Came to Stand on That Shore,” focuses mostly on a Jewish family’s quest to become American citizens. These poems are about a patriarch named Zaydee, and his wife and family, and how they discover and share American mores, but also how they learn to add their own uniqueness to this mosaic. The first poem “Seltzer” illustrates the vision of this America of the new and old seen through the eyes of these immigrants: They look out through the yet-unwavering glass at a continent to conquer, a shining sky (New Lots Avenue, where boys in payis and black fur-felt hats belt a stickball, their ears opened to the stubborn thunder of the el’s cattle-cars overhead), and they stare together at the siphon with all its bottled trouble, on the table standing blue and solid as all time.

Rogoff takes away the isolation of the autobiographical “I” to examine the meaning of minute instances that become moments of epiphany in a child’s life. These moments are apparent in the poem “Welcome to the Family” where Rogoff paints an illuminating scene of a grandfather’s burial and how a grandson’s nausea will always recall the exact moment in time of the event when the boy asserts: ...I made the rabbi laugh: gurgling and babbling. I puked on my father’s new suit, but I can’t remember.

My goggle-eyes couldn’t focus the carved Hebrew letters of my name.

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anxiety, and the rites of passage shows a writer who is a skillful technician with the emotions that energize his poetics.

The poem “Did the Black and White Movies Make My Mother?” reveals the dark playfulness of a mother enjoying her life through the lens of Hollywood’s leading actresses: Joan Crawford, Veronica Lake, and Ingrid Bergman. Rogoff balances a Jewish matriarchal history against a Jewish patriarchal history by addressing the mother’s need to rebel and become an immigrant who fully acclimates to American culture. The mother “ditched / the family candy store, having fobbed / her shift off on my wallflower aunt, promising / introductions, to snuggle down in the dark.…””

In the title poem, “How We Came to Stand on That Shore,” the son’s father tells him, “‘This place was gorgeous then,’” and elaborates more by saying, “‘I loved your mother, then,’” reflecting on the pain from the passing of time, only to deal with the realization of the present. And when the father declares to the son, “‘You / are the best thing I have done,’” the connection between the generations that reaches across the pain and disappointment is strong enough to carry them into the future.

In the second section of the book, “Transportations,” Rogoff uses language, literature, music, and painting as tropes to explore the experiences of becoming an adult who is more or less comfortable as a part of the culture around him. In “The Invention of English,” the less comfortable side of this is summed up when he writes: Is there time to teach ourselves a tongue to live by, to learn to utter love?

Strangers, we must strip our lives and scratch in the stutter and spit of brute speech, the impossible anchor of this English.

These “Transportations” through a wider world range from musings on “The Rock and Roll Angel,” “George Herbert,” “Hogan’s Bar, Galway,” and “Redon Discovers Color,” where the painter’s explorations grow, like the poet’s, to a new point of view: …Redon brought brush with color and color and color to them, color that would refuse to sleep at night, always keeping from him mere light of day.

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In the sequence that is third section of the book, “First Hand,” and in the last section of the book, “Scattering Bright,” we see the range of the poet as he takes us first through the experiences of working on a dairy farm in “First Hand” and then into some of his most lyrical and evocative writing in the poems which complete the collection in “Scattering Bright.” Whether examining the muck of the barn or the fragrance of lilac, the weight of milk or “a kiss above all kisses, / inviting like a glove’s / slap across the chin,” Rogoff illuminates the world through his poems and invites us in, as he writes in “Awakening”: “I'm neither hoping that you telephone / nor praying that a climax knocks you dead, // just that you peek through….”

—Reviewed by Curtis L. Crisler

Menes, Orlando Ricardo, editor. Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004.

157 pages. $14.00.

Poetry anthologies seem to exist for every conceivable genre, sub-genre, bad genre or bad idea in poetry. Orlando Ricardo Menes’s latest editing task has brought us Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred, a valuable addition to the growing number of anthologies. The book does important work in gathering the writings of Latino poets, and, most notably, embracing the mixed religious heritage of the Americas. As Menes writes in his introduction, “because of Latin America’s mixture of cultures, traditional Catholicism exists alongside other spiritualities of African or indigenous origin.” Menes presents poets writing from religious perspectives of the American Southwest, the Caribbean, the preColumbus native and African-influenced religions, the belief in nature and beauty as religion, and the expected Los Católicos— Roman Catholics. Renaming Ecstasy is a brief, but excellent, introduction to the contemporary religious writing that reflects the varying beliefs of a diverse range of Latinos.

The anthology’s most intriguing sections are the first three parts.

The first section addresses the religious fusion of Catholic, Aztec, and Pueblo beliefs, known as Aztlán, in the Southwest United States and Mexico. The Caribbean religions and their African influences make up the second section. The third section presents poems based 242 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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on shamanism and Ifá, the sacred art of Yoruba divination. The best poems in these sections are the ones that inform the reader about the religion and, at the same time, move past the basic information to the poet’s own spiritual engagement. In Naomi Quiñonez’s “Good Friday,” she writes: On this my good Friday I do penance on paper and work my way to a rebirth free of reason.

Here, we see how the poets of Aztlán incorporate aspects of Catholic religion. Another of Quiñonez’s poems, “Return to Aztlán,” takes its impetus from the polytheism of the Native American religions: With open veins I take in the shadows of hummingbirds, feathered fusion of small beating wings on the back porch of my travels.

The anthology moves from the centralized civilization of Aztlán outward to the Caribbean islands, rich in natural beauty and rich in religious difference and harmony. The islands are best represented by the poems of Adrián Castro, a babaláwo, or high priest, in the art of Ifá. He combines the Spanish influence of colonization and the African influences first brought through slavery and the African religions. These influences are most evident in the last few lines of “Cancioncita pa la Ceiba/Song for the Sacred Mother Tree”: So we ask Mamita Ceiba to shelter us from heaven’s tears as we watch the years in a lake dance like a holy wave a deeper shade of cha-cha-cha— the dance that put the lid on the jar the dance like her leaf Crab Orchard Review ◆ 243

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the dance like her branch— saludos a la Madre Ceiba Araba iya o The poem praises the Mother Tree—Mamita Ceiba or Madre Ceiba—and acts as a prayer for shelter. A deep sense of the Caribbean islands is evident, both in their natural and physical landscape, and in the landscape of language, the last lines incorporating not only English, but also Spanish and then Yoruba, a dialect from Africa.

Los Católicos poems make up the next section—a conscious decision by Menes to bring closure to the pantheistic-based religions of the first three sections and to introduce the Catholic God. Catholicism is the “unquestioned faith of most Latinos,” and his goal is to show the many other religions of Latinos along with Catholicism in the anthology. This section also functions to separate the religions of God or gods from the last section of the religion of nature and beauty. The poets Menes includes write directly of their experience as Catholics. Virgil Suárez incorporates the nuns in his family as well as parochial school, and in “San Lázaro’s Procession,” a religious holiday that profoundly affected him: …All broken, damaged somehow in this life, intent on kept promises. All on their way to El Rincón de San Lázaro, up on the hill, so far from where these people had started their pilgrimages, to see that old leper in loin cloth, surrounded by his three faithful dogs which lick and heal his festering wounds, the saint the catholic church doesn’t recognize, says is only myth, but what about these believers, moving through on pure will?

Suárez communicates part of his Catholic upbringing in a way that invites the reader into the scene of a procession of sick people, and 244 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

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he uses the scene to question his own faith in the Church. The poets of this section draw heavily from their experiences in the Catholic faith, and their poems work hard to demonstrate their complex interaction with their faith.

After a thorough introduction to the religions of Latinos, Menes next moves into a section called “Alternate Spiritualities: Beauty and Nature as Realms of Sacredness.” Although an excellent consideration, much of the sacredness of poems in this section could easily fit in other sections. A few of the poems absolutely belong under this idea and directly engage the sacredness of beauty and nature. One example is “Heat of Breath” by Valerie Martínez: And so, at the end, the cloud which takes the shape of neck, torso, and foot, exhaled from a mouth in the back, is a cloak, somehow familiar.

Martínez addresses nature and beauty through a cloud, and we can feel her spiritual tie to the cloud and its presence as a religious entity: Whose mouth blows into it with love, loverly, heat of breath, and so, who makes us?

Orlando Ricardo Menes has done us a great favor in Renaming Ecstasy by providing a brief introduction to the expansive spirituality of Latinos. As so often happens in anthologies, readers are left wanting more. The glossary and the appendix essays are helpful in explaining a few central ideas, but an expanded glossary and more explanatory essays would only heighten the enjoyment of the rich experience and language that highlights the anthology. Menes has taken a great idea for an anthology and turned it into an enlightening read through Latino spirituality.

—Reviewed by Kevin McKelvey

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Contributors’ Notes

Francisco Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press).

A native of San Francisco and longtime resident of Spain, his poems have appeared in various anthologies, as well as print and web journals. Author of three chapbooks, he is currently editing an anthology of emerging Latino poets. The founding editor and publisher of Momotombo Press, he is an editorial consultant at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Joy Arbor’s poems have appeared in Many Mountains Moving, Hayden’s Ferry Review, So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets, and previously in Crab Orchard Review. She has an MFA from Mills College and is currently a Ph.D. student in Composition and Rhetoric at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the editor of Plains Song Review.

William Archila earned his MFA degree in poetry from the University of Oregon, where he received the Fighting Fund Fellow Award. His poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, North American Review, and Rattle, among others.

Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was educated there and in England. In 1994, she moved to the United States. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles.

Her first novel, In the Shadow of Silence, will be published by Interlink Books in October 2004.

Ned Balbo received the 2003 Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and the 2002 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. His second collection, Lives of the Sleepers, received the 2004 Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and will appear from University of Notre Dame Press.

Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. Her most recent books of poems are Wild With It (Sheep Meadow Press) and Madly in Love (Carnegie-Mellon University Press). Her poems and translations have appeared or will appear in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, New England 246 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly. She is working on a new translation of C.P. Cavafy, One of Their Gods: The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy.

Lory Bedikian received her BA from UCLA and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon.

Jenny Benjamin-Smith has had poems published in the New York Quarterly, Poetry Motel, Wisconsin Review, Iowa Woman, pith..., and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She teaches literature to high school students in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Danit Brown’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train, One Story, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, and Seattle Review, among others.

Joseph Campana is a native of upstate New York. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, and Colorado Review, and are forthcoming in Conjunctions. His first collection, The Book of Faces, a meditation on the films, face, and figure of Audrey Hepburn, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2005. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

C.P. Cavafy (1863–1933) was born Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis in Alexandria, Egypt. Perhaps the most original and influential Greek poet of the last century, Cavafy never offered a volume of his poems for sale during his lifetime, instead distributing privately printed pamphlets to friends and relatives. Close to one-third of his poems were never printed in any form while he lived. In book form, Cavafy’s poems were first published without dates before World War II and reprinted in 1949. PÍÍMATA (The Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy) appeared posthumously in 1935 in Alexandria.

Richard Cecil teaches in the Department of English and the Honors College of Indiana University, as well as in the Spalding University brief-residency MFA Program. He is the author of four books of poetry: Einstein’s Brain, Alcatraz, In Search of the Great Dead, and Twenty-First Century Blues, which will be published in 2004 by Southern Illinois University Press.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 247

Contributors’ Notes

Susanna Childress is a recipient of the National Society of Arts and Letters 2003 Life Career Award in Poetry, an AWP Intro Award, and was a runner-up in the Mississippi Review Poetry Contest and the 2003 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review. She is a graduate student at Florida State University.

Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and teaches writing at Everett Community College and the University of Washington’s Rome Center. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Camargo Foundation (France), and the Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission. Recent poems appear in Verse and Ninth Letter.

Silvia Curbelo is the author of two collections of poems, The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press) and The Geography of Leaving (Silverfish Review Press). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Notre Dame Review, Tiferet, and in the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (forthcoming in 2005). A native of Cuba, she lives in Tampa, Florida, and is managing editor of Organica magazine.

Bianca Diaz has poems appearing in Blue Mesa Review, Fourteen Hills, Gulf Stream, Alligator Juniper, Mochila Review, and Ellipsis, where her poem “Finds” was the winner of the 2004 Ellipsis Prize, chosen by Claudia Rankine. She is originally from Miami, Florida, and is a recent graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program.

Ana Doina is a Romanian-born American writer, with an MA in Philosophy and History from the University of Bucharest, Romania.

She now lives in New Jersey with her family. Her poems and essays have been published in Pinyon Poetry, North American Review, Rattle, California Quarterly, and the anthologies Inside Grief, American Diaspora: Poetry of Exile, and Red, White, and Blues.

Qwo-Li Driskill is a Cherokee Two-Spirit/Queer also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee, and Osage ascent. His work appears in numerous publications including Many Mountains Moving, Red Ink, and The Raven Chronicles. He will be pursing a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University in 2004. His first book of poetry is forthcoming. Qwo-Li’s webiste is www.dragonflyrising.com.

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Contributors’ Notes

Camille Dungy has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Cave Canem, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, and on the website Poetry Daily. She currently teaches creative writing at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

Phebus Etienne was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and grew up in East Orange, New Jersey. She completed writing programs at Rider University and New York University. Her poems have appeared in The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Poet Lore, and The Best of Callaloo: Poetry. She received a 2001 poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a grant from the Whiting Foundation.

Blas Falconer is an Assistant Professor of English at Austin Peay State University where he teaches poetry and memoir. His work has most recently appeared in the Lyric Review and Blue Mesa Review.

Sascha Feinstein won the 1999 Hayden Carruth Award for his poetry collection Misterioso (Copper Canyon Press). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Recent awards include a 2002 poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. He is Professor of English at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where he edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature.

Teresa R. Funke is the author of Remember Wake, a novel based on a true story from World War II. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the 2003 Fish Short Story Prize Anthology, Tampa Review, Under the Sun, and In Posse Review’s Multi-Ethnic Anthology on Web del Sol. One of her essays was listed as a Notable Essay of 2002 in Best American Essays. She is currently finishing a collection of women’s stories from WW II. Visit her website at www.teresafunke.com.

Cameron K. Gearen’s chapbook Night, Relative to Day was published in March 2004 as winner of the Aldrich Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Antioch Review, Fence, Phoebe, and Poetry Northwest. She grew up in Chicago and lives in Connecticut.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 249

Contributors’ Notes

Lea Goldberg (1911–1970) was born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, spent her early childhood in Russia, and returned with her family after the 1917 Revolution to their home in Kovno, Lithuania. She attended the University of Kovno, and then Berlin University (where she earned a doctorate in Semitic studies in 1933) and the University of Bonn. In 1935 she settled in Tel Aviv, where she became one of Israel’s leading intellectuals and poets and the founder of the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (which she chaired from 1952 until her death). A prolific and versatile writer, Lea Goldberg’s work includes lyrical poetry, literary criticism, books for children, and translations of European classics into Hebrew.

Kevin A. González is a Renk Poetry Fellow in the MFA Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has work forthcoming in Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, and Kestrel.

Sapna Gupta was born in India and grew up in Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She now lives in Chicago. “Rajni Loves le Cancan” is her first publication.

John Guzlowski’s poems are mostly his parents’ experience as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. A number of these poems appear in his chapbook Language of Mules. Jezyk Mulow i Inne Wiersze, a PolishEnglish edition of these and other poems, has been published by Biblioteka Slaska in Katowice, Poland. His poems have appeared in Mississippi Review and Exquisite Corpse. In 2001, he received an Illinois Arts Council Award. He teaches American Literature at Eastern Illinois University.

Nathalie Handal is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and writer. She was named one of the ten “Arab Writers of Note” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her poetry book, The Lives of Rain, is forthcoming, and she is working on two major theatrical projects. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, and currently teaches at Columbia University.

Donna Hemans was born in Jamaica, and currently resides in Maryland. Her first novel, River Woman, was a finalist for the Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award in 2003 and co-winner of the 2003-4 Towson 250 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

University Prize for Literature. She has taught at Georgetown University and is also an instructor at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda.

She received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University.

Leticia Hernández-Linares’s work has appeared in Frontiers, Puerto Del Sol, and in the anthologies Cantos Al Sexto Sol: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac Writings and This Bridge We Call Home. In 1996, the Academy of American Poets awarded her the William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize. She currently resides in San Francisco.

Luisa Igloria is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program and Department of English at Old Dominion University.

She is a recipient of various of national and international literary awards, including Finalist in the 2003 Larry Levis Editors Prize for Poetry and many awards in the Phillipines. She has published five books of poetry, including Blood Sacrifice and In the Garden of the Three Islands. She is the editor of Not Home but Here: Writing from the Filipino Diaspora.

Laura Johnson is in the Ph.D. program for Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her poetry has appeared in Cream City Review, North American Review, and Shenandoah.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American living in Houston. He is a physician and an active member of Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders. His poems have appeared in Cutbank and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He is currently a student in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s first collection of poems, Wild Greens, was published by Red Hen Press. She has also published a chapbook, Fig, which won the chapbook contest from the Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press. Her poems have appeared in Pavement Saw, 13th Moon, Room of One’s Own, Atlanta Review, and Whiskey Island.

Holly Karapetkova is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared in The Formalist, Calyx, and other literary journals.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 251

Contributors’ Notes

Sarah Kennedy is the author of three books of poems, including Flow Blue (Elixir Press) and Double Exposure (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), and is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (University Press of Virginia). Her fourth book, Consider the Lilies, is forthcoming from David Robert Books in Fall 2004.

Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida. Her second poetry book, Dog Angel, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poetry and prose appears in the Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry New Zealand, Denver Quarterly, Malahat Review, and Field.

Sharon Kessler grew up on Long Island, in the town of Bohemia, New York. She received her BA from SUNY Binghamton and her MA from Stanford University, where she was a Mirrielees Scholar in Literature and Creative Writing. She is the author of a chapbook of poems, The Insistence of Names, and her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She lives in Israel, where she has taught English as a Second Language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Open University. She works at home as a freelance editor and translator.

Vandana Khanna’s first book of poetry, Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, Crazyhorse, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers Program.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of two poetry collections, a chapbook, a children’s book, a PBS award-winning poetry video, and is editor of four anthologies, including Glencoe/McGraw-Hill’s African American Literature Reader. He is co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art. He is Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, and is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Chicago State University.

Jeffrey Levine is the author of Mortal, Everlasting, winner of the 2000 Transcontinental Poetry Award from Pavement Saw Press. He 252 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

Contributors’ Notes

has won the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, and Quarterly West. He is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press, an independent literary press located in Dorset, Vermont.

Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. She received her MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She is currently finishing her manuscript, “Meanwhile, in the Crocodile Den,” and lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. She is the co-curator of Pete’s Big Salmon, a bi-weekly reading series in Brooklyn.

Elline Lipkin recently received her Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston. She has poems forthcoming in the Texas Review and North American Review.

Mike Maniquiz is enrolled in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno, where he was awarded the Philip Levine Scholarship. His poems are included in the anthology A Habit of Shores: Filipino Poetry and Verses from English, ’60s to the ’90s, and have been published in North American Review, Journal of Kentucky Studies, and Asian Pacific American Review.

Sharon May’s stories have appeared in Maµnoa, Alaska Quarterly Review, Other Voices, and Crab Orchard Review, and have been cited in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. She is guest editor of In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing from Cambodia, published by University of Hawai’i Press as part of the Maµnoa series of international writing.

She is currently completing a collection of short stories.

Shara McCallum is the author of two books of poems, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She teaches creative writing and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University and lives with her husband and daughter in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 253

Contributors’ Notes

Orlando Ricardo Menes teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame. His books include Rumba Atop the Stones (Peepal Tree Press) and the anthology Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe).

Kristin Naca lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her partner Tara Lockhart. Currently, Kristin Naca is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Her work is forthcoming in the anthology Pinoy Poetics.

Thomas O’Malley was raised in Ireland and in England. He immigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1984 at the age of sixteen. He is a graduate of UMass Boston and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, Blue Mesa Review, and New Millennium Writings. His first novel, In the Garden of Gethsemane, will be published by Little, Brown & Company in the spring of 2005.

Mike Perez just graduated from the University of Houston with an MFA in Creative Writing, and is working on his first manuscript, “A Homo Scale of Hardness,” which has nothing to do with Viagra.

Sara Pipher’s work has appeared in Hope, E Magazine, Red River Review, and Nervy Girl. She is a graduate student in Creative Nonfiction Writing at George Mason University. She lives and works in Washington, D.C. Pamela Porter’s poems have been published in Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, North American Review, Quarterly West, Seattle Review, and her work is forthcoming in Nimrod and the Texas Observer.

Susan Azar Porterfield’s work has appeared in the Poetry Ireland Review, Nimrod, North American Review, and Mid-American Review.

Christine Rhein is a former automotive engineer and a current stayat-home mother in Brighton, Michigan. Her poetry has appeared in the Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Margie, Literal Latté, Atlanta Review, The MacGuffin, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review.

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Contributors’ Notes

Roxana Rivera (1977–2003) was a first-year MFA student in poetry and graduate teaching assistant at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies and English from California State University Long Beach.

Jorge Sánchez received an MFA from the University of Michigan.

He lives, teaches, and tries to write in Chicago. “Relic,” a poem from his manuscript “The Golden Age of Exile,” is for his father, Jorge L. Sánchez.

A. Sandosharaj’s essays have appeared or will appear in River City, Massachusetts Review, and bar-tle-by. She is currently a Doctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland, where she toils away at a memoir.

Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian-American poet and editor. She grew up in the Arab world and attended college in the United States.

Her poems have appeared in The Poetry of Arab Women, Atlanta Review, and Flyway Literary Review.

Betsy Sholl’s newest book is Late Psalm, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004.

Lilvia Soto grew up in Mexico and started learning English at sixteen.

She has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook and has taught at Harvard and other universities. Her academic publications have appeared in various countries, her Spanish-language poetry in Spain, and her Englishlanguage poetry in the United States. She resides in Tucson, Arizona, where she is writing her memoir and translating books of poetry.

Susan Sterling received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and has taught at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, North American Review, Marlboro Review, and The Best American Sports Writing: 1998.

Lynne Thompson is a California poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Louisiana Literature, Poetry International, and Solo. Her chapbook We Arrive By Accumulation was published by SeaMoon Press.

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 255

Contributors’ Notes

Angela Narciso Torres was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Manila, Phillipines. Her poetry appears in North American Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, and Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas (Calyx Books). She won second prize in the 2003 James Hearst Poetry Prize competition. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

J.L. Torres holds an MFA from Columbia University and teaches at Plattsburgh State (SUNY). He has published fiction and poetry in the Americas Review, Denver Quarterly, Bilingual Review, Puerto del Sol, Connecticut Review, and Poetry Motel.

Beverly Tsao’s poem “Midwife” is dedicated to her grandmother, Elta Toole, whose family fled Ireland for religious and political freedom in America, but found the sacrifice of family and cultural heritage a dear price to pay. After completing a Ph.D. in English Literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Beverly Tsao plans to realize her grandmother’s unfulfilled dream of return to this mystical island of the ancestral past.

Heather Villars lives and writes in Seattle, Washington.

Eamonn Wall is a native of Enniscorty, County Wexford, Ireland.

Refuge at DeSoto Bend, his fourth collection of poetry, will be published by Salmon Publishing in 2004. He lives in St. Louis and teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

256 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Title Index After That (ptry). Betsy Sholl Against Roses (ptry). Steve Kistulentz Alexandria (ptry). Joseph Campana Alias (ptry). Cameron K. Gearen All the Way from America (fctn). Thomas O’Malley Annual Light (prose). Robin Farabaugh April 17th (fctn). Sharon May Arabia Petra (ptry). Jeffrey Levine Árbol, El (ptry). Roxana Rivera Art of Exile, The (ptry). William Archila At Three A.M. (ptry). Daniel Anderson Aubade with a Thistle Bush Holding Six Songs (ptry).

Oliver de la Paz Baladna (ptry). Nathalie Handal Bats (ptry). Mary Quade Berlin Snapshots (ptry). Joy Arbor Blessing (ptry). Sara Quinn Rivara Bonne Maman (ptry). Elline Lipkin Border, The (ptry). Adrianne Kalfopoulou Break in the Storm (ptry). Stacey Gillett Coyle Bruise (ptry). Melissa Crowe Capriccio in the Crazy Mountains (ptry). Joel Brouwer Charcoal Study: Dancer with a Fan (ptry).

Alexandra van de Kamp Checkpoint: Buenos Aires (ptry). Pamela Porter Citizenship (ptry). Lilvia Soto City, The (ptry/trans). C.P. Cavafy/Aliki Barnstone City Where—I’m Told—My Mother Was Young, The (ptry).

Jesse Lee Kercheval Con Canela, Miel, y Fe (ptry). Roxana Rivera Crux, The (ptry). J.L. Torres Cuento, Un (ptry). Roxana Rivera Dear History, (ptry). Shara McCallum Dien Bien Phu (ptry). Kevin Ducey Difference, The (ptry). Kevin Craft Dressing Vincenzo (ptry). Jenny Benjamin-Smith Dropping (fctn). Linda Mannheim Ellis Island (ptry). Eamonn Wall Enigmatic (ptry). Anthony Butts

9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1):

215 130 72 118 99 136 92 171 203 34 30 68

9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1):

136 168 31 169 174 148 42 43 40 200

9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2):

184 219 76 166

9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1):

209 226 200 178 74 81 45 14 230 41

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 257

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Epitaph for the Musculature of the Neck (ptry).

Oliver de la Paz Evening with Andrew Jackson (ptry). Qwo-Li Driskill Exile’s Collage (ptry). Francisco Aragón Exiles (ptry/trans). C.P. Cavafy/Aliki Barnstone First Love (ptry). Taije Silverman First Stone, The (ptry). Vievee Francis Five Thousand Miles from Maine, 1898 (ptry).

Sophie Wadsworth For My American Lover, Upon My Leaving (ptry).

Holly Karapetkova For the Late-Nineteenth Century American Orphan: Travel Tips (prose). Heather Villars Found in a Shoe Box Labeled “Keep” (ptry). Kevin Stein Ghost of Weather, The (ptry). Bruce Bond Given Account, The (ptry). Blas Falconer Halation (ptry). Bianca Diaz Handwriting in America (ptry). Nancy Eimers Hanover Museum: Lucea, Jamaica, 2000 (ptry).

Shara McCallum Hard Grace (ptry). Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Harvest (fctn). Donna Hemans Hija Americana, Una (prose). Teresa R. Funke Holy Week (ptry). Jim Daniels If I Could Enter Your Spine as a Fish (ptry). Anne Keefe Impediments (ptry). Betsy Sholl In a Time of Drought (ptry). Betsy Sholl In the Field of Cement Animals (fctn). Amy Knox Brown In the Port (ptry/trans). C.P. Cavafy/Aliki Barnstone Interior Lighting (ptry). Elton Glaser Intersection (ptry). Sean Serrell Jasmine (ptry). Melissa Kwasny Julie’s Brush with Death (prose). Liz Stefaniak Julio, El Barbero (ptry). Kevin A. González Key Points from the Assimilation Pamphlet (ptry).

Phebus Etienne Knowledge of the Body (ptry). Missy-Marie Montgomery Last Day at Nyadzi, The (fctn). Paula Nangle Latching On, Falling Off (ptry). Beth Ann Fennelly Lebanon (ptry). Susan Azar Porterfield Long and Short (ptry). S. Beth Bishop Love Letters (ptry). Katharine Whitcomb Making Merit (fctn). Sara Pipher Mandas (ptry). Roxana Rivera Mandelstam (ptry). Joel Brouwer

258 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

9(1): 67 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1):

90 29 74 194 87 205

9(2): 150 9(2): 153 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2):

197 34 114 84 80 177

9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2):

126 61 159 44 128 192 217 1 75 118 174 134 183 123 112

9(1): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1):

165 48 82 186 32 210 125 206 39

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Manifestations (ptry). Luisa Igloria Maria Liberita Graziani Beniamino (ptry).

Jenny Benjamin-Smith Mary Benjamin, 1942 (ptry). Jenny Benjamin-Smith Medicine Show (ptry). Laura Johnson Meheba Children (ptry). Fady Joudah Midwife (ptry). Beverly Tsao Migrant Earth (ptry). Deema K. Shehabi Modular (fctn). James P. Othmer Mosh (ptry). Anne Keefe Moss (ptry). Jacqueline Jones LaMon My Father Talks of 1946 (ptry). Christine Rhein My Mother at JFK (ptry). Vandana Khanna Nameless Journey (ptry/trans). Lea Goldberg/Sharon Kessler Naming the Birds (prose). Shara McCallum Noah (ptry). Ana Doina Nude in Oils and Sand (ptry). Elton Glaser Occasionals (ptry). Nancy Eimers Of Harvest and Flight (ptry). Deema K. Shehabi Oh! On an April Morning, (ptry). Neil Shepard Old Man Grier (ptry). Orlando Ricardo Menes On Motions of Death (ptry). Oliver de la Paz Our Wexford People (ptry). Eamonn Wall Out of Motown (ptry). Traci Dant Pennsylvania (ptry). Gabriel Welsch Pilgrim Soul (prose). Debra Marquart Poland (ptry). John Guzlowski Postcards (fctn). Susan Sterling Provider (ptry). Donald Platt purgatory (ptry). Quraysh Ali Lansana Rajni Loves le Cancan (fctn). Sapna Gupta Reader (ptry). Eamonn Wall Relic (ptry). Jorge Sánchez Remembering Roxana (prose). Allison Joseph Roberto Clemente (ptry). Ada Limón Roots (ptry). Richard Cecil Reunion Scripture Two (ptry). Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Sacrifice (ptry). Yahya Frederickson Saints of Ire (ptry). Nicholas Samaras Salsa Dancing (ptry). J.L. Torres Santo Domingo (ptry). Susanna Childress Scarecrow (ptry). Fady Joudah seeing what awaited her, she took the ghost path home (ptry).

Camille Dungy Several Years Before My Birth (prose). A. Sandosharaj

9(1): 122 9(2): 43 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2):

44 142 146 227 214 90 129 135 187 168 120 179 87 120 78 212 178 179 70 229 46 208 145 134 129 166 170 47 228 210 195 172 77 124 88 170 224 80 145 110

9(2): 189

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 259

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Shape Note Singings (ptry). Braden Welborn Singular (ptry). Maggie Smith Smalls’ Paradise, 1929 (ptry). Sascha Feinstein Song for Two Immigrants (ptry). Lynne Thompson Spider-Man Considers a Career Change (ptry).

Elizabeth Knapp Story of the Missing Fingertip on My Dad’s Right Hand, The (ptry). Mike Perez Sunflower Sutra (ptry). Neil Shepard Sweat (ptry). Leticia Hernández-Linares Tel Aviv 1935 (ptry/trans). Lea Goldberg/Sharon Kessler Thanksgiving (fctn). Danit Brown Thieves of Warsaw (ptry). John Minczeski Tita’s Soto (ptry). Roxana Rivera To Return to San Juan (ptry). Angela Narciso Torres To the Xicana in the Mirror (ptry). Roxana Rivera To Walt Whitman in Heaven (ptry). Betsy Sholl Transparencies (ptry). Bruce Bond Travel Document (ptry). Fady Joudah Travel Plans for Social Outcasts (ptry). Lisa Lewis Traveling (fctn). Latha Viswanathan Trenton, a Solmization, Two Rivers, a Few Tells (ptry).

Matt Donovan Trenzas (ptry). Roxana Rivera Two Open Palms (ptry). Lory Bedikian Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh (ptry). Kristin Naca Viejo Mundo (ptry). Francisco Aragón Villita, La (prose). Rafael Torch Visitors, The (ptry). Silvia Curbelo Wal-Mart Has Plantains (fctn). Sefi Atta Walnut Tree, The (ptry). Sophie Wadsworth We Should Have Turned Right (ptry). Mike Maniquiz What You Remember (ptry). Luisa Igloria Where Are You From, Originally? (ptry). Joy Arbor White Flowers (ptry). Ned Balbo Will of Mary Carryll: 1809, The (ptry). Sarah Kennedy Winters (ptry). Roxana Rivera

260 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1):

207 196 116 221 132

9(2): 183 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1): 9(1): 9(1):

176 137 122 15 164 202 222 199 190 36 144 158 103 71

9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2):

204 41 181 27 212 83 1 202 176 140 32 36 151 208

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004

Author Index Anderson, Daniel At Three A.M. (ptry) Aragón, Francisco Exile’s Collage (ptry) Viejo Mundo (ptry) Arbor, Joy Berlin Snapshots (ptry) Where Are You From, Originally? (ptry) Archila, William The Art of Exile (ptry) Atta, Sefi Wal-Mart Has Plantains (fctn) Balbo, Ned White Flowers (ptry) Bedikian, Lory Two Open Palms (ptry) Benjamin-Smith, Jenny Dressing Vincenzo (ptry) Maria Liberita Graziani Beniamino (ptry) Mary Benjamin, 1942 (ptry) Bishop, S. Beth Long and Short (ptry) Bond, Bruce The Ghost of Weather (ptry) Transparencies (ptry) Brouwer, Joel Capriccio in the Crazy Mountains (ptry) Mandelstam (ptry) Brown, Amy Knox In the Field of Cement Animals (fctn) Brown, Danit Thanksgiving (fctn) Butts, Anthony Enigmatic (ptry) Campana, Joseph Alexandria (ptry) Cavafy, C.P. (translated by Aliki Barnstone) The City (ptry/trans) Exiles (ptry/trans) In the Port (ptry/trans) Cecil, Richard Roots (ptry)

9(1): 30 9(2): 29 9(2): 27 9(2): 31 9(2): 32 9(2): 34 9(2):

1

9(2): 36 9(2): 41 9(2): 45 9(2): 43 9(2): 44 9(1): 32 9(1): 34 9(1): 36 9(1): 40 9(1): 39 9(1):

1

9(2): 15 9(1): 41 9(2): 72 9(2): 76 9(2): 74 9(2): 75 9(2): 77

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 261

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Childress, Susanna Santo Domingo (ptry) Coyle, Stacy Gillett Break in the Storm (ptry) Craft, Kevin The Difference (ptry) Crowe, Melissa Bruise (ptry) Curbelo, Silvia The Visitors (ptry) Daniels, Jim Holy Week (ptry) Dant, Traci Out of Motown (ptry) de la Paz, Oliver Aubade with a Thistle Bush Holding Six Songs (ptry) Epitaph for the Musculature of the Neck (ptry) On Motions of Death (ptry) Diaz, Bianca Halation (ptry) Doina, Ana Noah (ptry) Donovan, Matt Trenton, a Solmization, Two Rivers, a Few Tells (ptry) Driskill, Qwo-Li Evening with Andrew Jackson (ptry) Ducey, Kevin Dien Bien Phu (ptry) Dungy, Camille seeing what awaited her, she took the ghost path home (ptry) Eimers, Nancy Handwriting in America (ptry) Occasionals (ptry) Etienne, Phebus Key Points from the Assimilation Pamphlet (ptry) Falconer, Blas The Given Account (ptry) Farabaugh, Robin Annual Light (prose) Feinstein, Sascha Smalls’ Paradise, 1929 (ptry) Fennelly, Beth Ann Latching On, Falling Off (ptry) Francis, Vievee The First Stone (ptry)

262 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

9(2): 80 9(1): 42 9(2): 81 9(1): 43 9(2): 83 9(1): 44 9(1): 46 9(1): 68 9(1): 67 9(1): 70 9(2): 84 9(2): 87 9(1): 71 9(2): 90 9(1): 74 9(2): 110 9(1): 80 9(1): 78 9(2): 112 9(2): 114 9(1): 136 9(2): 116 9(1): 82 9(1): 87

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Frederickson, Yahya Sacrifice (ptry) Funke, Teresa R. Un Hija Americana (prose) Gearen, Cameron K. Alias (ptry) Glaser, Elton Interior Lighting (ptry) Nude in Oils and Sand (ptry) Goldberg, Lea (translated by Sharon Kessler) Nameless Journey (ptry/trans) Tel Aviv 1935 (ptry/trans) González, Kevin A. Julio, El Barbero (ptry) Gupta, Sapna Rajni Loves le Cancan (fctn) Guzlowski, John Poland (ptry) Handal, Nathalie Baladna (ptry) Hemans, Donna Harvest (fctn) Hernández-Linares, Leticia Sweat (ptry) Igloria, Luisa Manifestations (ptry) What You Remember (ptry) Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne Hard Grace (ptry) Reunion Scripture Two (ptry) Johnson, Laura Medicine Show (ptry) Joseph, Allison Remembering Roxana (prose) Joudah, Fady Meheba Children (ptry) Scarecrow (ptry) Travel Document (ptry) Kalfopoulou, Adrianne The Border (ptry) Karapetkova, Holly For My American Lover, Upon My Leaving (ptry) Keefe, Anne If I Could Enter Your Spine as a Fish (ptry) Mosh (ptry)

9(1): 88 9(2): 159 9(2): 118 9(1): 118 9(1): 120 9(2): 120 9(2): 122 9(2): 123 9(2): 47 9(2): 134 9(2): 136 9(2): 61 9(2): 137 9(1): 122 9(2): 140 9(1): 126 9(1): 124 9(2): 142 9(2): 195 9(2): 146 9(2): 145 9(2): 144 9(2): 148 9(2): 150 9(1): 128 9(1): 129

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 263

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Kennedy, Sarah The Will of Mary Carryll: 1809 (ptry) Kercheval, Jesse Lee The City Where—I’m Told—My Mother Was Young (ptry) Khanna, Vandana My Mother at JFK (ptry) Kistulentz, Steve Against Roses (ptry) Knapp, Elizabeth Spider-Man Considers a Career Change (ptry) Kwasny, Melissa Jasmine (ptry) LaMon, Jacqueline Jones Moss (ptry) Lansana, Quraysh Ali purgatory (ptry) Levine, Jeffrey Arabia Petra (ptry) Lewis, Lisa Travel Plans for Social Outcasts (ptry) Limón, Ada Roberto Clemente (ptry) Lipkin, Elline Bonne Maman (ptry) Maniquiz, Mike We Should Have Turned Right (ptry) Mannheim, Linda Dropping (fctn) Marquart, Debra Pilgrim Soul (prose) May, Sharon April 17th (fctn) McCallum, Shara Dear History, (ptry) Hanover Museum: Lucea, Jamaica, 2000 (ptry) Naming the Birds (prose) Menes, Orlando Ricardo Old Man Grier (ptry) Minczeski, John Thieves of Warsaw (ptry) Montgomery, Missy-Marie Knowledge of the Body (ptry) Naca, Kristin Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh (ptry)

264 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

9(2): 151 9(2): 166 9(2): 168 9(1): 130 9(1): 132 9(1): 134 9(1): 135 9(2): 170 9(2): 171 9(1): 158 9(2): 172 9(2): 174 9(2): 176 9(1): 14 9(1): 145 9(2): 92 9(2): 178 9(2): 177 9(1): 179 9(2): 179 9(1): 164 9(1): 165 9(2): 181

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Nangle, Paula The Last Day at Nyadzi (fctn) O’Malley, Thomas All the Way from America (fctn) Othmer, James P. Modular (fctn) Perez, Mike The Story of the Missing Fingertip on My Dad’s Right Hand (ptry) Pipher, Sara Making Merit (fctn) Platt, Donald Provider (ptry) Porter, Pamela Checkpoint: Buenos Aires (ptry) Porterfield, Susan Azar Lebanon (ptry) Quade, Mary Bats (ptry) Rhein, Christine My Father Talks of 1946 (ptry) Rivara, Sara Quinn Blessing (ptry) Rivera, Roxana El Árbol (ptry) Con Canela, Miel, y Fe (ptry) Un Cuento (ptry) Mandas (ptry) Tita’s Soto (ptry) To the Xicana in the Mirror (ptry) Trenzas (ptry) Winters (ptry) Samaras, Nicholas Saints of Ire (ptry) Sánchez, Jorge Relic (ptry) Sandosharaj, A. Several Years Before My Birth (prose) Serrell, Sean Intersection (ptry) Shehabi, Deema K. Migrant Earth (ptry) Of Harvest and Flight (ptry)

9(1): 48 9(2): 99 9(1): 90 9(2): 183

9(2): 125 9(1): 166 9(2): 184 9(2): 186 9(1): 168 9(2): 187 9(1): 169 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2): 9(2):

203 209 200 206 202 199 204 208

9(1): 170 9(2): 210 9(2): 189 9(1): 174 9(2): 214 9(2): 212

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 265

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Shepard, Neil Oh! On an April Morning, (ptry) Sunflower Sutra (ptry) Sholl, Betsy After That (ptry) Impediments (ptry) In a Time of Drought (ptry) To Walt Whitman in Heaven (ptry) Silverman, Taije First Love (ptry) Smith, Maggie Singular (ptry) Soto, Lilvia Citizenship (ptry) Stefaniak, Liz Julie’s Brush with Death (prose) Stein, Kevin Found in a Shoe Box Labeled “Keep” (ptry) Sterling, Susan Postcards (fctn) Thompson, Lynne Song for Two Immigrants (ptry) Torch, Rafael La Villita (prose) Torres, Angela Narciso To Return to San Juan (ptry) Torres, J.L. The Crux (ptry) Salsa Dancing (ptry) Tsao, Beverly Midwife (ptry) van de Kamp, Alexandra Charcoal Study: Dancer with a Fan (ptry) Villars, Heather For the Late-Nineteenth Century American Orphan: Travel Tips (prose) Viswanathan, Latha Traveling (fctn) Wadsworth, Sophie Five Thousand Miles from Maine, 1898 (ptry) The Walnut Tree (ptry) Wall, Eamonn Ellis Island (ptry) Our Wexford People (ptry) Reader (ptry)

266 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

9(1): 178 9(1): 176 9(2): 9(1): 9(2): 9(1):

215 192 217 190

9(1): 194 9(1): 196 9(2): 219 9(1): 183 9(1): 197 9(2): 129 9(2): 221 9(1): 212 9(2): 222 9(2): 226 9(2): 224 9(2): 227 9(1): 200 9(2): 153

9(1): 103 9(1): 205 9(1): 202 9(2): 230 9(2): 229 9(2): 228

INDEX TO VOLUME NINE — 2004 Welborn, Braden Shape Note Singings (ptry) Welsch, Gabriel Pennsylvania (ptry) Whitcomb, Katharine Love Letters (ptry)

9(1): 207 9(1): 208 9(1): 210

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 267

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2004 All Saints: New and Selected Poems by Brenda Marie Osbey. reviewed by Jon Tribble All Shook Up: Collected Poems about Elvis edited by Will Clemens (with photographs by Jon Hughes). reviewed by Jon Tribble And Her Soul Out Of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis. reviewed by Maria McLeod Archetypal Light by Elizabeth Dodd. reviewed by Douglas Haynes Bellocq’s Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey. reviewed by Melanie Dusseau Beyond the Reach by Deborah Cummins. reviewed by Teresa Joy Kramer Blues Narratives by Sterling D. Plumpp. reviewed by Jon Tribble Born Southern and Restless by Kat Meads. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan edited by Suzanne Kamata. reviewed by Betsy Taylor Cabato Sentora by Ray Gonzalez. reviewed by Jon Tribble Casino of the Sun by Jerry Williams. reviewed by Chad Parmenter Celebrities in Disgrace: A Novella and Stories

by Elizabeth Searle. reviewed by Tabaré Alvarez Chick-Lit 2: (No Chic Vics) edited by Cris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell, and Elizabeth Sheffield. reviewed by Beth Lordan Cornbread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing edited by John Egerton. reviewed by Curtis L. Crisler Crossing the Snow Bridge by Fatima Lim-Wilson. reviewed by Paul Guest The Dance House by Joseph Marshall III. reviewed by James Gill The Devil’s Garden by Adrian Matejka. reviewed by Chad Parmenter Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand by Steven V. Cramer. reviewed by Josh Bell

268 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

4(1): 240 7(2): 255

5(1): 250 7(2): 260 8(1): 266 9(1): 233 5(2): 232 3(1): 247 3(2): 264

4(2): 261 9(1): 247 7(2): 249

3(1): 245

8(2): 252

3(2): 267 4(2): 258 9(1): 240 3(1): 242

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2004 Dipleasures of the Table: memoir as caricature

by Martha Ronk. reviewed by Mary Stepp Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland. reviewed by Cynthia Roth Dry Rain by Pete Fromm. reviewed by Greg Schwipps Fakebook: Improvisations on a Journey Back to Jazz

by Richard Terrill. reviewed by Adrian Matejka Fire From the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru edited and translated by Susan E. Benner & Kathy S. Leonard. reviewed by Jenni Williams Five Shades of Shadow by Tracy Daugherty. reviewed by Benjamin Percy Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather by Lee Gutkind. reviewed by Mark Vannier Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-95) by Amiri Baraka. reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox Galileo’s Banquet by Ned Balbo. reviewed by Melanie Jordan Rack Girl Reel by Bonnie J. Morris. reviewed by Brett M. Griffiths-Holloway Hammerlock by Tim Seibles. reviewed by Adrian Harris (Adrian Matejka) Hell’s Bottom, Colorado by Laura Pritchett. reviewed by Tabaré Alvarez Her Kind of Want by Jennifer S. Davis. reviewed by Anne Clarkin The Hour Between Dog & Wolf by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr How We Came to Stand on That Shore by Jay Rogoff. reviewed by Curtis L. Crisler Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color edited by John McNally. reviewed by Adrian Matejka It’s Only Rock and Roll: An Anthology of Rock and Roll Short Stories edited by Janice Eidus and John Kastan. reviewed by Alberta Skaggs Leaving Saturn by Major Jackson. reviewed by Adrian Matejka Living On the Edge: Fiction by Peace Corps Writers edited by John Coyne. reviewed by Chris Kelsey

8(2): 243

4(1): 239 3(1): 244 7(2): 246

4(2): 264

9(1): 228 9(1): 229 3(1): 239 5(1): 249 7(2): 245 5(1): 256 8(1): 250 8(1): 249 3(1): 241 9(2): 239 7(2): 251

5(2): 234

8(1): 259 5(1): 258

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 269

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2004 Lost Wax by Heather Ramsdell. reviewed by Paul Guest The Mastery Impulse by Ricardo Pau-Llosa. reviewed by Chad Parmenter Messenger by R.T. Smith. reviewed by Matt Guenette Middle Ear by Forrest Hamer. reviewed by Adrian Harris (Adrian Matejka) The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture edited by Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta. reviewed by Melanie Martin Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. reviewed by Jon Tribble Misterioso by Sascha Feinstein. reviewed by Adrian Harris (Adrian Matejka) Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes. reviewed by Adrian Harris (Adrian Matejka) Naked by Shuntaro Tanikawa. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Near Breathing, A Memoir of a Difficult Birth by Kathryn Rhett. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Never Be the Horse by Beckian Fritz Goldberg. reviewed by Melanie Jordan Rack News from Down to the Café: New Poems by David Lee. reviewed by Brett M. Griffiths-Holloway Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam edited by Linh Dinh. reviewed by Joey Hale Notes from the Divided Country by Suji Kwock Kim. reviewed by Melanie Martin The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City edited by Bino A. Realuyo. reviewed by Terri Fletcher Ocean Avenue by Malena Mörling. reviewed by Ruth Ann Daugherty Of Flesh & Spirit by Wang Ping. reviewed by Paul Guest One Above & One Below by Erin Belieu. reviewed by Douglas Haynes Open House by Beth Ann Fennelly. reviewed by Melanie Martin Otherhood by Reginald Shepherd. reviewed by Kevin McKelvey

270 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

4(1): 242 9(1): 241 8(1): 264 6(2): 229 8(2): 249

8(2): 247 5(2): 227 5(2): 229 3(2): 266 3(1): 248 6(1): 266 7(1): 229 3(2): 263

9(2): 235 6(2): 238

5(1): 254 3(2): 270 6(2): 228 8(1): 257 9(1): 245

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2004 Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan edited by Michael Steinberg. reviewed by Ira Sukrungruang Prospero’s Mirror: A Translator’s Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction edited by Ilan Stavans. reviewed by Michael McGregor The Ressurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World

by Paul Guest. reviewed by Kevin McKelvey Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred edited by Orlando Ricardo Menes. reviewed by Kevin McKelvey Rise by A. Van Jordan. reviewed by Adrian Matejka Rouge Pulp by Dorothy Barresi. reviewed by Melanie Dusseau The Secret History of Water by Silvia Curbelo. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Selfwolf by Mark Halliday. reviewed by Cynthia Roth Sherpherdess with an Automatic by Jane Satterfield. reviewed by Fred Von Drasek Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction

by Luis Alberto Urrea. reviewed by Tabaré Alvarez Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints by Jack Micheline. reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox Smoke by Dorianne Laux. reviewed by Melinda Yeomans So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks

by Rigoberto González. reviewed by Adrian Harris (Adrian Matejka) Song of Thieves by Shara McCallum. reviewed by Curtis L. Crisler The Spirit Returns by Richard Burgin. reviewed by Carolyn Alessio Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology edited by Charles Harper Webb. reviewed by Melanie Dusseau The Stars, The Earth, The River by Le Minh Khue (translated by Bac Hoai Tran and Dana Sachs; edited by Wayne Karlin). reviewed by Vicky Kepple Tell Me by Kim Addonizio. reviewed by Amy Kucharik

7(1): 239

4(2): 266

9(1): 235

9(2): 242

8(1): 261 8(1): 255 4(2): 259 6(1): 272 7(1): 234 8(1): 253

7(1): 231 6(2): 233 6(2): 224

9(2): 237 8(1): 248 7(2): 257

3(2): 261

6(2): 227

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 271

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2004 Trouble by Mary Baine Campbell. reviewed by Chad Parmenter The Truly Needy and Other Stories by Lucy Honig. reviewed by John Wallace Turn Thanks by Lorna Goodison. reviewed by Kathryn Kerr Turtle Pictures by Ray Gonzalez. reviewed by Jen Neely 25 New Nigerian Poets edited by Toyin Adewale. reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox Under the Red Flag by Ha Jin. reviewed by Katherine Riegel Union by Don Share. reviewed by Kevin McKelvey Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. reviewed by Adrian Harris (Adrian Matejka) Vereda Tropical by Ricardo Pau-Llosa. reviewed by Terri Fletcher Walking Back from Woodstock by Earl S. Braggs. reviewed by Terry Olson What Happens to Me by Chuck Wachtel. reviewed by Fred Von Drasek Whitman’s Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets

by Neeli Cherkovski. reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox Wild Greens by Adrianne Kalfopoulou. reviewed by Jon Tribble Winning the Dust Bowl by Carter Revard. reviewed by Linda Lizut Helstern The Women Carry River Water by Nguyen Quang Thieu (translated by Martha Collins). reviewed by Terry Olson Work Done Right by David Dominguez. reviewed by Danny Wilson You Are Not Here by David Jauss. reviewed by Barbara Eidlin You Come Singing by Virgil Suárez. reviewed by Adrian Harris (Adrian Matejka)

272 ◆ Crab Orchard Review

9(1): 231 6(2): 224 5(1): 252 6(1): 268 7(1): 236 3(2): 260 9(1): 243 6(2): 236

5(2): 230 4(1): 237 6(2): 234 7(1): 225

8(2): 245 7(1): 227 3(2): 268

9(2): 232 9(1): 237 4(2): 263

INDEX OF BOOK REVIEWS — 1997/2004

Book Review Policy Crab Orchard Review’s staff considers for review collections and anthologies of poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction published by small independent and university presses. Please send titles for review consideration to: Jon Tribble, Book Review Editor, Crab Orchard Review, Department of English, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901-4503.

All reviews are written by Crab Orchard Review staff. In the past seven years, the following presses have had titles reviewed in Crab Orchard Review’s pages: Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, FL The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, New York, NY Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, Tempe, AZ BOA Editions, Rochester, NY Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso, TX Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Cleveland, OH Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT David R. Godine, Boston, MA Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA FC2, Normal, IL FMSBW Press, San Francisco, CA The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, NY Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN Green Integer, Los Angeles, CA Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, NY Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, Berkeley, CA Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD Limelight Editions, New York, NY Littoral Books, Los Angeles, CA Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA Lumen Editions/Brookline Books, Cambridge, MA Lyons & Burford, New York, NY Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI New Issues Press, Kalamazoo, MI Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH Red Crane Books, Santa Fe, NM Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, CA River City Publishing, Montgomery, AL The Roundhouse Press, Berkeley, CA

Crab Orchard Review ◆ 273

Seven Stories Press, New York, NY Steerforth Press, South Royalton, VT Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA Tia Chucha Press, Chicago, IL Tupelo Press, Dorset, VT University of Akron Press, Akron, OH University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, AR University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, IA University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI Washington Writersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Publishing House, Washington, DC Zoo Press, Lincoln, NE

274 â&#x2014;&#x2020; Crab Orchard Review

S

I

U

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Southern

Illinois

University

Carbondale

M F A Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing FACULTY IN FICTION

FACULTY IN POETRY

BETH LORDAN MIKE MAGNUSON BRADY UDALL

RODNEY JONES JUDY JORDAN ALLISON JOSEPH

Individualized Course of Study

Small Classes

Support Available for All Admitted MFA Students Contact:

Rodney Jones, Professor Department of English Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois 62901â&#x20AC;&#x201C;4503 phone: (618) 453-6841 fax: (618) 453-8224 email: gradengl@siu.edu

For information and application packet, contact Director of Graduate Studies, English Department, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale IL 62901-4503, phone (618) 453-6894.

Announcements Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press are pleased to announce the 2004 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition selections.

Our final judge, Richard Cecil, selected Victoria Chang’s Circle as the first-prize winner. Mr. Cecil selected Greg Pape’s American Flamingo as the second-prize winner. Both collections will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in April 2005.

We want to thank all of the poets who entered manuscripts in our Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.

Crab Orchard Review’s website has updated information on subscriptions, calls for submissions, contest information and results, and past, current and future issues. Visit us at:

<http://www.siu.edu/~crborchd/>.

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2003 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Birthmark Poems by Jon Pineda “Birthmark is brimming with a wisdom that seems not contrived from literary ambition, but born of a joy for life quite incidental to such ambition. It is the wisdom of Telemachus, the prototypical son, gained from long hours contemplating the missing father, then reconciling to the father’s return. It is a wisdom that begets tenderness and broadcasts, with strength and humility, a vision of contraries reconciled at the core of longing.”

—Richard Katrovas, author of Dithyrambs

“Jon Pineda’s strength lies in an unusual music and his feel for tidewater Virginia and the marvelous stories it tells him. … Birthmark is, like its namesake, tender, bright, lasting, and filled with identity we are called to remark is, if not our own, close enough to feel our own.”—Dave Smith author of The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 80 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2570-5 $13.95 paper

Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2003 Open Competition Award

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Year of the Snake Poems by Lee Ann Roripaugh “This is Lee Ann Roripaugh at the height of her powers. Precise and unforgettable images about family and community make these poems sing and stay with you days after you have gently put the book down.

She is a ‘fish with a third, wide eye’ delivering unflinching truths. I believe that Roripaugh is one of the dozen or so best poets writing in America today.”

—Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man

“What lyrical gems. Poems like diamonds faceted with the Japanese-American diaspora, our lives scattered and thrust into Lee Ann Roripaugh’s utterly exquisite canvas of sky and pen.”

—Lois-Ann Yamanaka, author of Heads by Harry

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review 80 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2569-1 $13.95 paper

Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry FIRST BOOK AWARD 2000, 2001, & 2002 First Book Award Winners TRAIN TO AGRA Poems by Vandana Khanna “Vandana Khanna’s sensual, evocative poems sweep the reader away on a journey of family, culture, and spirituality. ”—Allison Joseph 55 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2405-9 $12.95

WHITE SUMMER Poems by Joelle Biele “These pitch-perfect poems are written with a delicate, meticulous attention to craft and music. …this collection is a joy to read.”—Elizabeth Spires 67 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2468-7 $12.95

CONSOLATION MIRACLE Poems by Chad Davidson “Such a graceful marriage of form and lyric experiment that it's hard to believe Consolation Miracle is a debut.”—Austin Hummell 64 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2541-1 $12.95

For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Crab OrcharD Series In Poetry 2003 FIRST BOOK AWARD BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE Poems by Amy Fleury “The minute I finished Beautiful Trouble, I wished I had copies to give to all my friends: To the poets, of course, who will admire it for its art, but also to those who don't read poetry. Fleury proves that a book of poems need not be baffling or condescending or selfabsorbed. With ordinary words placed with perfect precision, this book throws open dozens of windows onto fresh new ways of seeing, and loving, the world.”

—Ted Kooser, author of Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps “These are troubles beautiful as plain days distilled to the wonder seed.”

—Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft 67 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2598-5 $13.95 paper

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from

For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2004 title

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

Twenty First CENTURY BLUES Poems by Richard Cecil “Twenty First Century Blues speaks to all of us whose lives fall short of the triumphs we had planned. Yet the jaundice in Richard Cecil's eye is offset by clear vision. This book tells bitter truths, redeemed by memory, by wit, by craft, by accurate and resonant details. These poems say ‘I came, I saw, I did not conquer, exactly, but I understood, I laughed, I celebrated by writing this down.’”—Charles Harper Webb

Praise for Richard Cecil “Richard Cecil’s most distinguished poems range persistently along, accumulating data until patterns and conclusions that have been latent become apparent. Again and again a faith in the lurking significance of things pays off, and the early particulars add up to revelation.”—William Stafford “Cecil’s poems are powerful, moving, and original. There is clarity, honesty, and delightful quirkiness. He captures—he recaptures—the human situation. He is just as shocking, radical, and aggravating, in his way, as language poets, for instance, are in theirs. He makes it almost possible—let me say possible—for a well-educated generalist to read poetry again.”—Gerald Stern

Twenty First Century Blues Copublished with Crab Orchard Review

96 pages ISBN 0-8093-2596-9, $27.50 cloth ISBN 0-8093-2597-7, $13.95 paper

Available at bookstores, or from

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2002 & 2003 titles

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

FABULAE

Poems by Joy Katz “Joy Katz is the quintessential storyteller, spinning her marvelous tales out of the gossamer of the imagination, but always with the goal of capturing the flash and flicker of the real world.”—Maura Stanton 59 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2444-x $12.95 paper

MUSE

Poems by Susan Aizenberg “This is an elegant and sustained volume. More importantly, it is an instructive one.”—David Wojahn 63 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2443-1 $12.95 paper

PELICAN TRACKS Poems by Elton Glaser

“These beautifully made poems—rich as redeye gravy, crystalline as Ohio ice— will delight anyone seeking a fresh understanding of the American soul.…Glaser is a national treasure.”—Alice Fulton 91 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2516-0 $12.95 paper

BECOMING EBONY

Poems by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

“Wesley epitomizes the poet as compassionate witness, and with such poets the answer to the question—Did this poem demand to be written?—is always a resounding yes.”—Stuart Dybek 79 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2517-9 $12.95 paper

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from

For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 2001 titles

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

MISERY PREFIGURED Poems by J. Allyn Rosser

“J. Allyn Rosser’s poems are savvy close-readings of her daily experience. She knows how to balance cynicism with the hope for love in language that is freshly minted and full of local surprises. In the words of her own metaphor, she writes with heart and wit about the friction inside the machine of her life.”—Billy Collins 75 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2383-4 $12.95 paper

ThIS COUNTRY OF MOTHERS Poems by Julianna Baggott

“Julianna Baggott has a fierce imagination which probes the ordinary details of a woman’s life and lights up both the sacred and profane. In a poem called ‘Blurbs,’ she half-facetiously hopes for the words ‘sexy,’ ‘elegance,’ and ‘bite’ to be applied to her work. Happily, in this book, she earns all three.”—Linda Pastan 80 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2381-8 $12.95 paper

NAMES ABOVE HOUSES Poems by Oliver de la Paz

“Names above Houses points to a new direction in Asian American poetry in which the creative genius of Oliver de la Paz hangs in the sky as luminous neon verse. He takes the urbane colors of John Berryman and mixes them with the sensuous hues of Arthur Sze. This is a book enriched with unexpected shifts of language, vertical and horizontal perspectives, and a full spectrum of emotion and insight.”—Nick Carbó 78 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2382-6 $12.95 paper

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from

For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress

the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 1999 & 2000 titles

Series Editor, Jon Tribble

The Star-Spangled Banner Poems by Denise Duhamel

“[S]o overwhelming is her relish for life that embarrassment, or titillation when the subject is sexual, just doesn’t stand a chance.”—Booklist 67 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2259-5 $12.95 paper

In Search of the Great Dead Poems by Richard Cecil

“[T]he technical skill and humor on display in this collection make it likely that Cecil’s poems will be read long after he joins that ever-longer roll call of poets who have passed on. . . . [A] remarkable book.”—Quarterly West 111 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2260-9 $12.95 paper

CROSSROADS AND UNHOLY WATER Poems by Marilene Phipps

“[T]his collection embraces awe and woe through curses and praise that unearth a meeting place for the unspeakable as well as culminant beauty— a book of acknowledgment and ritual.”—Yusef Komunyakaa 71 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2306-0 $12.95 paper

WINTER AMNESTIES Poems by Elton Glaser

“Elton Glaser’s poems are classic in the best sense of the word: he achieves stateliness without stuffiness and form without confinement. ”—Lucia Perillo 77 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2305-2 $12.95 paper

Copublished with Crab Orchard Review Available at bookstores, or from

For more information on the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry: www.siu.edu/~crborchd

southern illinois university press P.O. Box 3697 • Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 • 800-346-2680 • FAX 800-346-2681 www.siu.edu/~siupress