Flyway-14.1-fall2011

Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment

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Vol. 14.1

Gilbert Allen Adam Regn Arvidson Jonathan Barrett Claudia Burbank Anna Catone Suzannah Dalzell Julie Dunlop Evelyn Hampton Chad Hanson David Hornibrook Ann Elizabeth Huston Athena Kildegaard Judith Kleck Talia Mailman Maria Marsello Susan McCarty Stefan Milne Amy Patrick Mossman James Norcliffe Andrew Payton Ben Pfeiffer Ian Pisarcik Joseph Powell Sean Prentiss Mary Quade Julia Shipley Nicol Stavlas Cara Stoddard Tegan Swanson Jeff Tigchelaar Amy A. Whitcomb Jake Young

Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment

Cover artist Ladislav R. Hanka: Artist Biography Ladislav R. Hanka lives inKalamazoo, Michigan, and exhibits internationally. His work examines themes of life, death, and transfiguration—nature as the crucible in which man finds a reflection of his own life and meaning. He has had about 100 oneman shows and his etchings can be found in nearly 100 public collections on all continents.

Image:

Bee Tree I

Etching with Beeswax

9” x 16” 1,200.00

Artist’s Note I invested etchings of bur oaks into my beehives hoping the bees might respond and co-create. They did and covered over some images with wax comb while elsewhere they chewed up the paper and removed it with the dead bees and earwigs. Bur oaks are a signature species of prairie state horizons whose visage is engraved in my neural cortex with the finality of a well-wrought etching.

They survive prairie fires and live for centuries, occasionally hosting swarms of bees. And bee trees are pure magic. Bees will mob and kill a raccoon trying to enter the hive, yet tens of thousands of them, each with a stinger, will fly in and out of a miniscule knothole with complete single-mindedness of bee purposes and leave you in peace to stand by and watch. Somehow, you know.

The knowledge of beekeepers predates the written word and appears among the first recorded glyphs in dynastic Egypt and Mesopotamia. The wisdom of beekeepers survived the inquisition, when most folk-healing was cleared from the decks of medicine by the burning of its practitioners. Yet, bees today are not doing well and this has more impact on popular imagination than does the extinction of another bird or frog—more than another inevitable war, famine or terrorist. It is deeply troubling to the man on the street that bees are in trouble and that, finally, is some good news.

Friends of Flyway Flyway Benefactor $100, includes one-year subscription, plus a signed copy of The Horizontal World, by Debra Marquart. Name will appear on an Honor Roll inside the back cover for two years.

Mrs. Loralyn Marie Kokes Mr. David Crain McCunn Flyway Patron $35, includes a one-year subscription Flyway Sponsors Michael Martone & Teresa Pappas Zora Zimmerman

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Journal of Writing and Environment

The terms “migration route” and “flyway” have in the past been used more or less indiscriminately, but ... it seems desirable to designate as migration routes the individual lanes of avian travel from breeding grounds to winter quarters, and as flyways those broader areas into which certain migration routes blend or come together ....

—F.H. Kortright, The Ducks, Geese and Swans of North America

Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment Vol. 3 14.1

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contents

6 editor’s note

160 contributors

writing contests

(Notes From the Field Contest) 8 Winner: Cara Stoddard, Krummholz 16 Runner-up: Evelyn Hampton, Office

(Home Voices Contest) 126 Winner: Andrew Payton, You’re Not Welcome Here 142 Second Place: Tegan Swanson, Everything Rises on an Atoll 156 Third Place: Ian Pisarcik, Veteran’s Day

poetry

24 Anna Catone, Swimming Dog, Drifting Boat 26 Claudia Burbank, Tsunami

34 James Norcliffe, caldera 35 Julie Dunlop, Molecules’ Song 36 Amy Patrick Mossman, Snowline 37 Amy A. Whitcomb, Having Woken Blank Again 50 Julia Shipley, Bird Count 51 Jake Young, At the Edge of the Adirondacks, Hesperidia 61 Jeff Tigchelaar, Standing on the Porch with Charlotte, Watching Her First Storm 62 Ann Elizabeth Huston, Lunch in Long Hoa 71 Suzannah Dalzell, Island County Public Works Field Trip to Glendale Creek 72 Sean Prentiss, How I Come to the River 88 David Hornibrook, Apollo on the Block, Pax America, Pulled Pork

Requests for subscriptions and copies should be sent to the following address: 206 Ross Hall/Department of English Iowa State University/Ames, Iowa 50011-1201 Subscriptions: $24 for one year, $40 for two years Back issues: $10 Foreign subscriptions: add $3 postage charge Submit fiction, nonfiction, and poetry online at flyway.submishmash.com/submit flyway.org flyway.wordpress.com

contents 91 Jonathan Barrett, Gravediggers 93 Stefan Milne, Body of Heritage 105 Gilbert Allen, Latecomers’ Triolet 106 Joseph Powell, Horse Breath 107 Judith Kleck, Silence, I Am Thinking of My Grandmother’s House on Steele Street 121 Maria Marsello, Orchard Suite 123 Athena Kildegaard, Turtle, I Had to Wait, I Gave My Grief

nonfiction 38 Mary Quade, Hatch 53 Adam Regn Arvidson, The Hazards of Collecting Nectar 63 Chad Hanson, An Imaginary Fish 110 Nicol Stavlas, Eva Gray and a Year Passing

fiction

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27 Talia Mailman, Monsters 74 Ben Pfeiffer, Gemstone 94 Susan McCarty, Shearing Day

Flyway welcomes financial support in the form of donations, bequests, and planned gifts. Additionally, please inquire about the Friends of Flyway Fund and patron pages by contacting Sheryl Kamps at flyway@iastate.edu.

Flyway is published with support from the Iowa State University Department of English.

Copyright © 2012, Iowa State University Department of English.

All Rights Reserved. ISSN 0032-1958. Printed in Canada.

editor’s note Dear Flyway Readers, Days like this one remind me that I am an animal.

After hunching over a computer for most of the morning, I walked out into a warm January afternoon that smelled like spring. For the first time since getting out of bed, I felt myself breathing, occupying a landscape and a body.

While I was able to enjoy the day for its animal pleasures—mud yielding under my feet, fresh air in my lungs, sun warming my face and hands—I also felt uneasy, wondering what this weird, mild January might mean for Iowa. We’ll see lower heating bills, sure, but will we also see more floods in the summer, more confused plants budding too early in the season?

Paying attention to place forces us to engage with mystery and contradiction. In “Krummholz,” Cara Stoddard writes, “Out here, breathing this thin air, I am torn. I keep oscillating between grief and liberation.” This issue of Flyway contains many similar moments of complexity and fluctuation.

Our contributors speak from the braided landscapes of birth and death, domesticity and wildness, parenthood and childhood, disaster and political response.

These pages feature the winners of our two fall contests, Home Voices and Notes from the Field, as well as poems, stories, and essays from 23 writers from Kansas to New Zealand. We hope you enjoy reading our second online issue as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together. Please keep in touch, let us know what you think, and follow updates on our blog, Twitter, and Facebook page.

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staff [Supervising Editor] Steve Pett Thanks so much for supporting Flyway.

None of this work would be possible without you.

All the best, Sarah Burke Managing Editor

[Managing Editor] Sarah Burke

[Nonfiction Editor] John Linstrom [Fiction Editor] Genevieve DuBois

[Poetry Editor] Xavier Cavazos [Blog Editor] Brenna Dixon [Publicity Directors] Lindsay D’Andrea Lydia Melby [Web Developer] Patrick Burke [Technical Support] Sheryl Kamps

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[Readers] Logan Adams Sean Evans Geetha Iyer Logan Jones Mateal Lovaas Andrew Payton Ian Pisarcik Tegan Swanson Lindsay Tigue Chris Wiewiora 7

Notes From the Field [Winner]

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[Cara Stoddard]

Krummholz It’s the last week in May and we’re 13,000 feet above sea level in Southwest Colorado. The sun’s out and blinding, refracting off the white mirrors of the north-facing snow fields. We’re quiet, trudging uphill.

It’s staff training and Wyatt and I are somewhere between college and adulthood, working as backpacking guides for the summer. In a week, we will be leading 26-day trips with high school juniors and seniors. This is my third summer working at the camp, Wyatt’s fourth, and so we know the drill. We teach the newbies to drive 15-passenger vans over Coalbank Pass, and then we pull off at Andrew’s Lake to set up base camp for three nights. As a part of training we plan our own day hike in the area based on the age groups of the campers we will be working with, but Wyatt and I are the only ones leading the month-long trips, so we plan our own hike, the most ambitious route we can conceive. I tell Wyatt I need to get back in shape, need to get acclimated to this altitude, but more than that, I want to prove to him that I am capable, that even though I’ve been living at sea level in Michigan, sitting on the couch watching TV with my father, I can keep up.

We’re gonna bag Sultan and Turk, we told our boss the night before, casting our eyes toward the buttress across the highway, unable to hide the thrill of the limestone and granite rock faces staring back at us. That night, we were giddy in anticipation of getting up before dawn, lacing up boots around frozen toes and strapping on day packs, picking the bare essentials: a loaf of pumpkin bread, block of cheese, pre-packaged Oh Boy! Oberto beef jerky, GORP, the streamlined first-aid kit, a full liter of water each, gloves, rain jacket, and ice axe.

In the morning, sometime before six AM, we’re up and moving, our conversation picking up where we left off the night before, filling in the quiet corners of a new friendship. He was a plant biology major once, so he tells me the name of every plant we pass. The green buds barely

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poking through the ground will soon be fields of skunk cabbage. Awesome for toilet paper, he says. The tiny yellow flowers are dogtooth violets, commonly known as snow lilies for their propensity to bloom right after a summer snow squall. I want to ask him what kind of plant flourishes instead of withers in below-freezing temperatures. What kind of world is this that invents adversity and then evolves a whole category of flora and fauna to be resilient?

We pass an adult elk skeleton, all of the bones in their original arrangement on the ground, as if the flesh had been stripped away midstride. The skull is white as a wall mount, boiled by the sun, and antlers rest against ribs, too heavy to hold, puncturing that cavern where a heart once pumped blood, pumped warmth. Fallen vertebrae as large as my two clasped hands still interlock and the pelvis, built for running, is convex instead of concave. The bones are a stark-white grave marker in this green alpine tundra. A few minutes later we spot a circle of twelve other skeletons, and I feel as if I’m standing in a museum exhibit, that maybe the mastodon extinction happened just months ago, their massive bodies submitting to some predetermined date.

Wyatt says they must have frozen; it was a hard winter here this year.

I want to tell him then about what bones look like when they’ve been incinerated, how a living thing can be reduced to clumps of dust and shards of bone, sealed inside a baggie and delivered in a flimsy white cardstock box, like something you’d buy at a confection candy shop. I want to tell him what weariness looks like, what it means to be fiftytwo years old and completely worn out, bone-tired, dying of that malignant mass in the brain. I want to tell him I shoved that white box containing my father deep inside my daypack not even two months ago when we drove to northern Michigan and scattered his ashes in Glen Lake. And maybe my bones want to lie down and die here with the elk, maybe I’m tired of trying to carry on without him. But I’m quiet, willing one foot in front of the other.

Our boots crunch through frozen-over swamps, the earth soggy and yielding beneath us. We are above treeline now, but we started down below, on the other side of CO-550, the highway connecting Durango to Silverton. This morning, sometime before dawn, we

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climbed through the thick montane region where Wyatt pointed out the differences between lodgepole pines and mountain hemlocks. Letting me catch my breath, letting me remember that I left my widowed mother alone in that three-story house 1500 miles away from this place, where she is still making whole pots of coffee, then dumping most of it out. See their cones, he’d said, the lodgepole’s fat and rigid, splayed open, and the hemlock’s small and long, its scales flexible, soft to the touch. See the angle of the branches, he’d said, the hemlock’s tapered down at the tips, the lodgepole’s conical shaped crown, reaching skyward. At about seven AM, up at 12,000 feet, the forest started to thin, and soon we were taller than any of the trees around us, the krummholz, Wyatt called these stunted trees, named by the Germans. The trees that still try to grow up here are windbeaten and dwarfed, their branches gnarly and twisted.

I wonder if Wyatt finds security in knowing the names for each plant, knowing weather patterns, seasonal trends, and even though we can control so few of the factors out here, we can count on all things natural to be explained by a cause-and-effect relationship. When we look at these defiant trees, we can know they are slouching from all the wind and weather at this elevation, and when we look at a June creek crossing, we can know it is raging because of the snowmelt. I don’t think I believe in this causality though. I don’t think I can arrange the experiences of my life onto a flow chart and draw arrows showing how one thing leads to another and everything makes perfect sense. Maybe I could have believed in Wyatt’s ordering the chaos a year ago, or six years ago, before my father was diagnosed, but now all I believe in is a senseless series of unrelated events.

But maybe my coming to Colorado is just gravity rushing snowmelt downhill, and all this is about is running away.

Out here, breathing this thin air, I am torn. I keep oscillating between grief and liberation. My father’s death has been six years in the making, six years of waiting on the edge of my seat. Six years ago my father had a seizure on his way to a meeting, flipped and rolled his red Corvette through the median, and they took his driver’s license away, took part of his left frontal lobe with the tumor, turned him into a limping, mumbling imitation of the man he’d once

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been. I sat with him those last few months, horrified by the involuntary opening and closing of his right hand, horrified by this stranger in a body resembling my father. There are photos of him feeding me my bottle wearing an alligator puppet. I remember the puppet, remember the alligator talking, threatening to bite, and I think this claw of a hand is trying to tell me something urgent. He started calling me Grandma, calling me by my mother’s name, carrying on whole nonsensical conversations until finally, one Sunday night, my mother and I tried to help him back up the stairs to bed. The part of his brain that tells the legs to hold up his weight had been consumed by disease. And I said to my mother, to myself, We can do this. I can carry him. I’ve carried seventy-pound backpacks over the Continental Divide. But he was nearing one-seventy and didn’t buckle around my waist like a pack, and all three of us fell hard on the landing, panting like dogs. He never walked again.

It’s barely even been two months and I feel I should not be allowed to be here with Wyatt, wearing these thicksoled boots and marching over untouched places like this is the truest way to live, like doing something wholesome is making good use of my time on this earth. But I am tired of everything coming back to this loss. I am tired of telling stories of illness, tired of sitting in coffee shops across from empathetic friends explaining myself, this hole. I wish I could just write about going on a hike, how beautiful the mountains were, how invigorating it felt.

When I first came to Colorado three summers ago, freshly graduated with a liberal arts degree, bored and antsy and full of ideas about what living in the backcountry would be like, I imagined something akin to that flush of exhilaration I had as a middle-schooler on a ski trip, seeing the mountains for the first time, hanging my head upside down in the backseat of our minivan to try to view the tops of the peaks. I imagined a kind of daily rejuvenation basking in the shadows of an awe-inspiring landscape. Instead, I found that my own shadow followed me, that I was stalked by the knowledge that I’d left my family behind, that this might be his last summer, and this anguish kept me awake those freezing nights, under so many stars.

That first summer I learned the wilderness was not some sort of sanctuary where it was easy to forget where

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you came from. I thought maybe if I took on some kind of external responsibility, keeping these kids safe, keeping their morale high enough to pound out fifteen miles a day, maybe if I made a living out of getting up at sunrise to boil water for oatmeal, I could feel useful. But instead, I spent all those hours walking in the back of the line, like we’re taught to do, running worst-case scenarios inside my head, wondering if my mother called the camp, how long it’d take my boss to hike out here and find us, to pass on the news.

At night, I sat under the tarps with my headlamp pointed at our USGS quads, using the red string from my compass to measure mileage from the nearest trailhead. Thirty miles would be something like ten hours until I would know. Ten hours between my mother’s phone call and my receiving the message. Ten hours of ignorance.

Now that my dad’s gone, I’m thinking maybe this summer I will feel relieved. But I’ve just replaced all that worrying about my father with wondering how my mother’s holding up without me, walking the dog for hours just to fill up her days, mowing the lawn, pulling the blinds in the front window so no one will know she is alone in that huge house.

By nine AM, Wyatt and I are almost to the crux of our ascent, and we find a faint climber’s trail, beaten down grass and scree in the shape of a Z, switchbacking toward the lowest point on the buttress. I’ve been over this saddle before, with a group of campers two summers prior, so I warn Wyatt this is a false summit. We’re trying to avoid the snow fields, because it’s steep here, and one slip could cost us our summer job, so we’re sticking to the trail most of the time, sidestepping from grass tuft to grass tuft, where the scree is held in place by shallow roots from vegetation.

I’m breaking in new hiking boots, and my heels have blisters, but we don’t have time for moleskin and athletic tape. Today we take risks because we are only responsible for ourselves, each other, so we leave behind bulky items in the first aid kit like the SAM splint and the instant ice packs and the huge bag of bandages. Soon, we will be carrying all of the first aid kit, so we are calculating how much space we have in these day packs. Possibility packs we call them, in honor of the first rule of Leave No Trace, plan ahead and prepare, teaching our campers to be ready for any kind of weather, any kind of unpredictable accident.

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It’s slow going for us, but we know in a week there will be so much more at stake, so much more verbal encouragement, coaching our campers through every step.

I keep thinking the past two summers we’ve been lucky climbing these mountains that no one’s been seriously injured, and I wonder how I would go on if something were to happen to one of our group. In that moment I note the change that has happened inside of me to make this risk-taking so unpalatable. Why must everything return to danger, to what can be lost?

I am watching my feet, calculating each step, not looking ahead, when Wyatt sidesteps a marmot carcass in the middle of our found trail. His fur brown and gray, fiercely baring buckteeth even in death. Wyatt says it must be recently dead, that easy game like this won’t last long up here. We step nonchalantly around him, knowing it’s just nature running its course, and everything living is preprogrammed to die. And it doesn’t matter what the mortician writes as cause of death, it’s always just running out of time. As we plunge ahead, Wyatt wonders aloud if the marmot froze too, like the elk, and I say, Yeah, probably.

A few minutes of short breaths and lunge stepping, using our hands to grab clods of earth, and we are on top of the saddle. The white world opens up to us on this ridge, and we can see the peaks that were hidden to us down below, when we were in the shadows. I point out Sultan, Turk, orienting our topo map to the shape of the road, my best guess at north. Silverton is right over that ridge, two miles downhill, and it feels useful knowing things Wyatt doesn’t, like maybe we’ll be able to be a team this summer, dependent upon each other in a way I can’t be with my mother or my brother because we are all grieving, and asking for anything would be asking too much. I break off a piece of the pumpkin bread for him and one for me and we sip our cold Nalgene water.

After our break, we follow the ridgeline, skirting a cornice, and soon we’re on top of Turk. The feeling of standing on top of a 13,000-foot peak, being the tallest thing around, is a familiar one to us both but hasn’t lost its thrill.

The wind is still a surprise, and I shiver, pulling my down jacket out of my pack. The sun is blinding and we can see forever, the whole summer, our whole lives stretched out in front of us. I point across the highway to the Twilight

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Mountains, and I say I hope we’re going there with our campers. We can see the Needles, Chicago Basin, Vestal Basin, seemingly all of the western half of the Weminuche Wilderness, and I say what I know Wyatt is already thinking: This is where we’ll be living for the next two months. This is our job. And I think maybe this should make me feel like the luckiest person alive, but it doesn’t.

We goof around in the snow with our ice axes for a few minutes on the spacious peak, and then I set my camera on a cairn and press the timer and we take a picture of ourselves smirking and wielding our menacing red and yellow ice axes, like we are young and capable and there is no one out here but us, no one else so certain of what it means to be alive.

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Some of the staff say that working at this camp allows them to be the best versions of themselves. They say the other ten months of the year are suffocating with all their obligations to problem sets and research in laboratories and shit nine-to-five jobs, and coming out here allows them to live intentionally, to feel more vividly. But I don’t believe our movements add up to much of anything in this world. I say, no matter what we do, no matter what we deem sacred and try to hold onto, what matters most can be stripped away at a moment’s notice. And can we ever really live any differently than we should? Isn’t every decision, every time we load up the car and go somewhere new, do something different, just play-acting at autonomy, biding our time?

Wyatt and I summit Sultan and another unnamed thirteener all before noon, keeping to our schedule, and scamper back to the saddle, back toward our base camp, retracing our footprints in the snow, plunge-stepping downhill, leading with our heels, a technique we will teach our campers to build their confidence on steep snow descents. I’d once excelled at this kind of adventuring, this trusting my body to hold me upright. But everything seems more precarious now, my assurance isn’t what it used to be, and I wonder how I will teach my campers all these things I lack in myself.

After a short break to fill our water bottles in the snow runoff, it’s one thirty and we are practically running back to base camp, not wanting to make the rest of the staff

wait for our return. We are supposed to be giving a safety briefing at two, posing worst-case-scenarios to college kids who still believe in their own invincibility.

When we wrap around the corner of a switchback, I grab Wyatt’s shoulder and point. Look. A bird of prey swoops down toward the shadows of the treeline, the dead marmot in its right talon. It was a golden eagle, I say.

Down below the krummholz, we are wind-burnt and tired, hiking on autopilot, but still thriving, propelled by the nearness of our destination and knowing this task will soon be over. At the first stand of trees we stop midstride, in-sync with each other. Not even thirty yards away, we’ve spooked two eagles out from under a lodgepole pine, its branches angled toward the sky. On the ground beneath the pine, they’ve abandoned the marmot, red and bloody.

It’s carcass evidence that out here, the living keep on living in spite of the dead. The eagles circle back above us, their wings wide, like hands splayed, displacing the air and casting shadows resembling our own.

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Notes From the Field [Runner-Up]

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[Evelyn Hampton]

Office Yesterday in my office, I read an article about elephants in a zoo that spent long days of an unusually hot summer lying in the sun, refusing to go near a small pond that was filled by a cascade of falling water. The elephants’ handlers would try to bribe the elephants with treats to go into the water because they feared the elephants would die of dehydration.

Nothing the handlers tried could coax the elephants into the pond. Instead the elephants drank hot water from a small plastic trough the handlers placed beside them in the sun.

Finally one day a hard, soaking rain began to fall, and all the elephants got into the pond and played beneath the falling rain, sucking water into their trunks and shooting it at each other, splashing their enormous bodies in and out of the water.

Today I went to the pet store and bought an aquarium and two turtles. I bought all the accoutrements for the tank and turtles, and now in my office I can watch them swimming in a small pond and perching on a stone, sunning themselves beneath a heat lamp. For me, having pets is a novelty. I wasn’t allowed to have a pet as a child.

Now I can spend hours in my office watching the turtles.

Recently I noticed something strange about them. After I had siphoned dirty water out of their tank and before I siphoned clean water into it from a large bucket I keep on the floor, the turtles crawled to the glass wall of their tank and peered down. I watched them doing this for a while and finally understood that they were looking for the source of new water as if to inspect it, to make sure of its purity before it entered their home. When I understood that they were doing this, I positioned my face so that it blocked the source of new water, forcing the turtles to look at me. The turtles soon turned away and went back to the warmth of the stone beneath the lamp.

I don’t think the right sort of work for me is studying animal behavior, yet I keep thinking about the way the turtles

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turned away from me. I want to come to some general conclusion about the turtles and what they want in their lives that I can apply to me and what I want in my life.

Self-referencing is the mind’s tendency to locate itself, so when it’s realized that there is no self apart from the perceiving, the tendency to try to find one’s self in any experience, insight, or concept, ceases, according to a book I’ve been reading in my office. The book was written by a monk who has stayed in one place for the past forty years examining the ways his mind forms attachments to its own ideas and images, which he calls his self. Images and ideas carry with them a kind of space unlike the space that surrounds real objects like turtles and stones and the knickknacks that crowd my desk. If I could get rid of the knickknacks, I might have space in which to perform some sort of task, but since I don’t know what sort of task I want to perform, I don’t know how much space I’ll need, so I keep the knickknacks on my crowded desk.

Besides, during this time when I have not yet decided on the sort of work I will do, I like to look at my knickknacks and consider the few that are still mysterious to me. One of these mysteries is a spiky brown pod attached to a small branch that at one time must have been attached to something larger, but having broken off the larger thing, now it is here on my desk. Spikes cover the ball, which several days ago developed a small crack that has become a large crack. It’s the sort of enlarging that comes before a hatching, I imagine, and I imagine that something will crawl out from the crack in a few days to ask me difficult questions that I will not be able to answer. I imagine that what crawls out will be the monk.

Another of the mysteries on my desk is a rusted mechanism that looks like a small wheel inside a bracket.

There are holes where screws could be inserted into the bracket and the mechanism attached to something large and stable, like a house or a monk. There is a final mystery— two nameless birds depicted on a round coaster, the sort for putting beneath beverages. The birds are illustrated in a style familiar to me from a book on the history of scientific illustration that I have been reading in my office. The coaster is one of two that I’ve had since I was a child: on one, there is an illustration of a flower, and on the other, an illustration of the two birds. I do not know what kind of bird these

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are—there’s no name below them like there is beneath the flower, which is named Viola odorata. The surface of each coaster has been crazed by age and heat, and I realize each time I look attentively at the crazing how comforting it is to be able to see the things around me aging. I have the sense of my own aging though I can’t see it, yet it seems right that I should be able to, that the surfaces of my eyes should craze from exposure to light and heat and the unexpected things I’ve seen, and that I should have to see after a while through an expanding network of cracks and crevices that grow wider and wider until eventually one crack is the size of a door into which I disappear. But there is only a gradual blurring in me as I get older, so I am glad to own a few things where I can watch happening on their surfaces what I would like to see happening to me. The two unnamed birds are perched on a stylized, gnarled branch, as they were when I was a child, and for the past twenty years the net in which they have always been caught has been emerging from the white background, pushing through the leaves and the white vacancies between them. If the birds were to try to fly, they would find this net prevents them from gaining any distance from the positions in which their illustrator has depicted them.

A couple of days ago I was paging through the book on the history of scientific illustration and I came across the same illustration of Viola odorata that’s on the coaster on my desk. According to the book, the Viola was included in a treatise on medicinal plants by Serapion the Younger, a physician, in AD 800. His work was transcribed by a monk, Jacopo Filippo, in the 1390s. Yet it’s not known who illustrated the original treatise, I read, sitting in my office, and I began to feel satisfied, then self-satisfied, with this bookish not-knowing, a feeling that, as soon as I became aware of it, prevented me from reading any more that day.

Once, a physician showed me on an ultrasound the empty shape of my uterus. When my boyfriend and I have sex in my office, his sperm swim through my vagina and cervix into the emptiness. I imagine the black and white screen of the doctor’s ultrasound while my boyfriend’s body moves with mine and against mine. Sun reflected off the yellow house next door comes as yellow light into my office, and it is in

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this yellow light that I think these black and white thoughts about my body. Though I could imagine the interior of my body in any way I wanted to, the way I do imagine it looking is just like what I’ve seen on the doctor’s screen, which seems like a trustworthy intermediary. If I could see what was happening inside me directly, I’m not sure I would want to look.

People have been trying to see into themselves and the things around them for a long time. In the book about the history of scientific illustration, which I am reading again, there’s an x-ray diagram that a hunter in the Northern Territories of Australia has scratched of his prey, a kangaroo, into a piece of tree bark. In the diagram, the body of the kangaroo has been divided by lines into quadrants representing its bone structure and possibly organs, though it’s clear that these have been imagined and not seen firsthand—the kangaroo’s belly is filled with a fanciful latticework of diamond shapes, and the rest of its interior is divided geometrically into shapes like triangles and quadrilaterals. Beside the kangaroo a stick-figure hunter crouches with his spear. His erect penis is enormous, half the length of his leg.

When we moved into our apartment, I painted the walls of my office a color named Eggshell. I have begun drawing on the Eggshell walls in pencil at night when the streetlight casts shadows into my office. It’s difficult to see these drawings unless you’re looking very closely, and even then the wavy pencil lines look more like cracks in the walls than anything deliberately drawn. I’ve begun thinking of these drawings as ‘night murals.’ Sometimes I trace my own shadow, sometimes the shadows of other things, sometimes the shadows cast by the irregular surface of a wall upon itself. Many previous tenants have painted the walls of my office, and these layers of paint have built up like strata of earth over time.

From my office in the evening, I look at the sky in the spaces carved out by the columns of the neighbor’s porch and lose track for a while of everything’s size—the carved-out spaces are the same shape as the spaces between the slats of my father’s chair back, the chair he would sit in to read to me from books about faraway places, some real, some imaginary, and I think of all the places I’ve never been

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Hampton

that I’d like to return to in an impossible body—the body of an unnamed bird or a spiky brown ball—places I’ve seen from far above, or passing fast. Traveling through the Alps in France, I looked down and saw town in a tiny valley nestled in the cleft of a river’s path, a precarious form of life completely dependent on a thing as capricious as a river. I think I could be happy being that.

A few days ago in my office, as the sun was going down behind the columns in vivid pinks and reds, I read that often what complicates the diagnosis of a disease are the many kinds of bacteria the environment of the disease becomes host to. The article showed a photograph taken through a microscope with polarized light in which each strain and species of bacteria was a different neon color against a vivid pink background. The caption included this caveat: “False color is frequently added to monochromatic micrographs by computer processing, and in many such modern images the information content becomes secondary to the vividness of the result.”

I have been reading a lot, trying to figure out what sort of work I want to do in my office, yet the more I read, the more I wonder how much of the information I come across I can trust. It seems that so much of what people do is unintentional, and open to interpretation, that even after I have amassed a lot of information, I will still have to figure out for myself a way to order all of it; otherwise, lacking a coherent structure in which to fit the interesting things I find out, I will forget them, or I will believe something false, or something injurious to myself and others. I’ve hung a photograph in my office of German bathers at a public bath. The photograph was taken from above, the point of view from which it’s apparent that the people in the water have arranged themselves (without, I assume, planning to) in the lattice structure of a crystal. I’ve read that a crowd of people moves around obstacles just like flowing water. I’ve read that when there’s limited information about where resources are located, people tend to move in patterns that resemble waves. I’ve read that each person, by thinking only about her or himself, contributes to a pattern that may be unrecognizable to the people the pattern includes, and I can almost start to believe that what appears to me to be chaotic is actually the orderly functioning of an organism much

Office

nonfiction • flyway

larger than myself, and which I am one small part of. At Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, pedestrians have walked their own, more efficient paths among the concrete sidewalks that have been laid, creating an interweaving of paths that is geometric yet informal. I’ve hung a photograph of these paths in my office beside the German bathers.

The paths wind along and crisscross an oval of green grass, creating a pattern remarkably similar to the pattern on the shell of one of my turtles.

Sometimes I read and sometimes I look at the turtles, but mostly what I do in my office is think about what I would like to be doing in my office. When I make friends online from a computer in my office, it’s with the belief that the more contacts I have, the more lives I have access to, and the more lives I have access to, the more advice about offices and what to do in them I can solicit. But more information is not necessarily going to lead me to make the best decision, and it may be that I’m not any more likely to figure out what sort of work I want to do in my office by talking to people I barely know about the sort of work they do in their offices; maybe I’ll be more likely to figure out what’s right for me if I talk to nobody, or only to a small group of people, my family and neighbors, for instance. From my office, I can see into a small, office-sized room of my neighbor’s house, and when I look into this room I see my neighbor and his wife sitting in the flickering light of a television. I know that watching television isn’t what I want to do in my office, so it seems useless to ask these neighbors what work is right for me in my office unless they can recall having seen something on television that might reveal my work to me. I know that neither my mother nor my father has ever been in my position—having an office but not knowing what sort of work to do in it—and that if I were to ask them for their advice, they would tell me things like, Your generation has too much time on its hands, or, When I was your age, and so on, and I would never get them to sincerely attempt to address my predicament.

Possibly, I would be better off not having an office until I decide on the sort of work to do in my office. It might be best for me to spend my unemployed days wandering my neighborhood, following established paths and creating new ones, and watching traffic as it passes. I would be an exile from my office, and in general I think an existence of

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Hampton

exile would suit me. I don’t really know who I am, and I can never feel settled. When I come home after a day of being out, I feel sad, as if something that never had a chance to begin has ended. In my office, I have tried to think about my origin, but the place that I come from—the roads through it and the roads leading up to it—seems non-descript and vague, without clear boundaries, and I don’t really know how to think about something that seems limitless. Looking from where I sit in my office through the columns of my neighbor’s porch and seeing at the same time through the slats of my father’s chair, I feel that I occupy two times at once, and since in each of these times I have a body, I also occupy two bodies at once. It’s an uneasy feeling, so I sit very still, uncertain which body will respond when I next decide to move. Yet I am finding I don’t mind this uneasiness—I think I am good at tolerating it, so I wonder if this could be the work I should do in my office: sitting still, feeling uneasy and uncertain of which body, in which time, will move when I eventually get up to go to the bathroom.

I have never been good at knowing where I am, but when I was a child I didn’t know this, and believing that I knew which room of my house I would be looking into at the top of my climb, I began my way up the trellis in my mother’s garden. I was startled when what I saw wasn’t the sink and dirty dishes in the kitchen but my mother’s naked body reflected in the mirror of the bathroom. Surprised to see my face suddenly next to her body in the mirror, my mother screamed. This startled me again, and I fell down into the roses, crushing them. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen my mother naked—the sight of her body hadn’t startled me because it was naked but because it was in the bathroom.

Had I seen her naked in the kitchen, the room I’d been expecting to find, I doubt I would have been so surprised.

I haven’t told my boyfriend about my night murals—I think they would make him uneasy. He’s already uneasy about the walks I’ve been taking alone at night through our neighborhood, which many of our neighbors believe is becoming less safe. After his bicycle and kayak were stolen, one of our neighbors began locking his new bike and kayak to a frame in the bed of his pickup truck.

Even in winter, when he pulls his truck out of the driveway, it looks as if he’s going to the beach for a weekend vacation.

Office

nonfiction • flyway

Walking around our neighborhood at night, I don’t feel threatened by things outside of me but by things inside of me, which flicker and take different shapes. Sometimes the shapes are familiar—people I’ve known, things I know I’ve seen—and sometimes they are strange—unknown and frightening. There was a day last week when I woke in a terrible mood after dreaming of a door through which I could not pass though the way wasn’t blocked—there was something else preventing me. I spent the day in my office brooding over the little tasks I’d set for myself—changing the water in the turtles’ tank, reading from one of the many books I’ve begun but can’t seem to finish—without accomplishing any of them. Finally I began to feel less oppressed as the sun was going down, so I left my office and then the house.

Among the night clouds, the brightest spots were the windows of churches—there are so many in this town, I was thinking, and rather than be inside any of them, I’d like to stay outside of them all, where it is dark, and where the light shining from inside shrinks, momentarily, the hugeness of the experience of night to the size of a window frame, a human labor. I began feeling at ease, and soon I wasn’t by myself anymore but walking with a friend. She was back from a trip to some faraway place, but instead of telling me of the strange things she’d seen and done there, she was telling me something ordinary, and as she spoke, what she said wasn’t separate from the light coming through the windows above us: she seemed actually to be admitting light to me, as if she had always performed this loving labor.

I remember thinking that if there could be more of these transparencies, and friends to make them, not just windows but new forms, ones that bend out of the familiar gradually throughout the day so that as the day is darkening we begin to see them—then loneliness might become a discipline like architecture, and students will travel to cities famous for their loneliness, and at evening these students will go out on solitary explorations and will gradually see, bending out of the storeys of buildings, the intricate fretwork of their own experiences.

23

[Anna Catone]

Swimming Dog The dog knows better than to dive near drowning for what has vanished, as Donne wrote, or some version of that.

She swims out— seaweed strewn across her nose, her legs kicking up the ocean’s depths for what floats: the toy I’ve hummed out to her and what she holds in her mouth now, her paws all slow motion back to shore.

Where I am. Watching.

I say it like a prayer: I will not dive near drowning for what has vanished. No. I will not.

Not true. Only think of the apartment.

The keys I left in a mailbox.

The old hawthorn. The first dogwood.

This city, then that one.

What bullet went wrong far away and close; the sound of airplanes that are not airplanes in the air.

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flyway • poetry

The dog is a master of retrievals.

I have failed at that.

[Anna Catone]

Drifting Boat I won’t go out on that drifting boat again— wayward, wrecked skiff that shifts underneath the trees outside history, without devotion in the floating world.

The poem here at the root, old song that beats, hums under the olive trees— bright lantern….

Not out where the tree trunk’s lost its hollowed-out helix, its corporeal bark.

What I’d put between myself and the world—the sane and simple— new, tended fig, field-grown pepper, perfect lemon….

The jammed up, unloosed— scrap, litter, and good….

Shove off. Let be. Leave go.

Beneath a shared moon, the old boat sleeps, sails into the wind, luffs, goes nowhere.

poetry • flyway

25

[Claudia Burbank]

Tsunami Something has changed, the world feels strange now.

Even the clouds don’t move right any more.

All that’s left is the fierce clutch of ivy, a pocket full of currants, the fetal colt galloping in the womb.

Elsewhere people chatter to the air, silver snails in their ears oblivious to fallout and outstretched hands.

They still believe they shall be loved, forgiven in the eye of a salt-blind sun, dinners cooked, plates washed, children sent to school.

I believe the last telegram in the world has been sent saying god no longer exists, not even for drunkards.

Let us be gentle, then, when we question our fathers— gray, unleaved trees remember nothing and no one

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flyway • poetry

can really say what grass is, green is, blackbird.

[Talia Mailman]

Monsters

fiction • flyway

My father’s testing the ice. When his foot falls through, I think how he’ll be trapped inside the creek until some robins perch on his shoulders in the spring to lift him out and set him, way back, on the front lawn. But he pulls his foot out.

His boot’s stuck, though, so he takes his glove off and kneels on the edge of the bank to get it. His socked foot sticks into the air.

“Your foot’s already wet, Dad. Why are you holding it like that?”

He leans over, stretching his arm through the ice, and I think, what if he falls in. Either I’ll pull him out or he’ll take me with him. I push the snow around with my foot.

Worse comes to worst, I’ll grab one of the branches out of the cattails and stick it next to him. That way, he can pull himself up.

He gets a grip on the boot and yanks and falls and yanks again until he topples into a tuft of grass, shoe overhead. When I give him my hand, he pulls me down, tickling me through my coat.

I’m in fourth grade already. Too old for this.

Yesterday, he started biting his nails when I told him I didn’t want him to walk me to school.

I push him away and turn toward the house. Empty trees lean over the marsh, their branches trembling. I think of the wind falling flat from the sky, clear and harsh, rattling the windows in the kitchen while Mom chops onions. He shoves his foot back into his boot.

“Luce, come on,” he says. “Let’s go.”

I shuffle behind him wishing he could turn into something else. Something that retreats after a catastrophe.

Back to the kitchen. Let’s watch while Mom makes stew, thaw our feet over the heater by the table and sit on our hands until they get warm.

The marsh stretches all the way to the train tracks.

The tracks are on a hill, and the ocean’s on the other side, which is where my father thinks we’re going. A road cuts through, paved and plowed, but he wants us to walk over the dead grass and half-thawed creek. If I squint, the hill turns into a wavy hump that meets up with the sky. Railroad men

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Mailman

put it there a long time ago, and I wonder who got to decide where the marsh should end and the ocean begin.

“That was a bad patch back there,” he says, testing the ice with his feet.

I have to jump to land in his tracks. Yesterday, he said he wanted to walk across the marsh and see the ocean.

Then we were in the car, my father driving, my mother in the passenger’s seat, me nestled in the back under a blanket. You couldn’t see through the windshield for the snow. I thought I’m better off going through the glass with a blanket over my head. At the mall, I tried on boot after boot until my father looked at the price, then excused us from the saleswoman and guided us around the corner to the Dollar Store for a pair of galoshes with stars all over them. I can feel the snow through the rubber.

We move on until the house thickens into shape.

Even the dog won’t come out this far.

“Dad, can’t we just walk up to the road and go that way?”

“Shh,” he tells me, “that’s not the point.”

He grabs my hand, and we leap over a stream.

He came home Sunday. He’d been gone since school started, after he lost his job at the power plant. Every once in a while, I got a postcard from places I couldn’t read: Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson. He was supposed to go to all the way to South America, but his plans fell through at the border. He ended up back two towns over, in a place filled with witch ghosts and gas stacks. Mom said he’d started working nights, and when I asked her when he slept, she told me beggars can’t be choosers. I saw him twice that whole time, but that’s only because Mom made me go. “He’s your father,” she told me.

Garbage collects in the corners of the creek: faded soda bottles, beer cans, soggy packs of cigarettes. My father sticks bottlenecks between his fingers and passes them along to me. One pops out of my arms. When I reach for it, the rest of them fall and bump against the snow.

“Should’ve brought a garbage bag,” he says.

I pick up a bottle with my mittened hands. When I tuck it under my arm, it goes flying. The glare from the ice stings my eyes when I look for it.

The second time I went to see him, a week or so ago, I woke up to find my mother in his arms. I hadn’t heard her come

Monsters

fiction • flyway

“So much for that idea.” He starts throwing cans.

Metal hits the frozen grass with a clank and echoes off the bank.

In the summer, egrets and blue herons guard this place. Minnows nibble at my ankles, and heather blooms in the muck. Now the marsh is full of ghosts. My father says it’s where they hibernate. The living leave to let the dead in, he says. He puts his hands on his hips and leans back. I don’t think he’s talking to me.

He used to tell me stories about a monster who lived in the marsh outside my bedroom window. He had sharp teeth and a soft tongue. He could be as big or as small as I wanted, and he could hear everything or nothing at all. If he picked me up, I could curl up at the bottom of his thumb and wrap his fur around my fingers.

My father doesn’t tell stories anymore. He talks to himself, mostly, or to Mom. Last night he didn’t have to work, so they put me to bed early. After a while, I got up and knelt outside their room, listening, ready to bolt into the kitchen if one of them opened the door. I had to keep shaking my legs out so they wouldn’t go numb. Let’s not hedge our bets, I heard my mother say. You haven’t given up the other place yet.

My hand starts to tingle. I take my glove off, and out come my knuckles, purple and throbbing. My father’s ahead of me, pointing at frozen things. “Look at that frozen thing!” he says and goes into a long explanation of what the frozen thing is and how it got here and maybe what it was like a billion years ago. I think what if I grew wings and took off to someplace warm.

“Luce!” he says, turning around, “See what I mean?”

The sky starts to turn. Whole sections pile up with clouds, but there’s no wind. We could yell and the marsh would swallow the sound. It’s hard to tell where anything is.

“Dad, you think we should head back?”

“We’re almost there, kiddo.”

I wouldn’t mind losing a toe if it meant he’d feel sorry he made me come out here. His face is chapped red, and hollow, and his nose sticks out like a beak on a bird.

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Mailman

in. She dropped me off after school, promising to pick me up after dinner. My father had bought watercolors and thick paper. “For your art class,” he told me. I said thank you and put the gifts back in the bag. He ordered a pizza, and I picked out bits of broccoli until my slice was too cold to eat.

“You need your veggies,” he said.

“I don’t like them touching the pizza.”

This time, he didn’t make me finish. He made plain pasta instead, with butter and salt.

“I’m not hungry,” I told him.

He picked up the pot and threw it into the sink. Then he sat on the couch and turned on the news, mumbling something about his night off. I wanted to take the linguine out and stuff it in my mouth. Every time I heard a car pass, I pressed my face to the window, looking for my mother.

“Come sit on the couch,” he said, opening a blanket.

I went into the bathroom, locked the door and sat under the sink, thinking how I would escape. I thought until I couldn’t tell where the tile stopped and I began.

My father undid the lock. He was in his bathrobe, a drink in his hand. The ice cubes made clinks against the glass when he sat down.

“You want to come out where it’s not so cold?”

“No.” “No? Why not?”

“I’m sad,” I told him.

“Hi Sad, I’m Dad.” He nudged my shoulder.

“Dad.” I dipped my finger in his drink and coughed.

“No pain, no gain,” he told me. I touched my finger to my tongue. It tasted like burning candy.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here.”

He helped me up. I wanted to sink my hand into his, burn it there. When I sat next to him, he suggested I sleep in his room. He wouldn’t sleep anyway.

I stayed awake worrying about my mother, her car smashed into a guardrail. Her fault or someone else’s. Her thin body in the back of an ambulance. Doctors and nurses wheeling her through hallways. Plastic tubes stuck up her nose. She was dead or brain damaged. Either way, I’d end up with my father.

But, as I already said, in the morning, there she was wrapped up next to him, awake, like always. She gave me a wink, and when she tried to move, he held on tighter.

After that, he came back to live with us.

fiction • flyway

Now, here we are, face up to the train tracks, telephone wires drooping down the line. My father doesn’t look as if this is what he came here for.

“Let’s get over this thing,” he says.

The hill’s as tall as I am, times eight. I can’t even see the train tracks on top of it. I think of my nose crushed against a rock, legs dangling mid-air, fingernails breaking on the ice. Maybe the ocean isn’t even on the other side. He starts moving.

“Mom said be careful.”

He turns. “I remember what she said.” His voice comes from somewhere I never want to know about. He grabs my chin and turns my face up to his. I keep my eyes on the thread around his buttonholes.

“Look at me.”

The thread is thin and frayed.

He tightens his grip. “Look at me. Don’t you think I remember what she said?”

I nod, and he lets go.

“All right,” he says, “let’s get over this thing.”

The sun softens in the sky. Crazed flakes of pink and orange hit the ice. I bite my lip until it tingles and rub my eyes with my mitten. He makes his way up the rocks. I think about what it would be like if he got to the other side without me and start moving.

I keep having this dream where I’m wandering around the house, looking for my sneakers. I end up in the attic, and there’s my father, sifting through dust and boxes. I ask him what he’s doing, and he looks at me like he doesn’t know who I am. He digs his head in the box, takes out letters, throws them across the room. I scream. He can’t hear me, or he won’t. I spend the rest of the dream pounding the floorboards, going, dad, dad, dad, dad, trying to get him to raise his head.

“Luce!” He’s halfway up the hill. “Come on.” I hurry up and slip, my knees sliding down a rock. He grabs my hand and pulls.

Monsters

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Mailman

“I didn’t mean to get like that back there.”

“It’s ok.”

“What’s wrong?” His face changes and lets up. His hand is warm. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to go back to the house?”

“No, I’m fine, it’s okay.”

“I’m trying,” he says. He kneels in front of me and shifts his hands to my arms. “I guess I don’t know where to start.”

The night he left, they got in a fight. Over spilled milk. I don’t remember how it started, but I remember the gallon of milk. My mother was in her bathrobe. The house was cold, and I was afraid to go to sleep. When I heard her yell, I got up and looked in the living room. She was running out of the kitchen, my father following her with a bottle of bleach, opened and sloshing. He grabbed her by the shoulder and poured the stuff down the front of her robe. She hit him across the face, calling him names I don’t remember. After that, she walked to the other end of the house and locked herself in the bathroom.

Sometimes, the marsh monster comes after I go to bed and tells me he has a present for me. The moon casts his shadow alongside spindly trees. Once we get far enough out, he starts with my shoulder, licking it while I watch. He tells me he likes sucking the meat from my fingers and toes, but he throws my ears in the muck because of the wax. He laughs, and when he tears my tongue from my throat, blood pours through my teeth.

Before he left, I’d wake up my father. He’d walk me back to my bedroom and lift me onto the bed, pulling the sheet out from under me and tucking me in. Like a cocoon, he’d say. Now, I hear the water pipes clanging in the wall and there’s a rush of light on the closet doors from cars on the highway, and I think, This is it. He’s come to get me.

Later, when I came out of my room, my father was gone. My mother was mopping the floor. When I asked if she wanted help, she told me to go back to bed, I had school in the morning. My bed was cold, so I stood at the window, electricity humming in the walls and patterns of moonlight blinking through the trees onto the driveway.

I stop. By now, we’re halfway up the rocks.

“C’mon monkey,” my father says.

I lean into him and he slips. His chin hits the ice and there’s blood.

Or maybe it’s a strange, last shadow on the snow. I stare until he grabs me by the waist, his knuckles hammering against my ribs. We have to scramble to the top before the sun tucks in under the waves. He pulls me up. When I start to slide out of my coat, he lifts me under the arms.

His breath comes out fast and dampens my face. His chest is hard against my side. I want to breathe, but I can’t. The ground rumbles. It’s the train, far away still, taking people home.

We get to the highest rock, my eyeballs so cold it’s hard to blink. The lights from the train break through the dusk and make fat shadows along the track. My father braces my body against his legs, his fingers digging into my shoulders, and I wonder if I pushed him on purpose. The lights get big. The rocks shake. A lost gull flies over our heads. I pile my hands over my ears. This is it. If I reach my hand out, I can touch the flashing steel. A wall of wind slaps me sideways, and I grip the back of his coat with one hand, his knee with the other. I count the cars so I won’t think about getting caught beneath them, metal scraping along my face, all the times my father told me he might as well throw himself under since he couldn’t get anything right in this life.

The last car disappears around the bend, the metal ringing inside my bones. After we pull ourselves onto the tracks, I turn to look at the speck of our house. The light’s on in the kitchen. My father turns me around and there it is, the sun weighted on the water, balanced and sinking. We cross the ties, still warm, and lean toward the horizon. He kisses me hard on the top of my head. The blood from his chin drips down his neck, and I wonder if it ever gets better than the way it is now.

Monsters

fiction • flyway

33

[ James Norcliffe]

caldera the dangers of the path along the cliff top at dusk: a glittering sun in your eyes a slippery track of dried grass overhang of agave and bamboo spikes and there in the sky a single hot air balloon striped like a beach-ball rising high above the harbour it’s best to stop to breathe for the moment before you step into space it is all too fragile how quickly it drifts above the black basalt dykes how deeply the shadows stain the clefts and gullies but the headwaters are red like lava you imagine red like magma rising and lava running down

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flyway • poetry

and spurting forth into a sky full of the sparks that are stars the stars that were sparks before time began

[ Julie Dunlop]

Molecules’ Song We are the uprooted dogwoods, red berries scattered We are the squirrels, displaced We are the silence, shaken into uproar We are headstones, split apart by blasts We are the sludge at the river’s floor We are the roads bearing the coal trucks’ weight We are the valley bracing for more debris We are the night hiding the mountains’ scars We are the sun that shields no one from its light We are the wind keeping things stirred up We are the mist escaping any constraint We are the trestle, bridging the gaps We are the train’s whistle piercing the night

poetry • flyway

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[Amy Patrick Mossman]

Snowline Lying down, she spreads arms and legs, radiating electric in sharp air, imprints an angel in the snow, and for an instant her body shimmers

[Amy A. Whitcomb]

Having Woken Blank Again Puddles of pollen bleed through packed snow.

Here, Indian winter subdues the first punch of spring;

Blank again. Even after

having woken we wander out, guided

—or taken—by each other’s

slight scent of something.

A thin fissure in the ice.

The yellow swirls around it, drains into the dark, steeps

the rotting and ready earth

poetry • flyway

37

[Mary Quade]

Hatch I’ve been waiting for something that may or may not happen. It’s a small something, about the size of an egg. This isn’t exactly a comparison, because what I’ve been waiting for is inside an egg. I’m not a patient person, and spring in northeastern Ohio brings out a special kind of impatience in me, a paradoxical expectation of surprise at the sudden growth around me. It’s been just about four weeks. The mallard ducks are patient. They sit and sit, turning the eggs quietly with their bills, pulling out their own feathers to make nests soft. They sit in a kind of liminal state, between life and not life, for weeks. Is this patience or programming?

I’m not sure.

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flyway • nonfiction

The week the hens began sitting in earnest, on April 20, the accident occurred in the Gulf Coast. A British Petroleum floating oil derrick called Deepwater Horizon drilling into the ocean floor a mile or so below the surface hit a bubble of gas. The rig exploded and, two days later, sank. Now, on the ocean floor, a device called the blowout preventer has burst and leaks oil, uncontrolled, into the sea. There’s a hole on the bottom of the sea spewing crude and gas. The story has one clear message: this is bad.

The barn in back of our house isn’t a huge barn, like you’d find on a dairy farm, but instead the kind of barn where they kept the horse and buggy back in 1906, when the house was built. It has a small storage room and an upstairs loft, presumably for keeping hay. On the ground level, a central set of wide doors face the house. When we bought the house eight years ago, the barn leaned perceptively, the top half torqued counterclockwise away from the foundation.

Years ago, someone had cut through supportive studs to put a standard garage door on its eastern face at the southern end. The barn then began its slow spin away from true. The people from whom we bought the house offered to knock it down.

Instead, my dad and mom came out to visit the July shortly after we moved in, and my dad brought his tools.

He attached with cable the torquing front southeast corner of the barn to the base of a steel pole that held a basketball

hoop near the back south side of the barn. In this kind of configuration, the pole acting as a ground anchor is called the dead man. It’s the thing that won’t move. The cable was strung through a winch. Before doing anything else, my dad and my husband, Cris, spent a lot of time staring at the barn, their minds playing out scenarios.

For two weeks after the rig goes down, we’re paralyzed by the path of the oil across the water. This is bad. Danger.

This is bad. There are booms and burnoffs, but everyone knows these mean nothing if the oil keeps coming. Finally, on May 4, British Petroleum proposes a way to stop the oil.

The strategy stinks of the strange plans of desperation. It reminds me of sketches on cocktail napkins: drop a fourstory concrete structure over the leak. I imagine the word ACME painted on its side, an exaggerated sound effect as it plops into the ocean. Its name sounds like a sci-fi prison: containment dome.

nonfiction • flyway

The first mallard nests this spring failed. One behind a pile of plywood in the barn. One in the little A-frame duck house. One in the flower bed. Something got in, got the eggs—sad, pale green shells broken open in the morning.

Ducks persist. New nests showed up, all three in the barn.

Duck nests are—I assume—built by ducks, but I’ve never seen one under construction. They do just show up, a bowl of straw or grass or leaves and feathers, and then the eggs, one a day. The hen lays an egg in the morning, covers up the nest, and goes on with her business elsewhere until she has a nice clutch of ten or more. At that point, she settles in for good.

Ducks don’t seem particular about location. The three ducks in the barn have chosen the following spots for nests: a gravelly dip along the foundation on the inside of the barn next to an overturned clawfoot tub and practically beneath the rototiller; a space about as big as a shoebox squeezed between an old bit of cabinetry, two enamel sinks, a spare tire, a ladder, and the barn wall; and a patch of cement floor that, when I pull my car into the barn at night, lies directly against my right front tire. The only things these places have in common are that they’re somewhat dark and quiet, and they’re in the barn.

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The duck by the rototiller has a view of two mysterious parts of machines, perhaps a compressor and a radiator, as well as a broken sump pump, a broken shop vac, and a piece of metal siding. She’s made her nest of bits of straw and feathers and a few iris rhizomes that were in a paper bag nearby, but also, cleverly, from shredded pieces of old copies of The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper from 1933 that used to line a cooler in the storage area of the barn, which I saved because I wanted to read the ads. Her nest is architecturally eclectic.

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The duck by the sinks has a view of virtually nothing, because it’s rather tight and dim, and her nest seems to made mostly of feathers, so many that it’s hard to tell where the feathers begin and the duck ends. She’s the stillest of the three, blending in completely, mistress of disguise.

The duck sometimes under my car is well hidden in the evenings and morning when the car is parked, but sits exposed in the middle of the concrete barn floor during the day. She’s built her nest from leaves that had accumulated under the car, and I see her when I pull out to go somewhere, my headlights shining on a cranky bird. I relocated the nest a foot or so away from its original home when I became worried that I’d miscalculate my parking and run over the eggs. I carefully shoved the nest, the hen snapping at me the whole time. She refused to follow the moved nest, returning to her original, now-empty spot. I picked her up and placed her on the eggs, where she decided to stay after all. If one of the clutches of eggs doesn’t hatch, I’m betting it’s hers.

These nests illustrate one thing for certain: the barn holds a lot of junk.

When my dad and Cris finally decided to start cranking on the winch, tightening the cable attached to the upper corner of the barn, we weren’t sure what was going to happen. There were really only three possibilities: the barn would straighten out, the barn would do nothing, or the barn would fall down. From two of these possibilities there would be no turning back. As they cranked the winch, we heard popping sounds inside the barn, like nails popping off boards, percussive and resonant. When they gave the winch

a crank, they’d let the barn rest while we listened to the plinking of small things falling within. After a few cranks, my mom and I decided to go to the grocery store; some events should have few witnesses. We bought beer and potato chips and probably some other things that seemed like sustenance.

Hatch

In high school physics, it took me weeks to understand vectors. I’d stare at those graphs, trying to conceive magnitude and direction. For about a month, as I struggled through problem set after problem set, I thought my life might be ruined by arrows. I snapped out of it and was saved.

Seventeen days after the BP accident, and the containment dome doesn’t work.

nonfiction • flyway

When I poke around the barn in the morning, I hear the sound of gentle peeping coming from over by the rototiller.

Peeping means a hatch. I reach down so the hen will lunge to attack my invading hand, and beneath her she reveals a nest of several ducklings in various states of drying out.

A day-old mallard consists of two parts, the head and the rest. They weigh nothing, their backs mostly black and their bellies yellow. From the instant they dry out after hatching, they can run around and climb and behave like oversized, grounded bumblebees. They get into trouble. If you want to find all of the deep holes in your yard that you never knew existed, let loose a few dozen ducklings, and they’ll proceed to fall into every one.

Fragility defines ducklings. I’ve learned to be prepared for small tragedies. A hen and her brood might go to the creek each morning, and each day she returns with one less duckling. Snapping turtle, likely, but everything kills ducklings. Even other hens. I’ve seen them grab ducklings that aren’t theirs and break their necks. Cuteness and ugliness, a kind of yin and yang. And some ducklings just fail, can’t get things right. They walk out onto the dewy grass of a cool spring morning and never warm up. I find them, try to get some heat back in them, and they die in my palm or on my lap as I work at my desk. I’ve made an effort to stop putting things on hold, losing hours to try to save them, but a sick duckling is hard to ignore.

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A month after the BP accident, just when the ducks are hatching, oil appears on shores, as tar balls or sheen, as fumes in the air, as a threat to the nests of the brown pelican.

Nothing changes except damage. Now the government and the scientists and BP argue over how many thousands or tens of thousands of barrels of oil are contaminating the ocean each day. I have nothing to compare these numbers to. The only kind of barrel I know is a whiskey barrel, the kind one rides over a waterfall or wears when one loses one’s pants.

When my mom and I got back from the grocery store, the barn was straight. My dad and Cris went to work making sure it stayed that way, with more cables and one-by-twelves and replacement studs and a lot of nails. Eventually, we would pour a new foundation. Eventually, we would begin to replace the cracked siding with new pine siding and configure spots for doors where the original doors once were. Eventually, we would be able to close those doors to keep things out of the barn, or at least nearly keep things out of the barn.

The rototiller duck hatches ten ducklings, and within a day they leave the barn to wander the yard, chasing bugs. I put out a small roasting pan full of water for them to swim in— ducks are insensitive to irony. I’m wrong about the car duck.

A week or so after rototiller duck’s eggs hatch, car duck’s nest starts peeping. The next day, she waddles out with five ducklings. A small hatch, but something.

It’s forty days after the accident, and BP announces that it may not be able to stop the oil for another two months, when it will have finished drilling two relief wells. A strategy with another ominous name—top kill—has failed. I’ve witnessed accidents in a flash—a trailer of grain tipping over as it rounded a corner too tightly, a drunk man hit crossing a busy road, my own car careening into a snowy ditch—and they all appear slowly, as though something could be done to prevent them. Now we all witness an accident happening slowly, and we’re helpless.

June 4, I’m standing naked in our kitchen holding a duckling. As he left for work, Cris handed me the little bird he’d found before I could get dressed. Do I put down the duck to go find clothes? The duckling feels cold, barely moving, the runt of the rototiller duck’s gang we’d been worrying about, though just yesterday it was running around eating flies. I turn on the oven so I can warm up a dishtowel, scolding myself for not picking up a heating pad last time I was at the drug store—something I only remember when I’ve got a duckling in my hand. The duckling doesn’t lift its head. I go through the futile gesture of making warm sugar water, a trick that’s never worked, but that also doesn’t seem to do any harm. Wrapped in the dishtowel, the duck stretches out its legs and rolls to its side, the duckling spasm I recognize that inevitably precedes death. Placing the duckling on the stovetop, I grab another towel to heat so I can swap it when this one cools, but as I shut the oven, I hear a peep, a slight scratching. The end. I uncover it and set it on the kitchen table, then remove the second towel from the oven and go get dressed.

Last night, there were fifteen ducklings between rototiller duck and car duck. This morning there are nine.

Cris discovered the bodies of four of car duck’s babies dead by her nest in the barn, presumably killed by another hen, likely sink duck, who had tried to ambush rototiller duck’s babies a few days ago. With the runt, this makes six lost.

I head out to investigate. Perhaps in the night there was a battle over territory. The four ducklings lie belly up, light yellow fuzz exposed. Three have clear wounds—bloody heads, an eye popping out—the work of a strong squeeze to a delicate skull. Poking around for the fifth, I find it underneath the workbench, a few feet from sink duck’s nest.

Then I notice something bright against the barn wall, the belly of another duckling, feet in the air. Six? I’m not missing any more ducklings, so who’s this? While I’m puzzling it out, the feet move, swimming upside-down.

nonfiction • flyway

Junk. To get to the duckling, I have to crawl over a bunch of old storm windows stacked against the barn wall, a tight squeeze. The sink duck is back there too, behind the sinks, sitting on her nest, hissing at me. The duckling looks fine

Hatch

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Quade

when I pick it up, still breathing, kicking. But then I turn it over. The right side of its head appears crushed, a bloody hole in the fuzz toward the back, behind the eye, worse even than the injuries of the dead. Duck blood smells like fish or frog blood, blood of a watery thing, slippery, algae-like. Also stuck to its wound is a substance that doesn’t seem exactly to be blood. Brain? My first thought is to just get this over with, smack it with something, or a quick stomp. Then I think, what’s the harm in bringing it in to a warm towel? The oven’s still hot.

The latest oil strategy is called cut and cap. It involves slicing the pipe and putting a cap on it. On June 3, when BP made the cut, it was jagged, which means the cap, if they can cap it, won’t fit tightly. If these failures weren’t so dire, they’d be almost slapstick, a predictable comedy.

We’ve tried many methods of keeping a duck warm. A heat lamp works fine usually, but sometimes it dries out a sick duck. A blowdryer, not so good, same reason. A table lamp isn’t warm enough. I often stick them down my shirt, between my breasts, and though it doesn’t do the job any better than anything else, I want to believe it might feel more bird-like to the duck. At least, it makes me feel a little bird-like, the soft feathers over my heart. The warm towel is convenient if I have other things to do and can’t sit around with a duckling in my clothes. There must be a way of figuring out the ideal approach—something about latent heat of evaporation or the qualities of heat radiation. There must be a science to it, this restoration.

An hour and twenty minutes have passed since I discovered the injured duckling, and it’s still alive, wrapped in a rotating sequence of heated dishtowels. It’s a sort of duck/towel enchilada. When I open up the towel, it peeps, holding its bloody head up—a good sign. It’s not drinking any water, though—bad sign. I see two trajectories, arrows shooting off into the future, neither really what I’d planned for my day.

I’ve heard many times the saying that if you want to knock down a barn, you simply bust a hole in its roof. Time and weather will take care of the rest. The idea is that a structure will stand as long as its insides don’t rot. Barns falling

down fill the landscape of this country, bowing under their damaged roofs, like elephants collapsing in slow motion.

Our barn had a good roof when we moved in.

Though some of the barn’s supports were rotten at the foundation from termites, most of it was solid. The inside was dry. Once straightened, it could stand for years, decades, for who knows how long.

nonfiction • flyway

Two and a half hours, and the injured duckling is still alive, although not much has changed about its condition. I’m not hopeful, but I’m not unhopeful. Based on my experiences with birds, I know a head injury isn’t always fatal. Not much is fatal, really, except the inability to stay warm and broken necks. Birds’ brains recover. If a young bird will drink and eat, it’s usually going to be okay. It sleeps and the brain mends. I heard about a study that found ducks can sleep with one half of their brain at a time. Maybe my injured duckling doesn’t need all of its brain to get by. It has scooted halfway out of its towel enchilada and something is going on in that sad brain. It tries to lay its head down, but each time it does, it jerks it back up, unable to rest, alert. This could be a good sign or a bad sign.

Are these my ducks? Am I responsible for them?

They’re mallards, but they’re mallards descended from four mallards we raised, mallards I bought at the feed store. Some hunters raise mallards and then release them so they can shoot them. Same with pheasants, quail. So they sell mallard ducklings at feed stores. I’d had a series of ducks as a kid, most meeting ends of tragedy or mystery. When Cris and I lived in Portland, Oregon, we had a pet Rouen for years.

We drove her across the country when we moved to Ohio.

Here, with a little land, I wanted more. The first mallards we raised had names—Lucky, Junior, Sop, Motorboat. Feed store ducklings aren’t sexed, and somehow all of these were hens. I could identify the distinct quacking of each, and each had her own personality. Finally, we ended up with a drake, Doodle, who got busy. For a year or so, they and their progeny stuck close to home. Then they flew off, spending less and less time in the yard, and eventually, somewhat on purpose, I lost track of which was which; I didn’t want to know their fates. So they had nests. Their offspring had nests.

They populate the rural ponds and creeks near our house.

Hatch

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They linger between tame and wild, between something I’ve manipulated and something I can’t control.

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flyway • nonfiction

In the news, photographs of oiled brown pelicans, a dead dolphin, crabs crawling through sticky goo. Some experts suggest it would be better to kill the birds than to clean them, their survival rate is so low in the end. But other experts say that isn’t true, and besides, if we created this problem, we should do something. The containment cap BP installed captures some of the escaping oil. This is good, but the amount measured is much more than they thought had been leaking, which is bad.

We’ve seen all kinds of damage. If we’d brought some of the injured ducks we’ve nursed to a wildlife rehabilitator, they would’ve euthanized those birds. But maybe they are my ducks, and so I try. Who am I to make decisions about quality of life, about when to give up? I’m not trained in that field. We’ve had ducks attacked by hawks with holes in parts of their bodies. We notice them when they’re walking around dazed from infection, and we catch them, searching for the wounds. Then we give them antibiotics and flush their injuries with Betadyne, keep them in an old rabbit hutch we use for this purpose for a week or two. We’ve had a drake whose head clearly ended up in the mouth of something toothy for a few moments, feathers scraped off and a big scab over his skull, his neck floppy and weak. Same treatment—anitbiotics, Betadyne. We had a hen hit by a car one morning with a broken leg. I made a splint of soft bandages and kept her confined for a few weeks. All of these ducks healed, flew off, re-entered the world of anonymity.

One duck, however, stays damaged. She flew in the night after Thanksgiving two years ago. Her right leg was broken just below the joint and hanging on by only a little strip of skin and bit of tendon or other stringy flesh.

The leg was starting to go bad above the wound. Her foot had no blood circulating in it. We knew we couldn’t splint it, so we’d have to take it off. We stood around the kitchen thinking this over. Our wine glasses sat half empty on the table. What to use? We thought of a knife, but worried it might crush remaining bone. I opened drawers, surveying the instruments for anything sharp, our warm kitchen now a surgery theater equipped only with vegetable peelers, cheese

spreaders, a lemon zester, a grapefruit spoon. Then I saw the poultry shears. I held her while Cris snipped off the lower leg. We brought out the Betadyne and bandages. When she visits the yard every so often, she’s unmistakable, lurching to the right as she wades across the grass. Standing on the whole leg, she dangles the half leg below her.

Hatch

In the Gulf, teams of bird rescuers wearing biohazard suits scrub the birds. Some pour vegetable oil over the crude to make it lighter. The International Bird Rescue Research Center’s preferred cleanser for the birds is Dawn brand dishwashing liquid, with its famous slogan, “Takes grease out of your way.” Proctor and Gamble gives it to them for free. They’ll release the birds to unoiled shores in another state. They have no way of knowing how many make it.

nonfiction • flyway

Three hours, and the injured duckling is running around on the sunlit pine floor in a room off our bedroom. I don’t know what to make of this. It’s a little shaky, but its momentum seems to keep it going. I notice it’s only moving clockwise, good side of head to the outside.

I decide to drive into town to the drug store to get a heating pad. I can’t spend all day rushing back and forth with warm dishtowels. Outside, I notice car duck is in the yard with a duckling. Rototiller duck isn’t missing any. Where are these extra ducklings coming from? Then it occurs to me— sink duck’s eggs are hatching. My duckling is one of hers; in her frenzy, she attacked her own. At the stoplight in town, a blue tricked-out Subaru guns off the line, engine growling. It has a sticker in the window that reads “Afghanistan Veteran” and a Purple Heart license plate. When I get back, the duckling is scuttling around the room, but it quickly falls asleep on the heating pad. My usual predictions are wrong.

Forty-eight hours, and the injured duck isn’t dead, but it still won’t drink or eat. For two nights, I’ve gotten up every hour to reset the heating pad, which has an automatic shut-off timer. The duckling has a tendency to wander off the heating pad. On my knees in the dark, I reach around the floor until I find something fluffy. Each time, I expect to find it stiff, but each time it wiggles in my hand. Then one time I can’t find it. Cris turns on the light, and there it is, on its back under the dresser, a faint scratching as it paddles its feet against the bottom of the dresser drawer. The wound on its head has

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stopped bleeding and formed a black crust. The duck’s fuzzy face is a mask that ends abruptly at the scab.

The barn stands. Inside, it’s easy to see how its structure has been reinforced, rebuilt—braces, cables, cement foundation.

I try to envision it new and can’t, as I take in its dark stench of duck shit and straw and eggshell. No more ducks in the barn. I’ll keep them out, make sure they don’t settle in. I’ll impose order on this place, get rid of some of the broken junk.

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It’s June 6, and a plume of oil spreads underwater across the Gulf, instead of floating to the surface. No one is sure why.

It may be the one million gallons of chemical dispersants BP has applied to the spill. Experts argue over whether it is should be called a plume or a cloud. The layers of potential damage grow. Experts talk of water columns, hydrocarbons, bacteria, molecular isotopic approaches. No one can predict the effects. Even the experts can only guess at recovery—at the sea and shore’s resilience—based on past recoveries. In the news, vacationers sunning themselves on the sand watch as workers collect tar balls.

It’s about fifty-five hours after I found the duckling, and it’s finally beginning to show signs of wearing down. The energy it came with from the egg is running out. It can’t walk, but instead shuffles along the floor on its belly with its feet, swimming the wood, peeping in a way that seems cheerful to me. Outside, it’s raining. I’m reading a book. The duckling stops peeping and twitches, rolling on its back, legs sticking straight out. Its eyes are open, blank and black. I reach down and the body feels rigid. Then, inexplicably, the wings shudder and the bird starts breathing. I curl my hand around it like an eggshell.

The afternoon passes on. Again and again, I find it on its back, legs out. Again and again, it breathes. I can’t concentrate on my reading, thinking about the inevitable, about the little comfort I might give, about the impossibility of miracle. I think that if I knew more, maybe there would be something I could do. But I know this is hubris, to believe in control.

When BP drilled a hole in the ocean floor, it opened a hatch, a portal from a place of oil into a place of water. A hatched thing can’t be unhatched, just like an idea can’t be unthought. An oil well, a duckling, a plan—good or bad.

A man opens the hatch and steps out onto moonscape, the earth in the distance, one moment in a complicated series of hatchings.

We can never know exactly what we’ve lost, because there’s always been damage. There’s no way to know an undamaged world. How many pelicans would live without oil spills? How long will reminders persist? There’s no way to calculate this for certain. There’s only magnitude and direction.

Hatch

How many times can a thing reach the verge and return?

How many times can I bear to watch? And must I? This duckling is the toughest duckling I’ve known. Yet I have other things to do—the usual messes to clean up. I leave the duck alone. Later, in the evening, fifty-seven hours after I found it alive, I find it again, a puff on the floor, finally dead.

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49

[ Julia Shipley]

Bird Count they feel the need to steal what is freely given—overheard I. When the loon launches its dire lutish cry, the notes pelt my skin, the sky shatters and the pond dimples in rain.

II. Porter, a toddler, hands me a turkey feather, Here.

He gives me a thing, but uses the language of location.

I jab my heaviest thoughts with his feather.

III. The hen uses her beak to nudge-pull the egg under her breast, like a man tucks a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket; I took chocolate from the checkout shelf when I was Porter’s age.

IV.

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flyway • poetry

Now I venture into the loon-cried rains, to raid what the chickens gave.

[ Jake Young]

At the Edge of the Adirondacks When the snow melts and the matted leaves reemerge, the sun soaks up what color is left in them— leaves blanch to white, delicate as tissue paper.

You lead me off the path. Twigs snap beneath our shuffling feet.

You point to a porcelain sink and length of pipe out of place among the trees. You want me to see how the rust blooms from the drain, but I’m staring at the fresh buds swollen on the branches of white birches.

poetry • flyway

51

[ Jake Young]

Hesperidia I eat Killarney’s Kumquat jam spread to the edges on a piece of toast, the preserve rich with thin slices of rind.

Down south a man picks fresh fruit still warm from the sun in a grove suffused with a sweet, oily perfume.

The first berries, too delicate, turned inward.

A calloused skin grew over their tender flesh.

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Hesperidium—a flower whose petals have grown together into a fist.

[Adam Regn Arvidson]

The Hazards of Collecting Nectar On May 24, 2010, a Reinhart Foodservice semi truck failed to slow down for a line of vehicles stopped for road construction. It plowed in from behind, crushing a Pontiac Bonneville and a Chevy Lumina between itself and another semi trailer. That second truck carried 17 million honeybees.

Hives crashed down on top of the two cars, rendering them unrecognizable and indistinguishable. The bees panicked, fled from their hives, sought the cause of the disturbance, found motorists, truck drivers, and later, fire fighters, police officers, paramedics.

nonfiction • flyway

That same day I sat in the sweltering driver’s seat of my Volkswagen Jetta, four miles south of the crash site, completely stopped. The normal pace of the thoroughfare, the scrolling of the landscape, the cars and trucks flying by at double speed on the other side of the median—all that was absent. The crash had closed Interstate 35 in both directions, leaving the southbound lanes vacant and stranding me in a motionless line of northbound vehicles.

My two-year-old son Ethan was in the back seat. I rolled the windows down and turned off the air conditioning to keep the engine from overheating, then turned off the engine altogether. The breeze moved right through the car, ruffling Ethan’s wispy red hair. He looked out the window, and I followed his gaze. A hedgerow of ash and boxelder was still next to us, as it had been for the last half hour. It stretched away from the highway, a stripe of woods cutting through the young corn and beans. It danced in the hot wind. I thought about how much Ethan has changed in his short life. I used to organize our trips so carefully: charting out the snack breaks, planning drives during nap time, and narrating the landscape as he rode on my back—all sometimes futile attempts to keep him occupied, entertained, content.

But on the freeway he exhibited patience remarkable for a toddler. I sang “Lemon Grove Avenue” by local folkie Mason Jennings. It’s a song Ethan has heard since he was just hours old, a song he joined me that day in singing, but only the last word of each line: avenue, breeze, window,

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afternoon, boat, sea, bird, tree, feeling, heart, home, home, yeah.

Ethan and I were on our way back from a hike at Nerstrand Woods State Park. We had left home early and driven south to that shady remnant of the sugar maple, basswood, and ironwood forest that once covered most of central Minnesota: the so-called Big Woods. I parked the Jetta and we descended into the valley of Prairie Creek, Ethan walking beside me on the gravel trail, three steps for every one of mine.

The forest interlaced above us. The leaves of the trout lilies were yellowing, turning the ground into an early rendition of fall. There was no sign of bloodroot, hepatica, or spring beauty, these ephemeral flowers having already bloomed and retreated to their roots to wait for another spring. The backbones of Solomon’s seals vaulted from the earth in graceful arcs, flanked with a dozen or so leaves on each side. Pairs of blue berries dangled from junctions of leaves and stem. Clutches of waterleaf, named for the irregular grey spots marking their many-lobed leaves, hugged the ground. I pointed out some jack-in-the-pulpit, which we have been watching for in our own yard. Giant specimens rose as high as Ethan’s waist, their trinity leaves shading the green and maroon hooded vessels that are so un-flower-like. Ethan peeked under the leaves and called out his special name for this plant: puh-poh-dit.

At the bottom of the valley, at Hidden Falls, the gently flowing creek dropped over a straight-edged limestone ledge. That time of year, after the snow had melted and the spring rains had passed, the water came over the ledge in ribbons and trickles. At the end of the scarp, the water was sparser still, plunking as individual droplets into a narrow channel at the base of the rock. Moss bearded the face of the cliff. Ethan played in the falls, holding out pebbles to catch the drips. He ran to the end of a sandy point to throw stones in the pool below the ledge and stomped gleefully in the shallow water near the shore.

As we continued our three mile loop, he walked next to me, gathering sticks and pointing out each puh-poh-dit; then he asked to ride, and I lifted him up to my back. At Oak Bridge he wanted down again, and we hunted minnows

in the creek below and scared them with pebbles tossed between the pickets. We left the bridge and he wanted to be up on my back again.

During the last half mile he fell asleep, head slumped forward against my neck, like he has done so many times before. That was when I realized that this day felt different.

I felt different. I wasn’t on edge, worried he would cry unexpectedly, worried he would become inexplicably uncomfortable. I was relaxed, actually enjoying the unfurling summer leaves overhead, the last vestiges of the early spring floral carpet, the angelica at the edge of the creek just beginning to reveal its massive sunburst flower cluster. In the visitor center, there was a wall where people could post notes about what they had seen in the park that day. While Ethan slept, I drew a jack-in-the-pulpit, wrote ‘puh-POHdit,’ and signed his name.

Up ahead, out of our view, fire trucks were blasting the hives and the agitated escaped bees with high-pressure water to bring them under control. To kill them.

The radio announcers and the firemen were calling this a swarm, but it wasn’t. Bees swarm to expand their

nonfiction • flyway

Later, on the freeway, we crept inch by inch toward the next exit. It was nearing 100 degrees. The battered white Ford pickup right behind us blew its radiator with a pop and a hiss of liquid, like a water balloon exploding. The driver pulled onto the shoulder and sped to the exit. A Lexus closed the gap where the truck was; the driver hung her foot out the window and sang exuberantly, her bare toes tapping the side mirror. Occasionally, drivers jumped the queue on the shoulder. A few cars behind us, a pair of 18-wheelers blocked as much of the road as they could, as drivers of 18-wheelers do, to keep the traffic organized.

I switched on the radio to the news station, which reported from time to time on the accident. I passed Ethan his water bottle and told him to drink a lot because it was very hot and I didn’t know how long we would be stuck there. I thanked him for being patient. He took a long drink, then put the bottle on the car seat between his legs and checked on the hedgerow out the window. It was behind us, replaced with a highway sign that said Elko, 1 mile.

The Hazards of Collecting Nectar

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territory, to multiply. When a hive gets too crowded, the queen bee lays a few eggs destined to become new queens, instead of the worker or drone eggs she normally lays. These larvae are fed a special diet, called royal jelly, which allows them to grow into queens. Once these eggs are well on their way, the old queen rounds up about half the bees in the hive and they leave en masse to search for a new home.

Swarms can be terrifying: a flying cloud of bees, seemingly directionless, alighting from time to time in trees, on light posts, in eaves of houses, on bridges. But they’re just resting, regrouping. A swarm has a purpose, a mission, and swarming bees don’t tend to sting. That would be a waste of precious energy. Before beekeepers could order queens by mail, they would capture a swarm either by enticing its queen into one of their own hives or by simply capturing the queen and letting the rest of the colony follow her.

On the highway that day, the bees weren’t swarming.

They were confused and threatened. They would not be subdued by smoke and slow movements, like a swarm. They had to be drowned. Tens of thousands died in the deluge.

Dale Bauer, a beekeeper based in the town of Fertile, owned those bees. He told the reporters later that he cared less about the dead bees than about the people involved in the accident.

The two semi truck drivers were unhurt. Pamela Brinkhaus, who was driving the Lumina, died instantly, her car crushed underneath the honey truck and buried in broken hives. She was from Elko; she was about three miles from home. Kari Rasmussen, whose Bonneville was rear-ended by the food service semi, was pried from the wreckage by firefighters battling the bees and then airlifted to a local hospital. She died that evening. She was twentyfour years old and pregnant.

None of this information was being reported on the radio that day. The event was still too fresh for complete details.

Families had not been notified. Reporters mentioned the horrific state of the two cars, the rescue efforts, and, of course, the bees. Perhaps inevitably, sitting there in the heat, I ran through perfect-timing scenarios. What if Ethan and I had left the park a half hour earlier? What if he had followed me to the restroom quickly, rather than dilly-dallying over

rocks he found on the sidewalk? What if I hadn’t stopped to draw that puh-poh-dit?

Such questions are moot, though. If we had been there at that moment, instead of some other car, with a slightly different weight, shape, or color, perhaps there would have been no accident at all. So I didn’t waste much time on doomsday speculation. And since I didn’t yet know about the two women who died, I wasn’t overly emotional.

What I felt was curiosity about the unusual nature of the accident, and probably a little inconvenience, but mostly I was still reveling in my newfound comfort with Ethan. We were actually having an interesting adventure: stuck on the highway, singing songs, talking about our hike.

When I got home, over the next few days, I checked the on-line news outlets for more information. That’s when I learned of the two women who died. That hit me harder, of course, and I thought about the families, especially the father that will never hike with his child in the woods.

But I didn’t then—and I still do not—find myself wracked with emotion. I know that seems cold, but traffic accidents happen a lot. We hear about them all the time, and there are so many more that are never widely reported.

Even those with tragic outcomes tend to drop quickly from local news coverage. The one Ethan and I sat behind on the freeway probably only lingered in the papers and on the evening news for a few days because of the unexpected introduction of honeybees.

Instead, when I look back on that day, I find myself pondering the strange merger of the bees and the cars, our movement through the woods and our standstill on the highway, the wildflowers at Nerstrand and the frenzied pollinators at the crash site. Two commonplace events—a hike and a car crash—were thrown together in the same day, in my same mental space. It makes me think about how much wilderness and civilization have changed.

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Not so long ago, the big hazard in people’s lives was nature itself: wild animals, the danger of getting lost, the potential for bad weather with no shelter nearby, the real possibility of starvation. Going into the wilderness meant simply walking out of the cabin or wigwam or cave, and the danger began immediately. Today, the map of nature and civilization is

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reversed. Little nature pockets, like Nerstrand, sit in a fabric of agriculture and subdivisions. But despite our efforts to tame the wilds, the journey out into nature is as lifethreatening as ever. Yes, people still die climbing mountains, in flash floods, or in winter weather that sneaks up on what was intended to be an easy day hike. But far more people die simply moving from point A to point B.

And I illustrate the dichotomy. I live in the city, but I want to hike in the woods. I want Ethan to see the maples, the trout lilies, the waterleafs. I drive to places like Nerstrand Woods because I want it both ways: the civilized amenities of the city and the spirit of the wilds. In pursuit of civilization, people like me have, since Europeans settled here about 150 years ago, snipped away at the Big Woods for farms and towns until now all that remains is a few scattered patches.

Unlike most animals, bees also move between wild and civilized worlds. They live collectively in hives, cities they construct, and they venture out into the forests and fields to find the creekside angelica, the basswood trees, the spring beauties. They drink the nectar, collect the pollen, and return home, alighting at the entrance of the hive to dance directions to the rest of the colony. They walk about in figure-eights, wagging their thoraxes, telling the others which way to fly and how far. They pass their nectar to other workers, who pass it to others, gradually concentrating it into honey to feed the hive.

But even this civilized honey-making is a recent phenomenon in North America. European settlers brought the honeybee here in the early 1700s. In Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, people have been collecting honey from wild hives for thousands of years, but North America had no hive-making bees—bees, yes, but none that made the great sweet dripping combs we inherently associate with all bees. All of our native bees are solitary, making just a few cells of honeycomb in a tiny underground hole or small gap in a tree and concentrating just enough honey to feed a few developing larvae.

The original imported honeybee colonies came over in man-made hives, but, feasting on rich deciduous forests, quickly outgrew them. They swarmed and found

Ethan and I and so many others are like plantation pine forests, winter songbirds, deer, and bees. We are semi-wild.

We live and work in our homes and our cities, and we flit out into the woods to taste the sweetness of nature. We

The Hazards of Collecting Nectar

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new homes in the woods. They became feral, always colonizing westward ahead of the Europeans. The Indians called them “white man’s flies” and knew when they arrived in a landscape that the settlers were not far behind. They displaced native bees, but filled the same natural niche.

Beginning in the 1970s, the quantity of these feral honeybees began to decline. The reason why was never well studied because by that time commercial beekeepers were being hired to bring captive bees in their hives to pollinate orchards and fields. The Bauer Honey truck, in fact, was carrying honeybees from their winter grounds in Mississippi to Fargo, North Dakota, where they would pollinate sunflowers and apples, and make honey from clover, basswood, and buckwheat.

Then came “colony collapse disorder.” Beginning in 2006, for possible reasons that range from pesticides to parasitic mites to cell phones to the semi-annual forced bee migration, hives across the country were being found empty.

The worker bees had gone off to die, leaving their honey, their growing larvae, and their queen behind. California was particularly hard hit, and beekeepers have struggled to bring enough pollinators to the state’s almonds, grapes, and tomatoes. Today, my typical grocery store tomato—a fruit native to North America—is pollinated by a European bee that moves seasonally between California and Idaho.

This collision of civilization and wildness is all around us. After the great logging years of the early 1900s, timber companies and public agencies planted new trees— in endless acres of perfectly straight rows. Today, the tall red pine forests of Minnesota look natural from a distance, but, once entered, betray their civilized geometry. Deer are overabundant because humans killed most of the wolves, so humans, in essence, must become their predators. We must hunt them each fall or they would eat the forests to death.

We like to feed songbirds in winter, which makes them loath to migrate, but then we have to feed them or watch them starve on our snowy back porches.

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collect nectar from the waterfalls and the woodsy trails and the minnows in the creek, and we bring it home. We tell the stories to others, saying they have to visit Nerstrand in the spring, saying there’s good honey there. In that wild idyll it is easy to forget that we humans drive cars, and crash cars, and die in cars, and die in so many other ways, “outside” of nature.

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Ethan had no idea—still has no idea—what happened on the road ahead of us that day. After a while he started to stare blankly into the middle distance, and his water bottle drooped from his ever softer grasp. But he kept sluggishly pantomiming and explaining his Hidden Falls experience in one-word sentences: rocks, waterfall, splash, wet, arm, funny.

We arrived at last at the exit, and our Jetta followed all the other cars and trucks up the ramp. The freeway stretched out for miles, empty like a runway, the crash far ahead and still not visible. With each turn onto each new local road, the line of cars dissipated, each driver finding his or her own meandering way to somewhere.

Ethan fell asleep. All the way home, the images that came most easily to my mind were of dying bees and twisted metal. I replaced them, not effortlessly, with another one I still try to make myself focus on when I think about that day: Ethan crouching by the side of the trail, peeking under the leaves of a puh-poh-dit.

[ Jeff Tigchelaar]

Standing on the Porch with Charlotte, Watching Her First Storm

Athens, Ohio, October 2006

I don’t know how she’ll respond— the sudden sound of thunder, the flashes of light— so I hold her close, prepared to cup her ears or hurry back inside.

I’ve seen storms, so instead I look at her, watch her watching. She doesn’t know what this or anything means.

I kiss her cheek. She grips my finger.

She has no idea what’s there in the distance.

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[Ann Elizabeth Huston ]

Lunch in Long Hoa Rain sheets the air one wall open oilskin and scent of wet water buffalo We sit around full bowls and wait, examining the puddled ground through cracked floorboards, our table We each are responsible for serving the dish in front of us—whole snakehead fish for me— to be served flatside to backbone to bottom not flipping the fish for its other-side of flesh, but removing the skeletal frame, proceeding on, preventing a capsized fishing boat, guardian eyes painted on prow, red and black daring the rivers. Bowls refilled

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three times, we nibble fresh fruit and watch the water buffalo washed black by rain, the river and fields around us rising.

[Chad Hanson]

An Imaginary Fish

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I eat breakfast in diners. There are a number to choose from in Casper, Wyoming, and they’re all similar. They’re full of vinyl chairs and old men using salt and grease to hasten their way into graveyards. Every ramshackle breakfast spot in town has at least one waitress named Shirley, and even if their names are really Megan or Janet, they could still pass for Shirleys. My favorite egg and bacon hole stands next to a truck stop on the interstate running beside the Bozeman Trail. In its prime, the Tumbleweed Cafe served steak from six to eleven, but the owners haven’t hosted a dinner in fifteen years. They have all they can do to lure a counter full of white males in for coffee before nine o’clock. I’m there at quarter after eight.

When I moved to Wyoming, it became clear that I was going to share meals with geologists if I was going to frequent old diners. The regional economy has drawn earth scientists to town for a century. In the early 1900s, a handful of drillers found oil in quantities large enough to catch the eye of petroleum giants Sinclair and Conoco. People called Casper the “Oil City.” They projected it would grow to become the hub of the Rockies—bigger than Denver.

It didn’t work out like that, but the fossils are still in the ground, so we’re home to a high number of geoscientists.

I took geology as a freshman in college. I couldn’t resist. Earth science did not relate to my major, but I didn’t care. As a kid I spent entire afternoons walking gravel roads, searching for agates. My parents gave me a rock polishing kit in 1977. Every two months I loaded the tumbler and added a cup of mysterious powder. When the machine shut off, I opened the lid and found a container of gem stones. The stripes and colors convinced me that there is enchantment in the world beneath our feet.

I took that sense of awe with me to my geology course, and I found a teacher whose sense of wonder actually exceeded mine. Professor Ted Abrahams talked about tectonic plates in a tone that I associate with religion.

I still use the terms and concepts that I learned—especially when I’m on a road trip. The problem is that my wife gets nervous when I point to the difference between igneous and

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sedimentary rock through the window of the car at sixty miles an hour.

When I began eavesdropping on the conversations of geologists over breakfast, I noticed that the tone was less than reverent. That took me by surprise. Mostly, the Earth was referred to as a “son-of-a-bitch.” In truth, any person or thing that came between these men and deposits of oil were referred to this way: layers of bedrock, bureaucrats, incompetent crews of employees. Come to think of it, most people and things were referred to as sons-of-bitches. I don’t mind that kind of talk. I use the terms myself. I use them more than I should, but I like the old guys at the diner. I’m looking forward to becoming one of them someday. I curse as a way of practicing for life as a codger with nobody to force me to behave myself. Son-of-a-bitch!

Today the conversation isn’t about drilling rigs, soil composition, or the petroleum market. The subject this morning is fly fishing. Jimmy drove over from Glenrock.

He dropped his wife off at the shopping mall. Fred asks him what he’s been up to and he explains that he fished the Laramie River yesterday. I chime in that I’ve heard good reports from the south fork of the stream.

Jimmy says, “Yeah. We did alright. My grandson caught a half a dozen brook trout. We ate them on shore.

That kid is gonna be a fisherman.”

I go back to reading my copy of Desert Solitaire.

Fred asks Jim, “Have you fished Porter Creek?”

He replies, “No. I think that’s private land. I haven’t asked permission to fish, but I heard there are bull trout over there.”

Fred and Jim continue to talk about the area.

I continue to pretend that I’m reading, but I can’t read because I’m busy listening to them. Jim explains that you can access the water on public land if you drive south to Wheatland and then go west on a dirt road. The stream carves a canyon into the east slope of the Laramie Mountains. A rancher by the name of Hemstead owns the property along the foothills of the range, but the creek starts in the high country on land within the Medicine Bow National Forest.

Jim tells Fred about a rumor that Hemstead’s grandfather used to bring buckets of bull trout back from Montana. He says, “The ospreys and pelicans ate most of them, but the wise ones hunkered down, became adults, and now they reproduce.” ­ Fred says, “I’ve heard about bull trout. They’re like brookies, but they’re big and aggressive.”

Jimmy says, “Brook-trout-a-go-go.”

An Imaginary Fish

Two days later, I’m headed to Porter Creek. I’ve read about bull trout. They’re endangered. Their standards for clean water are high, and the number of western streams pure enough for them shrunk in the twentieth century. Today, the fish are protected. James Prosek painted a picture of a bull in his masterful book of illustrations titled, Trout. The mixture of uncommonness and beauty prompted me to drive down past Wheatland and then west to the Medicine Bow. While I’m loading my backpack in the car, my wife steps into the garage with the helmet I use for skateboarding. She says, “Take this with you.” She worries when I travel by myself, especially when I set out for a new canyon. I don’t try hard enough to ease her fears. I actually raise her level of concern with stories of rattlesnakes and brushes with death on the edges of cliffs. What can I say? It’s nice to have someone who worries about you.

The stories are easy to exaggerate. Canyons can beat you up. I come home with scrapes on my elbows and knees.

Once, I came home with a case of poison ivy that ran from my toes up to a spot where you would not want a skin rash.

Another time, I had to climb home with a gash on my ankle so deep it revealed the bone. I’m not about to start wearing a helmet when I fish, but I promise Lynn I’ll come back safe.

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There is no trail to Porter Creek. Still, I find a spot where people park their cars. I am not the first one to make the descent. It looks simple enough. The gorge is four hundred feet deep, and I manage without having to climb. There is just one place where I have to hang by my hands and drop over a ledge.

Once I’m on shore, I fit the pieces of my fly rod together. I slip out of my boots and into a pair of sandals.

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I tie a Goddard’s caddis fly to the end of my line, and then take a seat on a downed tree. Beside a creek, I usually get so excited I charge into the water, flailing like an idiot. This time I take stock of what lies before me, above me, and to the sides. Fifteen minutes pass. It’s easy to spend time watching a stream: stripes on a canyon wall, the shapes of cottonwoods along the bank, pillows of water bubbling up behind boulders.

In contrast, no one takes time to stare at a football field. Baseball diamonds don’t inspire, and I’ve never heard of anybody getting lost in the majesty of a hockey arena.

I am reluctant to compare fishing to other sports. I don’t think of angling as a sport. I don’t really know what to call it, except “something I have to do, despite several good reasons not too.”

This isn’t my first staring contest with a creek. I am thankful for my sunglasses. A harsh light beats on Wyoming.

Low elevation states have a mile’s worth of atmosphere to take the edge off of the rays. In the West, we’re right up on the sun. The light can burn in ways that we don’t even understand.

My wife and I met in Tucson. We rented our first apartment from an artist by the name of John Botrell. The walls of his studio were lined with eight by ten foot desert scenes. At first, I assumed the pictures were photographs. While he sifted through a stack of paper, searching for the proper lease to sign, I took a close look at the images. They were paintings—perfect reproductions of the local scenery.

When I asked about his process, he explained that he mixes a dollop of white paint into every color on his palette. In the end, the shades and tones match our squint-eyed view of the landscape.

The precision of the work struck me, but I am a fan of more impressionistic art. I like it when painters take some creative license. When it comes to realism, I say, “Get a camera if you want to make a photograph.”

On our way home, I asked Lynn, “Isn’t he just another realist, trying to recreate the desert with tiny camelhair brushes?”

She replied, “No.”

cactus.”

Then after a moment of silence, she said, “He is a

An Imaginary Fish

My line falls onto the water. Then it drifts toward me on the creek. I pick up the fly and toss it over and over. I watch the course of the fake bug on the current every time.

I fish dry flies. That means I fish sporadically. Mostly, I take to the water when bugs hatch off of the surface.

I’ve never felt the need to keep a strict angling schedule. I have friends that take pride in fishing across the calendar, including December and January. Others spend a hundred days on the water every year. Such efforts are very American.

When we enjoy something, we tend to take that thing to an extreme.

For example, I have a colleague I cannot picture without a pipe full of tobacco jutting from between his teeth. Of course, there is nothing wrong with enjoying the smoke from a bowl of burning tobacco. I bring a pipe with me when I pack into the Big Horn Range. Once or twice a year, around sunset, I like to commemorate a moment spent alone at the base of a granite cirque. But a dozen times a day? Every single day that you’re alive?

White people learned about tobacco from Native Americans. The plant does not grow in Europe. For a thousand years, native people coaxed smoke from the leaves of the plant they called “kinnikinnick.” They used it for ceremonial purposes. Tobacco played a role in attempts at diplomacy. A chief would inhale smoke from a pipe, raise it in the direction of the four winds, and then pass it on. The ritual formed and then helped to maintain relationships. The smoldering leaves made the men’s breath and the air around them visible—it symbolized their common bond to the Earth and its atmosphere. White people turned the act into a meaningless habit. nonfiction • flyway

I continue to cast, and my attention shifts to the geologists at the diner. Fred and Jim spent their careers drilling, dredging, stripping, and otherwise ruining the land, but when they talked about the possibility of bull trout up on Porter Creek, their eyes shone. They liked the thought that someone gave the rare fish a new habitat.

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Westerners have an odd relationship with the environment. For generations, newcomers took what they wanted. At various times, waves of settlers flocked to the region to fulfill their ambitions: miners, loggers, trappers, homesteaders, buffalo hunters, and today, a combination of roughnecks and corporate executives. Museums are full of sepia-toned photos of men with waxed moustaches posed in front of sawmills, mines, drill towers, and mountains of bison skulls. We spent two hundred years acting like voracious adolescents.

Not long ago, our culture and history met up with a population of bull trout struggling to hold their place in the Jarbidge Wilderness of Nevada. Jarbidge, Nevada isn’t on the way to anything. It’s a tiny berg at the end of a gravel road. Its population is made up of ranchers, prospectors, and an assortment of people who dropped out of society. It’s a prickly bunch. They’re isolated and committed to a way of life that began four branches up their family trees.

In 1998, a storm washed out a road that ran alongside the Jarbidge River. The road led to the wilderness area north of town. When the Forest Service heard about the damage, they decided to close the road as opposed to having it repaired. They based their choice on a concern for the bull trout in the river. They assumed that road building in Jarbidge Canyon would increase the amount of silt running downstream, and bull trout cannot tolerate any dirt in the water. Their gills evolved in clear creeks. Anything less than pure can snuff them out.

The people of Jarbidge did not like the decision. The thought that they would have to alter their driving habits for a fish sent them into an angry funk. They protested the ruling that prevented them from using public land for their private purposes. At first, the protest took the form of letters and telephone conversations, but those efforts did not succeed. In the face of having to bend their interests to those of a threatened trout, the people of Jarbidge began to organize a full-scale public tantrum. They started laying plans for a “shovel brigade.”

On July 4th, 2000, a hundred people gathered to rebuild the road that had been closed to save the bull trout in the river. The event seized the attention of the media.

Interviewees vented their frustration. They trumpeted their right to do what they pleased on the land their ancestors stole from Native Americans. Actually, they left out the part about living on stolen land and borrowed time. Nobody even mentioned trout—the sole reason the Forest Service decided not to fix the road.

People like using public land as they see fit.

Throughout our history we encouraged that tendency—for example, we used the Hard Rock Mining Act of 1872 to help settle the Rockies. We said, “There’s gold in them thar hills!” and we told people to go out and get some. Although, at the time, that meant gray haired old guys with teams of mules were lighting out for the territory. It was quaint and romantic. I grew up watching Grizzly Adams in prime time. I know the story. You do too.

So do the people of Jarbidge, Nevada. They know the tale perhaps too well. The story says, “Big, wild men should do what they want in this big, wild world.” The story made sense in the 1800s. The problem is that it’s not the 1800s anymore. The twenty-first century world isn’t big or wild. It’s indefatigably small, and some of its pieces are shrinking and threatening to vanish forever.

The America where everybody takes what they want, without a thought toward the consequence is gone.

The Hard Rock Mining Act of 1872 is still the law of the land, but lately gray haired men with teams of mules are not the ones taking advantage of its provisions. Today, corporate giants based in places like England, Denmark, and Canada use the law to extract oil and minerals from the American West. The quaint, romantic story about striking out on your own and making it big as a freedom-loving individual turned into the story of how corporations use lawyers and lobbyists to take what they want from states like Wyoming, New Mexico, and Montana.

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I decide to hike upstream on shore. Porter Creek’s streambed is pocked with boulders, each one a potential hiding place for trout. Twenty yards along I fling a fly onto the water upstream from a rock. The bug drifts along the near side of the stone and vanishes—gulped by a fish.

The trout runs for a deep stretch and I follow him through the current. I make it to the edge of the pool, but

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I’m up to my waist, so I cannot wade any further. I let the bend and flex of the rod wear the fish out to the point where I can pull him toward me. It’s a brook trout—just a common fish. He is spectacular. I don’t hold him for too long. I release the hook from his jaw and then ease him back into the creek.

The stream fishes well through the morning and into the afternoon. I catch seven brook trout within a mile of my vehicle. The rock cliffs on both sides of the creek close in and grow taller as I make my way upstream. When I stop, the gap between the walls creates a narrow band of sky up at the canyon’s rim. Through the slot I watch two prairie falcons soar in circles, sliding into and out of view.

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On the bank, beside the water, I develop a theory. Bull trout never swam the pools of Porter Creek. I’m afraid the geologists at the Tumbleweed Cafe are mildly delusional, but I forgive them. They are old. They spent forty years working to help corporations extract profits from the public land in Wyoming. When they were young, I’m sure that seemed like a sound choice. The business gave them stature, built six- and seven-bedroom homes, put Cadillacs and pickup trucks in three car garages. Even so, at some point, people grow tired of seeing their plains and forests bought up and ravaged by multinational companies. At some point you start to root for the underdog, even when the dog is an imaginary fish.

[Suzannah Dalzell ]

Island County Public Works Field Trip To Glendale Creek Standing by the creek bed talking rip rap and sloppy slopes talking riffles and pools for chum, coho, cutthroat.

Deep in the ravine

the day grows cold, the only light a wedge of blue above the rim.

Earlier in my upper pasture clutching sheaves of Lidar maps we discuss geomorphology hydrology

Semiahmoo muck to the contrapuntal toc toc toc of pileated woodpeckers

and chortle of ravens.

We caravan to Frog Water Road

wend our way down a mossy trail to a low dam of sticks and mud

a pond of tannic water.

With muted voices we tell the story of the breach the flood

the washout

while deep under the tangled roots of a creekside cedar

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[Sean Prentiss ]

How I Come to the River I. This river—a slate honey—teems with summer shad returning to the headwaters that washed their scales those years ago.

From a rusting bridge, we watched them swim upriver. Dead by autumn, she whispered.

II. In dark hollows, wide-leafed elms and loose-skinned sycamores grow. Dark and crying creeks feed into other creeks that feed into rivers.

That summer she taught me their names—the Alleghany, the Pequest, the Puanacussing.

I roll these names inside my mouth.

III. I walk along a shale bank to a beach overrun by raspberries. Years ago we fed berries to each other.

Then, during a new moon, she abandoned her clothes to smooth rocks. She swam bone-white to the river’s middle and bathed in no moonlight.

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IV. Midday, I slide naked into water warm and swim along a bank of cottonwoods.

The branches hang (in accidental reverence) over the river.

The trees whisper, Coming winter, shedding leaves, bare branches.

I whisper, This is how I come to the river.

V. A heron leaps from McElany Island, beats its pinions twice against water—breaking circles with circles and circles inside them— and then countless times against a sky that stops at nothing (not cornfields or slate quarries or the Kittatinnies) as it flies over every dark thing.

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[Ben Pfeiffer]

Gemstone The ambulance creaked into the village around dusk. Icy rain had begun to fall; the lakeshore was cold and empty.

Gemstone sat in the passenger’s seat, heels pressed to the floorboard where heat from the engine leaked into the cab.

Mac drove, as he usually did, leaning forward and squinting to discern the lines of the road beyond the headlamps. The Model T had no odometer, so Gemstone couldn’t tell how far they’d travelled, exactly—but she knew roughly how far the ambulance’s twelve-gallon tank could take them, and by her calculations they needed to stop for gas, or face being stranded in the New York countryside.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

Mac worked the pedals, rolled to the stoplight, a tiny red moon obscured by rain. The ambulance’s planetarygears system realigned. “What about that place?” he said.

He pointed across the street to an enormous inn, blue and gray in the twilight, with slate shutters and a brick chimney. Firelight painted the windowpanes orange, casting latticework shadows on the sidewalk. Briarwood Inn, a sign out front announced, Established 1807.

“Looks expensive,” Gemstone said. “It’s two hundred years old?”

Mac fished a joint and a book of matches from his pocket. He put flame to dampened paper, puffed a few times to get it lit, and the cabin filled with smoke. When he took a drag, the embers reflected in the lenses of his tortoiseshell bifocals, turned them into miniature tavern windows. He wore a parka, steel-toed boots, and a newsboy cap with a button on top. “We can’t drive in this storm,” he said. “Just order the cheapest thing.”

Gemstone unlocked the glove compartment. She took out the last of their money—seventy-seven dollars, grimy from changing hands, held together by a rubberband.

“Jesus, Gem,” Mac said. “At least leave me twenty for gas.”

“OK. I’ll save you some food.”

Gemstone found her baseball cap, opened the door, and stepped outside. She allowed the rain to wash away the cramped smell of the ambulance. Then she buried her hands in her jacket and crossed the street with her head down; the

freezing rain scalded her neck, trickled under her collar and her shirt. By the time she reached the front steps, she was shaking.

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The maître d’hôtel looked down at the floor when Gemstone came in. Then she looked up, feigned surprise.

A young girl, not much older than me, Gem thought, but cleaner and—from the look of her—warmer. Her hair was cut very short; she wore a cardigan and knee-high boots.

Gemstone waited, working her fingers through the knots in her hair. After shuffling her paperwork, the girl said, “Aren’t you cold?”

“Pretty much,” Gemstone said. “Can I eat in the tavern?”

The girl brought her a menu, placed her next to the fireplace. Gemstone ordered a four-dollar salad, romaine hearts tossed in peppercorn dressing with applewood bacon, beefsteak tomatoes, and shaved asiago cheese. She ate hunched, shoveling it in. After a while the girl brought her more bread, then refilled her water from a sparkling pitcher.

“You from North Carolina?”

“What?”

“Your hat,” the girl said. “The Panthers are in Charlotte, right?”

“Oh, right.” Gemstone turned her cap around to inspect the logo. “Sure.”

“Was that your car out front—kind of looks like from the 1920s?”

“My boyfriend bought it from a mechanic in eastern Kansas,” Gemstone said. “It’s a Ford Model T. His boss at the time—they added the cab to the ambulance, you know, rebuilt the engine.”

“Do you need a room for the night?” the girl asked.

“We have some vacancies.”

“I’m sure you didn’t notice,” Gemstone said, “but I can’t afford that.” She tore a chunk of bread from the loaf with her fingers.

The girl brought her the check. On the receipt she had signed her name, Aaryn, in looping script, and next to the total she had drawn a smiling face. Gemstone didn’t leave a tip.

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Gem had folded the remaining money into her wallet—and had picked up her coat to leave and find Mac—when she noticed an older man sitting alone. He had the travel-worn coat from her childhood on the chair beside him, next to a silver-headed cane; he wore the half-moon bifocals, and a hardback textbook lay open in front of him. For a moment, she forgot who she was, watching him turn the pages. He was not the man she remembered, not exactly—that man was dead, killed seven years ago in a car crash in Colorado.

“Who’s that?” she asked Aaryn.

“The professor?” The girl looked up again from her paperwork, suddenly suspicious; she tapped her pen against her teeth. “He teaches, like, mythology at the university.”

Gemstone chewed her lip. She paced, and checked the front windows, but there was no sign of Mac. She listened to the tapping silverware and clinking glasses and murmured conversations from the diningroom. And, finally, without realizing why she did it, she went back into the tavern and sat down at the professor’s table.

“Hello,” he said. He spoke with an accent. “Who might you be?”

If a stranger joining him caused him distress, he didn’t give any sign, but instead clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, as if he were amused. Gemstone told him her Christian name, and added that she had heard he taught at the university.

“I want to take your class.”

“Oh?” he said. “Very good, Solnyshko! Which class would you take?”

“Your winter intercession course,” she said, guessing.

“Far Eastern Folklore,” he said. “An excellent choice.”

“What did you call me?” she asked. “What language is that?”

“I joke about your name,” he said. “In Russian, Solnyshko means Little Sun.”

“You’re Russian?”

“Nikolai Stepanovich,” he said. “At your service. But you may call me Professor Shestov—at least for the time you are in my class.”

He tapped the cream-colored pages of the textbook.

Then he pushed it over the table toward her. The margins

were filled with cramped writing; some of the words were English, but many were Cyrillic. She didn’t turn the pages because she was afraid he would see her trembling.

“This story tells of Dyedushka Vodyanoy,” he said.

“Water Grandfather. A shapeshifter who lives in the rivers of the taiga. During days, he remains hidden, taking the form of a salmon; during nights, he reveals himself, and attacks travelers. He has a talent also for seducing unhappy women.

When he drowns a woman, he will marry her and rape her, and when she is pregnant he will come to the town seeking a midwife, and this midwife he rewards with gold and silver coins. At such times he may be detected by the icy water that leaks from the seams of his clothing.”

Gemstone followed the professor’s eyes and noticed water spilling from the stitching of her jacket, darkening the edges of the book, absorbing into the paper. When she looked again, the old man was laughing.

“I am teasing you again,” he said. “I do not know you; it is impolite to tease you so unmercifully. But you must understand I’m having fun because I am so old, seventy-four, and I am not accustomed to sharing my dinner table, not with such a strange person as you.”

Gemstone’s cheeks grew hot. She pushed her chair away, wishing for Mac, for the sleeping-bag in the ambulance. “I’m sorry I bothered you,” she said. She looked again at the professor’s coat, at his cane, at his face. She struggled to say something, anything, but no ideas came to her, and she began to feel trapped, as if she had blundered into a darkened room and, disoriented, could no longer find the exit. The professor watched her. At last Aaryn brought his check; the old man gathered his things. They reached the front door together, and as she set out into the rain, Gemstone heard the professor say, “My class meets tomorrow at 6 p.m. Mallott Hall, Room 223.”

fiction • flyway

She found Mac at a gas station. He had pulled the ambulance under an overhang, and he was standing outside watching the rain slant through the sodium vapor streetlights. The sheets broke on the cars, the buildings, and the sidewalks around them, creating halos of water and light.

Already a layer of rime had formed on everything. When she joined him he offered her a cigarette, which she accepted,

Gemstone

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and he also let her eat the last of some processed cakes he had bought from the clerk. But she was still hungry, and he used his last few dollars to buy her a plastic tray of nachos.

“The car died on me,” he said. “I had to walk here, buy gas, walk back.”

They both stood under the carport, shivering. Then Mac dropped his cigarette into a puddle, and Gem did the same, and they climbed into the car. “Where can we park?” she asked.

“I found an elementary school around the corner.”

Mac maneuvered the car into the teachers’ parking lot, in the shadow of the main building, adjacent to the recess lot: flat, shadowy-looking grassland broken by swing sets and jungle gyms. They left the cab and climbed into the ambulance’s cargo hold. They’d stocked it with supplies for camping: a tarpaulin, dirty pillows, a Coleman lantern, a battery-powered space heater. Gem stripped off her wet clothes. They climbed into the sleeping bag, Gem facing away, Mac breathing on her neck. She hoped he might fall asleep right away—they’d shared a grueling day of driving— but nearly at once she felt him pressing against her.

“Not tonight,” she said.

“Come on.”

She squirmed away from him as much as she could, but they were zipped together in the sleeping bag. After a moment or two of awkward silence, of him pressing against her and her pulling away, she relented, and spread her legs just enough, and closed her eyes and bit her lip. She lay quietly while he moved, panting in her ear, and he finished quickly, not bothering to pull out. When he was done he kissed her on the temple where her hair was matted from the rain. He rolled over and, in minutes, fell asleep.

She unzipped the sleeping bag. Mac did not wake up. She found his parka among the blankets and pillows and extra clothes, and it smelled like him, like pot and drugstore cologne, but she wrapped herself in it and went out into the storm with semen running down her leg. She turned away from the building and the floodlights, although no one was around, and even if they had been they couldn’t have seen her through the rain. She crossed the playground, past the tetherball poles, and she squatted to pee near the hopscotch patterns. Through the school’s windows she glimpsed dimly

lit classrooms: tiny desks, popsicle-stick dioramas, and walls papered in finger paintings, macaroni art, and hackneyed posters. She returned to the ambulance, careful not to disturb Mac, and stayed awake for an hour while she listened to the rain.

He was furious, although he took the coffee she brought him, and offered her a cigarette as he was yelling at her: “You did what? How much money do we have left?”

fiction • flyway

Overnight ice collected on the trees, and by the morning many branches had snapped, and fallen onto cars, or onto power lines, severing their connections. The storefronts along the lake shone darkly. The rain lessened, but the air remained damp, and the wind promised further storms.

During the reprieve Gemstone snuck out to explore the village. She found the pharmacy—open and on generator power—and asked the technician for levonorgestrel.

“We don’t have a generic,” the woman said. “But Plan B’s forty-five dollars.”

Gemstone peeled off the bills, sorry as she did it, and used the change to buy bottled water and a pair of scissors. She swallowed the pill on her way to the restroom.

The bathroom smelled as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks; Gemstone tried to lock the door, but the latch was broken.

She took the scissors from their packaging, and, in sweeping cuts, began to shear off her hair until it resembled a crude pixie cut.

Afterward she headed to the café across the street.

She maneuvered her way to the cash register, and bought a hot coffee. The space was crowded; both locals and tourists discussed the weather. The professor was not there, but there was a man in front of the store with trained animals.

He had three creatures: a duck, a cat, and an undersized dog, a reddish mongrel, very like a fox in the face. When he whistled or moved his hands they would perform tricks.

Their crowning stunt was a pyramid, with the dog on the bottom, and the duck on the dog, and the cat on the duck.

As people came and went from the café they dropped money into the man’s top hat, a shoddy costume piece, and from the look of his face he had made a fair amount.

She drank her coffee as she made her way to the school, wondering if Mac had missed her.

Gemstone

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“$6.23,” Gemstone said. “Deal with it.”

“Did you spend the rest on that haircut?”

“Plan B’s cheaper than diapers,” Gem said, “and college tuition.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mac said. “What are we going to do?”

“It’s your fault, asshole. How many times have I told you to pull out?”

“Don’t put this on me.”

“You’re probably sterile anyway, you fucking pothead.”

For a moment she hoped he might hit her, but instead Mac let down the tailgate, opened the canvas flap, and climbed inside. He reappeared dragging his toolbox, and after searching through the junk he brought out three metal tubes strung together with wire. He screwed them together, forming a kind of baton; on each end he fastened flameretardant caps. “I can panhandle,” he said. “Juggle fire, put on a show.”

“I can play guitar,” Gemstone said. “Maybe at the university. “This guy is making lots of money in front of the café with, like, trained animals.”

A police cruiser turned into the parking lot. Mac shut his mouth. The officer sighed when he approached them; he was a big man, tun-bellied, with puffy cheeks. His nameplate read Tinklepaugh. He kicked the ambulance’s whitewall tires.

“This your Tin Lizzie, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s it doing parked on city property?”

“Broke down last night,” Mac said. “Needed to wait till morning to fix it.”

“Uh-huh,” the cop said, playing along. “And is it fixed now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right,” the cop said. “You need to move out, if you can start it.” Mac started to speak, but the cop held up his hand, and added, “If you don’t move it, I’ll have it towed.

You can pick it up in the impound yard.”

“Yes, sir.”

While Mac asked the cop about the town, and about where he could park for free, Gemstone backed away.

She found her guitar and its case with their luggage. The

velvet lining had frayed, but the guitar looked fine—a steelstringed Dreadnought, built for deep, acoustic sound. She refastened the case, hoisted it on her shoulder. She began to feel nauseated. For a terrible moment she thought she might vomit. But the sensation passed, along with a cramps in her abdomen, and she dropped off the tailgate without incident.

Mac and the cop kept talking. “I need to get to school,” she said, but neither man acknowledged that she’d spoken. She left them bickering, not caring if they watched her leave. As she walked away, the rain began to fall again.

fiction • flyway

She discovered Mallott Hall, and spent the day on the steps of the nearby administration building, under an outcropping decorated with gargoyles. People slowed when they passed her, janitors and clerical staff, but also a few professors. They dropped crumpled bills into the guitar case, spare change.

Mostly she got pitying looks. A librarian offered her hot chocolate. She hardly paid attention to them, though; she wanted to see the professor. He did not appear until dusk.

She followed him up an antique staircase, but he did not acknowledge her presence until they stood together at the classroom. “Well, Solnyshko,” he said.

Ten other students filled the writing-desks: four boys, six girls, all dressed for rainy weather. No one spoke as Gemstone took her seat; the professor set his attaché case on the desk, shook the water from his umbrella, and groped for the spectacles in his pocket. “Let me see now,” he said. “I will call roll.” The list of names was short, and when he had finished the professor double-checked his roster. “You are not on the list, Solnyshko.” The other students now turned to look at her. “Have you not enrolled?”

“No, I did,” Gemstone lied. “Just this afternoon.”

“No doubt,” the professor said. “Perhaps the office has not processed it yet.”

Gem slipped lower in her seat; her nose began to run, and she snuffled, wiping her nose with her sleeve.

Seeing she had no textbook, the professor crossed the room and handed her the textbook from the previous night. He was smiling. “You may use my spare copy,” he said. “I’m afraid it is waterlogged. A careless student damaged it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Professor Shestov proved an engaging teacher— funny, expressive, and determined. Gemstone spent the class

Gemstone

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period watching his movements, the odd rotation of his fingers, the strange way he held the chalk. He covered the blackboard with the same cramped writing from the pages of her textbook; his lecture seemed unprepared, as if he were relating the old faerie tales without ready-made phrases, and his speech tumbled on irrepressibly quickly, passionately, and no power inhibited the flow of his speech. Gemstone didn’t take notes. She was mesmerized. She tracked along with her fingers, eyes toward the front of the room, mouthing the words as they were decoded. The professor rarely called on the class, and his questions were always rhetorical. He already knew the answers, and his banter was a hidden way of angling for his own opinions.

After class, when the other students filed out, she returned his worn-out book; but he held up his hand—in the same way Officer Tinklepaugh had—and nodded his head sadly.

“You keep it,” he said. “At least until the end of the week. It is truly a spare.”

“Tell me about your life,” Gemstone said.

“A boring story, Solnyshko,” he said, “and halffinished.”

The shell of ice on the world had thickened during the lecture. Now as they stepped from Mallott Hall frozen light distorted the surface of the buildings, and more trees had fallen, glittering branches forked like lightning across the paths. Gemstone trailed the professor. Rain pooled on the brim of his hat, and he offered her his umbrella. She accepted it. Neither one talked. They left the walkway to cut across the quad. The grass crunched underfoot, icy blades shining like broken glass. Gemstone’s cough had worsened.

The nausea had returned, too, sharper than before. She pressed her fist against her lips, spit phlegm onto the ground to keep from choking.

“Can I come to your house?” she asked. “I can sleep on the couch.”

“My nature is perhaps different from what you imagine,” the professor said. “I am sorry, Solnyshko. I cannot invite you home.”

“Please.” A dull ache formed behind Gemstone’s eyes. She wiped her nose again with her sleeve, regretting it immediately.

“You mistake me for another man.”

“I’m sick. I—I need to sleep.”

They arrived at the edge of campus. Ahead a parking lot sloped down toward the lake, black and swollen from the rain; to the left, Main Street beckoned, the café, the pharmacy, and the Briarwood Inn. And Mac would be near the hotel, juggling for the guests, trying to put on a show despite the climate. The professor unzipped a side-pocket on his attaché case.

“Take this money to the café and ask Margaret to brew you a pot of Kusmi tea,” he said. “And use the rest to buy piroshky—beef, I think.”

“Will you come with me?”

“No. I don’t want to give the wrong impression.

Tongues wag in this town. I could lose my tenured professorship. When was the last hot meal you ate?”

“A couple days ago.”

“Go and order piroshky.” He hesitated; then, as if he had decided something, he added: “If you have no other place to go when you’re done eating, you may come to my home for tonight. I live close by, east of the inn, on a street called Shoreline Drive, Number 5225. Beneath the rug on my porch, you will find a key. And I will put blankets on the couch by the fireplace.”

Gemstone paused.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

They came to his car, a beat-up jalopy, and he unlocked the door, breaking the ice from the handle with his cane. She moved to give him his umbrella, but he said, “Bring it with you tonight,” and climbed inside without saying goodbye. She started walking in the direction of the light, and the professor exited the parking lot by another route.

fiction • flyway

Mac was juggling fiery bowling pins in front of the café. A modest crowd had gathered to watch him. Among the faces, Gemstone noticed Aaryn, the girl from the Briarwood Inn. She did not recognize anyone else—most people were bundled against the cold anyway—but she did glimpse Officer Tinklepaugh’s squad car. Gem had to pass close, but if he saw her, Mac gave no sign, and did not stop his routine.

Gemstone

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She ordered what the professor had suggested from the blue-haired manager, Barbara, and afterward she raided the napkin holder on the condiment stand. Her upper lip was cracked and raw and painful. She coughed deep hacking coughs, covering her mouth with her whole arm, and her snot ran bright yellow. She watched Aaryn watching Mac in the rain; the girl wore a pair of single-pearl earrings, and a stocking cap with a poofy pink ball.

Mac finished his fire-dancing; the crowd began to dissipate. He gathered the money they had dropped, and while he put away his equipment Aaryn lingered to talk with him. He laughed; she blushed. When Barbara came from the kitchen, Gemstone asked for her food to be boxed, and the old woman obliged with a styrofoam container. She had just finished wrapping the piroshky when Aaryn and Mac came in from the rain and ordered two cups of coffee. Aaryn did not seem to recognize Gem. Maybe because I cut my hair, Gemstone thought, or because last night I was wearing a hat.

Mac looked at her, but said nothing, and she didn’t speak to him. She wondered where the ambulance was parked.

Gemstone made up her mind to leave, and thanked Barbara as she filled the tip jar with the last of the professor’s money.

The professor had described the location of his home to her, but not the architecture, and she was surprised to find he lived in a rich neighborhood. The house stood at the end of a short drive, lakefront property, a whitewashed colonial mansion accented in wrought-iron. The entryway opened onto a living room with a vaulted ceiling; a curio held awards, statuettes, medallions, and keepsakes. A leather couch had been stacked, as promised, with quilts and pillows; on the end table, next to the lamp, there was a sepia photograph of a woman with her hands folded in her lap. Gemstone set her textbook next to the picture frame.

She collapsed, and she did not wake until sunrise, when the smells of frying bacon drifted from the kitchen to the far corners of the house.

The professor had set two plates on the countertop and piled them with scrambled eggs, biscuits, and fresh fruit sliced to bite-size: kiwi, mango, strawberries, blackberries.

He waved his palms over the meal, a conjuror’s trick, and said, “Do not worry. I cook quite well. An old bachelor must know how to prepare a meal.”

Gemstone

fiction • flyway

“You live alone?”

“Yes. My wife died several years ago.”

They ate in silence. Gem chewed as softly as she could manage. She was afraid she might fall to sloppily inhaling the food, but a pain in her gut was growing again, and it was all she could do to force anything down. A grandfather clock in the hallway kept time. At nine o’ clock, it chimed, and the professor said, “Tell me, Solnyshko, why are following me?”

“You remind me of my fourth-grade teacher.”

“I am not this man, whoever he was. I have taken you in as charity, as a professor once did for me when I was young.” The professor turned to the sink with his plate and scraped his leftover eggs into the garbage disposal.

Gemstone picked at her bacon, wiped the corners of her mouth with a napkin. She thumbed the spine of the textbook—she had lugged it to the breakfast nook without thinking—and noticed for the first time that the author’s surname was Shestov.

“Any relation?” she asked, holding up the book.

“My great-grandfather. He was an editor, writer, and critic in Petersburg, but his hobby was collecting Russian folklore.”

Gem carried her plate around to the sink, hiding it with her body. She did not want the professor to see how much food she was wasting. Then she stood next to him, uncomfortably close, until he cleared his throat. She waited, elbows propped on the counter.

“We have an errand to run today,” the professor said.

“At the university, a meeting of sorts. Now committed, I have decided to help you. I’d like you to come with me to this luncheon—will you?”

“Of course. What do you want to do in the meantime?”

“You seem to be feeling much better.” The professor’s voice tightened, but he did glance at her collarbone, where she had unfastened the top button of her shirt. He had gray eyes, but his were flecked with hazel, and her fourth-grade teacher’s had been flecked with green. “I have term papers to grade,” he said. Suddenly, he laughed, pointing down the hall. “And you have just enough time to take a shower, Solnyshko. You are a very beautiful girl, but

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right now, you stink like nothing on God’s earth, and for our luncheon you will want to be presentable.”

She smiled. “OK,” she said.

The luncheon was in the university’s union, on the fourth floor, with a man named Jim Baum. He was bald, with a short, gray pony-tail, and the tweed coat of an aging hipster.

He bowed mischievously when Gemstone extended her hand. The professor gestured to the buffet tables, piled high with sweet rolls, mashed potatoes, and assorted vegetables.

But when they had piled their plates and started eating, Gemstone found the meat was filled with gristle.

“A pleasure to meet you,” Dr. Baum said. “Welcome to the sanctum sanctorum, the faculty cafeteria at Skaneateles University!” He held up his hands as if reciting Shakespeare, or delivering a lecture to a crowded auditorium.

“Dr. Baum is the Dean of the Humanities,” the professor said. “I have told him about your, ah, situation.”

Gemstone almost said something, about how she wasn’t homeless or helpless, and that she had no situation, but before she could interject, Dr. Baum said, “I’m grieved to hear about your parents. But I am pleased Dr. Shestov can give you a place to stay in the interim.”

“Oh,” Gemstone said, confused. She didn’t know what game the old professor was playing, but she could see her relationship to him changing, becoming something she had never intended, something paternal, a protector, which worried her more than the idea of anonymous sex.

“He’s been wonderful.”

“How old are you?” Dr. Baum asked.

“Twenty-four.”

“We don’t normally make exceptions for students who aren’t living under their guardian’s roof—and you’re too old for a guardian now—but Nikolai and I are very old friends. He has requested that I offer you an hourly student job to help cover tuition while you get back on your feet.

Of course, I can’t wave the processing fees for the entire university, but I can pull some strings at the Bursar’s Office.

I’d be happy to try.”

“You can take classes while you live with me,” the professor said.

“Thanks,” Gemstone said. “That’s generous of you.

She pushed the doors open and walked out into the rain.

Gemstone

fiction • flyway

It’s been tough to pay for school, since my parents are dead and all.”

“Yes,” Dr. Baum said, “you can work in the office of the College of Arts and Letters.”

“This is all happening so fast,” Gemstone said. “Can I think about it?”

“Of course,” Dr. Baum said. “Let me know this week.”

Dr. Baum paid for their meals. He shook hands with the professor, gripped the Russian’s elbow, and waved to Gemstone as he descended the stairs to the lobby. She waited until he was out of earshot, then sat down by a potted tree. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said. “That’s too much.

You’re almost as good a liar as me.”

“I did not only do it for you,” the professor said.

“What should I have told him? That a drifter-girl who is stalking me has moved into my home? I am not a sexual deviant, whatever you think of me, and I have my professional reputation to consider.”

Gemstone slouched in her chair. The professor came to sit near her on the bench of a public piano. He lifted the wooden lid over the keys. He began to play something.

“What is that?” Gemstone asked.

“Tchaikovsky,” the professor said. “Symphony No. 6 from Eugen Onegin.”

Gemstone got up, taking her textbook, and started down the stairs. The professor followed her. At the north end they passed an information desk and a bored-looking student worker. They came to the double-paned glass doors marked exit. Outside the rain continued to fall, harder than ever before, making visibility impossible, and Gemstone stood for a while watching the storm, and the professor stood next to her. Nikolai Stepanovich, she thought. And her fourth-grade teacher dead these years in a coffin planted at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, moldering, rotting with his hands folded on his chest, unable to wrap them around anyone else’s throat.

“Will I see you again tonight, Solnyshko?” the professor asked.

“I’m not sure,” Gemstone said. “I need time to think.”

87

[David Hornibrook ]

Apollo on the Block The god on his bike rode to warn you: a swerve of wind would bring the house down.

So what if the people scatter, if the wind-up rooster pops a spring, the neighborhood was bound to change and the child was bound to lose what he would.

Tonight is the night we gather at the brick stove and watch the leaves burn, tonight is the night

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the god on his bike pops the last wheelie.

[David Hornibrook ]

Pax Americana Music drifted through an apartment window & became lost in traffic. Beyond the complex the simple hills burned all day & will continue late into the night. Sunlight rode a ringlets curve straight into your glance. Dangerous birds divided sky with their wing blades.

The smoking bride on the hill above the boardwalk said it’s time to leave, meanwhile, August singed the tips of the grass, a lack of rain made us strange with desire.

In those days a black dog roamed the neighborhood.

Divers would often emerge from the river bearing boxes of old keys. Every hour there was a test of the emergency broadcast system.

We learned to tell time by way of warning.

Often, cats would gather beneath the window & listen to the voice of her hands dancing madly like a sun.

poetry • flyway

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[David Hornibrook ]

Pulled Pork The creamy head of my beer is gorgeous. My younger brother killed a man last year.

He tells the story casually. It was something that happened and his point in telling isn’t to tell but to prove how easy it is to be court marshaled for doing your job. The joy of a perfect black and tan becomes distant memory, a speck on the edge of a world, our father’s fishing boat once near enough to touch. This is the first time I’ve heard him talk about war, other than some vague remarks and too many details of weapons and equipment how a giant weighted net can be launched into the blue desert sky, an ominous blanket to land atop a minefield and explode all the buried treasure, as he calls it with a grin. I forget my pulled pork sandwich as he tells our friend how he shot the man in his own home—he walked into the room carrying an AK-47 and I wasn’t about to get myself killed.

Now the froth has settled on the beer, my brother has grown. He’s older than me and I’ve forgotten what it was I had carried.

[ Jonathan Barrett]

Gravediggers There are rows of plywood grave markers shaped like yield signs. A Colombo crow flaps its wings; its voice a harsh kaaa-kaaa.

The gravediggers have brought their shovels.

They call this death with dignity; this desolate graveyard with its library of numbered dead; this forlorn, fleshly field of the forgotten, the unclaimed buried beneath rippled swells of earth.

A woman wearing a bright pink veil finds a girl tossed in a garbage heap, gagged and wrapped in a black plastic bag.

An old man teaches you how to handle the dead, to remove the gag so they can speak again, to unwrap the black plastic bag carefully like opening a package stamped fragile, fluorescent light bulbs within. You lie the girl down, tuck her into roots, soft spores of mold; lie from the Latin lectus; as in a cigarette butt beds near your feet, as in this husk lulls in a soft scab of earth. The silhouetted scars of light.

The green flag above. The shrunken shrubs.

her ascending through loose clogs and clumps, ribs of dirt; through acrid air perfumed with embalming fluid, squeezing through

poetry • flyway

The gravediggers are silent; hands hasped, forgetting the rattled rasp, the wheeze of wind, pouring handfuls of soil on to her grave. You recite a prayer: We created you from it, and return you into it, and from it we will raise you a second time. And you imagine

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Barrett

narrow spaces and unpaved, potholed streets; through scooters spewing smoke and drivers pressing palms to horns; through rickety rickshaws cricking against slick pavement; through thousands of corpses washed and covered with white sheets; through the dusty horizon and flaring match-light of rusted dusk.

[Stefan Milne]

Body of Heritage America and Germany toss me on a table,

whip out the scalpel, gut me like a fish.

Who will harvest my eyes, my brain,

my heirloom heart that hangs fat on the vine?

Whose anthem will be played

when my ribs are marrowless flutes?

Above whose mantel will my glass eyed head be mounted?

Or: Will they simply pull me

apart until my flesh hangs stringy— tendons and veins and muscle fibers—

delicately sprawled across the Atlantic?

poetry • flyway

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flyway • fiction

[Susan McCarty]

Shearing Day Fifteen pills in the morning. He could feel them press through the skinny path of his trachea, like a finger, tracing him from the inside. Every morning he told himself a story while he took them, one at a time, dropped from his fist into his tilted head like a baby bird. The regurgitant of science.

Dead without.

The story went: Once upon a time there was a prince born with a broken heart. He was a good prince and did many things right in his life—got good grades, did not swear that much, had never smoked weed, even when Jason passed him a joint behind Koser’s Ice Cream in 8th grade and then made fun of him and, eventually, stopped being his friend. But the prince was always sad. His heart sat useless and bricky in his chest. There was nothing anyone could do to fix it until one day, a beautiful princess traveled with her coterie to the prince’s kingdom. She fell in love with the prince at first sight. For his part, for the first time, the prince felt some sleepy eye blink on inside him, then shudder out.

The princess said to the prince, “You cannot love me with a broken heart. If you take my heart then we shall always be together and your heart will be full of my love.” The prince said, “But what will become of you?” and the princess said, “I will live in you.” And the prince thought about it and thought about it and finally agreed—for their love was not true as long as his heart was broken. The princess kissed him once, then turned into a dove and pierced his chest with her beak. The prince fell to the ground, fast asleep. When he awoke he felt the dove fluttering inside his chest and all the love in the world rushed on him at once. And he cried and gnashed his teeth because the princess, his true love, was deep inside him now. He would never see her again.

Randy sucked the last pill from his fist where it had already begun to dissolve in his sweaty palm then wiped his hand on his jeans and went to the fridge and took a draw on the carton of O.J. Sometimes he liked to think of the princess as Melinda Rhead, from art class. She liked video games too and they swapped sometimes. She knew about him, but she didn’t care because she was new this year and had her own crap to figure out. He thought he might love her but he wasn’t sure how you told someone something

like that. He could tell her his story, maybe, and if she liked it, great. If she thought it was stupid and babyish, well, then he’d know something.

The busy sound of his mother proceeded her into the kitchen. “Take all your pills?” she bustled at the purse on her hip, rummaging around fruitlessly, then looking up at him with a sigh. “Linda called. They’re shearing today and she needs help with the food. Thought you and Will might like to see each other. Play some video games maybe.

Get ready.” She swept out again, still busy in her purse, still looking, it seemed, for some imagined thing that lay hidden, just out of view.

Randy gathered some video games from his stack in the living room and stuffed a couple in the front pocket of his sweatshirt. He hadn’t seen Will in three months, but he knew, from overheard phone conversations, that Will’s heart “took.” That’s how his mom put it on the phone to his aunt.

“Will’s heart took. And you know, I’m glad for them. I’m happy for Linda. But it’s hard for me to talk to her lately. It’s always ‘Will’s grown six inches,’ or ‘Will helped his dad with all the chores this morning.’ When will it be us?”

Randy thumbed the side of a game box in his pocket and thought of the hospital bed, his home for six months. All he knew is he didn’t want to go back. He’d rather be dead.

fiction • flyway

Will loped up the steep west hill of the pasture of his family’s farm. His approach scattered the crias, whose mothers gave him warning bleats as he passed by. The new barn at the top of the hill housed the alpacas, but the animals were scattered all over the pasture today because of the work going on in the barn. Will could hear the shouts of the men from inside and every now and then, an alpaca would come careening, panicked, out of the huge open doors, nearly ramming the fence before veering off into the field. Will’s destination was the old barn, just a few hundred feet away, lower on the slope. It was ancient and dark and housed all the animals they’d raised before his parents had caught alpaca fever.

There were hens and geese and a goat or two, but mostly sheep, cowering in the corners. They’d run into the barn when the alpaca had first appeared and had settled in ever since, stupidly afraid of the interlopers. They were old and tough and good for nothing in their smelly, overgrown wool that no one bothered to shear anymore. It wouldn’t bring

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even a fifth of what a fresh alpaca fleece could get. And so he was put in charge of them, the forgotten rotting sheep. It was like they didn’t trust him with their babies, those strange Huacayas with their giant eyes and bird warbles.

Will disliked the alpaca for their pretensions but he hated the sheep. “You stupid…pussies,” he said to them as they bleated in their corners while he filled their water troughs with the hose. He liked how the word felt in his mouth. Being a serious Bible student, he was not used to swearing—it didn’t come naturally. When he did manage to push something dirty out of his mouth, it always burst out crazy-sounding, too loud and out of control—like a flock of flushed partridge. Will thought it was a good idea to practice because today was shearing day and the Craig would come again, like he did every year. Will wanted to impress him.

It was the first shearing day since his surgery and he felt strong. He had grown six inches in the last few months.

He had been lifting weights. Once a picky and delicate eater, he now ate constantly, he ate everything. He might never stop growing. He wanted to crush things in his big, new hands.

Craig could lift an adult alpaca in his arms and carry it, kicking and spitting, across the barn without a faltering step. When his parents weren’t watching, Will practiced catching the yearlings in the far field and hoisting them up as far as he could. It made his new heart pound furiously, forced the blood through him so hard he could almost feel it pushing him out, making him larger, his flesh giving into the awesome power of the tides that now pulsed inside him.

He finished filling the water troughs and wound the hose onto its wheel. Men from neighboring farms, and from farms as far away as Michigan, were already at work in the new barn, laying out the wooden shearing platforms and hoist systems that would keep the alpaca stretched and prone while Craig’s clippers worked through the fleece.

Breeders and farmers were arriving every minute and they chased their animals out into the field. They would have about 400 animals to get through once Craig arrived. Will was ready.

“Can I drive?” Randy asked, but his mom was already sinking herself into the beige leather driver’s seat. She

opened the garage door and rolled down the passenger-side window.

“Get in, Randy, we’re running late.”

“I want to drive,” he said but he knew how his mom was.

“Randy, get in. We’re late and it’s too…I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be driving yet. We’ve already talked about this.”

Randy stood silently near the car. His old Flexible Flyer hung on the garage wall, spiderwebbed and rusted, put up for good after the doctor had predicted imminent catastrophic heart failure. He remembered the last weekend he had taken it out to a golf course a mile away from the house. The snow was three feet deep and higher where it had drifted. They’d all been stuck inside for three days during the storm and this felt like a hard-won freedom. The sun cut through the sky like glass as he waded through the snow.

His heartbeat filled his whole body, warmed him inside out, fell into his groin on that first wild hill. The copper taste in the back of his throat, his lungs pinching through his side, the brilliance of the sky as his sled banked itself and he flew forward into the soft lap of the new snow. The warm wooly smell of spit and sweat and ice on his face mask. He thought of that last day of sledding as the last day of his life.

His mother backed the car out of the garage. In the old days, she would have honked, started the garage door down so he’d have to run and duck to get under it, but now, even after the transplant, she was so afraid.

“Get your butt in here now,” she yelled. He kicked at a case of Diet Coke on the floor, hoping she’d get sprayed next time she opened one, and walked through the garage to the driveway.

fiction • flyway

Will and his father had just finished herding the last of the reluctant alpaca from the field into the holding pen when he got a text from his mom. Randy and Pam were at the house.

Come down and say hello.

“Oh…shit,” said Will. His father, who was tethering the gate to the holding pen closed, gave him a sharp look.

“What’s wrong, man?”

“Nothing. I’m okay. I just have to get back down to the house.”

Shearing Day

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His father relaxed, “Take it easy today, okay? I know you want to help Craig and his team, and that’s great, but they’re professionals. Try not to get in their way. And don’t…don’t overexert yourself. I’ve gotta go into town for a while. You help your mom run food and drinks up, okay?”

“Dad,” Will shot his father a nasty look and shook his head, then set out for the house at a sprint. He could feel his dad’s eyes on him all the way down the hill and he sped up, exaggerating the motion of his arms and legs, whipping across the pasture grass and leaping the divots and rabbit holes. He burst into the front hallway where his mom stood with Pam and Randy.

“Will, you’ve gotten even bigger…again, I swear.”

Pam gave him a long, sad and wincing look, then enveloped him in a hug that smelled like perfume and boiled potatoes.

The smell hung around even after she’d moved into the kitchen with his mom.

“What’s up, Will?” Randy smiled but Will could see he was exhausted. His eyes were big in his head and rimmed in shadows. His skinny frame sunk into itself at the shoulders. Will looked away. He recognized that body. It had been his not long ago. He swallowed to settle the disgust that blossomed in his stomach. “Hey man, how’s it going?”

“I’m cool. What about you? You’re taller.”

“Yeah. I’m good. Just helping with the shearing.

Didn’t know you guys would be here today.”

“Yeah, your mom called my mom. Your mom says she gets bored cooking down here by herself all day. So we came over.”

Will was only half listening to Randy. He was trying to catch the low conversation coming from the kitchen. Doctor’s weren’t happy. Minimal progress. Possible rejection.

Will put a hand on Randy’s shoulder. “You want to go see the shearing? They’re going to start any minute.”

“No, Randy,” yelled Pam from the kitchen. And in a sniff, she was at Randy’s side, taking his coat off of him like he was five. “How about you guys play some video games downstairs?”

“But they’re about to start up the hill.”

“Will!” Pam barked. Other adults were rarely sharp with him and it made him feel hot and hateful to hear her.

Without a word he turned and walked down the basement stairs and Randy followed without comment or apology.

Shearing Day

Video games had brought them together in the first place.

Their mothers had both walked into the PICU carrying new XBox 360 systems on the same day. Both had sons almost the same age waiting for heart transplants. Both congenital defects from birth. Will and Randy had been separated on the ward, each imprisoned in his private pediatric intensive care room, immobilized by the monitors and machines that kept their tired hearts beating. But they could talk to each other on their own Xbox live network. And as they drove over cops and pushed back Covenant alien attacks and did the only boyish thing left to them in the world, they talked.

Sometimes about how much they hated the wallpaper—giant stick children drawn by artsy adults, made to look infantile, in bright, basic colors, with a whiff of the crayon about them. Sometimes they talked about dying and said brave, untrue things like, “I’ve lived a good, full life” and “It’s all in Christ’s hands now.” Will wanted to be a minister.

Randy wanted to design video games. Both could appreciate where the other was coming from.

fiction • flyway

That had been a long time ago. Six inches of growth ago.

It had been in the weak time, but the weak time was over. When Randy asked if he had any new games, Will, without even thinking about it, almost didn’t answer him.

As if Randy had never spoken. As if he weren’t there. Will thought of Jesus in Capernaum and Gennesaret and all the people he healed. And for the first time he thought how hard that must have been. And how, if he were Jesus, he’d have totally hated sick people by the end.

“I don’t really play video games anymore. I’ve been really into working out and stuff.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s cool. Do you, like, have a girlfriend or something?”

“Yeah. I have a couple.”

“Do you play video games with them? Because there’s this one girl in my—”

“You don’t play video games with girls, dummy,” Will squinted at Randy. “You drive them out to some field and get them to take off their shirts.”

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Randy’s mouth opened in surprise and Will felt that disgust rising in him again. He wanted to push it up against Randy, to rub his nose in it like a bad dog. “Then, you know, sometimes you get to touch their…their titties.” Will tried to smirk, but he already felt bad about saying it, wished he could take it back.

Randy closed his mouth and cleared his throat. “I don’t know about that. But…I brought The Darkness with me. I can show you how to play.” Randy took a game out of his hoodie pouch and loaded the game.

“I guess,” said Will and sat the couch while Randy folded himself into a slump on the floor.

“So the main thing is, you’re Jackie, and you’re possessed by The Darkness, which is this spirit thing which is evil but also helps you. It’s like the new Grand Theft Auto, where you can do missions or just run around New York and shoot people.” Randy demoed a test short mission for him and Will thought a little more about Jesus and picked up the controller and they started a new game. For a while, the only sound was the hard industrial grind of the game music, turned low, and the soft click of the controllers in their hands.

“Hey Will,” said Randy.

“Yeah,” Will said, distracted as he tried to put a bullet in the face of a mob guy.

“Did your dick get bigger too?”

Will was silent a minute. “That’s a weird question.”

“Well, the rest of you got bigger. I just wonder. If they get my transplant working right, I just want to know if my dick’s gonna get bigger too.”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think we should talk about it though.” Will put down his controller.

“Let’s get out of here. They’re shearing up the hill. The shearing guy is from New Zealand. He’s, like, crazy strong.

I’m supposed to be helping him this year. He’s gonna be mad if I stay down here all day.”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to leave. I might get in trouble.”

“Come on, don’t be a…a pussy.”

Randy squinted at Will. “I’m not a pussy.”

Will looked at the ground, “I didn’t mean…let’s just stay here. This game is kind of cool.”

Randy put his controller down, walked to the sliding glass doors and pulled at them, breathing hard. Will followed him out of the house and took the lead. They cut around the side of the hill that rose above them, skirted it through the steep west pasture where they couldn’t be easily seen from the house. It was a cool April, but Randy was sweating. His breath came shallow and fast. Will stopped and pretended to count some of the sheep that had fled the noise and gathering crowd at the barns on the hilltop.

“Let’s just rest here for a minute,” he said. Randy pretended not to hear him and they both kept walking.

fiction • flyway

There were almost as many people in the barn as animals, whose screams seemed distant from outside the barn, but piercing and nearly unbearable inside. Utterly ignoring the noise, a few tight-haired older ladies in sweatshirts sat at a long table set up on the side of the barn, talking and labeling fleece bags and making official note of each animal being sheared. A few couples stood around silently, faces deep in coffee cups. Little kids kicked around in the piles of castoff wool accumulating in the corners of the barn.

There were three shearing stations, with two men on each pulley, two men to mind and rope each animal, and two fleecers crouched at the side of each platform to gather the wool as it was shorn and arm-sweep it into clear bags that were named and numbered. Each animal was led, whimpering from the holding pen. When the animal arrived at a shearing station, a sock was quickly stuffed over its snout to intercept the stinking green bile it would begin to spit when its front and hind legs were roped and stretched tight away from its body. Laying the alpaca out in mid-air, the pulley workers then gently lowered it onto a platform, where Craig would kneel on it, clippers already chewing air, and work the fleece free of the skin in long, wide strips. Back and sides first, then legs and finally neck and topknot. Then onto the next station where a new animal was laid out and waiting. Craig worked the room like a dervish.

“See, they have to work really fast,” Will yelled to Randy above the noise, “Cause he has to shear like 400 of ‘em in one day. People bring in their animals from everywhere ‘cause he’s so good at shearing. He flies all the way from New Zealand to shear all over the country every

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spring.” Craig, with his long blond hair, black coveralls and rubber knee-pads looked like some kind of superhero.

“It smells disgusting,” huffed Randy from beneath the cuff of his sweatshirt.

“It’s the spit. It’s really gross. Don’t get any on ya.”

The boys watched from the side of the barn for a while. When Craig called a break, Will pulled Randy’s shirt, “Come on, I gotta see if he needs me.” But Randy hung back. He thought Will, whom he had once considered his best friend, was acting like a big asshole. Randy smiled. Big asshole for the big new body. Maybe if his heart had worked like Will’s he would be a big asshole now too.

Randy watched Will talk to Craig. Watched Craig’s squint deepen. Watched Craig look around, like he was looking for help, come up blank, then begin to nod, slowly, at Will. Will walked back to the holding pens and Craig called one of the pulley men over and pointed at Will. The man nodded and Craig called the break with a whistle he fished from a breast pocket.

Their momentum broken, the men started off slower than they finished. Will led an alpaca to the first station, helped loop its back feet and then walked around to the front of the platform to take the rope that would pull the front legs straight. He nodded as one of the shearing team pointed and shouted instructions. “Front legs is weaker than the back, but they’ll still kick, so hold tight.”

Will squatted beside the platform, pulling the rope tight to hold the animal in place. There was a subtle back-and-forth between Will and the other rope guy as they lowered the splayed animal down to the platform. The professional rope man was trying to find a balance, letting out and pulling in slightly as Will struggled, sweated and grimaced with his end. The alpaca landed gently and Craig pounced. Will and the rope guy fell to their knees in unison.

Craig finished shearing and Will freed the beast, walked it to the finishing pen, secured the gate and wrangled another mewling animal to be shorn. The whole room worked like a machine and Randy felt lulled as the team became more fluid and faster as they worked the break out of themselves.

Craig was amazing to watch. His movements were so spare and quick. Not a turn or a reach wasted. He buzzed through animal after animal. Randy imagined Craig’s heart made a sound as regular as the ticking of a metronome. But

Shearing Day

fiction • flyway

stronger, thuddier. A slowed-down jackhammer. A piledriver.

Randy was invisible in this corner of the barn and he liked it that way. Liked to watch people who did not watch him back. No nurses or doctors or parents or teachers waiting for a sign, a twitch. Waiting for him to begin to die.

He relaxed and blew a clump of floating gray wool away from his mouth and watched it ascend, so light it might never come down.

Randy was lost in the rafters when he heard the first scream, felt his heart jump awkwardly then begin to race before he could make sense of the scene in front of him.

There was Will, painted in blood, and standing, mouth open, rope at his feet. The alpaca was pawing at the platform with its front feet and Craig yelled, “Hold it!” as two men from the other stations leapt across their platforms and landed on the struggling animal, whose neck was spitting blood. It was the animal, Randy realized, that was screaming. And as he understood this, the screaming stopped. There was a beat of silence, then frantic human voices began to echo through the barn, piling up and catching on each other like strands of loose wool. Two men took off for the house. Craig was working at the animal’s neck with a tube of superglue. His hands and the tube were slick with blood.

“Won’t fucking stick!” he yelled, as his hands worked the neck. But the alpaca was already limp. It had stopped kicking and its eyes had quit rolling in panic. They stared dully ahead, straight at Randy.

Craig looked at his hands and then up at Will.

“What the fuck you doing standing there? What the fuck is wrong with you? You didn’t see the fucking clippers was already going?”

Will’s jaw began to shiver, “I didn’t…the rope slipped out—”

“Get out of here! Go tell your dad you just cost him $50,000.”

Will was crying now, but didn’t move. Two men unroped the dead alpaca and dragged it into the dirt at the mouth of the barn. They were followed by a small, wideeyed crowd. Randy put a hand on Will’s arm and pulled at him. He came without resistance. Randy walked them past the dead animal, lost in the crush of people, who swarmed it like flies. The boys tripped down to the old barn, where

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they tucked away just as a group, running up from the house—Pam and Will’s mom among them—passed the old barn. Randy froze at the sight of them, rushing and stonefaced, saving it all up for the panic, then the anger, which would come momentarily. He knew that look. He plucked at Will’s shirt and backed him up to the corner of the barn, next to the sheep pen where a dove cooed on a post and an old buck eyed them suspiciously, its head half-buried in a feedbag. The boys sat hard in the dirt, shoulders touching, legs crossed like Indians, shivering, the stink of blood thick between them, hearts working furiously toward each other in the sun-spiked shadows.

Latecomers’ Triolet

[Gilbert Allen]

after Copland, after Billy, after Lewis & Clark

Still grasses, dawn, the open prairie before us.

Grays color from the cymbal of the sun.

Still grasses. Dawn winter wheat, in rows, now gilded to explain why birds cast open syllables of loss.

Still grasses. Dawn.

The open prairie. Before us.

poetry• flyway

105

[ Joseph Powell]

Horse Breath The smell is of ground grass and bread, like lying face-down on a hot summer lawn; I feel the depth and length of their exhalations, the fume of their being.

One velvety nostril after another lets its soft warmth steam across my face like a towel fresh from the dryer.

I breathe them and they breathe me as we stand mid-field, head to head.

Their breath swirls in my ears like a secret just released from the earth, from sunlight and mulch, water and air.

I stand, the omnivore, beside herbivores, coated with wind, flight-detectives, sensing the tension, that massive, delicate poise between nuzzling even softer or exploding into a wild freewheeling swirl of kicking bucks and blows ignited by that spark of fear or joy that can arc their tails, flare their nostrils.

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But now we stand in the pasture, a word and its antonym, fight & flight, meaning & meat— suspended between its two poles— the language of power in the mother tongue of touch.

Silence [ Judith Kleck]

“Silence is more eloquent than words. Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.” Thomas Carlyle

poetry • flyway

Before the eloquence of silence comes the tongue’s bumbling slur.

I learn quickly to avoid the ells.

Por favor (in English) becomes peas.

(And in this disease, the transition to vegetable matter is slow but certain, as sure as the seed becomes vine and bears fruit that splits into seed. And so on.)

Shortly after the ells, the tees depart, bees no longer buzz, cees cease.

The inconstant consonants recede.

But the inviolate vowels bloom and I ahh, ew and ohh my way through the day as if newly blessed by what I see, surprised at what I say.

Never mind that the voice I hear before I speak is the same voice I’ve known for years. Never mind that the woman at the coffee shop asks for my order twice. Never mind that the man at the table nearby glances up wondering if I am drunk or merely stupid, then looks away ashamed.

His shame is of the moment and for a moment we share it, silently.

But silence is of eternity and this world is meant for speech. So, bumble tongue and lips lisp your way through ineloquent nonsense; desire, babble your syllables— until you are the spectacle of sound, until the vowels close around you like a shroud, muffled and worn but warm, warm as the first word your mother’s face above you spelled.

107

[ Judith Kleck]

I Am Thinking of my Grandmother’s House on Steele Street its scent of face powder and brick, of green potatoes in the basement sink. So when my son stops mid-lift, halfway between chair and bed, and burrows his nose in my hair, I dangle limp, obedient in his thick hands.

My head lists left against his shoulder and he inhales—a slow deep breath meant to remember.

What hangs in the balance there between breaths, between now and then, the end we both feel coming?

The moment morphs into a presence almost palpable.

I am a burden he must bear despite my best intentions.

We hold our breath…

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Isn’t it always a question of holding on or letting go? Of gauging the waters’ pull against our need to anchor fast?

My son exhales.

He swings me into bed straightens my legs pulls the sheet to my chin.

We are casting off waiting for the boat to free itself of rocks and ballast to slip weightless into this unfamiliar current.

A little tug and we’re free.

I’m adrift; he waves, holding steady on shore: memory silvers the surface then dives deep.

One day may he, in some sweet exhalation of willow remember not this weight, but the smell of rosemary and linen caught in my hair.

poetry • flyway

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[Nicol Stavlas]

Eva Gray and a Year Passing - The middle of May I was born six weeks late, my mother says. I entered the world tucked in a blanket of winter which was also six weeks later than it should have been. Each year on my birthday my mother talks about that snowstorm, and the odd lateness of the cold and me.

As years have slipped away my mother has continued to send letters every May, trying to manage the memories of my birth and childhood, and the time, still passing. I refuse any other celebration, and chose instead to tally and stack a year of my failures and successes up. I list them out and then put them away with my mother’s letter.

This measure of a year is distant from the way I otherwise understand the passing of time, which is now wed to a man, a small house, a large garden and a fruit orchard. Here, we have come to count the years, our sense of togetherness, and our sense of time through the changing of seasons. The garden has determined the way days were to be spent together, counted as they passed. And so they have run, by cool nights and warm nights and how many of both rest up in a row, or by the time between rainfalls, by when to prune and when to plant early greens and when to harvest garlic.

But this spring is not spring like it has been before.

This year, the world has woken, wild. Our clean rows have seeped out across our paths and climbed up around the trunks of the trees in our orchard, making a grove of nothing we planted. The world is covered in thick, and like a lake, which murmurs only frequently enough to remind us of how alive it is below the surface, the tall greens part at their tips, revealing the paths of animals that make their way through the undergrowth. We watch and we don’t say much.

Today is my birthday, but I am counting down and not up. I am making lists of things we need, things we’ll do, things I should eat. I am full out in front and pregnant, too, with the sort of anticipation that changes the way I negotiate with the passing of time. If my measure is right, I must only wait until the beginning of August.

nonfiction • flyway

I make my way out of the house only to visit Euleta, whose house is a five minute walk from mine. When we moved to the neighborhood years ago she would talk me into weeding her front garden beds and send me home with flower starts. This, I later learned, was everyone’s relationship with Euleta—and because of it, the patches of garden that rise around the local houses all reflect hers. She has lived here longer than the rest of us and keeps the stories of the land that we are too young to know.

Since neither of us has the energy to work in the garden, we sit on the swing that Euleta’s husband hung under the front awning more than seventy years ago. It creaks with the slow rhythm of our bodies. She grins widely and presses at her sweating forehead with her palm. Her fingers shake as she runs them back through her wiry hair, which she keeps up in a loose bun. Our ankles, mine bloated with pregnancy and hers with age, dangle, our toes brushing the old wood planks of porch floor. Euleta keeps smiling as I lament the weeds in the orchard, the season getting away from me. She begins to tell me the story of the graveling, then the later paving of the road in front of our houses.

She tells me how the fields and homesteads narrowed and were divided into large lots, few growing things like they used to. How the buildings sprawled out and away from the courthouse, cropping up closer and closer to her house, until she no longer sat at the edge of a meadow, but instead the edge of a town. She details how each house rose up, one by one. About the night a street lamp was first turned on outside her house and the way the night sky muted around the lamp, dulling the stars. I have heard this story before, or parts of it, rearranged, and I think at first that she has grown too old to hear what I have said. But then I realize our stories only differed in their measure. While I count in seasons she is counting in decades. We’re saying the same thing: the world is fecund in an always unsettling sort of way.

“They grow too fast,” she says, holding my wrist and looking at my swollen stomach. It is what everyone says, but I get the sense that she means something else, that she’s not just talking about children, but also about spring weeds, about cities. My skin stretches to contain it all. Small fissures have appeared at the side of my stomach and the skin on my thighs and chest appears to have thinned, revealing blue

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branched veins just below the surface. You roll there, a little deeper, a murmur.

- A spring needle I make blankets, bibs, and woolen pants. My head exhausts easily, but my fingers stay awake at night, uncomfortable when idle. I walk by Euleta’s and find her door locked, the swing empty. One morning she is in her front yard in a wheel chair, her frame smaller, her blouse sweated to her front. “I thought you had forgotten me,” she says. Her daughter is here, encouraging her to eat. Euleta holds my wrist, then lifts a spoon of cottage cheese, shaking, to her lips. A bit of it catches at the corner of her mouth. “I’m not ready to go,” she says. “I thought I would be ready to go.”

The spring warms quickly, I exhaust more easily, and the doctor puts me on bed rest. I turn restlessly for most of the hot night and fall asleep in the early morning when exhaustion finally wins out over discomfort. In the mornings I stay half-asleep and mix dreams into the dull sound of the morning razor, the shower, the gas burner of the stove clicking on. I feel the corners of my mouth draw down to a frown, agitated as pillows are propped behind me, curtains opened, breakfast left on a tray and lunch on a shelf. I do not know what to say, except “I love you,” which we whisper in daily rhythm before your father leaves for work. I sleep late, nibble at the toast or cold oatmeal, and then flit a needle through fabric, moody, watching the birds.

A cardinal has returned to nest in the lilac bush that presses its branches against our south window. She is weaving bits of string with pine needles. She comes back each spring to our window bush, and in the past I have drawn the curtain closed for her, attempting to create the sort of privacy I assume she needs for nesting. But this year, I do not protest their opening. I sit as still as I can, moving only my hands, watching her. She is uneasy.

Nest building seems a more practical project than the ones I’ve taken up. It is hard for me to determine how a bit of fabric, spliced and hemmed, how small buttons or thread and needle, are going to adequately prepare me for anything.

In the other window there is a stray cat, following the bird and me with its lit-green eyes. Under the cat’s gaze,

and my own, the cardinal ruffles her feathers and dismantles her nest. And now it is only me that the cat watches, licking its lips or its brown paws as I tip a needle back and forth across the cloth. The cat is there when I wake and turn to the breakfast tray in the morning. She moves window to window, watching me when I rise, against everyone’s better wishes, to heat water for tea or seek out something that sounds more appetizing than the food left for me.

I begin to set out bowls of buttermilk and bits of chicken, and then I drag bedding outside, dropping clean linens out over the tall grass, which puckers and lumps under the bed sheet. She will not come close to me when I’m paying attention to her, but when she can tell that I am absorbed in my project she comes to bat at the thread.

Despite the interruption, or maybe because of it, I climb up out of the bed after your father has left everyday and move outside, taking with me the linens he has patiently washed and spread on the bed the evening before. The cat steals my buttons, knots my yarn. My days grow more tangled, less productive. And the green world grows up around

Eva Gray and a Year Passing

- The July storm -

nonfiction • flyway

Today the cat is in a chair, and I am propped up on a pallet.

We are still cautious friends, only close enough to both fall under the shade of the gazebo that your father set up for us in the orchard. I am eight months pregnant. My body has swollen all at once, retaining water in my hands, my face.

My skin stings, stretched from the fast swelling. My blood pressure is still on the rise. I am languorous, fuzzy headed, weary of spirit. The cat and I pant from the heat and watch one another and the garden, alive around us.

When the cicadas set off their electric hum and attack the screen, the cat rises to stalk the new prey and then collapses again. The air is still and sits heavy and wet on our bodies, catching and slowing any attempted movements in its weight. We are still together, watching insects take to flight and the groundhog coming in and out of his burrow under the garden shed to sniff the air. We watch the birds in the trees, and the leaves start to quiver.

Then, and suddenly, a wind gust forces through the thick air and hits us like an open hand. The trees bend and groan in a macabre dance. A giant whip of wind cracks

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across the gazebo, startling the canvas sun shade off, setting me upright. The corner posts lift, float precariously, and then fall again to the ground. And while we sit dumbfounded and generally exposed, a rolling black-grey shadow swallows the former bland white sky that had sat over us, perfectly still, for more than two weeks’ time. The rain falls suddenly and in a sheet, and the cat and I scramble together to the center of the gazebo and huddle, wrapped in the sun shade, while a torrent of rain pelts through the side screening of the small structure. The gazebo shudders. We shudder. And we sit in awe, so very caught in the storm, with nothing to do but let the roll and clap and whip come with this lesson: we are so small.

The cat tucks down in my lap. I am shaken, first by the storm, and then by her closeness. I breathe as quietly as I can. She burrows down the side of my stomach, tucking her head under my arm. The thunder echoes in the flinching muscles of her back. The storm holds for more than an hour, torrential and violent. Then it turns off, as suddenly as it started. The sky lightens again to reveal a world that is silent, soggy and toppled. We are exhausted from the long fear of the storm. And we lie down together, crumpled, wet and in a pile. There, we fall asleep.

When I wake, the sky is lit up in brilliant gold; the sun is setting. I smell the cat’s wet fur, her body curled between my stomach and chin, asleep. She is still against me, close enough for me to see the hairs that meet up at the edge of her nose and the puff of air that puckers her furred lips out as she breathes. There is something witching about the soft details that this closeness affords. About the stillness of the day and a sleeping stray cat, after a storm that has stripped the world down in cracks and smashes and then left us, honey-colored and tender.

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- Four days in August - On the evening when my contractions level to three minutes apart I light the candles. They flicker through the first night of labor, across your father’s face and the old painting of the tree that hangs above our bed. I am aware, more than anything else, of the deep shadows of the candles’ light. By the first morning the wicks have burned down, leaving a mess of hardened wax across the plate.

Eva Gray and a Year Passing

nonfiction • flyway

On the first morning, I rest up to my chin in water in a horse trough at the edge of the gazebo. I press my heels hard into the trough wall, distributing a sharp pressure across my lower back during contractions. It is all I can do to control the pain, but it leaves my skin black and mottled.

Your father called the midwife and our closest friends at some late hour. They are all here; no, they are more than here. They are suddenly tangible in a way I have not been able to recognize since the late months of my pregnancy—they are so intimately present, holding my hands, looking white-faced and sleepless and so delicate.

The cat, too, watches over me, pressing her paws up on the side of the trough and peering down into the water, inches from my face. Her whiskers become scorch-tipped from the citronella candles we set up in the yard on the second night, and she is as tired as the rest of us.

My contractions remain steady as the sun rises and sets. Rises and sets. Your heartbeat, fast as a bird, stays strong and steady, so I insist that we don’t transfer. I’m skeptical of the hospital, wary of intervention, convinced that all you really need is time. The midwife presses her hands against my stomach, feeling to see if you have righted yourself. But you remain backwards, head pressed into my spine, making very little downward progression.

When dawn rises on the fourth day I am no longer able to respond to the swim of faces who, in their exhaustion, in my exhaustion, become bodies again, backdrop. And I am alone. I sit very quietly in the water, now clouded. I focus on the hard pressure in my back. My nose is bleeding and I do not wipe it away. Everything is quiet.

It is afternoon when I have given up inside but not been able to say it. A cold rain takes over, making small circles in the pool in front of me, wetting my face. And then it is not any longer about what I believe about myself or my body, but only the coldness of the wet trickle coursing my skin, the water-flecked green of the land, and the soft sounds of a pattered cicada summer. Time slips and widens, and I am caught in it, and then I bear down.

Not long after that your father loops his fingers under your tiny arms and pulls you out. He lays you across my stomach, and I draw you up my chest, smearing dark blood and vernix across my skin. You unclench your fists and spread out the smallest hands, long curled in me.

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And we name you Eva Gray.

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- Autumn, when we open our eyes and look around As the setting nights begin to cool the summer days, we venture out into the darkness to walk you to sleep. We move, street lamp to street lamp, watching the shapes of cars, mailboxes and hedgerows rise out of the shadows of night, and then fade again. Your father and I whisper quietly with each other, and when you have settled your head down into my chest, I sing a hushed song until you still. Then we take up our whispers again.

There is a grow light on in the plant room of Euleta’s house, and street lamps to mute the stars, and no other light. Your father keeps his arm under mine, afraid of my weakness. Autumn brushes down over our small town, dropping leaves on the well-wandered paths.

In the beginning, we are outside only at night, but when your father returns to work, I resist returning to the propped pillows and the open windows he has left for me. The air has cooled, calls, and I have been lying down too long. And so I follow our night paths, now bright-lit. I narrate, because I can tell you are listening:

This is the world, which may look big to you now, but soon you will ignore the details and think it is small. This is the way little birds flock and try to fly all together, casting patterns confusedly across the sky. I am not sure they know where they are going. Look, there is the cat. The cat. This is the way it feels to stand facing into the wind. This is the way sunlight feels on your face, and the difference in the shade of the big oak just down from Euleta’s house. Listen, little one, to the sound of wind in the tree.

This is how warm it is when we walk over grass, and this is how warm it is when we walk over concrete. This is our street sign. Dodds street, that’s our street. This is the sound of walking down a gravel alley. This is the art house on Wylie, look at the statues, look at the iron, the rust. This is how bamboo rustles in the wind, which is different from how the oak rustles, up high. This is what the Iranian grocery smells like. This is the sound of a bike passing. Listen carefully.

This is the smell of early dead leaves, and the itch in the eyes that the leaf mold brings. This is a gully, where the

run-off rain makes a stream leading under our street. Look at the way the water presses down the grasses, look. And here is purslane, and here is chicory, growing roadside.

We move closer to the city, and there is suddenly too much to see, to say. My voice is muffled in traffic noises.

Your face crumples and reddens as you suck in air to sob. We turn to trace the purslane home. And I tell it all back to you as you listen, bleary-eyed, as if it is the first time.

Eva Gray and a Year Passing

- November and the sound of water -

nonfiction • flyway

I never knew a November to be brown and wet before I moved to Indiana. I spent the first twenty-some years of my life in Northern Michigan, where at least half the year is covered in white. In southern Indiana, by contrast, winter is unpredictable and never really here, fluctuating between rain and ice, and a cold-weather dampness that we hold in our lungs. The weather is horrible, and we go outside only because it stops your crying. Sometimes. Our neighbors, in their good sense, lock themselves in. The warm yellow burns out their windows, here someone is playing piano, here they are setting down to dinner, and we are out watching in the drizzle. At Euleta’s house, the light in the plant room is on.

There is a high side window so I cannot see in, but I imagine her there, waiting on the cyclamen’s winter blooms, nursing her less hardy plants through the winter months. The cat weaves and presses into my ankles, perhaps trying to catch the cover of the umbrella or our bodies, perhaps only being a cat. I walk, walk on, because I don’t know what else to do for you.

The pediatrician has diagnosed you with colic, which, she admits, means she doesn’t know what is wrong.

It is a diagnosis that means they don’t have answers. I don’t have answers either. All the things I read about in books, the things I was sure would work, fail to. We walk up and down the street in the rain and bitter cold. This is not in the books.

I have returned to teaching, and when I am away, your cries come to echo through my day, permeating the spaces you do not occupy. Your small voice is always hidden beneath the sound of water. I hear you in the faucet, in the coffee pot. In the park fountain, in the rain as I walk home from the university, my head down. Your voice trickles everywhere, and my own helplessness is maddening.

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While I am away, you stay with your father. I have grown envious of him, because he gets to keep you when I must leave. And I am envious when I am there, too, for he is always kind-eyed and patient as you howl, while I grow jittery and frantic, unable to soothe you. I demand to know how it works, what his tactics are, what I’m missing. “Water” he says. He imagines water. He imagines that you are a storm, a squall, and that he must choose the sort of water he will be beside you. He imagines that still water can calm a storm.

You are asleep beside me, where your father has laid you. He settles down on my other side, and his breath evens.

I lie awake listening to the rain patter on the metal roof and grow anxious that you will wake up before I fall asleep. I am nestled between the two of you, between your soft breath and slumber, but I cannot find the still water.

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- A January tooth Your gums are swollen and you do not sleep. Not even for your father. It is not colic anymore, the pediatrician says— you are teething. You are listless, exhausted, angry. We are all waiting on the tooth. Time is made loose, weary, and patternless. Your father and I follow a reeling schedule and your sapped frame through different shades of time passing, the blurred measures of day and night.

It is dark, but our eyes, open long enough, have come to treat it as if it were light. You crawl about the bed, pressing your head into mine, fumbling, mis-starting, plowing over us as if we were land and not bodies. And so we become land: here a mountain to block your way, here a soft bed of ground. After nights half-slept and shape shifted, we rise, people again, and spend the lit hours hardly managing. I run my finger over your swollen gums, hoping for some solid bit of tooth, for some promise of sleep. You howl at my touch. Our words, like the weight of the new world, are incomprehensible to you. By twilight we bundle and barrel out the door into the sharp wet of January. We circle under a road-side tree, grown up under a power line.

It has been topped and hollowed to keep its offending branches away from the wires, and it spreads its wings high to each side of the cable. You flip your head back and then to

the side. The weight of your shifting body strains my back, my shoulders.

We walk under the leaved angel and I sing that same song I started singing months ago, about where you came from and where my body will return. About the ground and water and trees. And your body grows heavy, still, for now.

We whisper to one another as we walk home, and the sky begins its winter drizzle. We prepare for another night, in which we will be the ground. We will be the water and the trees and the mountains that bar your sleepless way.

Eva Gray and a Year Passing

- A spring to hold -

nonfiction • flyway

Winter grows dry for just a moment and then rattles its cold bones and brittle branches, tapping the fence, preparing to wake. The earliest spring birds have begun to migrate north again. They rest down in our garden on their way, pecking at the seeds we scatter. They begin the morning with their songs and stories, waking us to the day, waking us from the quiet winter season to the changes that spring brings. The world is frigid and wide open, and you watch it, attentively, as the ice cracks and thaws, cold-wet and muddied. You concentrate on the branches, the birds, the book covers, the grey light through the winter window. In this watching, you come to understand for the first time that the world is mostly tangible and so you reach out your small hand and grasp it, holding tightly to the pieces you find.

You grab at the cat’s winter coat, and she leaves you with fistfuls of the loose hair that she is shedding for the coming warm weather. A bit of green edges out of the buds on the front trees and bushes, testing the air. Spring is not here yet, but every growing thing suggests that it is close at hand. The snowdrops, the bird-foot violets, the Lenten roses, fearlessly unfurl into the cold. You learn these earliest flowers for the first time, working your fingers over the plant starts, pulling at them, splintering their stems and bruising their spring petals. Stunned by the newness, by your own hands, you clasp it all tightly. I cringe but let you go on. I know that I too have come to know the world by breaking it to bits, eventually learning its patterns and settling into them. I cannot fault you for being unaware of how beautiful things can grow if you let them alone. I cannot fault you for

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the wonder you find in a solid world whose pieces, ripped and crumpled, fit in your new hands.

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- May and a porch swing I don’t learn until May about Euleta’s passing. When the early spring warmed, her garden beds were weeded, her yard waste was out at the road, the mailbox was full and then empty. I could not have known. Her daughter hung flowers in the baskets around the porch for Mother’s Day this year, like she always has. The neighbors did what they’ve done since her husband died twenty years ago. They just kept on, tending the queen-less hive.

We spend early spring evenings on the porch swing, you and me and the cat, all watching the baubles and clutter that decorated her porch, the hanging baskets, darkening, dimming in the fading light. She could have, at any instant, slipped out of her front door, sat down beside me, held my wrist.

But it is just us here. Creak-rocking on the old swing on Euleta’s porch. Today is my birthday. I am making lists to file away. I sit on the right of the swing, where Euleta used to sit. The cushion here is lumped up and uncomfortable.

While I am adjusting it I find a stack of papers tucked under the padding. On the top is a poem printed on paper that has molded with the damp passing of time.

Let us give thanks for children who are our second planting, and though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are.

I stop reading; I am crying. I am crying for her, but also for the way things close sometimes, year to year, too easily, too sweetly. For the mold, and for the way a bad poem works when you’re already feeling loss. Your eyes watch me, uncertain.

“They grow too fast,” she had said like everyone says, except that she had held my wrist, said something that I could hear but not yet understand.

[Maria Marsello]

Orchard Suite 1

We made vows in a Sterling orchard.

Like snared balloons, red apples with dropsy

hid in branches.

Dragonflies dodged

ornaments falling on uneven grass.

Cherubs stamped heart halves,

robins sang sonnets, sepals tipped crowns.

Silver birch sifted air, and pollen stuck,

here and there.

2

We nested in far western fruit-lands,

locked arms and lips, pips and pocket.

Knock-kneed deer side-stepped ground apples and roaming tarantulae.

Distracted, spooning cinnamon mush

poetry • flyway

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into baby’s frog-mouth and cleaning sugar-grit

from his tooth, steel creepers threaded our hair.

3

Your pate is now burnished.

I’m your crabapple crone.

Rusticating, we fondle milkweed’s chaste velvet and chapped skin.

Orange lantern plant limns our land and duff scratches slack apple calves.

But annually,

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we harvest Honesty,

drink cider hard and sweet,

too soon to founder

as non-plussed nags in a

dim-lit stable.

[Athena Kildegaard]

Turtle I smelled it first, a rot flies delight in, a wavering and deep-muddy smell, for the turtle was pretty well gone, his eyes keyholes, his spiny tail freed from ruddering.

The turtle was big on the rocks above the river. It must have flailed, nothing to hold on to, balanced as it was on granite, soundless and paddling— with its talony feet—the air.

The flies came in and out. I left them all on that flinty shore.

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[Athena Kildegaard]

I Had to Wait The way the deer regarded me— pensive as an urn, other-worldly, though corporeal, risen— turned me inside out— stopped my breath— and after she’d bounded— her white tail flashing among the birches—

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I had to wait— shivering as if I’d come up out of water—

[Athena Kildegaard]

I Gave My Grief I gave my grief to the heron, the penstemon, the rivers’ current, to the shadow of what I missed seeing— bird already flown— to the seed caught by wind, dropped beyond my path, to what stays the same— and here I pause for always there is no permanence— to what flows past writhing, wrinkling, folding into itself, wrestling the earth.

poetry • flyway

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Home Voices Contest [First Place]

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[Andrew Payton]

You’re Not Welcome Here

June 4th 2011 Marmet, WV The overhead florescent panels flickered to light and startled awake the two hundred or so bodies sleeping on the floor.

“Attention everyone,” said one of the organizers by the door. Her outgrown, greasy black mohawk reflected the sleeplessness of her duties. “We have gotten word from a reliable source that there is a party of twenty to thirty coalminers gathering in pickup trucks in Madison. They have been drinking, and are believed to be coming our way.”

The room stirred. The sound of nylon sleeping bags on carpet nearly drowned her out.

“We don’t know for sure what they intend to do—” She paused. “But we ask everyone to stay indoors and to keep away from the windows. We have called the Kanawha County police. We will keep you informed as information comes to us.”

Those sleeping by the windows, across the whole front of the building, floor to ceiling, started to scoot away, causing a chain reaction towards the back of the room.

Another organizer stretched rolls of duct tape across the glass.

Among mumbles of fear, annoyance, and excitement, the dreadlocked Tennessean next to me, using an unfolded piece of cardboard as a sleeping pad, laughed almost hysterically. He remained on his back despite the resituating of others. His dreadlocks pooled around his head as he crossed and uncrossed his legs.

“What?” I asked him, wondering what he thought was so funny.

“They can bring it on,” he said, scratching his beard.

June 18th 2011 Lincoln County, WV

nonfiction • flyway

I leave my family in the graveyard and climb the old road.

Much of the gravel has washed away and tall weeds grow in tire tracks. Avoiding poison ivy, sumac, and large stones, my blood starts to warm as my heart picks up speed. I don’t know how far I’ll walk, or what I’ll see, but when my father pointed past the family shack at the end of the drive to a road shrouded in brush, and told me, That way to the top, I knew I had to take a look.

At the end of the path I come to a clearing of tall grass and trashed appliances. Busted-out tires and couches have been left to weeds. Volunteer tomato and squash grow in a vaguely geometric shape at the center of the clearing. I think about what I might be able to grow up here, and what I might be able to hunt.

I keep out of the grass, wary of the copperheads my father warned of, by stepping from cinderblock to cinderblock. A trailer is turned over into the earth; rust consumes the tin. A poison ivy rash to come reddens my calves. I make a mental note to search for jewelweed, a natural remedy, when I descend the hill.

This is my father’s family mountain in the southwest corner of West Virginia. We’re here on a family road trip. Driving east from Kentucky—in which I’ve made a temporary home—to where I grew up in the DC suburbs, we stopped here to reunite with relatives on the land of my grandfather’s childhood.

From my cinderblock perch I look out across the treetops. If not for the spruce, —or firs, I’m only guessing—I could see down to the Guyandotte River. And if my family’s mountain was higher, maybe I could see out of this holler; maybe I could see to neighboring Logan or Mingo County where this river’s headwaters are. Maybe I could see the butchered land; where once the mountaintops were, maybe I could see the treeless patchwork of fallow stone.

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June 6th 2011 Boone County, WV The rallying of angry coalminers in pickup trucks turned out to be a bunch of smoke. According to the folks in charge, a lot of that was coming in—anonymous tips warning of violent counter-protests just ahead, even threats that locals were going to “force us out.”

Our numbers had grown and we were upwards of 300 bodies deep. The meandering county highway obscured the front and rear of our single-file line. It was the end of the second day of our 50-mile hike to Blair and we’d just found out that we were losing yet another of our pre-arranged campsites. The coal company was buying the land out from under our feet.

The local papers said we weren’t wanted. They said we were a bunch of out-of-staters who didn’t get West Virginia; who didn’t get coal. We were a stampede of hypocrites, coal-powered electricity-users, who drove hundreds of miles from surrounding cities—Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Washington, Raleigh—preaching what we thought was good for them.

We marched in remembrance of the original 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, following in the miner’s footsteps, from Marmet to Blair. We wore red bandanas around our necks. We carried handmade canvas signs, bound to bamboo poles with used bicycle inner tubes, that read “SAVE BLAIR MOUNTAIN,” “APPALACHIA DESERVES SUSTAINABLE UNION JOBS,” and “END MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL.” Folks came out of the hollers to hold out roses. The trucks, by order of the coal company, hugged the shoulders.

Cars with West Virginia plates drove by singing the horns and cheering us on. Small parties gathered on porches to demand, with the full capacity of the human lung, that we “go home.” The people were divided: union or nonunion, pro-MTR or anti-MTR, welcoming or hostile.

We were a varied group as well: professors and students, farmers, local residents, union miners, union steel workers, and as always in matters of civil disobedience, the vagabond class. And we marched for a variety of reasons: all came to preserve Blair Mountain and its historical

significance, more to stop mountaintop removal, and some to put an end to coal entirely.

You’re Not Welcome Here

June 18th 2011 Lincoln County, WV

On the first of August in 1921 Sid Hatfield, Police Chief of Matewan, West Virginia, and famed supporter of the United

nonfiction • flyway

I unearth an old shovel, the handle half rotted away, and rest my foot on the spade. I hear an animal, perhaps a deer, crash through the woods.

In this very spot several hundred million years ago I’d be straddling the equator in the middle of the supercontinent Pangaea. It would have probably looked something like the Himalayan Mountains—only taller.

This was all created when what was to become the North American continent collided with what was to become the African continent.

These are some of the oldest mountains in the world.

So old, in fact, that some biologists theorize that this is the birthplace of the tree. That would mean that every tree that has ever grown on the face of our planet can trace its family line back to right here; right here in Appalachia. This mesophytic forest is now so biodiverse that you can find more species of trees in any given acre than on the entire European continent.

These mountains are so old that they’ve already been worn to flatlands once, only to be reborn in a second uplift. During the Carboniferous period, when the area was covered in swamps, plant life buried in sediment eventually metamorphosed into thick, black seams of coal. This age-old rock runs in veins throughout this whole country.

At the end of the 19th century European immigrants and freed slaves migrated here to work in the coal mines. By the early 20th century the coal companies had become large and rich. The workers, plagued by black lung and dangerous working conditions, were further oppressed by low wages— getting paid in “company” money that only held currency at the inflated “company” store—and death was threatened to any who attempted unionization.

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Mine Workers Association, left the McDowell County courthouse with his wife and another couple. A group of coal company agents opened fire on the group, filling Hatfield’s body with seventeen bullets.

Armed miners started to gather from all across coal country. They aimed to march through Kanawha and Logan counties, all the way to Mingo, to unionize the mines by force. Anti-union sheriff Don Chafin’s private army of hired company goons planned to cut them off, on Blair Mountain, before they could make it to “Bloody Mingo.”

The men carried squirrel guns. They wore their military uniforms from the First World War and tied red bandanas around their necks. As they marched, and violence grew, the coal company opened fire on camps of women and children and hired private planes to drop homemade bombs on the marching miners. By August 25 more than ten thousand miners had joined the Battle on Blair Mountain.

The fighting went on for five days until eventually President Harding threatened the miners with federal troops and Army bombers.

It was and still is the largest civil insurrection since the Civil War. United Mine Worker membership plummeted after Blair. And not until FDR’s New Deal fourteen years later did the miners get the right to unionize.

Ninety years later, after being added and subsequently removed from the National Register of Historic Places, Blair Mountain is slated for mountaintop removal. The mountain will be literally and symbolically removed, its social and historical significance erased, its ecology permanently altered.

Mountaintop removal, or MTR as it is commonly referred to, is a highly mechanized process of coal mining in which the forest is logged, the surface is precision blasted, the summit removed, and the coal seams harvested by massive machinery. The refuse is then dumped into nearby valleys, burying streams, and water from the refining process is stored in so-called sludge ponds. It is efficient, it is cheap, and it is quick. It requires far fewer jobs than traditional underground mining, and it has, in some ways, kept energy costs low for American consumers.

Opponents of the practice say it is causing irreparable damage to Appalachian ecosystems. Already one and half million acres have been surface mined, and five hundred mountains in Central Appalachia removed, leaving behind topographically altered, toxic, and unusable land.

Proponents argue that is good for our economy, safer for miners, and necessary to supply enough energy to meet our growing demands. Mountaintop removal currently accounts for about 6% of our national supply of coal. In the past three decades the workforce in Kentucky coal mines has shrunk by 60% due to the reduction of underground mines and the ascension of MTR.

You’re Not Welcome Here

June 18th 2011 Lincoln County, WV I descend the hill, back down the old road, and return to my family. They are still gathered in the graveyard that sits at the entrance to the family land; a hundred or so acres, stretched up this mountain and down the other side. In the graveyard are one hundred and fifty years of names on stone—miners and farmers, veterans and still-births, immigrants and indigenous.

My brother puts his arm around me.

“Hey Andrew, what kind of tree is that?” He directs me to the right of the shack. It is old, fissured down the middle by rot. It could easily be climbed. Surely seventy years before our grandfather had climbed it.

“I have no idea.”

My brother lifts himself onto the porch. Sumac pushes through holes in the planks, and hickory nuts decay where they land. I follow him inside.

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My grandfather got out of Appalachia when he was sixteen.

He thought he was seventeen, lied about his age to join the Army, and got deployed to Germany at the very end of the Second World War. The fighting was mostly over when he got there, so what he did, a sixteen-year-old boy from coal country West Virginia, was move dead bodies.

America had just liberated the concentration camps, ended the years of war, and the only thing left to do on the ground was clean up. My grandfather had pictures:

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skeletons wrapped in thin layers of skin, men and women indecipherable from each other piled seven feet in the air.

When his time was up instead of moving back home he followed his brother out of the mountains to the East where the jobs were, to Baltimore, Maryland. There he met my grandmother—a second generation German immigrant—and soon after my father was born. It was 1949, they were broke and young, and America was changing.

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June 10th 2011 Marmet, WV Steam was catching in swirls over the five-gallon pot, so I killed the propane, and with two hand-stitched potholders carried the hot water to the portable sinks. A small volunteer crew had gathered to do the hundreds of dishes that dinner had brought. Mixed with detergent and diluted with cold water, the rinse seared my hands as I submerged plate after plate and fork after fork.

We were outside our rented warehouse space in downtown Marmet. It was the fourth night of the march and we’d lost each one of our camping spots; the companies were buying parks and roadside property, and threatening camp owners and local governments who had originally offered us tent space. So every night we’d shuttle back here for dinner and meetings, sleep shoulder to shoulder on the floor, and every morning we’d shuttle back out to the county highways for our slow crawl toward Blair.

“Not everybody’s like that,” said an older woman. A West Virginia local, hand drying the plastic plates and bowls, explained her community to us. “Most people around here is just afraid to speak out.”

“But can’t they see better than anybody else how much these companies are destroying this place?” said a nineteen-year-old anarchist dressed in amateur tattoos. A small bone was dreaded into his hair.

“They do know better,” the woman replied. Her hair was cut short and the steam of the dishwater was beading up on her brow. “But when someone in your family is going to lose their job if you speak out, it’s a lot to ask them to even look us in the eye.”

hands.

He nodded, scraping the pot of burnt rice in his

You’re Not Welcome Here

“People here know they don’t got good water.

People here know the air is dirty. But you speak out, like some of us do, and you get death threats. I ain’t kidding, either. Death threats.”

Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel.

Voices swelled, dozens of them; banjos, mandolins, harmonicas, guitars, mouthharps, big African drums, and even a bellowing didgeridoo clattered together to play John Prine’s classic, well known in the activist circles.

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land.

The dish pit quit talking. Some joined in.

Well they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken.

I started singing too. Porch lights switched on from across the train tracks that stretched behind our warehouse; train tracks that every twenty minutes would haul coal to be burned downriver.

And they wrote it all down to the progress of man.

When it came to the chorus, everyone knew the words: And Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County Down by the Green river where Paradise lay The neighborhood was staring. Maybe they knew the song, maybe they didn’t.

Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking, Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.

June 18th 2011 Lincoln County, WV

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The floorboards of the old shack creak. Grime and spiderwebs filter sunlight through windowpanes. My brother wipes the dust from a picture on the wall with his fingers. It is our great-grandmother, stern-faced and bent in age, surrounded by a few of her grown children. Their clothing suggests the 1970s. The tone of her skin proves Creek Indian blood, which has, after two generations of bleaching, filtered down to me.

I cough up the dust we’ve unsettled.

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My brother finds an old rag and uncovers picture after picture. Faces return to their old home. A small, square television with aluminum foil antennas sits on a small table.

He cleans its screen too.

I move into the bedroom. It is cluttered with boxes and clothing. Tears in a large mattress reveal the metal springs. Through the window I see my parents talking in the graveyard.

My father, raised on his parents’ seven-acre homestead in what once was the fringe of Baltimore, met my mother in Washington, DC. They both worked office jobs for the federal government. They bought a house in the suburbs, had three kids, and gave me the life typical of many 1980s-born middle class white kids—swimming pools, video games, boy scouts, and eventually a liberal arts degree from a large state university.

After graduating college, hitchhiking the states and backpacking Central America, I started to meet people who could walk outside and identify birds by their song, could name every tree in the canopy, eat freely the wild edibles of their forest, and intimately knew the rivers and streams that made up their watershed. And then when I would go back home, I’d nearly feel lost; I knew the city, and its stretching highways, but along the edges of the roads, and in the islands of backyards and state parks, it was like foreign soil.

The suburb I come from looks like suburbs across the nation. It’s strip malls, box stores, fast food, interstates, columns and curves of identical homes built in the 1960s and 1970s. The remaining woods are on death row, waiting to be cleared for more malls, more housing complexes, more parking lots, more highways. My house is situated in a cultural desert, and I started to feel like I wasn’t from anywhere.

So in a desperate search for meaning and history, I find myself here, in a remote West Virginia holler, by an old graveyard of family bones, and thinking of staying.

June 10th 2011 Boone County, WV Ten more miles and we’d be in Blair. We approached the Logan County line, and the forested roadside opened up

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into a series of lawns and isolated houses at the foot of a mountainside. Ahead of where I marched an overweight man in a neck brace stepped off his porch and lumbered towards our line. His head was down, and since he wasn’t yelling, I guessed he meant no harm. By the time he’d crossed his lawn my point in the march intersected with him, and he fell in line right in front of me.

He had a thick gray mustache, a red bandana around his neck, and a lunch pail swinging heavily from his right hand. Within fifteen minutes his back was covered in sweat.

His pace slowed and I feared for his health in the near hundred-degree heat.

“Sir,” I touched his shoulder. “Do you want me to carry that for you?”

“No, I got it.”

I let a moment pass and he continued to drag.

“There’s a van following along with us, if you wanted you could ride in it awhile.”

“No,” he was curt and short with breath. “I got to do this for my Pa-Paw.” “Was he in the Battle?”

“Shot in both legs,” he huffed. “Crawled two days in the creek bed back home to Sharples.” He pointed out across a field to a creek that ran through the trees.

This man was Charles. Charles was a coal miner for thirty years, and in the last half of his career, he was specifically in MTR. He was the guy who pushed the button that blasted the earth away.

“I feel ashamed,” he told me. His shirt was soaked, every conceivable bit of it, with his sweat. “I undid God’s work. It ain’t right.”

“It’s not your fault, Charles.”

“Yes, it is.”

A commotion started to trickle from the front of the line towards the back where we were. Someone pointed to the roadside, to a rock wall ten feet high, turning to those walking behind, and said “Jesus Christ.”

Water trickled out of the trees, down the wall, and into a small ditch stream. It was the color of a deep rust. It hung on the walls like melting copper, and ran, fetid and slow, in the direction we traveled.

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“It looks like blood,” someone behind me commented.

“It smells like metal,” said someone else.

Charles said nothing. His head still down.

A pick-up slowed its pace. A man in the blue jumpsuit and reflective orange stripes of a coal miner put half his body out the window.

“I see you, Charles.” The man grinned. Charles said nothing still, just struggled along. “Don’t think I don’t see you, Charles.”

I last spoke to my grandfather the previous summer on an obligatory visit before his death. He was sat in a metal folding chair at the edge of one his gardens. His camouflage jacket hung loose on his thin frame like his chin hung loose to his jaw. My father and I had just finished picking string beans under his unwavering guard. Inside my father was rinsing the beans for dinner, and I stood alone with the old man. He looked through me and into the woods.

“I planted that tree.”

I followed his gaze.

“The black walnut.”

He pointed out a few oaks, chestnuts, and apples as well.

His speech was slow and his throat sounded like it was stuffed full of cigarettes, eighty years of them, all burning at once. He told me how he would search for ginseng and sell it to the Chinese to buy candy. He told me how his mother taught him to make medicine out of wild herbs and mushrooms. How they raised pigs. How his father taught him to hunt raccoons and squirrels. How there weren’t any deer in his mountains, because the Cherokee had nearly cleared them out selling skins. How they’d collect wild honey by cutting the hive out of the tree. And what he didn’t tell me I invented: a boy raised half-wild in the unending forest. In a poor, less industrialized time, he learned his place with an intimacy that I will never have with a piece of land.

A few months later I was drinking with some friends at a cabin in the Kentucky woods when I got the call that he had died. It was winter and it had just begun to snow. I grabbed a bottle and walked straight out the door, down to the frozen banks of a drained reservoir. Pools of moonlight

collected in little islands of water. I kept my mouth wet with the liquor, and watched the snow burden the branches of the trees.

You’re Not Welcome Here

The line stopped. We waited for the order to cross the street.

A carload of teenage girls were sitting at the end of a gravel road intersecting with the county highway. They sat on top of the car holding posterboard signs scrawled over in sharpie messages meant to intimidate: “You’re Not Welcome Here” and “Go Home, Treehuggers.”

When our whole presence was upon them— hundreds of silent marchers, heads bowed and disengaged from any potential spat—they broke into song.

Almost heaven, West Virginia / Blue Ridge Mountains, / Shenandoah River. / Life is old there; / older than the trees, / younger than the mountains /growing like a breeze— And as they sang we sang too. Suddenly hundreds of us, West Virginians and not, took voice together: Country roads, take me home / to the place where I belong . . .

The girls looked puzzled, some of us were laughing, but they continued to sing.

West Virginia, mountain momma, / take me home, country roads…

In the commotion half of us had attempted to cross the street, while others, confused, lingered in the middle of the road. Car horns started complaining from either side.

I hear her voice, / in the morning she calls me. / The radio reminds me of my home far away, / and driving down the road I get a feeling / that I should have been home yesterday, yesterday.

June 10th 2011 Blair, WV

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When we got to Blair it was hardly there. A town that once had a few hundred families was now a modern-day ghost town. A few families, all on their porches, held signs of one form or another: GO HOME; WELCOME MARCHERS; COAL KEEPS THE LIGHTS ON; SAVE BLAIR MOUNTAIN; PROUD COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER; THANK YOU, WE ARE SO PROUD.

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The town once stretched up into several different valleys, we were told, but those old homes were bought out and buried by blasted rock. The advent of MTR cut jobs, and towns like Blair all through these mountains were slowly eroded away by an ongoing exodus. And it’s what the coal companies want. When the people leave, there is no one to stand in the way of the whole region becoming one massive coal mine.

We camped—hundreds of us and by morning a thousand—in the shadow of the mountain itself: finally, Blair Mountain. Among the many forested hills it was nothing special, and if not for having been pointed out to us, none would have taken particular notice. We turned the abandoned churchyard that ninety years before had served as a field hospital into a transient tent village.

That night, in full moonlight, we square-danced barefoot over loose and sharp pieces of that infamous black rock. We formed long lines with dozens of couples that stretched the length of our tent village. We laughed and shared secret flasks and almost forgot the unblinking eye of the red and blue lights of state troopers, perched on the highway above, waiting for morning to come. Blair Mountain watched it all.

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June 11th 2011 Blair, WV After a rally, and hundreds more marchers swelled our numbers, the last few miles commenced. The actual battlefield was property of Arch Coal of St. Louis, so the march was headed for a public turnoff on the highway.

However a group of us, myself included, taking up the rear, and numbering just shy of two hundred, had made the decision to go all the way to the battlefield.

We took the one lane highway despite the protest of the police. We were loud and strong, emboldened; curving up the mountain highway I couldn’t see the start in front of me or the end behind me. We were a presence that could hardly be ignored, triple the population of the struggling community, local and national networks had cameramen running back and forth our line.

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When the roads diverged, a bamboo pole with two bandanas waved left to right—the signal—and we broke away from the march. We marched to a green gate, clearly marked “PRIVATE PROPERTY.” The cops weren’t aware of this divergence from the main protest, but CNN was: as we jumped the gate a reporter asked us how we felt. A roar went up through the ranks.

The road to the battlefield was edged in blackberries that we picked along the way. Someone from the back started up a song, a Civil Rights traditional: Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around At this point, this far into the week, we all knew the words.

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, marching on to freedom land.

There were ramifications of our trespass, we knew.

Anywhere from a night to six months in jail, a fine anywhere from a hundred bucks to a few thousand. In West Virginia it depended on the judge; a pro-union judge was likely to let us off easy, otherwise, they’d throw the whole damn book at us. We had decided that our strength was in numbers, and whatever we did, we’d do together. Many of us had priors, most all of us were broke, some had jobs and families to get back to; so we decided we’d get to the battlefield, but once the police came, we’d turn and go home. It wasn’t about getting arrested; it was about getting here.

A private security truck blocked the road. The message came from the organizers up front to walk around the truck, and to not, for any reason, touch it. A man in a ball cap and sunglasses looked forward without expression as we bypassed his minor obstacle. We knew though that this meant the police were on their way.

At the top of the ridge, closing in on the battlefield, a view through the trees opened to our right: mountaintop removal in progress. It looked like a Wyoming plateau or something out West, nothing like what I knew Appalachia to be. Stretching into the distance the land had been flattened and the ridges removed. It was brown, dry, and wind-swept.

The coal companies claim all MTR land is “reclaimed” and “repurposed.” There was no purpose about this. Everything that lived there was gone; people, animals, trees, all gone.

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It was then that it finally struck me: I might be one of the last human beings to ever walk on this mountain. Blair Mountain, this very ground we were on, was next.

Once passed, an organizer turned and held the march until we were gathered into a large circle. “We have entered the battlefield,” he told the group. “Let’s have a moment of silence to recognize the history and struggle that this mountain represents.”

Our silence lasted only a moment. Five officers, two state and three county, broke through the crowd and into the middle of our tiny vigil.

“Everybody back down now,” one boomed. Each had dozens of plastic handcuffs hanging from their belts. We didn’t move. We stayed quiet with our heads bowed.

“Everybody move now.”

The organizer spoke to him in a hushed tone. “Is it alright if we just have a moment of silence for—”

“Down now,” screamed another officer. He grabbed bodies by the shoulders and pointed them downhill.

We started to move, sullenly, back the way we came.

“Plant your signs!” somebody called out. We thrust our bamboo poles—“Save Blair Mountain,” “Stop Mountaintop Removal”—into the dirt along the path.

Someone else started up another song:

Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom.

Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom.

Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom.

Hallelu, Hallelu, Hallelujah.

The police herded us down; down the mining road, past the gate, and miles on back to Blair.

We slept one more night in Marmet and in the morning started catching rides in various directions across the country. Our march had made some national papers, but a new day of news had come, and our struggle had fallen out of the spotlight. The organizers promised us that the fight was not over, and they still needed our help. But the high had ended; the mining continued, and we returned to our lives.

I was headed west for Kentucky, but I’d be back. In just a week my family was picking me up in Louisville to meet my new girlfriend’s family and then head east.

June 18th 2011 Lincoln County, WV

You’re Not Welcome Here

I drove with my family pressed against one another in my father’s Toyota. We left I-64 at Huntington, just over the Kentucky border, and took a state highway deep into the country. The road straightened out along the river, and we started passing roads that shared our last name, snaking off into the woods and up mountainsides. “Here,” my father pointed.

We took a gravel drive past a few old cars with weeds growing through the engines. I parked our car next to the shack where my grandfather was born. It was cool under the trees, and not nearly as humid as it was out on the interstates and in the gas station parking lots. We stretched our limbs and wandered into the nearby graveyard. My dad’s cousins, aunts and uncles, his brother and a few children were all there, already gathered around the names on stone. They’d all driven many hours to get here. Maryland, Alabama, Florida—few in the family had stayed in West Virginia.

Past the graveyard, past the rotting shack, the gravel road continues on into a dark tangle of trees ascending the mountain.

Our mountain.

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141

Home Voices Contest [Second Place]

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[Tegan Swanson]

Everything Rises on an Atoll I. Snorkeling in an early morning rainstorm, my face encased in a plastic mask, I am surrounded by billowing polyester the color of mango, banana, ripe papaya. I am buoyant, stuck to the surface of the tamed soup of ocean water which fills the lagoon, the inflated bubble of my Guam dress floating above me like the pneumatophore of a Portuguese Man o’War. The world is tinted and cloudy. Turquoise, tinged in salt, tepid and lolling. I can barely see my hands as they flounder in the water beneath me. Coming in and out of focus as it moves around the reef, a giant Napoleon Humphead wrasse grazes lazily on the dead coral growth.

It is bulbous and rainbow bright, a mosaic of flashing blue stripes and yellow swirls of fish flesh, nearly as long as I am tall. In the water below me there is a cloud of purple moon jellies, a school of bug-eyed, scarlet soldierfish, thousands of ephemeral flickering fins. Beside the stag-horn coral a pile of abandoned D batteries are leaching their toxic viscera into the lagoon.

I emerge dripping, wet polyester clinging to my arms and belly. Searching the narrow shoreline for my sandals, instead I find three cans of Raid, the remnants of a package of ramen noodles, the disintegrating mess of a dirty diaper half-buried in sand. Black flies swarm around the skeleton of a chicken carcass. As an influx of rainwater overwhelms the earth, refuse in varying states of decay is exposed and the sweetness of decomposition hovers behind the scent of wet sand, green matter, and Pacific salt on the air. Namdrik is many things. Pristine is not one of them.

Prior to the arrival of missionaries in 1857, almost everything that Marshallese communities used was made of biodegradable, local materials. By the time the Republic of the Marshall Islands had regained official sovereignty in 1986, much of this had shifted to cheap, plastic imports and single-use replacements. Already isolated by miles of open ocean and without the necessary utilities to dispose of any

1 cook house 2 expression of discontent or disgust 3 lady bird, or chicken; the nickname my host family gave me

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non-biodegradable waste, Marshallese on outer atolls have no choice but to burn the trash, pile it beside their homes, or throw it in the lagoon. Go looking on the beach or in the mangrove forests of Namdrik, and you will find plastic diapers, rotting shoes, broken transistor radios, rusted bicycle wheels, and miles of tangled, sepia-colored video cassette tape. The ubiquitous D size batteries come from the industrial flashlights which the men use to go spear-fishing at night. When they begin to dull, people just toss them aside.

After changing out of my sodden swimming clothes, I head toward the mon kuk1 to help my host sister start breakfast. Although it is nearly seven, I doubt that she is awake because of the rain beating against the tin roofs of Namdrik this morning. Wilpina likes to sleep late when it storms. The door to their house is open, and my thirteen year old host nephew Wotje is sitting on the bench beneath the overhang, playing my ukulele.

“Woror2,” he says in the middle of the song. “School is cancelled again.”

“Who told you that?” I ask, gathering coconut shells into my arms for the fire.

“The principal rode by on his bicycle,” he says.

“Libao3, can you make banana pancakes for breakfast?”

I raise my eyebrows in a silent Marshallese yes. “Go get me some from the tree.” He grins and puts the instrument down on the bench, running out into the rain with his t-shirt pulled over his head. Although I try not to have favorite siblings or students in the community, Wotje is both punkrock and polite, and he is smarter than most of the young men twice his age. He is the reason I know how to steer a traditional Marshallese canoe and how to play the ukulele.

There isn’t a steady male presence in the house, so Wotje is the one who goes spear-fishing for dinner. The girls don’t follow him around in droves yet, but I tell him they will someday.

This always makes him blush.

By the time he comes back with a bundle of tiny, golden fruits, my left hand is covered in pancake batter—we don’t have a spoon—and a flat, steel plate which acts as the griddle is heating up above the embers of the fire. Every so often a leak in the roof lets a rain drop sssszz on the metal. In

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mid-flip I notice that Etri, my sister’s youngest son, is crawling across the coral gravel yard on his hands and knees.

“Wotje, would you bring him in here before he gets soaked?” He grabs the baby and puts him on the ground beside me. Wearing no pants and covered in mud, Etri reaches for the griddle.

“Bwil4,” I say and tap him lightly on the nose. He giggles and retreats from the fire. When he opens his mouth to laugh, I notice that he is gnawing on something and I lean over to take it away. When I pull my fingers out, I am holding another battery, rusted at the edges and oozing with baby spit.

Facing down the barrel of an undergraduate degree which offered few job prospects beyond unpaid internships and volunteer opportunities abroad, I decided on the WorldTeach program in the Republic of the Marshall Islands for three reasons: I wanted to teach, I wanted to live in a rural community near the ocean, and I didn’t want to pay for my tenure. After the Marshallese government adopted a compulsory English education policy for students ages six to eighteen, the Ministry of Education began working with WorldTeach in 2002 to employ native English speakers in elementary and middle school classrooms all across the thirty-four island nation. Outer island communities are extremely isolated because of shipping costs and a general lack of infrastructure, and their schools have the lowest education average of the fourteen nations UNICEF surveyed in Micronesia. As ocean levels rise, the salinity of ground water on the atolls increases, and plant growth is stifled.

Copra production and fisheries revenues are the two largest sources of income for the RMI, beyond economic reparations awarded by the US government for damages incurred during World War II era nuclear testing. In conjunction with changes in marine ecosystems around the islands, the pressures connected to a resource-based economy increase as these resources grow ever more finite. During orientation, we were encouraged by our field directors to explore themes in environmental education, particularly in sustainable development and resource exploitation. Before I left the US for the year, I had carefully packed a hardcover copy of Dr. 4 hot

Seuss’s environmental parable The Lorax in the pocket of my hiking backpack.

5 sunrise, refers to the easternmost atolls; Ralik means sunset, and refers to the western atolls.

6 Marshallese for “windy season”—time period from approx. February to June in which there is the highest average rainfall 7 jungle 8 rural village at the far north end of Namdrik atoll, approx. 2 km from town center

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II. Ten days later and it is still raining. In the northern atolls of the Ratak5 chain of the Marshall Islands, many receive little or no rain even during iien in kototo.6 As a southern atoll in the Ralik chain, Namdrik has a much higher precipitation rate, averaging close to thirty inches alone in the three month period from April to June. Storms come most often from the northeast, barreling over the lagoon and breaking across the land mass in sheets. Women run haphazardly from their houses in a rush to save their hanging laundry, and they send their children, skittering like beetles, to cover the piles of dried coconut shells which serve as cooking fuel.

The highest point on the island is less than three meters above sea level. This means that within minutes of the beginning of a downpour, standing water pools on top of the shallow soil and Namdrik is a flooded, muddy swamp. The tin hut that I sleep in faces north, sitting under a pandanus tree about fifty yards from the lagoon. The window does not close entirely, and I have woken up more than once with a tropical rainstorm blowing in on my face.

Namdrik Alele Elementary School is located approximately five hundred yards from the lagoon, a utilitarian concrete form with two floors and seven classrooms. There is an empty field in the front which the students use for baseball —a broom stick and an old, brown coconut—and there is an expanse of walking palm bulon wojke7 behind the building, growing around the walls as though the trees are poised and waiting for dark to take back the land.

School has been cancelled for most of the last week. Heavy rainfall flooded much of Ajalto8, downing dead coconut palms and making the single dirt road nearly impassable from debris. Because some of the students live on this part of the island, whenever there is bad weather, the principal cancels school so that they do not have to miss

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class. It is a frustrating policy from an outside perspective, especially when the road condition is not actually bad enough to warrant the cancellation. In the beginning of the year I tried to have regular session anyway; very few of my students showed up. When we have rain days now, I invite my kids to come hang out in the classroom while I work on lesson plans. Sometimes they bring their homework, but more often they come to listen to my stereo and look at the stack of National Geographic magazines that I keep on my desk.

Even the eighth graders have a hard time finding words that they recognize, but the photography is enough to keep them entertained for hours.

Regardless of the inconsistent schedule, I have been planning an Earth Day celebration for the end of April. In all of my classes from kindergarten to eighth grade, we have been using concepts in The Lorax to study everything, from fractions and word problems to air pollution and geography.

The Truffula trees that they draw on the margins of their papers look just like the pandanus fronds which are scattered around the island, asymmetrical spiked palms in various shades of green and yellow and orange. Today there are about twenty-five soaking wet students bustling in and out my class.

“Where is the ahm- the aym,” says Make, one of my eighth grade boys. He is leafing through the magazines in a corner of the room, trying to pronounce one of the words.

“Spell it out for me.”

“A-m-a-z-o-n,” says Raymus, another of my “eights.”

“It says ‘river’ afterward.”

“Go find out,” I say. “What color is water on a map?”

“Blue!” shout three of my fifth graders in unison. All of the students who are old enough to reach, and several of the little ones who are not, run toward the wall to look. Crowded around the map they are intermingled; Raymus and Make, lanky like heliophilic weeds; Lowa and Risa and Hezkiel, nine-year-old bean sprouts with legs too long for their bodies; tiny six-year-old Selma is a lion-headed dandelion, waiting for the wind to blow her in every direction.

“It’s in South America,” says Lowa as he points defiantly to the map.

“What about the green parts?” I ask. “What does that mean?”

“Plants?” they say in unison again.

9 neighborhood on Majuro atoll where many Namdrik residents have family

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“Right. What kinds of things are plants?”

“Truffula trees?” Selma pops her arms up in the air, stick-straight like branches. With mock seriousness, I ask them one final question.

“And who speaks for the Truffula trees?” After teaching them a song I’d made up about Bar-ba-loots, Swomee Swans, and Humming Fish, they are ready for this one.

“The Lorax!”

The eighth grade boys have gone back to the magazines and are rolling their eyes at the little kids. These boys are tough to reach. Their idols are the elder brothers who have come back from Majuro and Ebeye. The brothers wear Lebron jerseys and sink shot after improbable shot from the half-court line on Namdrik’s crumbling asphalt arena.

They race canoes, they catch sharks, and the coolest ones have more than one girlfriend. They lean like Brando with fake silver swinging from their necks. They are covered in ink. Most of them are fluent in imitation American gangsta, thanks to a handful of pirated DVDs at the corner store in Demon Town.9 They shave fades and patterns and words into their heads. They smoke and they swagger, and they sweet talk every girl on the street—including me. But for some of these elder brothers, the reason they’ve come back in the first place is that they’ve got nowhere else to go.

Generations of Marshallese men before them have spent their whole lives on these islands, needing nothing but the reef and the trees that have sprouted from it to feed themselves and their families. These young men will not have that option. Like Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Carteret Islands of Papua New Guinea, oceanic scientists have predicted that the RMI will soon be uninhabitable. Ground water salinity will eat the atolls alive before the rising ocean levels swallow them completely. It is not a question of whether they will have to abandon their homes, but rather when this will happen, and where they will relocate when it does. After thirteen years of public education, sometimes they still can’t read. Others never really got the hang of arithmetic. There are enclaves of Marshallese immigrants in parts of Hawaii, Guam, and the continental United States, but alcoholism is rampant in a generation whose classwork consisted almost entirely of

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rote memorization and hand-copying the outdated pages of moth-eaten 1940s history books.

My “eights” act like they’re as tough as their brothers.

They have to, just in case. But I think that Raymus and Make —and all of the other boys who are here even though it’s a rain day—do not actually want to be like their elder brothers.

Even at fourteen, they know their time on Namdrik is running out.

“Do they have breadfruit in Arkansas?” Wotje is sitting next to my desk and looking at a National Geographic.

His father emigrated in 2004 to work at a Tyson Chicken factory and he has never been able to return. Land-locked Springdale is home to the largest Marshallese population outside of the RMI. “I don’t think so, hon.”

He shows me a map of the United States in the magazine. “How far away is Wisconsin?”

I put one finger on the little black star which means Madison, and another on the one which stands for Little Rock. “Maybe twelve hours if I drive,” I say.

“What about if you bike? Can you bring him some 10 kwonjin when you go home?”

It is still storming when I leave the school. Already nearly three inches of standing water on the road, it is deserted and unrecognizable from the dirt path it embodies on a sunny day. Patches of algae have flourished from cracks in the ground like spilled ink. Hidden yellow mussels leave faint lines in the sand behind them as they tunnel under the soil. I have no rain jacket, no galoshes, just a simple black umbrella which flips inside out when the wind gets gusty from the ocean-side. My toes sink into the silt and I wade to avoid losing my sandals. As I pass the community center, three of my kindergarten girls rush into the road and latch themselves around my body, trying to hide from the rain. I let the smallest of them climb on my back. She crows when I hand her the umbrella, makes me spin in circles so that the water swings off of the fabric in arcs. An old woman leans out of her doorway and whistles, her old man sitting just inside and chuckling at me in the dark.

Dinner is rice and what is left of the soy sauce— because of the storm, none of the fishermen on island have 10 roasted breadfruit

dared venture to fish off of the harsh break against the oceanside coral beds. I ask Wilpina why they don’t use the reef in the lagoon.

“The fish all taste terrible,” she says, wrinkling her nose as she puffs on a Kool behind the oven. “Plus, the water is lukkun ttoonon.11”

11 really dirty 12 rain 13 literally “things that live/things that grow” 14 female chief; most highly respected woman in the community

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III. One of my plans for our Earth Day celebration is to host a beach clean-up, and I have been trying to explain the difference between garbage and organic matter to my younger students so that they will be able to help. I have assembled a collection of items from around the island, and a few days before the Earth Day, I place them on the ground in front of my second graders. Fallen leaves, plastic food wrappers, a hibiscus bloom, batteries, and a pair of broken flip-flops. My cat, a six-month old, flea-bitten black and white female, is playing with an anxious hermit crab.

Named Wot12 because she was born on the floor of my hut in the middle of a rainy night, she is my space heater, my ratcatcher, my constant companion. In one corner of the room, I have written a sign on a box which reads both KWOPEJ and GARBAGE. In the other corner of the room is another box which reads MENINMOUR/MENINEDDEK13 and ANIMALS/PLANTS. Although not all of the kids can read the written form of these words, they recognize them when they are spoken.

“Who wants to pick first?” I ask. Before we came to our placements, they told us in orientation that Marshallese kids are shy and quiet in class. This was true for the first three days when they were trying to decide how much they could get away with in front of me. After nine months, they seem filled with a kinetic energy which is barely contained by the classroom etiquette I have struggled to maintain. My second grade class is particularly rowdy. Angela, the granddaughter of the lerooj14, raises her hand as she is already moving toward the front of the room.

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“Find something to put in the box that says ‘animals’ on it,” I tell her. She stares at the pile for a moment, then reaches down and latches onto the cat.

“Gentle,” I say. Looking precariously over her shoulder at me, she puts Wot in the box.

“Is she right?” I turn to her classmates. A chorus of agreement erupts. The cat jumps out and winds around my ankle. Louise, a tall, willowy girl with a big gap-toothed smile, raises her hand next.

“Find something to put in the box that says ‘garbage.’”

She grabs one of the flip-flops and tosses it across the room.

She grins. Louise already knows that she is right, but before I can even ask the other students, they all shout ejimwe.15 Henty, a skinny kid who stays everywhere but in his seat, runs up to the front and grabs a piece of flayed plastic.

“Okay,” I laugh. “Put it in the box where it belongs.”

He goes back and forth for a while, finally dropping it in the box which says ANIMALS/PLANTS, and bounces back to his desk. Although I don’t want to embarrass him, I am glad that it is Henty who is the first to get something wrong. He is one of the most talkative students in the class, and I am sure that he won’t be upset for too long.

“Is he right?” Seventeen little bodies jump in their seats.

“Ejimwe!”

Earth Day on Namdrik is postponed by a downpour which turns the island into a coral-stone soup. The principal promises that we will reschedule as soon as the rain stops.

Nine days later, ominous gray clouds still hover over the airport at the far end of the island, but for the morning at least it seems that they will stay where they are. The mayor has assembled the police force on the road in front of the school, five large, uniformed men holding garbage bags and boxes of rubber gloves. Kids are arriving with their parents in tow. Some of them are wearing costumes, paper hats, uniform colors from the Marshallese flag. It is a sea of white, orange, and blue. The garbage collection is a contest—in a few weeks, whichever team accumulates the most refuse from the lagoon will get to go on a picnic for the last day of class. There will be prizes for those students who find the 15 correct

16 children 17 United States Agency for International Development

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most ridiculous items, as judged by the faculty. We have decided to start at 8:30, and the principal is making his way across the field to ring the school bell.

Wotje and Raymus are standing in the shadow of a large breadfruit tree. I don’t see any of the other eighth graders. The Earth Day programs are considered mandatory for students, but I am afraid that the older kids are not going to show up. I wave them over and they drift across the yard as if their feet are tethered to the tree.

“Hey boys,” I say. “Are you excited?”

Wotje smirks at me. Raymus shrugs and says, “I guess. There’s so much trash.”

“Where are Make and the others?”

“Make said he wasn’t coming,” says Raymus. “He doesn’t want to get his clothes dirty.” Without the older students around to lead them, the youngest ajri ro16 will get distracted and wander away. I can only wrangle 127 kids with the promise of a picnic for so long, and parts of the beach look more like the town dump than a tropical paradise. I know from personal experience that when communities are not invested in development projects, they will last only momentarily after the outside instigation has disappeared.

Near the school sits a tractor which is stamped repeatedly with bold black letters—USAID17—rusting in its wheel treads, having been abandoned when the project coordinator left the island. There is a patch of land across the road which used to be a vegetable garden. A Peace Corps volunteer started it during the 1990s, but when she left, the islanders let the tomato vines rot under a growth of thick, purple weeds.

If my kids don’t care, the lagoon is only going to get worse.

Wotje sees my face.

“Libao,” he says. “Look behind you.”

I turn to see a crowd marching down the road, pushing wagons full of trash bags which are already full. Leading the way is Make and his oldest brother, a twenty-three year old named Ronny.

“I brought my boys,” he says with his skinny arms spread wide. “My little brother tells me there’s a prize. What do I get if I win?” He has been hitting on me for months, even in front of his mother. Adma is four foot seven. She has nine

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children and no time for their nonsense, and she tells me that one of my eighth grade girls has been hanging around their house and asking after him. That her son needs growing up before I should take him seriously.

“You have to be one of my students,” I say. “You want to come to my class?”

“Teach me everything you know, likatu18,” he says.

“Looks like you know plenty,” I say as I point to one of their carts. There are old plastic rice bags overflowing with disintegrating D sized batteries. “Can you help me with the little kids?”

“Figured you could use it,” he says, “I’m all yours.”

He draws out the vowels of his words and some of his boys whistle, but I don’t mind. The great thing about Ronny is that the other twenty-something men will do whatever he says.

“Thanks,” I say, handing him a roll of plastic bags. “I guess your mother was wrong.”

Everybody around us is listening now. He gives me a look like he doesn’t get what I mean. “She told me you were a komaturtur.19” The roar that follows makes him blush, but he laughs a little when he starts ordering his friends toward the lagoon, even blows me a kiss when he turns to walk away.

After they’ve left, a few of my eights are still standing around.

“Well you guys certainly got a head start,” I say to Make.

“My brother wanted to impress you,” he says. “It still counts, right?”

“I never said you couldn’t do a little extra work.”

“Then we’re going to win,” he grins at me.

The students spread out across the beach, climbing into tree roots, wading in the shallows, and digging through layers of rotting leaf matter and sand to find buried, decomposing treasure. I am standing by the water when one of my first graders, a round little boy with a froggy voice and huge brown eyes, comes up and tugs on my arm.

“Come see what I found,” he says.

“Bring it over,” I say as I ruffle his hair. “Do you have a bag?”

“No—I don’t know what to do with it.”

“We’ll go look. Maybe I can carry it for you.” I follow 18 pretty girl 19 trouble-maker

him down the length of the lagoon until we reach an alcove beneath a stately, gnarled breadfruit. An older woman is washing her clothes in a basin nearby, and she waves at us.

“What are you looking for?” she calls.

“He says that he found something good for Earth Day.” She smiles and bends over the clothes again. The little boy is down on his knees and crawling toward a lump in the shadows. As I get closer, I realize that the garbage he’s found is a pile of feces. “Oh honey,” I start, but he’s so proud of himself that I don’t have the heart to correct him. The woman looks up and laughs.

“What’s the trouble?” she giggles. “Don’t ripalles20 shit on the beach?”

As raelep passes into jota,21 a small mountain of black plastic bags forms on the road outside of the school.

The lagoon-side beach of the island is a narrow, four-mile stretch of land, but even after hours of work the difference is hardly noticeable. Even the trash that we have collected will probably continue to rot for weeks in the piles that have formed, waiting for a shipping boat with enough free cargo space to carry it back to Majuro. Though the capital island is only eighty miles north of Namdrik by open ocean, it would be naïve of me to expect that this pile will be gone any time soon. I can only hope that the sight of so much in one place will leave an impression, that the pandanus trees will still remind them of Truffula trees when I’m gone.

20 Americans, white people; literally “people with clothes” in reference to the missionaries of the 19th century 21 afternoon…evening

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IV. The next morning is cloudy and gray again, but through my window I can see a hint of blue sky above the airport on the other side of the lagoon. Wot is sitting on the mat.

She stares at a bruise-colored mangrove crab the size of my hand as it skitters around sideways, perilously close to my feet. Just as she reaches to swat at the bristling claw of the crustacean, I scoop her up in one arm and head toward the road. It is a Saturday, and I have some free time before I have to start lesson planning for the week.

I put the cat in a shoulder bag and take off on a rusted, wobbly bicycle. The airport is a thirty minute ride from my

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host family’s house. After the only road on Namdrik meanders through mangrove forest, coconut palm groves, and a swamp, it comes out on a clearing which has been paved over with asphalt. The runway is approximately two hundred yards from the ocean-side of the island, beyond which is a view that evokes adjectives like infinite and holy and untamed. The sand on the beach at the airport is different than the hard, pebbled gravel on the rest of the island because of the intensity of the waves which strike first against this northeastern outcropping of land. Here it is soft and fine. Clean.

East of the airport lies the bleached, bone-white frame of a breadfruit tree. Against the short, gnarled mangroves and the telephone pole coconut palms which grow like sentinels, it looks like a Mesozoic skeleton.

“Dead for years,” the old fishermen say when I ask them how long it has been lying there. “The hurricane brought that back to the beach.22 ” Even lying on its side, the trunk is taller than I am, and I climb gracelessly up its naked, sideways branches to sit. The cat crawls out of my bag and curls up on the sun-warmed wood. The glimmer of blue sky from the morning has disappeared, and I can smell the rain which is roiling dark clouds along the horizon.

On my way home the downpour comes up behind me, and I stop to take cover under the heavy canopy. A few of my younger students are playing in the flooded road, throwing a deflated volleyball at a pile of coconut hulls. I wave and duck beneath the roof of a house near the oceanside. Three older women are sitting on the floor near an open window, weaving the dried fronds of a pandanus tree into an intricate mat.

“Nice day for a ride,” one of them says and gestures to the space beside her. I sit down and try not to shiver in my wet clothes.

“It’s just like the Bible,” says another. “One day all of this will be underwater.” They all nod in agreement. I look out the window over the shallows of the reef and on toward the open sea. The water that slams against the break is grey and swirled with turquoise and green where the barrels move along the inside of the waves. No red and blue flecks from flip-flops or plastic tarps. No rusted brown lumps of battery.

22 Island legend referring to a storm in 1957 which destroyed almost everything on Namdrik.

Yet I know less than fifty yards down, below the pelagic surface, there are still colonies of garbage blooming across the ocean floor.

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Home Voices Contest [Third Place]

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[Ian Pisarcik]

Veterans Day The man was on his knees on the side of the road. The sun was high and the light came down through the branches of the tall pine trees and shone on the road. It had been snowing for three days and the white powder had mixed with dirt so it appeared as though the man was stumping for catfish in a muddy river.

My father turned down the radio in his 1982 Ford Ranger.

The man was wearing a black quilted jacket with a knitted trapper hat and gloves. His back faced the truck and he was leaning over something.

My father slowed the pickup and pulled to a stop ten feet behind the man.

The road in front of us was narrow. It curved right at the crest and disappeared. We were not far from our home.

We had just come from a small church where we had been spreading sand on the sidewalk and steps in preparation for the Veterans Day service.

Maybe he’s drunk, my father said.

I didn’t say anything.

Wisps of snow blew across the road like a platoon of ghosts. The man on his knees did not move. It was as though he was frozen in that position. I studied the ground outside.

There were marks left by tire chains and two reeded skid lines in the middle of the road. I followed the lines and saw blood.

It was difficult to distinguish at first because it looked like dirt. But there was a single red stain like spilled ink.

My father glanced at the rearview mirror. He shut off the engine and removed his ribbed winter hat from the dashboard and pulled it tight over his head.

Stay here, he said.

It was winter but the sun was warm and bright coming through the windshield. I looked in the rearview mirror. The burr arch of the covered bridge that spanned the first branch of the White River was a dull red. My father said the bridge had been constructed to resemble a barn so that

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horses would enter willingly. He said the mechanical rhythm of a horse’s hooves could do more structural damage than a modern truck. He said that soldiers in the Civil War had to break cadence when passing over the floorboards. I removed my seatbelt and inched forward on the polyester seat. The tall white pine trees were heavy with snow and they butted the road save for a pause in the tree line about five feet from our truck, on the other side of the road, where a brown station wagon sat parked at the edge of a driveway next to a rusted mailbox. My father stood motionless beside the front left fender of the truck. I wondered if he was contemplating removing the pistol he kept in the center console. But after a moment he rubbed his hands together and blew into them and started walking toward the man. I could hear the snow crunching under his boots.

He stopped less than a foot from the man. The man did not turn to look at him. My father thumbed his belt. He was a hulking figure. I sometimes imagined him coming over a high mountain ridge in the Song Ngan Valley at nightfall.

The wind had left finger drifts across the road. White powder had accumulated on the man’s jacket. My father removed his thumbs from his belt and pulled at the back of his hat. He was saying something to the man. After a moment the man on his knees turned to where the station wagon sat in the driveway across the street. My father followed the man’s eyes. He said something and shook his head and walked slowly to the truck. He opened the door and climbed in. His face was red from the cold and he smelled like woodsmoke.

It’s a dead dog, he said. He nodded in the direction of the man. He won’t move. He says he was told to stay there.

By who?

My father put the key in the ignition but did not turn the key. The owner of the dog.

Where is the owner?

He’s sitting in the station wagon.

I looked at the station wagon. The snow covered branches of the pine trees obstructed the view of the front window.

Where is the man’s car—the one that hit the dog?

My father nodded at the station wagon. That is his car. The owner of the dog drew a gun and told him to kneel beside the dog for an hour or else he would shoot him.

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The man on the side of the road had slouched and was resting on his heels.

Why?

Penance, I suppose, my father said. He turned the key. Cold air pushed through the open vents. He put the truck in drive and pulled slowly onto the road. We passed the station wagon and I saw the owner of the dog in the front seat.

He was an old man with thick eyebrows that seemed to pull at his forehead like steel curtain weights. He wore suspenders and a blue ball cap that said America over the brim. His eyes followed the truck as we passed.

My father kept the truck in first gear and we passed the man and the dog. The snow was coming down and thick flakes had accumulated on the dog’s fur. There wasn’t much blood. Only some red drops on the snow next to the dog’s piebald head. The man on his knees watched us as we passed.

His face was chubby and pink and he wore wire rim glasses that had fogged.

My father put the truck in second gear and followed the road around the bend and down a slight hill. He pulled to the side of the road next to an open field.

You have to wait here, he said.

What?

You have to wait here.

He left the key in the ignition and got out of the truck.

I watched him walk past the bed of the pickup and up the white hill. His boots were lost in a snow drift and eventually his whole body disappeared around the bend in the road.

I flipped the heat vent up and down. I looked at the center console. I adjusted the rearview mirror so that I could see the road while hunched in my seat. I remembered the apple that my father had put in the glove box for when I got hungry and opened the glove box and removed the apple and took a bite. It was brown. I rolled down the window and threw it into the field, imagining that a deer would find it. I rolled the window back up and got out of the truck. The air was cold and pulled the skin on my face tighter than bark on a tree. I started up the hill, following my father’s tracks and watching the bend in the road. The snow was coming down in soft pellets. My shoes slipped on the ice. The wind picked up and I had to drag my legs as though pushing against a strong

current. I thought of my father trudging through jungles. I thought of the stories I was told in school about men being dragged through rice fields to verify body counts. The wind blew so hard I thought I might fall if it stopped.

At the top of the hill, I positioned myself next to an old section of deer fencing that had been torn down and nearly buried in the snow. I could see my father through the trees. The old man had gotten out of the station wagon and was arguing with my father in the middle of the road. The man who hit the dog was still on his knees. The old man pointed at my father and my body tightened. I looked for a gun, but the old man’s hands were empty. After a moment, my father turned from the old man. He took two quick steps toward the man on his knees and pulled him up by the shoulders of his jacket. The man struggled to stand. The old man came behind my father and grabbed his shoulder. My father swiped at the old man’s arm and the old man lost his footing and fell to the ground. My father stood there for a moment looking at the old man. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. When the old man managed to turn over and bring himself to his knees, my father turned from him and began walking down the road toward the truck. I stepped out of the woods and hurried down the hill.

I waited for my father in the truck. I wondered whether the falling snow had covered my tracks. When my father arrived, he adjusted the rearview mirror and started the engine. He sat there for a moment. His eyes were bleary from the cold. He brought his arm back and struck the steering wheel with his fist. I looked out the passenger window. My father pulled the truck onto the road. I watched the rolling field of white and kept my eyes open for deer.

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contributors Gilbert Allen Adam Regn Arvidson Jonathan Barrett Claudia Burbank Anna Catone Suzannah Dalzell Julie Dunlop Evelyn Hampton Chad Hanson

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David Hornibrook Ann Elizabeth Huston Athena Kildegaard Judith Kleck Talia Mailman Maria Marsello Susan McCarty Stefan Milne Amy Patrick Mossman

Biography Gilbert Allen lives with his wife, Barbara, on three acres of land in upstate South Carolina. His five collections of verse include Driving to Distraction (Orchises, 2003), which was featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. His sequence of poems “The Assistant” won the Robert Penn Warren Prize in 2007. Some of his newest work has appeared (or will soon appear) in Appalachian Journal, The Georgia Review, Measure, Sewanee Theological Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and The Southern Review. He is the Bennette E. Geer Professor of Literature at Furman University.

Note Unless one’s being paid to produce occasional verse—a rare occurrence in contemporary America—there’s no logical reason to write about any particular subject, in any particular form, at any particular time. Every new poem depends upon the non-rational—upon my emotional weather, and upon what that weather brings into my mind. A sensory perception, a phrase, a memory, a person, an event, or another work of art somehow commands my attention. As I focus that attention on the page, and as one word follows another, I start seeing patterns and possibilities in what I’ve written. Some of those patterns and possibilities seem interesting, and I try to follow them as faithfully as

contributors James Norcliffe Andrew Payton Ben Pfeiffer Ian Pisarcik Joseph Powell Sean Prentiss Mary Quade Julia Shipley Nicol Stavlas

Cara Stoddard Tegan Swanson Jeff Tigchelaar Amy A. Whitcomb Jake Young

I can. As the manuscript moves towards completion, the rational, analytical part of my mind enters the process. For me, a poem is “finished” when I’ve convinced myself that any further changes would cause more problems than they would solve.

Biography Adam Regn Arvidson is a landscape architect and design writer who is regularly featured in numerous national design magazines. His work has also been reprinted in The Utne Reader and is forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Briar Cliff Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He is an MFA candidate at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two sons.

Arvidson, Adam Regn

Biography Jonathan Barrett works for a small community bank and lives in Kansas City, MO, with his wife and three sons.

This is his third appearance in Flyway. His poetry has also appeared in Georgetown Review, The Literary Review, North American Review, Phoebe, and Subtropics among others.

Barrett, Jonathan

Biography Claudia Burbank’s poems have been featured on the Best American Poetry and Poets & Writers websites, as well as Verse Daily. Recent work is published or forthcoming in Prairie

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Schoooner, The Antioch Review, and North American Review.

Her honors include the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Inkwell Prize.

Note: Some years ago I read an article about the last telegram being sent. I noodled a few lines but they never took shape.

The recent, tragic tsunami in Japan provided the impetus and the emotional underpinnings to dig those lines out and start over. It took a month for the poem to jell which is a speed record for me, who works at the pace of a sedated tortoise.

Catone, Anna

Biography Anna Catone’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Chautauqua, Commonweal, The Los Angeles Review, Terrain.org, Tygerburning, and elsewhere. Recently, she was selected as a finalist for the Ellen La Forge Poetry Prize. She is poetry editor at The Cortland Review and lives in Massachusetts where she often goes to the ocean with her dog. The elemental wildness of the coast gives her a sense of possibility.

Dalzell, Suzannah

Biography Suzannah Dalzell lives on Whidbey Island north of Seattle where she divides her time more or less equally between writing, restoring wetlands and working with raptors at the Woodland Park Zoo. Most recently her work has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Cascade: The Journal of the Washington Poets Association, EarthSpeak Magazine, and The Raven Chronicles.

Note While my poetry is not limited to a particular theme or style I do strive to write on the “edges between ruin and celebration. Naming and mourning damage” (Adrienne Rich). I believe that these edges are best conveyed through a combination of adherence to truth, tenderness and a large dollop of absurdity.

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Biography Julie Dunlop is a poet living in New Mexico. Her work is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Quiddity, and New Mexico Literary Review.

Dunlop, Julie

Note Stylistically, this poem was inspired by a memory of reading “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” by N. Scott Momaday many years ago. Contextually, the voice is collective, acknowledging the interconnectedness of all beings, especially those on either side of the ongoing debate about mountaintop removal.

Biography Evelyn Hampton lives in Providence. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, New York Tyrant, and Birkensnake, among other journals. WE WERE ETERNAL AND GIGANTIC, a chapbook of her stories and poems, is available from Magic Helicopter Press. Her website is Lispservice.com.

Hampton, Evelyn

Biography Chad Hanson teaches sociology at Casper College in Casper, Wyoming. His essays and short stories have appeared in Big Sky Journal, Third Coast, Pilgrimage, South Dakota Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, among others.

Hanson, Chad

Note I wrote “An Imaginary Fish” because I am confused. I ran away to the West at the age of 19, and at this point I have lived in the Rockies longer than I lived in my home state, Minnesota. I thought Norwegians from the Midwest were a proud group of people. It turns out that I hadn’t seen anything yet. Westerners wear their regional pride like a pair of cracked old leather chaps. The West looms large in our history and personal identities. You know the tune: “Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam …” But westerners readily offer up their landscapes to oil companies from Europe and Asia. I don’t think I will ever understand the contradiction.

We love this land, but we love it while the drill bits sink into the soil. Carcinogens creep into water wells. Bull trout, sage grouse, and moose populations dwindle. Rivers run dry,

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their waters diverted into fields of alfalfa, smog lurking over the horizon “… where the deer and the antelope play.”

Hornibrook, David

Biography David Hornibrook grew up in the Metro Detroit area and attended Oakland University. His work has appeared in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Stone’s Throw Magazine and is forthcoming in Dunes Review.

Note The process is a little different for every poem. The most important part is best said by Tom Waits: “You’ve got to get behind the mule in the morning and plow.” A few early hours with a cup of coffee goes a long way.

Huston, Ann Elizabeth

Biography Ann Elizabeth Huston is a second-year MFA student at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. She received her BA in Environmental Studies from Austin College, in Texas, and spent a semester in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam.

When writing, Ann needs to be outside and away from the city—exploring mountains, deserts, flood plains, streams, oceans—anywhere there isn’t concrete. If that’s not possible, she tries to remember experiences deeply, and think about the place, and all the senses of it, so she’s saturated by it.

Sometimes the process works!

Kildegaard, Athena

Biography Athena Kildegaard lives in Morris, Minnesota, in prairie pothole country. Her books of poems are Rare Momentum and Bodies of Light, both from Red Dragonfly Press, and Cloves & Honey: Love Poems, forthcoming from Nodin Press.

She teaches at the University of Minnesota, Morris, in the English and Environmental Studies disciplines.

Note I grew up on the Minnesota River, swimming, rafting, fishing, and exploring its banks. We put my mother’s ashes in the river and then a year later I returned to be near her, near the river, to find expression for my grief. I wrote first drafts of these poems on the bank of the Minnesota River, near a great blue heron rookery.

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Biography Judith Kleck has published two books of poetry; the most recent was Culling The Petals from Finishing Line Press. She was diagnosed with A.L.S. in 2007 and has since retired from teaching at Central Washington University.

Kleck, Judith

Note I always start poems with a cadence in mind, a line that has a musical edge which propels the poem.

Biography Talia Mailman is a harpist and a writer. She grew up on the marsh an hour north of Boston. Now, she lives and works in New York City. Find her other published work here: www. taliamailman.com

Mailman, Talia

Biography Maria Marsello finished her BA at SUNY Albany in 1992 and earned her MA in English from Weber State University in 2011. She has been a special educator in secondary schools for the past twelve years. During the best years of her teaching career, she helped students create keepsake anthologies of their writing that showcased their hardcore stories in the hope that they would write their way out of very difficult, rutted patterns. For some, it worked. Others continue to erase themselves with drugs and alcohol. She left that school after four years knowing that the impact would last far longer than her tenure. Her poetry can be seen in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, Chiron Review and in upcoming issues of Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems and The Chaffin Journal.

Marsello, Maria

Note I began writing poetry again in January, 2011, after a twentytwo year break. Digging and plotting and plodding make up my method cocktail. I write whenever I can, even when other things are pressing. My house is filthy, my dog is not groomed, and my back yard is full of leaves because those tasks are not that important to me, at 41.

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McCarty, Susan

Milne, Stefan

Mossman, Amy Patrick

Biography Susan McCarty’s work has appeared in the Utne Reader, Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Barrelhouse and elsewhere.

She’s a student in the PhD in Creative Writing program at the University of Utah, but she considers Iowa her home.

Biography Stefan Milne is an English grad student at Central Washington University. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Good Men Project and Revolution House.

If he has a process, it is merely one of gleeful early draft writing, followed by endless rewriting and self-doubt and hair-pulling and so on. He thanks you for reading.

Biography Amy Patrick Mossman grew up in Massachusetts and lived in New York, Nevada, and Minnesota before moving to Illinois, where she teaches English and works in a biology lab. Her interdisciplinary training in science and the humanities informs much of her work.

Note For me, a poem sometimes begins because an image or moment begs articulation, compelling me to scratch the words into the side of a paper cup or whatever’s on hand; other times I know there’s something that must be coaxed out, something that is hard to understand yet vital, and it feels like trying to scratch words into the side of a paper cup. Then there’s the thrill of the hunt for the right words, the sensuous brain tickling of revising and crafting, the incubation, the repetition of the process until the bare core emerges.

Norcliffe, James

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Biography New Zealand poet James Norcliffe has published six collections of poetry, most recently Villon in Millerton in 2007. He has also published fiction including a number of fantasy novels for young readers, most recently the awardwinning The Loblolly Boy published this year in the US as The Boy Who Could Fly (Egmont USA). Recent work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, and Gargoyle. Last year he was took part in the

XX International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia and this year the Trois Rivieres International Poetry Festival in Quebec.

Note My writing process whether poetry or fantasy is much the same and very organic. An idea visits, or a word, or a collocation of words and will not go away until I tease it or toy with it and sometimes, if I’m lucky, it accretes into a poem or a story or both.

Payton, Andrew

Biography Andrew Payton is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. A Maryland native, he has worked on films and farms, and his writing can be found in recent issues of dislocate, Yemassee, Lines + Stars, and Orange Quarterly Review.

Pfeiffer, Ben

Biography Ben Pfeiffer is the co-editor of Beecher’s Magazine at the University of Kansas, where he is an MFA Candidate in Fiction. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Faster Times, and The Moon City Review. You can find out about his upcoming writing, projects, and events at WritingInTheWild.org.

Note I wrote “Gemstone” for two reasons: (1) I wanted to write a Chekhov homage, which led me to include references to his stories “Kashtanka” and “A Boring Story;” (2) I had read a psychological study concluding that abused children sometimes seek out dangerous relationships to relive their past trauma, subconsciously attempting to gain control of the situation that caused them emotional distress, so I wanted to test that idea in a fictional environment.

For atmosphere, I had experienced an ice storm like this firsthand, and for fun I included hidden clues to Gemstone’s real name, plus a cameo by a character from a John Gardner novel.

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Pisarcik, Ian

Biography Ian Pisarcik is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and an MFA candidate at Iowa State University. He was born in a small town on the east coast and has lived in various places around the country. He is currently wandering around Ames, Iowa, with River, his Labrador retriever.

Powell, Joseph

Biography Joseph Powell’s most recent collection of poems is called Hard Earth (March Street Press, 2010), and he teaches at Central Washington University.

Note I often start with a piece of narrative and description to see where it goes. I also like post-modern structures, but gravitate toward clarity and narrative.

Prentiss, Sean

Biography Sean Prentiss is a creative writing professor during the school year and lives at his Colorado cabin in the mountains during the summer. He can be reached at seanprentiss@ gmail.com.

Note This poem is a departure from what I often write. Normally I have more of a narrative present. But in this poem, I worked on elevating the mood and the feeling over the narrative.

The reader might not know exactly where the girl is now, but hopefully they feel the mood of the piece, the loss, the nostalgia.

In terms of form, I wanted a poem that was both under control (stanzas of 3 and 2 and 1 lines per section) and slightly out of control (line lengths) to match the lack of narrative.

Quade, Mary

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Biography Mary Quade is author of Guide to Native Beasts (Cleveland State University Poetry Center). Her poetry and essays have appeared in West Branch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Isotope, Crab

Orchard Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Hiram College in Ohio.

Note According to the Deepwater Horizon Response Consolidated Fish and Wildlife Collection Report (www. restorethegulf.gov) for September 20, 2010, the day after the oil well was officially declared killed, over six-thousand dead birds had been found since April in the impact area. Also reported for the period were nearly six-hundred dead sea turtles and over ninety dead mammals, including dolphins.

On December 15, 2011, the website posted Shoreline Clean-up Completion Plan FAQs, including, “How clean is clean?” The response acknowledged that “in some areas further cleanup activities would cause more harm than good.” I have no excuses; my barn remains full of the same old junk. In 2011, mallards laid three clutches of eggs in the barn, and the hatched ducklings left my mess to encounter the rest of the world.

Biography Julia Shipley is the author of Herd (2010), winner of the Sheltering Pines Press Chapbook Award. Her work can also be found in Wildbranch: an Anthology of Nature, Environmental and Place Based Writing (University of Utah, 2010). Last summer she was a writer-in-residence at the Helen Day Art Center’s Habitat for Artists. She lives in Northern Vermont where she writes, teaches, and farms on six acres.

Shipley, Julia

Note My poems are kind of like a literary equivalent of caddis fly larvae, in that I seem to notice and gather the little things that filter down, a twig, a mica chip, a sand grain, and try to fashion some coherent whole from them.

Biography Nicol Stavlas is an essayist and poet. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth River, Blue Lake Review, Canary, Trachodon, Boston Literary Magazine, and Willows Wept, among others. Her journal is available at lastmaple.wordpress.com

Stavlas, Nicol

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Stoddard, Cara

Swanson, Tegan

Tigchelaar, Jeff

Biography Cara Stoddard is a nonfiction candidate in the MFA program at the University of Idaho. She received the Donaldson Prize for best Creative Independent Study from The College of Wooster, where she completed her undergraduate work. She has worked as a backpacking guide, middle school teacher, ski instructor, math tutor, and after-school program coordinator. She currently lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her dog Scout.

Biography Tegan Swanson is a writer and artist from Rochester, Minnesota. She has lived in a housing co-operative in Madison, Wisconsin, a crumbling brownstone in Washington D.C., and a nature preserve on the Pacific coast of Ecuador. She is currently working on a collection of essays about a year she spent teaching on the “world’s smallest inhabited atoll”—Namdrik, Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Biography Jeff Tigchelaar is a stay-at-home dad in Kansas. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2011, Court Green, Grist, Harpur Palate, Hunger Mountain, North American Review, Tar River Poetry, and Verse Daily. His work has received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.

Note My first daughter poem… it was relatively easy for me to write, since I was pretty enthralled by this little new person.

The hard part was paring it down. In addition to being twice as long in its earlier stages, the poem was also much gushier.

I kept going on about how watching my daughter watching the storm was so much better than just watching the storm.

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Also, for a long time the poem had this terribly clever ending where our narrator, gazing at the baby, proclaims: “There was calm in her eyes—and mine.” Because, when can you ever go wrong with melodrama and storm puns? But eventually that got axed and now the daughter poem doesn’t end on such a placid note. How could I do that, right?

Biography Amy A. Whitcomb grew up in New England, attended college in Virginia, and spent most of her twenties looking at flowers in the Sierra Nevada of California. She now studies Creative Writing in the Masters of Fine Arts program and Environmental Science in the Masters of Science program at the University of Idaho. In 2011, she received a Bodie McDowell Scholarship from the Outdoor Writers Association of America. Her poems begin, and end, as questions.

Whitcomb, Amy A.

Biography Jake Young grew up in California, and currently lives in Raleigh, NC. He is the author of the short book A Aga, and his most recent poems appear in ASKEW and Cloudbank.

Note These are two poems that I have returned to off and on for over a year, though each for different reasons. Both poems began with an image. “At the Edge of the Adirondacks” is loosely based on a walk I went on in college, and despite the fact the narrative has changed little, I’ve labored over the word choice and syntax that would recreate the emotion I felt that day. Although the first and last stanzas of “Hesperidia” have changed very little, my struggle with this poem was that I didn’t listen to Pound soon enough, and ended up going toward abstractions for a long time rather than away from them. I suppose a simple summary of my process would be revision, revision, revision.

Young, Jake

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Cover artist Ladislav R. Hanka: Artist Biography Ladislav R. Hanka lives inKalamazoo, Michigan, and exhibits internationally. His work examines themes of life, death, and transfiguration—nature as the crucible in which man finds a reflection of his own life and meaning. He has had about 100 oneman shows and his etchings can be found in nearly 100 public collections on all continents.

Image:

Bee Tree I

Etching with Beeswax

9” x 16” 1,200.00

Artist’s Note I invested etchings of bur oaks into my beehives hoping the bees might respond and co-create. They did and covered over some images with wax comb while elsewhere they chewed up the paper and removed it with the dead bees and earwigs. Bur oaks are a signature species of prairie state horizons whose visage is engraved in my neural cortex with the finality of a well-wrought etching.

They survive prairie fires and live for centuries, occasionally hosting swarms of bees. And bee trees are pure magic. Bees will mob and kill a raccoon trying to enter the hive, yet tens of thousands of them, each with a stinger, will fly in and out of a miniscule knothole with complete single-mindedness of bee purposes and leave you in peace to stand by and watch. Somehow, you know.

The knowledge of beekeepers predates the written word and appears among the first recorded glyphs in dynastic Egypt and Mesopotamia. The wisdom of beekeepers survived the inquisition, when most folk-healing was cleared from the decks of medicine by the burning of its practitioners. Yet, bees today are not doing well and this has more impact on popular imagination than does the extinction of another bird or frog—more than another inevitable war, famine or terrorist. It is deeply troubling to the man on the street that bees are in trouble and that, finally, is some good news.

Friends of Flyway Flyway Benefactor $100, includes one-year subscription, plus a signed copy of The Horizontal World, by Debra Marquart. Name will appear on an Honor Roll inside the back cover for two years.

Mrs. Loralyn Marie Kokes Mr. David Crain McCunn Flyway Patron $35, includes a one-year subscription Flyway Sponsors Michael Martone & Teresa Pappas Zora Zimmerman

Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment

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Vol. 14.1

Gilbert Allen Adam Regn Arvidson Jonathan Barrett Claudia Burbank Anna Catone Suzannah Dalzell Julie Dunlop Evelyn Hampton Chad Hanson David Hornibrook Ann Elizabeth Huston Athena Kildegaard Judith Kleck Talia Mailman Maria Marsello Susan McCarty Stefan Milne Amy Patrick Mossman James Norcliffe Andrew Payton Ben Pfeiffer Ian Pisarcik Joseph Powell Sean Prentiss Mary Quade Julia Shipley Nicol Stavlas Cara Stoddard Tegan Swanson Jeff Tigchelaar Amy A. Whitcomb Jake Young

Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment