dislocate

DISLOCATE

spring 2013 issue 9 Atlas of the Midwest

dislocate University of Minnesota Department of English 1 Lind Hall 207 Church Street SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 dislocate is a literary magazine operated by the graduate students in the English Department at the University of Minnesota.

Copyright © 2013 by Regents of the University of Minnesota.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

Publication of dislocate is made possible by the generous support of the Lerner Foundation; we thank the Foundation for their continued involvement. We are also grateful to the following organizations and individuals for their assistance: the Edelstein-Keller Endowment, the Regents of the University of Minnesota, the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, the Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Kathleen Glasgow, Julie Schumacher, and Peter Campion.

We are informed and inspired by all the ghosts of dislocates past and are especially grateful to previous editors Kerry Voigt, Kathleen Johnston, and Christine Friedlander. A special thanks also to James Cihlar.

For submission guidelines, please visit our website: dislocate.umn.edu.

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The Edelstein-Keller Endowment The Creative Writing Program owes the inception of its MFA degree and its stellar roster of visiting writers to the Edelstein-Keller Endowment and the generosity of Ruth Easton (née Edelstein). Ms. Easton was born in North Branch, Minnesota, attended the University of Minnesota for one year, and finished her education at Macalester College and the Cumnock School. She then began a successful career as an actress. She appeared on radio and on Broadway with Walter Huston, Lionel Barrymore, Clark Gable, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson.

In 1985, Kenneth H. Keller, then president of the University of Minnesota, discussed with Ms. Easton his plan to launch the University’s first capital gifts campaign–in particular, his hope that the first major endowment specifically benefit the Department of English. As a result of this discussion, Ms. Easton made a significant gift, which President Keller arranged to match with an equal sum from University resources, and the Edelstein-Keller Endowment was born. Ms. Easton named the endowment in honor of her brother, David E. Edelstein, and his closest friend, Thomas A. Keller, Jr. (no relation to President Keller).

The first Edelstein-Keller Endowment visiting writer was Isaac Bashevis Singer, who visited the Twin Cities campus in May 1985. Subsequent visitors have included Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Edward P. Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, J. M. Coetzee, Sam Shepard, Colson Whitehead, Vivian Gornick, Tobias Wolff, and the current writerin-residence, Charles Baxter. The Edelstein-Keller Endowment made possible the conversion in 1996 of the MA in English and Professional Writing to the MFA in Creative Writing. The result of Ruth Easton’s generosity and President Keller’s vision is a graduate writing program with a national reputation that continues to attract the finest established and emerging writers in the country. Please visit the Creative Writing Program’s website at http://creativewriting.umn.edu.

III

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Jennifer Fossenbell Nasir Sakandar

POETRY EDITOR FICTION EDITOR NONFICTION EDITOR

Elizabeth O’Brien Jonathan Escoffery Scott Parker

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Amy Adams Ashley Campbell Elena Carter Katherine Lee Julia Marley Katie Rensch Nicky Tiso Amy Adams

WEB & SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR DISTRIBUTION

Amanda Niedfeldt Scott Parker

DESIGNER

Kristin Havercamp

IV

Note from the Editors We are creatures born or migrated into a vast land of weather, a vast history of taking and giving. We exist on the boundaries of origin, direction, distance, intention, location, and dislocation. How do we know where we live?

Who we are as we live there? Where there is, with us or without us?

A body is a country with borders in crisis. Together we are always making, and these made things are maps of our many countries, and we draw out and around their relations, how they talk to and feed and fight and sometimes steal from one another.

Here you will find artists who are in themselves countries, borders, loud postmarks of journeys that unearth the places we live on or in. Captains of ships leading and luring us to familiar new places.

We are proud to have assembled these arresting images and acrobatic feats of the verbal arts. Our sincere thanks go out to the artists published here, as well as our staff, for helping make this issue the piece of artistry that it is.

And of course, thanks to you, dislocated reader, for being part of this space.

Jennifer Fossenbell & Nasir Sakandar Editors-in-Chief

V

ERNEST WILLIAMSON III Da Vinci’s Return [0] VISUAL ART BARRIE JEAN BORICH My Body as the Middle West [2] NONFICTION

W. JACK SAVAGE Untitled [6] VISUAL ART

TERRELL JAMAL TERRY A Vivid Sculptured Heart [12] POETRY BRIAN WHALEN Nature//Kid Buddha//Kettle [14] POETRY

0 5

EMILY JERN-MILLER Prairie Salt Series POETRY [5] VALERIE CUMMING Mayflies FICTION [7]

10 ERNEST WILLIAMSON III Lady of Old England VISUAL ART [13]

15

JOEY DE JESUS Drought in the Midwest [18] POETRY SARAH FOX Essay on Time//Essay on My Memory [20] POETRY

C. J. OPPERTHAUSER Iron Lung POETRY [1]

20 25

PATRICK NATHAN The Lady with the Apples FICTION [17] W. JACK SAVAGE The Monocled Bunny VISUAL ART [19]

WING YOUNG HUIE Intersections VISUAL ART [27]

30

TABLE OF CONTENTS VI

JOLENE BRINK Losing Thomas [35] POETRY ERNEST WILLIAMSON III Between Jazz & The Blues [37] VISUAL ART BRIDGET APFELD Venison [39] FICTION

ED BOK LEE Hologram [46] POETRY JOHN COLBURN Wednesday July 4 1979//Girls// Historical//Kiss [48] FICTION

CHANGMING YUAN 0//1 [56] POETRY W. JACK SAVAGE Untitled (The Chair) [58] VISUAL ART

[64] CONTRIBUTORS

35 40 45

JOHN FLYNN Sugar Smoke, 1953 POETRY [36] W. JACK SAVAGE Rainbow Man VISUAL ART [38]

JENNY ROBERTSON Lake Minnewawa POETRY [45] ERNEST WILLIAMSON III The Missing Children VISUAL ART [47]

50 55 60

JUSTIN HOCKING Big Medicine NONFICTION [52]

ERNEST WILLIAMSON III Lost in Japan VISUAL ART [57] CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY Let’s Just Get a Slogan INTERVIEW [59]

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TABLE OF CONTENTS VII

Iron Lung C. J. Opperthauser

The train barrels through town five times an hour and I swear to God it screams your name.

I want to chain-lasso it topple-screeching and yank it to my feet, challenge it to a game of kickthe-can, then race it back to Detroit.

I’m going to pry off its wheels and fling them at street signs.

I’ll rip jaw-clips and axles, tear apart pivot liners and hurl them into ditches.

I’ll crush oil drums, throw them down sewers.

I’ll bend fly-wheels.

I’ll douse cast-iron everythings with gasoline, dance around the flame.

Put my shoulder to the smokestack, plow rail spike through steam chest, take crosshead to coupler, tie car-cables into knots.

The engine they forged, I’ll rip it in two, pick it apart rust by rust and learn how to push metal ribcages down steel tracks and then I’ll head north: sparking, smoking, blowing different names.

OPPERTHAUSER 1

My Body as the SCALE: The measure of one woman’s body = the distance between two cities.

The Body I am facedown on the table as he needles my lower back. The tattoo gun hums and my neck and shoulders clench. Though I can’t see him, I feel his presence, behind me.

The pain maps I consulted told me this tattoo should not hurt as much as it does. I don’t remember such sharp pain with the others—the leopard on my shoulder, the amber rose on my ankle, the blossoming branch on my forearm. Yet I am not crying. I am not moving. I am trying to vanish into this wash, which I do, for long pauses that end abruptly.

As he works I can’t help but notice how unusual it is for me to be so close to a man. I am a woman who prefers women, have been married to Linnea now for over two decades, have not been this intimate with a dude in years. Ordinarily such proximity to anyone I don’t know makes me nervous. I’m not one to get a massage. I warm slowly to new chiropractors and doctors. I was slow to learn the Minnesota hug, though have an easier time hugging women than men. A man leaning over my exposed backside is not typical in my day-to-day, but tattoos are boundary-breaking situations. This new charting, across my middle, in more than one way remaps me.

But the work he’s doing hurts. Just as I begin to consider rearing up and slapping the tattoo gun out of his hand, he finally lifts the needle. This rush of absence feels like love.

The Map One drunken night when I was newly in love, my then-lover and I stood in a public restroom in South Minneapolis, looking into a streaked mirror. I stared at my own face with the devotion of the drunken and whispered to my lover that my eyes, nose, and mouth looked to me like a map. It was the sort of thing my lover liked to talk about. That woman’s face looks like a map of Eastern Europe, she’d say about some stunningly unconventional beauty or other we’d meet in passing, and I must have wished her to say the same about me. We were young—me only twenty-three—and often drunk or stoned and prone to believe all manner of

unlikely things about our lives in our mostly women’s new world, the lesbian nation, a floating country with invisible borders that my lover, nine years older than I, had arrived at first. I suppose I was trying to impress her, trying to get her to see me better, and indeed I was pleased when she nodded and told me she did see it too, my face made from the copper stones of some beautiful old country.

Neither of us had been yet to our family’s old countries. I hadn’t yet even been away from the Western hemisphere. Drunk as I was that night, if I made out anything in that wavy approximation of my features, I likely saw my father, whom I resemble. If I saw a map it was probably just that of my dad’s and my Chicago, with perhaps some cast of my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s Croatia underneath. I was taking note then of not so much ground truth as history, one of so many twentieth-century migration stories that started in the dregs and stones of an impoverished Balkan village and continued in the steel mill regions of the American middle.

My lover was a short Jewish woman with curly black hair, recently migrated from Boston, resettling here in the Scandinavian upper Midwest to work at the feminist theater company where we met, her homesickness the reason she talked about maps. I was not nearly so far from home, a tall blond native midwesterner just one major metropolis west of the city where I was born. And yet the idea of the map, that my body might carry a geography of memory, stayed with me from that night forward.

Years later I would read, in a book about the history of mapping, that maps are less actualities than acts of discernment. And yes, this is what I was doing looking into that mirror—discerning my asymmetrical 1980s haircut, the smudge of eyeliner under my eyes, the way my body had just begun to feel itself in love, in sex, yes, finally present for a lover in ways I hadn’t been with the women and men who had come before.

But also I had begun to locate myself in time and place.

When I said my face was a map I meant that I was beginning to discern what I’d decided to make of myself, mapping as the act of making out some new and more accurate self that I hadn’t made out before.

BORICH 2

Middle West

Barrie Jean Borich

The Middle Some tattoos hurt more than others. The less flesh, the more pain. Fatty areas, like the upper arm, buffer better, but at parts of the back, the ankle, elbow, and hip, the bone is too close to the skin. And the black ink hurts more than the colors. Today, the first day’s work on my back, the ink is all black. I’ve asked the artist to make me a map of urban architecture, of infrastructure, and he’s providing.

But this pain in my lower back as he works is somehow more than pain, which has to do, I think, with the vulnerabilities of the woman’s middle. When men call tattoos on the female sacral area the tramp stamp their word choice is obviously misogynistic, but hatred tends to gravitate toward wounds. My body has areas much more intimate than the lower back and yet, as he needles, the pain undulates up my belly to my throat.

Linnea has been sitting to one side of the action, one of her heavy boots balanced on the ledge of the ornamental fishpond at the center of the tattoo parlor.

She leans on one leg to watch the giant koi bubble up and down in their brick canal. When we first met, Linnea kept a tank in her bedroom, and for as long as I’ve known her she’s loved domesticated fish. But now she must see some new sting cross my face, enough to pull her away from the pond. She takes off her heavy motorcycle jacket and scrapes a chair up close, to hold my hand, but the distraction is too sweet, the press of her fingers cloying. I do and don’t want to be distracted.

Middles are both solid and vulnerable. In the famous 1872 landscape painting by William Gast called American Progress the middle of the New World is traversed by a big blond archetypal female. In the painting Columbia floats across the center, what was then, in the late nineteenth century, called the Middle West, both a middle and a frontier. The burned middle plains graze Columbia’s pale toe. Miss Manifest Destiny is heading for Hollywood, clothed in a white sheet that flaps behind her like a ripped flag, the fabric falling off her left breast, exposing her nipple to the hard wind. This is the myth of the middle, an empty space waiting to be strung up with electric wires, its undesirables vanquished and vanished. The woman’s body can stand in

for a fantasy of American habitation only if she is assumed to have no inhabiting desires of her own.

To conquer a country you have to trample the middle. We all hunch over to cradle our losses, to protect from the coming kick. The middle is a pivot where we remake careers, relocate homes, abandon or revive marriages, decide whether to stay or go. I desire. I long to inhabit. My middle is made of overlays the tattoo needle unpeels.

The City Once, sleeping deeply after spending a bit too long in a historical archive—where I’d peered into map after map of Croatia, Poland, Bohemia, and Chicago, deciphered charts of countries with arrows accounting for which old European population moved to which new American city, read transcripts of interviews with early twentieth-century immigrants who came to the industrial Midwest to work in the steel mills, not at all sure what I was looking for—I dreamed I took a trolley tour of some city. It was the prototype Great Lakes port city, built by immigrants like my great-grandfather Big Petar. The trolley tour guide told us we were about to see the city tourists never saw, and then the train clamored up steps and through eroded alleyways. We trundled past working docks and through the center of restaurants where lovers leaned together or walked encircled in one another’s arms. Then we rumbled outside again, into a frantic intersection of street vendors, crowded, as in archival photos of the old Maxwell Street Market in Chicago.

When I found myself on foot I was caught in the center of a full-color twenty-first-century throng, Chicago’s State Street right before Christmas, except now and then I noticed a filmy historical body brushing past, dressed in early twentieth-century garb, as if I’d spotted a cartoon character in the background of a news documentary, bodies of the past jumbled up with the bodies of the present, transparent men in hats, bustled women holding children’s hands and avoiding the eyes of strangers. The past and the present were strips of black-and-white film stock, the street a palimpsest, mingling and simultaneous. This was what I longed for, I realized when I woke. A map I could inhabit, a

BORICH 3

city tangibly conscious of the city that had come before.

Maps within the Map Maps obscure more than they reveal because their flatness is contrary to the layered experience of living. Maps are representational, but life is lived in the body, is dimensional, has voice and history. So every map can’t help but contain other maps, areas of detail requiring special attention, even when the insets don’t show. The body, my body, is a stacked atlas of memory.

If we think the middle of our lives are flat we mistake surface for substance.

The Geography The actual woman’s body in the middle of her life is neither map nor archetype, is both settlement and frontier. I choose, now, at age fifty, to treat the surface of my back as a cartographer’s canvas. I stretch out on the tattooing table. My body clutches and shivers. The artist inks a dual city skyline. My Chicago in the center. My Minneapolis to either side. The infrastructure of that sharp black ink stings worse than I imagined it could. Linnea squeezes my hand, but again I shoo her away. I came here to pull all my maps to the surface, not just a drunk girl’s hallucination this time, but a marking more permanent. Of course it hurts when he maps me in my history. d

Excerpted from Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2013 by Barrie Jean Borich Available wherever books are sold or from the Univ. of Nebraska Press 800.848.6224 and at nebraskapress.unl.edu

BORICH 4

prairie salt / 1 March into the field and come out with an arrow order along a vein. Leaf of an owl, a clay wave, hexagonal meteor waxing your hand perfect from wading loss.

Made by bees far from illusion.

Peaks where smoke questions.

Far from the moment you left ache for science to peel over handsome bone.

Paper meteor, just the skeleton of it.

Emily Jern-Miller

prairie salt

prairie salt / 2 morning height beefs the trees coral to papaya.

mouth warming angles, a whole page of letters your scrappy k’s and m’s.

Denizens of field and forest. prairie salt / 3 by the prairie a sign says “prairie” you follow a deer trail into itself a horn’s heat wasps up to glare your eye once closed closes the center of the prairie fragile the center where sloppy circling rises arched points no grief easily able to lie down

JERN-MILLER 5

Valerie Cumming

Mayflies Because it was Saturday night, because there was nothing better to do, we decided to drive around to see if we could find that old Indian son of a bitch who killed that white woman up in Elgin last winter.

There were three of us, all jammed together in the front seat of my F150: me at the wheel, and Derrick in the middle, because he was the smallest, and Steve Jones in the passenger side, where the seat was stained from where my old man had once spilled a Speedway cup of coffee back when the truck was still his. Derrick and I usually didn’t spend too much time with Steve. He talked too much, that guy, always running his mouth like there was no shut-off valve inside of him and every thought that popped into his head just had to come pouring on out. We let him bum cigarettes off of us, but he talked around them. The white woman who’d been killed, she was his stepmother’s cousin, so he’d begged to come along and we couldn’t say no.

We stopped at Burger King on the way out of town and then Steve started in about the murder, how his stepmom’s cousin had broken up with this guy, this nogood Indian Tommy Moon, and how she’d given him a week to get his things out of her trailer but instead he’d doused the whole thing with gasoline and set it on fire, starting with her. We knew all of this already from the papers, but Steve kept on talking about the body, how it was so charred the coroner had to use dental records to identify her, how the gold bracelet she wore had melted right onto her wrist, how her feet had both burned clean off. Next to me, Derrick shifted a little in his seat.

He was only fifteen and liked to act tough enough, but when it came right down to it there were things about the world that still had the power to surprise him.

“Nothing on this earth hotter than a burning trailer,” Steve was saying. “It’s all that metal everywhere. It took hours for them just to cool it down enough to where they could run inside and grab the body.”

There were people in town who doubted Steve’s story that he was really related to her, and so for a while he’d taken to carrying around an old Christmas card that the dead woman had sent to her cousin, Steve’s stepmom, about a month before she died. He kept it in his wallet like a rubber, all creased and frayed from the many times he’d taken it out and unfolded it to show people, the writing smeared from him passing his

sweaty palm over it so often, trying to smooth it flat.

Happy Holidays, it said, and then just the signature. On the front was a picture of a little cottage with a wreath on the front door. The cottage was just a painting, but the way the snow hung and sparkled in all of the trees around it and the way squares of yellow light shone from the windows on either side of the door made it seem like the kind of place you could just close your eyes and step into. But things were never that good in real life. Once, when I was about six, they set up a carnival in the parking lot of the Presbyterian church and I begged my old man for a ride on the crappy little merry-go-round, begged until he threatened to knock all my teeth clean out of my head, but my mother finally handed me the quarter and told me to go on. Then I felt so dumb, sitting there on that pink pony, going around and around in an endless circle with all of these little babies waving to their mommies. So I knew, looking at that picture, that probably no cottage like that could ever exist in real life, or that if it did, it was just a house with the same shit going on inside of it as any other, no more magical than a parking-lot carnival. Still, I imagined this dead woman looking at the picture while she wrote out her Christmas cards in her trailer a month before she would roast to death inside of it, and that thought made me sicker than any of the hearsay garbage coming out of Steve’s mouth.

The thing was, I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with this Indian guy, when and if we even found him. He’d been arrested before the trailer even stopped smoking, but they couldn’t hold him because he had an alibi. Everyone knows an Indian alibi doesn’t count for shit, because all these Reservation boys have each other’s backs and will make up any kind of story, but legally it was enough to keep him out of prison. He’d been in for six hours, though, while they got the whole story ironed out, and according to Steve and the paper they’d kicked the shit out of him so bad while he was inside that I knew he’d be easy to spot, even in a bar full of Indians. It wasn’t like they were just going to let us walk on out of there and toss him in the back of the truck, but the way I saw it, we had another forty miles or so to come up with a plan.

I kept the cab stocked with a couple of six packs underneath the seat, and while I drove and Steve talk-

CUMMING 7

ed, Derrick reached under and passed a few around.

They were warm from the heater. Usually it was our stepmom, Cindy, who kept us supplied; in the glove compartment was a half-drunk bottle of Kanchatka vodka, a birthday gift from Cindy, that I didn’t want Derrick to find out about because if he did, it would all be gone in about half a second, and with Cindy pregnant it was getting harder and harder to talk her into buying. Derrick had our old man’s liver; he could drink and drink and still walk a straight line and recite his social security number. Once, before Cindy, back when it was Steve’s father’s liquor cabinet that used to keep us supplied, I’d seen Derek drink half a bottle of cheap tequila all by himself in about five minutes and then climb to the highest row of bleachers in the high school stadium and walk it with his eyes closed, nothing between him and the asphalt parking lot below but a thin metal railing and two stories of air.

Me, I took things slower. Drank slower, drove slower, didn’t say more than I had to. The old man called me a faggot for it, or else pretty like my mother, but the truth was that I have always been a believer in thinking things through, in visualizing each step before you take it. Cindy said that she could see great intelligence in my eyes, though she knew better than to say that when my father was around.

You might think that my slowness made me an easy target in fights, but the opposite was true. I’d been in plenty of fights, and each time I found, after the first couple of punches were thrown, that I could almost step back out of my body with my mind, like watching two people fighting from above, and from that point of view I could practically see the punches coming. It was the one useful life skill the old man had ever given me.

I worried about Derrick, who had grown up hiding in closets and under beds when he saw our father coming for him and, as a result, had never learned how to fight properly. I wondered how we’d do, the three of us, in a bar full of drunk Indians. Indians, by the way, are not like you and me. The more they drink, the stronger and clearer-headed they seem to become; the stuff is like water to them. I knew this from all the times Steve and I had spent out at the Indian casino last summer, trying to get them to believe our phony IDs. That was before Cindy, when Derrick was happier just hanging around the house watching the tube than he was out making trouble with Steve and me. But Cindy had changed all that. Two weeks after she came to live with us, Derrick appeared in my bedroom door one night asking me if I’d give him a ride to the bus station. “Anywhere,” he’d said when I asked him where he planned on going. “Anywhere that isn’t here.”

Of course, he had no money, so we ended up just

driving around, stopping at the Burger King and then taking a couple of laps around the high school. By the time we got home, it was nearly four in the morning and I think we were both feeling better. There was no place for a woman like Cindy in a tiny rented house with men like my father and brother and me around.

I never slept with Cindy, but she and I fooled around once, while my old man was at work, and we would have kept going except that he came home and found us and put thirteen stitches into my jaw. He made sure to leave no doubt about what would happen if he ever caught us doing that again. But there was no escaping her: a pink bra hanging from the showerhead, Slim Fast in the refrigerator, perfume smell in the laundry basket. I was jerking off two, three times a day just to survive it, but I knew Derrick had it worse. He didn’t have friends like I did, at least not the kind of guys who knew the value in driving around leaving tire tracks in people’s perfect lawns or smashing in the neighbor’s American flag mailbox with a baseball bat. Derrick was quiet, like me, but in a sad way, his eyes watching everything in this way that made it look like the whole world was letting him down.

Just over the border into Michigan, near all of the fireworks stores with their huge billboards that light the highway all night long, we pulled over at a 24-hour Denny’s and shoved ourselves into a booth in back. I didn’t want anything–I’m like my old man that way, booze-skinny–but Steve and Derrick each ordered a full stack of flapjacks from the waitress, a pretty redhaired lady who looked like my old Cub Scout leader back when my mom was still alive and signing Derrick and me up for that kind of thing. When she came back with their orders, I gave a little tug on her elbow and said, “Excuse me, but you weren’t ever a Cub Scout leader in Toledo, by any chance, were you?”

“No,” she said, but her eyes looked surprised, like she was pleased that someone had actually asked her a question about herself for a change. Next to me, Derrick was digging into his pancakes without even bothering to cut them up first. “Why?” she asked, smiling a little.

“You look like someone is all,” I said, wishing I’d thought to order some coffee. I’d already lost track of the number of warm beers I’d had to drink, and it was a long drive back to Ohio.

“You boys are out awfully late,” she said. She was leaning one hip against the edge of the table in the way women do when they want something, and I saw, watching her, that she wasn’t that old after all, thirty tops, though the hair net and tangerine uniform made her look ancient. I asked her if she wanted to go outside for a cigarette and she said yes, but it was cold so

CUMMING 8

we wound up in my truck, fooling around a little. She was lonely, and I got the feeling that if I pushed, I probably could have gotten a blow job out of her, maybe more, but one thing I pride myself on is being able to figure out what a woman really wants, how far she’s really willing to go without some serious regret later on.

So instead we sat for a minute in my truck, smoking, while she told me about her kid, a little boy who lived with her ex-husband now. I held her hand while she talked, and then she went back inside and I waited a minute before I followed her, so that her boss wouldn’t get suspicious.

When she came back to the table to see if we needed anything else, Steve pulled that damned Christmas card out of his wallet and started showing her, asking if she’d heard about the woman who got torched in her trailer last spring. “We’re friends of hers,” he said. The waitress looked at the card a minute and then said that she wasn’t sure but she might have heard something about that a while back. She looked worried, like she thought we were after her for it or something, and the next thing I knew she’d pushed away from our table and was backing off, a gulf of shit-brown carpeting widening between us by the second.

“I’m Patty, by the way,” she said, not looking at me.

“If you need anything else.”

“Maybe some coffee,” I said, and she nodded, but she didn’t come back to the table again, not even to bring the check. After a while I saw her flirting with a couple of truckers a few booths down, but when she saw me looking she went back to the kitchen again in a hurry.

Derrick was holding the Christmas card in his hands now, turning it over and over, one corner already smudged and sticky with syrup. I could tell from the look on his face that he was still picturing that fire in his head. “I wish someone would do something like that to Cindy,” he said, more to himself than to us.

“Are you crazy?” Steve said, leaning way forward in his seat, the cracked vinyl creaking underneath him.

“If I had a woman who looked like that living in my house, I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d let her walk in on me, you know, right out of the shower or something. Or I’d walk in on her, when she’s all steamed up and reaching for her towel. Let her think it was an accident, at least at first.”

“Like hell you would, Steve,” I said, shaking my head and eyeing Patty as she popped halfway out of the kitchen, checking to see if we’d left yet. Steve’s stepmother was about fifty years old and wore her graying hair in a perm tight as an afro. She looked like a lezzie, my father said, and for once in my life I agreed with him. Cindy was a different story. She was a senior the

year I was a freshman, one of the rare girls to make it all the way through high school without dropping out or getting pregnant or both, and she had a reputation as a good girl–not Honor Society good, but quality good, a girl with blue eyes and a toothpaste-ad smile. She was on student council and played tennis, that much I knew, though we weren’t friends or anything close to it. I was only thirteen that year, on account of having skipped the third grade because my second-grade teacher thought I was really something, and as a result I was even scrawnier and more pathetic than the rest of the underclass boys who hung around her locker in the hopes of catching a glimpse of her. I have never understood what she saw in my father, though I’ve always assumed it had something to do with the steady paycheck he made doing roofing work. Sometimes I got to thinking about her senior picture in the yearbook: that perfect smile, eyes shining as she looked slightly off to one side, as if something irresistibly funny was happening there, some great joke that only she was in on.

Patty was too freaked even to come back with our bill, so we left ten dollars in ones on the table and took off again. By now, the night air was beginning to clear my head and I felt strong, like I could drive forever, though I wasn’t so sure anymore about heading up to Elgin to find that old Indian, Tommy Moon. I wanted to go home: not the home where Cindy and my father lived, but home as it had been before my mother died, when there was always someone waiting at the door to hand you a snack or ask you how school went.

By the time we cleared out of the parking lot, Derrick had cracked open another round of beers and Steve was going on about his other favorite topic, the girlfriend he claimed he had up in Traverse City, a friend of a cousin he’d met at some family reunion. He talked about her so much I’d never believed she was real, until once when Steve asked Derrick and me to give him a ride to the bus station so he could go and visit her.

The bus was delayed so the three of us wound up sitting around the station for hours, eating crap from the vending machine and watching people get on and off the buses. We stayed with Steve until he boarded the gray sputtering bus with “Detroit” in the window, and we were there three days later to pick him up again. We had to drive like hell just to make the first period bell, and him squealing the whole way about his old lady: the things she let him do to her, so much detail that it got Derrick to squirming in his seat.

Tonight, though, leaving the Denny’s, it wasn’t the girl Steve wanted to talk about but the place itself, Traverse City, so high up on the tip of the Michigan glove that even in the summer it never got above seventy degrees. “The bugs, though, shit,” he said, rolling

CUMMING 9

down the passenger side window to toss a can out onto the asphalt. “Fucking mayflies everywhere. You know those things only live for a day, right? They’re born, they fuck, they die, all in a day.”

“I don’t know about finding that old Indian shit,” I said, changing the subject the way I always did when one of Steve’s rants started to get on my nerves. “He’s likely as not going to wipe the Reservation with our asses.”

“Nah, he’s older than hell,” Steve said, reaching under the seat to grab at one of the cans that were still rolling around down there. “I ever tell you that I met him once? At a family reunion. Just this old grayhaired guy in a Brown’s cap.”

“You meet everybody at these family reunions,” I said, half hoping to get him so drunk or so busy talking that I could turn the truck around without him caring much. South of Detroit, there’s not much in Michigan, just a lot of trees and billboards and fuckers going a hundred miles an hour because of the crazy no-fault insurance laws they’ve got there, and I was half afraid we were going to wind up nailing a deer.

Derrick was already sleeping in the seat beside me. He had the craziest way of sleeping with his eyes half open, so you could never tell if he was really asleep or just faking you out. It used to drive our old man crazy when he’d do that, in church or on the couch at night in front of the tube. “Damned freak show,” my father would say, and I saw what he meant. It made me uneasy to look at too, as if, instead of sleeping, Derrick’s soul had just checked out of his body for a while.

“Hey,” I said to Steve. “Look at that.”

Steve laughed and then slapped his wrist against his chest, the universal sign for retard.

Just south of the outlet malls, I pulled to the side of the road and got out to take a leak. It was so cold out that the air actually hurt, the stars pulsing a little in front of my eyes. It reminded me of the story Steve told of trying to swim in Lake Michigan with the Traverse City girl, how he’d waded out as deep as his knees but then had to turn back. “No way was I letting that water near my balls, man,” he said. I imagined the Traverse City girl in her bikini, laughing at him, and just like that my thoughts went right back to Cindy again.

I knew the old man wasn’t around, or if he was, he was passed out across their big king-sized bed like a log. I had this idea about going home and picking up Cindy, then driving all night up to Traverse City, maybe get there in time to see the sun rise over the lake. I imagined Cindy hiking up one of the long, flowy skirts she was always wearing these days to hide her big baby bump, laughing as the icy water hit her ankles, her big toothpaste-ad smile brighter than the stars.

By the time I climbed back into the truck Steve was snoring too, his big messy head falling against the window, so I made a U-turn in the middle of the road and headed back down 23 the way I’d come. To stay awake I thought about Cindy, the way she was always asking me to put my hands on her belly. “Feel him,” she always said, grabbing for my wrists. “He’s moving. Your brother.” I told her no, that it grossed me out, though really I was just afraid that if I started touching her I’d never be able to make myself stop. All winter long she’d sat on that couch, writing in the baby book she bought at Hallmark and digging through the boxes of baby clothes that the churches and shelters send out to poor families like us. She liked to sort through the boxes and think up names at the same time, and if you weren’t careful you’d get stuck listening to her and have to give your opinion on all of them. “What about Daniel?” she’d say. “That’s nice, isn’t it? Little Danny, or Dan.” And I’d nod, tell her sure, feeling depressed as hell because we both knew all along that she’d end up naming it after my old man.

Steve and Derrick slept until we got to our gravel driveway, when I woke them enough to tell them to shove over, and then I went inside to find Cindy. She was passed out on the couch with the remote control still in her hand, her belly big as a beach ball underneath her dress. I gave her shoulder a little shake and she moaned, struggling a little to sit up. “What are you doing up?” she whispered when she saw me standing there. “What time is it?”

“Just past three,” I said, and she moaned again and rubbed one palm across her face.

“Where’s your brother?”

“Out in the truck with Steve.”

“Tell me you all aren’t in some kind of trouble.”

“No trouble,” I said. “It’s just, you know, a beautiful night, you know, really clear and cold, you can see for miles. I thought you might want to get out of here for a while and maybe go for a drive.”

“A drive?” she said, working on combing some of the tangles out of her long blonde hair with her fingers.

There was an empty potato chip bag lodged under her feet. I looked at it and thought that if she didn’t agree to come with me, I’d probably just kidnap her and bring her along anyway, that I would save her even if she didn’t know enough to save herself.

“We were thinking of driving up to Traverse City,” I went on, stumbling around the tiny living room in search of her shoes among the boxes of baby things stacked everyplace. I came up with one pink flip-flop and handed it to her. “Steve’s got a friend up there. A girl.”

“Traverse City?” she said, putting on the shoe.

CUMMING 10

“Michigan? Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“I don’t need to go,” I said, smiling. That was the thing about Cindy: no matter how I felt, she could always make me smile. “I’m like a genius or something.

I even skipped the third grade. Ask me anything.” I was feeling buzzed then, like all of the butterflies in my stomach had decided to take flight at once, thinking about her really coming with me, if only for a night. I imagined her next to me in the cab, right by my side, her legs on either side of the gear shift; I imagined driving with one hand and keeping the other on her belly, feeling the baby, my brother, move and buck inside of her. I imagined her laughing big with her head thrown back, the way I remembered her laughing in high school but hadn’t seen her do since. I imagined finding a room in some little cottage with a view of the lake, a window opening out onto all of that cold, blue water, and Cindy and me on the bed, the cottage all warm and steamed-up on the inside. I could barely stand still from just the thought of it and started hopping back and forth like some kid about to wet his pants.

Cindy yawned. “I’m beat,” she said, looking around her at the beat-up living room. “Aren’t you beat?”

“Nah, I’m just getting started.” I reached out for her hand and gave it a tug, but she’d gained more weight than it looked like and I had to let her sink back onto the cushions again.

“Who’d you say was out in the truck?”

“Derrick. And that guy Steve. You know the one.”

She shrugged. She never paid much attention to what Derrick and I did, or to who we did it with; her whole life was wrapped up in my old man and that baby. Even at seventeen I knew what kind of lonely life she was setting herself up for, and for the thousandth time I got ready to point that out to her, but the words died in my throat. She wasn’t getting off that couch tonight, and we both knew it.

“Where’s Traverse City again?”

“Up by Lake Michigan,” I said. “It’s pretty there, real pretty. You’ll like it.” I took her hand again, this time didn’t let go. “I wouldn’t mind seeing you in a bathing suit,” I said, though it was only March.

She laughed then, which I suppose was what I had been going for all along. “Five years ago, maybe,” she said. “Now? Fat chance.”

“Come on, you’re still pretty anyway,” I said. It was the only compliment I’d ever paid her, at least to her face, and I felt ashamed the moment the words were out. All she had to do was breathe mention of it to my old man and my ass would be dead by daybreak, or else I’d come home from school to find the locks changed and have to spend the rest of the winter sleeping on

Steve’s parents’ couch.

Maybe it was the compliment that got to her, though, because she nodded once and began hauling herself off of the couch, rocking back and forth a moment on her feet as she centered herself. “You guys are going to take me all the way up to the lake tonight, are you?” she said. “I’m going to wake up in the morning smelling water?”

“You got it,” I said, even though her voice had a mocking edge to it, like she’d been promised enough and let down enough to see right through pretty much anyone, and at that moment she was seeing her way right through me. And I knew that she was probably right. I knew Derrick and Steve and me and our plans, how they always turned out, like the thing with Tommy Moon. More than likely we’d wind up back at the Burger King at four in the morning, sucking down Whoppers and trying not to look at Cindy too close in the harsh fluorescent lights. I felt strange; I was asking her to choose me, but at the same time I was saying to myself that I understood why she didn’t. I was my old man’s son, after all. I would wind up disappointing her, and we both knew it. The good and special parts of me, if they ever were there to begin with, had disappeared along with my mother, because she’d been the only one to see them in the first place and now that she didn’t exist anymore, neither could they.

So I helped Cindy kick off her one pink flipflop and navigate her way across the dirty carpeting, around towers of Pampers and formula boxes, back to the bedroom, where my old man lay sleeping across the bed like a bear, one bushy forearm draped across his eyes and his shoes still on. I helped her untuck her side of the bed, helped her settle her heavy body underneath the covers. I smoothed her hair, dry and brittle from too much peroxide, over the pillow. Just as I was about to leave, though, Cindy gave a tug on my hand, the way I’d pulled at her a few minutes earlier on the couch. “Feel,” she whispered, and I did. I let her guide my palm under the covers, under her thin cotton blouse to the warm knot of skin underneath. I stood there a moment, barely breathing, as my baby brother kicked and rolled and danced under my hand, all hope and life, and in that second I didn’t care about Traverse City or the Indian asshole or anything else, I just wanted to kneel down beside the bed and lay my face against her belly and just hold on. But the old man was stirring, coughing drunkenly in his sleep, and so I slipped out of the room and left all of them there in the bed together, and went back outside into what looked like darkness but what I already knew to be the coming light of the new day. d

CUMMING 11

A Vivid Sculptured Heart Terrell Jamal Terry

Investigations of early doctrine possessors. On the periphery of existence a slogan turns black.

All sides justified. It’s another way to learn. I was cut off from the loft of thought. My mind was not ready for most things then; unsteady, yet stuck. I was scared of myself and I still am. Nervous by knowing. Earned luck scars from breath stars of muchness.

Remembering is always fresh soil.

How does the past cause our panic and vanish? I don’t know. I remake myself grateful. But no butterfly before my door like before. Living so close to the tracks, I know I knew that present train’s wavy late wails would wake me from sleeping. Still I clothe myself and grow no darkness.

TERRY 12

Brian Whalen

Nature

I met a dog who had a face so full of cancer he could hardly lick your hands.

But he licked your hands.

WHALEN 14

Kid Buddha More space inside of me for wants

than grounds for satisfaction in the world.

How huge inside of me must be!

WHALEN 15

Kettle Remember me, whispers the dust. – James Scofield

“So soon?”

the water whispers.

WHALEN 16

The Lady with the Apples

Patrick Nathan

All because he didn’t want to fly. You’d think a ten-year-old would love planes. The way they pop your ears, I said—it feels so cool. He rolled his eyes and went upstairs. Later he told me if I made him get on a plane he’d run away.

You’ll love Seattle, I told him at the station. It’s like Minneapolis but there’s mountains. He didn’t look up, and when I tapped him on the shoulder he pulled his headphones out of one ear and gave me that what-doyou-want look. The bus pulled up right then and I told him to hurry, even though we wouldn’t leave for a halfhour.

He noticed her first, across the aisle. Mom, he was saying, doing that thing where he kicks my leg. Mom look.

She was old, or she looked old. Her lips weren’t moving but you could hear her mumbling. There was an apple in her hand, and every few seconds she turned toward the window like she was going to go to sleep.

She’d pop something in her mouth and turn back to the front as she chewed. She’s got a knife, he whispered, if you could call it a whisper. He wasn’t lying—it was a little paring knife she tried to hide up the sleeve of her fur coat. You could see it wink when the bus hit a pothole. What a weirdo, he said. It was even less of a whisper than before and she looked right at us. We both turned away, and he pointed out our window and said something about an old barn, but we weren’t fooling anyone.

Even in North Dakota it was hard to fall asleep.

You could hear her sitting over there. I told you, she kept saying. I told you how many times? I told you but you don’t listen. After the sun went down he leaned against me. Somewhere outside Jamestown he tried to crawl into my lap but I wouldn’t let him. After Bismarck I let him, and she was still saying it, I told you, I told you.

It wasn’t until the next morning, a few hours into Montana, that I got worried. Something was wrong with the interstate, the driver said, and in some place called Forsythe we branched off onto a state highway.

This was the part in movies where something always went wrong, passing towns like Musselshell and Roundup. We both must’ve thought the same thing. He kept asking me to rub his hands. The part between his finger and his thumb always got sore—from playing those stupid games, I told him—and he’d hold them in my lap while I pinched the strange lumpy muscle.

Sometimes he just asked so I’d touch him. Stop staring, I told him, but after a while I was staring too. She ate nothing but apples, slicing off these chip-sized pieces one at a time.

You couldn’t not think of the apocalypse. Literally—nothing in every direction, the grass yellow and asleep. The sky was big like they say but it just made more room for clouds. If it would’ve been sunny the whole trip might’ve been okay.

I don’t know where we were when he said it.

What’s wrong with you? he asked her. If you weren’t holding his hand you’d have no idea he was terrified.

She took one more slice out of the apple and held it up for him. She turned it sideways to show how thin it was. At that he turned and buried his face in my shoulder, and he couldn’t see the way she frowned and chewed on her lip, the way she looked down at the slice like she too had to second guess its worth. She didn’t eat the rest.

We still hadn’t seen the mountains when she got up and walked to the front. Nobody heard what she said to the driver. When he pulled over, people got how people get—the sleeping woke up and the silent whispered to each other. The old man in the front seat asked the driver what was the big idea? The lady with the apples didn’t have much luggage—only a canvas bag she wore on her shoulder like a purse. Everything was in there, you could tell. It looked heavy as she walked off into the field. You really had to ask yourself if the world had ended, nothing left of us but barbed wire. I’ll bet the bag’s full of apples, he whispered in my ear as we watched her get small, and the way he laughed made me want to strangle him. You’ll love Seattle, I thought.

I’d been so hopeful, like he could love anything. d

NATHAN 17

Drought in the Midwest Joey De Jesus

a road-killed barn cat stiff in the 4-way stop marks a zero between axes on a grid of cut corn—fodder now heaped near the wheel sheaves, the warm hood of the wheel dozer I was thinking: do more with less never mind the huskingtide, the mealies, rivulets of splintering mud the lime sludge lagoons from the hard water treatment plant, tomorrow’s evening scorcher or the blackhaw heatwave.

Cashcrop men cashed out on a bona fide bug buster.

Why should I care?

When men see other men falcate with hunger and think, leatherback him with cattle sinews and sumac, fasten his lariat, drag ‘em, dust in the gutter, after rifling through a bible in a church where men tirade trades of excess insecticide for a supercell.

I ask you, who will they come for when the old vein’s skipped a drip, dried up with the bees?

DE JESUS 18

ESSAY ON TIME I will never fit into the glass slippers, nor have many children nor live in a shoe.

When the bell tolls, the mouse runs away with the spoon, the spoon.

You should never tease a weasel because teasing isn’t brawn, glory, or gold. I’m two-time green medalist in homo existential illuminus and in the olde days “workshoppe” meant the place where cobblers mended Red Shoes, singing “What a beautiful pussy you are you are!”

Then Zeus ran away with the swan. I’m seduced by red shoes, like my mother and daughter— genetic footprint, our excellent X traced with charcoal on vellum for the cobbler to shape the soul the foot fits. Maybe he borrowed time to carve his original workshop from the original slab of rock.

“Dear Sarah, the paper says it’s over 60º in Rome—I imagine you bought some flowers at the market.

I know I would love to spend a few days there with you. Love, Mom.” I’ve been searching forever for a footling that fits this little brown shoe. I sailed away for a year and a day in a flowerboat made by an owl. “Dear Sarah, I hope you find the place where children are made out of shells.

Why not be a mystic writer?”

Workshop used to be where the monkey chased the dragon. The cobbler, the baker, the candlestick maker. Adoration of the mystic lamb. “Dear Sarah, did you know that Uncle Art was an Olympic diver?” My first time diving off the high dive was also my last and no thanks about the high five, I’m high enough. “Gianni the driver will be waiting with your name, then much happiness will come.” No detective can locate the antidote for baptism, or the path of the pee of God. Never pees standing up. Never tease the weather, Mama. “Dear Mama, The animal inside me is a cat FOX 20

Sarah Fox

with eyes like the big yellow moon and claws like the stars in the sky and fur like the dark sea and that is the animal inside me.

Merchant’s Tavern Nicollet Mall, March 24, 2000.” Merchants and Bedouins and the very-most mystic of all the Cowboys and Indians. “I have been waiting forever to be a father in the form of a hole.

I am living proof of what I was and have nothing to be embarrassed about.”

And three blind mice, Lady Madonna, see how they run. I see March blaze in like a lion, O Holy See, because once upon a “March 25, 2000—Dear Nora, Happy Birthday! I wish you were here.

I threw 200 lire w/ face of Maria Montessori into the Trevi Fountain and buried your hand at Sopra Minerva. Someday we’ll go to Ostia, we’ll ‘see the sea.’”

But where oh where has my little shoe gone? Take the form of an old Indian Legend because this book is the property of your mother.

“Not your toad mother, my friend,” murmured the Buffalo Skull.

“Dear Sarah I’m sorry you’re not in a good way if I insulted you or hurt your feelings I am very sorry I miss you I love it when you’re her.”

Doesn’t everyone want to feel better, a little relief? Want to crush the people who try to be dead but can’t organize? The weasel thought the cobbler’s face looked wrecked and hideous, fat and awful.

The cobbler felt that God must be telling him something.

“Dear Sarah I hope this will not be too intrusive to your period of silence but I wanted to share with you an unusual experience I had at Mass this morning.” Dearly beloved, at the apartment you will find Mr. Honey the keyholder releasing your latest illusion; in the interim I presume you are already having sex.

The most magickal thing you can do FOX 21

is to die. I do not do drugs I am drugs.

“Dear Nora, do you remember the elfin violin man in Piazza Navona? Don’t forget to practice! Is Daddy getting used to our boathouse, does he like Minneapolis? Lucia and Gio say, Salve Piccola Bellissima!”

Mr. Honey had sex with Mrs. Peacock’s illusion after finally understanding how to break bread together. “I immediately thought of the strong and powerful Jeremiah trustfully carrying my little girl over all those fences. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, he is like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season but stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth.” In the movie, my father was so smart he made snails and whales and puppy dog tails. Thank Heaven for little girls. “Dear Mama, Why did you get mad at me on the phone? I’m sorry. We had fun in Duluth.” A reading from the Book of Jeremiah: Lord hear our prayer, slower and slower, seek with all your heart— surely it is I who sent you into exile oh funny face, if you really want to think about super expensive weather and whether anyone will even be home, or decent, when Mr. Honey arrives.

What form will you tell your parents you are?

Why does everyone have to eat something?

Isn’t a swimming elephant always beautiful?

My toad mother shows no distress but still bears fruit. “I am so sad. I hope I will talk to you soon. I feel Dad’s presence in the energy of early July.” Please do not under-estimate the importance of a proper burial. “For the Rite of Christian Burial, we need at least a locke of his hair.”

Gepetto only wanted a real boy to perfectly fit the little brown shoes he had cobbled, capisci? (Just nod— when we con-spire, we breathe together.)

Any old cobbler could get you back on your feet again. Any old codger, badger, coonface. “I will never stop spilling my oil until the shoe fits, FOX 22

until you wear it, until we both wear the most exquisite of shoes, the very shiniest mystics we are we are.”

I accidentally served my father’s last supper, cherries (his favorite)—just constantly treats and kisses and singing, constantly ice cream and hot cross buns and peace pipes, blackbirds baked in a pie and little maids all in a row.

“Mon cheri.” “More cherries!” I helped him hold the bowl against his mouth so he could spit the pits—then, he could no longer comprehend how to be eating, but he wouldn’t let go of the bowl of cherries. I could not loosen his grip, his crooked pinky.

He could not stay awake to live any longer, which is to say that his gaze ran away with his father on the horse Jeremiah. And so I silenced myself in the form of a terrible angel for whom horses appear, singing “whatever will be will be.”

God I wish everyone would be quiet.

People, we’ve got a guy dying in here! A former child desperate to find fumes and fun again! Nobody hears the body’s 3-D death tricks and so your job remains the same—look homeward, go to bed, call me in the morning.

Commit the crime. Keep it down.

People, we’ve got a colicky baby in here! Love it, love the earth and the landlubbers, the original rattling milk well. Love the tower and your toad mother as much as you ought. Imagine there’s no hunter doing all your dirty deeds dirt cheap.

Imagine how one door opens and another shuts—a form of pageantry. “I don’t know if this will have any pertinence to you but the connection with Jeremiah is obvious so I send it because I care very much.”

Thus says the Lord. “Love, Dad.” FOX 23

ESSAY ON MY MEMORY Sarah Fox

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / and tell sad stories of the death of kings…

—from Richard II Dudes, how did I end up surrounded by so many cocks? Who let the witch out of the Dictionary of Symbols? “W is for witch,” my grandmother said when I was little and she was a widow. She wore slacks, drank Manhattans, exhaled storm clouds through her prickly nostrils. She was “dark Irish,” they said. I’m a white girl a white lie. I always remember her asking the waitress if she knew “how to make a Manhattan.”

What’s a Manhattan? Cherries? Or was it bourbon old-fashioneds, “with water”?

“W” is for water and for Woman. Wants.

Wet. Window. Where. Waits. Wearily wearily wearily wearily life is but an old-fashioned nightmare where wicked women wager over a mirror mirror in the well, if you swallow my babies I’ll never tell.

Because: wife, wife, don’t ever tell anyone how you got that bruise. Once I flaunted a shiner, in memory of my feelings.

Hush little baby don’t say a word. I was wearing a wife costume, I forgot my name. Once I was pinned down in a forest of cars and punched punched punched punched punched & punched, he kept punching the wife face—who never “fell while dancing,” there was no “car accident” or any kind FOX 24

of “wishing well.” I threw legitimate lire into the Trevi Fountain when in Rome, but lire don’t count for nothing now.

In the Dictionary of Symbols’ entry for “Rome,” it is written: “see also Tower and Father.” I have seen them, came, conquered, etc.

Some Towers fill with water from the welling of aquifers.

The Roman aqueducts are famously both ancient & still servicing the people of Rome as well as scholars of aqueducts, poets, and memory technicians. Well-water reflects all the bruises of youth, and selfobsessed gods or self-selected selves. I’m not a black Irish witch in real life despite what the Tower says. The opposite of Tower is Well.

I can see all the land from the top of this tower and the tiny people, or are those goats. God is dead when you rise above the herd, where Lord, Ruler, Father, Bluebeard, Law, Hand, Victory—all rolled into one—can be yours for the mere price of your heart. Thus sang the witch who lives in the well and is real.

The Tower is an archetype for catastrophe. It must be very painful to sacrifice your heart. To fear the dark substance in the well from which ghosts and kings and witches and bruises all equally arise.

Oh well. My grandmother was a black Irish widow with Alzheimer’s when she, of all people, looked me in the eyes, searched their wells for her whiskered dementia, her oxygen tubes and gaze-terror, for watery husband-shadows crouching in the cold pools of her womb.

We became one in the median where tower meets well when she said, “You’ve got to leave that son of a bitch.” She was the only one who believed there was never any car accident (she hadn’t really knocked her hip on the banister), nobody tripped over any pregnant belly, or rattled your little skull and ear bones, your soundscape, to make it seem for a moment that you mightn’t be born after all. That you’d end up on the death raft with the others.

FOX 25

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men (king-kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o) Can’t put babies back together again (king-kong kitchie kitchie ki-me-o) She said, “don’t ever look back and here’s a thousand dollars.

Now can you please get me out of this Japanese prison?” Alzheimer’s, they say, is a memory disservice, depending on how you look at it, or prefer to remember or not remember. She remembered how to order bourbon old-fashioneds, how to coast when you’re leaving your husband and to wear slacks. She liked things just so, as, some might say, do I, especially in this Water Tower, some might say nesting, as if pregnant and preparing a good-enough manger for the coming babe. Nesting might be compromised if you’re getting your face kicked-in, but for me that’s all water under the Tower—I left the bloodied wife costume in the kitchen on my way out the door with my baby under my arm and a little black witch in the corner of my eye. But Towers—you just never know. I’m sitting in this one merely thinking, most of the time, about all the things I’ll be sorry for, all the smoke in its eye and soot and the bruise, for whatever it is that isn’t really true that I’m sorry to say I can’t seem to fathom. For the Rome I’m in when I’m not really in Rome and the babies taking a lifetime to drown down below. When in Towers… This one lured me up to the attic of its mind where I found dead flies clumped to the piles of wife on the floor, and a small wooden chair where a father sat. It was my father, I think, or my baby’s father; it was my mother’s father and my grandmother’s father, and anyone’s dead old father dusted over and whispering—I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…

I wanted to say “I’m sorry too,” but I was afraid it would make him stop before everyone else had heard him. I wish you could hear him! Can you?

Excerpted from The First Flag by Sarah Fox, by permission of Coffee House Press. © 2013 Sarah Fox

FOX 26

Intersections Wing Young Huie These six photographs span thirty-two years, with the earliest taken just eight blocks from the most recent.

Chicago Avenue & Lake Street was the first best street photo I ever took. I may not have taken a better one since. I was fresh off a one-week workshop with the celebrated street photographer Garry Winogrand, who was a genius at surreptitiously rendering his subjects.

My inclination for several years after was to emulate the inimitable master before finally settling into my own idiosyncratic approach.

Since then I’ve photographed thousands of strangers, but for the most part have talked to the subjects first.

On that day in 1981, however, while crossing perhaps the most trafficked urban corner in Minnesota, I held my camera to my eye, got off one frame, and kept on walking, my furtive actions unbeknownst to those now frozen on film.

The drama of the intersection has been a leitmotif throughout my photographic projects. Intersections are the soul of the city. In the urban core they are the democratic gathering spaces where one crosses paths with those whom might otherwise be avoided. Their four corners congregate shifting cultural islands that we glimpse or ignore as we scurry from place to place.

They are the in between places.

Interesting to analyze in a photograph how people waiting in public situate themselves in relationship with others in the intersectional landscape. What are the multitude of interpretations we infer in those spa-

tial distances and stances? And how much of what we view in a photograph has to do with the viewer rather than what is viewed? How much of how we see is personal? Cultural? Political? Societal? To me, the more meanings a photograph suggests the more successful the photograph.

Which means you usually have to take a lot. I took several rolls as I followed the Aluminum Collector for half a day as she went about her daily job, while also tape-recording conversations with her. I am a selftaught photographer. My formal training though is in journalism, and I often write about the people I photograph. It’s been a long time since I was a general assignment reporter for the Minnesota Daily at the University of Minnesota, but I am still a kind of journalist.

I had seen her in the dead of winter carrying cans balanced on a pole as though she were coming back from the market in her native Cambodia. She does it for the money ($16 on a good day) and because it gives her purpose. But it’s hard work and her legs are bruised from the rocks kids throw at her.

Her daughter is amazed that her mother never seems to get sick, even though she eats very little. I took this photo shortly after a brief rest under the shade of the McDonald’s arches where she pulled out her lunch— a small plastic baggy containing a few green leaves.

Later, when I showed her the pictures she shook her head, kind of laughed, and said, “Too thin. I used to be much prettier.”

Featured photos: Street Fair, Fargo, North Dakota (1999) [28] Street Corner, Frogtown, Minnesota (1993) [29] Bus Stop, 38th Street & Chicago Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2013) [30] Chicago Avenue & Lake Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota (circa 1981) [32] Aluminum Collector, Lake Street, Minnesota (1998) [33] Bus Shelter, Franklin Avenue, Minnesota (2007) [34]

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HUIE 30

HUIE 31

Losing Thomas Jolene Brink

His death was not a practice fall.

Not unlike pages blown out of reach down a long hallway, or the echo of a phone ringing across the ocean.

The first time it rang his mother put down her tea and rose from the kitchen table.

Inside the static a stranger explained how Himalayan trails follow the Ganges, and volunteers were sweeping the river but there was no body there.

Nothing but cracked morning sun scrapping rocks and roots, and the edge where he slipped— still clinging to earth.

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Sugar Smoke, 1953 John Flynn We scavenged sugar beets by trunkfuls later to discover only member growers could sell beets to the sugar beet plant.

Later on, they called it North Side, long before the railroad tracks rusted and decayed like the North Side of Chicago, or Minneapolis, but not Fargo.

But it was just North Moorhead then, out by the beet plant, from which the pall of acrid smoke quilted black the fallow onion fields.

And made it tough for the mare and the kids and the calves to breathe.

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Bridget Apfeld

I was home after a stint at the Peshtigo mill, fortyseven of us told our work making paper was exemplary but we were no longer necessary, so sorry, sometimes these things happen, and so what could you do when the union rolled over and took it and the machines kept running, running? I was twenty-four and tired, and I had forgotten what it meant to hear the trains wail as they cut through moon-soaked fields, to hang my head out of the car window and howl into the night and lick the cold air deep in the black of first morning. So I shook hands at the noon bell, pocketed my company gloves and cutters, and caught the bus down to Black River. Five hours spent watching out the dust-grimed window as fir and pine thinned into bluejoint and wheatgrass, lakes drained into rivers, moraines rose and kettles dipped. The bus pulled up at Marquette and 4th and I stepped down stiffly onto the salted sidewalk.

The street was empty and gray and it felt familiar, thin and stretched out into something colorless and smokescented. Cars slogged by aimlessly in the street slush and faint in the distance I could hear the freights’ low thunder, rolling in the ravines.

My sister Laurie came to pick me up, touched my shoulder and grabbed my backpack. I have to go back to work at two, she said, the game’s on and Sarah took off today, and I noticed fine lines around her eyes and the raw-meat redness of her hands. How is Joe? I asked, and she chewed her cheek. Dee is a handful, she said, but what three-year-old isn’t? as if I wouldn’t notice the switch. We settled into the Ford and drove too quickly down 53, waiting for the turnoff onto County Y and the dirt lane home. We were silent together for a while. I let familiarity grow back up again between us, not wanting to push Laurie too hard. My older sister did not respond well to insistence, growing shy

Venison

The first deer was called in by Todd Mueller two counties over in Moose Junction, near where the river ladles up around the pine forest and wells out from the Saint Croix. The deer had good color, gave off the right signs while it browsed incautiously in the thatch-bare trees. Eight points, perfect symmetry. He’d brought it down easy, Todd said, it practically walked up to him and begged for it, but when he’d strung it from the garage rafters and made the long slit he knew something was wrong. There wasn’t enough, he said to the DNR people, just not enough inside, and they knew what he meant. They tagged the ear and made a call and said vague things about being back soon. They wrapped the deer in a tarp and drove it away, and Todd’s dogs rattled the chain-link fence and yawped shrill with hunger.

and then vicious if she saw a threat. How is Mom? I asked, pressing thumbprints onto the fogged window, and she said fine, same as always, Grandpa’s there with her now. I glanced over at her chapped hands and dry hair and thought about how much time she used to spend in strange rituals behind locked bathroom doors when we were younger, yammering out of tune to songs screamed by punkish girl bands telling her to fuck them all. She had been a bad liar, though, always.

Her eyes were rimmed and her clothes black, but her nails had been candy-floss pink.

Laurie turned sharply onto the dirt lane marked by the fading red mailbox, and we drove up toward the gray-shingled house. Plastic toddler toys scattered the lawn and trailed up onto the porch, sweeping low and wide across the front of the house, while the weathervane spun idly in the breeze: a rooster, spinning and spinning, north and south. A few strands of cracked Christmas lights hung limply from the fence–forgotten leftovers. I haven’t told Mom you’re home, Laurie said, will you go get Dee? So I got out of the car and walked through the dirt up to the house and went in, while Laurie leaned against the station wagon and smoked.

The front hallway was dim and windowless, and absorbed the sound of my footsteps into the cedar siding covered in pictures tacked with rusting nails: Laurie peeping shyly out from a pile of leaves; my father and mother, unsmiling, on the front porch; my awkward attempts at a careless grin. Mom? I called, and a small body came running out of the kitchen down the hall, hurled itself at my shins. Dee, I said, where’s your Grandma? and she looked grimly up at me. I wiped a film of dirt off her chin and let her stand on my feet. We clomped together into the kitchen, Dee clinging tightly to my thumbs, toes hooked into my boot laces, and I faced my mother at the kitchen table.

Laurie wants Dee, I said, can she go with her today? My mother looked up at me and frowned. Mike, she said, what about the mill? The timing was wrong, I said, and hoisted Dee into my arms. The light was soft in the kitchen, and my mother seemed small and kind in it. It was still while she sat without speaking, and Dee was warm on my chest, and I thought that maybe I would stay for a while. Is Joe there? my mother asked. I shrugged and Dee tugged on my ears. She can take her, I guess, my mother finally said and I raised my eyebrows but she had turned away. I carried Dee to the door and asked, where are your shoes? and Dee just looked at me, and I rooted through the closet and found her tiny coat and hat but no boots, so I stuffed her thin arms into the sleeves and forced down the hat and hoped her socks would stay on. Laurie looked surprised when we both came out.

I was going to leave in a minute, she said, put Dee in the car. I strapped Dee into the back and leaned down to Laurie’s window. Is Joe at home? I asked, and her eyes were flat and mean when she said, he’s doing fine now, Dee needs him. The Ford kicked up dust as it sped down the lane, and I stood in the yard under the frantic weathervane and wanted to cry.

Your grandfather wants to see you, my mother said when I pulled off my boots in the kitchen. She made her lips tight and thin, and looked away into a spot on the wall close to the doorframe, so I knew she was thinking about Laurie. Faces change but expressions do not, and I had catalogued my mother long ago, tucked away for cautious consultation. I pulled out a stool and sat down next to her, watched her nervous fingers run circles around a mug. I waited for one to catch on the chip in the rim and weep into the coffee, but it never did. Old hands, strange and beloved. Mom, I said, Dee will be fine, I’ll go check up on them tomorrow. He’s out back, she said, I’ll make you chili how you like it.

She turned from the wall and looked at me. I could see Laurie in her, and Dee also, and maybe even myself if I wanted to, and I thought it was a mystery that the lines on her face cut deeper in me than anything I knew. The clock ticked on the wall, and we sat in the amber-lit kitchen, quiet. Mike, my mother said, and I nodded and stood, slipped my boots back on.

Dee will be fine, my mother said to the table, to her hands, you were fine, and I zipped up my jacket and left into the building cold.

The second deer was spotted in the fog on the west banks of the Namekagon, stepping with careful hoof in and out of the shadowed ferns. Mary Becker, who swore she saw it, said it looked thinner than the trees it stood behind, dipped its head too often. Like its head was too heavy, she said to the check-out girl at Otto’s Wine Cask. When she told her story people scuffed their boots and looked away embarrassed, and when they drove up to search for it they found no trace, nothing but the mist and the dripping pines. Too light to make a mark, Mary said, and thought it must mean something.

He sat huddled small and thin in the old barn amidst the rusted debris of dead and desiccated machinery, thin light filtering through the vaulted loft to highlight dust and cobweb, iridescent and perfect.

Stacks of timber and maple lined the walls, old chair legs and basket reeds littered the floor. I breathed in deep and slow, absorbing the passing of time that hid in the chinks in the walls and scuttled sideways un-

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der the floorboards. The barn had always smelled like wood shavings and something much older, something rooted deep into the loam: rotting willows by the river, abandoned cars with seats stained sweet with lovers’ sweat. I looked around. Broken machines, cast-off tools, scraps of wood–there was sadness in the barn.

It had grown smaller. But other shadows lingered too.

Fear, hot and bitter, swelled beneath my tongue though the screaming machines were motionless and I was no longer a child watching sick and breathless while my father put his hand closer and closer to the table saw, steady though his eyes swam red. I’ll stop in time, he would say, and he did every time. Nothing ever happened, each time we went to the barn. I was still nervous there, though, saws and axes and blades dull now but gleaming in my mind. I kept my hands in my pockets, away from edges.

My grandfather rested at the work bench and picked through a pile of bent nails. The mill? he asked, and I shook my head. No luck, I said, and examined an auger. My grandfather looked down and sorted, one by one the nails divided, and his hands were precise and clean. He spoke. The whole of the question is, he said, why are you here again? The auger was cool and its twists were smooth and I thought of jamming it down into the table, cleaving the wood deep. Sometimes, I said, things don’t work out. Nails clinked. Your cousin John’s working down in Madison, he said, and I said, that’s nice for him. We always knew he’d do well, my grandfather said, and I wondered what they’d known about me. Joe is back, I said, and my grandfather stopped sorting for a moment, then said, yes, I know.

You don’t care? I said, quite sure the auger in my hands was going to fly from my pulsing fingers and bury itself in the wall. The barn was silent, no more nails moving, just wood dust wafting into piles like wave-washed sand with our every breath. Sometimes there is nothing that can be done, my grandfather said finally, and I turned from the bench to leave before the auger furrowed into his heart.

I paused at the sliding door and picked a chunk from the frame. I thought maybe this was how things disappeared, splinter by splinter. Do you even love her?

I asked him, and his chin was set hard when he said, your mother was fine.

It was Erik Olson and his nephew who found the next one. They’d been perched up in their stand out near the Oconomowoc plains and had sighted it stumbling through the brush. Wait, Erik had said to the boy, but the gun had fired anyway and the geese whirled up in confusion. The swell of Indian grass billowed out from them when they picked their way toward the

deer, and Erik had bitten his tongue when he saw the legs still twitching. He had not wanted to use the knife.

You must never make them suffer, he said to his nephew, and had let the boy look away when the red life poured out. When they came to collect it, they asked Erik how he had known to call and he just shrugged.

It was the smell, he said, it was already dead. And they had carted it away, and the nephew watched the body thump in the back of the truck.

Down near the crook of the river where the I-90 trailed off into nothing and a lone hill cast long draping shadows were the bones of a failed dairy farm, and there I went in the early morning to punt old glass milk bottles in the concrete caverns of the barns and blot out the silos with my thumb. The rich musk of the animals still lingered on the chill air and the ghostly sound of cows lowing wove around the barn. I walked along the edge of the feeding trough, balancing on high for the invisible crowd, and wondered if they had been happy here. Laurie had always been terrified of the cows and their precarious mass but I had loved them and their sad eyes, one look could send a shivering seriousness into your jellied bones. See how much we do for you? they seemed to say, we give everything and we are content to give, are you not satisfied?

I jumped off the trough and scuffed aimlessly at the random wisps of hay and alfalfa still covering the floor in sparse clumps, remembering Laurie’s frightened shrieks when one Halloween we had opened the front door and been greeted by a herd of felt-cloth cows proffering hollow plastic pumpkins. Our father had laughed and twitched her braid and told her not to be scared, and my head had hurt thinking about how Laurie would push her dresser against our bedroom door at night. Just in case. I still knew how to exit the windows in our house more quickly than the doors.

Sometimes now my mother’s voice would startle me because I had so few memories of her ever using it when we were young. Just quick flashes of conversations overheard on the dark staircase that I learned to understand far too soon. Don’t go out to Gilly’s tonight. A pushed-back chair. Don’t tell me what to do, or more often Did I ask you to speak? And always my grandfather’s voice in the silent echo, you bring this on yourself, child. Don’t think about it. My father, braggart and bully, too-fast driver and sullen scrapyard worker, picker of locks and cheerful seller of things that were not his, he was the thing under the bed that forced us to make the long leap from the door so our feet never touched the floor. But I had loved to stand in the bathroom doorway and watch him shave and hope for those wonderful mornings when he would lather my

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face and scrape it all off with the side of his toothbrush; I would ride proud with him to the scrap piles and beg to be allowed to pick just one mysterious object from the rusting treasure trove. My father, builder of fires and treehouses, teller of tales and sometimes-owner of the world’s softest beard. My idol worshiped with my own blood. Then one day I came home after school and stubbed out a cigarette on the clean kitchen floor with my shoe. My mother saw me do it and said nothing, just looked at me with cow eyes, and I had stared at her in disgust and thought how weak she was. And then I had gone into the bathroom and thrown up with the shame, and resolved to hate my father.

How easy he had made it for me, and how hard.

I had been fifteen, watching angrily as Laurie slid casually into cars with boys to do strange shut-eyed things I ached for, and our grandfather had called our mother and said, he’s been caught. Our Father who art in prison, they whispered in the school hallways when we passed, hallowed be thy chain. And I had gone that night to the old skeleton farm and thrown bottles at the silo wall, from the joy and the pain of it, to hear something smash and pretend that might help.

There were still bottle shards at the base of the silo, sharing space with cigarette butts and sad-looking condoms and other broken, rusted relics, and I kicked through them as I walked back to my mother’s car. I needed to go ask Laurie where Dee’s boots were, why her child would learn the feel of rock and gravel on her soft soles; I wanted to know how Laurie could let her grow into a girl who ran coltish in the fields and slipped into cars with boys because the bed of a pickup was warmer than November wind on bare feet. I wanted Dee to be fine in a way I sensed Laurie had not been. The engine coughed dryly before it caught and I thought I should stop by the repair shop. The wheatgrass rattled in the wind as I pulled out onto the County ZZ, and I knew there were no boots.

Heard about the deer? Josh Feller asked from under the hood of the car. I shook my head and said, no, something wrong? He let the hood drop and wiped his hands on a rag and said, they’re turning up funny, the DNR’s been up a few times, all very quiet. Epidemic, maybe. That’s odd, I said, and fished a twenty out of my pocket and gave it to Josh. He nodded in thanks and wandered back to the garage.

Laurie smiled when she saw me through the screen door but did not open it, and I had to ask if I could go in. Oh yeah, sure, she said, not hiding the furrow in her brow fast enough, though she let me push by as she held the door open. The house was

dark and smelled of burnt soup, and I tripped over a plastic horse when I tried to walk forward. It neighed shrilly under my foot. Is Joe home? I asked, and Laurie nodded, heading through the house toward the back porch while I followed. He’s sleeping, she said, outside is better, and we stepped through the back door out onto the peeling deck. Dee sat in the dirt a few yards off, bundled tightly in her puffed-up coat, where she scratched patterns into the ground with a stick while humming happily to herself. The sandbox nearby was filled with a thin sludge, and I supposed it had been there for months. Laurie and I sat on plastic chairs and she lit up, folding her arms tightly across her chest. I breathed in deeply the smell of her smoke and listened to the delicate shiver of the few remaining maple leaves against the roof of the house. Laurie brushed a strand of hair behind her ear with her long, rough fingers and I looked at her bitten-down nails and felt a strange tenderness for her.

Laurie, I said, when did Joe come back? She took a long drag from her cigarette and I saw that she stiffened her shoulders. Three, four weeks ago? she said, he called and said he’d be in the area, could he stay with us, and I didn’t see why not. She stared into nowhere and I said, you didn’t see why not? She looked at me sharply. He’s Dee’s father, she said, he has a right to be here. He gave that up, I said, and she shook her head.

I need him, Laurie said, he’s going to change, and I wanted to hit her because her cowardice made me cruel, but Dee was there. We sat and watched Dee play in the dirt for a while, and I could hear the huff of the freight trains nearby.

Well, what about you? Laurie asked, and I said, I quit. Sure, she snorted, and I’m the queen of Sheba.

We smiled at each other, willing to be kind again, and she stretched over and tapped my foot with hers. Got a girl? she asked, and my ears burned to think of the scratches down my back. My sister laughed and flicked her cigarette into a bucket near her chair where it twisted down into the muddied rainwater. Just don’t knock her up, she said, and I looked at Dee and hoped she couldn’t hear us.

Good advice, Joe said, suddenly leaning against the porch door, wish she’d given it to me. He stood bare-chested in the cold, proving some point, and I said, hey Joe, back again? He nodded and moved behind Laurie’s chair, twisting her hair idly between his fingers. I did not like him touching my sister’s corntassel hair, and looked away. Peshtigo didn’t work out?

Joe asked me, and I said no, did Wausau not do it for you? Joe barked a laugh and pulled over an empty chair. More opportunities here, he said, more connections. Dee’s small voice floated over to us, nonsense

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words and short snatches of phrases, and Joe frowned.

He looked over at me. The mill really so hard to stay at? he said, raising an eyebrow. A tightness in the back of my neck tingled, and I considered the communion of fist and cheekbone. Laurie sucked in her breath through her nose before I said no, Laurie, Joe’s right, it isn’t that difficult to keep a job, really. So, I continued, want to set me up with something where you’re at? A wind chime rattled in the trees in the silence that followed. Oh, Laurie didn’t tell me you weren’t working yet, I said, and when I turned to look at her Laurie’s eyes sang out fuck them all at me. None of her business, Joe said with a curl of lip that showed white teeth, and she doesn’t care anyway. He reached over and put a hand high on her thigh and Laurie did not move it, she smiled at him, and then I felt a thick anger at her and I wanted her to deserve the bruise I saw sketched on her wrist.

I stood and pushed back my chair. How long you going to be around? Laurie asked me, and I shrugged, stamped my feet in the chill. Dee looked up and I waved, and she lifted one small hand shortly before resuming digging. Tell your grandpa I say hey, Joe said, and I nodded without any intention of doing so.

I pushed the porch door open quickly and stepped through, looking back in time to see Joe snake his hand again through Laurie’s hair, holding her tightly.

She smiled, frightened, and I swallowed down shame for her and left.

The coyotes feasted that week in the prairie fields, two deer had gone down and now all that was left to find was bone, broken and bleaching in the emptiness of thistle and Queen Anne’s lace. Their victorious keening filled the air at night and we opened the windows to listen to their joy.

My grandfather stood at the workhorse and sketched plane lines on a board, and did not hear at first when I came in. I just went to Laurie’s, I said and he nodded, said, your mother told me. I stood behind him and watched his careful measuring, the strong sweep of the pencil across the wood. Dovetail joints, invisible notches. Things joining together, bound up by their own swell and stretch. Pass me the level, he said, and I said, why did you let it go on so long? He paused and considered. Because she could have done something, he said, it was not my place to interfere.

Our choices are our own. She was your daughter, I said, and he frowned and said, it was her life. So it’s the same for Laurie? I asked, and he was quiet while he drew. I folded my arms and said, then how about what’s fair?

Dee has no boots. It is not my place, my grandfather

said, and I said, it’s no one’s place, but you’re here. It won’t change anything, he said. The wood squeaked as he sketched out another line and said, life is not unjust, and I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. So you’re the judge of what is deserved? I asked, and he said to me, do you never feel the same? And I thought of my mother’s cow eyes and Laurie climbing into cars, and felt the vomit rise in my throat and so I said, Dee has no boots. But will you give them to her? my grandfather asked, and the cold lump grew in my stomach and I said, no.

Come outside with me, my grandfather said then, and we left the half-light of the barn and walked into the shadowy grove of paper birch and elm. I found it out back yesterday, he said, as we passed voiceless through the trees into the fields, wheatgrass and reed, tufted sedge and black-eyed susan staring brittle and betrayed. The sun was falling low on the horizon, and I could smell fog in the air. What did you find? I asked, afraid, and my grandfather said, you know. We stopped.

It was curled into the snowthistle under a manic cloud of bluebottles, legs splayed out where it had fallen and a faint covering of frost molding over what was left of the fur. The ribs jutted out, dune-like and ridged, and the fur was a sloughing patchwork of dry down, fluid to the touch. The hips looked broken. Chronic wasting? I asked my grandfather, and he stared and nodded, yes. He nudged the deer with a boot, dislodging flies into a perturbed frenzy. Waste of good meat, he said, and I considered the flies. We stared down and I asked, what causes it? and my grandfather said, nothing really causes it, no one thing. It’s from the inside out. Get the antlers, my grandfather said, and he stooped and took hold of the hind legs, shaking the stiffness out of them. I grabbed the rack and we lifted.

The crack as the neck broke made me think suddenly of wishbones, of Thanksgiving and cousins and jealous fights in rooms smelling of cedar and wine. The wishbone had made that same noise when Laurie and I closed our eyes and pulled and it snapped, only smaller. Very quick–no echo–but it stayed with you. It was so light, bone and tooth and fur. More delicate than it should be. I breathed in hard and my grandfather shook his head. Don’t think about it, he said, you can never think about it, and we carried the deer away.

The weathervane creaked above in the wind as I sat on our porch steps, watching eddies of dirt and dust sweep across the front lawn. The sky was scummed over with grayish clouds building to a head in the west, the temperature at the uncomfortable line between rain and snow. From where I sat I could smell

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the deer as it hung from the rusted basketball hoop, its rack gently scraping the ground beneath it like bony, loving fingers. I could remember a certain peace as a child that had come with knowing I would never escape them: deer draped on car roofs, trussed with jumpropes to ski racks, folded up in trunks, in back seats, in front seats, glassy eyes pointed in final worship to the sky and tongues poking out madly from slack jaws; the smell that lingered in trailers and cars and on jackets and under nails and in hair. They were always there: it was how it was, and how it would always be. But this was something I did not understand, this creeping diminishment that crawled beneath the skin. Did they know their doom when they ate and ate but became less and less, until one day their hearts gave one last anguished pulse and crumbled into ashes? Could they feel the death within them?

I picked idly at the cuff of my jacket and tried to untangle things as they were, Laurie and Dee and Joe, my mother and my father and my grandfather. It had been easier to leave, turn my face to the north and pretend I did not carry them with me, rotting in my guts and coiling up in my rancid, resigned breath. It would give me away eventually–was beginning even now, splintering in my bones and reeking from my pores. They had it too, the thing lodged deep inside that lurched forward in the fog, grinning with white teeth and sunken eyes. I could see it would be from the inside out, that we would decay into our own frothing slick and weep for forgiveness from each other and ourselves. But it would never come because it should not, not for us. There would be nothing for us in the end. d

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Lake Minnewawa Jenny Robertson

On land, my cousin always wins: Monopoly, foosball, arguments. I dream, am disorganized, I don’t like to fight. Our mothers float on air mattresses over our heads and give us the shallows. Buckets and shovels. The muck.

The Danmier boy growls by in his golden boat; I see muscles move under his brown skin and hope he will bring me later into deep water.

When we still, the minnows move in close, deciding, it seems, together, where they will go. When you’re small, safety trumps the autonomy of individuals.

In the same way, though we can’t see them, the leeches come: to bare legs, to summer soles, to the edges of our bathing suits. When we rise, they hang on us like punctuation: backslashes, exclamation points, parentheses.

My cousin’s howls bring back our mothers. From the cottage, down steep steps, the salt shaker. My cousin won’t use it—he is red-faced, a wailing siren— but I give my leeches coats of white and they bunch up, fall off, and die: angry dots.

Here is something I can do better: be still; do the necessary thing, not scream.

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Hologram Ed Bok Lee

Some nights I watch the anonymous, middleaged couple soaking in TV across the alley from my kitchen.

In college, a professor lectured on postmodern revisions of the mind

held hostage, trapped inside an Atlantis theme park constructed on white sand shipped in.

“Say our bodies are not even cells, atoms, or strings of energy, but projected reflections. . . ”

I didn’t understand why my father had left our family. Or why, at twenty-two, it should matter to me or my fiancée at the time. I see now over dim recycling bins,

two lovers whose nods, body language, even hair styles mirror the other’s unconsciously is a bad sign.

I’ll say it: they have a shallow understanding of what it means to be a selfindividuated human being.

I take it back: Of course she and I could have been happy. Sometimes we’re still riding that crabby Vespa through blue space to the beach.

Time shimmers

thin across the night’s wide sea. Far to some future city where

millions still await memory.

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John Colburn

wednesday july 4 1979 We perceived an enemy, outside of town, rising from the golf course. Objects fell from the sky wherever we walked. Not just snow and rain but fire, horses, teeth. A chant fell to our limbs, we tried to shake it out.

Cottonwood trees on Goat Island croaked names across the river. Older Brother said he would play a saxophone someday but I knew he wouldn’t. A crooked bank of clouds sang in the north. We sat in Older Brother’s yard and watched trampled grass stand back up. In the beginning there was no ocean, look at all the ocean now. Around us next lives made their shapes. I thought I should go back to the woods. Because what deep-eyed night cooked the earth. A cricket song entered my left leg. The enemy would fry us under hairy lamps. I should go back and dream the father’s dream or throw bread into the creek. Older Brother looked flat into the sky and said Hurry up. The enemy’s thin horn hovered. I said Into the earth, sweet thing to a beetle.

Each stone truly had thoughts. Each hour of light made doorways. Each rain shower remembered us and our names were only names of those moments. Fireworks exploded in the starred air above me. I was their child too.

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girls In our town girls appeared suddenly, maybe they were spirits. Diane and Rene let us hold their hands for a time.

We hoped our blue eyes haunted them. The playground fell to pieces, eaten by its slow god. We began to “hang out” by “back doors.” It didn’t involve talking. Did we think enough? The girls told us never to kill toads, toads were someone’s children. We walked by the river so dark, we hummed together the properties of time. Spirits roamed in brown light, there were two haunted buildings, snakes and turtles lived on Goat Island. A dog chose where to lie down. We watched cottonwood trees release seeds.

The green barbershop upholstery, the rusted cars behind the liquor store. We saw where to hide a magazine. Four hundred and seventy-nine people dreamt our town. Days rushed toward us. Diane and Rene walked as daughters in mangled light. We stood ramshackle and swaying on the bridge and looked into the woods. A leaf shone. I remembered a hoofbeat. Earth language had crept into us. Did we imagine we had walked through the woods? A cold tongue traveled the ground. The woods had walked through us. Diane and Rene shied from our sidelooks.

They laughed at us. Older Brother told them We saw vapors.

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historical Our town made itself into dream. Ripped up sidewalks and put down boardwalks; installed hitching posts for horses from the 1800s. It began to celebrate the lowly marigold. It raised a clean ghost. Packs of bikers blew through, evaporating us in their wake. Limestone walls spoke in a sea language. Someone gave the daughter a terrible flower. Our town took a wooden shed and made a covered bridge to Goat Island. The old stagecoach road, the brewery, the pony express: ruins resurfaced as the outline to a great reverie. Light arrived in other light, alive. What was beneath the church, or who. We could make our town duel time. Invent it. Older Brother wanted a girlfriend and a future. Our sky kept close as an eggshell. Maps pleased us by doing nothing, by not showing where spirits released their troubles. We found the types of light alive in woods, said they too were nameless. Our town lived twice. Trees blossomed then fruit made the blossoms go blind. Tourists would come, spilled from legendary buckets onto our earth. Historians would ring the bells but in the woods history meant nothing.

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kiss Where we kissed Diane, first one then the other, it was a contest, her hair caught on the rough brick of the post office, each brick alive. What was in the water, what surfaced. Where men in glass caves made twilight, someone chose you through a sea of human noise, walked by your house in summer, found out when practice ended, chose you by red thoughts in an unknown space of mind, someone unknown thought of you in the dark and you were unbelievably chosen to be kissed. Maybe someone said a prayer for the safe arrival of shy people through dangerous mountains, then the touch of kiss and from its spark I saw a future ghost in Diane’s hair waiting to be born, heard the words it used to bear flesh.

The other world could be anywhere, maybe the first person who died invented it. Our town seemed a mirage, a decrepit butterfly floating through the land of the dead.

The kiss developed in caves and found its way to our faces.

A tractor sounded from near fields, reached us and tried to strangle our kiss. Crayfish could be simple spirits. Was this the blue garden? Were we unknowing magicians?

Older Brother stood watching us. I forgot life on earth.

Excerpted from Invisible Daughter by John Colburn, by permission of firthFORTH Books, an imprint of Queen’s Ferry Press. © 2013 John Colburn

COLBURN 51

Big Medicine Justin Hocking

“Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it.”

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

1) The Slide (1982). My mother and I plummet down a twisting green tube, following fizzy, heavily chlorinated water as it jets up around corners, frontside and then backside, banking way up on the walls, bobsled-style, then disappears down a dip—and we plunge down after it. We bank up frontside again and all the way around in one final, funneling, corkscrewing turn, until the aperture of the world floods open with a burst of polychromatic summer light, clay-red mountains, an aquamarine diving board, white puffs of stratocumulus. We slip out, hang momentarily in midair before plunging feet-first into a square landing pool where it’s all bubbles and froth and clanky, crooked underwater sounds.

When I sprout up from the water, the first thing I see is our plumber.

He’s there, kneeling on the edge of the landing pool, staring at my mother. Stan or Phil or Gordon stitched on the lapel pocket of his blue, one-piece work uniform; his black military-issue glasses beaded with pool water.

Then I realize what he’s looking at, that the slide has somehow swallowed whole my mom’s bikini top.

Although she doesn’t realize it yet, not until others begin to stare as well, other mothers and their children and a very hairy, bearded man in a Speedo and the three teenage boys over by the diving boards who point and laugh. Until finally she looks down and shrieks, covers herself in horror, calls for the female lifeguard, who mercifully wraps her in a big towel and escorts us to the locker room.

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2) The Vapor Forest (1953). When my mother is eight years old, my grandparents send her and my uncle John from Missouri to Colorado, where they visit their Aunt Lilly and Uncle Phil in Glenwood Springs. Phil is the chief water engineer for the Western Slope of Colorado; on the long drive from the Denver airport up to Glenwood, he points out all the waterfalls and rivers, all the lakes and streams. He knows them by name: The South Platte, Clear Creek, Lake Dillon, Blue River, The Colorado, No Name Creek, as well as their flow rates, where their sources begin high in the mountains, up above tree level, and also which rivers and tributaries they feed into, some flowing all the way to the Sea of Cortez or the Gulf of Mexico. Their first night in town, Phil takes them to the Hot Springs Pool—the biggest pool my mother’s ever seen—located right along the Colorado River. It’s the middle of winter, cold and snowing heavily, but still they change into swimsuits and trot barefoot across frozen concrete to the water’s edge.

My mother remembers that first step into the pool as a sort of revelation, the way the hot water both stings and soothes her cold skin, how every nerve cell in her body tingles as she slowly immerses herself. Fully submerged, she finds herself surrounded by columns of steam, swirling thirty or forty feet up into the sky, a forest of vapor. Other bathers seem to just materialize out of the fog—Pentecostal smoke rising off the tops of their heads—then just as quickly disappear. When she lifts her own hand from the water, steam pours off her fingertips, like just-extinguished altar candles.

And she watches in awe as falling snow reflects on the water’s surface, creating the illusion of snowflakes rising from the pool’s bottom, ascending upward to meet their crystalline twins on the surface.

It is, at the time, one of the most beautiful and mysterious experiences of my mother’s life.

3) The Hot Pool. After the public viewing of her breasts, my mother is a little bit mortified. She has a sense of humor about it, but she’s also feeling tense, wondering how she’ll ever face her plumber again, and whether her new bikini top will ever actually be located. So after changing into the one-piece she has in her club locker, she visits the one place that always makes her feel better when she’s tense or sad: the Hot Pool. The Hot Pool is the smaller of two pools at the Glenwood Springs Hot Springs pool—our local pool, the geographical and cultural centerpiece of Glenwood Springs, Colora-

do, and also our claim to fame in that it’s widely known as the World’s Largest Hot Springs Pool. Combined with the Cold Pool, the Glenwood Pool is roughly the length of a football field. And while a third the size of the Cold Pool, the Hot Pool is still like the largest hot tub you’ve ever seen. Unlike a hot tub, though, the water in the Hot Pool is full of what many claim to be healing minerals, and is heated naturally, by geothermal pockets hundreds of feet below ground. The Hot Pool is my mother’s home away from home; it’s the place where, after long days of skiing or teaching aerobics or being on her feet all day at the hospital, she brings her aching body to rest. Afterward, in the big white-tiled communal showers, she and her friends stand around naked, talking and laughing, and after an uptight Midwestern upbringing this helps her feel comfortable in her own skin. The Hot Pool is where she strikes up a conversation with a woman who invites her on a three-week bicycle trip down the Oregon Coast; my mother has never done anything like this, is not sure she can make it, but after so many days on the road, next to the fog-shrouded Pacific, she realizes she can do almost anything.

The Hot Pool is also the place where, just weeks after my parents decide to divorce, my mother and her psychologist friend make the final decision to attend a weeklong therapy intensive at the Lomi institute in Northern California. This being the ‘80s, they’re fed nothing but vegetables and made to sit through long encounter-group sessions, where participants are encouraged to challenge one another, to “help” themselves delve more deeply into their issues by pointing out every flaw and weakness. After an intense Aikido session, my mother plays hooky from afternoon group therapy, immerses her sore muscles in an outdoor hot tub. She’s joined there by a fellow participant, a massage therapist who rubs my mom’s tense shoulders. It’s here, in the water, that strange sensations start to wash over her. She begins breathing heavily; she feels close to blacking out; when she opens her eyes she finds her vision crowded with dark shadows, stars. The woman tells her to relax, close her eyes, keep breathing. Scared and unsure of what’s happening, my mother enters a kind of altered state, is transported to a dark place deep in her own body, a cramped space where she feels huddled, trapped, alone. But she slowly emerges from the dark place into light—she has a brief vision of her eight-year-old self in the Hot Springs Pool—and soon begins to feel unbound by the constraints of her own

HOCKING 53

body, like a hard shell cracking open, giving her this intense sense of openness, unity, oneness—not just with the women in the workshop, but with everything around her—sky, redwoods, ocean.

Afterward, as they dry off together, the massage therapist offers an explanation, says she believes my mother has just had a “spontaneous re-birthing experience.” My mother finds this idea a bit kooky, but she can’t deny that something has shifted, that she feels somehow reborn into her new life as a single woman.

4) Yampah. The Hot Springs Pool was originally known

by Native Americans as Yampah, meaning “Big Medicine.” The name refers to the root Perideridlia Gairdeneri that was used by Ute Indians as food and as a cough medicine or respiratory aid. The Blackfoot used Yampah as a Panacea. A “diviner” or medicine man would dig for it with a talisman such as a bear claw, then spray it on the ill. The Utes believed their namesake Yampah Hot Springs had similar healing qualities; they used it for hundreds if not thousands of years, until well after the arrival of Europeans. In fact, the entire town of Glenwood was settled mainly because of the Springs. At the turn of the century, during what some claim as the Golden Age of Mineral Spas, the Glenwood Hot Springs were among the most famous, and known at the time as the “Spa of the Rockies.” A sanitarium was built in town, drawing people from all over the country and the world, all of them seeking mineral cures for their ailments, including famous gunslinger Doc Holliday, who spent his final days in Glenwood before succumbing to tuberculosis. His alleged burial site is in an old graveyard on the hill above my former house; on weekends my friends and I would ride our bikes up and pay tribute. But the pool wasn’t just for the sick; even the immensely robust Teddy Roosevelt came for invigorating mineral baths. He spent so much time there that during his administration the Hotel Colorado, which overlooks the pool, became known as “the little White House of the West.”1 5) The Seven Wonders of Glenwood Springs, Colorado 1 The World’s Largest Hot Springs Pool 2 The Vapor Caves 3 The Colorado River 4 The Fairy Caves 5 Doc Holliday’s Grave 6 Mt. Sopris 7 Glenwood Canyon

6) The Stairwell. Once, when I’m seven, my father takes me to the Vapor Caves. Just across the street from the Hot Springs Pool, they’re heated by the same geothermal pockets. The Vapor Caves were also used ceremonially by the Ute Indians, for healing purposes and something akin to a sweat lodge, a place where boys shed their childhoods and emerged as adults, as warriors. The Vapor Caves have since developed into a day spa; a quaint, aboveground building houses tinkling fountains, a warm changing area and separate rooms for massage work or mud baths. But the Caves are still the main attraction; a long, dark concrete stairwell plunges down forty feet into the earth, then opens up into a series of dimly lit, steamy caves, the rocky walls lined with cement benches and a few cold water shower heads for cooling off when the heat becomes unbearable. Later, as an adult, I consider the Vapor Caves one of my favorite places in the world, but at age seven I find the idea of descending into the earth terrifying.

Despite my father’s patient coaching, I stand there at the top of the stairwell, peering into the hot darkness, refusing to go down.

7) Silence, Please. Along with healing properties, the Hot Springs Pool has a shadow side. A handful of fringe Christians complain that its shape too closely resembles a giant coffin—they claim that as the former site of pagan Indian rituals, it must be satanic. Then there’s the circular pool at the foot of the Hot Springs— the collection pool where untreated water bubbles up from the earth at 150 or 160 degrees. As a kid I’m oddly fascinated by this pool, by its pungent sulfur smell, by the technicolor algae that blooms beneath the bubbling surface, by the foreboding barbed-wire fence that surrounds it. And even more so by a story my father tells me once about a deer that jumped the fence and was boiled alive.

I’m reminded of this story years later, at a meditation retreat at Breitenbush Hot Springs, in Oregon, where I’ve just learned of David Foster Wallace’s death, and where I hear another story about a family that hiked to a remote hot springs, immersed their Oregonwhite bodies into water that felt comfortable at first.

Being unmanaged, though, the water in the springs suddenly heated up by thirty or forty degrees, inflicting them all with third degree burns, and nearly killing their youngest child.

Out in the far side of a grassy meadow at Breitenbush sits The Sanctuary Pool, where, unlike at the

1

A photograph in the lower floor of the Metropolitan Museum of History captured Roosevelt riding a horse on a bluff just across the Colorado River from the Hot Spring Pool, very near the hillside where I grew up.

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other ten or so pools, soakers are asked to observe total silence. But in the water, at nighttime, grieving over the death of one of my favorite authors, my mind is anything but silent. Having survived my own bout of severe depression and anxiety, I know this had something to do with Wallace’s death, how he was both blessed and cursed by such staggering amounts of language, by a disquieted mind.

These two stories—Wallace’s suicide and the hot springs accident—remain indivisibly linked for me, like a metaphor for depression, the way our wordscalding minds can deceive us.

8) The Vortex. During college in Boulder, I sometimes make the three-and-a-half-hour drive up to Glenwood Springs to visit my best friend, Gabriel Liston. Being a student and a painter, respectively, we don’t have money for the pool—nor do we want to mingle with so many tourists. So we pack up towels and swimsuits and walk along the railroad tracks to a place we call The Vortex. It’s a natural hot springs right on the rocky banks of the Colorado; it’d be too hot if not for the constant, cooling rush of river water. We strip off all our clothes and spread them carefully across the rocks, then lower ourselves in the pool. Sometimes, if the moon is full or close to full, you can lift your hand into the light, watch as it projects shadows onto the manifold vapors rising up from the Vortex, creating the illusion that you’re being held there by mysterious hands.

9) Eden. My roommate in Brooklyn, Paul Jacobsen, is also from Glenwood Springs. He was actually born in Brooklyn and lived there until he was twelve or so. But after his father moved to Glenwood, Paul followed him out west. He was done with the city, with all the chaos of New York public schools; he was ready to live in a place where he could ride his bike around without fear of getting it stolen, where he could learn to snowboard and afterward go swimming in the Hot Springs Pool.

While living together in Brooklyn, Paul works on a large painting, the canvas six feet wide and four feet tall. The execution is nearly photorealistic, but the composition is fantastical. The focal point is a natural hot springs—not developed like the Hot Springs Pool, but like some lesser-known pools outside of town, Penny Hot Springs or The Vortex. Congregating around the water are woodland creatures—rabbits and a speckled doe and two large black bears playfully wrestling near the edge. In the foreground a voluptuous blond wom-

an kneels on vibrant green grass, her naked backside facing the viewer, head turned to reveal the decadent, lusty way she’s devouring a piece of fruit.

10) Roman Bath. Early in my sixth grade year, my father moves to California. I decide to go with him, but only after finishing grade school. Being a twelve-yearold boy and needing my father, his leaving upsets me; I cross the days off my calendar until our next visit. I feel so anxious that I begin to experience chest pains, something that only mildly concerns my mother. She assures me it’s just stress, and then, despite the fact that she works multiple jobs to support us, she splurges on two-year-long passes for the Hot Springs Pool.

We make a pact to go at least three nights a week, after I’ve finished my homework and we’ve eaten our dinner. It’s usually dark by the time we arrive, and since most of the tourists have gone back to their hotels, it’s mostly just us locals. Everyone congregates here in the evenings, to swim laps, to soak, to socialize on the steps of the Hot Pool. Business deals are sealed here, marriage proposals. My mother’s friends are always there, along with their children, who are my friends. In this way the Hot Springs Pool is like an alpine version of an ancient Roman bath.

Despite swimming lessons, I never really figure out how to dive properly or do the crawl—and won’t until my thirties—but I can doggy paddle with the best of them, launch cannonballs and corkscrews off the low dive. Sometimes in the shallow end of the Cold Pool my friends and I play long, aimless games of Marco Polo or lift each other on our shoulders for slaphappy chicken fights.

Then my mother and I drive home, the car windows frosted, crisp winter moonlight reflecting off snow, the slight smell of sulfur lingering on our skin, headlights transforming the road-ice into sheets of gold and silver. But our bodies are still warm from the pool—even as we crawl into our beds, where, after so much time in earth-heated water, we drift easily into sleep. d

HOCKING 55

Changming Yuan

0 empty (for early indians?) no entry (to ancient chinese?) a placeholder definitely, between you and me nothing that can be anything except the wheel that keeps our civilization rolling a circle, squeezed to look taller and slenderer a shape, less round than a hole but it can suck in a whole world o that we were all living outside the zero

1 originated in the east a horizontal line kept moving towards the west point by point until it rose, standing straight like the axis of the earth to be identical with the first person singular with or with out a serif at the top with or without a support at the bottom until 1 and i became one and the same presenting itself as a unity one that is its own factorial its own square, its own cube, the identity For multiplicities, derived from tai chi or nothingness First of all there was, there has been

YUAN 56

SAVAGE 58

Let’s Just Get a Slogan An Interview with Christopher Kennedy

by J. Fossenbell

3 Fun Facts about Christopher Kennedy: 1. Mr. Kennedy didn’t start writing until his mid-20s, after a couple of failed attempts at community college.

2. Mr. Kennedy took on the prose-poem form because the “irregularity” of lineated verse began to trouble his mild case of OCD. That and the coerciveness of conventional autobiographical modes.

3. Mr. Kennedy wrote his favorite of his books, Trouble with the Machine, in just six weeks.

4. Oh, did we mention his name is Kennedy? And he has really cool handwriting.

Shortly after Election Day, 2012, Christopher Kennedy visited the University of Minnesota. In the midst of being shuttled from place to place and being forced to eat banquet food, read his poetry out loud, and consult with poets in our MFA program, dislocate arranged to have him taken to a “private office” for a little “conversation” about poetics, math, and recent politics.

I CAN STOP TAKING THE DRUG dislocate: I want to start with a few thematic questions. One of the threads that runs through your most recent book, Ennui Prophet [BOA Editions, 2011], is this idea of hopeless solipsism in the U.S. and the West in general.

If you step back, how real is this sense of a historic shift in terms of what’s going on in the U.S. today? Could it be just another example of negative exceptionalism, thinking this is the worst it’s ever been?

Christopher Kennedy: I think we always think that we’re the generation that’s going to see the end of the world, and that we may even be the generation that brings it about. There’s that fear, and I think it’s false; it’s just not the case. In some ways I think and I hope that I’m making fun of that notion, that it’s all doom and gloom and there’s no surviving it, or that we’re never going to recover from this. But I do think there’s a post-9/11 phenomenon in the idea that we were in this safe haven called the United States of America, which now no longer exists. And so any kind of normal fear has been exacerbated by that event. And then you have all these media outlets and social networking sites. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you can’t filter that, and if you’re just being bombarded—willingly bombarded by that kind of information—I think that can have a very negative effect and make you overlook that it’s human nature and people have done this for as long as there have been people. d: So would you say that maybe what’s different now is that the message-making mechanisms are so frenetic that we’re just feeding that back into ourselves again and again?

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CK: Yeah, and the thing is, you know, part of the issue of trying to write poetry in the 21st century, is that you want to write something that people are going to spend time with and ruminate about and absorb, and the culture is doing everything but that. It’s saying, process immediately, go on to the next thing, get through it, get to the next one. Whereas poetry hopefully is working against that in some way. On the other hand, I see poetic approaches that are embracing those technologies and I think those are interesting as well. So it’s not as if I want to say that poetry brings us back to a more idyllic, meditative state or time or place—it’s more that I’d like to think it can work with the culture to point things out to the culture and to slow it down a little bit. Information shouldn’t be fast food; you should be able to digest it and have something substantial and then make decisions about what the world is really like. If you take yourself off the grid a little bit, you can see it immediately. I notice I’m a little calmer and a little bit less afraid of my neighbors or whatever—like I’m taking a drug and it’s freaking me out a little bit, but then I can just stop. I can stop taking the drug and I’m okay. d: You said before that you’ve been inspired by absurdist writers such as Zbeignew Herbert and Daniil Kharms, who have written under conditions of political oppression, and that you attempted to impose your own sort of fascist regime on yourself to force a similar reliance on symbol. Beyond looking at it as a craft decision, I’m curious to know how much that political posture affects your work. Do you actually think in terms of oppression or political resistance?

CK: In a way, yes. I try to imagine, what if there really were a censor waiting outside your door to approve something? How would you get it past that censor and still be accessible to an audience that would understand what you’re trying to do and would get whatever coded message is in that metaphor or that analogy. To me it raised the stakes that you then have to think beyond pure description. So it’s creating tension for myself. And you know, it’s not that difficult to imagine a shift toward that. Actually, this most recent election was really a kind of a litmus test: were we going to go the right or were we going to stay moderate. And I think a lot of people were really fearful that we were going to go into this really dark place. d: You could say, though, that in a way you’re playing a kind of political make-believe with yourself. Do you view that as a possibly appropriative gesture?

CK: I think of it as, how do you honor that tradition, if you think of it in terms of oppressed peoples and how to exist as a dissident in a culture that takes dissidence very seriously? We’re in a culture where there’s a kind of ambivalence about it, and I find that unfortunate. I came of age at a time when there was a lot of social unrest and a lot of politicized people out there in the streets—literally out in the streets putting their lives at risk, and people being assassinated . . . I mean, it was a really tumultuous time. And then something happened, you know, and that stopped. And it’s not like I’m nostalgic for it, more like I want to keep that spirit alive and the embodiment of the notion that we should be calling into question things as much as possible and also we should be as precise as possible in how we present these social and cultural issues in literature. Finding the right metaphor might be a way of talking about something in a new enough way that somebody will look at an issue differently. Without being dogmatic—that’s the last thing I want to do. I mean, that’s one of the things that I love about those Eastern European writers is that they’re not dogmatic at all; they’re playful and everything seems kind of benign and then you realize no, this is really devastating. This is really dangerous what they’re doing. d: Here’s is a gimmicky question, because why not: four years from now, which living poet should run for president?

CK: Ha! Let me think . . . I’m thinking of so many different people, I’m trying to narrow it down . . . You know, I think if it came down to it, I would love to see somebody like Bill Knott. Because, you know, he’s just so fed up with everything that I would love to see him have that podium. I doubt that there are a lot of people who would support my positioning Bill as candidate for president, but I’d love to see it.

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WE KNOW THE SYMBOLS d: So changing directions a bit, in the poem “Personality Quiz,” the speaker claims at the very end to be “a dyslexic psychic, predicting the past.” What can you predict about our recent past?

CK: Hm. That it’s not as bleak as everybody thought, and that out of that sense of despair and concern, what got generated was actually a kind of optimism that I think we’ll see more of. I really do believe that that’s the case. d: You mentioned in your talk that two key phrases that are often associated with Ennui Prophet are “post-9/11 U.S.” and “Alzheimer’s disease.” Can you talk about the way both of these topical tags are related to memory?

CK: Yeah, I think the book in a lot of ways is about that sense of cultural amnesia, that because things come at you so quickly and don’t get processed on a very deep level, you don’t remember what happened a year ago or two years ago. It was amazing to me that within a year of Obama being elected, I was hearing pundits on television talking about how he had destroyed the economy. You know? And nobody challenging it. It just seemed bizarre to me, and yet it’s clearly what happens in a culture that is losing its collective memory. So when I saw my mother going through what she was going through, I felt like it was happening to the country at the same time. It was interesting because one of the things they would do for her therapy was show her a picture of Mount Rushmore and ask her to name the presidents, and she was able to do that. She was able to remember all these iconic American images. She knew those very well. But I’d walk in and she’d have to ask me who I was and I’d have to explain. And I thought, is that not a metaphor, that we know the symbols and what they’re supposed to represent but we don’t necessarily know the lives of the real people who are trying to live out this American dream or reality. d: In that way it’s like icons become both deeper and shallower than real things.

CK: Absolutely, and if you’re thinking in terms of symbols and what they represent and how that’s supposed to be a reality or something to aspire toward, you don’t want reality to get in the way. For a while we’ve been in that frame of mind; we don’t want reality in the way—it’s too painful, it’s too difficult. So let’s just get a slogan and a nice easily accessible notion of what we’re supposed to be as a people. And that’s why I think we saw people like Sarah Palin having an appeal, because she made it very simple. I’m a pitbull with lipstick. People liked that, and I can see why because it cuts through all that more complex notion of who we are historically as a country. And she was perfect for the right and the left; she became a symbol for both sides for exactly those reasons. I’m fascinated with those kinds of binary things that crop up. Obviously I like hybrid forms, so I like how things merge. Watching the political process unfold over the last twelve years or so has been pretty fascinating. d: Alice Fulton called your poems “wayward fables,” and said that they “create profane and absurd substitutes for the sacred.” I was considering your work in light of this comment and I see maybe a kind of embarrassed or suspicious notion of the sacred in some of your poems, like images of the Bible, for example, that crop up in a dark spotlight. What does the “sacred” mean to your poems? And would you agree with her that these are fables?

CK: I think in some cases, yeah, they’re definitely fables. That notion of the sacred is there because I grew up in a very religious family, and in a way I feel like a religious poet. What I mean is religion, and what comes of religion, is often this sense of morality that’s at play, but hopefully that undermines the sort of pretension associated with it. The sacred and the profane are the same to me in a lot of ways—it just depends on who’s holding the cards. I wouldn’t want to give anyone that kind of power, so I like to play with those notions. I grew up in a household that was churchgoing and I was in Catholic schools for a lot of years, so I saw a lot of contradictions. I can’t help but have that in the work.

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ANYTHING YOU WANT IT TO BE d: Let’s talk a little craft. I was interested by a recent worry voiced by Mark Doty [in the introduction to Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century] about the overuse of performative speech, particularly in prose poetry—something about the creation of a voice overshadowing the creation of an experience. I wondered if you talk about the performativity of your poems. Are they performances, and of what?

CK: That’s a really good question. I never think of myself as performative when I write. At all. But when I think about voice in my poems, I think, Oh yeah, there’s a definite sense of hearing this spoken. But I’m definitely writing for the page, and I’m also writing, even though not consciously initially about an event that’s taken place, it always ends up attaching itself to an event. But I’m not just trying to recreate an event as if to say I can show you what happened. I have the point of view that is the point of view you should be concerned with. Because I don’t think that’s possible. d: Speaking of point of view, I notice that a lot of your poems do contain an “I.” Is there any continuity to that “I”?

Is there a specific persona that pops up a lot in your poems?

CK: Instead of using second- or third-person, or, you know, some other means of distancing myself, I just tell myself “That I is not me” and work from there and see what I can get out of it. And then of course, I always come around to “Well, yeah, it is me.” . . . But you know, thank goodness I didn’t know that for a while. d: And is it usually a different “not me”?

CK: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it’s this sort of multiplicity of selves that play themselves out ultimately, and that’s where my interest level comes into its own right, like what aspect of myself is being portrayed through this particular persona? And, in doing that, I’m able—I hope—to find out more about myself than if I sit down with a fixed notion of what that “I” represents and then try and reinforce it in some way. d: I was thinking of a line you read last night in the poem about a lover who bakes his head for his beloved— something to the effect “I loved you in the moment you thought, but stopped the instant you lit the oven.” Do you ever love the thought of the poem and then you light the oven and suddenly stop loving it? How do you deal with that?

CK: Yes, absolutely. I think it’s every writer’s dilemma, that you have this idea of what you want the poem to be, and then in the execution you lose that impulse. And then how do you get back to it, and a lot of times you can’t.

What’s wonderful about writing is when you somehow discover where that is, and you find yourself having that epiphany in the process of going, “Oh, I actually am creating something that is the embodiment of that feeling or vague notion that I had.” It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it feels like you’ve really accomplished something. You want that sense of accomplishment, but you also know that probably you’re gonna fail. The execution is always gonna be a little less than what you imagine. d: So on that, how do you know when one of your own poems is finished? Or how do you know when it’s good?

CK: I don’t think I ever know when it’s good. I rely on other people for that. I’m a better reader of my own work than I used to be, but I still rely on a few people: my wife’s a good reader of my work, I have some friends whose opinions I trust implicitly, and I don’t have any qualms about showing them, and if they say, “Eh, it’s not really working,” I think, “Yeah, you’re right.” And if they say, “Oh, this is great, you’re done,” I’m not sure that it’s true, but I decide to trust it.

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d: Last night you read your poem “Word Problem,” so I feel the need to press the subject: How do you feel about word problems? Aren’t poems sort of the same thing?

CK: Yes, absolutely, but in a really good way. As opposed to math word problems, which just hurt me to think about them actually. They were the kind of thing at a time in my life when I was unsure about things and that seemed like almost a symbol for my insecurity. I really don’t understand this, and I don’t even know how to begin to even formulate the question to ask to learn how to interpret this properly. And so, when I wrote that poem, I was really thinking, “How do I create that sensation but not have it mean anything”—you know, there’s no answer to it, obviously. Then I thought, “Well, maybe that’s the whole point, is that there is an answer but we don’t know what it is, and that that’s what makes it terrifying in a way: that we know there’s a right answer, and there might be ones that are almost right” . . . that nervous energy that comes when you’re in a test situation and you’re going to be judged, whether or not you’re able to interpret something properly. d: Which is how a lot of people feel about poetry.

CK: Yeah, absolutely. You are absolutely gonna be judged. You have to lose that concern and just do what you can do well and hope that someone else will appreciate it. But not worry if there are those who don’t. d: Do you ever feel like you’re in a prose-poem box now? Is the form still liberating to you in its possibilities, or do you get bored with it?

CK: I do get bored with it, so then I change things. I try to do things that will make it seem less like a restrictive space and more like an open possibility that I can do with whatever I want. That’s the paradox of the form, is that there is no real form, yet it looks like it’s a paragraph and it looks like every other paragraph, so it’s both anonymous looking and also completely open to being anything you want it to be. That’s what I like about it. The thing is, how do you make sure you’re not boring people or boring yourself by having something that really looks like the thing that they just read before it? So I’ll change the margins and things like that to see if changing the shape changes how I feel about the poem. d: So as you’re considering the visual lengths of lines on the page, are you ever considering the line itself in a more conventional sense, controlling where the break ends up happening in relation to syntax?

CK: Yes, and I’ll reset the margin to make sure that it’s broken where I want it to be. If there needs to be some tension, just as there would be if I were delineating the poem, I’ll make sure that it ends on a strong noun or verb or something in order to heighten that, so that when you go back to the other margin, it’s resonating for the reader.

So in that respect, I’ve had people tell me, “Well that’s not really a prose poem then,” and they may be right. But it still looks like a prose poem. d: Do you know what shape your next book is going to take?

CK: I don’t. Like I said, I’ve been really playing with those margin issues and trying to write poems that really stand alone and are less persona-driven in some ways. I mean in a lot of these new poems the “I” is—well, I’m sort of acknowledging more directly that this is me. I’m writing not so much autobiographically but more realistically, I suppose. But still with a sense of letting in stuff that might be more absurd or surreal. d: Great. Thanks for talking with us. Have you had enough?

CK: Yeah, that’s good, thanks. d

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Contri BRIDGET APFELD is a senior English major at the University of Notre Dame, with previous publications in Re:Visions, Scholastic, and The Juggler literary journals. Bridget is from Mequon, Wisconsin.

Q: Where were you at the precise moment that you became a writer?

A: Hunched over a Windows 95 at one in the morning, fourteen years old, killing off a character because it was easier than another fifty pages.

BARRIE JEAN BORICH is the author of Body Geographic and My Lesbian Husband, is a faculty member at DePaul University and splits her time between Chicago and Minneapolis.

Q: Where are you?

A: I am in a plane, train, or bicycle. Or on foot.

JOLENE BRINK grew up wearing wool socks in northern Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Camas and Studio 1.

She lives near the Mississippi with her husband, John, and their cat-in-residence, Steve.

Q: Where are you?

A: I am heading for the woods.

JOHN COLBURN is the author of Invisible Daughter (firthFORTH Books) and the forthcoming Psychedelic Norway (Coffee House Books).

Q: How far do you have to go?

A: I have to go into my ancestors; they live inside rocks and trees.

VALERIE CUMMING is a freelance writer, teacher, and editor based in Columbus, Ohio. Her stories have appeared in more than a dozen publications, and she is currently at work on a novel.

Q: ?

A: I am from the suburbs. I don’t believe that any place else contains the number of secrets housed in the wide green lawns of suburbia.

JOEY DE JESUS holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. His poems have appeared in Antiphon, The Cortland Review, Kin, LUMINA, The Nervous Breakdown and Versal.

Q: How far do you have to go?

A: I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

JOHN FLYNN: “Mother and Sister Angela taught me letters.

I graduated university, became a carpenter and, over time, a writer, father, grandfather. I write every day. And read. And play. You might pin me to Minneapolis. But I have never been to where I’m from.”

Q: How far do you have?

A: I have miles to go.

SARAH FOX is the author of Because Why and The First Flag, from Coffee House Press. She co-enacts the Center of Visionary Poetics and also serves as a doula.

Q: Where were you at the precise moment that you changed the polarity of the gaze?

A: I was at MoMA and I was sitting with Marina Abramovic.

JUSTIN HOCKING is the Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, Oregon (www.iprc.org). His memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in early 2014. He has to drive 90 miles to reach the Pacific Ocean, which is 90 miles too many.

WING YOUNG HUIE’s many photographic projects reflect the complex cultural landscape of American society, much of it centered on the urban cores of his home state of Minnesota.

Q: Where were you at the precise moment that you decided to become a photographic artist?

A: I was at Film in the Cities at age 26 attending a photography workshop by the esteemed and restless Garry Winogrand.

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butors EMILY JERN-MILLER’s recent poems can be found in Yew, Fail Better, & Thirteen Myna Birds.

Q: How far do you have to go?

A: I am on my way to the post office.

CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY’s most recent book is Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd.). He is an Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Q: Where are you?

A: Lost in the middle of everywhere.

ED BOK LEE’s Whorled (Coffee House Press) won a 2012 American Book Award, and a Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Lee’s Real Karaoke People won a 2006 PEN/Open Book Award.

Q: Where are you?

A: Right now (33%). Right then (33%). In transit (33%).

PATRICK NATHAN is the Founding Editor of Mill City Bibliophile, an online literary review based in Minneapolis.

Q: Where are you?

A: Less, I hope, than halfway.

C.J. OPPERTHAUSER is a Michigander living and teaching in Ohio. He blogs at http://thicketsandthings.tumblr.com.

Q: How far do you have to go?

A: As far as two bad knees can weather.

JENNY ROBERTSON’s work has appeared in Dunes Review, Greatest Lakes Review, Cheekteeth, and Bite: An Anthology of Flash Fiction. She studies fiction at Pacific University.

Q: Where are you?

A: I’m running down the road wearing scuba gear and my high school track team is running beside me, cheering me on.

W. JACK SAVAGE is a retired broadcaster and educator and a native of St. Paul, Minnesota now living in Los Angeles. He is an actor, artist and writer and he and his wife Kathy are the parents of cat daughters: Stella and Cinny.

Q: ?

A: I was running down the Mount Wilson Trail in Sierra Madre and met my first rattlesnake. We both hung out on the trail for a while, the snake crawled off and I continued down the path....at once I knew, peace was at hand.

TERRELL JAMAL TERRY was born in Heidelberg, Germany and grew up in North Carolina and Texas. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse (online), Sou’wester, Coe Review, Curbside Splendor, and other journals.

Q: How far do you have to go?

A: I think I am somehow much closer and more remote from where I could see myself seeing.

BRIAN PHILLIP WHALEN is a PhD student at the University at Albany and has an MFA from Iowa State University.

His recent work appears in CutBank, Pank, and Rhino.

Q: How far do you have to go?

A: As far as the dog goes.

DR. ERNEST WILLIAMSON III has published poetry and visual art in over 400 national and international online and print journals. View over 1200 of Dr. Williamson’s paintings/ drawings on this website: www.yessy.com/budicegenius Q: Where are you?

A: Dr. Williamson operates out of New Jersey and New York.

CHANGMING YUAN, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of Allen Qing Yuan, holds a PhD in English, tutors in Vancouver, BC and has poetry appearing in nearly 700 literary publications worldwide.

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BRIDGET APFELD 1 Wisconsin BARRIE JEAN BORICH 2 Chicago/Minneapolis/in the location of a lower back tattoo JOLENE BRINK 3 my Grandpa’s farm with the Dethloff Slough (pronounced seh-lewe) and the old pine trees, Grand Rapids, Minnesota JOHN COLBURN 4 Mantorville, southern Minnesota VALERIE CUMMING 5 Columbus, Ohio JOEY DE JESUS 6 Ardsley, New York 11 EMILY JERN-MILLER on a postcard

JOHN FLYNN 7 Minneapolis

12 CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY Ryan and Sons Funeral Home

SARAH FOX 8 placenta/Rome

13 ED BOK LEE Almaty, Kazakstan

JUSTIN HOCKING 9 Portland, Oregon

14 PATRICK NATHAN Minneapolis

WING YOUNG HUIE 10 The Third Place Gallery, 3830 Chicago Avenue South, Studio B, South Minneapolis

15 C. J. OPPERTHAUSER Outside Detroit 16 JENNY ROBERTSON The Bobber Water Tower, Pequot Lakes, MN 17 W. JACK SAVAGE Monrovia, California 18 TERRELL JAMAL TERRY South Seattle 19 BRIAN PHILLIP WHALEN The dog 20 DR. ERNEST WILLIAMSON III New Jersey 21 CHANGMING YUAN Songzi Country, Hubei Province, PR China

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