Leland Quarterly, Vol. 3 Issue 2, Winter 2009

WINTER 2009 Winter 2009

ZEWDE

YERASWORK FRANK

GUAN MIRRA

SCHWARTZ ZACH

CHOTZENFREUND NATALIE

JABBAR

q 1

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LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

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QUARTERLY

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

W

Volume 3, Issue 2

Copyright 2009 by Leland Quarterly • Stanford University All Rights Reserved.

Giant Horse Printing • San Francisco EDITORIAL BOARD, WINTER 2009 Editors-In-Chief OTTO LEINSDORF, MICHELLE TRAUB

Senior Editors

REVTI GUPTA, JANET KIM, RUTH MCCANN, LINDSAY SELLERS

Associate Editors

ELISSA KARASIK, BRIAN LEWIS, MAX MCCLURE, MILES OSGOOD, GRAHAM TODD, NATHALIE TREPAGNIER

Art and Design Editor JANET KIM

Web Manager JADE WANG

Financial Manager LINDSAY SELLERS

Resident Cartoonist YUN LIANG

Advisor

JOSH TYREE

Special Thanks JOSH TYREE and TOM KEALEY for their continued support

hen my grandfather came to this country, his cousins were in the furniture business. “Up and down all those stairs, that’s tough,” my father tells me as we walk out of a 99-cent store in Bensonhurst. “He didn’t understand why he would do that work. He had a trade.” These days, talk of my future over dinner tends to wander from Korea to LSATs, from the Dow to sustainable agriculture. At school, in the midst of Muir, my father calls to say, “You’re at Stanford with all those nerds, you know, engineers or whatever, who may say they know what they’re doing with their lives, but that’s Mars and beyond on the Starship Enterprise.” Sitting on my futon under a typewritten sign that reads No Talk of the Future Here, I tap the crust of microwaved tea off the mug’s lip and watch the fragments hesitate in the air like gnats.

I ask the majors of Economics, at what point do I go to the bank, take out all of my money, and put it under the mattress? At what point, do I worry about sustenance? Post-Graduation existence seems increasingly theoretical. I’m not sure what future I’m looking for anymore. My friend has been working for over a year in Antarctica, and I ask him: Do you Google truth? He laughs, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by authenticity, hysterical Googling truth naked…”

When will we explore the mosaics in the abandoned subway stations? When will we harvest for the New Year? I frantically sculpt orange rinds in the Nevada desert, weld vertebrae in part-time studios, stash familial tintypes and polaroids in top-shelf first editions. Clinging to the potential and the unease, the hazy and the untranslated, between the cellular walls and beyond the event horizon, I rummage the present. I’ve never been mechanically inclined; my fingers tremble from cog to manual. I follow the written word with instinctual faith.

On a road trip through New Orleans, we listen to the funk of enduring generations and discuss the supersymmetry of elementary particles. For the journey, I wrap my laptop in burlap. I wear my sheepskin boots in preparation. Packing wool and propane, I find myself nourished by the panic, when what I really want is itemized on a to-do list: microscope, four-pound lobster, Pyrex, Alaska, and a mercury fountain.

“You can only put your pants on one leg at a time,” my father says, and to that, we toast. From pronoun to preposition, from interjection to interrobang, we page through the appendixes, attentively.

Leland Quarterly: A Statement on Literature, Culture, Art, and Politics is a general interest magazine that showcases the very best in Stanford University undergraduate art and writing.

–– MICHELLE TRAUB

Jin Yu

& the Editors of Leland

contents

ARTWORK

Cover, “rockin’”

FICTION

Functioning Society MIRRA SCHWARTZ

Princess Gets a Boyfriend ZACH CHOTZEN-FREUND

8 7 30

Meals for Three NATALIE JABBAR

16

CRITICISM

Infinite Zest FRANK GUAN

Back Cover

The Bones that Build Your Back

ADRIENNE CHUNG

Adrienne Chung

19

Starving on the North Side of McClure Pass

23

Forks

29

Desert Exhaling

CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Sara Sisun

POETRY

Amy Steinberg

Johaina Crisostomo

Will Geier

Stephanie Caro

(40), “Patience”

48 39

(27), “laugh”

(46), “Reflection”

The Weaver Jessica Cornwell

(43), “silencenoise”

CULTURE & SOCIETY

The Fool and the Schoolmaster Weep with Rapture

47

Epilogue to a Story

54

There is All This Still Unsaid

40

ZEWDE YERASWORK

(11), “Waiting”

Wyatt Hong

Adrienne Chung

Janina Motler

FACULTY INTERVIEW (16)

BENJAMIN MERRICK

(23)

Keith Ekiss talks to the LQ about inspiration, teaching, and writing to the heart of the poem (30), “Fashion”

(50), “Airport Loneliness”

(21)

24

(28), 'Lola in the Garden or Nuestra Senora de la Frontera”

(44)

(53)

(13), “Origin”

(54)

(8)

Jessica Cornwell Will Rogers

Mae RYan (14)

(7) (38)

Nehel Khanani

(36)

CONAN LIU

Sam Toh

The Bones that Build Your Back In maps I look for you, In myth, in frames, but mirrors I can watch you quietly, a subtle glance then wayward fall against The gravity of spine, the trail of bones that builds your back That twist and pull, the tides of water rolling endless under bridges The suspension pulling cables into latticeworks of song.

I can watch your neck, a steeple spiring white above those waters In a willowy sway, astray: a turret that hovers in cloud.

But to know you bone and sinew forming bridges unto steeples There is no truss I would not climb to see where you begin.

Adrienne Chung

6

will Rogers LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

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7

Benjamin Merrick

F Society unctioning

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LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

by MIrra Schwartz

“Fuck Big Boy Burgers,” Larry mumbles to himself as he tries to slam the door at yet another greasy fast food joint that has refused him a job. The slowing door mechanism prevents the satisfying slam that Larry had anticipated, so he forces it shut with his entire body. A mother with a small child entering the establishment looks at Larry with slit eyes and pulls her boy’s wrist, keeping him close to her body. Nothing is going as planned.

Shit, Larry thinks as he looks at his watch and blinks his eyes hard. There is no way he is going to make it on time to his appointment. He starts running towards the bus stop, but has to stop after a block because he’s winded and his pants keep inching down. Two blocks away from the bus station, he sees the 31 rush past him and stop, far out of his reach. He starts running again, flailing one arm in the air and using the other to hold up his drooping trousers.

Larry is still a block away when the bus pulls out.

Sometimes Larry catches himself thinking about how it used to be and how he never had to think about catching buses.

Larry looks down at his watch as he rides the elevator up to the fourth floor and brushes hard pieces of greased hair out of his eyes, exposing his pimpled forehead.

He is twenty-five minutes late. He squints at the bright florescent lighting as he makes his way over to cubicle 48A. “You are twenty-eight minutes late.” Officer Grabel states flatly as Larry sits down on the chair beside him. He recognizes the cold tin of the seat. “I missed the bus after my job interview,” Larry replies as he starts to bounce his knee furiously.

“You think I don’t know a liar when I see one?” Grabel asks calmly, keeping his eyes locked with Larry’s as he slaps his hand hard against Larry’s knee, steadying it. “This is strike two, Larry. Do you know what that means?” He doesn’t wait for Larry’s response. “Three strikes you’re out, Larry. I don’t want to hear your excuses. It’s my job to make sure you are transitioning successfully back into our functioning society.” Larry had heard that line at least seven times in the last two months from Grabel’s mouth. He must have had to memorize it at some parole officer orientation. “If I don’t feel that you are, you go right back to where you came from. You’re an adult. Am I right, Larry?

You are forty-eight years old. Now if you can’t find a job in the next week or two, we are going to have to seriously reevaluate how to handle this.”

Larry nods his head while his knee begins to thump hard against his clammy palms. He stares at the poster above Grabel’s head, the primary decoration of his soft cubicle held with purple pushpins.

“Everyone has a burden. What counts is how you carry it,” a golden retriever puppy states, a digitally forced smile reaching across his face and a colorful knapsack hanging from his shoulders.

“Now,” Grabel starts, opening a program on his computer, “Let’s get through these. Are you clean?”

“Yes.” “Have you been paying for sex?”

“No.” “Have you found a residence?”

“I suppose.”

“Yes or no, Larry? Come on, let’s get through this so both of us can go home.”

Larry leaves the office building and heads back to the Motel 6 on Fourteenth and South Van Ness. On the way, he picks up his regular fifth of Jack and sits on the sidewalk, nursing the bottle in its crumpled brown paper bag. Halfway through the bottle, he stumbles and inserts twenty-five cents for a newspaper at the corner. He cradles the newspaper in his arms, promising to look at the classifieds tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day everything will turn out as planned.

He clutches the newspaper close to him as he rings the bell for apartment #3.

A man opens the door immediately, as if he has been waiting around in the entrance hall all morning for someone to ring. His belly greets Larry before the rest of him, the buttons on his blue Hawaiian shirt straining to cover as much flesh as possible.

“You here for the job?” The man says in a startlingly high-pitched voice that makes Larry cringe. Larry nods, holding up the classified page with the fat man’s ad circled in green pen.

Misc. jobs around house. Must be reliable & quiet.

“Yep, there it is,” the man says to Larry in a sing-song voice usually reserved for small children or the mentally delayed.

“Right this way.” Larry follows the man into the apartment, holding the newspaper

in his right hand while he pushes open the closing door with his left. It takes a minute for his eyes to adjust to the new dimness after coming in from the fluorescently lit hallway.

The first thing that hits Larry is the smell. It’s a pungent, body smell, similar to the one at a strip club, but markedly less arousing in this environment than the last. Muttering and then the sound of laughter from a sitcom fill the room, and Larry realizes that the only brightness in the apartment is coming from the small TV in the far corner and the gray light filtering through the tightly closed blinds.

He is standing on disturbingly-crunchy shag carpeting in the middle of the living room. To his right is the kitchen, which is completely visible over the counter. Larry immediately notices three microwaves, each humming and heating items he can’t make out.

“It’s no palace,” the man says.

Larry’s eyes have finally adjusted to the lack of light, and he is immediately greeted with a picture of Jesus hanging on the wall directly before him. Larry suddenly realizes that all of the walls are slathered in pictures of Christ. Jesus on the cross, Jesus with the Virgin Mary, Jesus at the Last Supper, Jesus crying, Jesus smiling, Jesus with a crown of thorns, Jesus walking on water. On the far end of the living room, near the TV, is a glow-in-the-dark image of Jesus, his arms outspread, cursive font on either side of him glowing: “Jesus Lives.”

“My sister’s right over here,” the fat man’s high-pitched voice brings Larry back to reality. He is toddling over to the couch directly in front of the television.

“Hey,” the man says, “someone’s here for the job. His name’s--” There is an awkward pause and Larry realizes that the fat man is waiting for him to fill in the blank. “Larry,” Larry says quickly.

“It’s Larry.” The first thing Larry notices are her ankles. The bone near her bare foot protrudes hard like a tumor, the translucent skin stretching over it and exposing tiny blue swimming veins, crisscrossing over and over themselves like lots of miniscule tic-tac-toe boards. He brings his eyes up her body, tracing one particularly noticeable vein up to her thigh, the rest of her covered in a large men’s t-shirt, no pants. She looks vacantly at the television, her skinny arms out of proportion in comparison to the oversized

LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

9

shirt. Long, stringy, blond hair covers part of her face, her cheekbones protruding so far as to make her look like she must have a big smile on her face. Instead, her thin lips are gathered into a straight line, pursed together in concentration over whatever is on television.

“This is Rainey,” the fat man states.

Silence follows. Rainey does not draw her eyes from the television. Disembodied laughter fills the room, followed by silence.

One of the microwaves makes two short beeping noises, and then stops humming.

Rainey jumps up from the sofa, momentarily exposing more of her upper thigh. She runs across the room and opens the third microwave’s door, swinging it open and leaning into the cavity, breathing hard. Larry stays near the sofa, half watching Rainey’s skinny legs, illuminated by the microwave light, and half keeping his eye on the sitcom on the small television to his left.

“She does that,” the fat man says.

“You’ll get used to it.” He changes the channel to a football game and is suddenly glued. Larry continues to stand in the middle of the dim living room, waiting for something more to happen. Another microwave beeps, and Rainey immediately thrusts her face into the

machine.

“Hey,” the fat man beckons, “sit down.” He scoots over, making just enough room on the crowded love seat for the two of them. Larry squeezes in, trying to feel and be as small as possible. His back completely erect, he stares ahead at the football game.

“Look, man,” the man whispers into Larry’s ear as he turns up the television volume, “I’ve got to get out of here.” Larry can feel the man’s hot, moist breath on his ear and tries to create more distance between them, but is trapped by the unmoving armrest.

“She’s stopped eating,” the man says. “And I can’t handle all this religious bullshit. I feel like a fucking criminal when I pull off.

You know? All these Jesuses staring down at me. How far can one guy push himself?”

He pauses, looking up at the glow-in-thedark eyes staring back at him. “Look, I just need to get out of here, but I can’t just leave her. She forgets to eat unless you tell her.” Larry stares back at the man’s sister, humming something softly into the row of machines in the kitchen. “It’s a great deal, man. You stay here. Free food, free board.

Buy some groceries, Just make sure she eats. That’s it.”

“That’s it.” Larry repeats, thinking about Rainey’s body splayed out on the couch. “Great. You seem like a stand-up kind of guy. Like a guy who has a clean, clean-ish, record,” There is a pause. Larry looks at his hands. “I don’t want to know your past, man. We’ve all fucked up.

Can you start tomorrow?” the man asks fast, desperately.

He finds the key under the “Jesus Loves You” doormat, and slowly inserts it into the keyhole. A similar scene from the day before greets him as he enters, except the fat man is gone. It takes Larry another minute to adjust to the dim light, but soon sees Rainey standing in the kitchenette, in the same shirt as she was yesterday, her big eyes fixed upon him. Larry puts down his trash bag full of sparse belongings. “I could use some breakfast,” Larry says as she continues to stare him down.

“What do you have?” She steps aside, an emaciated Vanna White, and motions to the kitchen. One of the microwave clocks reads 3:30. “I guess it’s more like lunch time,” Larry says as he slips

10

LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

past her, sucking in his stomach as to make minimal contact with her body, squeezing tightly between the kitchen counter and her tall frame. An open can of tuna and half an onion sit inside the refrigerator. Inside the freezer are two fried-chicken Hungry Man dinners sitting on top of each other and an open bag of frozen peas. “Perfect.” Larry says, taking out the frozen dinners. He can feel Rainey’s eyes hot on his back as he pulls the meals from the cardboard boxes and places them in two of the three microwaves sitting on the sticky counter.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Rainey says calmly, putting her large bony hand on Larry’s and pushing him away from the microwave push buttons. “You can’t use these,” she explains. Her grip is tight around Larry’s wrist. “They’re mine.”

“There are three of them,” Larry replies, shaking her from his hand and motioning once more towards the microwave. “And I’m hungry.” Larry feels like he’s setting the scene. Letting her know who’s boss. “Now I don’t know what the fuck your deal is, but your brother hired me to make sure you eat and I--” As Larry’s finger touches the number 4, Rainey looks calmly at him and hits him hard across the face.

“I said no,” she says sternly, and Larry feels the sharp after-burn of her slap.

“I don’t know what your deal is,” she says, “but when you’re in my house you play by my rules. One wrong move and you’re out.”

She flips the switch on the oven to preheat it and sets each of the microwaves at different times with Pyrex measuring cups inside them. two minutes and forty-one seconds, fourteen minutes and seven seconds, fiftyfour seconds. She calmly saunters over to the couch. “You don’t touch my microwaves,” she says as she plops down, switching the channel to a soap opera.

Larry has no idea how to go about making these dinners in an oven. The last time he had even seen an oven was before he went to jail for the first time, back when he was thirteen and living in his thenstep-mother’s apartment in Wichita. He looks on the back of the box, but sees only instructions for microwave use. Rainey is lying on the couch, her legs splayed off to the side. He pushes both of the dinners back into the freezer and wanders into the living room, opening the blinds. Rainey gives him a look and continues to watch

Sam Toh, “Waiting” television. “Let’s get a little bit of light in--” He stops talking when he looks back at the room. With the light in the room the Jesus paraphernalia is overwhelming--the sheer number of sad, forgiving eyes make him feel claustrophobic and a little nauseous. He quickly turns around and draws the blinds, coolly comforted by the return to dimness.

One of the microwaves beeps and Rainey jumps up from the couch, almost skipping across the living room and into the kitchen, putting her head deep inside the microwave. She takes out the measuring cup, looking at the liquid inside. She laughs aloud, puts the cup back inside the microwave, and sets it off humming again, plugging another mysterious combination of numbers into the machine.

“Where am I going to be sleeping?”

Larry asks Rainey, half wondering and half wanting to pull away from the feeling still left in the air after their Hungry Man altercation.

She shrugs, making her way back into the living room.

“On the couch, I guess,” she says,

looking him straight in the eyes, motioning to the love seat which wouldn’t fit a sevenyear-old horizontally. As she sits back down, another of the microwaves beeps and she jumps up again, running back into the kitchen. She leans deep into the third microwave, whispering something while her head is inside. Larry fixates on the flattish curve of her ass in the spotted light.

He takes a seat on the couch and flips the channel. “So what do you do all day?” Larry asks, switching past a hair-plug infomercial.

“Days of Our Lives,” she replies, wandering back to the couch.

“What?”

“You’ve never heard of Days of Our Lives?” Rainey asks while looking at Larry’s blank face. “I like that,” she says. “I can show you a couple of things.”

Larry feels the twisting of a stomach growl as he leaves the apartment that evening and realizes that he hasn’t eaten anything all day. After walking halfway up the dimming

block, he heads into The Men’s Room on Eighteenth. He enters and takes a seat at the bar, collapsing into the weathered bar stool which is still warm from the last patron. His nostrils are forced to attention by the sharp synergy of cheap perfume and unwashed bodies. Grabbing at the bowl of peanuts in front of him and shoving the salty nuts into his mouth, he sits back and gazes at Cherry Pop and some new girl with blank eyes rubbing up against each other on the stage. Cherry Pop is wearing a tiny sequined thong and no bra, her mousebrown roots poking into her long blond locks, greasy from the early evening’s work. Droopy breasts cover most of her skinny abdomen, moving slowly, not in rhythm with fast-paced music. He asks for a beer from a skinny girl who can’t be too much over eighteen.

She brings him a Budweiser and as he takes the first gulp he lets out a deep breath, feels his shoulders relax and his scalp tingle. He smiles at the young waitress’ almost-exposed breasts and shoves a dollar bill between them. She gives him a sheepish smile and

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wanders over to the next customer, a skinny man with Disney’s Little Mermaid on his white t-shirt.

After running out and chugging a fifth of Jack from the corner store, Larry is back inside Rosa’s; his face feels hot and courageous. He beckons to Cherry Pop and since he is one of the last customers, she strides over to him. She stands on the table, her feet parallel with his face, toenails painted bright blue. “Don’t try any of your funny shit,” she says flatly as she slowly rotates her hips over Larry’s head, her eyes vacantly set on the clock above the luminescent exit sign. He sits quietly, staring up her legs to the juncture, watching the spot as she swings her hips. Before he realizes it, his hand is reaching between her legs, grabbing at her inner thigh and reaching underneath the sequined thong.

Cherry yelps and jumps away, but Larry has a strong hold on her leg and she falls over, landing with a loud smack and her legs splayed apart on the bar. Everyone is stunned. All that is audible for a few short seconds is the pulsating background music.

Larry stands up, feeling the beer and Jack swirl around inside his head, forcing him to close his eyes to adjust to his changing position. The bartender doesn’t say a word.

He heads straight to Larry and punches him hard in the stomach. Larry can’t breathe; all the air has been knocked out of his lungs and into the room. He feels the sticky carpet beneath him and he tastes vomit in his mouth. “Get out,” the bartender says flatly, giving Larry a sharp kick in the back.

That night, Larry feels his bruised rib with each inhale and each exhale as he ascends the stairs back to Rainey’s apartment.

“It comes on at 1:30, I think,” Larry says. “Yeah, yeah it must have been 1:30 because it was right after we came in from lunch count. I would sit next to the door so I could hear it from the guard’s handheld.

I’m telling you, Guiding Light has even more drama than this. Plus, listening to the radio is just, different. Different than having everything given to you like on television,” Larry says, feeling fair in his statement after watching two weeks worth of Days of Our Lives.

“I don’t believe it for a second,” Rainey says, jumping up to check on a microwave, “but I’ll try it if you say it’s that good.”

12

Larry sits on the carpet across from the radio and turns the AM stations, waiting for the familiar voices. 630 AM. “Bertha will you please put down a card! We know your luck so everyone brace yourselves!” a familiar voice booms from the radio.

Rainey sits next to him on the floor, her legs folded into herself, bony chin resting on bony knees. The television is off and the only light that fills the room is from the three humming microwaves.

Twenty minutes later, a microwave beeps. Larry leans to the side a bit, giving Rainey room to stand up and get past him into the kitchen. He looks at her. Rainey doesn’t move. She stays glued to the radio, eyes glazed and fingers relaxed, cradling her face. The second microwave beeps “ready” in simple Morse code. The two of them sit close, putting their ears near the tiny AM/FM radio, their faces illuminated softly, flaws smoothed by the yellow glow.

Rainey doesn’t get up to check until the commercial.

Today is the first day Larry will use the oven. He is sick of tuna sandwiches and those two Hungry Man dinners are still in the freezer, three weeks after he first laid his eyes on them. Larry sets the oven to 400-- a nice, round number. He takes the meals out of the boxes and puts them into the oven body.

The intervals between the microwave checks are getting longer and longer.

A microwave beeps while a used car commercial screams from the radio. Rainey groans and pushes herself from the floor, begrudgingly making her way over to the kitchen. An indentation is left in the shag carpeting marking her spot. “Half of my next dinner says that Michelle is cheating on Darren,” she says as she opens the microwave door. “I mean, it’s like what you were saying before: “once a cheater, always a--“ “Why do you do that?” Larry interrupts softly, testing the waters. He leans forward and turns down the radio.

“What are you doing? Turn it back up!” she says from within the cavern.

When he doesn’t, Rainey takes her head out from the microwave. “Come on, Larry, turn it back up. The commercial’s about to end.” She is holding the water-filled Pyrex cup.

“Why do you do that?” Larry repeats,

LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

looking down at the boiling water in the Pyrex glass in Rainey’s hands. She looks down at the linoleum on the kitchen floor.

“Because I have to.” She replies as she pours the hot water into the sink and refills the cup with cool tap water.

“No one has to do what you’re doing.” Larry says. “You’re sticking your head inside a microwave. You’re heating up water in glass pitchers and pouring the hot water down the sink.”

“I am fully aware of what I am doing. He chose me to do this, Larry.”

“Who chose you?” Larry asks, looking at the bobble-head Jesus on the coffee table and already knowing the answer.

Rainey smoothes back her hair, looking straight ahead, fixating on something Larry can’t see. He looks at her for a moment, eyes softening, then turns back towards the radio set, shaking his head.

“I pity you,” she says. Larry turns around to see Rainey standing directly behind the sofa, looking down at him as if he were an armless child.

“Goes both ways, sweetheart,” Larry replies, turning the radio back up, wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead.

“But I know I’m needed,” Rainey says smiling, placing her delicately bruised hand on Larry’s shoulder and looking up at her Jesus with arms outstretched. Larry looks back at her sunken eyes, a full-grown woman who hasn’t left the house in weeks.

“I know that without me, the world would crumble.”

“Something’s burning.”

As the words leave his mouth Larry can smell it. The industrial smell of burning plastic reminds him of the years he spent inside making license plate holder after license plate holder, pouring the molten material into metal molds and hearing the satisfying drying pop when they were finished.

Both of them stand dumbfounded, watching the kitchen fill with deep black smoke rising steadily from the oven. The smoke looks like an illustration against the light of the microwaves.

Rainey snaps out of her mesmerized trance and runs screaming into the kitchen, attempting to bat away the smoke. “Help me!” she screams, trying to pull the first microwave from its extensive crossed extension cord circuitry. “Larry! Please

help me!’ She gets it free and brings it towards the living room, tears streaming from her face as the black smoke threatens suffocation. The fire alarm goes off and the small sprinklers above start to rain tiny droplets of hard water. Larry forges into the kitchen, grabbing the other microwave and pulling it hard from its outlet. Everything is blurry and his throat is raw and his eyes are

stinging and leaking and his ears are twisted with loud human and machine screams.

Smoke fills the entire apartment and he falls to the ground, holding the microwave in his arms. He can smell the inside of his lungs burning as he inches towards the doorway, cradling the microwave.

Once he is out the door he runs downstairs and gulps the early evening air

while coughing up his lungs. The bright sun outside the building makes his temples throb. Tears pouring from his eyes, Larry looks around at the neighbors, all standing a safe distance from him. Rainey isn’t outside and the microwave is still hot inside Larry’s arms. L

Conan Liu, “ORIGIN” LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

13

Starving on the North Side of McClure Pass Mama Colorado says a band of cicadas plays Cat Stevens every night in her head.

They’re half a key sharp, always, she says.

I ask her what song and she hums “The Wind.”

The bench we share outside the General Store has one loose leg, I’ve come to tell her that Keiko has died.

A giant tumor hidden in the silver fur of her neck, I’m supposed to say, and they had to come put her down.

But instead I listen to her hum the same tune over and over as we wobble back and forth watching the mouth of the quarry swallow, voraciously,

her insufficient notes.

And I peel paint chips from the wooden feather on Totem Joe’s headdress.

She gently scratches my knee with dirty crusted fingernails like I’m Keiko and this is any afternoon of theirs.

There is nothing here.

We sit outside the General Store and this is what I want to tell the black Mercedes that kicks dirt and shavings from discarded marble blocks,

cut and abandoned by the quarry, in our faces.

The tourists come before the snow does because they know they don’t belong, And Mama Colorado whistles for Keiko to come nip at their heels, and scare them deeper, from the mouth to the throat of the quarry.

The calloused paws don’t respond and she lines her face with concern, twirling wisps of wiry gray hairs that escape from her single braid and humming,

slower and softer now.

Marble dust returns to its sleep on the semi-frozen ground.

The forecast will soon say snow forever but snow is a lot louder and so I think they mean marble dust.

All I can hear are tone-deaf cicadas and so they must mean marble dust.

Mama Colorado says the quarry is empty. It’s an eggshell with the yoke dynamited out.

Rusted orange cranes came to decide this is pure and this is white, she said, perfect for our monuments and our sculptures,

A ‘Tomb of the Unknowns!’ they cried.

with echoes of themselves thrown at them by the quarry in self-defense

and they’ll run, terrified and red-faced, right on out of here.

But the quarry still coughs enough dust to pad the ground before the snow and to cake and dry the inside of my nose chalking math equations in iron oxide on the tree bark and smelling of crushed freshwater pearls

or raw sulphur

ready to be sprinkled like a cardamom garnish on holiday desserts next to cut rectangular blocks of marble in a field

of starving Christmas trees.

The fringe on Mama Colorado’s grey sweater hangs far below her hands and she looks wise, like a storm cloud weighing over a mountain peak.

She stops her humming.

No more cicadas? I ask.

No. Now it’s a goddam army of crickets, she says.

I fed the cicadas to the quarry, she said, and Mama Colorado asks me what I’ll feed it.

I take her hand from my knee and hold the edge of her stretched sweater We walk down the road to a broken fence where Keiko curls around herself on a mound of cold dirt.

She lies at the bed of a browning Pine tree, but the afternoon wind is brushing her fur in the wrong direction like a feather caught on a branch and she does not fight it.

We pick her up and walk to the mouth of the quarry And back into the throat And down into the stomach And leave her where our breaths linger and float like small ghosts escaping our chests to hide in the rock.

I hear minerals squeeze water droplets that slip and explode so slow.

I hear crunching tires and crisp shouts that slice open the marble so fast.

Mama Colorado takes my hand and I think she wants to leave, but we just stand and inhale and exhale the cold shivers of dying organs.

AMY STEINBERG

I think that one day the orange cranes and their polished-shoe people will want to botox it all when it sags and wilts from sun damage and the tattooed names of war veterans.

And they will come back to scratch and tap the inside of the quarry for younger stone, but instead they’ll be smacked

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LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009 15 Mae Ryan

CREATIVE NONFICTION

MEALS for

ThREE

By Natalie Jabbar

benjamin merrick

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LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

Watch, little child She stands on a step-stool in a sunlit kitchen in Damascus, watching her grandmother’s pale hands fashion food for a family of ten. Although her grandmother tries to shoo her away, the bird-like sixyear-old perches at the old woman’s side everyday, straining her small neck to catch every motion. She learns how to pluck the feathers from a chicken, how to blend chickpeas into hummus, how to burrow walnuts into fresh dates.

As the girl grows older, her grandmother sends her to do the shopping and she pumps her knobby knees to the local butcher and the outdoor vegetable market down the street. She returns home slowly, arms spilling with peppers, with eggplants, with nuts, with bright red meat wrapped in clean, white paper.

No longer needing a step-stool, she hovers by her grandmother every day until she leaves to boarding school, absorbing the motions and learning the ingredients that will soon form the recipes of her future.

What is the recipe for love?

My mother encounters my father in the summer of 1985. At the age of thirtyfive, she has decided to make the permanent move from the Middle East to the Bay Area to study education. When she walks up to a dusty Toyota dealership on El Camino Real in search of a new car, she finds a curlyhaired salesman welcoming her at the door.

After they exchange hellos, she recognizes something familiar in him.

“Where are you from?” she asks in Arabic, assuming he will understand.

“Lebanon,” he replies back, trading his learned English for his native tongue.

“You don’t look Lebanese. You’re Iraqi,” she blurts back immediately.

“How...did you know that?” A blush pushes through his dark, craggy skin. He has been living in America since his freshman year of college and has grown used to people not having any conception of his birthplace.

At 42 years old, he has long since decided that it is easier to offer an answer that people might understand.

“You can’t fool a fellow Arab,” she responds, her sharp black eyes smiling as she slowly scans his face.

Although she doesn’t end up buying the car from the charming car salesman, she remembers him a few weeks later when

she needs the signature of an Arab in order to renew her old passport. He agrees and she invites him over to her apartment for a simple meal to thank him for the favor.

Hummus blended to garlicky perfection. Warm pita bread. Tangy bean salad. Rice that is slightly burned at the bottom of the pan. In Iraq, they call the burnt bits hokoka but my father just calls it love. Her “simple” meal tastes better than anything he has eaten in years. Looking around her tidy kitchen, he notices that there are no cookbooks to be seen, no recipes strewn across the counter. This is a woman who cooks by heart.

When he goes home later that night to the girlfriend he has been living with for five years, he can only think about the meal he just had and the woman who made it. He remembers the way her tight, pale cheeks folded into a bright smile each time she slid a new dish onto the table.

“I have a life to live with this woman I just met,” he finds himself admitting to his soon to be ex-girlfriend.

My parents get married four months later on January 29, 1986.

A leafy lunch Soon after their marriage, my mother, pregnant, rises early in the morning and makes my father’s lunch. She presses her swelling stomach against the kitchen counter as she leans over the cutting board to slice a tomato for his sandwich. She slips the food into a brown paper bag and writes, “Have a nice day” punctuated with a smiley face on the outside. In this way, she goes to work with him.

Summer fades into fall. As the leaves parachute to the ground, I am growing inside of my mother’s womb. I like to kick her hello in the morning as she bends over to pick up fallen leaves from the driveway. She writes short love poems along their veins and places them in my father’s lunchbox.

She thinks it’s important to feed his soul. He has been lost for a long time.

Colostrum and Cuisinarts My mom breastfeeds me for eleven months. She is very proud of this fact and likes to use it as scientific justification for pretty much anything.

“Your daughter is so healthy,” my doctors say.

“Well, I breastfed her for eleven

months, you know.”

“Your daughter is so intelligent,” my teachers marvel.

“Well, I breastfed her for eleven months, you know.”

“You and your daughter are so close,” her friends chime.

“Well….

The first real word that gurgles out of my tiny mouth is not “mom,” but haleeb, the Arabic word for milk. I speak the soft syllables to summon my mom to me when I need her the most. When she tries to gives me a bottle of formula, I screw up my face and refuse the tainted goods. When she offers me a bottle of her own milk, I accept it. Even as a baby, I know that my mother’s food will always be better.

After my mom finds a sliver of glass in a jar of Gerber’s mashed peas, she calls them to complain because she considers herself “a consumer advocate.”

The company sends her coupons but that cooing baby-face label will never be seen on the pantry shelves again. I will not be a Gerber Baby. Instead, she invests in a mini Cuisinart and blends her own brand of baby cuisine for me. At one-year-old, I have already experienced more vegetables than some will taste in a lifetime.

The ties that bind The three of us sit down to breakfast every morning before my dad goes off to work at the car dealership which he now owns. When he returns from work, we always sit down at the table for a homemade dinner. In between bites, my mom asks us about our days. She starts with me, and I ramble out the tiny details of my day as she continues eating. She tries to ask my father questions, but he would much rather chew than answer, so she turns back to me after he says a few words. I am more than willing to talk with my mouth half-full.

At the end of meals, my father and I traditionally chime an Iraqi saying he has taught me.

“Ashe-ayadiki,” we say to my mother as she swoops down on the table to clear the plates. Bless your hands.

“Shukran,” she smiles back. Thank you.

Even after she starts up an educational toy company and works as many hours as my father, if not more, she still manages to feed us every morning and every night. This

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sounds a lot like a ’50s sitcom, except it’s not. I am allowed to leave the table before my father finishes eating and my mother never wears an apron and still never, ever cracks open a cookbook.

Sunny Solstices Everything tastes better in the summertime when my mother brings the life of our garden to our mouths. Onion bread laced with rosemary from the herb patch.

Tart apples boiled with brown sugar and cinnamon and drizzled over French vanilla ice cream. Fleshy figs, little loquats, and sweet strawberries swirled into compote.

Baby zucchinis stuffed with rice and ground lamb meat. Bowls of bing cherries that we eat until our lips are stained dark red.

On bright afternoons, I play outside while my mom works her magic in the kitchen. Sometimes my dad pushes me on the garden swing, pressing his palms against my bony back so that I can ascend higher than my knees can take me. He leaves me and goes to pick an orange from our tree, unpeeling it on his way back while I try to pump higher without him. As I feel myself losing momentum, he begins pushing me again with one, distracted hand. He eats the orange with the other hand, occasionally placing a slice into my laughing mouth as I descend from the sky. Even though he is pushing me away from him, this is the closest we will ever be.

Weekend mornings On Saturdays, my dad makes breakfast. He wakes me up early to embark on our exciting expedition, scooping me out of bed and carrying me towards the garage. I float through the house in his arms, weightless until we reach the car. When he lowers me, I climb into the passenger seat, curling up in my cotton pajamas and closing my eyes again as he starts the engine.

At La Boulangerie, I pick out a dozen donuts dotted with fluorescent sprinkles and several pastries, pregnant with chocolate or fruits. When we return home, my mother removes the pastries from their baby pink bakery box and cuts each one into three parts.

“We have to be fair,” she likes to say as she places the pieces onto our plates.

After breakfast, my dad either dozes off or disappears somewhere. He has done his duty for the day. My mom then takes me

18

to the Farmer’s Market, where she weaves through the stands with purpose as I follow her sandaled feet. She lets go of my hand to gently squeeze some peaches or rub a cantaloupe before holding it up to her nose.

I hold my breath as she laughs and lingers with the fish vendors, trying to find the freshest pick of the day.

On the drive home, the leathery scent of my mom’s sedan is masked by a curious blend of citrus, salmon and fresh flowers.

I love the smell of Saturday mornings.

The moment we arrive home, she pours the produce onto the gray granite of the kitchen counter and begins to wash each fruit and vegetable, one by one. Every so often, she summons me from a nearby couch, where I am absorbed in a book.

“Come look at this eggplant, Natalie,” she gasps. “Isn’t it beautiful?” “…Sure, mom,” I reply. I never quite understand what she’s talking about, but I want so badly to see what she does.

I carry your heart with me No matter how busy she gets with work, my mom prepares my lunchbox every morning. While my little comrades stand in the cafeteria line or peel the sweaty plastic from their Lunchables, I stare into my lovingly packed mini-Igloo, trying to decide what to eat first. It is different every day. Hummus stuffed into triangles of pita.

Homemade fruit cups. Pesto pasta salad.

Sugary rings of dried pineapple. Celery stick logs lined with chunky peanut butter and raisins. A savory sample of mixed nuts.

Cream cheese and raspberry jelly pressed between two pieces of whole wheat bread.

She has somehow mastered the art of making healthy food delicious.

She sharpies “Be Good” onto my white paper napkins and draws two smilie faces underneath the inky letters. In this way, she comes to school with me every day for most of my life.

A missing ingredient When the car business proves less than lucrative, my father abandons it and becomes a different sort of businessman, a “financial consultant,” he tells me. I don’t really know what that means except that he’s not around as much anymore. He leaves to Geneva, Switzerland to embark on a business venture when I am seven-years-old,

LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

and I sob under my covers for hours after we drop him off at the airport.

Although he no longer sits at the breakfast table, I hear his voice through the telephone line every morning after I read the comics. I ask him when he is coming home and he always says, “soon.” It takes me a year to realize he is lying to me, and it takes him two years to come back.

When my father is gone, I go through a series of stages. For a few weeks, I want to eat nothing but raisin bread. I was never a picky eater before.

In the morning, my mom eats the Sun-maid toast with me as we sit alongside each other at the kitchen table. I always nibble alongside the crusty border first, wanting to savor the small square of buttersaturated swirls for the last moments of breakfast.

The raisin bread is harder to come by at dinnertime. Sometimes I catch my mom eyeing me as I mash my barely-eaten bean salad into the corner of my bowl with a fork.

She and I both know it will not disappear the way I want it to.

“Natalie, you’re eating like a bird,” she sighs.

“I don’t feel like eating this now,” I reply. “Can I have some raisin bread, please?”

She stares at me for a moment and my throat constricts until she silently gets up from the table to get a box of Saran Wrap from the counter. She tightens a layer of plastic over my abandoned meal, slides it away from me, and walks towards the toaster. A few minutes later, she sits back down again with the bread in hand, and I begin my path around the crust as she resumes eating the now-lukewarm meal she cooked us for dinner.

My raisin bread stage eventually subsides as I approach my seventh year. For my birthday dinner, my mom crafts a threetiered black forest chocolate cake, each dark layer lined with a different fruit: raspberry, pear, peach. When I squeeze my eyes shut to blow out the candles, all I can wish is for my daddy to come back.

“It’s just you and me, Natalie,” my mom says sometimes after she hangs up the phone in the morning. I can’t see her eyes because her glasses have clouded over from the steam of her Earl Gray tea, but she sounds sad.

We learn to turn that lonely

declaration into a mantra.

“It’s just you…,” she starts as she tucks me in at night, gesturing towards me with her index finger.

“And me,” I reply as I smile and point at myself with my thumb.

Sometimes we reverse it and though we know this makes no grammatical sense, it gives us a strange sort of comfort. We are in this together.

By the time I am blowing out the candles on the chocolate cake my mother makes for my eighth birthday, I no longer am wishing for my father’s return. His absence has become more familiar than his presence.

Only months after my father’s return in 1995, my mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. She puts her business on hold, but she keeps on cooking and taking care of the household while he spends the entire day on international business conference calls.

It is like he never came back. Although she is back in good health after a few small surgeries, her relationship with my father has taken a less-than-benign turn.

Dough At least once a month, my mother devotes an entire day to baking. She wakes up early with a certain look in her eyes and soon, the kitchen counter is coated in chalky flour. When my mother bakes, my mother bakes. Chocolate-chip cookies with walnuts.

Oatmeal raisin bars. Anise biscuits. Banana bread. Foccaccia Bread. And my favorite: a Swiss Bread reminiscent of challah. I stand beside her at the counter, watching as she kneads the dough briskly with her pale knuckles. She lets me braid the elasticy strands before we slide them into the oven.

Hours and dozens of trays later, we sit down to enjoy the labors of our day. Before she raises anything to her mouth, she will hold it gently for a moment, her eyeglasses slipping down her nose as she rotates it in front of her. When I laugh at her, she tells me she has the right to admire her creations.

Sometimes I catch her looking at me with the same thoughtful tenderness.

When I am in middle school, my mom confirms that I am, in fact, a baked good.

“Children are like bread,” she explains to me one night as we talk about the kind of person I am and the kind of person I will become. “You can choose

which ingredients you will add to the mix when they are babies and there is still time to shape them after the dough has risen. But once you put them in the oven, it’s hard to do much else.”

“You’re already in the oven,” she tells me. “It’s all you now.”

“But don’t worry,” she goes on.

“There’s always time to add a little egg wash or some jam once you’re out of the oven.”

She had a point. I am not that much different from my 11-year-old self, except for a garnish or two.

Letting Go A few weeks into my world history class the summer before ninth grade, we are learning about ancient Babylon and Hammurabi’s code. That same week, I learn that my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer again.

After a few minor tissue removals, her doctors tell her that there is a chance that the dense cells within her breast can become invasive. Because my mom hates taking chances almost as much as she hates the possibility of prolonged suffering, she rejects a lifetime of medicinal cocktails and radiation treatment and opts for the most extreme solution.

“Just take them both off!” she shouts at her doctors, even though the cancerous cells are only ravaging the right side. She labels her breasts the “the bad and the balanced.” She’s always been a fan of symmetry.

She spends the days before her mastectomy in the kitchen, preparing meal after meal and freezing them in Tupperware containers. My father spends the days in his room, shouting on his phone to business people who are somewhere far away, somewhere that isn’t here. He reemerges at dinner time with a guilty look on his face.

In the anesthetized moments before she rolls into the operating room, I cannot even hold her un-needled hand because it is painfully swollen with stress and sadness. I sleep in the hospital next to her bed for the next two nights.

Only one day after my mother’s surgery, my father departs on another business trip, leaving me alone to take care of my mother, even though it is she who always ends up taking care of me. I bring juice boxes to her in bed, and she insists on getting up to reheat the food she had so

carefully prepared the week before. The only other time she gets up is to clean the drainage pumps that are connected to the flesh where her breasts once hung. I sit on the bathroom counter as she cries out from both the physical pain of her lost flesh and my father’s final, stinging abandonment.

Every time she screams, I hate him more.

A Broken Table, a Battlefield The kitchen table used to hold my family together and it is at the kitchen table that I realize my family has fallen apart. At breakfast, I hide behind the newspaper so I don’t have to confront my father’s empty stare or my mother’s sad eyes. Dinner is either thirty minutes of silence or an endless verbal joust: You’re never around. I’m working!

You never tell us anything. In due time.

Why can’t you just tell us the truth? It’s more difficult than that. We’ve been at your mercy for years. Why do you have to bring up the past like that? We’re financially instable because of you, we never know what tomorrow brings. Why don’t you go back to work again. I’m trying to hold this family together.

Their words incessantly swirl into the same, sad story every time.

It is at the kitchen table that I also begin to wonder why my parents didn’t separate years ago and what kind of joke it is that we are trying to sit down together for a civilized meal.

My mother now hates preparing food for him. “My brother always told me that you shouldn’t even fry an egg if you aren’t doing it with love,” she tells me.

But she keeps cooking anyways.

“The two of us have to eat, too. What’s one more plate?” she mutters as she removes three forks from a kitchen drawer.

The acid dripping from my parents’ daily arguments begins to burns my esophagus, and I develop heartburn at the age of fifteen. When I start to acquire gastrointestinal problems, my mother takes me to my pediatrician, who chides me for my “Type A” personality. I never seek her medical advice again. She doesn’t understand that my body is grieving.

Reconciliation and Rotisserie Chicken

During the summer before my junior year of high-school, my mother takes back

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her maiden name and accepts a job to direct a Montessori school in Kuwait for a year.

She leaves in November because she can no longer handle my father, but also because she wants me to learn to love him again.

An hour after the Super Shuttle takes my mom away, it is dinner time and my father and I move towards the kitchen.

I walk to the fridge, where a final meal has been left for us with careful instructions about rearranging and reheating.

“I can help,” my father tries as he leans against the kitchen counter, swirling a glass of Merlot in his hand.

I shake my head no. Only one interloper in her world at a time.

He retreats to the table and leaves me to bumble about. The kitchen never seemed this big before. Was the microwave always so loud? When I open the spice cabinet to get salt, fifty clear Tupperware containers filled with crushed powders stare back at me. Her magic ingredients. I can barely stand to look at them.

I scoop the warmed meal onto two plates and bring everything to the table, now littered with my dad’s business papers. He pushes them aside and starts tucking into the food while I settle in my chair across from him.

When I try to raise the first bite to my mouth, I break. My fork falls from my hand as I bend my head down and start to quietly cry.

“Natoolie,” my dad murmurs, invoking the nickname he called me when I was a little girl. He has stopped eating.

I shake my head no once more without lifting my eyes. When I hear his fork clinking against his plate again, I steal a quick glance across the table. His big, watery brown eyes look cloudier tonight. Maybe, in some way, he misses her, too.

“It isn’t too late for him to learn how to be a father.” My mom’s voice echoes in my head as I blink at the empty seat on my right, remembering the conversation she and I had only hours before she left.

Maybe she’s right, but I’m just not ready for it to happen yet. ** As the weeks pass, my father and I slowly negotiate our relationship in the kitchen while we stretch the potential uses of rotisserie chicken in every meal. I

find myself regretting that I hadn’t always paid close enough attention to my mother when she urged me to watch her kitchen techniques, but there’s something fun about the ignorance that my father and I share.

On good days, my dad and I work together to make a meal and only argue about how much olive oil should go in the pasta sauce and whether or not rotisserie chicken really jives with ravioli. We laugh about the moody oven when I make brownies out of a Betty Crocker’s box, an event my mother would have considered blasphemy.

On bad days, we butt our stubborn heads and our arguments are bigger than the space of the kitchen. I am trying not to see him through my mother’s angry eyes, and I know that every time he looks at me, he sees her. In my inability to forgive him. In my acerbic rejoinders. In my laugh, in my smile, in my silent tears.

“I can’t take it anymore! Can’t you do anything right?!” I shout at him when something explodes in the microwave.

“I’m sorry, Natalie.” He looks hurt.

“I wasn’t paying attention. Let me clean it up, at least.”

On most days, we exist sort of like tolerable roommates, acknowledging one another’s presence pleasantly while mostly staying out of each other’s way. We prepare breakfast separately each morning, but we eat together. Occasionally we will exchange a quiet smile or even a word as our newspaper pages overlap in the middle of the table, a picture from my features section resting on his business article.

I do all the food shopping, not only because my dad has a tendency to come back with everything but what’s on the grocery list, but because I find solace in the shelves of the supermarket. I remember my mother as I now linger in the produce section, sniffing the cantaloupes as nearby shoppers stare at me, bewildered.

Meals for One My mom returns home just before my eighteenth birthday and my last year of high-school. For my birthday, we celebrate not only my entrance into legal adulthood,

but also my parents’ divorce. It has been a long time coming. We continue living in the same house until high school is over. Probably not the best idea, but it is convenient and my parents have been living estranged for so long anyways that we’re all used to it. We drive to my graduation in separate cars. I go with my mom. My father goes alone.

Just before I leave for college, my parents finally go their separate ways. My father is now the fully realized version of the working vagabond he has always itched to be. When I see him on rare occasions, we always meet in a different place, a different country, a different restaurant table. An Indian restaurant in London, an outdoor café in Spain, a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles. We talk about college, about my future. We talk about the food in front of us, neither of us able to say what we really think: She can make this so much better.

We also talk about his current business ventures; when he starts to ramble about a new project I have to remind myself that he is a lot like those characters in the books I read as a child who constantly invest in newfangled contraptions that almost always fail.

Sometimes I can just nod and go along with it, but sometimes the talking becomes too much for me and I rush to the bathroom, crying against a stall door as the past comes flooding back. Give him a chance, I convince myself, as I walk back to the table with a red nose and a tight smile.

I go home to my mother whenever I can. At the kitchen table, my body is purged of dining hall food, of college commotion, of constant motion. We talk about everything over plates of food. Fruit salad infused with rose water. Spicy curries. Homemade raisin bread. At breakfast, I study her hands, curled around a mug of Earl Gray, and I trace her startlingly blue veins with my eyes.

Later I will stand beside the kitchen counter and carefully follow these hands as they fly across a cutting board and sprinkle spices into three different boiling pots. I don’t want to forget a single step. I am finally ready to learn. L

Janina Motler 20

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Forks It’s the old-women talk mothers wag on one finger, look you white-pupil in the eye, say: if you drop a fork while eating a man is about to enter your house, cross the two front steps – frame his too-dark silhouette on your door.

And when you were young, You wondered Who this man might be— as you stopped to pick the silver trinket from the floor— and when will he come?

Till one day you find him sitting across from you, stabbing a cherry tomato on his plate, growing frantic because it keeps on slipping, rolling to the other side.

And when he drops his fork, somehow, you saw it coming.

Stained, you take it to the sink, where you spend the next half hour washing dishes in cold water, laughing inside at sooth-sayers who made you believe in the power of falling forks— how they bring men, how you grow up, how you find yourself alone, in a kitchen, echoing with clatter.

Johaina Crisostomo

Benjamin Merrick 22

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an interview with

Keith Ekiss Keith Ekiss is the Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University for 2007 to 2009.

He is the recipient of scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Petrified Forest National Park. His poems and translations have appeared in Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Christian Science Monitor.

How did you decide to become a poet?

Picture courtesy of Ketih Ekiss

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I can’t remember a point when I decided to become a poet; I just decided to spend lots of time writing poetry, because I loved poems and I loved working with language. In the fall of 1999, I’d been out of graduate school for five years working fulltime as a writer of manuals that explained how to use business software. It wasn’t the worst job, but I wanted to pursue my own writing, as an end in itself, without thinking about whether I was becoming a poet. I reduced my hours to parttime, and for the next six years, until I came to Stanford in 2005, I worked three days a week writing software manuals and four days a week writing and translating poetry. It was a great arrangement— enough money to live in an expensive city (San Francisco), and plenty of time to write. In 2005 I was fortunate enough to receive a Wallace Stegner fellowship and I haven’t written a

nice word about computers ever the abstraction, write with vivid imagery, and revise to the heart of since. the poem, I’d better do it myself.

How often do you write and how do Teaching helps me clarify what I value in poetry, which then leads you motivate yourself ? back into my own efforts.

I write frequently, though not every day. When I don’t have other responsibilities, I like to write for 3-4 What poems are or have been hours in the morning. I think best in important to you? the morning and almost never write Different poems and poets have been at night. Motivation is easy, and, in important to me at different times. some ways, I was helped by years When I was an undergraduate, I of working in Silicon Valley, when loved the poems by Joy Harjo in I really didn’t have a choice about her books She Had Some Horses whether I got up and sat a desk and In Mad Love and War, poems working all day. If I don’t feel like like “New Orleans” and “Santa Fe.” writing, I read the poetry of other She was the first poet I ever heard writers until I sense a spark and can read when I was a freshman at the begin my own poem. Or, I’ll re-read University of Arizona in Tucson. my old drafts, looking for ways to I’d lived in the Southwest most of revise. my life, and it was important for me to hear about its history and How does teaching interact with your landscape from the perspective of this Native American poet. own poetry?

“Yellow Glove” by Naomi Shihab It often occurs to me when I’m Nye was a favorite—I’ve always writing that I’d better walk the liked poems about childhood, it’s talk. So when I tell students to cut LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

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an inexhaustible subject. “Under Stars” by Tess Gallagher was one of the first poems I ever memorized.

Recently, an important poem to me that I frequently re-read is “Paean to Place” by Lorine Niedecker. It’s an autobiographical poem about her childhood in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.

workshop?

“Poetry should be made by all,” said the French poet Lautreamont.

This is a tough one. Can I say, “Next I don’t think there’s any special question!”? I work on my poems benefit for technical majors in taking for a long time. It’s hard to know poetry classes. Poetry, like literature when a poem is done—sometimes of any kind, or the arts, is just one you just can’t figure out how to of the good things in life. Everyone make it better, or else you choose has something to say about their lives and the world they find around As you look back over older work, to put your energy toward poems them. There’s poetry out there for what changes do you notice in your that seem more promising. When a poem is “finished” does that mean everyone. I love it when students with poetry? it’s “perfect”? Probably not. My a technical background bring their I hope that my poems have become best advice is to keep starting new perspective to my writing classes— more tightly crafted, and, as a poems— your best work is ahead of their attention to detail makes them result, more urgent. I’m a stickler you, and spend lots and lots of time some of the best poets. for removing unnecessary articles, revising your old poems, taking them What do you think a poem can do adjectives, and prepositional phrases to the next level as best you can. that other forms of writing cannot that tend to slow down a poem. I like my poems to have rhythmic What do you think is the role of an do? cadence, force and motion. I have a editor for a poet? Is it possible to self- That’s another tough question, and clearer sense than I used to of trying edit or is it important to get another I can think of counter-arguments to make each line of poetry a good person’s perspective? to any ideas that I propose. In line and not just a few words that get Very few poets have professional general, poetry is more compressed me from point A to point B. editors, in the way that prose writers that prose, less focused on story.

But, there are plenty of poets who What is a typical writing process for have editors. But, poets do have friends and peers and readers who are wordier than Hemingway, and you, from idea to completion? they trust. There are some poets, compression is a big part of microMy poems generally don’t come I imagine, who can work without fiction and the short story. Also, from preconceived ideas. A line or feedback, but I’ve always found that poems can tell stories just like prose. a phrase simply comes to mind, smart readers are very important If anything, poetry is able to more from observation or memory or to helping me improve my work. quickly shift gears and follow other thinking, and I go from there. When They call me on my indulgences, on ways of thinking and moving in it’s going well, when I’m feeling a places where the poem becomes too the world than prose. Poetry strikes lot of energy behind the start of a private or where it lacks clarity or me as more provisional, more apt poem, I like to work on it as much energy. You’d probably be amazed to contradict itself for the right as I can while the emotion is new. at how much published work out music and not apologize about However, I’m rarely able to finish there has at least some element of it. In a poem, you can write what a poem in a short period of time. collaboration behind it. Most poets you think and observe without any After the initial drafts, I’ll return to a don’t go at it wholly alone. intermediary other than your own poem periodically over a long time, language. L often years, making improvements How do you think a student with a or eventually deciding enough’s technical major can benefit from enough. participating in a creative writing How can a writer know when a given poem they have created is “finished”?

Sara Sisun, “Laugh” 26

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27

Desert Exhaling There is a place In New Mexico Where small children dance like starfish And my mother swims alone in the oasis at night.

Here, she remembers the desert.

She slept on the floor Of pueblo ruins Among siblings and desert winds, Warm beneath the silver blanket Of her grandmother’s hair.

When she was nine, The Oldest of All the Cousins Tied feathers in her hair So she could fly away, if she got scared When their grandfather’s coyote howled at night.

This is the place Where aunts became sisters again And painted their lips with rose colored earth To leave kisses on the foreheads of husbands Who wore them as sleeping third eyes Who grew out their beards in old age to cover The places where they forgot to smile.

She watched a generation of wives wait for their husbands.

Men who took walks in tall grass Talking politics with conquistador ghosts Speaking Spanish through smoke circles.

Whose skin always came back paler, more expensive Until their wives could no longer tell The living from the dead.

But she was carried for miles on her mother’s dark back When her feet were blistered from the sand When Time bid them farewell with a kiss and Godspeed.

She was carried so she could stand On the Four Corners With arms outstretched And scream I told you so, Of women Of ubiquity Of the gathering of cardinal directions, To the broken mesas above To the bearded nonbelievers.

- Stephanie Caro Jessica Cornwell, “Lola in the Garden or Nuestra Senora de la Frontera” 28

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29

PRincess gets a boyfriend

By Zach Chotzen-Freund

30

LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

Conan Liu, “Fashion”

“

I’m Goose,” the boy says, extending his hand. He smiles, flashing a mouth full of silver braces and saliva-coated rubber bands. He has little eyes and big glasses and a terrible buzz cut that looks as though he did it himself.

I take his hand and try to grip it hard.

Goldie has always told me that I have a weak handshake. “I’m Princess,” I tell him.

“Princess,” he repeats. His voice falters, as though he’s unaccustomed to the depth of its pitch. He clears his throat.

“Cool.”

I shrug. It’s just my name. It has been for twenty-three years, as long as I can remember. I was Sheila until I was nine months old, but then Papa’s sister Maddie tried to eat a toaster pastry while driving her truck and got in an accident that damaged one of the lobes in her brain and ruined her eyesight. She’s totally blind now, and the last word she ever got to read was “Princess,” which was the brand of toaster pastry that she was unwrapping. Papa thought it would be nice to honor Maddie’s eyesight, which he said had always been stellar when they were growing up, and he wasn’t such a big fan of “Sheila” anyway. Goldie didn’t mind because Princess sounded like a dog’s name, which was what she had wanted in the first place before Papa knocked her up in the garage. So they changed my name, officially.

I watch Goose and he watches me.

He opens his mouth once or twice as if to speak, but then he just licks his lips and closes his mouth again. Ernie, my boss, yells, “stroke it like you mean it, sunshine!” at the guy in the batter’s box, and one or two of the players in the field actually turn this way to look at him. Goose giggles.

The batter makes contact and Ernie whoops loudly. “Touch ‘em all, baby.

Touch ‘em all over and boogie on home.”

He turns to me. “Good, huh, Toots?” he says. I stare at him blankly. “Eh, Toots?”

He says. I nod. He grins again and looks back at the field, shouting, “Get her! Get her good!” Sometimes I’m not even sure he’s talking about baseball. The first time I showed up to work he looked me up and down, spit a sunflower seed onto the pavement, and said, “you’ve got breasts.” It sounds perverted, but I didn’t really mind. I mean, he was right.

“So,” Goose says. He pauses, and I wait. “So, what’s it like to work at a snack shack? Do you eat chips and stuff all the

time?” It occurs to me that it might be a comment about my weight, but he asks it so earnestly that I can’t help smiling.

“I drink a lot of Gatorade,” I tell him. Goldie won’t allow Gatorade in the house. She says it’s an athlete’s drink, and we’re just not a family of athletes. She tells me that if I drop fifty pounds I can drink Gatorade, otherwise I’m just pretending to be something I’m not. So I drink it at work.

Lots of it.

“Sunflower seeds!” Ernie chimes in.

The inning just ended, and he’s torn his eyes away from the field for a few seconds to join our conversation. “No seeds for the kids now,” he whispers in my ear, and Goose leans in closer to try to hear him.

Ernie glares at Goose. “The kids don’t got seeds, don’t want ‘em. More for me, sure, but hell. Hell almighty.” He spits out a seed onto his own shoe, growls with frustration, and spits another one. This time he hits the cash register and hollers, “that’s right!

That’s the ticket! You like that, Toots?” Still mumbling, he turns his attention back to the ball field.

“Why does he call you Toots?”

Goose wants to know.

I shrug. “He likes me,” I say. “It’s a term of endearment.”

“Are you guys, like, married or something?” Goose asks. My disgust must be evident, because he bites his lower lip and whispers, “sorry.”

“He’s like fifty,” I whisper back.

“Probably older. That’s gross. And I’m not old enough to be married.”

“How old are you?” Goose looks at the ground when he asks this. I can tell that he’s trying to act like he doesn’t care, like he’s just making conversation.

“How old are you?” I counter.

“Old enough.”

“Old enough to what?”

“To drink beer.” I give him a skeptical look. “I mean, like, not legally, I guess, but, like, to enjoy it, you know,” he explains.

“Like it’s an acquired taste, right. And I’ve acquired it.” He looks me right in the face to see if I’m impressed, and then returns his gaze to his Adidas sneakers.

I take a swig of Gatorade and wait for him to make his next move, but he’s watching the game too. After thirty or forty seconds of silence I get sick of waiting. “Are you a player?” I ask, nodding towards the infield.

“A player?” He echoes. His eyes widen and he bites down on his lower lip so that the silver braces glint in the sunlight.

“You mean like, a ladies’ guy? Like, do I have lots of girlfriends?”

“Uhhh, no.” Is he serious? “I meant baseball. Do you play baseball?” This time I point to the infield with my index finger to drive home the point.

“Oh. Right. No. My brother. And my friends, some of them, they play. And I was bored, so, like…. You know….” He trails off.

I sip my Gatorade and he rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and we watch each other. Finally he turns to go, then stops and wheels back around to face me. “Beer,” he says. “I’m, uhhhh, gonna drink a beer with my friends when the game is over. In the parking lot. ‘Cause I like the taste and like, why the hell not, right?”

I nod, waiting for the punch line.

“If you wanted to, like, share it. Or have a sip. Or have your own one, I guess, if there’s enough. Anyways, we’ll be in the parking lot.” He shifts his weight and knocks on his head with his fist three times.

I smile. “I’ll be working for a while.

There’s another game after this,” I say brusquely. He meets my eyes for a few seconds, then looks away quickly and leaves without a word. “I’ll see if you’re around when I get off,” I yell after him, even though I don’t mean it. He doesn’t turn around, but I can tell from the way he straightens his posture and widens his stance as he walks that he’s heard me.

I haven’t had a beer since I quit my job at Lucky’s Bowling back in March, but as the second game wears on, Gatorade begins to satisfy my thirst less and less. In the bottom of the fifth inning I tell Ernie I need to make a phone call, and I wander towards the parking lot. I weave through the cars, looking for Goose, but the parking lot is empty. I briefly consider calling his name, but I think better of it. I kick the tire of an old Honda and head back to the Snack Shack to finish my shift. *** Everybody is in the garage when I get home. Goldie and Maddie are sitting at their workbench, holding hands, while Goldie runs her other hand along a new James Madison stick.

“This is good,” Maddie murmurs.

“The nose is right. Chin is too pointy, but not bad. That’s Jimmy Madison all right.”

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31

Goldie and Maddie make Presidential Walking Sticks together, with faces of the presidents carved into the top of the stick.

Goldie whittles but she has no memory for faces, so Maddie, who has all the presidents’ features memorized, describes them to Goldie. They mostly only sell the obvious ones: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, Clinton, but they make them all anyway just for the sake of integrity.

There’s a market for anyone who’s on a dollar bill or has served in recent memory.

There’s no market for Chester Arthur or Zachary Taylor but Maddie would never let Goldie get away with skipping a single one.

For Goldie, it’s a business. For Maddie, it’s deeply personal. Maddie came to live with us after the accident left her blind. She slept in my room until I moved out of my crib, and then she moved into Goldie’s room.

They’ve been roommates ever since.

Papa is lying on his beanbag, drying.

He’s shirtless and wearing the blue athletic shorts. His arms are painted grey and his belly has a big red pelican on it. I’m glad to see that it’s a pelican. A pelican means

32

a good day. Lately Papa’s been painting a lot of road kill and skeletons and natural disasters.

Papa used to be a real painter but now he only paints himself. He says that the human body is the best canvas. He would paint us if he could but we don’t let him, and it’s clear that he takes it personally.

He’s stopped asking, but he’ll still make snide remarks into his beard about how a family, especially a family of artists, ought to support one another’s creative endeavors.

Goldie would flip if I let Papa paint me, so I try to find other ways to support him as best I can. After he paints himself and dries he usually has me photograph him, so at least he has a record of his work. Goldie thinks the whole business is disgusting.

“Papa is the ugliest man I know,” Goldie always says. “Only a blind sister should have to see that.” To which Maddie always replies, “And thank God I’m not able!”

Only Papa looks up when I enter the garage. He gives me a tired smile and jabs at the pelican on his belly with his forefinger to indicate that it’s nearly dry.

“How was work?” Goldie asks without taking her eyes off of James Madison.

“Fine,” I respond.

“Hot. And the second g a m e went extra innings.

Ernie was so excited.

I wanted to gouge my brains out.”

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Goldie has another question, her favorite. “Meet any eligible bachelors at the baseball field? Any hunky shortstop take a liking to you?” She laughs bitterly. Goldie has never been able to forgive me for looking just like her. I guess I don’t blame her.

“A handful,” I reply sarcastically. I usually don’t bother to give Goldie any lip, since it only makes her taunting worse, but some days I’m just not in the mood to put up with her. “There were a couple pitchers, and also one of the left fielders and also his father, too. You should have seen them all.

I was going to bring them home to meet the family but I was worried we wouldn’t have room at the dinner table. If I’d known Papa was doing a belly pelican today I might have brought them all over.” Papa looks up at me and winks. I can tell from the way his beard twitches that he’s smiling.

It’s weird to think that I’ve never actually seen Papa smile, even though I know he does it all the time. He stopped shaving when Goldie got pregnant with me and he hasn’t shaved since. We all grew together for a while: Papa’s beard and Goldie’s belly and me inside of Goldie.

By the time I was born, Papa’s beard was so big that you couldn’t see his mouth, and Goldie says that even back then it was hard to understand him when he talked. Goldie hates Papa’s beard. She’s always yelling that she can’t make out what he’s saying and threatening to shave it while he’s asleep. She says that it’s ugly. Papa usually just shrugs, or else he’ll mumble something into his beard so that Goldie can’t understand it. He’s had the beard for so long now that he’d feel naked without it. Besides, he always says, he hasn’t shaved in twenty-four years and he probably wouldn’t even remember how.

“I wouldn’t be so surprised if you did bring a shortstop home one of these days, Princess,” Maddie chimes. She still insists on applying her own makeup, and today lipstick lines her upper lip like a moustache. “You don’t realize what a catch you are. You’re college educated.”

“Not quite,” I correct her. “You have to get a degree to be college educated.

Just taking classes doesn’t count.”

“I don’t see why not,” Maddie says angrily. She tries to spit for emphasis but mostly just drools on her blouse. “All the fuckers with degrees took classes, same as you.”

“They took more classes. They stayed four years,” I explain as if I’m talking to a child.

“Watch your language, Maddie,” Goldie interjects at the same time.

“Shove it, Goldie Anne,” Maddie replies. “I’m giving Princess a pep talk, and I’ll say what I want. Fucker. Fucker.

Fucker.”

“How’s old Ernie doing?” Goldie inquires, changing the subject.

“Erect Ernie!” Papa interjects.

Maddie whistles. “Every time I used to see him in Albertson’s he would have the biggest hard-on. Erect Ernie. I don’t think he shops there anymore.” Papa scratches his belly and accidentally scrapes off a little bit of the pelican’s eye with his fingernail.

He grumbles curse words into his beard.

“Well, I haven’t noticed that. He only ever seems interested in the game,” I say firmly, trying hard not to picture Ernie with an erection. I try to think of other things, better images, and my mind flashes on Goose. I’m vaguely aware of the fact that he seems taller in my imagination than he is in real life. I wonder whether he actually drank a beer in the parking lot. For some reason I hope he didn’t. I like the idea that he made it up just to impress me.

“We used to love baseball, didn’t we Papa?” Goldie demands.

“False,” Papa answers wearily.

“That’s fabrication. We did not love baseball. I did not and you did not. We liked Crackerjacks, maybe, but not the sport. We’ve always gone for the snacks.

Snacks got us all hot and bothered. But we did not love baseball. We didn’t do much loving of any kind even in those days. Some things don’t change after all.”

Papa and Goldie were married for seven years, and now they’ve been divorced for twenty-four. In all the years that they’ve lived together, both before and since the divorce, Goldie and Papa have only done it twice. Just twice. The first time was decent according to Goldie. It was good enough according to Papa. It was a consummation, a typical honeymoon hump but without the honeymoon. They got married the same day that Goldie’s daddy died and when they got home from the funeral, three days later, they realized they’d forgotten all about sex so they went and did it on the couch.

Goldie wanted to do it on her daddy’s bed, but Papa said it was too soon. He said they

should have some respect for the dead. He said next time, but Goldie didn’t want a next time. Maybe if it had been better the first time they would have reconsidered, but it was only good enough at best. We talk about these things.

It turns out there was a next time, but it wasn’t on Goldie’s daddy’s bed. Next time was seven years later in this garage, just after the divorce was made official. They were both so happy to be done with the damn thing, and Goldie figured that one more time wouldn’t do any harm. It took about six weeks for her to realize that she had been wrong, that I was growing inside her.

So that’s me, the honest-to-God product of a broken marriage that never quite finished breaking. We still live here in this house, all together. I left once, for college, but that didn’t last long. Papa left once, right after he found out Goldie was pregnant, right at the same time he stopped shaving, but he came back three or four days later. They say they learned during those days what a real divorced lifestyle felt like, not living together and everything. Neither one liked it very much. Papa was lonely and Goldie was bored, and so when Papa got back they talked about it and decided he would just stick around. Besides, Papa told me, by then they knew that I was coming, and shared custody is a real bitch.

“Can we stop talking about erections, please?” I can tell that I sound whiny, but I don’t care. If I let this get going it’ll never stop. My family talks about sex instead of doing it. They probably talk about it more than normal people do it.

“Well, you’re no fun,” Maddie complains. “Pick another topic, then, Princess.”

“I drank Gatorade today. Lots of it,” I offer, looking right at Goldie, who shoots me a warning look. Seeing her angry and helpless only makes me feel feistier.

“And then I almost drank a beer. Someone offered me one. A boy.”

Goldie ignores me. “Let’s do a McKinley or two after dinner, Maddie,” she says crisply.

“There we go!” Papa shouts over her.

“Did you hear, Goldie? The girl’s gone wild! She’s drinking Gatorade and almost drinking beer!” He gives a deep, throaty laugh. “This is the teenage rebellion we’ve been waiting for. Here it is, a decade late.

Not a decade. Eight years, maybe. Is that a

decade?” He laughs again. “God damn shit monkey! I can’t even remember how many years are in a decade.”

“Ten years,” Maddie informs him, and then launches into a slow, mournful rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

“Well there you go,” Papa says again, ignoring Maddie’s song. “What should we do? Should we ground her? No sleepovers this weekend? How are we supposed to punish our twenty-three-year-old daughter?”

Goldie lifts her head and looks right at me. “Who’s the boy?” She asks.

I shrug. “Some kid.”

“A kid with beer?”

“Just some kid.” Goose grows another inch in my mind’s eye. I’ve always liked lanky men.

“I’m all dry, Princess.” Papa announces. “Grab the camera, will you?”

I take several photos of Papa. “Smile,” I say teasingly. “Say cheese.”

“Gouda,” he replies. “Parmesan.

Cheddar. The one with the holes.”

I think he’s smiling behind his beard again, but it’s never easy to tell. *** “You’re not fat,” Goose says softly.

“Not that fat.” He leans over the snack shack counter and pokes his head so close to mine that I can see the pear shaped smudges on his glasses and the baby pimples forming along his sideburns. “Sneak me a bag of Doritos,” he whispers, his voice cracking on the word “bag.”

“You can’t do that,” I tease him, vaguely aware that my own voice is higher too.

“Do what? Ask you for some chips?

I’m hungry, okay?”

“No, not that. Not the chips, you goofball. You Goose-ball.” I turn towards the fridge listening intently for any response to this new nickname, but he doesn’t flinch.

He can only focus on the Doritos. I pull a Glacier Freeze Gatorade Frost out of the fridge and twist off the orange cap. “You can’t tell me I’m not fat just so I’ll give you Doritos.” I know I’ll give him the Doritos eventually, but I want to make it take as long as possible. This is flirting. It’s definitely flirting. I’m almost surprised that I even know how.

He leans a little farther over the counter and takes the cap from me wordlessly. His fingernails are filthy and too long, but so are mine.

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33

“It was two thoughts,” he says, tossing the orange cap back and forth from one hand to the other. “Separate. I said you weren’t that fat and then I said I wanted Doritos. Two things. Two different things.

Not related. Separate.”

Ernie yells something at the field about keeping your balls to the grindstone.

Goose leans in even closer. I open my mouth to shush him.

“I can smell the Gatorade on your breath,” he whispers. “I never realized that’s what Gatorade smells like.” It’s a stupid thing to say. Of course he knows what Gatorade smells like. But I like it anyway.

I like the way that he says it like it’s a secret.

“Maybe it’s not Gatorade,” I say.

“Maybe it’s normal breath.”

“Nope,” he counters, “it’s Gatorade.

I have a really intense sense of smell. Really cute.”

“Acute,” I correct him.

“Whatever,” he says. *** Roast beef sandwiches for dinner, courtesy of the grocery store deli.

“You’re lazy,” Goldie tells Papa between bites. Papa’s the cook in the house, but these days it’s mostly take-out or microwavable buffalo chicken nuggets.

Papa shrugs and mumbles through his beard, “It’s good enough.”

“What?” Goldie demands, crumbling a slice of bread in her fist. “Speak clearly, Papa. Jesus.”

“He said it’s good enough,” I tell Goldie. She has so much more trouble understanding Papa than I ever have.

“Well it’s not.” Goldie snaps back.

“I wasn’t making excuses for the dinner, I was just telling you what Papa said,” I say, dramatically over-enunciating each syllable to communicate my exasperation.

“I’m not picking sides.”

“I’m on your side, Princess,” Maddie shouts. “I think this roast beef is awful, but I’m just too polite to say so. You and me both, sister. Not sister. Niece.” Maddie laughs at herself, belches, and laughs some more.

“Jesus, Maddie,” Papa barks. He pushes against the table and his chair scoots back about a foot. “Where are your manners? You’re like a goddamn cavewoman. And this dinner is perfectly fine.”

“It is not,” Goldie retorts. Spit flies

34

out of her mouth and lands on her halfeaten sandwich. “You can’t do anything right. Can’t even pick a decent dinner from the deli. Can’t speak clearly because of that disgusting shrubbery on your face. You don’t even have a job.”

“I’m a painter!” Papa protests. “For once in your life…”

“Give me a break, Papa,” Goldie interrupts. “Go paint a funeral on your ass.”

“Stop it!” I yell. I’m on my feet, squeezing my sandwich in my fist until I can feel the mayonnaise on my fingers. . I hate it all. The crappy food that Papa buys and the way that Maddie belches and the terrible things Goldie says and the way that none of us, not even me, ever have anything nice to say to Goldie. “Why are we always like this?

Why do we have to swear all the time?” I think of Goose and wonder if people say these things to each other in his family. I wonder if people do this in anyone’s family but mine. “We are so ugly,” I say. I’m still shouting. “I hate how ugly we are.”

Goldie is out of her seat now, standing behind me. She touches my hair like a mother, but there’s nothing soothing about her fingers. *** Later, in the garage, Goldie apologizes as she shapes the balding pate of Gerald Ford. Her blade dances over his scalp again and again. “It’s because we’re artists,” she says. “And we’re not good artists, either.

Bad artists are especially volatile.”

“Speak for yourself,” Papa interjects from his beanbag. He’s stripped down to his boxers and painted a dead mouse on his inner thigh.

“I was speaking for you, mostly,” Goldie tells him. She tucks Gerald Ford under her arm and brushes past me and back into the house.

Papa trembles. “She’s a tough one,” he says, not quite to me. “Takes a blind woman to love your mother.”

“You love her,” I protest. “At least you did. You have.”

“Maybe,” he says, dabbing his finger into the red paint and smearing it on his neck. “Sometimes I think I’m a blind woman myself.”

“I guess we do our best,” I offer, only half-believing myself.

“Sure,” he says softly, but he doesn’t sound convinced either. “We do good enough.” He rolls over and buries his

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face in the beanbag to indicate that our conversation is over. I linger for a minute, my chest pulsing to the rhythm of his muffled breathing. I want to go to the beanbag and wrap my arms around him, but he’s too huge and too tiny all at the same time. *** “Is anyone home?” I shout, wiping my muddy shoes on the welcome mat. Goose does the same, although his technique is poor and hardly any of the mud actually comes off of his shoes.

Maddie calls back from the bedroom she shares with Goldie. “No one’s here,” she says. “Just me. And Papa’s in the garage.”

“What about Goldie?” I yell back.

For once, I actually want her to be here. I want her to see what I’ve brought home with me. “I call my parents by their first names,” I explain to Goose. “Papa and Goldie.

Papa’s first name is Papa. Everyone calls him that. He’s actually my papa, but that’s just a coincidence.” Goose nods, but I can tell he thinks it’s strange. Oh well, he’s here now. There’s plenty of strange.

“Goldie’s out there too,” Maddie shouts from her room. “I guess we’re all here, come to think of it.”

I watch Goose examine the living room. He scans the mantle above the fireplace and then each of the walls. I wonder whether he’s looking for family photos. I think normal families always have those. “It’s kinda pretty,” he says sweetly.

He pauses for a few seconds, and then he awkwardly grabs my wrist and fumbles with it until he’s holding the back of my hand.

“Like you, I guess. You’re kinda pretty, too.”

I lead him out to the garage, where Papa and Goldie are going about their usual tasks in silence. I poke my head around the corner of the doorway first. “I’ve got a surprise,” I announce, and they both look up. I grab Goose’s hand and pull him into the garage.

“Goldie, this is Goose,” I say politely.

He clings to my hand and swings both of our arms back and forth. “Papa, this is Goose.

Goose is my…”

“Boyfriend!” He interjects. It’s not a word we’ve used before, but I don’t really mind. Papa’s eyes grow big and he runs his fingers through his beard. Goldie closes her eyes, takes three deep breaths, and then opens them and smiles at us.

“You’re a little old to have a

babysitter, aren’t you?” She asks Goose in a sugary voice. He stares at her blankly.

“You’re a nice tall child,” she continues. I feel my muscles tighten and my head begins to throb. I look to Papa for help but he’s staring at his belly and doesn’t notice me.

“And skinny. You’ll have a happy life, I imagine. Puberty will be challenging, but then it is for everyone.” She resumes her whittling. It’s a new walking stick, and I can’t tell yet which president it’s supposed to be.

“Goldie, please,” I plead with her.

“Please what?” She says innocently.

Goose’s hand slips out of mine and falls limply to his side. He’s standing half a step behind me and I don’t look back to see his face, but I can feel that he’s trembling.

“Please be nice,” Papa answers for me. He squeezes his belly with both hands and shakes it. The surge of gratitude I feel toward him is quickly overcome with a much stronger surge of humiliation.

“I am being nice,” Goldie insists. “I’m just giving Goose some motherly advice.” I can tell that Goose wishes she wouldn’t. My head starts to pound uncontrollably. I really hate her.

“I’ll give some advice,” Papa offers.

“Listen up, Bruce.”

“Goose,” I correct him.

“Goose?” Papa repeats, astonished.

“Really, Princess? Goose? Like the duck?

Well listen up, Goose.” He clears his throat, and I ready myself for whatever is coming.

“My daughter is the fruit of my loins,” he says, gesturing to his loins. “We’ve all got loins, and she’s the fruit of mine. Fruit.

Fruit is an activity I condone.” Papa’s belly rumbles and he drums on it in response.

“Go to an orchard, buy some berries from the stand on the side of the freeway, eat a juicy apple. But loins, loins are not a good activity for you two. Leave her loins alone, Bruce,” he commands, before realizing his mistake. “Goose. No exploring. Don’t go playing Lewis and Clark with her Louisiana Purchase.”

“You’re unbelievable, Papa!” I scold him, and I can feel the humiliation turning to fever just beneath my skin. “What is wrong with you? What are you trying to do to me?”

“I’m building a moat around my Princess,” he says matter-of-factly. Goldie releases a single note of laughter.

“Well, don’t. Please don’t,” I say curtly, turning my back to them both and,

in the same motion, grabbing Goose’s arm.

I whisk him out of the garage, back into the house, and towards the front door. We almost crash into Maddie, who stumbles around the corner and thrusts her hands straight onto Goose’s chest.

“Why it’s a young man!” She says gleefully. “It’s a young man for my Princess.

I can’t see you, young man, so you’ll have to tell me whether you’re handsome or not.”

She runs her hands up and down his torso and feels her way up to his neck and chin.

“Not now, Maddie,” I tell her. I need to get out of the house to breathe. I pull Goose into the driveway and stand there next to him. I let go of his arm and we stand there next to each other, not touching. He has no idea that I want him to hold me. “I’m never taking you back there,” I say furiously.

“Never?” He says. I don’t know why he seems surprised. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “I liked your house. It was kinda pretty,” he says sadly. “I’d like to go back sometime, maybe if your family was out. If they were gone or something. It’s a nice house.”

“Sure,” I say. “If they’re all out doing something.” So that’s what we do. *** Papa and Goldie call it humping, but with Goose it’s something different. It’s uneven and fleeting, almost accidental, but it’s also the most human I’ve felt in a long time. Maybe ever.

After it’s over, I rest my head on his chest and trace my index finger along his bony little ribs. “You’re just a kid,” I say, releasing the words I’ve been afraid to acknowledge all along.

He exhales, lifting my head a few centimeters towards the rafters of the garage ceiling. “Not anymore,” he says in his best impression of sexy. “Now I’m a man.” It’s a terrible line, but there is real pride caught in the chasm between his unrelenting pulse and his slow, deliberate, asthmatic breaths. I don’t laugh. Can this man-child, this gangly, spectacled, pimply gentle soul really be this worked up on account of me? Does this body really fit so perfectly into mine?

“I’m the second one of my friends to actually do it,” he whispers hurriedly, divulging a secret that he can’t contain any longer. “Rusty did it, but Rusty’s done everything. Gabe’s dad bought him condoms but Gabe hasn’t used them yet.

Eric almost…”

I lay my lips on his, stopping his words, filling him with my Gatorade breath. *** It’s Papa’s birthday dinner, though you would never guess it from the menu: seven boxes of microwavable macaroni and cheese, a two-liter bottle of orange soda, and some baby carrots.

“What is this garbage?” Maddie wants to know.

Papa tells her that at least it’s aesthetically pleasing: all orange. It appeals to his painterly sensibilities.

“Well, I can’t see it,” Maddie retorts, “but my other four senses aren’t much impressed.”

Goldie coughs deliberately. “If this is what you call aesthetically pleasing, that explains a lot about the shit you’ve been painting lately.”

“I think we should talk about Princess and her boyfriend,” Maddie interjects, changing the subject.

“Princess doesn’t have boyfriends,” Goldie says. Her eyes are narrow and gleaming.

“Is he any good?” Maddie wants to know.

I shrug, embarrassed and confused.

“So you’re really all mixed up with that poor child?” Goldie wants to know.

“I’d rather not say,” I tell her. They’re all looking me intently, waiting. Why do we have to discuss these things? Why can’t they leave me alone?

“Oh god,” Goldie exclaims. “I might just vomit all over my orange dinner. Are you happy now that you’ve picked Pizza Face out of his sixth grade math class? Is this what you dropped out of college to do?

Take advantage of infants that you find at the Little League Snack Shack?”

“You don’t know him!” I struggle against the tears that keep threatening to leap out of me. “You know nothing about him.”

“I met him,” she says decisively.

“You mocked him,” I correct her.

“You didn’t meet him. You didn’t let him say a word.”

“Oh, does he talk?” she asks innocently. “Well, that’s nice. I’m relieved that you had enough sense to pick a child with basic language capabilities.”

“Goldie!” Papa drags his hands through his hair. “Don’t you dare, Goldie.”

“Is he any good?” Maddie asks again.

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“Give it a rest, Maddie,” Goldie snaps.

“You give it a rest, Goldie Anne!”

Maddie clenches her jaw when she gets defiant. “I’m trying to ask Princess a real question. I want to know how the sex is.”

It’s the last thing I want to talk about, but as I watch Goldie squirm in her seat, I feel like I’ll do anything in the world just to spite her. “I think it’s a fair question,” I say.

Papa shoots me a pained look, but Maddie smiles. I don’t want to look at Goldie. “I’ll tell you all about it. Every little detail.”

Maddie is practically clapping with delight. I close my eyes, trying to forget they’re there, and I launch in. “The first time was in the garage, as a matter of fact…”

“Shut up!” Goldie shouts.

“I want to hear about the sex!” Maddie shouts back, just as loudly.

Goldie hurls a frozen container of macaroni at Maddie, hitting her squarely on the nose. Maddie yelps, stunned. Blood begins to flow from her nostrils.

Papa is up, charging at Goldie, screaming unintelligibly as spit flies from his beard. He tackles her to the ground and rises again in one motion, swiping her plate off the table and bringing it crashing down onto her leg. She screams as the ceramic breaks into three perfectly equal pieces.

The next instant Papa is sitting beside her, his rage gone as quickly as it came, hugging his knees to his chest and whimpering.

“Goldie,” he says, but not really to her. “My Goldie. When did this happen?”

We all breathe together for a moment, the four of us. Thick, panting breaths that plow their way through blood and tears and snot and vanish from us into the fraught air.

“Goldie,” Papa says again, this time he’s leaning over her. He kisses her forehead. She turns her face into the carpet.

“I’m a beast,” he whispers. “I don’t know how… I can’t… I’m so…. so… sorry.” He waits for a response. When none comes, he rises uncertainly to his feet and staggers down the hall, into the bathroom.

I stand over Goldie and watch her as she whimpers.

“Are you hurt?” I ask, trying to be gentle. She nods, then shakes her head no.

I sit on the ground next to her and put her head in my lap. Her tears ooze into my jeans, turning the denim a deeper blue.

No one speaks for several minutes.

Then Papa emerges from the bathroom and

stumbles down the hall towards us. He has shaving cream in his ear and several specks of blood just under his jaw. His face glows a gentle red, like the color of undercooked meat, and he’s smiling at us sadly. I can see his chin and his mouth and his lips. I can see his whole face.

Goldie turns her head towards him, resting her cheek on my leg. “You shaved,” she says. Her voice sounds like a little girl’s.

Papa nods. “I figured it was about time someone around here did something for you, Goldie,” he says. He turns to me and smiles. “Hey, Princess,” he says. He has a double chin and pale, thin lips. “Here’s my face. What do you think?” *** When the doorbell rings I know right away that it’s Goose. He’s been calling me for days. I haven’t picked up or called him back. I’m not mad or anything, though.

I could never be mad at Goose. I just haven’t felt like seeing him.

I open the door slowly, and there he is. He nods at me confidently and scans me up and down, pausing self-consciously at my hips and again at my chest and brushing lightly over my face with feigned conviction.

Then he catches himself and clears his throat and shuffles his feet, finally bringing his big green eyes to rest on some point just beyond my left shoulder. He removes his glasses, rubs his eyes, and puts them on again.

“So,” he says. “Hey.” A purple orchid with petals shaped like butterflies rests in the crook of his arm.

“Hi,” I answer, eying the orchid.

“Is that… should I?” “Oh!” He has forgotten about it.

“Oh. Yeah. For… for you. Because of… I mean, you know. And you’re welcome.

I mean, for the flower, I mean… sorry.

Thanks. Sorry. Damn it.” He takes a deep breath. “What I mean is that this is for you, but it was my mom’s idea, but it ‘s because I told her you weren’t calling me back, and she was like, do something nice, and I didn’t know what, and so she bought this.” He stops and takes a deep breath. “But, like, it’s really from me.”

“You’re sweet,” I say calmly. I take the orchid from him and kiss him on the cheek. “And tell your mom thank you also.”

“Oh yeah,” he says bashfully. “I will. I mean, it was my idea though, mostly, but she had the cash and stuff. I’ll tell her.”

He looks at me imploringly, sweat rising from his pores, and then squints past me into the house. I know that he wants me to let him inside.

“Thanks for the orchid,” I reiterate.

My tone is gentle but firm. He doesn’t get to come in.

“Sure,” he says, shuffling again.

“I’ll see you… I’ll see you…?”

“You’ll see me,” I reassure him.

He nods and forces a smile, then turns and treads back down the steps and out into the driveway. He turns once, just before I close the door, and stifles a wave.

I enter the garage noiselessly. Papa and Goldie are sitting together on Papa’s beanbag, both of them asleep. Goldie snores quietly. Papa holds her and strokes her hair as he murmurs to himself, letting the strands tumble from his thick fingers with each of Goldie’s gasping breaths.

Maddie is on the workbench, three Taft walking sticks sprawled across her lap.

“Hiya Princess,” she whispers. I exhale in reply. “Smells like springtime,” she muses.

“It’s an orchid,” I tell her. “Just got dropped off.”

Maddie nods. “Lovely,” she says.

“Like springtime.” She smacks her lips and hums three slow notes.

Goldie gasps and rattles in Papa’s arms. I inhale slowly, deliberately, trying to fill Goldie’s lungs too, and Papa’s lungs and Maddie’s lungs, all of us. I clutch the orchid to my stomach and try to include it, too, in my breath, to fill myself with its beauty. Sometimes there is so much inside of us that the world becomes so peripheral, so unnecessary.

I’ve had my little grey suitcase packed for days, but I still can’t bring myself to tell them that I’m leaving. I don’t want the questions. “Why?” and “where?” and “what’s wrong with us?” They won’t believe me when I say “just because,” and “I don’t know,” and “nothing.” They’ll tell me that I belong here.

Goldie’s snoring fades and her lips lie still, and Maddie wraps her little fist around Taft’s thick head and giggles at the momentary silence. “All quiet!” she muses.

“How unusual.”

I’ll stay for one more day. There really is nowhere else to go. L

Benjamin Merrick 36

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37

The Weaver Grandmother Spider lingered at the center of the room, lit by a golden orb.

Come closer, hija she said. Come. Ven Aqui.

She spoke the language of Borges and Cortรกsar and in my dream I froze, unable to understand, -Come Closer Hija.

She said.

Ven. Ven Aqui.

So I went to the orb, the great ring of light Grandmother Spider sat round with all her eight long hairy limbs, and she held in her right palm (For she also had fingers and toes and feet and hands) a pair of scissors and a Daffodil, and in her left a Lily of the Nile and a red winged star.

Her web shimmered in the corners of the room and I felt the presence of an old ache-to-know.

Ven. Look. See. She said, and she breathed a long spider breath that grew into green tendrils of smoke and became an apple tree that bore fruit and died at dawn.

So I crept to the precipice and looked, wrapping my toes round the sharp edge of light and looked down down down till I saw a world draped in khadi and the shadows of a tired willow tree and three lone soldiers who wept for reasons not known to me and a child who made paper cranes on a mountain ten years south from here and somewhere it was raining too, big thick drops of rain that crashed and played on mossy rooftops and when silver trains rocked the valley twice Sending out shoots of fog and steam I blinked and turned away.

But the Spider bent and whispered in my ear Look Closer.

So I crept to the precipice, and looked over a mountain Ten years south from here Where a small girl lights a candle in a bamboo window And a boy shreds his paper crane and breaks three pencils at midnight While three soldiers share warm coffee Heated on a fire that burns desultory at night.

Their thoughts are frayed and beneath my eyes, they are trembling.

Now. Said the Spider, high on her thrown of home spun thread Now. Said the Spider, and her voice cracked in the rain.

Please tell me why they are weeping.

Jessica Cornwell 38

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CREATIVE NONFICTION

Fool SCHOOLMASTER wEEP WITH RAPTURE the

and the

By Zewde Yeraswork

“The cannon bewitches the body…the school compels the soul.”

-Ambiguous Adventure

S

ome ten years ago, while my mother and I lived in Dakar, Senegal in an overlarge white concrete building between the grandiose villa of a corrupt politician with three wives and a squatter settlement covered in weeds and rocks, I first came across a copy of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Aventure Ambigue.

It stood slightly askew on our mahogany shelf among several dozen thicker, newer books purchased in airport boutiques in Paris or New York. Until that afternoon, I had somehow overlooked the meager, slightly torn white Paris Poche cover featuring a small brown mask with closed eyes and an impenetrable expression.

My daily walk to and from school is impressed in my head like the memory of any process repeated so often it required no presence of mind. Thermos and lunchbox in hand, book-bag on my back, I walk past the neighborhoods guards and say bonjour—a must around here—I

listen to the pentatonic birds singing the same six notes in thirty second intervals. I take a left onto a walkway paved with cheap blue chalk that leads to the Route de Ouakam, which links downtown, to my left, with the airport to my right, and divides Mermoz, into two neighborhoods, Sotrac (named after the buses) and fenetre, meaning “window,” where the light enters onto the Dark Continent from the West. As I cross, with the help of a gendarme, whistle in mouth, his hands gesticulating in every direction, I can taste the tang of exhaust fumes from the Sotrac bus company on my left. On the other side lies a fou- foot wall with no perceivable purpose. I walk through the car entrance and stick to the side, occasionally waving at my friends and their parents as they drive past me. All Along the short path between the low wall and the school gate, unkempt reeds grow from under trash heaps and soundless ecosystems emerge centered on decaying rodents. Behind the last landfill on the right is a long colonial building, supposedly an abandoned hospital, where entire families— whose children I have often played

soccer with stones as goalposts and torn sandals as cleats—live huddled underground rather than come out into the light. On the left stands my school: the International School of Dakar, run and operated by the American embassy. It shares a wall with the Americans-only “American Club,” a beautiful spot by the ocean with outdoor tennis, volleyball, pool, a basketball court and an Americans-only commissary replete with Jiffy Peanut Butter and Blockbuster Video. If I had kept walking for another minute, rather than turn into the school, I would find the cliffs at the very edge of the continent, bordering on the Atlantic and the dim morning sky stretching out to the West. I wouldn’t dare though—that’s where the bandits roam, along with the fiends, the lepers and who knows what kinds of unseemly people. Instead, I spend the day at the International School oblivious to my surroundings, where students from eighty countries and nine grade levels gather to learn.

In eight years at ISD, I didn’t have a single Senegalese classmate. Not one.

I flipped through the pages to catch a glimpse of this Cheikh Kane’s world, which seemed so strangely detached from the ones I was used to perceiving on screens and pages.

Here was a book by a living African, with a short dédicace to my mother from the author, on our shelf, littered with dense philosophical ideas summarized on the back cover— including the angoisse (anxiety) of our age and the Meaning of Life.

It told the story of a young writer named Samba Diallo, a muslim trained at the traditional Coranic schools of the Diallobé people, who left for France to study and came back a torn shadow of himself.

That was about all I could grasp at that age and limited fluency in the language. It occurred to me then that I would have to improve my French, not my Wolof (which was nonexistant, since I am Ethiopian and not Senegalese) in order to understand what this book meant and why it was on my shelf in the first place. I would have to use a mediating colonial language to bridge the gap between the so-called Darkness of the West and that of the East, between where I was and Will Geier, “Patience”

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where I was from. This book was nothing like any of the others around it: subtle, it seemed the sole representative of the world in which we lived and ate, bought peanuts from the peanut woman on the corner, played soccer with the squatters’ children on the semi-paved streets and watched the neighborhood guards ritualistically sip sweet Mauritanian tea at the villa gates.

Cheikh Kane only ever wrote one novel of any note. But since then, every generation of African writers writing in French, anyone who employs the former master’s craft and code must feel ashamed in front of the griots, the story-singers who memorize and recite hours worth of lyrics on their impassioned journey from town to town, taking each place with them into the past. They must feel ashamed in front of the oral historians of St. Louis—the present ghost of a once-prominent colonial capital, where migratory birds and old jazz legends annually converge—who nourish their visitors with local spices and anecdotes.

Every generation of écrivains noirs (Ba, Barry, Diome, Mabanckou, Tchack) quotes, reflects on, imitates or somehow acknowledges this work, which appeared, like a miracle brought by the beaks of southbound warblers, one dry afternoon in Dakar.

I had a very pleasant, peaceful childhood in Dakar in the 1990s. It was the last term of Abdou Diouf ’s presidency, and even though everyone in Dakar hated him, and everyone everywhere knew he had stolen the election of 1993, and would not get away with it again in 2000, calm reigned in the urban center of Senegal, out on a peninsula, perfect topography for a port-city, centuries apart from the villages inland. Nevertheless, I often had nightmares of the beach at sunset. I was a poor swimmer, so the water often summoned fear of death. I still taste the traces of salt-foam waves at the tip of my tongue, ten years on. I build little sand-castles in the simple angular shapes of mosques and village huts. A sudden burst forward by the ocean—which, in waking life, would erode half the beaches I used for my sand castles by the time we left Senegal, that is within eight years—washed the little structures away, but the giant overhanging tourist lodgings beyond the beach were immovable. They knew how to tie wood to wood.

The reverence afforded to Kane’s masterwork is the reverberating effect of a psychic nerve struck at the core of the

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African’s perception of his world and himself.

It evokes the shock of awaking to an age that will be defined by someone else’s tools, someone else’s images and sounds. The character of the Fool--le Fou, the madman, the sound translates better, in this case, than the actual meaning—as the Diallobé villagers take to calling him, embodies this shock with his hunched posture and the “histrionic art” he performs for those who have yet to notice the sky falling. A former rifleman in the French campaign in Southeast Asia, like so many real-life traumatized young “French West African” men in the era of so-called de-colonization, the Fool babbles incoherently and beautifully throughout the novel, recalling visions of sensory failure and the ground crumbling beneath his feet.

At his side, by novel’s end is the religious schoolmaster of Samba Diallo’s home village, whose practice of prayer and self-flagellation becomes an active means of non-resistance as history gradually escapes his once firm-as-baobab-bark grasp. As the novel opens, the Schoolmaster hovers over Samba Diallo and his classmates forcing an entirely oral mastery of the Qu’ran in Arabic—yet another mediating language, revealing nothing of meaning in the midst of a deluge of sound. He brutalizes his students, especially Samba, the disciple he loved most, for every error and hesitation, shouting his furious faith and love at each pupil. “The teacher thought that man had no reason to exalt himself,” Kane’s narrator explains, “save definitely in the adoration of God. Now it was true—though he fought against the feeling—that he loved Samba Diallo as he had never loved any disciple.

His harshness toward the boy was in ratio to his impatience to rid him of all his moral weaknesses, and to make him the masterpiece of his own long career” (23).

And yet real pain, for Samba and thus Kane, comes in the absence of lashes and furious admonishments, now replaced by quiet reflection on Diderot and Montesquieu.

The Schoolmaster’s texts are no longer lone wonders in a world of stories told aloud, as his pupils are sent to new colonial schools, so that they may learn to “tie wood to wood.” But as Samba learns in France, from a traditional point-of-view, wood, like the woodworker, was made to rot in the Earth, while faith in the infinite wisdom and coherence of the universe is paramount.

Geometry, like medicine, can make or

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save life, but death is of equal if not greater concern, while new scientific practices pose an immediate threat to the infallible teaching of God. A hundred yards from where I lay my head, I can hear the waves of the Atlantic crash against the cliffs. They appear, spatial images of feeling, in dreams about nuclear war with savages from islands visible from our cliffs. One of those islands, l’ile aux serpents served as a backdrop for the imagination of all the city-dwellers, raised on spoken stories, on the parole of elders—which denotes both truth and speech, because, even in French, the two are meant to be inseparable. On the other side from the Islandof-many-snakes is the island of many restaurants, French cannons, and slave houses—Gorée. You took a ferry to get there. Only sometimes the ferry sank.

Countless ill-fated rides to the Island sink together into one disaster constantly laying siege to my sleep.

I imagine washing ashore—one of hundreds now each scrambling for themselves against the cold current. I twist my half submerged face up to the Island’s crest, my eyes barely avoiding the salty sting of the water, and see one of the slave houses where they sometimes crammed sixty people into a one cubic meter cell and mercilessly threw some of them out the window into the sea right there in front of me, where the sharks did the rest with them and now they’re liable to come for you. In waking life, I wander around Fenetre Mermoz at sundown, saluting the guards as they sip tea and sweep the streets free of leaves. I glance over at the calm, stirring sea, feeling both afraid and at home.

In addition to Samba, the teacher, and the mad returnee, Kane’s book offers a series of archetypal characters, each of whom represents a way of understanding and reacting to the colonial encounter. Samba’s “father,” the dark chevalier, is a mythic and wishful apparition at a climactic point in the novel when the African imagination must seek connections to the past for guidance and pride. Like any other culture, these foundation myths, in the Light of sciencehistory, reveal themselves as mere story.

Still, Cheikh Anta Diop and Leopold Sedar Senghor, the two most celebrated public intellectuals of post-colonial Senegal, built their intellectual endeavors on establishing lineages to the relative light of the East—the Ancient Egyptians, the Coptic Ethiopians, the lost Nubians of the Sudan. Diop and Senghor were significant people, powerful even—Senghor presided over the Republic of Senegal in its first twenty years—but like

the Knight, they wielded there consoling might and intellect with a generous realism.

There was once again a home, a fatherfigure, a guiding light—but its scope was narrow, and its shining path beset by flickering contradictions.

Senghor wrote a famous book of poems entitled Les Ethiopiques, which as an Ethiopian, I read with curious interest and complete lack of recognition: I saw neither my ancestral homeland, nor my adopted hometown. Then again, the afro-pessimists, the late great Ousmane Sembéne prime among them, disparaged the poet-president as un assimilé, a man who invented a national pantheon by borrowing from the Egyptians, and the Frnech, advocating a “universal humanism,” while vaguely posturing at some proud state-of-mind called négritude.

A liberal and a Francophile, he crushed the popular ideology of African socialism and lived out his last years in a mansion in France with his very French wife. The Village Chief—poet and president—gutless wonder--how could you not blame him?

Then again, Senegal has never had to suffer

the fate of Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire and countless other neighbors who, throughout the 1990s and well after my family and I left Senegal for good, suffered coups, revolutions, civil wars—all forms of chaos. The Village Chief—poet and president—realist and savior—how could you not honor him?

The day Abdoulaye Wade won the presidency in the Spring of 2000, a month before I left my hometown forever, I remember walking back from school, crossing the route de Ouakam—the longest single commuter road in town—and noticing, to my amazement, the pure pristine silence. For that day alone, the funny papers contained no cynical cartoons, only simple matter of fact headlines like “Wade Président,” one way to make the past still living in the present. There were no riots; nor were there celebrations. The people I spoke to, the guards from the quartier and the woman who sold us peanuts at the street corner, normally loud and opinionated when it came to politics and the need for le changement, all seemed suddenly quiet, pensive. I remember sitting down to tea with two neighborhood regulars and talking almost exclusively

about football and going to the beach—anything but politics. This was unprecedented. As was the event itself. It was the first peaceful power transition from one party to another in Senegal’s history, and one of only a handful in the region as a whole. Looking back, I’m reminded of the spirit behind Kane’s characterization of that first rupture, “those who had no history were encountering those who carried the world on their shoulders.” The RFI announced the election results and lack of mayhem matter-offactly. CNN, which reported anxiety in the capital leading up to the election, said nothing after the storm had passed over us and Dakar was left, once again, dry and silent. Apparently it wasn’t worth reporting.

Whatever one might say about the Chief, the same goes for the Most Royal Lady, la Grande Royale, a grand, beautiful, Mama Africa in her flowing gown who, alongside the village Chief, the meekest authority figure in the novel (the local kingdoms were the first to be sacrificed to the irrepressible foreign spirits of progress), eases the transition to a new world order.

They choose to send their sons (nothing

SARA SISUN, “SILENCENOISE”

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43

wasted talent. Thematically, we haven’t come very far. But why change, when the storyline is so apt, and the experience of disillusionment carries over so easily from generation to generation. Afropessimism: the literature of those afraid of having to visit museums someday in order to experience exhibits of their former selves on display—spear in one hand, modern machete in the other, faces beckoning forth, large and colorful. Imagine having to learn from such a thing.

NEHEL KHANANI

here on the daughters) to French schools, leaving the Schoolmaster, like the Fool, dispossessed and crazed. Something about that initial journey to the colonial center leaves the African intellect irretrievably shaken. He spends the rest of his days praying--his body contorted, his joints creaking, his soul soaring. He and the Fool hold each other in the empty schoolroom, laughing and crying.

Some of us discovered the book in Paris, where an entirely different audience greeted the novel with a slightly different, though equally enthusiastic, reception. We understood the disillusionment of being away from home, but knew relatively little about distance from one’s past. Emigration is certainly a form of rupture, but its psychological effect pales compared to being lifted up from the ground right where you stand, were born, raised and will die, to find that the earth which the ancestors inhabit is suddenly unrecognizable. Worse yet, you realize, even at birth, the place you knew was probably nothing like what came before it, just a generation or two ago—and the rule of seven generations no longer applies.

Worse than forgetting itself is forgetting that one has forgotten, which is why the Fool’s forgetfulness is a virtue, the blissful state of being aware of one’s amnesia, wide awake at every new moment.

But for the émigré, those “lucky

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ones” who made it, often after suffering the humiliating rite of passage of sleeping in airports and shelters that stink of urine and sweat, a more direct contrast presents itself. The center, the middle, the power crux, blasts its bright lights and noises full of information and entertainment right at you, buries the malleable mind in mounds of texts relaying everything it knows. The wide-eyed African watches increasingly mixed peoples teeming through giant iron mazes. For those of us who weren’t making the occasional giant leap anymore, who moved back and forth and back and forth between the continents, mobility becomes a source of comfort, a source of smugness that aggravates the mental divide between normal people living the life of instinct and the cosmopolitan creature enduring the life of intellect.

I have never been lonelier or more frightened than I was during those three months spent in Paris.

That’s where I first read L’Aventure Ambigue and its successors, the “afro-pessimists,” as the academy, somewhat awkwardly, calls them. That same year a young Senegalese woman living in France wrote a beautiful little book called Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, about a Senegalese girl who moves to France and becomes disillusioned with the life of intellect. Isolated from her own community at home as well as abroad, she returns to Senegal to find a host of sad stories of misguided ambition and

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Compared to the Chief, the Knight, and the Most Royal Lady, the dispossessed Schoolmaster and Fool react with an appropriately endless reservoir of indignation and chagrin. And yet they come from opposite ends of the social spectrum for Senegalese men in the midcentury. One is a traditional beacon of rectitude and strength, the other a modern symbol of trauma and internal conflict. The former confesses to the latter, “we have turned ourselves into hybrids, and there we are left….filled with shame” (113). As if to perform the Schoolmaster’s narration on the village stage, the Fool would go into a frenzy recounting the moment an Indochinese piece of lead tore through the cheap fabric of his French uniform and pierced his abdomen, leaving a gaping hole at the center of his being. Alone with Samba Diallo, he relates the haunting experience of a nervous breakdown, several months after the war, on the hard concrete of a crowded city sidewalk. His histrionic art at once recalls and reaffirms the lost power of spoken history. Unaware of just how diffuse the Fool’s post-traumatic stress truly is, the villagers conceal themselves from the modern world and go on living in silence.

We are all always seeking the silence of the schoolmaster’s corner in the midst of the senseless violence we remember. What I remember—what images the television burned into my mind-weave together with the sounds of baritones booming facts from Radio France International in the mornings, and the cynical cartoons of Afropessimists embedded in Dakar newspapers, inciting disillusionment. We were there, but we weren’t there for the American soldier dragged around the streets of Mogadisho (and the countless, photo-less Somalis he took with him). We were there but we weren’t there for Kabila posing for Jeune Afrique in khaki shirt besides his smiling troops, two months before the takeover. The ominous shadow of two mass murders, one pre and one post this particular

photo-op (which like some things slipped into the long-term register from the short-term habitat of curiosities dwelling and fading at the surface of the mind) and his own assassination loom over the sunny poses of his conquest. We were there but not there to see—on the eight o’clock news—the last boat leaving Guinea-Bissau after their coup. Our whole city welcomed and befriended the refugees, most of whom had one or two people who stayed behind. Senegal was an exception to this continental maxim of chaos—it saw itself kneeling, immobile in the Schoolmaster’s safe enclave--except for the Casamance, where one of our house-workers lost a brother, ambushed, mutilated by insurgents, and served up as a tragic story in the Dakar papers for our living-room consumption the next morning.

Later that same year, Ethiopia, no exception either, descended into war with Eritrea. We listened to the news of mutual airstrikes and press conferences with presidential sound bites. Virtual war—the kind that creates the illusion of proximity when things are being kept far away from each other—had come to our little corner, where we could no longer hide like the Schoolmaster, but suddenly felt compelled to pray.

Today, the vast oceans separating the continents no longer represent the gap between past and present—instead the few miles of savannah between the city African and the quiet villager (often his distant cousin) enact the turbulent history of several centuries. Since the book’s publication, the initial rupture between past and present, faith and science, has become more remote.

Its full impact has worn off in the African collective memory. According to many “indigenous” traditions, it takes about seven generations to cross that fine line between history and myth, fact and fiction, that which is transferred over dutifully and that which is invented on the spot. With new tools at hand to sever the old constriction of seven generations, Kane and his disciples have had to remind us of a lost world. Otherwise, not only are Africans forgetting who we once were, we are forgetting how we came to change in the first place.

In Senegalese epistemology, the living and the dead are bound together, indistinguishable, throwing into question the very translatability of being in African notions of the cosmos. Water is the origin of both life and death. Water ebbs and flows everywhere alongside the cliffs of Mermoz and the homes of several, now intermixed, descendants: Peuls, Touaregs, Wolofs. The true origins of these

(like any other) people, are mysterious, well beyond seven generations of fathoming. They came from somewhere between the sea and the desert, between water and scorched earth—this is as much as we know. To mediate between the two, just as rivers flow through the savannah plains naming the kingdoms they nourish—Senegal, Congo, Niger— so poetry and metaphor flow between the wealthy sea and the barren land, the living and the dead.

Those who have died are never gone/They are in the water that flows/They are the water that sleeps/The dead have not died/Listen more often/To things than to beings/Hear the voice of water.

--Birago Diop, Les Contes D’Amadou Koumba The ebb and flow of the Atlantic current takes fragments of our memory and brings new myths, often from distant lands where wide-eyed children settle and become riflemen and writers. In Birago Diop’s Les Comtes D’Amadou Koumba, another classic from the first generation of indigenous writing, the animals join the wind, the water, and the earth in speaking and interacting. Bouky the hyena, a clever and enterprising protagonist and a whole cast drawn from the local animal kingdom, animates an amusing, lyrical world of play—a welcome relief of lighthearted entertainment compared to the dense and dreary ruminations of Schoolmaster and Fool. The whole of Diop’s oeuvre was supposedly chanted to him by a griot named Amadou Koumba, whom he heard as a child. The oral frame of these tales is, not surprisingly, also the theme of the book.

You’d be more likely to believe me, Diop seems to be saying, even when I told you about trickster hyenas and idle lions, if you had heard it from him rather than read it from me. If you still had faith—in the larger sense, the sense, which Schoolmaster and Fool preserve and mourn—if you were young and receptive, you would be able to learn about human nature from the inanimate realm as well as the animated creatures around you. Our fate is so tied to the things that precede and surround us that we (not necessarily Africans, but pre-modern people everywhere) use their experiences to guide

our own, and more importantly, those of our children. We gather round, tell stories in which animals play people, and reflect on ourselves.

In the years since the emergence of Birago Diop, Ousmane Sembène, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Mariama Ba, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, an entire industry, beyond the stuffy boundaries of bookishness, has sprung up around the arts of re-memberance-an industry of recovery. The stories behind old Mouride ornaments and pre-colonial artifacts, the narratives of guided tours of St. Louis and Gorée, anthropological societies and linguistic projects aimed at recovering lost dialects all emerge and dissolve, shape and re-shape the past, ebb and flow.

Remembering requires making matter of the immaterial. Nebulous pictures of fleeting light immerse the mind in tidess that like the Atlantic rise up at night under the mysterious guidance of the moon. Screen-less projections of darkness play out in the non-space of dreams. I recall the dusky afternoon in ’93 when we first drove around our new quartier, one third villas, one third tenement homes, one third makeshift squatter homes with corrugated iron haphazardly tacked to the fences. The villa part of Mermoz was inhabited by foreigners mostly--Americans Lebanese, Africans—inhabiting art-deco and middle-eastern style homes--many designed with the exact same blueprint, so that you could walk into a stranger’s house and approximate your way around the place. Old men with wooden toothbrushes and ragged shirts swept the sidewalks along quiet streets in the daytime. Blue plastic bags caught up by weeds in the dirt roads shook and leapt in the humid wind. I haven’t been back in years— eight, to be precise—but I am often told I would not recognize it. Four-lane highways and sky-rises have replaced the unassuming paths we used to take. The earth is covered in newness, and soon people will forget what it was like to taste the dust clustered underfoot and lowly clouds. Somewhere the Fool is performing his histrionics along the amateur theatres that spring up by the cliffs of the corniche as the tides rise and the sun recedes. The Schoolmaster is in the back-row of the audience, reciting his prayer, oblivious to the show, having already internalized the plot.

Then as now, I have a recurring dream of standing on the side of the beach, overwhelmed by wave after wave, my head constantly crashing against the black rocks. L

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Epilogue to a Story I smell the page, and I see broken pieces of crayons the wings of paper cranes sealed by your lips once wet, in a strand of cotton candy and I remember you write in pencil you leave silhouettes before you lose a page. the drops you shed they’re all dry, wrinkles I trace on my mother’s face and your small shoes hold sahara’s sand warm on the empty stage, where marionettes in faded colors grazed by your hands, dark from broken tips of chocolate, lie silenced with severed strings, inflections of your voice in every fall and I lose a page. your words, unfinished draw on the pages you left branches of a winter tree in a handwriting no longer mine, and your lanterns swing unlit brighter in the evening hue until I hear, on the windowsill my fingertips making circles, outlines of your fragile shoulders your breath peppermint white when I buried you in the desert night

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WILL GEIER, “REFLECTION” LELAND QUARTERLY WINTER 2009

and I lose a page. maybe you were a mannequin sculpted in my stillest hour, the crust of sugar on your lips but a slight imperfection from my shivering knife. maybe I heard in the ticks of our hands unwinding a merry-go-round the tune repeating up and down until the door closed with you inside, still and I lose a page. maybe I was a reflection in your darkest eyes, the orphaned prince of a bedtime story, a lie you once believed in. and I disappeared between your lips down the stairs following your breadcrumbs and your moonlit stones after your birds nameless by the pink panes of my eyes, the windows I broke a touch of your nose in every piece, and I could draw your face before I lose this page.

Wyatt Hong

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Crticicism

infinite Zest

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time For y’all have knocked her up.

I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe; I was not offended.

For I knew I had to rise above it all Or drown in my own shit.

George Clinton, “Maggot Brain,” 1971

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I

T’S HARD TO SAY whether this kind of thing—making a case for a dead writer, I mean—was easier in the past than it is now.

My guess is that it was. Easier, that is. It’s not so much that the critics of the past had more on their plate so much as they were eating more or less the same meal at more or less the same time. And when they wrote on this dead writer or on that dead writer, the question, voiced or silent, would rarely be of the Gospel of John, or Juvenal, or even Joyce up until a few decades ago, were worth chewing up, but rather of how he should be chewed up. But now we can eat whatever we like, at whatever hour of the day, or night, we please, and if you should like cucumbers but not onions and I onions but not cucumbers, that’s alright. But if you happen to write an essay on cucumbers and I one on onions, it’s quite clear we’re not from the same planet. My interest in the texture of those little frecklish lumps, your interest in the way the peeled skin holds the light: they’re not nothing, but they’re also not something.

And of course the point of essays like these is to explain our enthusiasms to the world at large, to entice one another into indulging in the other’s tastes. But say we try everything

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thoughts on Gogol

by Frank Guan

that’s recommended to us; then say we say because it can’t be done. Even if weekends were as long as months and hours long as weekends, it’s simply not in us to take everything in.

But that’s beside the point. The point’s actually a problem. And the problem isn’t that composing an essay on Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) is hard because he’s dead, or that he needs an introduction. It’s in how the nature of his art works directly against the form of the review essay, which takes finitude as its basic premise: because our time on earth is limited, and our minds unsuited to take everything in, we have to make choices with regards to what art we, to put it crudely, consume. Though we live in an age when matters of taste have become almost completely individualized, and though today’s reviews may be more inarticulate with regards to appreciating art, they remain as grounded in a notion of circumscribed time as when Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold trod the English earth. For interesting reasons that would be interesting to explore (but do we have the time?), nowadays we tend towards evaluating films and albums numerically

rather than verbally, be it through top ten lists, a four star scale, a ten point scale, or that all-too-familiar hundred point system masked by five letters of the alphabet and two adverbs, plus and minus. Perhaps we don’t judge anymore, but we compensate by grading everything relentlessly: restaurants, songs, professors, internet videos, news articles, microwave ovens, human beings: you name it and we’ve got numbers for it.

And though you could argue that at least the fine arts and literature remain exempt from the rest of the creative world, it only takes a field trip to an art auction and to the Amazon website to realize just how far we’ve come in transforming even high cultural aesthetics and criticism into statistics, econometrics, arithmetic: finite figures.

So it’s not hard to imagine problems arising when we try to decipher Gogol, whose central essence, as far as I can tell, consists precisely (or imprecisely, as the case may be), of a linguistic infinity overwriting (or devouring) an infinite reality. Our fixation on numbers as the measure of all things hides, I think, a fantasy of unbiased perception and communication: Gogol’s language is unlimited precisely because it

delights in the functions of speech that have nothing to do with making statements clear, the likes and ums and you knows and I don’t knows that form—and this is Gogol’s insight—the wheat of our everyday language, and not, as we’d prefer to think, its chaff.

In opposition to the idea that literature clarifies, delineates, selects, and above all fixes reality, Gogol presents a spectacular universe lying between all categories but belonging to none. Instead of our familiar either/or he offers a nebulous neither/nor: he brackets things with what they aren’t and refuses to affirm what they are. It’s no accident that most of the dramatic action in Gogol’s short stories takes place at night, when the distinctions of the mind cave in. when things cease to be and begin to suggest. But though Gogol’s sheer profusion of descriptive material invites all manners of interpretation, in the end it’s a mistake to try to grasp Gogol using concepts: all his works seem to take place in those strange states of mind which are defined precisely by their lack of metaphysical content: certain of the provincial stories in The Collected Tales as well as his final masterpiece Dead Souls feel as if they were composed solely

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axes chopping and crows cawaing, the whole road is flying off no one knows where into the vanishing distance, and there is something terrible in this quick flashing, in which the vanishing object has no time to fix itself—only the sky overhead, and the light clouds, and the moon trying to break through, they alone seem motionless.

In some sense all of Gogol’s language seems to be written in italics1, in speech tilted and transformed by some invisible and omnipresent force, or else all underlined as if the words themselves were horses galloping. Or even all struck through, as if to say mistakes and hesitations can be rejected, but never erased2.

Nothing is illuminated, but everything gets emphasized, obfuscated, warped, sung. For Gogol, there is neither a single thing nor a single human being in the universe that deserves to waste away unspoken, and it’s not too much to claim that the ridiculous splendor of Russian prose in the rest of the 19th century would have been impossible if Gogol had not offered before it his vision of a literature founded on comprehensive and uncompromising love3. Tolstoy’s luminous, absolute, and4 unbounded scrutiny, Dostoevsky’s hallucinogenic images and his compassion for outcasts, the absurdist speech of Chekhov’s plays and the subterranean mysticism of his stories: it all would have been diminished, restrained, and impoverished without Gogol’s impatience with literary form and CONAN LIU, “AIRPORT LONELINESS”

in that thoughtless stupor that follows a tremendous meal, and the more obviously fantastic tales, such as the inexplicable “The Nose,” in which the titular organ of a petty official comes to life and begins a civic career of his own, have all the fluid incongruity of dreams. If realism thinks of words as a fence, Gogol sees them as paths, as “roads… crawling in all directions like caught crayfish dumped out of a sack,” to borrow one of Dead Souls’ weirder metaphors. Like rain and orbits, the road’s a noun defined by motion: one of the things Gogol retains an especial fondness for throughout his writings is movement. His descriptive passages swiftly flash from image to image,

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as in for example the Ukrainian (Gogol was an Ukraininan) pastoral described in the tale “A Terrible Vengeance”:

the middle of the round sky, and the moon strolls about in both the upper and the lower half.

Fair is the sight from the midst of the Dnieper of the high hills, the broad meadows, and the green forest! Those hills are not hills: they have no foot; they are sharp-peaked at both bottom and top; on the slopes are not woods; they are hair growing on the shaggy head of the old man of the forest.

Under it his beard washes in the water, and under his beard and over his hair – the tall sky. Those meadows are not meadows: they are a green belt tied in

Or take the famed passage on driving near the end of the first book of Dead Souls:

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The horses got moving and pulled the light britzka along like a bit of fluff. Selifan just kept brandishing and shouting “Hup! hup! hup!” bouncing smoothly on his box, as the troika now flew up and now rushed full-tilt down a hummock, such as were scattered the whole length of the high road, which ran down a barely noticeable

slope. Chichikov just smiled, jouncing slightly on his leather cushion, for he loved fast driving. And what Russian does not love fast driving? How can his soul, which yearns to get in a whirl, to carouse, to say sometimes: “Devil take it all!”—how can his soul not love it? Not love it when something ecstatically wondrous is felt in it? It seems an unknown force has taken you on its wing, and you are flying, and everything is flying: milestones go flying by, merchants come flying at you on the boxes of their kibitkas, the forest on both sides is flying by with its dark tanks of firs and pines, with

1 Interestingly enough, Gogol lived for a long while in Rome, having fled Russia after the success of his story collections: Dead Souls, his most ambitious and most “Russian” work, was mostly composed a thousand miles from home.

2 Incidentally enough, Gogol published all of his writing in the space of something like a dozen years: he spent the last years of his life convinced that his power of writing was something diabolic: the reason Dead Souls’ second book comes down to us only in fragments is not only because Gogol gave up on it, but because he burned his manuscript of the text. Of course, everything published before then had become, in a very real sense, public property: pretty much all of the characters in Dead Souls became pretty much instantly proverbial; and decades later the city of St. Petersburg commissioned a sculpture of a giant nose in homage to Gogol’s tale.

3 Love here used in a more mystic sense: as far as actual women went, Gogol was something of a complete failure.

4 Apparently.

his hunger5 for material of every kind, be it physical or verbal, provincial or urban, alive or dead, animal, vegetable, or mineral, interesting or banal, tasteful or not.

And it’s precisely this bold and undiscriminating passion that, I think, makes Gogol especially valuable for us.

The democratization of taste that began in the 1960s opened up for us tremendous horizons in terms of what stuff we could like and dislike, but what it failed to abolish was the squeamishness upon which the idea of taste ultimately derives—in fact, it allowed that squeamishness to balloon: without a language to express and explain aesthetic preferences, the sheer assertion of contrary taste or distaste takes on a terrifying valence from which we can’t help but shy away. We withdraw into cliques, or into ourselves, or both, giving up the great world out of fear, and this takes place not only in art, but also in our everyday lives, in our politics.

There’s a Gogol tale, “Viy,” in which a young man, Khoma is forced to spend three nights in a church with the dead body of a beautiful witch. Swarmed by dark spirits, he somehow survives two nights, but when the spirits call out the monster Viy on the third night, he looks into its eyes and dies right away. Khoma, a young philosopher, spends most of the story running away from everything, first from the university, then from the witch, then from her father, a Cossack chief. By the time he’s trapped in a closed space by all his fears (incidentally Viy is the Russian pronoun for “you”), it’s too late to face them all. His fears are strong enough to destroy him. Convinced of his strange literary creations, Gogol died of guilt and starvation in 1852. Sixty-five years later, after countless procrastinations of reform, the czarist system whose stagnation Gogol described so vividly in Dead Souls would die as well. It’s too early to tell precisely how well our own society will hold up, but one of the many reasons we might read Gogol, and I think read literature as a whole, is that in reading we’ll find out what to do before it’s too late. L 5 Like several of the main characters in Dead Souls, Gogol devoured food with a passion. It’s not too hard to make the connection between his passion for food and his passion for language: in both cases once-living matter is rendered dead and then begins to reenter life through motions of the mouth.

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MAE RYAN 52

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STEPHANIE CARO is a sophomore from Oak Park, IL

THECAMPUS LOOP

W H AT ?

WHERE? WHEN?

A NOTE ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS JOHAINA CRISOSTOMO is a sophomore from Glensdale, CA ZACH CHOTZEN-FREUND is a senior from Santa Barbara, CA

There is all this still unsaid: I was in no rush to set the table, it is just you and me who eat Everything unchanged the lions at the door, the carcasses on the walls The ruins seeking passage now have hung our fates on hooks I’ve laid the sheets along the coffin walls and sealed them down, slowly Here and there the marriage of our lives is floating by On old and blue charades, a borrowed vase to walk the aisle to the priest who loved my brother And the island of Capri, dresses to buy and keep The happiness I never knew The anger I could never show The shame of all my life that I have kept from you, and still To live and live for years alone is all I have to suffer That is not so bad but better than to have to live with you like this is shame beyond all life True, I am alone, but with ashes in the kitchen I have waited in this house with my dead husband at the throne, the setting silverware to count until the end of all my years.

Adrienne Chung

ADRIENNE CHUNG is a senior from Stillwater, MN JESSICA CORNWELL is a senior from Ojai, CA WILL GEIER is a sophomore from San Diego, CA FRANK GUAN is a senior from Louisville, KY WYATT HONG is a freshman from Seoul, Korea NATALIE JABBAR is a senior from St. Petersburg, FL NEHEL KHANANI is a senior from Karachi, Pakistan CONAN LIU is a senior from Chicago, IL MAE RYAN is a senior from Newton, MA MIRRA SCHWARTZ is a senior from Albuquerque, NM SARA SISUN is a senior from Denver, CO AMY STEINBERG is a senior from Keystone, CO and Miami, FL

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Saturday, February 28, 2009

Stanford Spoken Word Collective Show - 8:00 PM - Hillel House Kopa Cafe - $5 for students

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Mark Doty reading - 8:00 PM - Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center

SAM TOH is a sophomore from Singapore Zewde yeraswork is a recent graduate from West Orange, NJ JIN YU is a sophomore from Kunsan, Korea

q: HOW CAN I SUBMIT TO LELAND?

– Leland publishes three times per year. We accept submissions on a rolling basis throughout the year. Submissions will be reviewed September through June, and we will do our best to respond within six to eight weeks.

– All submissions to Leland must be original, unpublished work. Please mention if you are submitting to other magazines simultaneously or if your work has received or is being considered for an award.

– Leland accepts and encourages submissions in a wide range of disciplines, including: fiction, poetry, art, creative nonfiction (e.g. memoir, campus culture, student life), reviews (books, movies, music) and political essays (full-length investigative pieces).

– The editors of Leland are concerned first and foremost with the quality of expression exhibited in a work, and not in the genre of work itself. Our goal is to have quality content across a breadth of disciplines, so please do not be afraid to innovate in your submissions.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Mark Doty colloquium - 11:00 AM - Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Spanish Harlem Orchestra - 2:30 PM - Memorial Auditorium - $12.50 for students

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Stegner Fellows Dina Hardy and Jesmyn Ward reading - 7:00 PM - Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

Monday, April 20, 2009

– Leland accepts submissions exclusively from current Stanford undergraduates.

Poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly - 8:00 PM - Cubberley Auditorium

– We encourage multiple submissions for as many issues to which you would like to contribute. That said, we request that you send in no more than six poems at a time and a maximum of four longer pieces.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

– All submissions are judged anonymously by the editors.

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Stegner Fellows Peter Kline and Ammi Keller reading - 7:00 PM - Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

JANINA MOTTER is a freshman from Tallahassee, FL

– There is no expectation in terms of length of essays, poems, or fiction.

MAE RYAN

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Submissions can be sent to LelandQuarterly@gmail.com Check out lelandquarterly.com for more details.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly colloquium - 11:00 AM - Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

q

Volume 3, Issue 2 Copyright Š 2009 by Leland Quarterly Stanford University http://lelandquarterly.com /