Letters VOL.
AWAY
IN
2
FLAMES
Par The Anatomy
“... I think it’s that same feeling that catches me lingering on the edge of a dry spring burn or late at night balancing on an erroding bluff with the sounds of something greater pounding on the rocks below. I wonder what happens when I step into infinity...
1
rt 1. y of Melancholy
My online dating profile would probably feature a picture of George Armstrong Custer and say something to the effect of, ‘Greatest fears: prefabricated housing, people who have handicapped licences for being fat, Los Angeles, and christmas decorations. Hobbies: working and making love.’”
2
Every fourteen days begins the same way. Like each scripture of Hope from the book of Romans; a faithful daughters’ daily recital of childish interpretations and the unpolished whispers that always follow his departure. Away in Oregon, he coasts in and out of mist and memory; the Dalles lying down at his feet, an ex-lover close by in the city, and his current opportunity-to-give-a-shit rolling around on the floor in discomposure. Home is always 3,000 miles away in every direction. You dream beneath the sun and wake in flames. I preach and remain nothing but a blemish. Youth cascades over my cheekbones like crystal water always sparkling, tears black and blue and red like police lights flashing on a pale-white bedroom wall. Angels and tyrants weave through my life and prosper, leaving behind nothing but broken condoms in the toilet and the scribblings we shared about what we could have been if someone had rescued our mothers from an artless era of miscarriages and handed them each a golden ticket to the ivory tower of academia. Rather, cul-de-sacs, happy meals, divorce; a dissatisfied adolescence and the Dormition of our fathers. Suburbia offered addiction, denial of privilege, lack of culture. We clung and clawed and howled unceasingly at the shameful earth. If I was ever loved by anyone, they would talk about the confluence of my blood and Castillo, how it glittered under so many moons. Always though, the inevitable rejection; “Sorry, but I like girls, Women, not the bastard offspring of what must be some kind of weasel who is too pretty to say please.”
Man will always be Man. A feral animal rescued by God and locked in the cage of a new body. Your birth and the wafting, stinging scent of instability on your breath that drove away the pack. Weakness. The way of Family. When vulnerability translates to fragility, shame, guilt; I couldn’t hide it. You saw it in the black cracks of my fingernails reaching for the brown bottle with three X’s on the label. You watching me from your chair and me in my drunken-cartoon-bubbly-eyed-hypnosis; swaying at the counter, cursing, singing, preaching, laughing loudly. I tell you again how alcohol belongs in my blood, my body, my heart- this life flowing faster and smoother and more beautifully when I’m playing with the ice cubes with my lips and keeping my eyes closed real tight. i play the desperate part of the only one you’ll ever love, feigning grace or any kind of symmetry. Nothing but a blemish in the sky on the day of your 29th birthday. A sideways smile beginning at the corner of your mouth. Someday I will sit back in my chair with my hips wide and spread out across the seat and I’ll say, “That first year was the hardest.” Can you remember November? That glorious winter of splicing in the hot light of the high country, our bedroom full of skin. You said something about choices, spontaneity, how you couldn’t help it. So she called you and asked you if you had told me that you loved me yet and you told her you had and she hung up and didn’t talk to you for a whole year.
3
4
5
The conditions were immaculate. All I could do was marvel over my own blonde-haired, blue-eyed deceit that had finally charmed a good man who spoke slowly and never lied, who always asked first. We were pendulating in a pitiless love, an oscillating madness, blind to the consequences of equal lows for every high.
damned sun and me who can’t stand to wake up, to indulge in pavement at the perfect temperature, to see the clear-as-the-virgin-river truth of it all. Misery boils into wrath and fades back into a dim despondancy. You sit there with your furious apprehension and watch as it burns a hole through the bottom of my stomach.
And then July. The weekend that you took it all back. From across the table you said, “This relationship can’t exist in a vacuum.” You kept talking about something you heard on NPR about romantic partnerships but I couldn’t hear you over the deafening sound of my eviction from your palms. I saw the wild, shining facts-of-life rearing up from behind your eyes and I’m muttering, “I’m an adult, I’m grown up”, and I feel my heart beating in my uterus; a once dormant and foreign organ to me until I met you. I know I never should have told you how it had been at home while you were away in flames, how I had been standing at the foot of our stairs with my ear to the wall and my sweating hands on the rail to listen to our newly-engaged roommates fuck quietly upstairs. Something I never told you: July was the re-introduction of the Castillo Gold regime, of self-hatred, of staring at hands and stomach-pits and heaving. Ancient fractures, unyielding to the bedside prayers and protests and promises.
Transgression, sleep, weight loss; born again on the third day of August as a sewer rat, a scavenger and a heathen. And then you arrive again, over and over, every fourteen days as the Archangel out of the darkest of my minds, crowned in noble, blinding light. To be an addiction is to be a muse. To be his flame is to bleed from the mountains and live on in the pockets of his tonsils. I’ve got what it takes; a sultry glance over my shoulder, the right sweater, enough freckles. We dance this anchored dance of oxygen and nitrogen and hum desperate melodies through the sheets. At daybreak I remember that the world owes me nothing.
How can you say that I don’t need you Your name is a battle cry, a shield and a when it’s you who replaced everything weapon, the color of aspens in the fall. that I have been clutching with the fear of God since the day I was born? You, who burns brighter than the god
6
I
n the nights I hear you. An ancient sound echoing from your naked body, alone on the prairie. I can sleep. It is you in your new house on Christmas, a two by four leaned against the worn fur of a gentle horse. Your front teeth fresh with ridges, no curlers in your hair. In the mornings I walk across the warming red dust, into your lovers house. I am glad when it is your oatmeal I eat. I try to chew softly, I try not to be desperate for the smell of my mothers shampoo. As the cool of the morning fades and is left only under rocks where the rattlesnakes sleep, the heat of the rootless dirt enters through my feet and struggles to find a way out. Strings of goat watch me through oil and glass; I am sick in her pantry. Burst capillaries scatter like goosebumps, show dully through Irish, wax paper skin. I am forced to the ground by my own stomach. She shouts at you. She breathes in the doorway, dares you to leave the mess. My hair is light, you’ve grown my hair before. You have more teeth than us both and you say nothing. Soft dirt hovers above the dense, dry ground. Your prairie is quiet.
Splashing drowned wasps on my face, it is your cries that I hear. Ulcers pinching your stomach. You learned to be a cowgirl every time your mother left you. You with knives in your pockets at school. You before your hair was white. Your mother’s lips stained red on canvas. You, a girl of the western front, married out of guilt and an unforgiving love. Cooing at your baby boy, horses in their pen. My mother was the last child you carried, but not the last child you loved. Dragging your fear through tall grass and dark mud; she keeps earrings from years ago. She tries to finish painting the house. In our nights together she sings to me, songs from a grayscale farm. Sirens and trains blow through the fan over my flushed cooling body, wearing my father’s shirt. She holds my hands, says they are small and powerful. Generations of strong women, bushwhacking through my mythology and my blood. Sun spotted, hammer yielding, pulling soaked braces off of babies bleeding legs. These powerful hands hold on to heavy things.
7
Grandmother, my hands are wet. Damp with less weight in their arms. Grandmother, the the fears of blood where a baby should have pinecones you made me collect, were they been, two cars crashing in the middle of the to count the people you’ve tried to save? day, a mother in a cloth plane, a secretary’s bouncing chest, the only black boy in the county, gums clapping and clapping, a gun turned to your stepmothers stomach. My hands are sweating and the prairie is on fire. Father, grandfather both clenching their chests; collapsing. Two women above them scrambling to reach the phone. Purple mumbled screams.Two funerals in march. Hair you grew fifty years ago, eyes you didn’t want to see through again. When I finally get the courage to ask, my mother tells me my father died on the kitchen floor- and it is no wonder to me anymore why she has torn up the tile again. Why the backyard collects more garbage. Grandmother I don’t wonder why you couldn’t cry for me, why I’m still on the prairie, sucking snot back into my head. Yes, I have the blood of strong women living in me, but women who have used their strength to endure painful loves. Women Now, I am here with the same copper that who have been lost. Who have held pulse- drained you almost completely.
8
9
i am whispering to you through the silky depths of infinity, casting words unspoken through the ink between space and time. i want to liberate you before you know what it is to be a prisoner in your own body. i want to tell you all the secrets now so that you may later embrace the world rather than resist it, chiseling at the rocky bits with your bare hands until your raw fingers bleed and your whole body sings sweat and sadness. Sadness. beautiful, damning sadness. it is the bone marrow of women like you and i and all the other thinkers gone by. it is the language of women who talk to themselves and the sea and the full moon and animals, specifically women who hear these things reply. and how that will be considered crazy, and so for a long time you will tell no one. Sadness. the first thing that will happen is hundred thousand incessant lies will be told to you, puffy as tufts of spun sugar and rotting the teeth of those who recount them. how despite blooming in the hushed interior of a woman you were plucked from the ribs of a man. how your destiny has already been spelled out in pounds and inches and receipts and bank statements and photographs. how if you adhere to the map if these things you will probably lead a happy life. how subservience is a virtue. the irrelevancy of wisdom. the permissible decay of the soul.
10
I
miss the poetry, I miss the quiet instances I’d learned to collect as refuge from this sudden swarm of responsibility, the mindlessness of this work, the obscenity of ‘autopilot.’ It’s a shock of cold; I’m surprised to find I’m submerged after swimming so surely across the waters of Waldo Lake, free. Am I free here? I feel gutted. Between mouthfuls of air, I search for space in the day to remember myself. But the selflessness of the job does not allow it. It’s a difficult edge. If you lose yourself completely, if you forget your code, your way of being, your essential harmonies, then you flounder in the infinite flux. And without dirt beneath your feet, the others suffer. The leader has to steady herself. And in this hunt for some respite, for a mid-ocean ridge where I can sit in an easy simmer of brine among the minerals and detritus, I think of you. I don’t understand how or why things converged, came together as they did, when they did. The sense of interstice escapes me, regardless of how my senses wrap around our bodies. There are no logics to fit these encounters. There isn’t a paradigm or a plan or a hope for us. Now we choose or cascade complacent. The shoals crowd with with sound but here, in the aether, a substance silences the human spell. Reality breathes in the airflow. We free ourselves of these illusions. It will not last. And look, see: we are fading even now. These trees on Kaldor Island - a modest mound of land in the center of the Mackenzie River below the hydraulic dam - are mossy sentinels. Huge, overbearing arms heavy with green. I’ve never seen anything like it. I am an Easterner, driven by Eastern desires, driven out-of-doors into cold and snow. These arms curve over us, over the trails we’ve scratched from the soil with our tools directed by our hands. We fjord our resistance with sweat and laughter. Tendons, fibers, torsos, elliptical limbs pulling and leaning in untoward directions. And where will these hands, these arms, this body - where will this inconsequential corpse lie? And the rest, the outer world, sings of ultimate truths - truths more easily distinguished in the woods - sounds vibrating in the pits of the earth, in veins in leaves, in the spaces between the disparate instances of echoes. At the clearing, blackberry brambles coil, snaring my distracted consciousness into distinct loops. The feeling, the deep feeling - dark and dense eddies - sinks and weaves through warmer currents. Caddis flies, spores, roll in flows, bound and unbound by rocks and snags. This feeling, it is vaguely familiar to me. I felt it once before. I was seventeen and climbing alone in mountains to rid myself of pain. One summer, a boy joined me. He had a copy of Moby Dick, a sack holding whole peppers and tomatoes, a carrot, a can of beans. We crushed yellow bell pepper between our teeth and spat out the seeds at sunset into a fire ring. We watched as the mountains blued, watched the ravens riding the low pressure drafts, watched each other.
11
And so, yes, this feeling is familiar to me. It strokes through shifting maple and sounds like nostalgia. It moves with shadows - scarves that breathe and swell as the land respires. It is peace, contentment, joy great effulgence of joy. Your Portuguese syllables settle across my face, torn pages of carnations, foreign petals stiff with salt, sexed pollen. We anoint each other with tongues and teeth and sliding parts under the sickle moon. I will never understand. Thank God, I will never understand. I will never know what to call this. We are both so unknowable, you and I. You asked me a question that last night. What was that question? Out here, miles from that place, I try to remember while my left hand draws down the length of my Pulaski, gravity arcs my intention, and I slough off a scalp of grass. As I work, I recraft the past. I attempt to relive my peak experiences. I smile. I return to my labors. I empty my mind onto the tread and you appear again as a canvas, a sail, strung to a masthead and I can see the vision from the rigging, sense my solitude and your solitude - how they greeted - and the vision is actual. It is joy. Experienced personally - but impersonally. It is the essential paradox. It is release. I don’t care about tomorrow or yesterday or years ago or years ahead. I don’t even care about today. I am atomized. No longer identifiable but elemental. Reducible to particle. Life is strange - this is obvious. But I feel, in my bones, my blood, how uncertain, unpredictable and changeable it all is. Feelings, too, are temporary, but the heart has some consistency. It is a muscle with integrity. Its pulse is leveled by music, affected by others, beating back the banter and doubts of the mind. The mind. The mind is a bully, attempting to make sense of reality by manipulating reality. The mind negotiates differences by settling for routes of least resistance at the expense of knowing of what truly ‘is.’ And then, there, sitting in our heads, acting from our heads, beauty cannot touch us. Only a kind of meagre but deceptive prettiness gets under the skin. And love does not last, when the head hijacks the heart. When we fix ourselves to our thoughts, we forget ecstasy. We jump around, we lose our sense of feeling. Numbly, we experience short flares of excitement, but this, too, is temporary. Anxiety prods us onward. We break hearts and break our own. We detach ourselves from presence. I take comfort in nothings, in absences, in voids. I seek them out. There, I can love. There, a light descends that illuminates others, the immense splendor of basic human foibles, of human features, of what was said, of how this moves, manifested as action across landscapes. Of eyes, hands, lips.
12
I’m going to have to kill you after you read this. I’d like to kill myself for writing it in the first place. Let me explain to you who I fell in love with. I’m going to have to kill you after you read this. I’d like to kill myself for writing it in the first Despite the command of an impressive vocabulary he often speaks place. Let me explain to you who I fell in love with. with his eyes, and “piercing” is not the right word. “Annihilating,” maybe, or “spirit guide,” dusky windows into the depths of Despite the command of an impressive vocabulary he ofthe most peculiar soul you ever cared to fathom. I can’t look ten speaks with his eyes, and “piercing” is not the right into them too long or you’ll crumble into a pillar of ash and word. “Annihilating,” maybe, or “spirit guide,” dusky winsalt. I’ll burn out like a cigarette butt. I’ll float away on a dows into the depths of the most peculiar soul you ever trade wind and join the ranks of all the other vagrant spirits cared to fathom. I can’t look into them too long or you’ll enveloped by the silent, searing wildfire of love unrequited. crumble into a pillar of ash and salt. I’ll burn out like a cigarette butt. I’ll float away on a trade wind and My God, I want to burn this letter already. join the ranks of all the other vagrant spirits enveloped by the silent, searing wildfire of love unrequited. Smacking of the sun. I mean, dripping with it, conceived in a solar flare. Skin darker than mine, fair as he is, “I’m a GERMAN,” My God, I want to burn this letter already. he likes to announce by way of introduction. Visage overflowing with a mirth both sweet and wicked. A poison apple-apex predaSmacking of the sun. I mean, dripping with it, conceived tor-James Dean type (I hope you get the picture because for once in a solar flare. Skin darker than mine, fair as he is, I have no words). “I’m a GERMAN,” he likes to announce by way of introduction. Visage overflowing with a mirth both sweet and wick“Come here, let me fix you,” broad hands running through my hair ed. A poison apple-apex predator-James Dean type (I hope but gentle, not yanking or wrenching or slamming my face into you get the picture because for once I have no words). whatever sideboard. We go out dancing, broad hands running over my body but it’s a celebration and not a reaping. “Come here, let me fix you,” broad hands running through my hair but gentle, not yanking or wrenching or slamming my face into whatever sideboard. We go out dancing, broad hands running over my body but it’s a celebration and not a reaping.
-11-
13
Look at them look at us. Watch you watch me, dark eyes dancing like flames underwater. You told me a story once about the river that ran through your hometown catching fire, a flare in the inky black, and it’s like that now, the rage and bone of me splattered across your darkest pitch. And I’m drunk, I’m high on so many things, I’ve reached the point of no return where I ask all the questions and tell all the secrets in every way I know how. Do you love me why do you love me. All the fears, the ghosts of everything they has led to this, they hang off of me like ornaments on a tree. I bear the weight of them by drinking, by writing letters no one will ever read and falling in love with people I will never have. “Because I got inside that head of yours.” Murmuring in my ear, even when you’re not there, the whole of my body ringing your name. Kiss me drunk, all bourbon and maraschino cherries and your tongue as big as the whole world filling the place where the words should be (or perhaps the place for which there are no words). And the heat, always, the glorious cascading inferno pouring out your eyes and off your skin, roaring through my mind down to my breast and hips and back again. I started out wanting to burn the letter. The letter burned of its own accord.
14
Sometimes it becomes known how a mountain consumes the night and with a sigh those stars nearest the peak become extraneous and glacial and they scream a scream of spheres and they scream a scream of sacrilege and orchid and the ears become pressed upon the flesh encroaching upon vacant lots of nerves tied in bundles like apples hung in rows and offered to the wet of the lung. 15
I have climbed to the tops and given the bread of my corpse to the screaming but nothing has come of it or rather, I remain in sessions of my former self that callous figure descending upon the delicate orchard to chide the crows that pick its strange fruit.
16
Part Makeshift
11. Rooms
Dear Lengua Espa単ola, On the side of angels, you came. Reaching into my cell, you lifted my language-being out of grief. You adjourned the trial of my suffering. If I had listened earlier I would have known: even in the courtyard of a prison, things grow; even in the desert, life enters into a relationship with the elements. I was a prisoner of love. I was in love with the wrong language. I wandered astray in a desert that shed its color to hide its secrets. Unknowingly, I had packed the wrong things for this journey. Irrepressible laughter, positive feelings, joy. These things I had forgotten or never possessed. Limited water makes you think the life stirring at the edge of the desert is a trick, or that the loneliness you feel is Dickensonian solitude, not the feeling of not being wanted. The day you came the air was hot and unforgiving. Time was still, eternity felt no bigger than an asterisk of pollen. I doubted the power of life to flourish under such conditions. I cared about the world, its history and languages. I told myself I was capable of joyous discoveries. I wanted to believe I existed outside of my own control, ready to risk myself in pursuit of another living thing. Adapted to the extreme heat of the desert, your petals cupped the hot air without fear of wilting. Alive and fresh, in the height of the heat, your blooms opened, revealing a clutch of crimson pistils. I leaned into your radiance. You are a flower that gives pleasure. You are the unexpected encounter. Lowering myself, I listened - finding all that I had lost, all that I could not see. Past, present, and future resounded with bitterness, seduced by the gifts of consciousness. I told past, present, and future to quiet down, that freedom itself is a new joy and new joys awaited. I lingered in your aliveness. Listening, interpreting, responding to the traces that haunted me across two continents, the faint whispers that formed questions I could not answer despite long days of listening, straining against the snarled traffic, the heat, the revolution, the debris of two aborted trips. 19
Deprived of the most basic tools, my hands, busy with other things, hardly scratched the surface. My heart communicated an envy that was not in my nature but was outliving the happiness of those whose privileges I envied. If only I knew then what I know now: seeking for the sake of seeking is a ridiculously small thing to do. All that time I had been chasing a language that retreated from me. I tracked footsteps in the hills in vain. Tashk朝l scattered like fireflies. Ungovernable dialects burrowed deep underfoot, leaving hints on the surface of the life teeming below. Wandering in a desert can make you feel dead for a millennia. Hardly moving, my heart beat at the risk of bursting. I was tired, near giving up. I stopped myself at the gates, having grown fond of failure, explaining to the authorities that I had no place on the inside because I took up words in every possible way but the right way. I labored in the negative. I opened lines of communication leaving them exposed like live wire. I felt guilty. Unworthy. But now, somehow, something brought us happily together. I was delivered to the source. Collected by the dark green earth. The water that nourished your roots sent its rewards. Our lips seal in the freshness, drinking from the same glass, speaking as one. Slowly I am being freed by what imprisoned me, discovered by what I lost. Your small opposing green leaves pulled me up, setting me on the ground, feeding me little words like agua, libro,naranja - the words getting longer and stronger, giving me the strength to stand, to face the wind, to feel the breeze against my skin, to resume the journey of life in good company. Con cari単o, Michelle Marie
20
21
I’ve been thinking on bones, on the moving landforms of my teeth drifting in my mouth, the hole in the pillow exact as a fingerprint where I’ve bit. I’m thinking on each of my counted and recounted scars and the slow haul of cells that planted the six of them kiss-red on the pale of me. I am thinking because this is not what an animal would do: would not worry the loosed eyelashes and wish them away, willing the fabric of time to unfurl in three unknowable satin directions. This body will say one thing only now, now until I make it otherwise, until I scream into the inside of my own mouth that I am, and will, and have been screaming. 22
M
orning suggests itself slowly as a lover leaves bed. Pale light dresses his thin frame in shadows. Half a smile pretends at resolve, but his eyes are too tired to hide any uncertainty. Hers press questions he can’t answer and answer questions he can’t ask. Years later she still wonders how he knew what to touch when he felt inside her; he never told her she had taken his hand and led. Somewhere in Wyoming he wishes he had. He pulls over to write these thoughts when they won’t stop filling the few remaining spaces in his car. This morning a Wolf met his gaze, then pointed its nose towards solitude. Following, he wonders what tracks will be left by his own barefoot stride. She worries at the distance these paths carry him. At the forest edge, she hesitates. She’s never ached more deeply to abandon her fears; but maybe she fears most the hollow that would open if suddenly she were free of them. The lover still stands by the bed and the window. He would promise her everything if he were still young enough to believe that he had it to offer. But if age taught him one thing it’s that he’s got more to give than a promise could ever provide. The naked intensity of her eyes reminds him of when he believed that a single look could save him. How much has she seen? The lines around his eyes have always told more than he intended. For years he believed he could live free of heartache, that he could love honestly by opening only the biggest rooms in his heart, the ones with carefully arranged windows that track the subtle shades of the day’s arc.
23
There were other rooms, but he left them locked and often even forgot they were there- certainly could no longer remember what they contained, if he even knew. Whenever he found someone wandering those hallways, or running their hands across the ornate woodwork of those old doors, he pushed them out, slammed doors, ran from everything raw. They were always welcome back to the big room, where he invited them to appreciate the cycles from milky dawn to afternoon ochre. They never spoke of those other rooms; though often his gentle, deliberate stride found him exploring their own dark passages. He felt at home there, appreciating the raw beauty of unfinished floors and walls. Always though, he had the big sun room to return to; sometimes they joined him. But days began when he would return to find those old doors blown open by the wind or half fallen from a rusty hinge. The heavy doors he’d designed and carved so meticulously were wearing and splintering at the edges. Even the hallways he could no longer keep clean as dust accumulated from the forgotten rooms. Silently next to him in the car, she wavers between the wounded girl she fears she is and the wholehearted woman of humble courage she aches to be. She plays songs she hopes will say everything she can’t. He knows they’ve said much more to each other with other peoples’ songs than they’ve ever spoken. Knees pulled to her chest, she is ashamed that drink keeps her from telling him the story that she feels pulsing in her veins. But she drinks to thicken her senses until she can no longer hear the pounding on either side of the walls...
24
He could drive her to the mountains; he wants nothing more than to sit with her in the dark again, to breathe her tiny presence next to his in the unfiltered night. But he distrusts his yearning- or does he think he has something to prove by where he takes her instead? If she could melt, she would allow the wax of her body to pool at that point where their knees press. Her mind lingers there, but nothing changes. He watches her wrists, still desperate to grab them and pull her somewhere they can both breathe. Or is it his mind that dives to that place he feels her pulse and lets all else drift muffled on the surface? How well does he know those other rooms now? He would tell her he has sat in them, long uncomfortable hours in each of them. But some are filled with boxes he still hesitates to open or books he can’t bear to pull from the shelves. He’ll close the doors when he leaves, though he knows now he’ll return. The labyrinthing hallways suggest there may be rooms yet to find. And sometimes he brings others now, at least to show them the doors. She reminds him how recklessly he believed his impulses, until tempered by forces beyond his recall. But tracing the form of her body till she shudders where his hand fits perfectly in the arc of her low back, awakens in him the iron ore of those tempered forms. They resonate tuned to her vibrating pitch. This frequency drowns every other voice that calls his name. He wearies of so much movement somedays, wonders if he wanders out of habit. As miles tear by, everything in him urges a slower pace, a pace in tune with his attention. He wearies of distraction. He knows he’ll find what he seeks whenever he pauses long enough to notice it.
-11-
25
There is a softer, lower call in him too sometimes. It invites him to follow these circles more deeply, more carefully as they widen outward around his life. The courage he admires most is the courage to stop moving, to engage and nurture those more subtle changes of every moment. He might be a farmer if the coyotes didn’t keep singing him into the desert night. But they do and their laughter lingers in those half-sleep dreams of early hours. Later it is he who stands at the forest’s edge with that sincere, implacable expression he wears when weighing what he’s prepared to offer. Or maybe he’s standing at the large south-facing kitchen window in the house he built of hand-hewn timbers, watching the shadows glancing off a row of hanging cast-iron pans. He appears to be waiting for something-someone- but he could also be drifting in a sepia tide of memory. His lips curl, undecided, halfway to a smile. She sighs and pushes down hard against the helplessness that rises thick in her chest. He touches his lips briefly, then laughs at this dramatic affect. They both know their youthful clichés cling futilely to words or looks that might delay his departure. He laughs now at how carelessly we discard subtlety. Meanwhile the mundane demands indifferently most of the hours, days. This is where he seeks his solace, cherishing every simple gesture of this unceasing interdependence. He remembers first finding her gaze, it’s open intensity thirsting for unbridled commitment to every moment. Lifetimes spanned out in those capacious eyes. He wondered how many times they had met.
26
27
28
Our sacred bodies complete the Other. Mirrored mind oposite in justice’s hand. The weight of the world balanced by the days on that bench, sitting close under a pink blanket.
sitting in the back of the courtroom with you text book in hand trying to feign a fluency while you confessed your guilt paying what your dad calls the “stupid tax” again i’ll never forget how your hand felt in mine as we waited for your judgement.
every time i see a blue carolla my heart jumps into my chest. i hear pavlov’s bell awaiting your arrival.
29
30
le t t ers & o t her pieces
A DISGRACE TO HUMANITY || 1-2 CRYING IN THE || 3-6 MCDONALDS BATHROOM BARBARA, || 7-8 A PRAYER FOR A DAUGHTER || 9-10 WHO IS NOT YET BORN EXCERPT FROM A LETTER || 11-12 TO A YOUNGER MAN UNTITLED LETTER || 13-14 THE SCREAMING || 15-16 UNTITLED LETTER || 19-20 PIECE II || 21-22 LETTER II, PART I LETTER II, PART II LETTER II, PART III || 23-28 APRIL 24TH, 2014 || 29 AFTER CLASS || 30
C. IVES A. DACK
M. MADIGAN C. FAMBROUGH A. NICHOLS C. J. M. K.
FAMBROUGH GOODHUE RYDER VAN BROCKLIN
S. CRABTREE J. RIDABOCK ANONYMOUS
photographs
FAMILY PORTRAIT MILE MARKER 28 FIRE MILE MARKER 28 FIRE, 2 MCCALL RX UNDERBURN BIG SUR UNTITLED GLACIAL HISTORIES CITIES IN HEAT UNTITLED AFTER SHOWERS COASTAL GHOST SPANISH SANDS SECOND SUMMER ABANDONED SHIP BALD MOUNTAIN LOOKOUT VOLCANOS UNTITLED WINTER OVERPASS
|| || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || ||
COVER 1-2 3-4 5-6 7-8 9-10 11-12 13-14 15-16 15-16 17-18 19-20 21-22 23-24 25-26 27-28 29-30 31-32 BACK
31
S. KRASHAAR A. PACA A. PACA A. PACA K. VAN BROCKLIN S. CRABTREE A. DACK D. KRAUSHAAR O. GREENBURG A. DACK D. KRAUSHAAR D. KRAUSHAAR K. VAN BROCKLIN D. ROUSSEAU K. VAN BROCKLIN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC R. STUBBLEFIELD D. ROUSSEAU A. DACK
letter from the editor
Home was red and gold soil breaking open at the tires the day I decided to move back to the desert. Crook in hand, my wrists bent towards water. Cold clean teeth swooning for the hens, a palace of bottomless Manischewitz in an ocean of maple and hemlock. I met him in the deep black ponds, the boy in the cedar sauna, our dixie cups full of water. His steam spliced edgewise with the Vermont stars and I buried myself with the dogs in the underbrush. Drunk in the doorway, I watched the dragging of spines under arches of private spaces- and the burning. Him burning red as orange as a Baneberry bush in the snow. He taught me how good and true are the names of these ancient mounds, the songs the rain plays with the meadows. Salt of the earth, a day of iron skies. Home was two honey-dipped shoulders, an entire winter in the Old Ford, his eyes sinking backwards. From a makeshift room we watched the bull elk, all black beards and musk- black as red as the Spanish wine on his breath, soughing in my ear; “The last eastern woodland elk was shot in Kansas in 1892.� We laid in floods of caramel needles, fallen from a ridge fire in the spring. Home was the shepherd I never met, strong as an ox, listless somewhere between the hinterlands of Appalachia and the Valley of The Sun.
to submit to Letters contact Abigail at (abigailannadack@gmail.com)
32
“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.� Psalms 22:14