Hawaiʻi Review Number 20: 1986 by Hawaiʻi Review Archive

Fall1986

Number20

Cover an, "Menehune Watermelons;· by Santos Barbosa Poems in this issue by Robeno Juarroz , translated by W. S. Merwin, are from Sixth Vertical Poetry © by W. S. Merwin. Jose Lezama Lima's poems in this issue are from his book Fragmentos A Su !man, © 1977 by Heredoros de Jose Lezama Lima.

Hawaii Review is a semi-annual publication of the Board of Publications, University of Hawaii at Manoa. It reflects only the views of its editors and writers, who are solely responsible for its content. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to Hawaii Review, Depanment of English, University of Hawaii, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. The editors invite submissions of fiction, poetry, translations, reviews and literary essays. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Subscription rates: one year (rwo issues) $6.00; single copies, $4.00. Hawaii Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, is indexed by the American Humanities Index and by the Index ofAmerican Pen"odical Verse.

Editors: Rodney Morales Margaret Russo Holly Yamada Zdenek Kluzak

Editor in Chief Managing Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor

Readers: Kevin Kawamoto Jackie Kunning Diana Moore Nancy Mower Jeannie Thompson Roberta Young

CONTENTS

FICTION

1 18 40 59

from PROUD MONSTER THE FIFTI-1 RATIONALE BABY, BABY WHEN THE SNOW MELTS BELLYBUTTON THE GUEST THE PENITENT MAGDALENE

88 94

Ian MacMillan David Stroup Nora Cobb Gladys Pruitt Gary Kissick Jill Widner Jonathan Hall

POETRY TWO POEMS

TWO POEMS BIRD'S VIEW MAKUAKANE TWO POEMS TWO POEMS UNTERECKER'S GUAVAS FOUR POEMS

14 30 32 36 38 45 46

TWO POEMS BOYS AND FIREWORKS CENTERING LEGENDS APPROACHING BEQUIA WHEN I TURN OUT HAWAIIAN ELECTRIC TWO POEMS MOTHER, MOVING LATE IN THE SEASON

54 56 68 69 70

Jose Lezama Lima translated by joseph Chadwick Norman Hindley Kathryn Takara Haunani-Kay Trask Richard Hamasaki WingTek Lum Ed Parris Roberto Juarroz translated by W. S. Merwin Michael McPherson David Graham Kathleen Neuer Ted Lardner Richard Morris Dey

79 82 84 85

Joseph P. Balaz Louis Phillips Peter Desy Arthur Kimball

THE LURE FLYING FISH THE FLAME SWALLOWER'S WOMAN

86 92

Jill Widner Kauraka Kauraka

Lyn Lifshin

David Sheskin

ART

DRAGONSLAYER FLYING TOWARD ETERNITY TRIPLETS ELECTRIC CLAN

21 58 81

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

106

Dragonslayer

David Sheskin

Ian MacMillan from PROUD MONSTER

Western Russia, Winter 1944-The Ice-Unit We were in a remote area, moving westward as a part of the great Soviet offensive. Some of us wondered as we marched, sometimes achieving twenty kilometers in a single day across difficult terrain, would we ever see a German soldier? Pusev, our commander, was continually disagreeable because for him, a man with experience in war, this particular set of orders and location were below his capabilities. "Imagine," he would say, "here I am a veteran of the Great War and numerous campaigns against the Whites, and what do they give me? A bunch of conscripts who don't even shave yet and some ignorant Kazakhs! " We younger conscripts would smile at each other and make fun of the perpetual huff poor Pusev was in. He was insufferably superior to all of us, so much so that his lofty and overbearing attitude became a kind of joke. At length we advanced upon a suspicious-looking area in the brushy and slush-covered outskirts of a deserted railway maintenance station which our unit had secured an hour earlier. There had been nothing to note there except evidence of limited occupation: one round mess can of the type German soldiers carry, feces in one corner, a couple of obscure documents with the Wehrmacht crest on top. "Gone already!" Pusev said, "and me with my automatic loaded!" But this suspicious area nearby piqued Pusev's curiosity-there were , he was sure, soldiers there. We would now have an engagement. A Kazakh scout was sent up to within thirty meters to take a closer look. He moved quickly on his haunches with a kind of animal grace. Then he scrambled back, his broad face beaming with excitement. He had seen the shape of a man, probably a guard. Pusev ordered us to check our weapons, and we advanced. As excited as he was, Pusev was the first to get to the Kazakh's forwardmost position. He raised himself up, aimed , and fired a burst, then ducked and rose again. Suddenly he was running back toward us, high stepping through the heavy snow, his face locked in wide-eyed amazement. "1-1-" but he could not speak. The Kazakh scout went along the path in the snow and looked, then stood up and waved us forward . 1

We found eleven German soldiers, all frozen solid. They had been set up in various statuesque positions, perhaps months ago. The superstitious Kazakhs stayed at the edge of the arrangement of soldiers, talking amongst themselves , their backs to the display. The sentry Pusev shot was sitting there pocked with icy depressions in the face and tunic, his mouth slack and a frozen wound on the side of his head . Behind him five men sat in a circle, their arms up in the midst of gestures common during conversation. They had been held in these positions with thick stakes and pieces of wire. Another soldier stood straight as a board, at attention. His fly was open and inside we could see the ice-encased genitals. The sculptor had failed to make his hand stay where it was supposed to. Two other soldiers were locked like rigid , expressionless dolls in the attitude of a man and a woman making love , their pants pulled loose and frozen around their rock- hard thighs. One of them had a hand with a missing ring finger hovering over the other's back. "Partisans," Pusev whispered. "They have a detestable sense of humor. Look, they set them up with sticks and wire." "This happened long ago," I said. "Yes," Pusev whispered . "See how some of the snow has begun to melt around them." I think that at that moment we all began to feel an uncomfortable chill. We were about to leave when one of the men emerged from behind a bush breathing quickly as if he had been running, a look of grim amazement on his face . I went to him . Behind the bush the partisans had set up two soldiers facing each other on their knees, each with a pistol held at the other's face , and the barrels of the pistols had been jammed each into the other's right eye all the way to the trigger housing. The partisan had apparently had to hammer the barrels into the eye sockets of the dead soldiers. Their faces were locked in icy grins, and their free arms with closed fists were in their laps, with their flies open. This arrangement had required a number of sticks and tightly twisted lengths of wire. We left the lewd memorial as it was, assuming that the warmer weather would release the men into a more proper rest. We never did become involved in any shooting engagement with German soldiers- in fact all of those we were to see later would be strewn along roadsides with their personal effects littered around them, or arranged in lines of prone corpses or hanging from the branches of splintered trees. But Pusev took it all in silence. I imagine someday walking into a museum and seeing carefully worked in fine, pale marble the forms of those two soldiers who had penetrated the skulls of each other with the pistols, each leering at the other with bestial exhultation. I see this mirror image isolated as the sculptor's masterwork in the center of an opulent room, protected from the inter2

visitors by those soft, thick tubes of velvet-covered rope attached to uuut1>u~::u brass stands at the four corners. One needs circle the statue only to get the right impression.

Lev Rogin awakened slowly. There was a sound somewhere , but he could not identify it. A beat of some kind . It was not synchronized with the rapid beating of his hean, and the only other thing he was aware of was an irritating numbness in his limbs. His mouth was full of saliva as if in instinctive expectation of food. He had discovered that those who are starving produce a lot of saliva. He had had no food in a number of days, and before that, hiding out with other Jews in a small, furnished pit on the outside of a village, he had only enough food to keep him from becoming sick. But he was driven nearly mad by the closeness: I need room, give me just a little room. Would you please stop that? How can I help it? What would you do about gas? Could you expect anything else with cabbage and sausage that burns the skin off your tongue? Don't I eat the same? Well, then whose bowels did you inherit? Lev Rogin had left one day and wandered into the forest . He had a chance to eat the flesh of a somewhat rotted horse days ago and now regretted having passed it up. Since then he walked through the icy and remote woods , and finally yesterday was reduced to crawling into this meager little shack. Death by freezing was alleged to be almost pleasant, and waking up he was not pleased to realize that he was still alive. That meant another day of wandering towards nowhere in that peculiar combination of lethargy and agony that starving produced. He had not been warm in months, and now this business of dying had extended itself to the point that at twenty, Rogin felt eighty years old. What little family he had was surely sent up some bleak smokestack long ago, and now he considered the idea of himself carrying the seed of his family's future onward a stupid joke. Death was the only thing that reproduced itself now, and with amazing fertility. His heanbeat slowed, and he tested his limbs-still there. Next was to try to get up. Not likely. He was already exhausted . The strange ticking came to him again, and he relaxed, trying to identify it. Then he caught something in his peripheral vision. He turned and waited. Water- it was water dripping off the old wooden roof of the shack. He forced himself to think- water in liquid form, dripping. Its significance gradually became clear. This meant that the circular courses of the planets, the turn of their huge arcs, the mammoth sweeping of their paths around the sun, had all conspired to . break the winter's back. This seemed to mean that there 3

would be another spring. He realized he wanted to see the water, and struggled to his knees. The blazing whiteness drove his eyes nearly shut as he crawled, and he saw everything through those violently bright slits of vision. Yes, it was warmer, almost balmy. He ended up at the base of a gnarled tree, ridiculously angular against the riotous blue of the sky. He ate a handful of snow, forced it down and waited for the acidic cramps to double him over. In a short while he was rocking with his forearms gripped over his stomach, vaguely aware that the seat of his pants was soaked from his body heat on the snow. He moved to get up, and saw under where he sat a slab of dirty, blueblack ice with strange cracks in it, creating multicolored sheets which fractured through to the dirt. In these silver sheets were tiny, brilliant points of color, as if the ice were some crystalline mineral. For a moment his eyes locked in on this universe of shape and color, and because of the tenuous grasp his senses had on reality he seemed to lose his hearing, sense of touch, even his pain. The ice was a tiny spectacle of shifting prismatic variation which convinced him that when you were starving to death, it was the eyes that died last. They caught something else that made him curious, brown circular shapes suspended deep in the ice. Stones, or curled leaves. He drove his fingers under the sharp lip of the ice near the treetrunk and broke up a section a half a meter square. The strange shapes were embedded on the ground surface, and he picked at one and broke it out. Realizing that its weight suggested something other than a stone, he brought it to his mouth and bit it. The taste stung his mouth with an astringent, fermented bitterness, and he chewed the strange brown material for a few seconds and then spat something hard out into his hand. It was a dark seed. "Apple," he said. He began to tremble uncontrollably and became dizzy and numb. Lev Rogin vomited up the first few apples he ate, and then settled back on his knees convinced that his stomach had absorbed some small percentage of the material before sending it up. When he ate more, concentrating on doing it slowly, he began to feel juices squirting and organs moving with painful vigor in an exhultant harmony. Then he looked up and perceived the outer world. Beyond this tree was another equally gnarled, and beyond that another, in a line which defied chance. They made a straight line. He had stumbled his way into an orchard. He could not hold himself, and wept. The only clear conviction that he had had in weeks came to him then: if he could survive, if he managed his way through this pain, through this universal orgy of death, then he would spend his life raising apples. He would have every kind, dangling from the limbs of his trees, and even from high in the air in a plane you would see

.....~...,....., below you the dusky grid of trees studded with a profusion of red , and his trees would be laid out with careful geometrical precision, the lines they made would stretch as far as the eye could see. Poland, Winter 1944-Another Speculation on Death I guarded the Professor the night before he was shot. It was a painful for aJI of us because we truly respected him and he had a reputation a humanist and thinker. But our leader, an underground soldier all these and former officer in the cavalry, decided that his coJlaboration, howseemingly harmless, had to be punished. The man had after all â&#x20AC;˘ cnncn(:a himself in various ways on the pain of others. He helped the Nazis identify people "appropriate" for transport to the East. When he realized he was to be shot the next morning , he looked at us sadly, but with calm understanding. Of course, what must be done must be done. The night before the execution his daughter was permitted to visit him. She was perhaps nine years old , at that age when a grasp of reality is not fuJly developed. We had the Professor chained to a chair in the back of the church, in a store room. Since the Germans were gone, we were able to move about our village more freely. The Professor's daughter looked at him with sad, moon-eyed sympathy. "Are they going to shoot you? " "Yes," he said. " It seems necessary." " Will it hurt?" "No." "But how will I ever see you if you' re dead?" The Professor leaned back in his chair and rattled his chains thoughtfully. Then he said, "When you die your awareness ceases, but as long as there is awareness, then you participate in it. In other words, awareness belongs to the species, and the individual participates. You don't die, the individual you is simply transferred, forgetting all of your life , to the awareness of another. The dead see through the living." The little girl nodded doubtfully and I considered this explanation. It struck me as a valid idea. Here everyone was trying to explain death, and the Professor had succinctly presented one of the best I had heard. "So you participate in the pain, pleasure, and memory of some other individual," he went on. "The nothingness we all fear doesn't exist, in fact cannot exist, unless awareness ceases to exist. So I will participate in your awareness after tomorrow.'' "Will I feel it?" " Perhaps. Just make me happy.'' 5

"I will," she said. Then she began to cry. He laughed and told her not to be concerned. He had no fear of death and knew each and every person would someday have to face it. I was a little choked up at all this. Some fool let the daughter go out when we executed the Professor. This would have been all right except for what happened. He was being walked by three partisans to the clearing outside the village, where he was to be shot. He looked serene and loftily sacrificial, almost as if he had become philosophically weary of the procedure. But when they were emerging from the woods toward the spot where other panisans stood by a fencepost, the Professor began to speak to the men leading him. I could see the fog of his breath shooting out of his mouth. The little girl stood by a brushy hedgerow watching, perhaps wondering if she would be able to feel his perception waft into her brain after his death. The Professor had stopped and now began to plead in a loud, whining voice, no, you can't, you mustn't. Please don't, I beg you! I'll do anything! He wrapped his arms around a tree and began to cry with fright and misery. Two panisans had to peel his fingers one by one off the tree and carry him toward the execution post while he squirmed and writhed and bellowed at the top of his lungs with throat-ripping shrieks. He would not stand at the post so we tied him around the waist and thighs, and as we stood back and prepared to shoot he began to hoot and shout with a combination of laughing and crying, throwing the upper pan of his body at us in a series of lunging bows, all the time staring past us with a strange, manic expression on his face . Then it was over. In the silence following the gunfire I remembered the little girl. She was there by the hedgerow staring at her father who now dripped blood into the snow. She was as still as a statue , breath vapor curling away from her pink, expressionless face. Near Arnhem, Holland, Fall1944- Making Contact Dirlewanger waited while the Dutch contacts took his papers into another room, toward the back of the dingy farmer's cottage. He was not sure if he was in Holland, but it didn't matter if the papers were acceptable to the panisans. He tried to relax, to capitalize on the opportunity to rest, but his temples throbbed and his hands were tight, sweaty fists in his lap. He had walked and begged shon rides all across Germany and the journey was made into a monumental struggle because he carried around 45 kilograms of unrefined dental gold in leather pillows bound around his body. Walking like a normal human being had required considerable

路 skill. His undergarments had chafed his armpits and crotch raw, legs ached horribly, and his heart pounded with dangerous force . The act of deserting his fatherland, sacrificed by military ineptitude high command corruption, had seemed to him awful. Beyond that he never in his life be able to get over the horror of standing before of kilograms of dental gold, fillings glittering out from tooth and yellowed plaque, and knowing that there was no way he would be able to carry it. But he sneaked out with his forty some-odd shortly the massive, bleak extermination camp was dismantled, and got rid his SS uniform just inside the border of eastern Germany. Sitting in the cottage, Dirlewanger was sure his deception would He used the name of one Geradus Schneck, a Dutchman who at the wore the inmate's green triangle signifying that he was a criminal. photograph resembled Dirlewanger so closely that it would take an to know the difference . Dirlewanger had interrogated Schneck at camp using the usual truncheon blows and finger twisting, and had """路r<>rtPrt the necessary information. Schneck was now of course a cloud, by necessity. Dirlewanger's desire to get out of the war was recognized by Schneck, who, it seemed, wanted to barter the information and papers in order to save his own miserable skin. It amused Dirlewanger that two of the gold teeth now being warmed by his body heat came from Schneck's mouth . The stupid man! He had finally informed Dirlewanger that he himself wanted passage to America, and he knew how he could get it. Dirlewanger, aware of the photograph, knew that Schneck's revelation was his own way out. When Dirlewanger indicated that it was Schneck's time to die, Schneck tried the last ploy and revealed the names of the men on the border of Holland who could arrange the flight. But he knew it was useless to try and barter and came out finally with a wan, hopeless shrug, and laughed with dejected abandon just as Dirlewanger had the Kapo wind the thin garrote around his neck. He waited. The gold, which felt like bags of sand, encased his lower trunk, and he hoped only that the men would find no excuse to search him. They returned to the room smiling, one holding the papers. "Geradus Schneck,'' one said. "Yes,'' Dirlewanger said. "You are under arrest." The man turned and looked at the other man . "By our-say, organization here. There are a couple of small villages that you must pay for." After the brutal search, the discovery of the gold and the beating

which followed, there was a conversation during which Dirlewanger tried to convince them that he was not Geradus Schneck-"Of course you're not! Of course! A murderer of children like you! You're obviously someone else and photographs don't lie! We are going to hang someone else tomorrow! Of course! " It came to Dirlewanger gradually, while he shook his head at their accusations and wiped the blood from his mouth and nose , that the cr;rl'ty Schneck, criminal, conspirator and collector of campbound Jews ' valuables belonging legally to the Reich , had after all had the presence of mind, all beaten up and bloody as he was, to baner wisely-a life for a life. Treblinka, Eastern Poland, Spring 1945-Gold Rush It is just after dawn. The boy has been digging for an hour, watched by his father, who believes anything of value will be buried shallow in amongst the trees adjacent to the ruins of the camp. The patches of dewladen grass show their darker trails, which run next to holes already dug, "in places you'd be able to remember," the father had said, "next to a certain tree, or exactly between two trees." The boy finishes a long, shallow hole, and looks up with weary doubt at his father. "Nothing,'' he says. The father muses, holding his chin. Then he looks at the mounds of chunks of blasted cement and rusted billows of barbed wire fifty meters to their left . "Maybe we should try sifting the firepit." "What for?" "It- There might be something." " Who'd hide valuables in a fire pit?" The father glares at the boy with a flash of anger, and then pauses and looks back at the trees. "Let me think now, the guards would wander around here . Prisoners who gave them money for food or whatever would not be able to-Now think if you had something to hide, where would you bury it?" "Over there?" the boy says , pointing toward the ruins. "Fool! I told you there was a building there! " He rips the shovel from the boy's hands, his face wooden with rage. The boy stumbles back , and says, " I'm sorry, I only-" The father begins digging with furious concentration, flinging din with energy far in excess of need . The boy moves off, pretending to look for valuables. He kicks the sandy earth near a grassy bank, hoping that by some miracle this famous gold he has never seen will appear. Soon he is lost in a semiconscious swoon of vague expectation, kicking dirt out from 8

the grassy hummocks of the bank. His shoe strikes something hard loosens the dirt. He continues kicking, then backs away. "Father! " His turns as the boy points. It is the front half of a skull, lying on its side the earth. The jaw is detached from the top , and the base of the skull is !Dtttered, so that the interior looks like a little cave. "The teeth! " the father says. "Look at the teeth! " The boy gets down on his knees to look at the teeth-only five or six, gold. Just as he is about to rise with the bad news, he senses movement inside the skull. He looks into the little cave, and in emerging definition he sees a mouse, standing above what look like four little bluegray bullets -babies. "Oh look!" he says. "Father, look here! Look!" "What! What!" he snaps, walking quickly toward the boy. "Look! It's mice , little baby mice! There's the mother! She has four babies-look! " The father's face is held in a mask of momentary question, then darkens with rage and frustration. He raises the shovel and with four powerful whacks reduces the skull into fragments flattened into the earth. The boy watches, then turns toward the ruins of the camp. The air is blasted &om his lungs and he ends up on his face, his mouth full of dirt. At first he does not know ~hat happened, but understands when he sees his father looming over him, the shovel in his fist . Getting his breath back, the boy clears his mouth and stands up, the flat square of pain on his back increasing in intensity as his senses return. His father is digging again, now exactly between two trees.

Jose Lezama Lima LAS BARBAS DE UN REY

~Las puertas? Las barbas de un rey g6tico que preside la cai'da de una piedra. Atraviesa la puerta, la nieve en Ia punta de los dedos escurre como una mirada que extrae granos de arena. ~Salimos o entramos? Te aprieto las manos y nos quedamos adormecidos con saltos y sobresaltos. (Salimos? Una playa con un reno oye en Ia altura vozarr6n de una nube . ~Entramos? El bosque se retira, Ia decoraci6n se a proxima a una fiesta campestre finlandesa. ~Entramos? Yo tiro de tus brazos. (Salimos? Saltan los ojos mortales de un mineral.

Jose Lezarna Lima A KING'S WHISKERS translated by Joseph Chadwick

The doors? The whiskers of a Gothic king who presides at the fall of a rock. He walks through the door, the snow on his fingertips trickles like a look that extracts grains of sand . Shall we exit or enter? I grasp your hands and we fall asleep by fits and starts. Exit? A beach with a reindeer hears high up a cloud's huge voice. Enter? The forest withdraws, the decor imitates a Finnish country festival. Enter? I pull on your arms. Exit? Out leap a mineral's mortal eyes.

<. Y

MI CUERPO?

Me acerco y no veo ninguna ventana. Ni aproximaci6n ni cerraz6n, Ni el ojo que se extiende, ni la pared que lo detiene. Me alejo y no siento lo que me persigue. Misombra es la sombra de un saco de harina. No viene a abrazarse con mi cuerpo, ni logro quitarmela como una capota. La noche esta partida por una lanza, que no viene a buscar mi costado . N ing6n perro esmalta el farol sudoroso. La lanza solo me indica las 6rdenes de la luna haciendo detener la marea. Es la triada del colch6n, la marea y la noche. Siento que nado dormido dentro de un tonel de vino. Nado con las dos manos amarradas.

AND MY BODY?

I come close, I don't see any windows . Not nearness nor fog nor the eye that wanders nor the wall that stops it . I move away, I don't hear what pursues me. My shadow is the shadow of a sack of flour. It doesn't come to clasp my body, nor can I take it off like a coat. The night is split by a spear that doesn't come seeking my side. No dog decorates the sweaty streetlight. The spear only signals to me the moon's orders that make the tide cease. It's the triad of mattress, tide, and night. I feel like I'm swimming asleep inside a tunnel of wine. I'm swimming with my two hands bound.

Norman Hindley

HOLDING THE NEW MOON FOR ONE HOUR NEAR CHRISTMAS, SHE LIGHTING THE TREE for K.B. away

Getting her to come down is tricky, But I used one of D . W.'s poems like food To tempt her, It was the right temperature and color, A shallow spoon-of-snow poem, And pulled it off. She came through the door, Scooped it, and sat just as you please in the sofa. She asked for a beer, Whoopee! And read Diane's poem like an elegant menu. Close up Her dress made a noise like club soda, And you should see her bracelets! Circles of cold milk. She said lift her into the tree, I did, using my most modest grip, Her body light as a bee, And in place, on one elbow, was a real star. Settled in, the pine burst to amethyst to ice To searing white like the Creation, Every needle a plume spiking light . And the tree filled with gifts In your name Kathy. Two pearl shoes , A sliver of Persian melon, The holy man you've been expecting, His coat a whiff of snow sashed with white hair, His hood full ofKool cigarettes. There's a bend from a beautiful river On one bough And silver oarlocks for your boat. There's a storm and you're on horseback, happy, And rainwater gushes out of downspouts Fast as laughing white cats,

All in miniature. And the hour is up. And the new moon lifts Turning, smiling and dreamy Leaving Shows her silver ark And the plum blue rest of her.

THAT'S ALL FOR PICASSO for Barbara

Because you stand like champagne on the lawn, Or at the back of the yard To manure the hill of bromeliads , Or at dusk under the blowing paper lanterns In your sequined cape, Or have salad in the early a.m. , Lips leafy with mint, He's drawn toward you . The couple next door have seen him Simmering in your carport, Noted his baldness, bowleggedness, His you-know-what thick as a rib. One eye's carmine, One madder rose . Picasso, Picasso, And he's come calling, Barbara, and so beguiling, To say "Gertrude Stein," " fame," in tender French While you read . His sigh is a berry. He listens in your room And words that come from your dream Like a soft drink Will be taken as yes. He'll draw on the pads of your fingers, lift Your long night shirt, push back a knee, Stare. He 'll squeeze colors on a brush, Draw his rosy donkey on the low hill of your belly, Sign your behind like a check. And Michael, beside you, in the deepest sleep of his life, Dreams shimmering rivers of daughters, Rides prayerless The narcotic of Picasso's art. And Picasso's not finished.

He will paint in your eye, Barbara, An owl, glowing like milk in a dark oak, Its face the shape of a heart, His talons gold rings , The warm sweep of spread wings, a lotion. He' ll lean back and admire his work. You 'll wake. Shower the colors out, His seed cold ink at your feet, Brush out your hair, fill it with combs, Give the dead painter the gate . . . The sun's a nasturtium this morning Backlighting your body A bell In a thin dress, To pass or stand as you will By the lawn, By the hill of bromeliads.

David Stroup THE FIFTH RATIONALE

A week before I killed her, and touched the taut skin of something vast which I still don't quite understand, there were reponers in front of the clinic. I saw the protesters first, more of them than usual, taking advantage of the publicity. It was still early, the eternal grey light of nighttime in the Manhattan core fading into grey daytime as the NY-GEO mirror rotated away, towards the solar furnaces in Jersey. The picketers were a mixed bag, mostly Sacred Lifers and assorted members of the Christian Youth. Any patients would have already been allowed to take refuge in the lobby; I just hoped that Marsha was screening them well enough to keep the mobs out. The small knot of reponers was waiting next to the door, vidcorders resting on their shoulders. I screened them out and pressed through. "You're going to love this one, doctor," Marsha said, glancing up from her desk as I came in. Her left eye-the cybernetic one-remained focused on the screen before her as she handed me the file. I took it without glancing at it. "Waiting in your office." "Morning. How long have they ..." I gestured over my shoulder at the reporters. "Since she came in," she said. "Hmm." The lobby was filling up. What had this woman done to get so much attention? I looked around at the dozen or so who were waiting, and started soning. There was an old lady in a wheelchair, poor enough that the age showed , easy to classify. A couple more who were obviously sick. A handful who were difficult to place, and, sitting together, a group of Pilgrims. As I headed towards my office they smiled at me, benignly. One of them held up an appointment slip; I didn 't have to look . It was a week old, the waiting period had elapsed. I think the Pilgrims bugged me the most. They're the fourth type, and they 've only started showing up in the past five years. Outside my office I opened the file and scanned it quickly. All it contained was a fax of the appointment sheet she'd just filled out and a copy

of her medical records . No doctor's approval of intent. I glanced at her age, then double-checked-no, the AOT box was empty. She was healthy as a horse, in fact . That meant money. I'd been gene-looped a decade ago and it had punched a considerable hole in my finances. I was beginning to see a pattern. I'd read about a case like that a month ago, out on the West Coast. I wished that I'd followed it more closely, but it had all been gossip column stuff. I glanced at the name and stopped dead in my tracks. Bigger than the West Coast. It was still dim inside the office; she hadn't turned on the light. "Ms. Dickson?" "Dr. l3ates! Thank you, and I'm so sorry for any inconvenience I've caused you. Your receptionist said it was all right for me to wait in here ... !hope-?'' "No, no, it's fine. Can I get the light?" "Cenainly. My eyes are fine. I just left it off so I could see the city better." I hit the switch and the fiber-optic panels glowed to life, channeling cool light from the building's central lamp. She was beautiful, and not a little spooky; I'd never seen anybody her age before, not in person. Her walk was perfectly controlled and graceful, with all those years of practice and none of the ill effects of aging. There was something ethereal about her-in the fine, pale texture of her skin, her unnaturally slim figure , the tiny, cobweb lines at the corners of her eyes that surgery hadn't erased. And those eyes: ancient, peering from under slightly-hooded lids, yet clear and sharp as stilettos. Eyes that had seen more years than four decades of my family. She could, I realized, have been any age, perfectly preserved. But there was something about her-about all of the ancients, remnants of the generation that discovered anagathics and gene regression-that spoke of centuries, and power. " So, Ms. Dickson, why do you want to take your own life?" She sat opposite my desk and smiled a perfect smile. "Do you always get to the point so quickly, Doctor?" I smiled back, with about eighty years less practice. "Not by a long shot. But you don't look like the type who's going to break down in here, and we both know what son of storm 's about to hit." I gestured at the door, at the reporters. "Like in California, when a woman of around your age walked into a Euth Clinic and the board of Chai-Osterman spun straight off its axis ." " And straight into the hands of a corporate shark from Tokyo GEO.

She couldn't be more than 25 years old ...." Her eyes got a far-off look and she sighed. "Oh, well . Why does anybody my age come to a place like this , Dr. Bates?" "Usually;' I said, "it's because their bodies are falling apart and they can't afford gene- looping." "I assure you, Doctor, this is not a decision I've made lightly, or in haste." "Uh, sorry." I opened her file and rested my chin in my hand . ''I'm sorry. It looks like its going to be a bad day. And I have to ask you these questions-" " I know," she said, and quoted: "Mandatory counselling without approval of medical intent." She tapped the file. "And my body is in fine shape." "Then why? And have you considered options that may be open to you?" We both knew; options meant life prolongation. Gene-regression therapy, prosthetics, cybercoding of personality, longevity drugs. I caught something in her hooded, razor-sharp eyes then, something old that smiled at me. She stood slowly and walked to the window. "I started using lazarazine when I was 60, Dr. Bates. I'm addicted now. I had my first GRT treatment at 100; I was one of the first." Her company had funded the research, and produced the rare drugs and enzymes at their factories in Clarke orbit. "I've been through it five times now. I'm 157 years old, Dr. Bates. I need hypnotics, mnemoboosters to remember my childhood. To picture my mother's face. My memory's perfect; there's just too much to recall." It sounded like a speech. "You seem to do pretty well for yourself." "Oh, quite well," she said. "But for how much longer? "Entropy, Dr. Bates. There's only so much that medicine can do. Every time I go in for a treatment, small elements of damage accumulate. Next time it's twice as difficult. If I quit using lazarazine my body would be riddled with cancer inside a month. I'd have Alzheimer's disease with. . ,, tnSlX.

I joined her at the window. The view was impressive, the clinic on the upper mall of the Chai-Osterman megastrucrure overlooking Central Park. The sun was just catching on the panels of the park's transparent, geodesic canopy. "They're always coming up with new techniques. Your company is. Maybe cloned bodies next- you could get a completely fresh start." "Not by a long shot, Doctor," she said. She placed one hand against the glass and looked out at the waking city. I imagined that I could hear

the far- off pounding of breakers as the Atlantic surged against Manhattan's dikes. "1 remember this island before the subsidance. Now its sinking, and with the greenhouse effect the ocean's rising to meet it. A life can be like that. Entropy can affect many things." ''I'm not sure ifl get you," 1 said. Actually, I had an idea where she was going now, and I had something I wanted to add. But I had to draw her out first. "Last year I had over two thousand law suits against me- personally - in the courts. Some of them date back almost one hundred years. The number is increasing geometrically. In my business it can't be avoided. Do you know what my business is, Dr. Bates?" "I have an idea." "It's 路 everything. Orbital Dickson Factors has an interest in almost every segment of human existence. For myself, personally, it's as bad; my address book- personal contacts, business contacts, relatives- takes up a

sizable portion of a mainframe in orbit. I have six generations of descendants to keep track of. That's well over a thousand people. In my web of personal acquaintances there is room for enemies, and feuds, and wars that I've路never even heard of. "And my business dealings ... there's hardly a corporate entity I haven't had dealings with . Hardly one I haven't screwed over, Dr. Bates, at some time. Oh yes , I have 'screwed over' quite a few." She smiled. Her hair was wispy and black as space; hair always seems to come out different after longevity therapy. More vivid than before. My own had gone from auburn to fire-engine red. " When you count in relations, interlocking corporations and zaibatsus, and the like, I'm at the center of something far too large and tangled to control. My life isentropic. Too many tiny errors have accumulated , too many small elements of damage which the surgeons can never correct. Eventually it simply becomes ridiculous, morbid, to go on." I was thinking of my own life. Still healthy at seventy-eight and with no end in sight. I thought back over three marriages, over too many friendships that had dissolved into animosity, over the faces of people forgotten and then recognized, generations later, in their children. The realization that I'd been part of history that could never even be explained to most people. " Are most of the , ah, so-called ancients like that?" I asked. "Hmm .. . I suppose so. What do you mean? " "I think I read this in Time. Something like 90 % of the really big zaibatsus and corporations-all of the orbitals- are controlled by people over one hundred years of age. Ancients. The people who got in on the ground floor and have had longer than any other generation to rise to the top. They must all have lives like yours." " Yes ," she said. "Like Elizabeth Osterman. She had the right idea . . . let someone else start over. Of course the confusion it caused for her corporation was regrettable- " "No, no , that's the whole point." I tried to figure out how to say it without it sounding like I was encouraging her towards euthanasia. I can't encourage or discourage-the courts ruled long ago that trying to talk someone out of it was a denial of their civil rights. And the Anti-Euth lobby would tear me apart if I started pushing death on people who were undecided. " It works both ways . This thing about entropy in relationships, in businesses. If the ancients accumulate, with all their errors and complex webs of relationships, then it begins to weigh the rest of the world down

.. like the accumulation of buildings that can drag a city under. Living with successes the rest of us can't live up to. And failures we can't down . We need the ancients, but . .. maybe the people who got in the ground floor have to get off eventually." She looked at me with a new, different light in her eyes. "That's very ~c,eotn're, Dr. Bates. Yes, a number of us have had thoughts along similar . Of course, there is some dissent over just what our allotted span is . . over when it is time, indeed, to move on." She held up her hand, the milk-white skin, strangely delicate looking, almost microscopic around the knuckles. "Perhaps I could go on forever, one step ahead death. I have no desire to run Zeno's race with the reaper." "Maybe I'll feel the same way when I'm your age. I've only been (CDie-JIOOJ:>ea once, probably won' t need it for another decade ." It had a strange experience, my genetic clock set back by tailored gene-veeviruses. Then for six months special temporary rider codons forced my y to age in reverse, regenerating damage decades of age and neglect done. "I sort of just missed being an ancient, you know. I was in on research that started gene-looping." She looked at me with an expression I found hard to pin down. ? I owe you something of a debt of gratitude, then. Please, tell me "It wasn't much. I was a research assistant. That was the only time ever spent in orbit . . . hated every minute of it." "I can certainly sympathize there. Well, that's ... fascinating. There 't many left who worked on that project .. . most were older and 't keep up with their treatments." I turned back to her file . "Well, there isn't really very much else to You've thought this over quite thoroughly? " She smiled. "Yes, quite. For a good many years. And I've investigated a number of possible paths; the euthanasia clinics are the safest and most cenain. This clinic, in particular, has an excellent record ." "Thank you ." I looked back to her forms, everything was in order. "Ms. Dickson-" "Teya, please." "Ah, Teya. I usually don't tell people this. Sounds cold, but . there are basically four types of people who come in here. Most are pretty easy to classify. Four rationales for kicking your own bucket. The first are the medical cases-people with the few diseases which are still incurable. Either they're in so much pain that that they can't go on or they're just not strong enough to keep up the fight . The second are related to those-

people aging but too poor to afford even the cheaper longevity treatments. The third group are the emotionals. They make up most of our business. Broken hearts, broken dreams, whatever. About 90% of them come in for counselling, cool off, and never go through with it. "And the fourth, the fourth are the Pilgrims. They still spook me .. . taking their own lives just to see what 's on the other side. Fastest growing religion around. That's scary. Can't boot a magazine without reading about their seminars, prayer meetings, preparations for their 'vastest journeying.' " "And me?" "You don't fit," I said. "You don't fit any of those categories. You don't seem ... ready to give up." "Are you saying I shouldn't do it?" I picked up the pen and toyed with it. "If I didn't believe in graceful acceptance of mortality .. . , I wouldn't be here. But even with everything you've told me, I can't believe that you're ready." She leaned forward. "I assure you, Doctor, I am more ready than you can imagine. Would you please sign the form?" "Of course.'' I signed, and passed the pen to her. "I don't understand you, Ms .... Teya." "You don't have to;' she said, and signed, with a signature that had taken a century and a half to perfect. There's a one-week waiting period for any applicant without an approved medical rationale. A cooling-off period, it weeds out a lot of them. Of course, the Pilgrim's PAC's trying to have it abolished . The reporters did their jobs with depressing thoroughness and the story was all over the media by evening. The next day the stock market dropped twenty points; it quickly recovered. The board of directors at Dickson Orbital was thrown into a frenzy, then all reports were cut off as corporate spooks clamped down a security lid. Neighboring zaibatsus licked their chops at the prospect of Dickson's financial empire thrown into disarray. Within the company it was just as bad, when a corporate transpon enroute from the volatile mines on Halleys to a cis-lunar habitat turned up missing, the rumors hit the fan. One article said it was due to an " accidentally" misdirected stream of slugs from a mass-driver tug. The magazine skipped an issue when its editor in chief died from a mysterious dose of tetrodotoxin. Public interest died down midweek, then picked up again as the date approached. I half hoped that she wouldn't show up for her appointment,

but somehow I knew that she would. I ran over everything she'd told meand everything I'd told her. I'd watched the euthanasia movement rise out of " living wills" and the "right to death" laws in the early 21st century. I'd seen it argued both ways in the courts and in the streets. I believed in everything I'd told her. By the end of the week I realized that, in some way, she scared me more than the Pilgrims. I arrived at the clinic early, during the false night of the orbital mirror, to prepare for the arrival of Ms. Dickson and her media retinue. The injection room was prepped, and everything double-checked, by the time the rest of the staff showed up. If she'd read the literature we 'd given her on the way out, she'd know enough about procedures that the whole thing would go smoothly and, I hoped, quicker than usual. Sometimes they come in unprepared and we have to talk them through it; half of the time they walk out after we spend half an hour lecturing them on what they should have read during the cooling-off period. Sometimes the reality of it is enough to scare them off. Death by lethal injection: a light, oral sedative, an IV needle with a saline drip, and the addition of the drug, Legal E/K. Papers signed all along the way. Once a patient panicked after I'd inserted the IV-they can change their minds up to the last instant, of course, but this left me with a frightened would-be Pilgrim dragging an IV stand around the clinic by his vetn. She arrived just after the clinic opened, surrounded by attendantsall discreetly and legally armed. The reporters got into the lobby. I only saw her for an instant as a pair of orderlies moved her through the crowd and into the injection room. I caught her gaze, just for an instant. There was something different in her ancient, razor-sharp eyes-something glazed and distant. She looked at me like she was seeing something else entirely, and I was inconsequential. I took her file from Marsha and, with the bodyguards running interference, made my way out of the lobby. No other patients, no Pilgrimsno one else would be permitted in until the media circus was over. Leaving the bodyguards behind , I took refuge in my office. Bodyguards, I thought, protecting the man who's about to kill their employer. Her file, of course, was in order. The only addition was the week- old appointment sheet, now signed and stamped "completed," stapled to the inside front cover. Usually I see patients, for counselling or approval of their forms, all morning; administration of euthanasia is scheduled for afternoons. We'd scheduled Ms . Dickson first thing, and when I got to the injection room

she was sitting on the edge of the table , a clipboard resting on her knee, with Alex Wrede (the clinic lawyer) peering over her shoulder. He indicated the black screen at the bottom of the clipboard. " Sign here for the computer." She scratched her signature on the black rectangle, leaving a mark only in the clipboard's computer memory. She looked up at him , vaguely. "That all? " Her whole bearing, somehow, was different-her movements less perfect and controlled. "Almost. There'll be one more, later, only one signature. The nurse will present it to you. Do you have any funher requests?" She smiled. "Like a priest? No thanks." I stepped forward as Wrede left the room. " Good morning, Ms. Dickson. I'd like to ask you again-is your decision final, or would you prefer another week to think things over?" When she looked at me I saw it again. Something distant . "Good morning, Doctor. Good to see you . No, believe me, I know what I'm doing." She looked at the meditech preparing the monitor and automatic IV unit. "Will we get a chance to talk? Alone?" " He'll be leaving in a minute. Have you read the information we gave you on the procedure? " "Long ago. Well enough to know all the formalities by heart. No, no requests. Yes, I'm certain and yes, my lawyers have talked to your lawyers. No, I have no implants or deadman switches that will affect the procedures." She looked up at me. "Can I have the sedative, please?" The meditech glanced at me , he'd positioned the monitor pickup and the screen was showing strong vitals. The IV was programmed, with green lights showing. " If you're ready." She nodded. I handed her the paper cup the meditech had prepared. "Drink it in one swallow, please. It's a very mild sedative which should not inhibit your reasoning. You will still be able to change your mind." She took the cup and swallowed its contents. "Smooth," she rasped. I'd heard it before-everyone wants their death to be a performance, and about half have a battery of jokes ready. The meditech left the room and she immediately caught my eyes. That sharpness was there-somehow far away, but still there. "I'm going to tell you something you won't believe, Doctor. I'm going to tell it to you because my lawyers assure me that this room is absolutely clean-has to be, by law-and because nobody will ever believe you." I had a sudden picture of the whole thing falling apart . Was she a crazy after all? "Ms. Dickson, I don 't think it's wise-" . "Shh." She laid a finger across my lips. " Listen and learn ." She lay down slowly, with an eery half-smile , never breaking eye

contact. "I'm not here, and I'm not going to die in a minute . I'm several hundred meters away, and I'm about to start all over again. Just like I said. "You mentioned cloned bodies and personality transfer. Those technologies have been perfected for twenty years, Doctor. I have an implanta neural transponder-and for the past three months I've been slowly moving my personality and memory into my new body. You can' t just 'transfer' minds, you see-brains aren't computer chips that can be programmed and erased. But with two brains linked together intimately, you can move from one to the other. Like moving into a new house . . . a piece at a time until the old one's just a shell. "I've been doing that, Dr. Bates. When I started, the clone body was like an accessory, like something I ran by remote control. Now I'm mostly there . I just have to terminate my connections with this one. Maybe I'll lose something, I don' t know. I think it'll be more like having a limb amputated, though. "You won 't recognize my new body. It looks nothing like this one. Completely different genetic stock-tissue types aren' t even compatible. And it has a completely developed legal identity, even though it's really only a few years old, and almost all of that was spent in a tank. I'll be a new person. That's why this'll work; I'll stan over, just like we discussed. I'll leave behind that vast, tangled entropic web, that life grown old. I'll be a new person, unknown, with no enemies, no ties, no chains .. . just a century and a half of knowledge and experience. "That's what happened in California. Sara Kiuchi, that hot shot from Japan-that was Osterman. And the same thing will happen to Dickson Orbital. I'll be even younger than Kiuchi .. . a nine-day wonder who can play the company like a musical instrument. And it'll happen again. You know who we are, Dr. Bates: the ancients, the generation that built this society. We know its technology, its laws, its conventions from the ground up. We built the core of the machine that the younger generations take for granted. And now we can come back , without the accumulation of years that threatens to strangle us. Everything you said was true, I think, but the world does need us. You do take this thing we've built for granted. But this generation will be with you forever, though our names change. And each generation we'll be stronger, as we gain experience and you move away from the foundations of the structure you live in, less adept at controlling anything but the superstructure. We are the infrastructure. "Why am I telling you? Am I gloating? Hardly. I've talked to a few of the others, and we all agree: you're almost one of us . You were in on the creation of gene-looping, and of everything that sprang from it. You played a small part in the birth of Dickson Orbital, and of this thing that 27

the ancients are becoming. You can become one of us if you want to. Any time you're tired of the cycle of youth and age, treatment and decay, go see my successor at Dickson. You'll always have an appointment. "And I think you will come, for all you said about accepting mortality, you have too much contempt for the suicides. You type them, secondguess them." The door opened and the meditech entered with Jackson , the RN. "Are you ready, Ms. Dickson?" She looked up at him and smiled benignly. In a quiet voice: "Yes. Yes, I am." One tech took the monitor while the nurse handed her the clipboard. "This is the final release. If you still wish to go through with it, sign here." I stood in shock. What had she told me? I had never heard anything like it-was she crazy? If so, if she couldn't be held responsible for her own life I had to stop the injection. But I couldn't-! couldn't reconcile what she'd said with anything I'd ever believed, but I couldn â&#x20AC;˘t dismiss it. Serial immortality? A global conspiracy of ancients, perpetuated into infinity? Myself as part of that-an ancient? The things she'd said about me ... was I contemptuous of the patients-the suicides? I'd had those thoughts ... "too weak for the struggle," "kicking their own bucket." I talked about acceptance of mortality, counselling people my age who couldn't afford the longevity therapy I'd had, while saving for my next gene-looping, the next, newest drug to keep me young. "Ms. Dickson, would you like-" "Yes, please." She gestured at the monitor, and the nurse turned on the audio recorder. She cleared her throat. The IV needle was in , the dose waiting. "My name is Teya Bogdanovich Dickson, and I was born in 1921. I've seen a lot ... it's been a long life, a good life. And yet, though I'm not religious ...." She looked straight at me . " I have the feeling that what's to come will be even better. Eternal life . . . perhaps I will touch the face of God yet." The nurse looked at me. "Doctor? " Teya said. She chuckled nervously. "That's your cue." I stood frozen . She touched my sleeve, a gentle tug. "Doctor?" Very slowly, I walked to the IV machine and keyed the lethal dose of Legal E/K into her vein. I took a vacation, for a time, then went back to work. My marriage broke up; soon I was contemplating another. 28

Dickson Orbital fell apart, and a young woman from Brazil-only 18 years old, a prodigy- seized control and began to put it back together. I walked by Dickson corporate headquarters often, but never went in . I had plenty of time: 80 years old. A child, by some scales. And one day I saw a young woman, lean and quick, moving like a shark , surrounded by a cloud of bodyguards, being hustled out of a limo. For a second our eyes locked, and she smiled, and something ancient, hooded and sharp as truth looked out at me from the face of a teenager.

Kathryn Takara

BIRD'S VIEW

High up on Mt. Tantalus With you so far away, I trust and see in trees. Gliding on a bird's view, Eucalyptus and tall shadows stretch your absence As the sun lounges on the mirrored water of Honolulu Harbor. Within a platinum sea of emotions, You seem so far away in the talons of another's presence. Impoverished, I flee to the hills hating her, Seeking solace in the regions of my love. Cars and trucks Occasionally pass by and stop like mosquitos, Violating my stillness & fragmenting the colorful prism of sensitivity. The men in them seem to be intruding upon my solitary flight. I depan their subtle advances, As down on the horizon ships move across a slice of my vision, Sailing to unknown destinations.

Flying high again, I find solace in the fragrances of lofty heights, Soaring on the currents of wind and birdsong, Seeking the regions of my love.

Haunani-Kay Trask

MAKUAKANE Waimanalo, 1986

for a month I wake to find you in the stomach of my sleep shark's tooth overhead turtle guarding out at sea I bring you pa'akai, luau leaves a bowl of sour poi the wind blows cool from Ko'olau II. in the shadowed light I see you, father young Hawaiian dancing stories of the land towards the bay kanaka men go together to lay net

across the pu'u giant suns are showing off ali'i cloaks of gold III.

little doves dan in and out startled from their banyan by screeching cars people throw cans cigarette butts plastic politicians carve up land: shoreline for hotels, valleys for houses, underground for bunkers, sewers miles of wire

IV. father, our lives are made now, all of us brothers fish and plant sisters practice law and one of us followed you, dancing me , I fight for the land but we feel there is no hope only sounds diminishing at dawn

v. now, your daughter wears your oldness as a cloak tunles disappear at noon, a parching sun scours the land

tonight, in the tomb of sleep, I will bring luau leaves and salt we will wait for the dark wind from Ko' olau then take our canoe to sea with the dying moon

Richard Hamasaki I DON'T WRITE NO

HAIKU

I DON'T WRITE NO HAIKU JUST THREE LINE BREATH THREE sWEET LINES NO RHYME NO FEET JUST VISION AND RHYTHM I DON'T WRITE NO HAIKU THAT STUFF THEY CAll HAIKU IS AMERICAN JIVE DO YOU SPEAK THE LINGOHAIKU IS coMPOSED IN NIHONGO 1 DON'T WRITE NO HAIKU JUST THREE LINES MAYBE 3 WORDS MAYBE ONE LONG LINE TWO OR FOUR IMAGE AND soUND IT'S FRESH AND SWEET BUT IT AIN'T HAIKU IF IT AIN'T NIHONGO I DON'T WRITE NO HAIKU NO RHYME NO FEET JUST VISION AND RHYTHM

WingTekLum

THE CAR

Why, I should remember to drive my car more often. For ifl did, I would not have thought to just leave it in Mechanics Alley, where on the third day someone broke into the trunk, stealing, among other things, the spare , which (upon having a flat on Canal Street as I was looking for a garage with cheap tires) I could have used to get me out of the traffic jam I caused, blocking the only access to the Manhattan Bridge, resulting in the police towing my car down to the Fifth Precinct headquarters, while, as I could not find my registration, their computer checked on the license number, coming up with the discovery that I really owed them six hundred dollars in back parking ticketsthe approximate worth of the car, which they subsequently impounded. Mary, remind me to drive the car more often.

her head came out doctor winked: red hair! really there was no denying itwas the father.

wife's first glance a voice of shock and mild disappointment: lhe looks like you . And that's what I wisecrack to all my friends who comment on how cute she is: resembles her father, right? It's in the eyes, I think; like when she smiles they crinkle like my mother's used to. That's what I told my aunties last week. I also said that when she cries her face and mouth turn oval reminding me of my father. That broke them up . It's an inside joke with our family. Their brother, though, in his own way must have loved me just as much .

Nora Cobb BABY, BABY

They made love then, because she wanted to punish him. She lay flat on the bed, legs together, looking at the spackling on the ceiling as he kissed her nipples, pushed her legs apart, worked his way into her. He grunted and moved above her, and with her eyes, she traced the shape of a chicken in the spackling. The bed moved in the rhythm of their bodies, and the headboard banged against the back wall with each thrust. She didn't want to say anything, didn't want to reward him with either movement or words, but she did: "Don't come in me." He thrust. The headboard hit the wall. Some spackling fell off the ceiling onto his back. The chicken lost part of its beak. "Why," he asked. "You 're already fuckin' pregnant." "Just don't." He grunted, pulling out, and rubbed hard against her belly, body pressed tightly onto hers. "I love you, Mel," he said into her cheek. She pushed him off her. "I hate you." Raising himself onto an elbow, he looked down at her, eyebrows knit, and slowly, softly, he stroked the tiny freckles of her nose. ''I'll make breakfast," he said , and then he left their bed. Melanie lay on the bed after he'd gone, wanting him to come back, wanting his arms to cradle her, to rock her. She wanted him to say, "I will take care of you," and she wanted to snuggle in the comfort of his shoulder. Melanie lay on the bed, eyes closed, listening for the footsteps of his return, but she heard only the clattering of dishes and pans and the rhythmic whisking of the eggbeater. "I hate you," she said, and kicking off the blankets went to take a bath. The kitchen was littered with the efforrs of breakfast: splatches of yolk from overzealous scramblings dappled the stove and counter in the spaces left between the splattered bacon grease; the eggbeater rested at the side of the sink, oozing batter which was beginning to gel; two delicately charred

pieces of bacon lay discarded next to the eggbeater; and the milk was left out with the spout open. Comfonable amidst the mess, Tim sat reading the newspaper at the counter table, his half-eaten meal spread out before him. She stood in front of him, robe wrapped around her body, towel wrapped around her head, and watched him. Newspaper crinkled as he snapped the paper neatly and turned the paper exactly at the crease. Melanie could see the fine and fuzzy smudge-prints left by his ink-stained fingers on the counter top, his napkin, his coffee cup that said "My coffee-Yum! " Tim's head bent over the paper reading, his eyebrows frowning at the words. A friend of hers had once told her that if he shaved his eyebrows down the center where they connected, he could model for GQ. Melanie had laughed and said people with one eyebrow would always have good luck and riches. "Got any lemon chicken? " she asked. Tim looked up , surprised, and put down the paper. "No." He smiled and took her hand. "But how about eggs and pancakes? Sit down." Melanie let him pull her into the chair next to his, but shook her head when he gestured to the food . "I couldn 't ," she said, and gently touched her stomach. She smiled weakly and he smiled back, patted her hand, and returned to the paper. Not looking up, he groped for his cup of coffee, found the handle , brought it to his lips. He slurped twice and placed the cup down. Brown coffee drooled off the side of the rim of the white porcelain cup and formed a dark ring on the counter. Tim left his thumbprint on the cup, next to "Yum!" "What do you want to do? " she asked . "Hmm?" He was still reading. "Tell me." She slouched back into her chair, tucked her hands into her terrydoth pockets. "Tell you what?" In one of her pockets Melanie found a loose thread. She rolled it into a ball and pinched it between two fingers. " You know," she said . "I don't know!" Tim put the paper down , crumpling it , and looked at her, waiting. "What?" he asked . "What? The baby? Is that it? Huh?" Melanie watched his eyebrows jump and dip, dance on his forehead. "Yes." "I don 't know! Whatever you want, I suppon you ." "No! Don' t you. get it? I want to know what you want!" "Melanie," he spoke and his voice was quiet, words punched in staccato. "We don't have to decide right this minute , now do we? Because I don't know; I have to think . ..." 41

"But Tim, I'm not talking about decisions. I'm not talking about thinking. I'm talking about feelings. How do you feel? Do you want it or don't you?" "I don't-" "Yes or no? How do you feel?" She let the balled-up thread bounce from finger to finger as she talked. "Because you know if we want it, we should get married and that means telling my dad we're living together in the first place and he'll stop sending me support money. We aren't financially prepared for a baby. Tim! We wanted a big beautiful wedding , and that means I'll have to quit school before I get my degree and-" "Okay then, okay," Tim shouted, "it's obvious, right? Abortion. We have to get rid of it!" Melanie jumped off her stool, pushed him with her fists. "I hate you," she said, and with angry hands she smeared the hot tears against her cheeks. Tim touched her, petted her arm. He stood up and unwrapped the towel turbaned about her head. Wet hair fell about her shoulders and Melanie buried her face in Tim's chest. "I don't understand, Mel,'' he said. "I want it, Tim,'' she said and wiped her nose on the shoulder of his shirt. It was a flower print. A repeated pattern of pink and purple roses on a beige background. She followed the stream of flowers, pink and purple, running fast up and down the walls . Pink and purple flowers bled together. "Honey. Honey?" Tim looked at his girlfriend who sat forward, her butt at the edge of her chair, her legs tucked under her seat. Elbows propped onto her knees, Melanie cradled her head in her palms and stared at the wall in front of her, mouth slightly ajar. Tim shook her, and Melanie's elbow slipped off her knee. "Mel, you okay?" Melanie sat back, turned to face him, tried to find his eyes, but Tim seemed so far away, seemed to be ballooning in and out like an old PeptoBismol commercial. "Mmm ... medicine ... this morning ... okay, yeah." The words were thick in her mouth, awkward, but her tongue forced them, pushed them out into the air. And then she was thirsty. "Wah-ter?" "No, sorry baby, but the doctor said no water, no food before or after the medicine, 'member?'' He fingered the edge of her cotton skirt. At first she didn't understand, because she wasn't listening. She was watching his lips and his chipped tooth. A little bit of spit shot through the small, ragged gap.

"Wah- ter?" she asked again, and then it was her time. "Melanie Richards? Melanie Richards?" They called her name, and a blonde and silver-haired, heavyset nurse , comforting in her plumpness, like a fluffy white powdered doughnut, like the Easter Bunny, bounced toward her in thick nurse shoes. The nurse laid a pink and white hand on Melanie's arm. "Good girl, up we go . . . that's it." She shuffled Melanie out of the room with the Cosmopolitans and Good Housekeepings, out of the room with pink and purple, pink and purple, up and down, into another room, a small room with harsh lights, a room which smelled like alcohol and had no color at all except for the flat , cold grey of metal. "Okay, Honey, take off your shoes and jump on the scale ... you can sit on that chair there to take off your shoes." The doughnut-nurse pushed Melanie into a chair positioned near the scale. "Probably shouldn't have worn sneakers . . . difficult to maneuver, huh?" The nurse chuckled , jowls bouncing. Melanie smiled briefly, then concentrated on the strings of her shoes. " Now then, sugar, did you take all those pills we gave you yesterday?" Melanie nodded. "A blue tranquilizer and a pink antibiotic?" Melanie nodded. "Did you take them an hour ago?" Melanie nodded. "All of them?" Melanie nodded and the nurse beamed, proud of her little patient. " Good girl! Now just hop right up onto the scale and we 'll weigh you in ... don't worry about moving fast . . . that 's it .. . Good girl! Now, one-o-nine . Leave your shoes. We 'll get 'em later." The pink and white nurse left Melanie on a paper-sheeted metal table, left her with her stockinged feet propped into the air by cold, grey stirrups. Her socks were stained with dirt at the heel, and she hoped the doctor wouldn 't notice. She hoped her socks didn't smell. And then the Easter Bunny was back in the room and she brought the doctor with her. The doctor was bald and he had a mustache and he said, " Hi , How're doing? Do you like Pat Benatar? " He had turned the radio on to 98 Rock. Melanie held the paper sheet tightly to her body, and she couldn't remember taking her panties off, couldn't remember where she put them, and she couldn't tell if she had any clothes on at all. The doctor was talking to her, saying " Don 't use love as a weapon," because he was singing along with Pat Benatar. The nurse was giving her gas, holding the plastic

mask over her face with rubber-gloved hands, and then there was pain. All the way up inside her, a hot fire. Melanie's eyes flashed open, watering, only she didn' t think she was crying, only sweating .. . through her eyes. Pain burned through her again, and Melanie heard someone crying. She gripped a gloved hand, flesh bulging in plastic seams, and she wanted to say that she wanted to hold skin, someone real; she wanted to say that it was okay to really touch her because she wasn't infected, but the pain was constant now. The doctor was bent over between her legs, digging into her with a thin, silver stick ... the type of stick dentists use to scrape plaque off teeth . And the doctor was singing snatches of some song "Baby, baby" and scraping plaque from her body, her womb, and wiping it on a cloth napkin. And the plastic hand was giving her more gas, and the stick was digging and scraping, and someone was crying and someone was saying "What a good girl. Good girl, what a sweetie."

"Guavas!" He carries a lunch bag of guavas, a world of poems, and one Groucho Marx song all the way through by heart. " Guavas! Who wants fresh guavas from my tree? " At least once a semester Jack brings guavas from his tree and sings

Lydia, The Tattooed Lady. And once when the bag was empty he blew it full with air, handed it to me and said, "These are all the metaphors you'll ever need." I keep it pressed in a notebook with my poems, and on occasion take it out, reflll it with air, squeeze out some tree , stone fish bone. "You can learn a lot from Lydia."

Roberto Juarroz

from SIXTH VERTICAL POETRY

El relampago de la belleza crea la eternidad en el reves del ojo . El relampago del amor crea la eternidad en la espalda del olvido. El relampago de la vida crea la eternidad en la otra cara de la muene . El relampago del instante crea la eternidad del otro !ado del tiempo . Toda luz ilumina. Y hasta quiza deslumbra. Pero la claridad esta en el reverso de la luz .

lightning flash of beauty the eternity in back of the eye. lightning flash of love the eternity in back of oblivion. lightning flash of life the eternity in the other face of death . lightning flash of the moment the eternity on the other side of time. light illumines. may even dazzle . clarity is on the other side of the light.

l Hasta donde podra subir le enredadera que se apoya el el aire?

Tambien arriba hay llmites. Y tambien el aire se apoya en la enredadera.

Where does it go this vine that climbs the air? There are limits even up there . And besides, the air is climbing the vine.

La soledad me llama con todos los nombres, menos con el mfo . La soledad me llama tambien a veces con tu nombre . Pero hat otras veces en que Ia soledad me llama con su propio nombre. Quizas algun dfa pueda yo llamar a Ia soledad con mi nombre. Y entonces, seguramente , habra de responderme .

calls me by every name

even calls me sometimes by your name.

one day be able to call solitude by my name then surely will have to answer me.

Hay una puerta abierta y sin embargo hay que forzarla. No conocemos que hay detras, pero de all! surge elllamado. Podemos ir hacia otra parte, pero venimos de otra parte. Estamos fuera y lo sabemos, pero quiza todo es afuera. Siempre buscamos esta puerta, pero debiera estar cerrada. A qui lo abierto es lo infranqueable. (Como pasar lo que no existe? Hay que cerrar Ia unica puerta para poder tal vez entrar.

is a door that's open we have to break in, just the same. don't know what's behind it the calling is coming from in there. could go somewhere else we've come from somewhere else. re outside and we know it maybe everything is outside.

路 is the door we keep looking for it's supposed to be closed. we can't get past what's open. can you pass what doesn't exist?

We may have to shut the only door in order to get in.

Michael McPherson VISIT

I begin to miss agents in the closet, under the bed , your mother's syringes. Once I dreamed you called with directions and when I said you're dead you hung up. Since then nothing, only Curly and I chastise each other in your voice. We've decided you' re still here. Was it for you he sledgehammered his 9mm till the chamber couldn't turn? I haven't seen your daughter in over a year. Kula winters are crisp. It snowed on the summit this November. Your long misshapen fingers would redden and ache. Now rumor says it was suicide, a late delivery you fixed . Did it still matter? I saw your certificate with one cause crossed out and then another. But you know all this , as before. Those porpoises who spread your ashes in a thousand purple orchids know, it all begins again. Into this circle of clear sea darkness we welcome the unexpected guest.

WlllTEVOLVO

all over the road today sunglasses, a lips parted transport. breeze over her cheeks is fast, this day a fingerlift takes your load the pier sails gaily into any tide , what remains of your life jumps a barge goes out where currents run. on the beach sleek lines into the grainy sand around your feet while these waves hardly warrant effort sea is clear and walking to the shower see that gleam parked against the fence. IOm,eorte's one true love vacates a stall the fruit stand as you arrive. double rushes past you to a rendezvous sea level as you climb beyond the sign, your watch and you're late for orchids. bumpers never crumble out here in the wind, seatbelt is fastened snug she's driving the other way.

David Graham BOYS AND FIREWORKS

All night they've praised night with explosions below my window followed by giddy laughter. Happiness is wrong, I want to say, with my headache, with my insomnia, but these boys are without form and won't hear above the splintering hiss and crack echoing down our hill and up Paris Mountain. Besides, happiness is not wrong, just annoying, like a secret date or a change in the menu. Catcalls and horselaughsthe boom of my own building withstanding all . A light, cool rain settles like breathing dust, and I wander the white noise of sleep for whole minutes until , with snorts of warning, another volley sparkles over the hayfield. Tonight I'd almost welcome the mockingbird's bad jokes, anything but this separate piece of the world flaring like mad fireflies. I know these kids, their nicknames and bravado, one eye out for the searchlight of the cops. As a kid I too wanted to ignite the brick- by-brick hush of a sleeping world , wanted all the more because nothing came of it but movies I played against the dim treeline of my truant dreams. And all I did

dress up dogs, burn anthills, out in my own backyard I watched the 1V glimmer my parents' bedroom until expired. Tonight, standing in my on the balcony, I squint the dark, seeing nothing the manic slice of a bat's wing my light. I'm sad now kids have been spooked quiet someone, not me. I won't say miss their idiot joy. Sadness

Triplets

Pruitt

THE SNOW MELTS

He drove slowly, letting other cars pass his blue Mustang. Occasionally stopped to read the names on the mailboxes . All were unfamiliar until found John J. Honeycutt , old Henry's son . He and John). were the age. What if he rapped on the front door right now. Hey, do you me1mb1er me? Andrew Darnell, Joseph and Emily's middle son . My hair's white now, but it was red like my Mama's when I knew you. You remember Emily, don 't you? The woman with four children who them and her husband to work in Raleigh. She liked wearing her white ..,,~â&#x20AC;˘.,.rrn and a cap pinned on top of her heavy auburn braids. She used to about "being somebody." Did she think that she was bettering herself she took a job at Dix's Hill? Taking temperatures and emptying '-'in"''" in an insane asylum . Say, John J., do any of you Honeycutts still ride around at night, hidunder white sheets, threatening blacks and women who don't conform your idea of justice and morality? His foot touched the gas pedal. The Mustang leaped forward , sending a cloud of gravel onto the paved highway. As he accelerated to sixty, his mind raced aimlessly until he read a sign that announced the approach of MENDELL, THE CITY OF PROGRESS AND OPPORTIJNITY. The words seemed so completely ludicrous that Andrew smiled. Until now, he hadn't realized how much he hated this pan of the country, but he must have known that he had to return, or never be able to exorcise himself of the despair he felt. But this would be the last time . He had visited everyone except George who had died a year ago. No one had asked, but he knew that they wondered why he hadn't come back for his brother's funeral. A gathering of people who paid their last respects to an individual they shunned and tormented when alive. Ever since Mama's funeral ten years ago, the absolute hypocrisy of it made him want to puke. No, he would rather remember George, not as a hopeless alcoholic, but as the older brother who brought peppermints home to his mother and sister.

He had tried to talk to his younger brother Richie this time, but beyond a few shared childhood experiences, they had nothing in common. Observing the twenty-five mile speed limit, he drove past a feed store, several gas stations, two drug stores, the Baptist church, HudsonBelk's, and an old tobacco warehouse. On the outskirts of town there were a few eighty-year-old white frame houses with wraparound porches, sit· ting far back on spacious green lawns. The homes, he recalled, of retired farmers, merchants, doctors, and lawyers. The kind of house he always wanted to live in, but never had. He found the side road after a few false turns and dead ends. Driving up the lane, its borders thick with Carolina pines, his breath became shorter. He was getting close now. Past an open field. The crop was soybeans, he supposed. Once it had been cotton, corn, and some tobacco. Would the farmhouse be here after thirty years? Andrew's hands trembled on the steering wheel. There! Across the field was an old house. The wood silver-gray as pewter. A barn and tobacco shed had long ago collapsed. It must be the same one. He cut off the engine, opened the car door, and stepped out onto the ground. Scooping up a handful of the gray-brown soil, he could hear his father's voice. "Sandy loam, best in the county, better than that red cl1y over yonder. I can raise any crop I want to here." Walking toward the house, he thought, God, how small it looked now. The wood was rotting; the roof half gone. Wonder how long since someone lived here. He looked into the kitchen from an open window sagged at its frame . . . . He had seen her standing in front of the black coalburning stove morning. She' d been stirring oatmeal. He could see from the ext)re:sstolll: on her face that she was far away. His five-year-old sister Mary was setting the table . The room bright with sunlight, reflected from the snow that had fallen for two days. "But it won't last long," Papa said yesterday, "so you boys best out there and build you a snowman before it melts." Andrew remembered what fun they'd had rolling out the wet snow packing it into three balls. George , of course, had rolled out the o•·~~c:Kt and then helped Richie . Andrew dido' t mind that his ball was the ,,..<IUJ~..,. because it was the snowman's head, the most important part of his body. Mary found a withered carrot in the root cellar for his nose, and scrambled under the house and brought out an old broomstick to under the snowman's arms. Even Papa helped by contributing one of

old straw hats . When Andrew put some lumps of coal on the head to make eyes and a toothy grin, he heard his father shout, "That's a mighty fine snowman, boys!" And they all cheered and clapped before they ran back into the house. Andrew expected to find his mother in the kitchen, but he realized later that she was in her bedroom because he heard her moving something around. The door was shut. Later that afternoon she came out while he and Richie were playing checkers. Seating herself near the kitchen window, she began to darn socks. The sun, which had been shining all day, was especially bright now as it got lower. He looked up and saw that his mother was sitting directly in a stream of light. It was turning her head on fire, her braids a fiery halo. "Look, Richie, look at Mama. She's an angel on fire ." He expected her to smile, but she didn 't look up . He stared at her while waiting for Richie to take his turn, and saw tears running down her cheeks. That night he was dreaming maybe or something woke him . He seemed to be hearing his mother telling his father that she was going to Raleigh . . . when the snow melts . . . he wanted to ask her about it . . . or tell her his dream . . . . Andrew circled the farmhouse, stopped outside one of the bedroom windows. An iron bedstead , its rusty springs sagging, stood in the middle of the dusty, littered floor. The bed he was looking at right now might be the same bed he'd been born in . When had it become too small for a man and a woman whose bodies had been joined so many times in passion, in tenderness, or even desperate need? Somewhere off toward the woods, he heard a bird calling , " too-toota-too ." Silence, and then, as he held his breath, it came again, " too-toota-too ." Why, under God's green earth, had they paned? In all the years before she left he'd never heard them quarreling . Maybe that was why he 'd been so shocked. And yet there was that feeling of tension in the kitchen the last night . ... Mama had told them a story before the Bible reading. She was looking at George when she began: " I was just your age, thirteen, when I went to work in the mill." "Why didn't you go to school, Mama?" Andrew asked . "You always tell us to get an education . You say that education is something no one can take away from you ." "There wasn 't a high school in the town, but I reckon it was because my Papa needed the money my sisters and I earned. I hated the noise from the machines, and the dust that got in my nose and mouth made me cough and sneeze. But worse than that, was having to do the same thing 61

over and over again, day in and day out. So I used to make-believe to pass the time-'' "I do that, too." Andrew interrupted. "What did you think about, Mama?" "I pretended that I was a nurse. I read about Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale. She was my favorite-" "Emily," Papa's voice was heavy. "I think you'd best get on with your Bible readin' if you want to get these younguns to bed on time. Mary's 'bout half asleep." "All in good time, Joseph." His mother's voice was sharp, highpitched. There was silence, and Andrew heard the wall dock ticking. He wondered if they heard it, too. "So I used to pretend that I was a nurse," she continued, her voice soft again. "And there was a soldier who was wounded and the doctor said he might be blind. I'd sit beside his bed and hold his hand and tell him that he would get his sight back. Then sure enough, one day when the doctor took off the bandages, he was able to see me. And we fell in love-" Again Andrew heard the dock ticking. He didn't know why; it was only make-believe, but he felt sorry for his father. He was glad when George said, "Mama, it's time for my readin' , ain't it? I've chose the 127th Psalm. As arrows are in the hand ofa mighty man; so are chzldren of the youth." Andrew waited impatiently until his brother finished, wishing that he could have read it . But the next psalm was almost as good. He cleared his throat and tried to make his voice as clear and strong as Mama's when she read. Thy wzfe shall be as a fruitful vine by the stdes of thine House; thy chzldren like olive plants around about thy table. Andrew wanted to ask her if she knew what olive plants looked like, but Richie had begun to recite the Ten Commandments. "It must be my turn now, Emily," his father said, as he came over to the table and thumbed through the Bible until he came to Proverbs. Then, his hand resting on Mama's shoulder, he read: Every wise woma11 butldeth her house; but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands. "My God, my God," he muttered, shaking his head, feeling- tears streaking his cheeks. How could Papa have been so calm when he knew that Dr. Williams would be driving to the farm to take her and Mary away? What if he hadn't gone to Mendell with Papa and his brothers that morning? If he'd been home, could she have gotten in the car and left?

She had made a special trip out to the barn to say goodbye. Kissing George first, then himself, and Richie , reminding each of them to "be a good boy and mind your Papa." "We 're always good , ain't we? " Richie asked. His father didn't answer, he didn' t even notice Mama who acted as if she were waiting for something. Andrew hopped into the back end of the wagon, huddling next to Richie under the old patchwork quilt, waving at Mama, whose voice sounded husky, as she called , "Goodbye, goodbye." He felt no urge to climb into the seat that George occupied next to his father. George was always teasing him about being a sissy because he didn't like to exert himself, but he didn't mind . That was better than being a show-off like George , who tried to lift heavier bags of grain than other boys his age, or who made himself sick eating the most hard-boiled eggs at the church picnic. The motion of the wagon as it jolted along the rutty lane lulled him into an uneasy sleep , but when they passed a large brick building with block letters, MENDELL CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL, he was wide awake, thinking of the reading contest that would be held here soon. He cleared his throat and recited a poem Mama had taught them . He wished that she hadn' t told them that story about the nurse. She should have read her favorite psalm, The Lord is my Shepherd. Mama's voice was better than Preacher Hardy's when he read in church. She was different from other mothers, prettier, more alive, and she didn't dip snuff. And then George shouted, " Hey, Andrew, Richie, wake up! We're here , and look, Papa gave me fifty cents. He says we can see the picture show." After Papa tied the horse to a post in front of the general store, he said , "Now you boys behave yourselves while I do my marketin' , and if y'all want to see that picture show two times, why, jist go ahead." Andrew joined his brothers to wander along the busy street. Watching people was fun. He saw a girl from his class at school , but when she smiled at him, he was too shy to smile back. He wished that he could have been wearing knickers with black socks like the town boys. His blue overalls told everyone that he came from a farm . "What are you gonna do with the extra nickel, George?" Andrew asked, when his brother gave him fifteen cents. " I'm gonna buy some peppermint candy to take home to Mama and Mary. I wisht they were with us ." "Yeah, so do 1," he agreed, as he bought a hot dog and a coke and sat down beside Richie on the sunny stoop of the store.

It was mid- afternoon when they came out of the theater. The cowboy movie had been exciting, but Andrew's head ached and he wished that he was home right now, eating a piece of cornbread with buttermilk. They found their father sitting on a nail keg at the back of the store. Head down, arms resting on his knees , he looked as though he had been sitting there for a long time. When he heard Richie's voice, "Hey, Papa;' he looked up, his dark face a deeper red. "Did y' all git enough of that shootin' and hollerin' ?" His voice was uneven and the words ran together. Andrew didn't know what to think until old man Johnson came over and said , "Your Pa's had a little too much white lightnin', I reckon . And you , boy (he looked at George), you' ll have to do most of the drivin' ." Papa put his hand out to steady himself, but nearly fell. Somehow, they managed to help him onto the driver's seat. Andrew stayed awake all of the way home. What would Mama say? Baptists were strictly against drinking, even wine. Although there was a place in the Bible where Jesus turned water into wine. He wanted to ask her about that . The cold air seemed to help Papa, so that by the time they turned into the lane, he was sitting up straight , holding the reins. When the horse stopped beside the barn , Andrew was relieved to see his father climb down and help George unharness the horse . Richie was awake now. " Do you think Mama will have fried chicken for supper?" "I hope so. Can you help me carry this bag?" They stumbled up the path toward the back porch. The house looked dark and quiet in the twilight. Andrew pushed open the door. " Mama! Mama! Mary, we're home." Dropping the bag of groceries on the floor, he looked around the room. There was no smell of food. The stove looked cold and empty. He heard Richie calling, "Mama,.where are you?" Andrew found a match and lit the kerosene lamp. He carried it to the sitting room ; but the sofa and both chairs looked like they always did, waiting for the preacher to call. " Maybe they went to bed early," he said to Richie, who was whimpering now. His parents' bedroom door was half- closed. When they pushed it open, the bed was empty, its blue chenille spread drawn up tight and smooth. They went to the other bedrooms. " Mama, Mama, where are you ?" Andrew's cry now strident, demanding . They returned to the kichen where Papa and George were sitting at the table. George was scowling, his fists clenched . " Sit down, boys. I reckon I've got somethin ' to tell y'all. I didn't want to have to before. It would have spoiled your day in town. But, the

truth of the matter is, well, your mama's gone away. She's seen fit to take a job in Raleigh ." Was it true? Andrew ran back to her room, opened the closet door. Some of Papa's overalls were hanging on pegs, his black Sunday suit on a hanger. It looked so bare, almost empty now . Mama's dresses, hats and shoes were gone. Mary's dresses weren't there either. He ran to the other bedroom, the little one where Mary slept , and opened the closet door. Maybe they were playing hide-and-go-seek . Then he went back to the kitchen. "Papa, where did you say Mama went?" " She went to Raleigh to work at the state hospital. Dr. Williams come by today." "Why did she go there , Papa? Why did Mary go with her? " Richie was crymg. George stood up , his chair fell back, hitting the floor. "Here!" He threw the bag of peppermints on the table, "You eat 'em. I don't want 'em! " and ran out the back door. Papa pulled himself to his feet. " Well, let's see if I kin fix us a little supper." He began slicing ham at the stove, but turned around when he heard Richie crying harder. " Now, boy, shet up and wash your face!" Later, when Andrew and his brothers were sitting at the table Papa forgot to ask the blessing, but no one reminded him. Andrew took a bite or two, but stopped eating when he discovered that he was no longer hungry. During the night, Richie wet the bed so Andrew dragged a blanket into the kitchen and made a pallet on the floor. Before he went to sleep again , he stood at the window looking out into the yard. In the light from the full moon, he could see the snowman. It looked so small now. The snow was melting. How could he have dreamed something that came true? They all slept later than usual the next morning. No one spoke of Mama's absence, but the air was heavy with the feel of it. Andrew tried to help his father prepare breakfast while George fed the animals. "Uummm, this is good, Papa." Richie praised the food . It was true, Andrew thought, Papa's biscuits were as good as Mama's. If she were here now, she would tell him so. But it was Sunday, and she might be shooing them off to get dressed for church . "Are we going to church, Papa?" Andrew asked . "No. Not today." "Will we have to go to school tomorrow?" George wanted to know. "Not unless you want to. With this spring thaw, I could use your help in gettin' ready for plantin' ." "I can go if! want to, can't I, Papa?" Andrew's voice was anxious. 65

"I don't want to go to school." Richie said. " I reckon you can go if you want to." Papa answered Andrew before he spoke to Richie. "And I think you'd better go with your brother." Richie made a face . Then , jumped up to look out of the window. "Hey, Papa, George, Andrew, look! The snowman we made is almost gone . There's just a big pile of snow where he was with your hat on top." Andrew ran over to look, and when he saw how funny the snowman looked he began laughing, and laughed so hard he couldn't stop until his father slapped his face . Andrew had dreamed of Mama coming back so many times, but now that she was actually here , he couldn't move. Only his brothers ran out to greet them. He and Papa stood in the doorway and waited . But when she hugged him and he felt her body warm and close, he began to cry. Only after George poked him, and said, "Shut up, sissy" had he stopped. All that day he waited for a time to be alone with her. But there was only a brief moment when they were sitting side by side on the sofa and he whispered that he had won second place in the reading contest in Mendell. Later, while he was playing tree tag with his brothers and Mary, he slipped away to find Mama. But when he entered the kitchen , he heard Papa's voice from their bedroom. "People are talkin' about you, Emily. Preacher Hardy give us a sermon on fallen women . And when we was leavin ', I put out my hand for Miz Honeycutt to shake and she jist turned away. And- and, I didn't want to tell you, but-" his voice broke. Andrew had to strain to hear. "The Klan 's been ridin ' again . You recollect how they burned a cross down at old man Earp's place-" "Well, I'll tell you . No one, not even the Klan's going to tell me that I can 't come back here to see you and my sons! " And she had returned. Until one summer night when Andrew woke up when he heard his father talking. There, in the front yard, were three white- robed figures on horseback. And Papa said, "No. No , Henry, that won't be necessary." Why had he come back? Torturing himself with reminders of a past that would never change. He walked toward the Mustang, kicking at the ground . It was good soil, but Papa hadn't been able to farm . Always late in putting in his tobacco, or blaming a drought for spoiling the corn and cotton crops. As he drove down the lane toward the highway, he thought of that day when he had been helping Papa chop cotton. He was so tired, but 66

:,.... v~"'"' was keeping up with his father, and he wanted to show them that he was good for something besides going to school. Finally, Papa said, "Let's take a rest, boys." Andrew threw himself on the ground, breathing hard. While he was lying there, he felt the hand stroking his head. Ruffling his hair where it was wet. And then Papa's voice so low he couldn' t be sure: "You look jist like your Mama, Andrew." He turned around for a final look at the abandoned farmhouse, and thought that he could see her face as it looked the day the snow melted. She'd been sitting in the sunlight, the auburn braids wrapped around her head, setting it on fire.

Kathleen Neuer CENTERING

All jitters, the canoe Waits for the man. Now he gets in, Now the cat, old hand At this. And they Push off, he with a Jut of his chin, canoe Leaning back a bit, Cat bolt upright In the exact Center of cat. Home, I run the scene Through again, my large Slippery carp Of a body Attempting the lotus Position. We know What to expect: The mind's slow Strings loosen, The soon cat Comes to sit.

Ted Lardner LEGENDS

They've said that catfish the size of pianos sleep in suckholes under the dam, and rise after nightfall off of the bottom, hungry for something that must to them look a lot like the tangle and slash of the neon and streetlamp glitter that dances and shines from bank to bank on top of the water in ways a catfish must find attractiveson of like carrion from the world beyond the tingle in a catfish's whiskers. In gloom as deep as a barge can sink, the salvage divers who have seen these fish, or, rather, have not seen them at all , say that at first they mistook the jolt of live weight for deadhead logs moving under their hands: smashed blunt by the current, whole oak trees that trembled and shook like magnetic needles. And since they never imagined catfish as large, and that also could not be seen, they say that they finally were forced to take the horns that sprout from a catfish's jaw for a thicket of battered arms and hands, which blew their minds, though temporarily; the salvage divers are a steady lot.

Richard Morris Dey APPROACHING BEQUIA for james F. Mitchell

Island passed-by, officially undiscovered, of no interest to counting houses, on few maps, spoken only by wanderers, unpainted, never sung; island chastened by neglect, by suffering well-preserved and surfacing now like a lost Atlantis, now ElDorado redefined: are you one of the Enchanted Isles, promising eternal sunrise? Island fair and not, I take you ever as a landfall, a few acres now fit for frangipani, now a cassava isle. Is this enchantment? Though I essay to root in your seaward shores, in your harsh jewelled light to escape and grow, I make no claim on your lush and rugged, your seagirt sovereignty. No. And yet because you've found in me a willing subject, mine is a craft come like the wind that trades over you, to seek out your solitudes and sing of 70

our exchange. Is this not discovery? Joint investment? Or do you prefer the cant of the tourist dollar? Island fair and not, Bequia World , having left behind this cargo, I too will pass you by: become a ghosting jumbie voice that lanterns the amphitheater of your Admiralty Bay.

Gary Kissick

BELLYBUTTON

The morning after her graduation party we lay naked beneath a blue sheet as palm-filtered light leapt from blue walls onto the bed. "I'll fix us a nice breakfast," she said. " Mmm. Guava crepes?" " And other kind , too. But first see if the frogs are gone." "There weren't any last night." " Okay, but make sure please." Lately, the kitchen had been plagued by giant toads, the kind seen frequently in Lanikai streets-black and leathery and flattened to the thickness of an inkblot. Midori called them frogs, and I let her. Those that survived the neighborhood traffic gathered often in my house at night. They hopped in through the cats' entrance, and it was not uncommon when visiting the kitchen for a midnight snack to discover a circle of likeminded bufos huddled around the cats' bowl, gorging themselves on Puss 'n' Boots fish or chicken dinner. I always felt irrationally apologetic at first, as if I had interrupted something private-a catered seance , for example, or a meeting of gangland bosses. The cats, ever sensitive to insult, never failed to display a haughty disdain for their food once the frogs had fouled it. But not once had I seen them lift a paw in its defense. When the frogs were around, they were not. They were adept at maiming harmless geckos and dragging half doves into the livingroom , but their chivalric code forbade an engagement with frogs. They considered it my job. Twice I had tried to shoo the frogs with a broom, but on both occasions they had displayed the wit of eggplants. Once attacked (too strong word for my gentle prodding), they were just as likely to plop behind refrigerator as out the exit, and in this cul-de- sac they were as trapped as windup toys; I'd have to shoulder the heavy Frigidaire aside simply flush them out. That seemed too much work in the dead of night, so I usually let them be. Midori was a good girl who had adapted well foreign customs, but frogs in the kitchen taxed her liberality. The year we had lived together she had retained her dorm room as 72

occasional refuge from what she called "their amphibious assault." In Japan, she had often pointed out, frogs were not allowed in the kitchen. As I'd suspected, there were no frogs that morning. There were, instead, a great many plastic cups, as well as wine and be~r bottles. It had been a wonderful party. I cleaned up some of its refuse, then entered the livingroom to encounter more of the same. Someone had crushed taco chips into the sisal mat near the breakfast bar. Half-consumed drinks sat on the windowsills-abandoned, misplaced, forgotten . I made my way to the couch, where I found one of Professor Fun's balloons still inflated. It had been twisted into the shape of an animal the night before. I could no longer tell which. The Professor had twisted many balloons into the shapes of many animals, but as far as I could tell, they had differed from each other only in the length of their torso or neck or legs; in all other respects they'd remained the same. All the other balloons had been popped or pilfered, but this pink one had somehow survived. I sat down beside it and poked it affectionately. It felt as tender as an overripe papaya. I was twisting it idly into a new shape when Midori emerged from the bedroom in her black happi-coat. Her legs were so simple, so elegant. They carried her closer. "What's that? " " One of Professor Fun's balloons." "That's neat what you did." I was flattered. Midori always had a way of making me feel somehow talented. I had twisted the balloon into an abstract shape resembling a breast, a reclining nude, and the figure 8. It was a happy accident. With a nipple at one end and a stub at the other, it seemed indeed a work of art, a sculptural statement of sorts. Midori was right , it was neat-far superior to any creature Professor Fun had concocted. I began the difficult task of removing the dust and hairs attracted by its static. There were short cat hairs as well as long human . "Did you notice how when he made the animals he always keepedkept?-the bellybutton away from the audience ?" "The bellybutton?" "Yes; ' she said. "This part. The part you blow into." "Oh. Yeah, I guess he did, didn't he. The mark of a true professional.'' And that was how it began-or rather, resumed . It was that silly pink balloon that led us again to bellybuttons. It was fate , pure and simple. Midori reminded me that hers was different from mine. I confidently inserted a forefinger into my navel and extracted a neat disk of red and gray lint. A single hair curled around the perimeter in what seemed a 73

perfect circle. This small feat never failed to amuse her. The first time I'd done it she had actually gasped. "How did you do that? " " Do what? " "That!" " What? " " You pulled that out of your bellybutton!" "Sure. My Uncle Bill stuffed a pillow with his bellybutton lint ." "No! That's impossible." "Not at all. It just requires patience." She had then commenced a close examination of my navel. We were in bed at the time. "Awwhh!" "What?" "It ends! Your bellybutton ends! I can see it!" "Sure. All bellybuttons end." "No they don't. Look at mine." I'd looked . Her stomach had been tanned by days at the beach and radiated warmth like the sand itself. " What's so different about yours?" "It doesn't end." " It doesn 't ?" "No. And it doesn 't get fuzz either." " Are you telling me you never extract fuzz from your bellybutton?" "Never." "That's impossible. Where does it go?" "Fuzz?" "Yes." "Inside, I guess. It goes inside." "No! How can it go inside? You'd leak." "How can it not go inside? How you make it end like that ?" "Easy. When you're born they tie the umbilical cord, then cut it." "Tie it in a knot?" "Yes." "Owwee!" "Didn't they tie yours?" "No. We don't do that in Japan." "But what do they do?" "Nothing. Just put a clothespin on it. Just cut it. Then we keep it. Keepsake ."

"That's incredible." "Some people pick at his bellybutton. Then it gets infected. Then they have to had it sewn up. Then they have no bellybutton. Nothing at all. It's like they never had a mother. We call these people frogs." Midori, whose English was actually quite good, erred grammatically in direct proportion to her level of excitement. "Do it to me," she said, as we sat in the livingroom that morning, she in her black happi coat. Her legs were drawn up beneath her and she held one hand to her ankle. I was not at all cenain what she was suggesting. "Do what?" "Undo my bellybutton." "You can't be serious." "Why not?" " A, it can't be done, and B, it might get infected. You told me so yourself once. And C, you might let all the air out and disappear." "No. We'll be careful." "You're mad." "No, I'm not mad. Why should I be mad?" "I mean crazy." "We'll do it tonight." "Why?" "Because I love you. An act of love. I trust you with my own bellybutton." With that she arose and headed for the bathroom. Later she made crepes. When I think of Midori, tears burn sweetly in my eyes like the blue flame of a brandied dessert. Why did I do it? Whatever was I thinking? Putting the Beamer Brothers on the turntable, I cleaned up the living room while she cooked. I heard a soursop plop to the ground in the garden. Through the hibiscus hedge I saw my neighbors towing their Hobie Cat to the beach. So that was it then. The bottomless well versus the culde- sac. The funnel versus the eggcup. I suppose I had always thought of the bellybutton as a wound that heals, a hole that closes. Not so, apparently, for the Japanese. And was this also true of the Asian mystic for whom the navel is the focus of contemplation? Is his bellybutton a vonex, a whirlpool , a passage within? If so, he himself is an infinite convolution, a son of human Mobius strip. His tunnel leads not, like mine, to a deadend, but to life's all-pervasive mystery. And it is a fountain, too, around which he sits in peaceful meditation. And it collects no fuzz. That evening we swam in Lanikai Bay until the setting sun purpled the sky. We walked home and hosed each other down on the lanai. The

spiny soursop lay beneath its tree like a green hedgehog, its stem a severed umbilicus. I carried it to the kitchen, washed its wound, and added its juice to our pifia coladas. Midori fed the cats. For dinner we ate take-out Chinese from a restaurant in Kailua. My fonune cookie read- "The time is ripe for a wise investment," while Midori's read-" A long voyage awaits you." At this she. burst into tears, for in fact a long voyage did await her. Having graduated from the university, she would soon be returning to Kobe. I put my arm around her thin shoulders and tried to calm her. I saw Mariah, my black cat, slide into the garden like a shadow. Midori wanted to be an American . And wanted my love. And wanted my proposal. When I suggested that I might seek employment in Japan, she replied , "Your bellybutton's boiling tea." I'd heard this before. She meant I was spouting nonsense. I noticed that the balloon, curled like a cat on the windowsill, had grown hopelessly flaccid . And she was right to have called its nub a bellybutton. I've discovered since that belly descends from the Indo-European bhel: to inflate. We're all balloons. It was not that evening but days later when I complied halfheartedly with her request, holding her flesh taut as she twisted on the mat beneath me, unwinding herself. Being against nature, it wasn't easy. Nor did I see the point of it. It took several attempts before we made any progress. Sud路 denly I caught an awful whiff of something both sacred and profane. When an acrid drop of brown fluid bloomed before my very eyes, I released my grip in horror. "Ouch," was all she said. Then , "Now you know the inside me." I daubed at her navel with an alcohol-soaked wad of cotton set aside for just such a contingency. I would not have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. She was crying as we drank Mai Tais in the cocktail lounge, and as we walked through the metal detector to the depanure gate, and as we sat in a crowded no-man's land casting heavy glances at the red and white tail of the JAL 747. Large planes bring out the dumbness in me . I remember thinking rather stupidly, just staring into the tail, that it was bigger than both of us. She looked like any Japanese schoolgirl in her straw hat, pink dress, and white shoes. We sat strangely silent, reflected in the glass of the viewing window, her small hand in mine. Like an intravenous bottle, I had been attached to her all day, nursing her through her depanure, but now the vital fluids flowed as much from her to me, and the vulgar image collapsed. Midori would board the plane. The plane would depan. I reviewed

these certainties like simple arithmetic, amazed by their weighty simplicity. Only then did I seriously ask myself why I had allowed events to proceed this far. " Baka-chan" she had playfully called me on several occasions when I had done something foolish, as when, at my insistence , we had driven all the way to Aloha Stadium one evening to see a football game that was being played in Las Vegas. "Baka-chan," I said aloud. She merely raised her eyebrows and smiled her delicate smile. Like a paper balloon, her last kiss floated on the darkness of my closed eyes. I crossed the Pali alone that night. When I saw the toads complacently gathered around the cat dish as if nothing whatsoever had happened, I cried to discover how easily my world had been deflated. I paced recklessly about the house , cursing my stupidity, disturbing sleeping cats. I had thought that I would simply find another woman-!' d been good at that -but now I had my doubts. I found the broom in the hall closet, where Midori had left it. I sounded my charge with a hoarse wounded cry and dispatched them without mercy, cutting the dimwitted off at the refrigerator. I was wearing shoes this time and didn't hesitate to kick them. I flung open the kitchen door and chased them into the garden, where they hopped about aimlessly in the dark like human emotions. Then I returned to the house, poured myself a stiff Cuba Libre, and sat down to write a passionate letter while Midori was still airborne. When I returned from work the next evening, I reread it and set it aside . I wrote a calmer letter after dinner and mailed it during my lunch hour the next day. I was surprised to pay $1.62 for postage. Emotions are dearer when conveyed over long distances. Midori's letter arrived a week later, by which time I was more or less myself again. Its gossamer green paper gave it an ephemeral quality, as if the words of love contained therein might float away on the slightest breeze. The floating world. ''I'm sending you a present ," she said at the end . "I want you to have it. Remember me by. I love you." The next week a parcel arrived, reminding me that I had yet to answer her letter. It was a small package, not much larger than a thick paperback, covered with blue stamps of Buddha. A present all the way from Japan . The gift itself was wrapped in pink ricepaper. I tore it off to discover a box made of a pale Japanese wood I had never seen before. For a moment, I thought I detected a scent. Three Japanese characters had been imprinted on the lid. I expected a charm or trinket, but lifting the lid I found something formless lying on a bed of white cotton. This could not be from Midori, I thought. What I lifted from the box resembled nothing quite as

much as the petrified gecko one occasionally discovers flattened in a door jamb. It was a stiff, twisted gray cord the length of one's pinky. An ancient piece of frayed hemp constricted one end. Was this some son of insult? When I removed the cotton pad, the box was empty. I held the box to my nose . It did carty a slight fragrance, somewhat akin to sandalwood. I 路 examined it thoroughly, wondering if the box itself was the present. I sat puzzled, toadlike, the recipient of a mysterious gift from Japan. It must have taken a full dumb minute to realize what she had given me.

Joseph P. Balaz WHEN I TURN OUT HAWADAN ELECTRIC

Fingenips move across my thighs in a warm advance and touch finds what never sees the sun when I turn out Hawaiian Electric.

While my 75 watt bulbs cool the darkness is set ablaze as inner flames lick furiously at the fervent duality of desire.

Turning on an unseen glow I breathe bright like red hot coals responding to a crazed fan .

The fuel of illumination nses and as I prepare to grasp its release

the heat of a billion hibachis explodes into my brain like a supernova.

When I turn out Hawaiian Electric I don't conserve energy.

David Sheskin

Louis Phillips TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE METROPOLITAN TRANSPORTATION UNION

All journeys tend toward allegory, Esp. in lands Where bolt-eyed dragons tolter, Where roads are wide & blue & Always someone is getting To where he/she is going. Even journeys to the underworld Where death-gongs Bobulate & ravens pulse Inquisitions-even there Row boats run on time, Passengers soned out & ferried, If not in abject comfon, At least with accuracy; No need for exact change there, No fumbling for currency. That black boat is free & always, always on time.

THE TRANS-WORLD COURIER EXPRESS IS ON THE MOVE

World right as rain, Flowers angle , Roots wiggle in themselves Through Planet soil. Oh God, how satellites of mouths whirr, Moles with fury, snakes With love's trappings, comb Oflight sudden on some down . The world, right as rain, is damp, But rails of ore are laid, Lights flash go, Whatever the living know Is tightly crated. These old bones whistle. The Trans-world Courier Express is on the move .

PeterDesy MOTHER, MOVING

She's eighty this month and nothing satisfies her still. The mail's late, the window's stuck, or President Reagan's still not dead . She's just moved in to her new apartment and today she's hitting all the sour notes on her frayed violinsomeone broke her antique gravy boat and the silverware won't reveal itself. Boxes littering the apartment are stuffed with things needing decisions, where to go. She's getting frantic, so I go out into the hall and scream into my sleeve. I know she's old, and tired, but do I have to relive my entire childhood among this wreckage? Then I imagine hugging her, and she comes apan in my arms and all pieces of her drop at my feet . The guilt is overwhelming, so I say "Mother, everything's all right ." "No," she says , surveying the boxes , "you wouldn't understand, your father never did ." "God," I say, "I'm tired too."

Arthur Kimball

LATE IN THE SEASON

Having laid up its lavender my wisteria accommodates the fall, hunkers its strength into core tucked tight in and under its bamboo suppons and here, like an umpire with a close call, stiffens the spine. This October both bald spot and prostate opt for expansion, spons-page blur with presbyopic constraint demands more left-hand power, an elbow insists I remember a ball thrown in youth, and my own, or parental flaw, designates a slump at jaw. Winter rules, these, with more than pennant on the line. I peer again at the vine.

Jill Widner THE LURE

The form she has taken is uncertain, but she is there in the background, a winged fish hovering above a black roof steaming with sudden slanting October rain that falls drily like snow through sunlight. Surveilling the landscape that was once hers, she unexpectedly sees the eyes that were hers looking into the eyes of some buckskin colored half-breed. It's a desolate face, not very pretty, and she can' t tell if it's deep or shallow because of the odd combination of her features partly hidden behind tangled surf-bleached hair out of which serpentine river-stone eyes blink severely, all fingers and white teeth and light. She shudders, remembers when it was a typhoon pushing turquoise waves against a shallow reef that captured his attention. Black-haired and snow-quiet , she suspends herself underwater, risking the surge between the rocks, certain she's purer of thought than any serpentine-eyed half-breed could ever be . When winter arrives and he's still with her, the black-haired one stands in the doorway of a barroom, dark and red and vulgar with smoke. The flurry of colored eyes vying for his attention looks up from their domino game, but just when they think they have him to themselves, he stands to depart, upsetting the table.

The game is discarded, the dominoes fall, and he walks drawn and repelled into the night after someone. The yellow-skinned high-boned half-breed alone at home in her room is very quiet without those hooves she thought would carry her over the face of the earth for the rest of time. She kneels on the rough white weave of her bedspread breaking and peeling a green stem and then another and another until one means he will return. The city streets are cold and still and black and white. He stops to strike a match beneath a streetlight. Cinders fall from the air like convoluted stars and the wet sole of his boot freezes to the curb. As he turns his head, exhaling smoke into the night , he sees crouched behind a grey stone wall, the fine-lined fingers of a black-haired woman wrapped around the butt of a silver blade. And before she realizes she's even taken aim, his blood runs onto the snow.

Jill Widner THE GUEST

She heard the folding sound again. It was him turning the pages of a newspaper in the kitchen. She had already decided she would get up when the angle of sunlight widening across the floor reached the bed. She buttoned his long-tailed shin around herself and walked to the bathroom to take a shower. The room was dustless, newly painted; it was too white. Besides that the window was open, and the sunlight coming through the screen, like the paint, was so uncomfonably bright she had to squint. She wanted to draw cunains but there weren't any. She hung his shin on the back of the door and started to dose it, then she decided she wanted to look at his bed from a distance . She had deliberately left the white sheets strewn and wrinkled at the foot; she didn't make men's beds anymore . .As the too-hot water beat into her shoulders and neck she thought of a bed she had left unmade one morning ten summers before. She had just staned to pull up the covers when a voice in the doorway said, "I didn't ask you to spend the night because I wanted a wife; leave the bed alone." She washed her hair twice with this man's shampoo and let the water run for a long time down her back until the mirror steamed over even with the window open, and she almost forgot whose shower she was standing in. When she was finished she reached for a towel. They were thick and tightly folded into the shelf beside the window. And then because they smelled so dean she decided to use two. The only smell she liked better than the smell of sunlight on dean hair and skin was the smell of sunlight on windblown laundry. The towel was sweet and rough and light brown and made her think of the backs of his hands. She wanted to see his hands again. She reached for his shin on the doorknob. It was long-sleeved and pale green and as she slipped the white buttons through the paler-edged button holes she smelled cigarette smoke on the collar and thought of the barroom where they had been the night before. She remembered holding a cork in her hands and dropping it. She remembered sliding her hand across the floor between the chairs until she found it and then dropping it again and saying to him, "Don't look at me ." 88

"Why not?" "You're too aware of me . Don' t look at me now. I'm clumsy now." " If you knew I was watching you you're too aware of me." The ice in her glass clinked; it was empty. He gave her his and they shared the glass of scotch the rest of the night until they were standing on a verandah in a cold wind saying goodbye to a party of faces , but what she remembered were silver bracelets sliding and clanking on wrists and blacksmeared eyes and yellow teeth disappearing into the dark of the parking lot. She remembered sitting in her car smelling the familiar vinyl and recognizing the flat rock that had lain on the dashboard for years, but his hands were holding the steering wheel and her feet had nothing to do with the clutch. As he drove through the city, a wet black shine from an earlier rain illuminated the vacant streets. They reflected red and sometimes green and the tires rolled and sometimes stopped and sometimes splashed through a dip in the pavement. She leaned her head out of the window into the night thinking it strange to be driven; it had been a long time since she had been driven. She hated the smell of cigarette staleness so she pulled the sleeves of his shin over her wrists and let it fall to the floor. She used one of the towels to dry the tile then wrapped the other one around herself and walked back into the bedroom. Her blouse was inside-out in the spine of the chair beside his bed, and after holding it to her face and smelling the nicotine on it too, she decided to take a shirt from his open closet. There were many and they were all neatly ironed. She took a grey one off of its hanger, pushed the sleeves to her elbows, and combed her wet hair back from her face with his comb. From the doorway she saw him leaning over the newspaper spread open on the kitchen table. She smelled burnt toast and cognac through the coffee steam. Standing behind him she saw that his coffee was black. Not many people she knew drank their coffee black. Her father had , but not with cognac, at least not in the morning. In the time it took him to turn around , maybe it was the shape of his shoulders, she didn' t know what it was, but she remembered being twelve, sitting with her father one night in the bar of a hotel on the southwest coast of Java. She was wearing an orange and gold printed Thai silk dress that was cut low in the back and slit to the thigh. She remembered the year and the dress because it was the first time she had ever been interested in trying to look the way a woman was able to look. A four- piece. band was playing on the edge of a varnished dance floor. Candlelight flickered through designs cut in hanging brass lamps. The waiters' faces looked

polished beneath blackfelt topis and their white uniforms were starched with southeast Asian perfection. She remembered the smell of melting 路 wax and the brush and slash of metal across the surface of the drum keeping time while her father drank cognac with his coffee. She felt light-headed thinking this was sophistication at last and she wanted to dance , but her father silently proceeded to put a damper on the night . He stared at the ceiling smoking cigarette after cigarette. She knew what he was thinking about. He always did that when he thought about his other daughter, his dark- haired dark-eyed older daughter who was barely nineteen and pregnant. She was going to excuse herself when he touched the cognac in his glass with his fingertip and began to rub the rim to show her how to make the crystal ring. People turned in their direction and when she realized she mattered more to him than they did, she forgave him his distractedness. She thought he looked very tired when he turned around. His hair was dark and tangled and hung low over his brow. His jeans looked slept in, he still wore his socks, and his chest was bare. His skin there almost looked green it was so white. She tried to remember how his shin had ended up in his bed without him, but she could recall nothing-almost nothing. " Why didn't you want to sleep with me last night?" she asked. His eyes widened and appeared to sink back, "I always sleep on the couch when I have a guest." " A guest ," she repeated. He rubbed his hand over his face and then over his thigh. "We drank a lot last night. I didn't want you to drive home that way. Do you need to go, or would you like some coffee?" His eyes did not leave hers and he did not mention his shirt. "Sit down," he said. " Are you hungry? I have bread, I can make toast, or would you rather have a left- over piece of blueberry pie; do you like pie in the morning?" "Just coffee, I can help myself." He ignored her and walked to the stove where the coffee was standing in a tall chrome thermos. " But without cognac," she said sarcastically as he poured. He looked up and when she saw his face she regretted her tone . But he wasn't even looking at her. It was an odd expression. It wasn't apologetic, or self-conscious. He seemed to be trying to remember something. " I don't have milk in the house," he said. "That's all right, I don't use milk." ''I'm helping a friend look for an apartment ," he explained , pointing

toward the classifieds lying across the table. "Do you mind if we don't talk?" When he handed her the cup of coffee, she saw that his fingers were not long and brown and spatulate and it occurred to her that in the shower it hadn 't even been his hands she'd been remembering.

Kauraka Kauraka FLYING FISH

Your blue-silver body glittering in fast arcs across the night sea your watery bold eyes wide staring at me before I had time to look What dares you to parade in the rays of my flaming torch? Waves and sharks cannot keep me away my net is on a steady pole tonight Flying fish your life is in my net Choose you this night your destiny? If to entertain then dance with me and your supper shall be in the flames of my coconut fronds but if to tease me with flying dreams upon long white clouds and your confusing tales of women with pigs my net is ready to deliver you from flying to frying tonight!

Lyn Lifshin

TI:IE FLAME SWALLOWER'S WOMAN

lights candles around the bed so one more wild flame won't make her nervous. She coats her lips in vaseline, soaks in baby oil and cold cream. In high school she nearly flunked chemistry, afraid to light a match and for one year woke up howling, dreaming the house was on fire . Some thing in her is the moth (tho she's been warned and almost married the janitor) drawn to what scorches, his touch, fire sirens sucking on her pulling her barefoot toward what is about to explode .

Jonathan Hall

THE PENITENT MAGDALENE

When the painter is done with his penitent Magdalene , he sits there staring at it, looking holy and sad, while she, the model, allowed to shiver from the cold of the room now that she's finished, puts her shirt back on, lights a cigarette, crosses her legs, looks out the window. "Don't you want to see it?" Elliot asks, watching it himself, not looking at her. Lydia sits for a moment, holding the smoke in, tasting it. She shakes the hair out of her face, looks at him, sees him waiting with an odd contented smile on his face, as if he weren't expecting anything, not even an answer from her. "No," she says, and turns back to the window, smoke in her lungs. "Yes you do," he tells her, immediately. She exhales and watches the smoke fog around her. Her eyes are grateful for the relief of looking down finally and for the darkness that greets her on the other side of the pane. He had her looking up the whole time, toward heaven , he said, and it hurt . All she 'd seen had been the splintered ceiling and the bare light bulb which made spots fill her eyes. He kept mumbling about Tiziano. He wanted her to feel saintly and repentant but not to hide her breasts. She felt sorry for him. "You know you do," the painter tells her, trying again, nearly whispering, but in the moment afterward Lydia has no memory of his voice, as if he hadn't spoken at all, merely mouthed the words. ''I'm hungry," she says, because he is looking at her. She does not want to eat. ''I'm not sorry." "I know," he tells her, nodding, but he makes no move toward the kitchen. She looks at him, sitting straight in his straight-backed chair, a big man with a short haircut, wearing a sweatshirt with the obliterated name of a college across the chest, and a pair of old, stained jeans. She looks at his brush, dipped in green, still locked in his hand. He has a strangely unfixed expression in his eyes; he could be looking at the picture, the studio, her, or all three at once.

"Come and look," he says. "You'lllike it." " I don't want to," she says, perfectly still, not even shaking her head for emphasis. "It won't be me." "That's why you ought to see it," he tells her solemnly. Then she understands: it has come to that part of the evening. He wants to draw her into the bedroom, or, failing that, to make her come to him and coo over the painting. She doesn't want to do either, and she couldn't say why not. He's not unattractive, and that was why she came here in the first place, in order to be seduced. She'd never believe for a moment that he was a painter-no one could be who acted the part so outrageously, hustling the bars for models and mistresses, in search of teenagers who think it romantic to be made into a painting over a glass of beer: "My Madonna!" he would cry. "My penitent Magdalene! " She could picture the parade of starry-eyed lambs coming back with him , just as she had , though they would not be able to picture her. And in some corner of her mind she could still remember what it was to be able to think something "romantic"; it was not all that long ago, in years. She mused, over her drink, about absent girls for an hour or so, listening to him chatter about Leonardo and the Medici , then, swallowing the last of her scotch, she agreed to go with him. But when they got there, he turned on the light in the studio, began mixing his paints and said: "Well, let's get right to it, shall we? I'm raring to go. I hope you're not tired." "No;' she said, lying, and took off her blouse and brassiere slowly, as though she were shy. She still didn't fully believe that this was what he wanted of her as she watched his preparations wearily from across the room, propping her eyes open with her fingers. She was hoping that he would keep her awake with more of his little anecdotes about famous dead artists he felt he knew, the way he had in the bar, but all he had to say to her, as he began sketching and filling in the background on his sheltered side of the canvas, was that she must look up , "as if to Heaven." Lydia gamely held her hands at her sides, tensed in fists to keep from shivering. She tried to make the bulb a sun and to picture Heaven beyond it past wisps of white clouds. She forced herself to pretend that he was right, she was Mary Magdalene, and that the balmy breezes of a mythical Palestine blew against her thrice-struck, repentant breasts. But it was no good: the clouds were no more convincing than smoke from an imaginary cigarette, and the desert kept dissolving into faces. Instead of Heaven she was seeing Richard, who would be waiting sleeplessly at "home" for her now (his apartment-she'd gone so far as to give up her own), turning over and over on his tongue the bile of every argument that had led to this one, the one that is still going on, the one which ostensibly ended with her

slamming the door behind her with her arms half into her coat, and vowing to go out and "fuck a stranger- maybe ten strangers!" Richard didn't yell anything after her, though she'd waited in the hall to hear his rejoinder, head cocked to one side after she shook her hair out of her fur collar, buttoning her coat. She nearly expected him to charge out into the hall after her, half-dressed and shivering in his socks on the cold floor, bleating apologies and begging her to come back inside. She intended to ignore him if that happened, but she seemed to have taken the words right out of him, so she took the time to light a cigarette before she strode to the end of the hall, the sound of her heels loud enough for him to hear, and went down the stairs. He would be there now, alone, looking through and touching her clothes in the closet to assure himself that she must come back, no matter what she said. Once she'd walked in on him, in the middle of winter, and found him on the bed with his eyes closed, holding her purple sundress against his cheek, fondling the fabric . "I was looking for something," he said, "in your closet," but he couldn't seem to tell her what it was he'd wanted. "This reminded me of summer." She'd taken the dress back from him, put it on a hanger, returned it to its place, wondering if he was in the habit of playing with her clothes when she wasn't around, thinking about the times she'd found a skirt more rumpled than she remembered it from the laundromat. He's right in a way, she has to admit: I do need my clothes. But even with them on she feels naked as she crushes her cigarette butt beneath her shoe and turns to face Elliot. He waits behind his canvas, still wanting her to look at his picture, to learn what kind of woman he wants to sleep with. He makes it hard to leave her chair. I'm tired, Lydia decides, I was wrong when I said hungry before. But then she chides herself for reducing her reluctance to that, and recognizes it for what it is: that eerie, half- annoying feeling you get when you realize some guy likes you, the kind who promises to call you and probably will. If you don't like him it's a drag, but if he appeals to you then it's even worse. They're all so pathetically lonely and they want you to want to be with them. The trouble is that sometimes you do . "Can't I look at it in the morning when the light's better and the paint's dry?" Lydia asks hopefully. She sees Elliot's ftxed brush beckoning to her like a ftnger from across the room . "We can make love now, if you like," she offers , trying to stand up, succeeding on the second attempt, then advancing cautiously across the floor toward him. She keeps her gaze ftxed on a point just above his right shoulder so that she won't have to meet his eerie eyes. Just as she steps past the canvas, he stands up to kiss her, his lips so scratchy and parched against hers that even licking them

does no good. His wet brush, still in his hand , rubs against her blond hair as he embraces her, leaving a streak of green . Elliot lets go as abruptly as he had taken hold, and stands close beside her in front of his painting, not touching her, just watching her watch . She can hear his breathing. The penitent Magdalene holds its left breast, absently. Its long neck , curved like a swan's, occupies the center of the painting. It looks down, out the window, into darkness, just as she did, yes, but that was after. Why did he have her looking up, then? Had he seen her at all or might she just as well have been a bowl of fruit? She stands and studies its eyes and the way the hair falls thickly on its shoulders. "Tell me what you think;' Elliot suggests, intruding. He waves his brush loosely in the air in lieu of a shrug of his shoulders. It is not quite the right position; she tries to put herself into it. That beautiful neck is bent at just the wrong angle, a barely possible angle, as if stretching the venebrae and daring them to snap-yet there is no visible strain in the neck, as if it were a perfectly natural way to bend. She can't take her eyes off of it: a woman, a tall woman like her, with long blond hair, like hers, and a face that has the same features as hers but is utterly unlike it, turning open eyes down into the darkness, as if the floor had fallen away beneath her like a trap door. " I wanted it to be me," she says softly as her eyes finally break and she is able to look away, beyond the canvas, back toward the chair where she sat before. "My penitent Magdalene?" Elliot says. "That's not a penitent Magdalene ," she maintains, pulling her eyes away from the painting, but looking only furtively at him. "No? Then what is it? " he inquires, and looks at her off-focus, waiting. "Well," Lydia begins, licking her lips tightly as if her tongue were hoping to gather inspiration from her skin , "it's a woman ... who .. . it's a woman . .. ." Her hands are frozen in front of her in an unfinished gesture, stalled after spinning fruitlessly in the air. She studies their position, trying to read what it was they meant to emphasize. She drops into Elliot 's hard chair behind the easel , then finds herself looking up at his face . "Yes?" He is still waiting, watching her face with unthreatened curiosity, not helpful. "Just that," she snaps. "A woman. No need to pretend you're religious." She raises her head at him briefly, flushed with virtue, as though he were now utterly exposed. "Religious?" Elliot smiles back his unwavering ironic smile. He

shakes his head at her, runs his forefinger up the bridge of his nose as if adjusting a pair of glasses, and leaves it there for a moment, his blunt brown eyes flashing and blinking at her on either side of it. After a moment he drops his arm to his side, turns away, and wanders abstractedly into the bedroom without glancing around again. Lydia sits on the harsh wooden chair, her head and shoulders twisted around to watch Elliot's retreat. He leaves the bedroom door open behind him and doesn't turn on a light. The sounds of drawers opening and of shoes dropping to the wooden floor reach Lydia from within the darkness where Elliot moves like a blind man through his accustomed world. She wonders whether he can see her from where he is and whether she is expected to follow. She can hear the bedsprings strain under his weight as he lies down, and she can make out the shape of the bed through the doorway, but she can't see Elliot. No sound of breathing, waking or sleeping, escapes from within . Her own lungs fill harder and louder, as if she'd been holding her breath for hours and were now trying to make up for it. Lydia has to shift around in the chair, for she is not yet ready to leave it; her legs feel as though they had atrophied into thin stems of brittle bone. She pivots on the seat, throwing her knees off one side of the chair; the painting is a quick flash of confused color as she swirls by, and it dawns on her that she could even leave if she wanted to, grab her purse (it must be here somewhere), run down the stairs , and then-where? Back to Richard, whose hun eyes would rebuke her for the betrayal she'd promised him? But then he would want to fuck and make up, that's his way. If she were to refuse, he would say with awkward, unpracticed malice: "Got enough of that already tonight, huh?" She can picture the way he would look up at her from his pillow, trying to scratch her with his voice even while pleading with her to stay. But sometimes, when he's not mad, it's even worse. Once, back in the summer, he'd even called her a "sweet little Jamb chop," for Christ's sake, because that was what he was cooking for her at the time, standing barefoot in the kitchen in his underwear, holding a beer bottle against his forehead because the oven had made the place unbearable . The name might not have been so bad in itself, but then he just stood there staring at her like he was a lamb himself, one who had just found out that it was going to be slaughtered , and she was supposed to do something about it. She hadn't said anything at the time, just turned away and gone off to watch television resolutely, but the phrase had stuck with her, and today she'd tried to explain it to him- which was when the whole thing blew up in her face . They'd been lying in bed , half- dressed , and he was stroking her skin

while listening to the radio-she'd thought it was a safe time. "Sometimes, Richard," she said to him, leaning on one arm, "you look at me as though I know the meaning of life and I'm just not telling you about it out spite." He pulled his arm out from underneath her, sat halfway up in bed, looked at her. " Don't give me those eyes," she told him . "That 's what we're talking about." And it had just degenerated from there, down to the point where he was reminding her (and the neighbors) that she wasn't paying anything toward the rent and the least she could do was to show a little sympathy. That was when she dressed and left. Sitting in Elliot's chair, Lydia looks at her hands. Well, Richard will have to be dealt with-but not tonight, sometimes you just can't when you know what it'll be like. Really, she decided, she simply wants to sleep somewhere, preferably alone, preferably in a place where she would not have to wake up until she wanted to, where she would have a chance to get out the taste of this night. But after a while, she stands up, sighing, sniffs the air, and walks slowly into the dark bedroom. As Lydia opens her eyes, she finds herself in bed, a strange single bed with yellowed sheets and fuzzy green blankets, in a room where nothing hangs on the walls. Elliot has opened the blinds and the sun has taken possession of the room, rudely. Kneeling on the edge of the bed beside her, his weight wrinkling the sheets, he frowns down at her as she lies on her back. She turns her head away. "Don't move now, damn it , I've almost got it!" he calls to her. "Just another minute and I'll be done ." Lydia sees then that he has a paintbrush in his hand , that it had been there all along, concealed behind his far knee and the folds of his blue robe. She looks around for his easel, for a sketchbook, for a piece of paper, anything, but all she can see are his paints. She shudders a little: has he been sitting here all night, she wonders, watching my face and the way I touch my body, watching the way I breathe? He brings his brush forward now, dipped in gold-he is hard at work on her forehead , his tongue between his teeth; she can feel the thin tip of the brush prickling her skin. "What are you doing?" she demands, wildly. She sits halfway up, clutching the sheets against her chest. She is sure that the beating of her heart must be visible. " I'm giving you some gold stars," Elliot says , wearily, taking hold of her shoulders, his brush still in one hand, and lowering her slowly but firmly back onto the bed. Lydia, feeling suddenly nauseous and lightheaded, lets him do it, and her head plunks back onto the pillow. He draws back his brush to dip it in the paint again. She is looking at the knot

which holds his robe closed so tightly that she can't see a single hair of his chest. "For good behavior," he adds with a slight smile, leaning forward toward her again. "In what? In bed?" But she is not cenain that she even touched him. She tries to remember: did anything happen? But all she can think of is the dream she had, which comes back to her in a flash: Elliot painting the walls of the studio green, with a magic paintbrush, until they dissolved, and the floor with them, leaving only Christmas ornament angels singing in the painted sky. "If you like ; â&#x20AC;˘ he says absently, inspecting his work. "Yes, that should do quite nicely." He packs up his equipment and carries it out of the bedroom, back toward the studio. Suddenly suspicious, Lydia throws back the covers to have a look at herself-and finds that the upper half of her body has been painted over in what appears from her perspective to be only an undifferentiated mass of lines and color without plan or logic or even a definable shape. "Elliot!" she calls, and her voice is both softer and steadier than she expected it to be. He appears for a moment in the doorway, waves, then continues to the bathroom to wash his hands. Lydia listens to the water and looks down at her stained skin , assessing the damage. But she needs to be fanher away to see it, needs to be a ghost of herself hovering above the bed. There is a rattling of pipes as Elliot turns the water off suddenly, and then he is standing by the foot of the bed, looking down at her. Lydia has not covered herself with the blankets; she wants him to see what he has done. "What does this mean?" she calls to him across the length of the bed and her body. "What on eanh do you want from me?" He smiles down at her, his bemused and kindly expression disturbed only by a small wrinkle of flushed pleasure in his face. "My penitent Magdalene," he says, walking around the bed and pulling the covers over her, having looked his fill. "No!" she cries, her voice loud and sudden. Her body freezes under the touch of his fingers as he tucks a blanket beneath her. "No," he purrs softly, as he straightens and walks across the room slowly, turning out the light before he closes the door behind him. She spends most of Saturday alone in Elliot's bed, sleeping as much as she can and wishing that the paint would fade . Elliot comes in to check on her every once in a while, but never offers to bring her anything. It begins when she wakes up to find that he's pulled the covers off of her and is sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, gazing at his handiwork. She grabs the bedclothes and yanks them back over her, but the effon exhausts her 100

she throws her head back on the pillow, struggling to regain her breath, while Elliot, his hand on the blanket , tells her how beautiful she is. "Your skin is perfect: tender, yet firm enough to hold the paint, and its pigment is very subtle-it was quite a challenge to choose colors that would complement without marring." Occasionally it occurs to her that she hasn't eaten since yesterday, but her hunger never seems urgent enough to justify asking for something-every time she tries to speak her throat seems to constrict and she falls back into silence. " It's the paint," Elliot tells her once , smiling. "You just rest now, that's the best thing for you." She gets up only once before nightfall, to go to the bathroom, wrapping herself in a scratchy flowers-on-white terrycloth robe which she finds in the closet, left behind, she supposes, by Elliot's last mistress. When she steps into the hallway, she hears Elliot moving in the studio, and tiptoes to the bathroom so that he won't know that she's up . She's exhausted by the time she gets there-the paint won' t expand when her lungs fill with airand she ends up leaning over the sink as though about to throw up into it, gulping air. When she looks up finally, into the dirty mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet, she hardly sees her eyes at all or the movement in those eyes; she notes the four stars and the stray streaks of color on her cheeks, nose, and chin that inexplicably refuse to make her look like a clown, and the way he has traced in red the thin single line of her jugular vein. A dizzying swirl of colors covers her torso, her breasts highlighted in blue, her navel in orange-apparently he hasn't gone below that. Instead of proceeding to the toilet , Lydia finds herself turning around to examine her backside in the mirror as casually as she would move on to the next offering in a gallery: everything is black and shades of gray, tangled snakelike lines that seem to converge in a spot she cannot quite see, though she stands there a long time, straining to make the mirror show. Lydia turns away and steps into the shower, closing the curtain behind her. She stands there in the sudden half-darkness for a moment, watching her bright-colored breasts heaving up and down violently as she struggles to recapture her breath, then she turns on the water, scalding hot. She forces herself to stand under the stream, telling herself a story about the heat melting the paint, and she picks up a bar of soap and scrubs an arm savagely. She pictures pieces of her skin circling in the water at her feet before going down the drain, but when she looks she sees only soapsuds and hair. She watches her feet for a long time, proving to herself that she can still wiggle her toes, and as she does she can feel her head filling up with something.

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The next thing Lydia knows she is back in bed. It is dark outside and Elliot is scolding her. "You really can not exert yourself for the first couple of days, you know," he says, shaking a finger at her. "Your skin will have to learn to breathe differently." He lays a hand on the sheet that covers her legs. " Right now the thing to do is to rest and regain your strength. And please don't try to get out of bed by yourself-you'll only faint again. You could have drowned in the bathtub if I hadn' t been here. As it is you've got a nasty bruise on your forehead ." She wonders if he is angry because she has messed up one of his gold stars. Lydia stays awake all night, half-sitting up in bed with a pillow propped against the wall, keeping a close watch for Elliot. She wonders how much resistance she'll be able to put up, in her weakened condition, if he decided to try something, and whether he'd somehow drugged her last night-that would explain why she felt like she was in the hospital when she first woke up. But Elliot never appears, and in the morning Lydia ventures out in the robe to look for him and for her clothes, which seem to have disappeared. She persists in poking around the bedroom, shaking out sheets and blankets, and around the studio, searching for a recognizable fragment in a painter's rag, for nearly half an hour, but finally she has to admit that they are gone. She finds it easier to breathe this morning, and since Elliot is nowhere in sight, she ransacks his closet, trying to find something wearable. She comes across a shirt that would do, but all of his pants seem to be twice her size. She pulls the belt as tight as she can, but they still sag low on her hips, which seem almost to have disappeared, leaving her body thin as string and fading away minute by minute. She begins to wonder if it is not silly of her to expect clothes to stay on her body. She grabs a worn-out pea-green jacket which she doubts he wears anymore, and closes the closet door. On the floor of the studio, beside the unmoved empty chair where she had posed, Lydia finds her purse. Is it possible I haven't needed any路 thing since then? she wonders. She snatches it up and heads for the door, then stops before the easel. The straining of the Magdalene's neck appears even more pronounced now, as if it were trying to wrench the head around sufficiently to turn its own eyes back upon itself, its body and its predicament. How could he make it bend that way? she asks herself again. Why would he want to do that? At this moment she starts to hear footsteps ing up the stairs. In a panic she ducks behind the easel, bends down slightly and presses her body against the wall to wait for air. Elliot unlocks the door and shoves it open, then slams it shut and pockets his key. He goes directly to the bedroom. Not finding her there, begins wandering through the apartment calling "Lydia, Lydia," his 102

familiar yet anxious as though he were looking for a cat he feared had escaped. She doesn't answer, just waits for him, straightening herself behind his painting. Only her eyes and the stars on her forehead stick out above the canvas. "There you are," Elliot says loudly as he comes into the room, letting out his breath. "What are you doing back there?" "Where are my clothes, Elliot?" Lydia demands. She moves from behind the easel, comes out to stand between him and the work of his brush. She waits for him to look at her. "Oh yes, I threw them away, I suppose I should have mentioned it," he says with a shrug, his gaze dropping from hers and seeking a restingplace elsewhere in the studio. "They just weren't right, that's aiL" "What's the matter-would they smear the paint? " she asks him, pleased that her voice is getting sharper. ''I'll get you some more when I get a chance," Elliot promises. "What's your size?" "Don't bother," she tells him. ''I'll just take these in exchange." She looks down at the oversized pants she is wearing, and she sees him inspecting them , too , with a hurt expression on his face that makes her feel as though she were absconding with his favorite pair of jeans. WeU, she decides, if so I'm not sorry about it . "I take it you're going, then," Elliot says after looking at her for a moment. "But what if you faint on the street when I'm not around to help you back to bed? " He brings his arms together in front of him, as though he meant to embrace her but had a mistaken idea of how far away she was. "Well, I'll have to take that chance," Lydia says. She grabs the doorknob and waits. Elliot makes no move to stop her, just stands very still in the middle of the floor, scratching behind an ear. Lydia can ' t quite trace the path of his eyes, but she suspects he might be looking at the painting on the easel beside her. She glances back at it herself, as she leans against the door: its torso seems even more starkly naked than before, as if a modest veil had been stripped away, and the swollen nipples of the exposed breasts bulge out at Lydia like a second set of eyes. Then Elliot turns to her. "You'll be back," he says simply, and turns around to go into the bedroom. She stays a moment with the door half-open to see if he will look around at her-he doesn't-and then she goes out the door and down the stairs. Richard is lying on his side as Lydia pushes open the bedroom door. His reading lamp is on, but his face is turned away from it, sunk into the pillow. A thick paperback book rests beside him on the sheets, its spine turned up to keep his place. But he has only been on the edge of sleep: he 103

sits up at once with a flurry of arms and blankets as though he were a guard caught napping on duty. His mouth is half open, and the blankets cover all but a sliver of the pale boyish skin of his legs. He is wearing a plain white T-shirt and briefs , and he is breathing hard. She has an urge to brush his hair back with the palm of her hand and tell him everything's all right and will be and how she is never going to leave him again, all the nonsense that he wants to hear. But something in her rebels against this, against the way he holds her too tightly against his body after they have made love, or kisses her deep into her mouth before she's even had a chance to recover her breath. There is something too endearing about him, Lydia muses as she watches him, something soft; he nourishes fond , abstract visions of every woman he has ever been in bed with. She wonders what he will say about her, to the next woman-she is sure that he has a story prepared, a story which began before he met her. Because Richard always makes everything mean more than it does, always twists your words around until he's got you saying what he wants you to say; even when you tell him to fuck off, that's supposed to mean you're trying to say I love you but not quite making it. But he doesn't really know what I'm capable of, she tells herself, watching him steadily as his eyes blink and turn away, even more unable to meet hers. Now she begins to take off her clothes , slowly, unerotically, as though she were peeling an onion. She glances at Richard from time to time: he sits on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor, still clutching the red blankets piled around him. He very carefully keeps his lips pressed together, perhaps afraid of what might otherwise force itself up his throat . She can see his Adam's apple move as he swallows his saliva. For herself, there are only the movements of undressing, the button of a shirt, the buckle of a belt. Somewhere she knows that he is looking at her, but behind her skin she feels calm and invisible, folded into herself. The small light behind him throws his shadow on the floor at her feet, and in the lines and furrows of his young face she can see the stripe of every brushstroke on her own skin as she plays it out little by little in front of him . When she has dropped the last of her clothes to the floor, Lydia throws her hair back so that it will not obscure his view and stands as still and soulless as a statue-Elliot would be proud of me, she congratulates herself. She watches Richard's moving eyes, which do not challenge hers, as he traces the route of every minute line, every streak of gushing color, every likeness of a tiny exposed artery. It seems to her that he recognizes some of them, some of the marks etched by hands and lips and tongues, by warm and cold caresses, by tender and brutal rubbings against her skin. 104

Yes, Richard would know some of them, especially the light ones around her breasts and the bottom of her neck, the ones he left there for Elliot's brush to catch in, to find. "Who did this to you?" Richard demands, with a visible effon to force the air out of his mouth. He keeps clenching and unclenching his fists, and his shoulders tremble faintly. "I'll kill him." She sees him look up again, trying to focus only on her eyes, but he sees too much and has to look away again. "Lydia?" he says to the floor. Without replying, she turns around to let him see the black lines on her back, thinking of him as a mirror. This-the thought strikes her idly and quite calmly as she turns to observe his face-is the cruelest thing I've ever done. She finds that the idea does not bother her all that much. Richard sputters for a moment, as though struggling for breath, then he regains enough control to fling the blankets off and stand up next to her. She can't tell where he 's looking. "Why don' t you get dressed now and we'll go out for a drink or something, okay?" He reaches out as though to touch her shoulder, then pulls his hand back. Lydia pretends not to notice. With her hands on her hips, she watches him shaking his hand as though there were something jangling in it. "What's the matter?" she asks him at last. " Don't you like what you see?" "Get dressed!" Richard's voice is louder and narrower than ever; a foot stamps the floor. Lydia looks at him for a moment, then at her closet-the door is closed and she finds that she can't even imagine herselflooking inside. She picks her way among the odd pieces of clothing strewn across the floor, bends to retrieve a few, and begins stepping into them.

105

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Joseph P. Balaz is "part-Czechoslovakian, part-Hawaiian, part-Irish, partly crazy, and he likes to part his hair right down the middle-but since it's not the hair on his head, you would never know." Santos Barbosa lives in Makiki. Joseph Chadwick teaches in the English Department of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His work has appeared in such journals as Ka Huliau and Victorian Poetry. Nora Cobb is an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii majoring in Psychology and English . Peter Desy teaches in the English Department of Ohio University in Lancaster. He has new poems coming out in Kansas Quarterly, Yankee, Poem, Centennial Review, and others, as well as a short story collection from Bottom Dog Press . Richard Morris Dey's second revised edition of The Bequia Poems will be issued in 1987. He has published poems in many magazines, including Poetry, Harvard Magazine, and Sail. James F. Mitchell, to whom "Approaching Bequia" is dedicated, is Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. David Graham's first book of poems, Magic Shows, appeared in the summer of 1986 from Cleveland State University. He has recent poems in Poetry, The American Scholar, College EnglÂŁsh, Ploughshares, The Louisvtlle Review, and other journals. He teaches at North Carolina State University. Jonathan Hall is from upstate New York. Currently, he lives in Ithaca, after a Cornell M.F.A. Richard Hamasaki has poems in Ho 'tHo 'i Hou (Bamboo Ridge Press) and others. His concrete poem, "Death at Sea," with Mark Hamasaki's serigraph, is on permanent display at the Basel Youth Hostel in Switzerland. Norman Hindley says, "When Bukowski-purring beauty, disaster, racetracks, privates, and wine- is made our Poet Laureate , American Poetry will be in pretty good shape." Roberto Juarroz is the author of Sixth Vertical Poetry. Kauraka Kauraka is a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a poet from Rarotonga, Cook Islands . His poetry collection, Return to Havaiki, was published in 1985 by USP, Suva. His new collection, Dreams of the Rainbow, is currently with the Institute of Pacific Studies, USP, Suva. Arthur Kimball is a professor at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan, and is the English co-editor of Poetry Kanto. He has poems published in Manhattan Poetry Review, Wflves, and others. Gary Kissick currently lives in West Germany, where he teaches for the University of Maryland, European Division. He is the author of Outer Islands (University of Hawaii Press, 1984), winner of the first Pacific Poetry Series Competition, and has poems in Esquire, Hawaii Review, Poetry Now, Prairie Schooner, Rolling Stone, and others. He also won a 1984 PEN Syndicated Fiction Award for

106

"Late Departure," a ghost story set in Molokai, and is completing a Hawaiian novel, Winter in Volcano. Ted Lardner teaches at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. He has finished a first book of poems, Reasons to Believe. Lyn Lifshln, an internationally known poet and editor, has published poems in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, as well as Ms. magazine and Rolling Stone. Her collection of poems , Kiss the Skin Off, won the 1984Jack Kerouac Award. Jose Lezama Lima is the author of Fragmentos a Su !man, Paradiso, and others. Wing Tek Lum's first volume of poems, Expounding the Doubtful Points, ts scheduled to be published by Bamboo Ridge Press in 1987. Ian MacMillan's Proud Monster is scheduled to be published in July 1987 by North Point Press. The title of this work comes from Goya's Disasters of IMzr: the second to last etching of a mythic animal lying on its side, a little avalanche of men coming from its mouth . Other excerpts from this book have appeared in ten magazines, including TriQuarterly, MSS, Carolina Quarterly, Iowa Review, Quest, and Hawaii Review 16, and have been reprinted in Pushcart Prize and Best Amen'can Short Stories anthologies. Michael McPherson is 40. W. S. Merwin lives on the island ofMaui . Kathleen Neuer is the recipient of awards from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts, 1983- 1984, and the Pen and Brush Club, 1982, at The New York School, New York. She is author of The Inn Book: A Field Guide to Old Inns & Good Food (Random House) and her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and others. Ed Parris holds degrees from W.C.C. and the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and is finishing his MFA thesis at Eastern Washington University where he is poetry editor of Willow Springs. He misses the cool clap of bamboo against bamboo. Louis Phillips' recent collection of poems-The Time, The Hour, The Solitan路ness of the Place-was published by Swallow's Tale Press. His full-length plays include The Last ofthe Marx Brothers' Wn'ters, Kops, and The Ballroom in St. Patrick's Cathedral; his story, "The Man Who Was Struck By Lightning,'' received the PEN Fiction Syndication Award. He teaches creative writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Gladys Pruitt, who lives in Kailua and attends the University of Hawaii at Manoa, writes poetry and fiction. In 1985-86, she won the University's Myrtle Clark award. "When the Snow Melts" is her first published story. David Sheskin's drawings have appeared in numerous publications; most recently, his work has appeared in The North Amen'can Review and The New Mexico Humanities Review. David Stroup is a Physics major at the University of Hawaii; this is his first sale. When he grows up, he wants to be a cyberpunk . K2thryn Waddell Takara, a long-time resident of Windward Oahu , strives "to teach, learn, observe , grow, write, and refine her craft with visions of new

107

correspondences, metaphors and the 'exquisite,' to be found in any particular moment." Haunani-Kay Trask says "The Hawaiian people lived in the land's keeping for 2,000 years. And the land, with her people, flourished . But once the Europeans and Americans flooded the land, the Hawaiian people declined in great numbers. Now, the land is filled with strangers who have no roots and care nothing for the land. There are only a handful of us left who still grieve for the place of our ancestors." JiU Widner, editor of Literary Arts Hawaii, teaches at the University of Hawaii and has recent poetry in Cima"on Review.

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fiction by: BradY T . BradY Patricia Eakins Allanlzen ursule Molinaro Sylvia watanabe Leona '(amada poetrt by: sanora Babb Josepl"l P. Salaz Jim oaniels Rictlard t.Aorris oey Barbara Gearen Jol"ln GreY Norman Hi ndleY oean Honma Lyn Ufs\"1\n Edward C. LynskeY t.Aicl"lael t,AcPt~erson James A. t.Aillef TracY t.Aorisaki Li nda Relacion Qosal"lwe Louis Pl"lillipS paulette Roeske GUY Rotella CaroiAnn Russell Alan seaburg JosePI"I Stanton Reuben Tam ooug "Turner Jill Widner Rob Wilson Leona '(amada ReYiew•E...ybY: Angel a Ball Rob Wilson Art • PhOt09raphY bY: Sopl"lia Hindley Faye KicknoswaY T\"18 Hawaii Tt~eatre

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