Mount Hope Issue 6 Fall 2014 by Mount Hope Magazine

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MOUNT HOPE â&#x20AC;˘ ISSUE 6

EDITOR Edward J. Delaney

COPY EDITOR Kristen Walsh ’14

WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE Adam Braver

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Katherine Bagley ’14, Ian Curtis ’16, Brenna Gloudemans ’14, Katherine Gladsky ’16, Catherine Hunter ’16, Alexander Newton ’14, Alexandra Orteig ’15, Austin Rosenthal ’15, Kyle Warner ’15

DESIGN EDITOR Lisa Daria Kennedy Massachusetts College of Art POETRY EDITOR Shelley Puhak Notre Dame of Maryland University MANAGING EDITOR Leah Catania ’14 ASSOCIATE EDITOR Amish Trivedi

COVER ART Terry Boutelle, terryboutelle.com Counting Breaths, 2013, acrylic, 10" x 90" This piece is comprised of 9 paintings, each one representing a year in the Iraq war. Each mark is made by scraping away the paint revealing a dark underpainting, and represents a civilian life lost during the U.S. occupation. The colors of the panels are inspired by photographs of the various colors of the Iraq landscape. The paintings are displayed horizontally, like a timeline of the war.

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CONTENTS FICTION 5 The Children of Icarus

NONFICTION 22 On First Looking into

by Khanh Ha 53 Ruinations by Luke Bartolomeo 56 Perfect by Alexander Ross 65 Trees in Alabama by Emily Marshall

Yeats’s Ireland by Jim Krosschell

INTERVIEW 27 J. Michael Lennon on Norman Mailer

POETRY 17 Saying Something

GRAPHIC ARTS 35 Globalization in South Asia

by Abayomi Animashaun 18 A Descendant of Palamedes by Abayomi Animashaun 20 National Poet by Abayomi Animashaun 62 we, the comet tails... by Panika M.C. Dillon 78 Mermaid by William Miller 80 Field Trip to Montgomery, 1965 by William Miller 82 Mercy Gets Her Krump On… by Laura McCullough 83 Change The Game by Laura McCullough 84 Say It isn’ So, Ho by Laura McCullough

by David H. Wells 47 Pathetic Confessions of a Coffee Addict by Dave Van Patten

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FICTION

The Children of Icarus by Khanh Ha In his sleep, Minh heard a noise at the door. Lan stood by the night table, looking down at him. Her white nightgown shimmered in the glow of the clock dial. Behind her the door was open a crack. He pushed himself up on his elbow. “What keeps you up?” “I don’t know,” she said in a whisper, as she sat down on the edge of the bed. He ran his hands through her hair, brushing it back behind her ears. “I miss you.” She tilted her head, trapping his hand against her shoulder. “How much?” He opened his arms and pulled her to his chest. She held still. “Everyone’s in bed except you,” he said, and heard a hoot of a barn owl behind her house in the suburb of Maryland. “I’m glad you came to visit me and my family,” she MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

said, her face pressed into his chest. “It was dreadful last week during the trip back from school. At home my sisters said I looked like a sleepwalker.” She raised her face at him. He bent his head and kissed her on the neck, the spot below her earlobe. Then his face eclipsed hers. She parted her lips with a sigh and her mouth drew itself to his. After he stopped, she cuddled against him. “You ever kissed anyone before?” He traced the curves of her brows. “Why’d you ask?” “I’m jealous.” She smiled, her eyes gleaming. “I have a story about a jealous wife. You want to hear?” “Tell me.” “One day,” she said,“the king summoned his favorite mandarin and the mandarin’s wife into his palace. He’d heard that the wife was unable to bear children. That meant the end of the mandarin’s lineage. He offered help. ‘I grant you the right to have a concubine,’ the king said to the mandarin. ‘Hopefully, you would be blessed with a son.’ At the wife’s silence, he chided her. ‘You seem in disagreement with my decree, do you not?’ She nodded, again in silence. The king said, ‘I give you one chance to redeem yourself. If you abide by my decision, you will be rewarded with the cup of tea on your left; if you oppose it, drink the cup of poison on your right.’ The wife kowtowed to him, then picked up the cup of poison and drank it. The king sighed and said to the mandarin, ‘Your fate has been decided, and I cannot change it for you. Both cups are tea.’” Lan raised her hand and rested it on the top of his head. “And I didn’t date anyone in school either, so your soul can rest in peace.” “Not even in high school?” Lan sat up. “I didn’t have a boyfriend. The closest I came to dating was with an American pen pal while I was a high-school junior.” “How could you date someone through correspondence?” “Ah.” She smiled. “At his request, I sent him my picture, though I’d never received his. All I knew was that he was from Chicago and a high-school senior. Then in one letter he told me he was going to Vietnam after his graduation—his first worldwide tour.” “A rich kid, eh?” “He’d mentioned that his father being one of the top car dealers in the U.S.” Lan rested her head on his shoulder. “One morning in January, he showed up at my house. He was a redhead, tall as a tree. You know that back home only bar girls hung out with American GIs, and you wouldn’t see girls with strict upbringing walk with foreigners, especially American GIs.” He imagined a face from many redheads he’d seen. None formed in his head. “My dad happened to be home that week from his military service,” she said, “and with his limited English managed to tell my pen pal that his 6

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daughter was too young for dating. He let my American friend speak to me in the living room, but Dad sat by me.” She pressed his palm against her cheek. “My pen pal came back the next day, asked my dad if we could have some privacy to talk. No, my dad said. He’d become so disturbed by his neighbors’ curiosity for two days that he told the young American, ‘Vietnamese girls don’t date foreigners. That is our value system you must understand.’ My pen pal was flabbergasted. He said, ‘What did I do wrong? All I want is to get to know her.’ A persistent kid, he came back the next day, only to face a marine posted on the front porch.” Minh pressed his lips against her forehead. He waited. “I know my dad was ashamed to see a Westerner seeking a relationship with his daughter,” Lan said, and lifted her head from his shoulder. “My upbringing was so strict—all the way down to how I wore clothes. My mom forbade me to wear tight outfits. Once, she made me change my pants—too tight for my legs— before we went to downtown Saigon. Darling, she said, you don’t want boys to look at that crease down there.” “Oh dear.” He chuckled, then, “So am I your first love?” “Yes.” She snuggled her face against his collarbone. “Do you want your betrothed to be a virgin?” His Adam’s apple jerked. “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t have the guts to admit it in front of your friend.” “Dzu?” “Him. Do you like him?” The man was an ex-pilot during the Vietnam

“

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Don’t confuse your value system with mine; don’t malign me before you even know me.”

war―barely five years had gone by since the fall of South Vietnam. Most girls thought fliers were hot. The ex-flier sought them out in the bistro’s crowd of students the previous week, just before spring break. “I like him as a friend,” Lan said, holding his gaze. “I’ve learned a lot about the differences between the privileged class and the deprived class since I knew Dzu. You and I never saw much of our country except Saigon. He did. He never runs out of stories to tell—war stories, cultural stories, folk tales. He makes me homesick. I realize I’m in a foreign country. I can speak its language, live its habits, think its thoughts, but I’ll never be a part of it. That’s how much he represents Vietnam, at least for me.” “Be careful. You might be taken in by his act.” “Yes, she nodded. “I know you don’t like Dzu. I know he’s bitter and crude, and he’s a friend of mine. But that’s about it.” She smiled as he tried to absorb her frankness. The three of them had been sitting in a nightclub and he forgot what caused it when the subject of a girl’s virginity came up. “My wife,” Lan’s expilot friend said, putting his hand on top of Lan’s on the table, “she wasn’t as pretty as you, but she was pretty enough for me to fall in love with her and marry her.” Minh tried to ignore Dzu’s hand still on top of Lan’s hand and said to him, “So you married her for her good looks?” Dzu said, deadpan, “Because she was a virgin.” Lan winced, and Minh felt as though the man had just touched her between the legs. Minh looked at Dzu’s hand still covering Lan’s as words rushed out of his mouth, “Virginity is an obsession among Asian men. You know that?” Dzu snubbed out the cigarette butt in the ashtray and slowly looked at him and said, “Tell me, if you ever fall in love with a girl, sleep with her, then find out she’s not a virgin, would you marry her?” Quickly Minh nodded, and Dzu said, “You’re a liar. You’re also a hypocrite. Marry a girl who’d lost her cherry to someone? What do you take me for? An idiot? You know, you’re such a privileged kid you have your head in the clouds most of the time—” “Privileged?” Minh glared at Dzu. “In what sense? My education? I earned that. Maybe you ended up in the wrong place because you didn’t have an education. If you feel sorry for yourself, don’t blame those who made things happen for themselves.” “You’re no smarter than me. Swap shoes and you won’t walk that far.” “You’re such a jealous loser. A loser who takes shots at those who made it.” “How ’bout getting off your butt and help those refugees who get here broke?” Dzu said, as he held his smirk. Minh slammed his glass on the table. “I’m not going to get into a patriotism contest with you. Let me set this straight: Don’t confuse your value 8

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system with mine; don’t malign me before you even know me.” He stood up. “Let’s go, Lan.” Dzu jabbed his finger at him. “Don’t start acting like you own her. You don’t order her around—not while I’m involved.” “This is getting out of hand,” Lan said. “People are watching us.” Dzu sneered. “He’s overreacting, Lan. He cracked up.” “I must go,” Lan said, her face hardening at Dzu. The ruckus they made had other people looking in their direction. They left, moving through a veil of bluish cigarette smoke that drifted across the room. He felt violence simmering in his veins, and in his nose the bar smelled like a wet rag just quenched from burning. Now recalling the incident, he still smoldered with anger. He’d never asked why, never looked deeper at the root of his resentment, until he heard Lan speak again. “So if your betrothed isn’t a virgin, you won’t marry her?” “Well—” “Think about it,” she said softly. He took her hand and pressed her palm on his cheek. “Any other questions?” “You ever thought about a family for ourselves?” “Only about you.” Then he smiled. “Maybe a baby for us.” “Childbirth scares me.” “You’d rather not go through it?” “I’ve seen abnormal babies. Typical Mongoloid. Their mothers lived in the defoliated zones during the war.” “Where did you see these babies?” “In a Saigon hospital during my senior year in high school. We toured the hospital and one of the children I saw was a Mongoloid. She had only one cross line in her palms, a prominent forehead. Her left foot had six toes and both her feet and hands could be bent back in the wrong direction. The nurse said that the child had abnormal tear ducts. When she cried, her tears didn’t run out onto her eyes but down into her nose, choking her. She had permanent infection of the eyes. She couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, except to say Mama.” “The Agent Orange caused this?” “Her mother drank water and ate food from the defoliated area. The mother was normal, didn’t take any medication during pregnancy, hadn’t even been x-rayed. There were no abnormalities in her family for generations.” Then she squeezed his hand. “I’m not afraid of childbirth, the pain of it. I’m more afraid of the abnormal childbirth.” “Let’s not talk about it.” She cuddled against him in the lock of his arms. He looked down into her eyes, those coffee-brown eyes crisscrossed with tiny lights. He lowered his MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

face. He felt her lips parted to receive him. His hand felt hot, as if he had a fever. He kneaded her abdomen in circular motion, then stopped. His fingers slipped in through the front of her gown, fumbling at the buttons. She grabbed his hand. “Please, don’t—” she said, panting. His hand stopped. His breathing labored in her ear. She cupped the back of his hand and meshed their fingers. “We must wait.” She gulped. “I . . . I want to save it ‘til we have a bond between us.” He leaned his face into the mass of her hair. In its thick scent he felt like he’d just lost a golden key. She phoned him at four-thirty. “Minh, I need to talk to you. Dzu just called me—” “What was it about?” “He invited me over for a farewell dinner. You know he’s leaving for California tomorrow?” “For good? Did you accept his invitation?” “Yes. That’s why I called.” “You shouldn’t go.” “I shouldn’t go? Why?” “He’s bad news. That’s all I can say.” “Minh, just because you don’t like him doesn’t make him a bad guy. He’s a friend. He’s leaving, and this is his last night here.” He felt stuck. What did he want to protect her from? He knew his antipathy for Dzu clouded his judgment. “Lan, keep away from him. I mean it.” “You make him seem like a criminal.” “So you’re going?” “Don’t control me like that, Minh—we’re not even married.” Bitterness filled him. He understood her independent nature. He knew he was opinionated. But that only made him feel more miserable. Now he cranked down his car window and felt a blast of warm air. He squinted. From Lan’s rented room in Georgetown, he used to watch Rock Creek Parkway curve below P Street Bridge and beyond it, farther north, the Oak Hill Cemetery on the hillside. One block up from P Street Bridge was the Buffalo Bridge. She told him that with binoculars you could make out a row of stone Indian heads anchored to the side of the bridge, each wearing a crownlike headdress, sculpted after the life mask of Chief Kicking Bear. You could even see the four colossal bison in patina green guarding the tips of the bridge. But, of course, you couldn’t see—she giggled—what the pranksters sometime did to these animals’ gonads with red spray paint. Gentleness tugged at his heart. 10

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He hung out with some friends in a bar through Happy Hour, and then went to the waterfront, where they ate at a seafood restaurant. It was dark after dinner. He wandered around, past the fish market, brightly lit with a good crowd who loved oysters and mussels and blue crabs from the Chesapeake Bay. The market was smelly and wet, and people ate steamed shrimp and baked red snapper from their brown bags. From the Gangplank Marina, he stood watching transient boaters on the water. Something had been gnawing at him. And he knew why. It was near ten o’clock when he got home. At the door of his apartment he heard the phone ring inside. He strode into the living room and grabbed the phone. “Hello?” “Minh…” Lan sobbed. He heard her as though she was burying her head in his shoulder. He waited, the way one waits out a summer downpour. “Where’ve you been?” She had difficulty breathing. “I’ve been calling and calling, but no one answered.” “I went out with some friends to the Wharf. What’s the matter?” She sobbed and didn’t stop, as though a dam had burst. “Dzu… he raped me tonight…” Her words went like a blade up his gut. He tried to speak, but his jaws were numb. In his ear she stuttered, “I went to his place… . He kept telling me he wouldn’t be back… . He was pathetic.” She wheezed, sucking in her breath. “I was so happy about us that … I told him we’d get engaged this MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

“

Vietnamese girls don’t date foreigners. That is our value system you must understand.”

Christmas. …He got drunk and nasty, didn’t let me leave. Then he… he…” “How could you be so naïve?” he shouted. “I told you he can’t be trusted. …Christ!” “I… I know it’s my fault…” Her sobbing sounded like hiccups. “For a girl about to be engaged—you went all the way to his place. Jesus. Did you expect him to behave like a monk—after he tried to come on to you at the bistro? You led him on. Good God!” “Minh—” “I asked you not to. Didn’t I? What did you say to me? You talked about trust. How—” “Stop it!” she screamed. “Why do you keep pointing fingers? It happened! You hear me? I can’t reverse it. Do you care? For me? Do you?” He fell silent. Hatred drowned him. Whom did he hate? Dzu? Lan? Suddenly, he heard an ambulance siren over the phone. “Where are you now?” he asked. She sniffled. “I’m in a pay phone—around the corner from his place.” She sounded so hoarse that he could barely hear her. “What? I thought you were already home. I thought you had enough sense to—Lan! What got into you?” “What got into me?” She squealed. “I don’t know, Minh. Why do you keep interrogating me? Why didn’t you ask me just one thing about my condition? Want to know what I look like right now? A hooker! Want to see what I’m like after he was through with me? I can barely walk. But I ran. I just wished I ran into you. I can’t tell you how much . . . how much he hurt me… I just can’t….” “Stay there, and I—” He heard her phone clanging against the wall. He heard car horns blare, then a click followed by a busy signal. At eight o’clock the following morning he pulled into the cul-de-sac. He got out and walked up the porch. With only a few hours of sleep, he felt as if he were floating on clouds. Across the lawn the shadows had receded, and the grass was bathed in the morning sunlight. Flanking the porch steps were trellises now covered with profuse masses of yellow honeysuckle. The door opened, and he stood face to face with Lan’s mother. “Thưa bác,” he said. “Chào cậu,” she said. Her greeting sounded restrained. She looked as if she were at a funeral. She stepped back to let him in. As they passed the kitchen, he glanced over and met Lan’s sisters—Linh, Trang, and Trinh. They stood at the kitchen counter, grating potatoes and dicing carrots. “Thưa anh,” they said in chorus. Her mother gestured for him to sit down. Slowly he lowered himself onto the couch like an old man. She sat in the stuffed armchair, her back 12

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to the kitchen. He looked past her, through the sliding-glass door. There the morning sky was brightening and here in the house the quiet made him soften his voice. “How is she?” “She’s coming around. But she was a wreck last night.” Lan’s mother’s voice wavered. “I made her scrub herself till her skin chafed—then she did what needs to be done for precaution.” “I told her not to go to his place. I told her to watch out for him.” “She’s very trustful. That sometimes can be a curse, too.” “Where is she now?” “In the park.” Lan’s mother squared her shoulders. “She wants to be alone.” “But I need to see her.” “Why not last night when she needed you most?” She stared at him, head tilted. “Didn’t she call you after it happened?” The edge in her voice, the look in her eyes made him want to hide. He lowered his gaze and stared blindly at his knees. “I was angry with her and let it get the better of me.” He looked up at Lan’s mother. “I thought about it and am here to ask her to forgive me. I hope you understand.” “I’m sure you weren’t the victim of circumstances like her. It was very hard for me—and for her—to accept your act.” “I’m sorry.” He thought how the law would find the rapist if her family hadn’t reported the rape. But then he realized that most Asian families would rather protect their names than seeing their daughter’s name dishonored in public. She motioned with her sweeping finger. “Once you have the matrimonial thought already in your head, you should leave your little self behind.” She rose. “You know how to get to the park in the back of our house, don’t you?” The word yes was stuck in his throat as he brought himself to his feet. She paced ahead of him, and following her he saw Lan’s sisters wave at him like characters in a silent movie. She kept the door open until he got out, then shut it behind him. He walked around the house and into the woods behind it, following a bike trail that cut through the park. Glancing back, he saw their garden, hemmed in by the white fence. Then the trees blocked his view. He rounded the curve and heard the rushing sound of a brook. The bank sloped down to the water coursing over boulders the color of oatmeal. The water looked dark under the trees, their branches laced into a long arch. The empty trail skirted the brook and, upstream, opened out into a field. He stopped when he saw Lan sitting on a bench by herself. In the distance she looked small, a figure in a gray sweatshirt. She wore a straw hat. He watched her the way a traveler coming home might watch the smoke rise from the chimney of his house. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

Slowly he walked up to her. His eyes never left her as he glimpsed only a part of her face, the rest covered by her wide-brimmed straw hat. She sat with her back straight, knees pressed together, and hands laced in her lap. Her posture reminded him of a pose for a portrait. When he was near her a twig snapped under his feet. Lan’s face tilted up. The shock in her eyes made him stop short. “Lan—” He sat down by her. He could hear her sharp intake of breath as he bent forward to seek her eyes. He saw the reddish marks on her jawline, on her throat. His heart contracted with a violent tug. Those marks left by the beastly rape could have passed for skin rash. “I need to speak for myself—” He dropped his voice, “—despite what happened.” She turned to face him, the brim of her hat brushing his brow. Her eyes were puffy. “Tell me what you have to say.” Her voice was still hoarse. “I lost my mind when I heard what he did to you.” His hand found hers, then froze as she withdrew it. “I was going to call you later,” she said, “and ask you to forget about our relationship.” “I’m here because I love you,” he said. “Will you forgive me?” He put his hand on the back of hers. This time she let him. “Last night,” he said, “must have been the longest night ever for both of us.” She said nothing. “Did you sleep?” he asked. “Or did you not?” “Linh slept with me. I guess she probably didn’t have much sleep either because of my crying.” He took a sharp breath. “I wish I never met him,” she said, crimping her lips. “Never knew him. He turned on me—just like that.” He dropped his gaze to the ground. His head was full of murderous thoughts. “Every time I closed my eyes I saw him….” She took off her hat and held it in her lap. “Then that scene came back….” He put his arms around her, and she rested her head on his shoulder. He could smell staleness in her hair. “I went crazy with his smell on my body when I got back,” she said. “His disgusting cologne on my hands, on my arms, everywhere. His sweat… smelled like ammonia, and it stayed on my skin. I prayed that… you were here with me last night.” Her body felt stiff. He closed his eyes, saw himself trapped with his evil thoughts. “Lan.” He pressed his lips on the top of her head. “I want to ask you if—” “If I get pregnant?” 14

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That felt like an electrical shock. Damn. “What will you do?” he asked. She fell into a long silence. He thought she didn’t breathe. Then she said, “I thought about that. I had a long talk with Mom last night. She… ” “What did she say?” “She didn’t want to see me go through it.” “And how do you feel about it?” “I’m against killing life—any life.” He gripped the slats of the bench to brace himself. It would be much easier if she accepted her mother’s opinion. It would be much easier for everyone. But if he could put himself in her place, be a victim, be her body… if he could only stop thinking about himself— “Will you go through this with me if it happens?” she asked. He sucked in his breath. The notion was revolting. “Damn,” he said, loud. Immediately, she jerked her head back. “What?” “Please let me explain.” She shook her head, grimacing. “I wish I could go back in time and undo it,” he said, stroking her on the back between her shoulder blades as if to ease her shaking. “Just like you wish you never met Dzu. The whole thing’s sickening.” “Stop. Please stop.” “If you want me to.” “Stop it!” She turned her body away. His hands slipped down from her back, and again he gripped the slats of the bench. She shivered. Her teeth clattered. Her nose dripped and she let it. The ground sucked his feet into it, a magnet that glued him in one place. He spoke to her back. “I love you,” he said. “And I don’t care what will happen.” “Please don’t say it for the sake of saying.” “Sorry, I can’t just shrug it off.” “If you love me, then help me accept and love what God intends for us. Bad things, too.” “I understand. But it’s so sudden—before I knew it.” She leaned her forehead against his. He could hear her choke on her inhalation. Then, in a scratchy voice she said, “I love you.” He held her, like holding a mannequin. Her spasms went through to his fingertips. She lifted her face to him. Along her jawline he saw red marks. He laced his fingers behind the back of her neck and kept his voice level. “I’m sorry. I cared only about my loss and forgot yours.” Her eyes softened. He cupped her face and kissed her on the forehead. “Can we go back in?” he asked. Slowly they rose and headed for the house. Beneath their feet the leaves crackled as they walked down the trail. His head bent forward, he watched MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

their shadows moving in front of them on a slant. Her body felt limp in his arm. He slowed down and their feet caught. “Let’s sit,” he said. “You’re out of breath.” They knelt down by the edge of the brook in the shade. On the wet grass a mantis rose, clasping a grass blade with its forelimbs. He could see the brook’s bottom where massive white and tan boulders overlapped, dotted with bluish and gray pebbles. She placed her hat over the mantis. “Will you be honest with me?” she said. “What bothers you?” “You were the one who said you would marry a girl who’s no longer virgin.” “I lied to Dzu.” Then he pressed her hands against his heart. “I love you—with everything here.” Nodding, she closed her eyes. He dipped his hands in the water. Bluegills darted with quick shadows. The water felt cool. He dabbed water on her face, and she shut her eyes. Then he bent and pressed his face into his cupped hands. He opened his eyes and saw in the water Lan’s face looking up at him. For the first time, she smiled.

Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh (2012, Black Heron Press) and The Demon Who Peddled Longing (November 2014, Underground Voices). He is a threetime Pushcart nominee and the recipient of Greensboro Review’s 2014 Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction. 16

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POETRY

Saying Something by Abayomi Animashaun Often, It’s a tense affair With brows Furrowed And jaws Clenched. Cornered By such sayers of things I lean into the emptiness Of our first meeting— Before salutations And warm exchanges— I sing unrhymed hymns Braid my eyebrows And stick my tongue out To the wind.

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POETRY

A Descendant of Palamedes by Abayomi Animashaun How disappointing it must be To learn you’re a descendant Of Palamedes, After years of combing archives And mapping each branch Of your family tree, Examining each leaf And tracing your lineage Across the Atlantic To Bronze Age Greece— With its stock of heroes Whose failures and deeds We continue to read And marvel at still Priam, Hector, Briseis, Ajax, Nestor, Achilles. How disappointing That of all these You’re a descendant Of Palamedes—

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The also-ran Responsible for calling out The king of Ithaca In his two-paragraph cameo In Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca. An ancestor, if we are to surmise, Capable of peering through The most planned out guile But lacking foresight To stay silent on what he finds Forgetting not all truths Must be shared or spoken alike. What reputation to have. And it’s no wonder, good friend, You’ve become iron-clad— Silent on why I turned up shirtless This morning outside my house After spending all night at the bar. What welcome change you are To that progenitor of your line, Who would have told my wife I wasn’t attacked by robbers But bartered my shirt for wine.

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POETRY

National Poet by Abayomi Animashaun Gone are the days When his work was read By the President Who made a habit Of giving him medals For unwritten poems Gone the flutists Playing his verse The banquets endorsed By Congress. These days he Walks around town And is hailed By young writers Eager for autographs And well-wishers Waving flags.

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In the evenings He returns home And after dinner Sets about some verse He hopes will win praise Like those from years past. After hours staring At the same lines His neck slouches His eyes give And he starts snoring On the couch dreaming— This time, he’s inside The Presidential Villa With emissaries From neighboring towns Nodding to his famous poems, Set to music and played By ferrets and field mice.

Abayomi Animashaun’s poems have appeared in such journals as Southern Indiana Review, African American Review, and Diode. His collection of poems, The Giving of Pears, won the 2008 Hudson Prize and is available through Black Lawrence Press. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

ESSAY

On First Looking into Yeats’s Ireland

by Jim Krosschell Inishmore On the boat to the Aran Islands, some one hundred years after Yeats traveled there in 1896, my wife and I had the pleasure of a party of Easter-week holiday-makers, several of whom had no stomach for the cold, rough April seas out of Doolin. One lass—in pumps and sleeveless 22

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blouse—went almost immediately to the head and never came out. Another sat green-faced and hung-over in a sheltered corner, mirrored by a young man in a similar condition across the aisle. This latter suffered doubly; a friend, unaffected by the late night at McGann’s or the seasickness, hung in his face and hooted. We assumed they were from Dublin or another city, from the unsuitable dress and the boisterous, unpoetical talk of nothing. Yet they were endearing in their rough ways, especially since one wonders what they were doing on a boat to forsaken islands with barely a pub on offer. They were following the guidebooks and the folklore and their blood, I guess, modern riders to the sea. With both regret and relief we watched them disembark at Inisheer, their plans cut short. Inishmore and the stronger winds of Foul and Gregory’s Sounds would wait for a more sober day. After his trip, Yeats urged the struggling young playwright John Millington Synge to visit the Islands, and the people and the paganism profoundly affected Synge’s life. Yeats himself never wrote a word of Gaelic but took its spirit, and spirits, into his bones. Between the two of them, they changed the course of Western literature. Until now, my maiden voyage, I had only their words as corroboration. We landed on Inishmore as tourists. Small, dirty buses belching exhaust had replaced the pony-drawn carts my wife remembered from thirty years before. There were several shops, a couple of restaurants, even a small supermarket where we bought French bread, bottled water, and sliced cheese in plastic wrap. Deliberately, I had brought no books on this trip, nor had I re-read the poems and plays. Yet we left as something else, after only a few hours. We walked to the southern end of the island in the glorious springtime sun. We ate our lunch on the hillside near the tiny church of St. Benignus, built 1,500 years ago to enshrine a saint in stone. The church, or tomb, measured 3.2 by 2.1 meters according to the guide book, room enough for a priest and a chalice and a coffin, walls thick and mossy, roofless. Then we roamed the bare, stone-walled fields, imagining song and ceremony, wind and weather, the books come alive. Water Frontage About 100 miles north, near Sligo, we followed Yeats again as he walked through Slish Wood along the deserted shores of Lough Gill and dreamed of the solitary life on Inisfree. He was just two miles from Sligo Town. Amazingly, you can still dream such things today, on almost every Irish waterfront we saw, for there is little development: no hotels, no bungalows, no marinas, no monstrous second homes, no sewage plants, no natural-gas tanks, no oil tankers, no signs proclaiming Residents Only and Cars Without Town Stickers WILL be Towed, This Means You. On the loughs, there are no MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

We scurried through to the dining room, where the burghers ate burgers and chips and pork chops and cheesecake and the Guinness kept coming…

boats: obtaining a fishing permit apparently requires the surrendering of your firstborn, and speedboats might well be abominated. Earlier in the week, we had walked for an hour or more around the inlets and peninsulas of Dogs Bay, near Galway, where the white beaches are formed of microscopic seashells and the land the same, only covered in grasses and heath, and we saw no houses and three people. Later, in Sligo, we walked for two hours on the strand of Drumcliff Bay, accompanied only by the sheepdog from our inn. No wonder our view of Inisfree could have been Yeats’s, his translucent bits of wisdom so easily ours. There was encroaching bad news in various guises. We had seen two jet skis in the harbor of Inishmore. The lawyers had gotten to the administrators of the Cliffs of Moher, viz., the tall, raw, and ugly fences along the edge. Cottages dotted the hillsides above the shores of Connemara. Something huge was rising in the hills above Lough Gill. But the beaches and shores of the West were mostly pristine. Have the Irish legislated this? Do they look westward, like John Keats, into realms of gold? Are they wary of the water and no longer make it easy for devils like the British to dock on their shores? How long can this idyll last? And when it’s gone, will Yeats too be forgotten? Galway—We Hardly Knew Ye Galway does not figure prominently in Yeats’s poems, maybe for good reason. Maybe he knew what was coming. My wife said that Galway Center City was lovely when she visited, but it may well be that nobody lives there anymore. Apparently, they all live in long snakes of terraced housing, straddling every hillside for miles around, joined together like all-white Lego bricks. And they all drove on the ring road at noon, shopping at the malls and car dealers and petrol stations and Burger Kings, as we were trying to circumnavigate. It took us an hour. We might as well have been on Route 1 in Saugus, Mass. Is this life, or death? The economy roared, prices were London-like, 24

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the Brits are out, Lady Gregory’s house fell down, the dolmen are all neatly placarded—did you see this in your Vision, W.B.? Yeats United A few miles north and west of Sligo lies the little village of Carney— a couple of shops, two short streets of 18th-century townhouses, only one small estate of terraced housing, and a dusty field. The field hardly looked big enough to be a football pitch, and it was barely level, but there was the sign in front, Yeats United FC, admittedly in some disrepair. W.B. was hardly the sporting type, and his name would not inspire mayhem as Arsenal’s might. What’s the connection? A seasonal squad from the Yeats International Summer School? A wry Irish joke? Is there a team of Joyce Red Devils hidden in the hills, and do the Beckett Gunners roam the Strand? Yeats would have liked the sign. In the eyes of many, sport represents what he strove desperately to do all his life, to unite body and mind. I imagine English hooligans doing just the opposite. Under Ben Bulben Yeats certainly would have smiled at the typo in our guidebook, where his tombstone is quoted thusly, from his poem “Under Ben Bulben”: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! From “Uncle Ben Bulben” (1938) He might have called himself avuncular, kindly patron of the arts and champion of all things Irish, but calling the mountain Uncle? Never, for it’s a fearsome, awesome place. On our Ben Bulben evening we went to a pub supposedly still operating also as a grocery in the old style. Alas, it had been avuncularized, and the locals stared when we walked through the wrong door. We waved weakly, they pointed, we scurried through to the dining room, where the burghers ate burgers and chips and pork chops and cheesecake and the Guinness kept coming, four by my count for the stout gentleman across the aisle, and it looked like he would have a fifth after dessert. As evening fell, the Hibernian evening long even in April, we drove towards the mountain, where you are not next to it, or near it, but definitely, like Yeats said, under it. It looms. There were a few new houses on the lower slopes, with their stone walls defining one’s safe place, and a raw lot or two (outlined by walls, which get built before anything else), but the roads grew narrower and the fences fewer as the car climbed, nothing civilized in sight now but sheep in long, MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

narrow, crooked pastures. Halfway up, we saw another car coming down the one-track lane. We pulled over to let it pass, and it stopped right next to us, very close, and a window rolled down, revealing several young men packed inside, or it could have been a dozen, I was so flustered I couldn’t look. One asked something incomprehensible, in Gaelic or a thick accent. I looked then at his red hair and wide grin, and made some silly squeak, and they all laughed and stared at us for a moment before driving slowly on. We turned back shortly thereafter, whether because of the rough track, or the falling night, or the possibility that those boys would be turning around and following and taking us prisoner high on the desolate slopes, I don’t know, and me with only a thick copy of the Everyman’s Poems, bought the day before in the gift shop at Drumcliffe Church, to defend us. The boys were just joking with us, I’m sure, the local variation of “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?”, but for a moment Yeats’s crazed Cuchulain still roamed that place, a place all the more thrilling for its centuries of boys and beasts, where Anglo devils had better fear for their suburban lives. And as I now read the poems, or if a few more years pass and we return, I expect I’ll feel the same wild surmise, even if terraced housing encircles Ben Bulben’s throat like strings of false pearls.

Jim Krosschell’s essays have been published in Pank, Louisville Review, Waccamaw, Southeast Review, Contrary, The Brooklyner, Southern Indiana Review, The Common, and many others. “Yellow Finches,” published in 2009 by Contrary, was named one of its Top Ten of the last 10 years. 26

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Interview J. Michael Lennon knew Norman

Mailer as a friend, and took on the famous author’s sometimes-messy life as his official biographer The acclaim for J. Michael Lennon’s biography of author-celebritypolitician-journalist Norman Mailer has been resounding since Simon & Schuster published the book last year. Norman Mailer: A Double Life illuminates the often-dual nature of the author who, through both sublime writing and sheer bombast became one of the best-known authors of the second half of the 20th Century. Lennon, too, led something of a double life, becoming a longtime friend of Mailer’s even as he researched, observed and interviewed on the way to the publication of the book. Lennon, a Massachusetts native, made a career teaching English at the University of Illinois-Springfield, where he headed the Institute of Public Affairs for two decades, and Wilkes University, where he helped found the low-residency MFA program. He has edited books of critical essays on Mailer and James Jones; his forthcoming book of Mailer’s selected letters comes out late this year from Random House. Lennon lives with his wife, Donna, in Westport, Mass.; they lunched with Mount Hope editor Edward J. Delaney overlooking the bay in Bristol for a conversation about Mailer and the writing of the biography. MH: Explain how you came to do the book... JML: I was the understudy to write the biography of Mailer for a number of years. The original biographer was Robert F. Lucid, a professor at Penn and a friend of Mailer’s going back to the late Fifties. Bob did a lot of excellent research, but he never really got deep into the writing. And then, in the early years of the new millennium, he got ill, and his wife got ill. His wife died, and he had macular degeneration. He never gave up writing the biography, but he was stalled in his later years. He died in December 2006, and MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

I took over. When I got the manuscript, I saw that he had only gotten to 1951 in Mailer’s life. I had a choice: extend his manuscript—Lucid’s estate was interested in that—or begin anew. Bob had a beautiful style—at his best, he was positively Jamesian— but it wasn’t my style. So I started from scratch. I was putting together an edition of Mailer’s letters at the time, and I put that on the shelf, and went to work on the bio. Seven years later it was published.

out in 2003, and worked with him on several other projects, including his letters. The next question was how to depict myself. Should I use first person? Refer to myself as “I”? Or use the third? I went back and forth. I talked it over with Donna, my wife, my agent, editor, my brother, and Mailer’s sister, Barbara. Finally I wrote a sentence, “Mailer met Professor Mike Lennon that fall,” and I thought, Well, why not? Mailer wrote about himself in the third person; I can do it.

You were a friend of Mailer’s and figured in his life. So you were, in essence, a character in the story that you were writing. The book treats yourself in a thirdperson way. Tell me how you came to that approach.

You had to wrestle with the idea of objectivity. How did you? I had a long relationship, 35 years, with Mailer. I presided over his funeral; I co-produced his memorial at Carnegie Hall. I’d written or edited a half a dozen books on him, so it was pretty clear that I liked the guy, and that I got along with him. But I admired him this side of idolatry. You know, I didn’t approve of everything he did—nor did he—and he was pretty unambiguous in telling me before he died to me to put everything in; let it all happen: “No one is ever going to believe Norman Mailer’s a plaster saint, so you might as well just let it rip.” So that was what I did. I also decided that the three crisis moments in his life would form the structure of the bio.

The first decision was whether to put myself in the bio or not. Finally, with advice from several people, I concluded that I had to become a character. In 1980, I was involved in making a documentary about Mailer made in Germany. I was the interviewer. Mailer and I were friendly—I met him in 1972—but the documentary really cemented it. As time went on, it was pretty clear that the role I played in editing some of Mailer’s books, working on his Archive, spending time with him on Cape Cod, made it unreasonable for me not to be in the bio. I had come up with the ideas for two of his books, The Time of Our Time, published in 1998, and The Spooky Art, which came 28

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One was the stabbing of his wife.

philosophical interest. For example, The Armies of the Night. He wrote that in a couple of months, 90,000 words in nine weeks. He was paid a large amount of money for these words by Willie Morris, the editor of Harper’s, which published the piece in early 1968. At the time, it was the highest payout the magazine had ever made, and, I should add, the longest single essay or memoir in American magazine history. The sales of that issue, and the subsequent book were terrific, and he won a Pulitzer and the National Book Award. It’s never gone out of print. But, to be clear: he wanted very much to write about the events of that book, namely, his participation in the March on the Pentagon, which he saw as a real turning point in American history, the moment when the nation started to turn away from the Vietnam War. And that led to L.B.J.’s decision not to run for re-election. Some of his other books, books that he got huge sums for—Harlot’s Ghost and, especially, Ancient Evenings—were not as successful. The Executioner’s Song, a massive, 1,000-page nonfiction saga that came out in 1979, was done with the same mix of motives. Mailer needed the dough, and he had a profound interest in Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed in the U.S. after a ten-year hiatus. Gilmore, you will remember, insisted that his execution be carried out. A firing squad put four bullets in his heart. Gilmore’s story was a crucible for all the issues Mailer had been fascinated with for decades—especially his ideas on death, karma, and reincarnation. He always had a double motive for his actions, and that’s one reason for the title of my book: Norman Mailer: A Double Life. Norman always needed money, but

One was the stabbing of his second wife Adele, in 1960. The second was Jack Abbott, a murderer who he helped get parole, and who murdered again. The third was when his sixth wife, Norris, left him, temporarily, because of his philandering. All three crises were the result of his blunders, his pride, his selfishness and so forth. He knew that all of this material was going to go in the bio, and he never shielded it. He told me everything; he encouraged me to talk to everyone. After a time, it got pretty easy because I thought, Well, Norman would have wanted me to write about this. But I tried to avoid a lot of commentary on these events. Better to get down the essential contours of the great tragedies and difficulties of his life and let readers decide for themselves. That was my general stance. I had an interesting experience reading your book and Adam Begley’s Updike back-to-back. It appears that Updike wrote what he wanted to write and money came from that, but I was surprised in reading your book how much of Mailer’s output was based on the obligations to the five ex-wives, the many children, and the IRS. Do you see that monetary debt as part of an artistic motivator? Did it make him a better writer? That’s a good question. It’s complicated. If you look at the Mailer books that have been the most commercially successful, you’ll find, in almost every case, that they resulted from a combination of financial need and what you might call long-term, vested MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

he was also in love with his subjects.

I think that the jury is still out. It brought him immediate publicity and It seems the last thing you’d tell any serirenown, but it also created a cadre of people who despised him because they ous writer to do is write a book in three months. How did he do it? thought writers should stay home and write rather than pontificate on TV programs. Updike is an example of that. I said somewhere in the bio that he had two compositional modalities: fast and From college on, Mailer was a gregarislow. In the fast modality he could write ous person, and after a few failures he learned to become a pretty good public 10,000 words a day, and he did, and speaker. He enjoyed it. He enjoyed the they were good words. In the slow gear, action. He could speak well even when he revised over and over—on Ancient half-drunk and he could do different Evenings, for example. It has great movoices: Harvard, Brooklyn, Texas; he ments, but a lot of it is not successful. I could do Irish (learned from Brendan don’t think his enduring reputation will Behan), Mafia (he be based on Ancient loved The SopraEvenings. It’s gonos). He became a ing to be based on really fine performArmies and The Exeer. But while he was cutioner’s Song. Harperforming, he was lot’s Ghost is another observing himself. book that I think Robert Lowell once will be remembered, said something whatever its flaws. It like: “Mailer was will be remembered in the middle of as one of his great everything at the novels. Mailer never March on the Penhad writer’s block. J. Michael Lennon tagon and he never He was always ready took a note. He was to write. Occasionacting out and he ally, in the Fifties, he was drunk, but he remembered everyhad some trouble getting traction, but thing that happened, every conversaafter that he just wrote and wrote and tion. I’ve never seen anyone remember wrote. He learned after a period of time things so accurately.” The observing how to get a draft out, a rough, shaggy side of Mailer was always watching the draft, and then go back and rewrite and performing side, and then went home fine-tune it. But in the early days, no and wrote about it. In my view, he was page went into the completed pile until one of the premier insider-outsider it was perfect. The Deer Park, his 1955 figures in American literature. He knew Hollywood novel, was written like that. the Kennedys. He knew Muhammad Ali. But he never joined the establishHe was so much of a public figure...was that to the benefit or detriment of his art? ment; he flirted with it. He wasn’t crazy about going to the American Academy 30

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of Arts—it was too stuffy. He’d rather go to a bar in Provincetown and talk to the local characters, the Portuguese fishermen. He had a raging thirst for experience, and for meeting people from every strata and enclave, not just famous people. But he liked them too. He enjoyed being with William Buckley, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons. But he didn’t want to spend all his time hobnobbing with the wealthy and celebrities, not at all.

Larry said of the Gilmore saga, “I don’t have the hands to write this book.” He needed Mailer. He had the wit to understand that Mailer was the person to write it, the guy with the narrative ability. Initially, Mailer had all kinds of ideas on how to write it; he was going to write an essay; it was going to be a play. But when he got into the raw material, the interviews and transcripts, he saw, eventually, that it had to be a narrative. Schiller knew this all along. Mailer discovered his method at the tip of his pencil. Schiller kept sending him material, piles and piles of interviews. Mailer was losing himself in all the paper. He couldn’t swim. “Stop sending it,” he said. “No, there’s more, there’s more,” Schiller replied. That’s why the book was written in 18 months instead of 8 months. It was an enormous effort to get that beast under control, and without Schiller it would not have happened. Mailer and Schiller met at just the right time in their careers. They needed each other. They did eight or nine projects together, most of which were quite successful.

One fascinating person in his book was Lawrence Schiller.... He seems largely ignored. What do you make of that? He had a lot to do with some of Mailer’s best work. What was the connection there? Schiller was Mailer’s most important collaborator. I take a distant back seat to Larry Schiller, who is a friend. He was a great dealmaker. He has great ideas for books that would sell, books about Gary Gilmore, and the spy Robert Hanssen, and the football player O.J. Simpson. Larry doesn’t know much about great literature. He’s dyslexic, he doesn’t know grammar. But he knows how to package a great story. He still calls me up and says, “What does this word mean?” Or he needs some help on his verb tenses, stuff like that. He is also a terrific interviewer with a great eye for story. Mailer learned that Schiller had gifts for understanding the underbelly of American life, and interviewing the people in it. Larry would talk to any thug in the world if there was a good story in it. There are no pretensions about Larry. He’s as raw as they come. Larry always has deals cooking, dozens of them. He did the longest interview in the history of Playboy (April 1977) with Gilmore. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

Do you think in the end he was judged as a great writer? Did he ever get to where he should or wanted to be? No, I don’t think he did. He didn’t accomplish everything he wanted, but he raised a high bar. He always talked about Dostoyevsky writing the first half of Confessions of a Great Sinner, which was The Brothers Karamazov, and Mailer said it was a failure from one point of view, but look what he got out of it. Mailer wanted Harlot’s Ghost, which is half-done, to be seen in that light. I think he’s going to be remembered, like Byron and Mark Twain, as a 31

Norman Mailer and J. Michael Lennon, 1980 literary celebrity. But ultimately he will be remembered for several great books, seven or eight: The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song, An American Dream (one of my favorites) and The Naked and The Dead. Then, Harlot’s Ghost, Advertisements for Myself, The Fight, and his classic about the moonshot, Of a Fire on the Moon. So he’s going to be remembered for different things. Another is that he was one of the last great public intellectuals, along with Robert Lowell, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, and William Buckley, intellectuals who were known and listened to by the general public. When Robert Lowell turned down an invitation to the L. B. J. White House, it was on the front page of The New York Times. Mailer’s 1962 debate with William Buckley was also on the front page of The New York Times. That doesn’t happen now. They were the last.

I had a lot of material when I began. I had published a bibliography of Mailer that annotated every essay and interview, so I had that huge stockpile and it was organized. He must have given seven or eight hundred interviews and I have them all, categorized and indexed. Second, I had his letters. I am the only person beside him who has read them all, 45,000 of them. My wife did an index of 3,500 of his best letters for the bio. I think I quoted from about eight hundred. The third source was the Mailer circle. I knew all the family fairly well. I knew the wives, the girl friends, all nine children, and I have a good friendship with Mailer’s sister. I knew many of his buddies. I know Schiller, and I knew his oldest friend, the late actor, Mickey Knox. I got to know author Gay Talese, and novelist Don DeLillo, both of whom Mailer liked and admired. George Plimpton, another good friend, was always around and I worked with him on some projects. I also had the public record, including many obscure

How did you research the book? The fact gathering...what was the process? 32

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Norman Mailer and J. Michael Lennon, 2008 profiles in college newspapers. They’d send them to Mailer after an appearance. He made some memorable statements at college campuses. He must have spoken at hundreds of them. I had all that to go on. The fourth major source was a series of interviews I did with him in his final years, the interviews for his final book, On God: An Uncommon Conversation [2007]. I also interviewed him about the people in his life when I was editing his letters: I’d say, “Let’s talk about Jean Malaquais [his intellectual mentor]. What was he like?” Mailer would give me ten minutes on various friends and family members ... beautiful material! Finally, there were his papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. My wife and I helped catalogue them, and we visited the Ransom Center a half dozen times. While there, I listened to the cassette tapes of him dictating his letters. Thirteen hundred cassettes, forty years of cassettes. I did it to help the people in Texas figure out who he was writing to and the dates of letters. They were a tremendous resource MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

and listening to him compose his sentences was fantastic. I was Mailer’s archivist, succeeding Bob Lucid. Also, I am fortunate in that I never had to worry about being a biographer until I was really ready [laughing]. I was sixtyfive when I started the biography. One of the problems facing a biographer is selection. You can drown in your sources. Carlos Baker almost did in his biography—what Hemingway had for lunch every day, and how many bottles of wine he drank. I also benefited from Lucid’s work. Mailer wrote thirty or forty short stories at Harvard. Lucid had long discussions of almost all of them in his manuscript. You’re not going to put all that in. I don’t think he realized the problem, as it was his first draft. Bob wanted to do three volumes on Mailer. So you mentioned seven years writing the book...did that entail hours of sitting in a chair? What was the process? [The process] was pretty dull. I wrote 33

almost every day for six years.

Writing is hard. What did Mailer say, “Anything is easier than writing.” But it was also enjoyable; I loved those years of writing.

Did you write it chronologically through the years?

I’m interested in the art aspect...Were you consciously thinking of a story arc or was the story arc just his life?

The first thing I wrote was a chapter on the early Sixties. I began with the stabbing and took it up to the publication of An American Dream. I wrote that to get the contract, about 10,000 words. My agent ran an auction for eight or nine publishers who were interested. It was very exciting. Simon & Schuster won. Then I just wrote every day. I’d start at 9 o’clock in the morning and I’d write until 4:30 in the afternoon, make a big drink, go back up and read what I’d written for the day, and knock off after a few edits. Donna and I went for a long walk every morning. Didn’t talk. The wheels would be turning. I’d get to work after that and it was 500 to 1,000 words a day. The final manuscript was about 415,000 words.

From the beginning, I sensed it would be a mistake to go beyond his death. One of his children said, “You know, you should put in another chapter about the Carnegie Hall memorial.” He wanted to hear the summative things that were said about Norman after he died, but that opens a can of worms. Which encomia does one choose? What about the nasty things said about him? How would including post-mortem statements bear on contradictory statements that preceded them in the bio? So, I decided to end the book with his death. Another issue was determining the turn points in his life. The great crises in his life invariably followed a great success. He wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner’s Song. A year later, his protégé, Jack Abbott, kills an innocent young man. He finishes Harlot’s Ghost to general acclaim. His wife leaves him. He becomes friendly with Jackie Kennedy and Jack Kennedy. It looks possible that Kennedy wants him to be part of the Camelot round table. And then Mailer stabs his wife. I knew that these would be the three masts of the ship. Once I had the double life as a working principle, everything fell into place. It became patently obvious to me that he was of two minds about everything in his life.

What was the final number? About 325,000. I cut 75,000 and thought it was tight as a drum. My editor, Bob Bender, said, “Well, let me take a look at it.” He cut another 15,000, a beautiful job. My wife read it. Mailer’s sister read it. My agent, Ike Williams, read it. My brother read it. Bob Heaman, a colleague, read it. Six people read the chapters as I wrote them, and I was getting their feedback. They told me what worked and what was dull, and I listened. I think it went through four drafts, all told, then came the copy editing. For six years I wrote and then it was a year of editing, which is a lot of fun after the writing. 34

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Globalization in South Asia David H. Wells Starting back in 1995, David Wells sought to discover, photograph and share what he thought of as “the fluctuating encounter between the eternal and the modern in South Asia.” Because globalization has been a part of human history for millennia, Wells thought we collectively needed to understand globalization as best we can, since we certainly cannot “stop” the process. This project explores the challenges presented by globalization in terms of the benefits and the problems. Additionally, this work is intended to further cross-cultural understanding and awareness of the complexities of the global push for progress. Wells has been awarded two Fulbright fellowships to South Asia and an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to India. These enabled him to continue his work highlighting the impact of globalization on local culture while bringing a fresh set of eyes to the changing physical and cultural landscape of South Asia. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

Bangalore, India, 1997 A satellite dish in the Electronic City area of Bangalore, which is considered to be the “Silicon City” of India.

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Udhagamandalam (Ooty), Tamil Nadu, India, 2008 This photograph was taken while the photographer was walking the city streets of Udhagamandalam. Disparate items include a statue of Ganesh and a television dish.

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Southern India, 2008 This man makes his living breaking down recycled electronics, for the parts, by foot and by hand. Despite the obvious risks to workersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; health and safety, this has become an increasingly common job in the Third World.

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Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, 1999 People in a train station occupy their time, one sleeping on the floor and another working in an internet cafe, in Southern Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most heavily industrialized city.

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Kolkata, West Bengal, India, 2009 A vendor makes a living by selling coconuts, in this case to the driver of a three-wheeled motorized auto-rickshaw.

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Orcha, Madhya Pradesh, India, 2008 A cenotaph (an “empty tomb” erected in honor of a person or group of people buried elsewhere) aligns with power lines after sunset.

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Kandy, Sri Lanka, 2005 This photograph was taken inside a tent set up on the side of the road to sell toys to middle-class Sri Lankans.

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Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2000 The photographer captured this picture of an older ditchdigger in front of new architecture while walking with his Bangladeshi students.

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Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2000 Two menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clothing choices represent the distinction between traditional dress and more Westernized apparel.

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Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2005 Consumer goods are promoted at a trade fair targeting growing markets in developing countries.

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David H. Wells is a freelance photographer, workshop instructor, blogger and Olympus Visionary based out of Providence, Rhode Island. Affiliated with Aurora Photo, he specializes in intercultural communication, the use of light and shadow to enhance visual narratives and photo-essays used for publication and exhibition. His work has been featured in LIFE magazine, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Geo Magazine, and The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine. He has had exhibits at Brown University, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Houston FotoFest, and the Visa pour l’Image Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan, France. He has won awards from Pictures of the Year, the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, American Photographer Magazine, Society of Newspaper Design, and SocialDocumentary.net. His photo-essay on the pesticide poisoning of California farm-workers was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He teaches photography workshops around the globe and was featured in Photo District News as one of “The Best Workshop Instructors.”

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GRAPHIC STORY

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Dave Van Patten is a California-based artist with a focus on acrylic paint, paper cut outs, and ink illustration. He’s published humor comics in Los Angeles-based art magazines, and self-published a number of graphic novel zines and twisted “children’s books for grown ups.” 52

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FICTION

Ruinations by Luke Bartolomeo

The sheets of the bed were always tight under the mattress, and they were very crisp and starched, and the pillows, too, were always kept clean, everything white. And when you went into her room, it had a sacred space in it, the Holy Ghost trembling like heat waves about it. It had that sort of energy. Like being in the sea and feeling the great shaking waves breaking over you, and just as they broke, afterward, how there was this wet and cold shock to your system, and there was also this strange peacefulness in seeing them off in the distance, the greatness of them over with. It had this sort of feeling too. Of the aftermath of a great shock.

ii.

You would see on her walls little drawings and sketches, candles on the drawer that were half-whittled down, and there was also the ash left over from incense. It stayed there in a little broken piece of earthenware that she said she had MOUNT HOPE â&#x20AC;˘ ISSUE 6

made as a child. The ash stuck to it. It was gray and black. It reminded me of an urn exposed, someone’s remains contained there nonchalantly above her sock drawer. But it was not so, really. And sometimes I imagined this was an old lover, kept in remembrance of how she once thought love was. ‘Til death do us part. I dreamed she had the romantic spirit in her, but she told me that was only a boy’s dream. iii. On her windowsill were potted plants, lavender and rosemary, and a flower that when you touched it it shriveled up and went scared, and sometimes it seemed like hours before it would open again, and I would sit there on the bed and watch it and wonder when it would open. Sometimes I left and wondered if it ever would. iv. The bookshelf was crammed with college texts and a few spiritual classics, and there were also the texts on what to do with your life, vocational texts, and the texts that said how you were to be or if the culture was telling you something other than what you were supposed to be doing. I asked her again about her romantic spirit, but she didn’t know what that meant. She only half-looked at me and shook her head. It was not something she wanted to talk about based on my definitions. It was something she could only talk about when it was right for her to talk about. It was based on feeling, the talk about it. And ultimately the whole thing was based on feeling too, the romantic part of it too. It was very hard for me to know what to say or how to say it even if I could. I studied the books again, read their titles, and wondered from the books she had chosen what I could glean. v. In the winter you would see the light hit at an angle across the room, slicing the room in half, so that either you were in the light or in the shade, and the room would be very cold or hot depending on if you sat in the light. Sometimes we would switch places, being either one too cold or the other too hot, but there was only once, when we were sitting on the bed together, piecing a puzzle, that we both sat in the light. vi. She talked a lot about her sister in Madrid. She talked a lot about her father, the sportsman pilot, who owned a small coupe. She talked a lot about her mother, how as a child they would shape balls out of white bread and dip them in egg. Her brother was unknown to her. She missed her brother, and said he would only receive communication through letters in the mail. He would not send her letters, but she had sent him one every month for a whole year. She would always wait for his replies and she worried that maybe they would never come. 54

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She loved her family and they were like saints to her. vii. She pondered happily the places that she was going to, the people she would meet, the sheer overwhelming quantity of numbered streets, everywhere a place to be and inside, of cafés and shops on long boulevards, neon-lit night life, the multiplicity of countenances that greeted, and the scrapbook conversations. St. Louis was a possibility. There was always the great Midwest. California and its sense of time being like her sense of time—slow and organic, unheeded by concerns or responsibilities, but those things river-guided through her life, creeping and arriving like unexpected ghosts, and taken and observed, nurtured until they disappeared, out of reach, not to be got or sought for again. There was always Madrid. And there was Bordeaux. There were sweet lands and sweet faces. The hard vitality that hit you when you went on a trip, that took you over so that you were powerless to it for a few moments or days. Experiences that pressed you flat down, took you dead-on like a dedicated lover to the cause of orgasm. I asked her about the memories of such things, dreams of these things and the things that she had done. They came out in shards, glossed over, and in her eyes, always keeping away from mine, I could see there was something painful about the memory of them, the inevitability of deep losses surely marked by clouded visions in the mind. She kept quiet after awhile. viii. In the corner of the room was an old chair of tattered yellow fabric, and above it were draped the many folds and sheaths of material that hung from the wall. The patterns were intricate, like so many flecked pieces and strands, all gold and a deep red running through, like that of dried blood. You could get lost in them, so that your eyes were always setting on something else and it was hard to know where to look. Everything there like a shrine. Like a place of prayer. A place to sit and see as a space outside the spaces you had drawn up everywhere else for yourself. I would sit there, and I would watch her on the bed, typing at something, or drawing, some music playing in the background. It was these small moments, the ones that anyone should easily forget, that made me think that it was only the small moments that I ever wanted to live out. I made that chair into my own space, and I wondered and prayed about things that I would never tell her about. I knew that she would not want to hear them.

Luke Bartolomeo is the editor of the Monongahela Review. He has been previously published in Word Riot and The Driftwood Review. His blog is called “The Cipher” and can be found at thisisthecipher.wordpress.com. He resides in Philadelphia. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

FICTION

Perfect by Alexander Ross

Her back is to me in such a way that I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see her face, but I can make out a pale sliver of chin peeking from behind the rippling curtain of red-gold hair which falls over her shoulder. She is bent over almost double, pulling a silk stocking over a firm calf and her broad, milk-white backside dominates my field of vision. I exhale slowly, allowing my eyes to rove over the back of each creamy thigh, the narrow small of her back. She is both vulnerable and self-assured, fragile and immutable, inviting and terrifying. She is perfect. I am in the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, standing in front of an oil painting of a nude prostitute by a longdead Impressionist. Looking closely I can almost see the individual brush strokes, seemingly careless but in actuality probably meticulously planned out and measured, which have, in a handful of deft flicks of the wrist, fleshed out her angles and curves in a manner implying that she is beneath a perpetually moving and inconsistent source of light, stippling her with a thousand pinpricks of paint. 56

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A week ago I had stood in this same gallery in front of this same painting with my girlfriend Katherine. Similar works by the same painter hung all around, and Katherine had joked about the elderly, tweed-sporting museum membership holders that shambled up to each painting, adjusting their bifocals and squinting to get a closer look. I had to admit, it was kind of funny, watching their faces get closer and closer to the canvas and then pulling back as the realization suddenly dawned on them that they were inspecting a naked woman in front of their partners, all of whom kept a respectful distance, talking about the how pretty the colors were, brochures tucked neatly under their arms. Katherine’s commentary had made me snicker, but it had also made me a little bit sad, because I didn’t really think she and I were any better than the old folks, not really. A little less naïve maybe, more cynical, raised on a steady diet of internet porn and irony as popular culture, but the fundamental experience was the same. There we all were, each of us pretending that the love we felt for these gold-framed naked women was purely platonic. To admit erotic sentiments would be to admit failure as civilized persons, to reject high art, and furthermore, to flaunt something icky and private in a public forum. It was a universal truth upon which we all silently agreed: you’re not supposed to get hot and bothered in an art museum. When we got to the girl with the silk stockings we got up close to her, because it’s not really a very big painting, and there’s no other way to see it in detail. We stood side by side and studied it for a minute. “They fucked,” she had said, as if it was the final word on the subject. She was positive. I wasn’t so sure. I told her so. “There’s something innocent about her.” I said. “Oh come on,” she said. “I know you’re all for courtly love and the beauty of bygone eras and all that junk, but this is just, way sexually charged. How else could the old fogey have been able to paint her so intimately? Besides, who has the art history degree here?” “Maybe you’re right,” I said, not entirely convinced. “Of course I’m right. She’s so vulnerable that it’s downright vulgar. And anyways, it said on that little placard thingy by the door that all his models were prostitutes. How innocent could she have been?” It was true. She was vulnerable. But I certainly didn’t think it was vulgar. For a fleeting instant I felt a strange pang like something akin to lovesickness. Then I shrugged, a concession of defeat, and we shuffled on, but I took one last lingering look at the redhead girl before allowing Katherine to lead me to a different wing of the museum. Now I am back, without Katherine, and the gallery is virtually deserted, allowing me to drift anonymously amongst the images at my leisure. We have very recently had a fight of epic proportions, worse than MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

“

It was true. She was vulnerable. But I certainly didn’t think it was vulgar. For a fleeting instant I felt a strange pang like something akin to lovesickness.”

any we’ve ever had before. It started, as such things often do, with a point of contention so trivial that I have already forgotten what it was, but my head is drowning in the echoes of the things that came after, things we had probably been waiting months to say. She tells me that I am arbitrary, I am obstinate, I like to argue too much, that I spend so much time with my books and records and my pictures that I no longer know how to like anything or love anyone properly. This onslaught is followed by the painful realization that I am no longer attracted to her, and when our shouting reached a fever pitch I told her so. It hit me like a bucket of ice water being poured over my head when I said it, and I knew immediately that it wasn’t something I could take back. She threw a plate, and there were still shards of porcelain tinkling on the linoleum when I slammed the door, car keys clutched in a fist. There are a few oils, some of which span entire walls, but for the most part the collection is comprised of small lithographs, all of them portraying women in various poses and states of undress. It is these miniatures which attract me, inviting me in. You must get up close to look at them, you must get intimate. I come to one of a woman sprawled out on a red divan, stark naked save for her black silk stockings, and I know at once that it is the same model with whom I have already fallen in love in the previous print. Small blue eyes stare back at me. Standing here by myself, my thoughts uninterrupted by the 58

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scraping of anyone else’s shoes, I have no trouble conjuring the image of the artist at work with his model. It is Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the artist enters the brothel, a ramshackle, dimly lit building down a cobblestone alley. The air inside is heavy with perfume and a thousand cigarettes. Through an open window he can hear a few strains of music from a cabaret down the street. The madam of the house merely nods in acknowledgement of the young man, so familiar are the prostitutes of the Montmartre with his comings and goings. Many artists come to sketch the girls, but this one is different in that he merely makes his studies and goes home. He compensates his models handsomely, but shows no further interest in them. It is speculated that he has no interest in women. He sees the redhead from across the room. She can be no more than nineteen, but she is confident and haughty. She takes him by the hand and leads him upstairs. He slumps in an armchair and rummages in his satchel for his tablet and charcoal as she peels off her gown. Underneath she wears nothing but a pair of black stockings which he urges her to leave on (“It will be good to have more black in the composition,” he explains). She shrugs and lays herself out on the divan. He does not get up. He wants to touch her, but he doesn’t. He is disheveled, hasn’t slept for days. His hair is untended to, his moustache drooping, dark circles under his eyes. His cravat hangs limp and untied about his neck and the MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

“

He sees what she will become: the swirls of paint, of color, the saffron yellows, the cadmium reds and cobalt blues.”

top buttons of his shirt are undone. Beads of sweat roll down his exposed throat and chest as he sketches feverishly, occasionally sipping from a snifter of cognac which he has poured himself from a decanter on the nightstand. He never looks down, just lets his hand scribble furiously and automatically as his eyes rove over her, drinking her in. He sees what she will become: the swirls of paint, of color, the saffron yellows, the cadmium reds and cobalt blues. He finds her essence and draws it out of her. The public is in awe of his vision. Katherine and I met at the art show of a mutual friend at a swanky gallery on Newbury Street. With her chestnut-brown hair and bright green eyes made all the more vibrant by heavy lashes thick with mascara, she drew my attention far more quickly than any of the paintings. She had, like me, arrived alone, and I watched her amble from one piece of art to the next, barely even attempting to look interested. After a few plastic cupfuls of pink wine from the open bar I worked up the nerve to sidle up to her. I pretended to gaze intently at what appeared to be a vomit stain on a canvas, chin in hand, until she noticed me and cracked a smile. We made eye contact, and she blushed, so that for a brief moment the gin blossoms in my cheeks had company. We stayed just long enough to be polite, then hugged our artist friend and left for more drinks and a quiet place to talk. She was funny (we both loved Woody Allen), Virginia Woolf and Joni Mitchell had been her closest companions in high school, she went to concerts whenever she could, and she smiled often, and without shame. Like me, she had been on track to a graduate degree but burned out and was “over all that.” She believed that when it’s right it’s right, and that there’s no use in prolonging the inevitable. We had sex on top of the sheets with the lights on, and her stereo blaring Lou Reed. She moved in. We took walks together. I was in love. Two years later I would find myself alone in an empty museum. Back in the little room in Paris, the artist looks up from his from his finished drawing and is confronted abruptly with the reality of his subject. As he looks at her, the colors which were so vivid in his imagination become impossible to find in life, as though she were beatific for only a fleeting moment which cannot now be reclaimed. Her face is tired, her skin sallow. Her red hair is one great snarl as a result of the many hands which had become entwined in it that evening. She was beautiful once, but he has stolen that beauty away and made it into something else, something that does not belong to either of them. He has been selfish. She is used up now. He no longer wants to touch her. He goes home. He lives alone. He cannot sleep. My nose is practically touching the canvas now, and I can no longer see her. Up close, she is nothing but a random assortment of hues and textures. Thousands of tiny cracks in the thick oil paint crisscross the picture. 60

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In some places the colors are faded to the point of being indistinguishable from one another. They have all become the color of rust with the passage of time. A crack runs through her face. A small flake of paint is missing, right below the eye. I take a step back. I feel sick. When I get home Katherine is still awake. She is lying on our bed, reading. She is naked. Only the small lamp on the bedside table is on, bathing her in an amber halo of dim fluorescence. I see it all now, the way her soft brown hair falls in messy curls over her shoulders, the way her body has a natural fluidity, a living testament against the very notion of straight lines. Tear tracks trail down from sea green eyes like wells of absinthe. Her lower lip is swollen, cadmium red and bruised indigo. She has been biting it. I search the endless expanse of her skin for flaws, for flakes, for cracks in the plaster. I find only one, a small scar on her stomach from when she was twelve and she had her appendix removed. I do not go to her for a long time. I just stand there in the doorway, watching and breathing. Everything outside of the splintering wood of the doorframe becomes invisible to me, and the little bedroom scene becomes my whole world, with her at the center. I am afraid to touch her, afraid to ruin the painting. She is vulnerable and self-assured, fragile and immutable, inviting and terrifying. She looks up from her book.

Alexander Ross is a recent college graduate living in Boston. This marks his first prose publication. When not exploring literature, Alexander is a songwriter, and is constantly striving to better his sense of lyricism and harmony in both media. His music can be found at alexanderross.bandcamp.com

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POETRY

we, the comet tails exploding into Jupiter’s red eye (twisting) by Panika M. C. Dillon

most desert deaths are from drowning, but we have no such luck here in the hill country i all downhill, from here against (the hood of the car) / your mouth gilt of guilt: a whisper, a whimper pinches cheeks (hard enough to leave a welt) / a creek’s rush, a voice dampened to ripple / a fish touches surface to swallow a fly & we roll like Sisyphus

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ii call us mules, call us useless / the road fogs our head lights, each lane a take off zone / (zero) ground packed like clay—not letting water / we steer to sink holes, to electrical storms / a window cracked: sloppy / stray clothes on the passenger seat: gutter, eave leaves / we bottom out in corner booths, on speed bumps / we bray as the wind checkmates our cheers; as limestone chalks the driveway, chalks the sunset, chalks it up to the soles of our shoes & we hopscotch along iii a building of bones settles in the creaking cold / learn the rhythms of space, the living house, its groans & sighs / something in the walls, something of the pipes—a rattle, an alarm’s shrill / speak to static, to raccoons in the attic / confront the tiles’ refraction: a mosaic

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choir / fight the growling boiler / sing with the rip & drip / fall in love: lights ticking bomb, tick tick ticking us off (to sleep) iv no man’s land is still a road to some place, too / say, one foot in the grave, we want / to say, so to speak, we want / to sing, Georgia Georgia as if sighing were enough / we should have been raptured, by now noted: why is your voice so hoarse? / we click our heels, there’s no place like home / like hope, this is all scripted: temporary / this is: bleach the linens, take out the trash; feed the dog, let in the cats / we click our tongues, there’s no place like nowhere / flip the turn signal keep on driving / turn up the radio & keep on

singing

Panika M. C. Dillon is from Fairbanks, Alaska and Austin, Texas. She received her MFA in creative writing/poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Borderlands, Copper Nickel, The Diagram and others. She works as a political organizer. 64

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FICTION

Trees in Alabama by Emily Marshall

It was an insufferably hot August afternoon when Benjamin Freeman buried his younger son, Seth, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days. Benjamin’s older son, Elijah, turned to him as their family and friends left the grave, and said, with the calm conviction of a man who had lost his very soul, “I should kill him.” He was twenty-eight, his brown skin glistening with sweat and fury, his eyes large with agony. He ran his hands over his closely cropped hair, squinted into the hot Alabama sunlight, and said it again. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

“

The world was changed—desolate, scarred and burnt—and his former existence had died as violently as his brother.”

There was a pregnant silence between the two men, still and suffocating as the humid summer air. Benjamin shifted his substantial weight from foot to foot and spat a glistening jet of tobacco into the ground, his eyes never leaving the fresh earth of his son’s grave. He was a large, dark man, whose age was wellhidden behind his smooth, handsome face. His hands were broad as canoe paddles and twice as hard, though never used to cause a living thing an ounce of pain. He deliberated silently, and never bringing his eyes to meet Elijah’s, murmured softly, “No, son.” Elijah did not respond immediately. His hands flitted beside him like nervous birds, aching for actions of consequence, of rancor. The knowledge of what had happened to his brother had engulfed his very soul in a conflagration that could not be controlled, nor did it want to be. He had never been a man prone to rage, and much like his father, subdued his emotions in dignified silence. Yet the summer of 1967 was a hot and violent one, and would set the heart afire of any man with either conscience or color. Benjamin led the slow procession of cars back to the house, a modest framework of pine and oak that could be seen from the road, perched atop a hill overlooking his property. Relatives and friends spilled from inside the house out onto the wide porch, sipping cool water and fanning themselves against the mid afternoon heat. Elijah followed silently, scanning for his mother in the crowd of women in their wide-brimmed hats. Veronica Freeman sat like a queen amidst the sea of ladies, head tilted upward as if listening to a voice inaudible to all others. Despite her excruciating suffering, she seemed almost at peace, sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap, not tending to the delicate beads of sweat gathering on her forehead. Her pale eyes lighted upon Elijah as he mounted the porch, and she extended a regal hand 66

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toward him, a rare gesture of vulnerability. “Mama. What can I get you? Let me get you more water.” Elijah took her hand gingerly in his own and bent to kiss her cheek, anguish emanating from both their bodies like solar flares. “No, baby, I’m quite fine. Your auntie June has watered me like a dying flower. Go set awhile with your cousin Hollis—he’s out back with the boys. Go on now, honey.” Elijah was overcome with the sense that his mother could not bear to look at him, that the resemblance between himself and Seth was too overwhelming. He could not fault her for this; as children, despite their ages, the older ladies of the town would always coo at the fortune of Benjamin and Veronica being blessed with twins—Elijah had always had a baby face, and Seth was always large for his age. “Yes ma’am,” Elijah murmured, dipping his head and passing like a specter through the humming clusters of folks crowded in the house. He let the back screen door slam behind him as he made his way into the yard, a shady relief of Chinaberry and Persimmon trees, accompanied by the violent eruption of color from his mother’s carefully-tended rhododendrons. His cousins stood in a small cluster beneath one of the trees, passing a bottle of bourbon among themselves. They quieted as Elijah approached, quickly passing the bottle around to him. He took a deep swill and looked around for Hollis; their eyes met, and Hollis lowered his head slightly, as if acknowledging their tacit understanding. The men resumed their conversations, a low buzzing among the trees and sweltering stillness. Hollis took the bottle back from Elijah as they turned to pace the yard, footsteps slowly synchronized, like two men carrying a coffin. They stopped in the shade of a chestnut at the top of the hill and looked out across the Freeman property, silently passing the whiskey bottle. Finally, Hollis spoke: “I know what you’re thinkin’, Eli. And I’m tellin’ you right now, it ain’t smart. You go after any of those McEwan boys, your ass is gonna be as cold as Seth’s.” Elijah sipped slowly, not looking as his cousin. Finally, after a long pause, he murmured, “The trees, Hollis. They left my only brother, my blood—they left him in the trees. And ain’t nobody goin’ do nothin’ about it.” He spat viciously in the dirt and swigged again from the bottle, passing it back. Hollis nodded slowly. “No, sir. They won’t. And I figure we know what scum took ‘im. But your mama can’t live through another funeral, Eli. She’s a strong woman, but ain’t no woman strong enough to bury two sons in one week. Not one.” The late-afternoon sun drenched the hillside in suffocating sunlight. The sounds of a strange social gathering, particularly for the Freeman home, wafted through the air; it was devoid of its usual laughter, of music, of children playing. The cousins agonized silently amid the swarm of tumult that had been MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

“

Their propensity for violence went, for the most part, unchecked”

ravaging the South for years. Many a newspaper article was discussed in the evenings after dark, of the marches and demonstrations, protests and riots. They patiently endured to see the changes they so hungered for, never touched by a violent hand until four days and seven hours before. Elijah turned this over in his mind, hardly debating what his soul had already decided for him. He cleared his throat, turned to Hollis, and uttered suddenly, “I been thinkin’ about buyin’ a gun.” His cousin flinched at the sound of his voice, as if he had been slapped. “No. You don’t even know how to use a gun.” He leaned forward as if to shake him by the shoulders, but his arms could not seem to lift their own weight. Elijah could not deny this. Until the evening before, in the surreal quiet of his bedroom, he had never considered it to be an option. This, to him, was irrelevant. The world was changed—desolate, scarred and burnt—and his former existence had died as violently as his brother. His only worry was that the pain he intended to inflict would never rival that which Seth had suffered. He snatched the bourbon from Hollis, draining the last of the amber spirits. He let the bottle drop to his feet and wiped his lips, finally turning to face him.   “You ain’t heard that, and you’re not goin’ to say nothin’.The only reason I’m tellin’ you this is so you know. You know if I ain’t come home one night, who done it.” Hollis placed his face in his hands and exhaled slowly. He rubbed his hair and the nape of his neck before muttering, “I can’t let you go ‘lone. Those bastards’ll kill you, Eli. And they’ll like it even more than killin’ Seth. Those sonsabitches are devils from the pits of Hell. They ain’t human.” Elijah shoved him suddenly in the shoulder, gripping his arm. His warm brown eyes were suddenly cold as flint, though they flickered like flame. “Don’t you be tryin’ to follow me when I go,” he hissed. “I ain’t takin’ you, I ain’t tellin’ nobody what I’m doin’. I’m doin’ it alone. I’m 68

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gonna kill that sonofabitch, and then I’m comin’ right back home, like ain’t nothin’ happened. Understand?” The McEwans had always been known to Elijah, their presence always regarded as a vaguely malevolent phantom on the other side of town, known for their raucous indulgence in pot whiskey, out-of-season hunting habits, and general disregard for women, colored folks, and Catholics. Their reputation was not unwarranted, as many of the townsfolk held, based on personal experiences, that they were generally evil people. Bennie Lee Bridges was doomed from the beginning of her life, having been forced into a loveless, bitter marriage to Zeke McEwan, a man fifteen years her senior who manipulated her fragile, trusting nature and twisted it into a broken shut-in, a woman who would not show her often purpled and exhausted face in the town. By twenty-four she had mothered four boys, all of whom took their first breaths of life and exhaled poison. Not long after the youngest boy’s fifteenth birthday, she died unceremoniously, leaving a brief life tainted and battered into submission to death. As the boys grew, their absence was a deliverance for schoolteachers, their presence reviled by the neighborhood pets and children alike. As adults, they commandeered the local bars, their pursuits of women and bourbon-fueled brawls never falling out of the circles of the town ladies’ gossip. Their propensity for violence went, for the most part, unchecked. There had been no shortage of beatings loosely associated with the brothers, although no legal recourse had ever been sought. The town’s sheriff, far from a humble civil servant, preferred mostly to sit dumbly in his office with his tiny blackand-white television. His deputies were really no better: listless in their patrols, disinterested in most goings-on and certainly more than hesitant to cross the property lines of the McEwan brothers. Six days, two hours, and twenty minutes after Seth had been buried, Elijah crossed Malcolm Street to Carver Clarke’s Package Store, a pleasant-smelling place laden with fragrant tobaccos and bottles of spirits glittering in the light of the setting sun. Carver smiled as the bell chimed over the door, turning to greet Elijah as he entered. The deep gold of the setting sun illuminated his mahogany skin, face backlit over a muted halo as he approached Carver’s polished glass counter that displayed corncob pipes and shiny butane lighters. For the first time in days he smiled easily, relieved to see his favorite shopkeeper, knowing there would be light conversation rather than solemn questions followed by non-committal responses. “Hey, Elijah. How’s work been, son? I seen your mama t’other day, down buyin’ a new pipe for your pops.” The two men shook hands firmly, a concrete understanding of what must be left unspoken. “Yes sir, she’s doin’ fine. You know my mama, she’s always out in those flower beds. Can’t keep her out of the dirt.” Elijah dug in his pocket and pulled out some loose change, sliding the coins across the counter as Carver pulled MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

his customary pack of cigarettes from the crowded racks behind him. With his back to Elijah, he responded lightheartedly. “I know it, yes sir. That mama o’ yours just loves the good Lord’s blossoms. Why, I was just telling her the other day—” He was turning back to Elijah, smokes in his hand, when his eyes lit upon a figure, through the storefront’s window. His body froze in that instant, mouth still open, arm still half-reaching toward Elijah. His eyes had lit upon Jacob McEwan. Elijah turned to look over his shoulder as Carver unwittingly gaped at the swaggering figure that loped down the sidewalk. His shadow made Elijah’s vision dim, horror and rage welling up in his gut yet again, no different than the climax of his nightmares. Two feet from him, on the other side of a fragile crystalline wall, was a monster—Elijah’s personal demon that had wrested every last molecule of peace and trust in humanity. His breathing nearly ceased as he watched Jacob continue down the street, his sauntering gait unencumbered by guilt. Elijah could see the freedom in the way he walked, a staggering contrast to his father, a man broken and yoked by anguish like some sick human livestock. His hand dropped, empty, onto the counter as he stared at Jacob’s back, receding from view as he entered the tavern down the street, marked unflinchingly with a sign to the left of the door that read, “WHITES ONLY.” The barely perceptible breathing of the two men was the only sound drowning in the absolute and deathly silence in the package store. Elijah felt he had aged a hundred years in the fleeting seconds his eyes had burned upon Jacob McEwan. His neck was hot and flushed with, of all things, confusion; he was enraged, but somehow exhausted, as if electricity had ravaged his muscles and left him weak and paralyzed. Carver cleared his throat and pushed the cigarettes and money back toward Elijah. He looked sadly at the young man, murmuring, “On me today, son. You tell your mama I say hey.” Elijah nodded to him without speaking, dumbly taking his things and venturing back outside, crossing the street with weak legs. The hinges of his pickup screeched as he climbed inside, lighting a cigarette without taking his eyes from the Crimson Inn, into which Jacob had disappeared. He could wait all night. He would wait all night, if he must. The sun slowly bled out all its color onto the town as Elijah sat and waited. The cigarettes he had bought at Carver’s store slowly became a growing pile of discarded butts on the gravel beneath the truck, burned through with great intensity and purpose. He did not feel the stiffness of his body from sitting so still, catlike in readiness for his prey to reappear. He found that he could not think of his brother without his pulse quickening sharply; he feared he would be overtaken with this rage and forget his plan of silent vigilance. Instead he imagined the colors of his mother’s yard, the deep violets and luscious oranges of the flowers there, the cool depth of shade from the trees. It was almost too much for him to bear, and he would light a cigarette as soon as he realized that he was growing angry again. 70

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Deep into the inkiness of the night Elijah’s subject reappeared, his arrogant gait the same, if not altered, almost comically so, by the activities of his last five hours. His legs bowed out slightly beneath him, feet conspiring clumsily against his limbs in their inebriated state. He fumbled drunkenly for his keys beneath a streetlight; Elijah could see the poorly wrought tattoos on his forearms, his battered knuckles, the stubble of a week-old beard on his weathered face. He in truth would not have been considered a terribly unattractive man, if it had not been for the treachery that emanated from him. Elijah waited patiently as Jacob started his truck, pulling away from the curb haphazardly, tires spinning crazily in the dusty gutter. When he had rounded the corner heading west of town, Elijah started his own truck, following him distantly. It’s nice that McEwan is drunk, he thought, as he glided stealthily behind the swerving pickup. He won’t sense a soul around. The drive from the center of town to the McEwan property was not terribly long, but the scenery was not the kind that folks might tour on Sunday drives. The roads were bumpy and remote, the trees thick, dark and sinister in what they promised to hide. Elijah was careful to stay far behind Jacob, his lights off and his engine quiet. In a few panicked moments he feared that he had lost him, only to be awash with relief at the sight of his flickering taillights. They finally reached a long dirt drive, tapering in the black distance into a dimly lit old farmhouse, the dismal place in the clearing that old Bennie Lee had abandoned so completely many years ago. The McEwan patriarch, Zeke, had followed in the same fashion not long ago, leaving the eldest, Jacob, to do with the house what he wished. The other brothers had taken up residence closer to town, living cheaply off sundry women with frail convictions. Elijah waited at the end of the drive as Jacob pulled up to the house, clambering from the truck onto the gravel drive. No dogs ran to greet him as he slammed his truck’s door; no light switched on to greet his arrival home. He lived alone. Elijah’s blood ran hot at this realization. There is no one to hear him scream for miles, he thought. His lips curled in a sick smile, and, lighting a cigarette, he switched his headlights on and drove back the way he came. The nights crept by in stagnant darkness; the low, dim moon waned, night by night, like a dying candle. Elijah slept fitfully, if at all, his dreams poisoned with hate and listlessness. Often he would awaken violently, his breath escaping him loudly, like a death rattle, as he tore his sheets from his writhing body in the middle of the night. The eerie, polluted moonlight of his dreams left his body streaked with the shadows of tree branches, twigs and trunks twisting between his fingers and incapacitating his limbs, sheer terror in his impotence and anger. He often sat in silence for endless moments after his nightmares, panting quietly in his childhood bedroom while his parents slept nearby. His mother had requested his continual presence in the house after Seth had died, although she never spoke a word of it to Elijah. At each of MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

his attempts to return to his own home across town, Veronica’s eyes dimmed like flickering candles, her silent nod and pained smile making Elijah’s resolve falter. Elijah’s home lay ten miles across the dusty town, a small wood frame home with bright, clear windows, wedged between a feed store and teetering on the tails of the service station at which he worked as a mechanic. His bedroom regularly smelled of gasoline and ammonia, the chemicals permeating his home almost undetected to his nose from the long hours spent in the garages. His nails, although scrubbed and cut down, were always layered with dark streaks of oil and engine grease. His home fell into the halo of the other black families that lived in town, two or three crowded blocks of cheerful, lopsided houses brimming with children and the delicious smells of families cooking. In the hot nights the men congregated on the steps of the houses, passing whiskey and telling stories, while the ladies fanned themselves up on the porches and hummed to each other their veiled disappointments, lives of struggle wreathed in smoky utterances of “Mmhmm” and “Yes ma’am.” Elijah loved the neighborhood, his own evenings a lighthearted series of tall tales and cursory flirtations, only recently allocated to the lovely countenance of Miss Marianne Turnipseed, who lived in the house across the street. Elijah did not mind the respite from his own home, as he felt the clean air and sweet scents of the flowers on his parents’ property cleared his mind of the tumultuous and impassioned conversations of his back stoop. He had proceeded through his days quite mechanically, accepting graciously the condolences and good wishes of his neighbors, going back to work, concealing dutifully the nightmares and fervid fantasies that plagued him night and day. On this day though, he was drawn into town, a sinister desire festering in his afflicted heart. His rumbling pickup truck delivered him jovially into the neighborhood, drawing the delighted attention of excited children and gossiping adults, each waving cordially to him from doorways and porch steps. The truck rolled languidly to a halt in front of Tyrus Forster’s home, a low brick building with a massive wood porch forever laden with dogs, children, and food. Dim light spilled from the windows and screen door as Elijah jumped from the truck. Tyrus’ massive figure filled the doorway as he heard the engine die, and burst from his house like a friendly ogre. “Eli! Hell, it’s been too long now, hasn’t it? You back from your folks, now?” Elijah embraced him firmly as they came together in the yard, inhaling Tyrus’ scent of cut wood and leather. “Nah. Not quite yet. My momma still likes to have me around, at nights.” Tyrus nodded and gestured toward the doorway. Elijah entered almost hesitantly, as if the dim interior concealed some kind of unknown terror. He stepped over the threshold and beheld, not for the first time, the modest interior. Newspapers were stacked neatly on a small wooden table in the living area, a mournful collection of the transgressions suffered around the men as 72

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a means of recollection. Elijah sat on the sofa in front of the stack, bathed in the garish ecclesiastical light of an old Tiffany lamp. Tyrus closed the door behind them, an affront to the gathering neighbors, who soon commenced to pursing their lips, craning their necks, and murmuring with no words at this odd interaction. Tyrus lit a cigarette in the stillness of the living room, exhaling deeply and squinting through the screen of silver. He had intended to wait for Elijah to speak first, but was overcome with eagerness at the reason for his friend’s visit. “Your folks—they doin’ alright?” His heavy baritone sank deeply into the surfaces of the house, penetrating Elijah’s skin and startling him into response. “Oh. Yeah, yeah, they’re... managin’.” No word seemed to convey with true accuracy the darkness in his mother’s eyes, nor the increasingly heavy gait that his father had developed over the past few weeks. The family was hardly managing, but rather had sunk into a cloud of unspoken torpor, tacitly acknowledged and never discussed. Elijah shifted on the scarlet-colored divan nervously, wringing his hands with almost imperceptible motion. He cleared his throat and met Tyrus’ eyes briefly. His intentions flashed through him like white-hot flame, and he felt suddenly that if he did not tell his friend why he had come at this moment, he would leave unfulfilled. He coughed dryly into his hand and raised his head. “I came... well, I came to... to see if you might be able to help me. To put things right. Fix ‘em the way they ought to be. Nothin’ will bring back my brother. I know that as good as anybody. But...” his words began to fail him and he looked again at Tyrus, eyes imploring him to say what he could not. Tyrus exhaled a final cloud of smoke and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray on the table between them. Not looking at Elijah, he said, “You want a gun.” The words spoken aloud were almost more than Elijah could bear, but his nerves kept him from answering. He could only dip his head in assent, and watched as Tyrus rose from his seat and left the room, returning from the back of the house momentarily with a tattered cigar box in his dark, wide hand. He set it nonchalantly on the table between the two men and sat again, his eyes now fixated firmly on Elijah. “Before you open that box, Eli, I want you to understand somethin’. We livin’ in a time and a place that got no love for us, you and me. Anybody colored. I ain’t denyin’ that some folks out there, they don’t mind. Mind us, I mean. Black folk. But the way I see it, they ain’t want us on their buses, they ain’t want our children in school with theirs. They afraid. Afraid of us, when we the ones gettin’ beat, and raped, and killed. See that stack of papers?” he gestured vaguely beside him, “That there’s a library of hate. Now, I ain’t got hate for white folks. But these here, these papers... that’s fifty and some-odd reasons why I ought to. I keep ‘em as a reminder of why I won’t let these sonsabitches win. They think they won. They ain’t won. And they’ll get theirs in Hell, I believe it. But sometimes, Hell can’t come fast enough. You understand?” MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

“

He contemplated pulling out the pistol now, torturing Jacob with the prospect of death

Elijah felt the hot, undulating rage, so familiar to him now. He reached out and opened the box, pulling out the modest pistol that lay within. Courage swept through him, the synthetic brazenness of a man holding a gun even without knowledge of its use. “I understand,” he breathed, fingers stroking the slim steel of the barrel. It was a revolver, with six empty chambers simply waiting for his passion to overtake him. Later that evening, long after the sun had set and his parents had quietly retired to their bedroom at the back of the house, leaving Elijah to sit silently on the front porch in the hot darkness, did he check his watch for the time. He rocked to and fro in his mother’s chair, appreciating the new moon and the inky-black darkness it provided. Every so often he would reach into his pocket and touch what he found, fingertips stroking the cold metal like a favored pet. His heart, he felt, had been transformed, twisted and converted into something his body and brain could not recognize.. Elijah waited until the light in his parents’ bedroom had long gone out, waited until he could no longer hear Benjamin and Veronica whimpering like beaten animals in the dark, until their uneasy sleep pulsated through that humid black night like radio waves. When he was sure they were sleeping, he pulled the keys to his pickup truck from his pocket and strode without hesitation to his vehicle. The truck rumbled to life at his touch, headlights flicking on like fireflies of sinister purpose. He had become familiar with the path to the McEwan property, learning it thoroughly on the many nights he waited outside the house, observing the nightly customs of its inhabitant. The house, he had come to realize, was deeper in the darkness and the trees than any sane man could wish to reside. He pulled up thirty yards or so from the house and stopped the engine, the truck’s lights having been extinguished long before. He could see the wavering figures on the porch as he had before, obstreperous in their self-indulgence, oblivious to his watchful eye these past few nights. He sat 74

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patiently among the trees, counting each and every intoxicated fool that staggered from the porch, drunkenly waving good-bye to the resident indigent. Soon all that remained was Jacob himself, and the glowing tips of his cigarettes floating, detached in the dark. Elijah got out of the truck. Jacob heard the squeal of the metal hinges and looked about drunkenly; Elijah had made it within six feet of the front porch by the time he realized his location. He leaned forward in his chair, cradling an unmarked bottle, and squinted to discern the hardened face staring dispassionately back at him. Elijah stopped at the bottom step of the long, wide porch, just shy of the weak pool of light spilling onto the gravel from a barely-burning lantern. There was a stillness between the two men that nature herself could not duplicate. Several minutes passed without a single sound—no bird calls, no leaves rustling in the wind, no sound but the blood rushing in the other’s veins. Finally, Jacob McEwan spoke, his tongue thick with pot whiskey and arrogance. “I reckon you’re that boy’s family, ain’t you?” Elijah hesitated. He was surprised at how difficult he found it to speak to this man, his lips and throat defying every moment he had rehearsed this meeting in his hours of savage solitude. Finally, he found his words. “His brother.” Jacob’s figure scoffed drunkenly in the dark, rising slowly from his chair to stand at the top of the three lopsided steps on the porch. He at last saw Elijah fully, who was standing firmly with his arms straight at his sides, expressionless. He stepped clumsily down the stairs, his pale white skin glowing strangely in the moonless night. Finally his dusty boots hit the gravel drive, and he stood malevolently parallel to Elijah, a menacing phantom in the stillness. He spat viciously at the ground, missing Elijah’s feet by mere inches. He snorted. “It’s a shame what happened to your boy. I ‘spose that’s what he gets then, ‘uh? A lil’ nigger boy runnin’ ‘round with a white girl just ain’t fittin’ to this town, the way I figure. Thinkin’ he’s as good as a white man, which confounds me.” Elijah remained silent for a moment. He contemplated pulling out the pistol now, torturing Jacob with the prospect of death the way he planned. But his arms remained heavy, and he staid still. Finally, he spoke. “The way I figure, my brother ain’t your business. That girl ain’t your blood. And if she were, we’d still be here now, I guess.” Jacob grinned in the darkness, and took a menacing step forward. Elijah’s right hand twitched instinctively, fervently betraying his body. His vision began to cloud with panic, which he had not foreseen. “Listen, boy. Jus’ because you got that mixed mama of yours runnin’ around like a common whore don’t make it right. I’m fixin’ what ought to have been fixed decades ago.” He pulled his belt suddenly from his jeans, a brown serpent hissing in the night. His eyes grew feverishly wide. He whispered his MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

next words, mocking and bitter: “Ain’t that right... boy?” Elijah’s blood reached a fever pitch in his temples as his right hand flew into his coat pocket; before his fingers could even brush the metal Jacob was on him, pale hands wrapped around his throat. Elijah fell backwards onto the gravel and grappled blindly for his gun; before he could reach it he felt the rough sting of rope around his wrists, as Jacob bore all his weight against his chest. He flipped Elijah forward onto his stomach, dirt and gravel choking his throat and stinging his eyes. He could feel McEwan pulling violently at the collar of his jacket, stripping the sleeves and dusty fabric from his body as if robbing a cicada prematurely of its shell. The pistol skittered from Elijah’s pocket across the gravel, succumbing to the darkness of the night. He kicked violently at Jacob, his arms restrained by the rough rope produced by this demonic being of the dark. He refused to scream—he knew the sounds of his terror could only fall on the merciless limbs of the trees encircling him, would only stoke the fire of Jacob’s hate. A sudden rush of unspeakable agony flooded Elijah with such intensity that he first felt shock before he realized pain. Jacob’s leather switch tore through the thin cotton of his shirt like a razor, opening merciless gashes in his back that streamed crimson blood onto the white gravel, evil spillage in the empty night. Elijah screamed then, without thinking, without knowing he was even breathing. Footsteps on the gravel fell near his head—Jacob’s boots briefly retreated into the shadows as Elijah lay on the ground, twitching and writhing in misery. He had never felt pain that incredible before—it constricted his lungs and made his eyes strain from his head, his brow and neck drenched in icy sweat. Jacob’s heavy steps approached again within deafening long seconds as Elijah lay panting on the ground. The pistol was in his hand. “Eh, boy, what’s this? You bring this?” Elijah coughed and spat, his mind screaming in pain. He thought only of Seth, of what he must have felt, if the gravel of the clearing had ground roughly into his face as well, if it stung when the tears rolled into the cuts. His body convulsed violently as Jacob kicked him in the ribs, waving the gun in the air. “Answer me, boy! What you think you was after, coming here to find me?” He seemed almost delirious with the hilarity of such a thought. “What you think you was goin’ to do? Shoot my ass like a dog?” He laughed harshly as he grabbed Elijah by the wrists, heaving him to his feet. “Naw, boy. Typical colored folk. Too dumb to know better. I almost feel sorry for ya.” Elijah screamed again in pain as he was shoved against the trunk of the nearest tree, an enormous elm that towered high into the dark night above the two men. Jacob advanced quickly, shoving the gleaming barrel of the revolver into Elijah’s mouth. Elijah felt the metal crack his teeth as he panted in terror, trying not to scream in what he knew to be the last moment of his life. He 76

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thought of his brother. He thought of Hollis, receiving the news of how his body had shown up on the side of the road somewhere. He thought of his mother. Unbearable sadness flooded him, realizing that his mother again would know the cruelty of her own child’s funeral. He was crying, and he could not help it. He sobbed violently, his lips still wrapped around the gun. Jacob McEwan stepped away from him, pulling the revolver from his mouth and holding it from his body with his arm stiff, pointed directly at Elijah’s stomach. He laughed, and his laugh was like poison. “This way boy, I shoot you ‘ere and you just lie there, bleedin’ like a stuck pig. Give you time to think about—” His head exploded with a sudden roar, pieces of brain and skull splintering into the darkness and across Elijah’s face. He screamed without knowing it, too terrified to move from where he stood rooted beside the Elm tree. Surely he was dead, and this was some sort of hallucination from the depths of his fading brain. He backed away quickly from Jacob’s body, stumbling over his own feet and falling to the ground. He screamed again in pain and struggled to crawl from the monstrous pile of dead flesh so close to him. Suddenly he felt large hands on his own, fumbling frantically with the rope around his wrists. He could hear labored breathing behind him—his hands were freed, and he rolled onto his side to see his father standing over him, his shotgun clutched tightly in one hand. The two men strode quickly through the maze of trees to their trucks, sweat streaming down their necks. Nothing could ever be the same now; there was no going home to bed, no work the next morning. The moment Seth took his last battered breath the whole world had shattered, and Elijah had been spun out into oblivion. Now he would not even be the one to bear the weight of Jacob’s blood. Several months later, a man who had lived for thirty-nine years, two months and twenty days died at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Veronica Freeman sat alone in her house, hot tears streaming silently down her face as she watched in horror, her heart breaking yet again. She saw the streets seething with anger, cities across the country enraged and riotous. Her heart ached violently for her family, its remaining members cast out across the country like forgotten dice. In the stillness of her home, she mouthed a silent prayer, her regal lips trembling with the uncertainty of the days to come.

Emily Marshall is from Kansas City, Missouri and currently a senior at the University of Kansas, studying Literature and History. This is her first published story. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 6

POETRY

Mermaid by William Miller Like their sisters, they call sailors to the rocks, a salty death â&#x20AC;Ś I knew a woman who called me late at night, laughed, teased, denied me. And I enjoyed those calls at first until they seemed more sinister than phone games. And I told her I wanted to meet, see her in the flesh, put a face to the midnight voice. She made promises that brought me closer to the rocks, her human arms.

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But they were only promises, and I took a real girl to bed. I heard her voice, even when she stopped calling, touched her dark red hair, her glittering scales.

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POETRY

Field Trip to Montgomery, 1965 by William Miller We stood around the gold star, the wind popping the state flag above us. Davis took the oath here on a gray, winter day, before a crowd of men who brought their muskets with them. There was rebel blood in our veins, the teacher said, poor farm boys, mostly, who died or came home without a leg or arm … We’d forget the marble steps, her little speech, forget and listen to loud music, try every drug while a second

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war was lost in a far-off jungle. But that day, we held hands in a circle around the star, as if we believed, understood.

William Miller is the author of five collections of poetry, twelve books for children and a mystery novel. He teaches, in the summers, in the MFA Program in Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Literature at Hollins University. He lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans. MOUNT HOPE â&#x20AC;˘ ISSUE 6

POETRY

Mercy Gets Her Krump On in Atlantic City and Shows Some Boys How to Dance Like a Girl by Laura McCullough Tommy 2 AC clown pops his ass down on the boards says Show me what you got. Mercy says, You think you know, then does her show, going diss and sick: bully, beasty, cocky. All flash, no goof, not yet; Mid East pop in her I-pod, power jerks and rugged, she mugs a face, has learned grace is thought weak, ends in pose, says, You so white, without irony, wishing she weren’t. She is grimy and sweaty from her snaking and shaking and quaking and twerking, feeling free right now from fear, loving to be near what makes her feel alive. When she gets the bus home, the mile-markers on the Garden State Parkway clicking by out her window look like the ruler she will refuse to be beaten with, and she’ll calculate the days until she can go again to, show them how it’s done. 82

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POETRY

Change the Game by Laura McCullough

Mercy and Rick, play games, are meatmasters in the Kingdom of Loathing, searching for their familiars, iced White Canadians in hands bricked with splints; already their wrists are shot, but they don’t know it. I think of them as they sit in their screens’ glow, what might be coming. Lux, Latin for light—not from the screens, but what they sense in each other. Hey, Skullhead, they croak, push glasses up their nose bridges. Oh, they are so lovely! Caterpillar brows, off-the-grid Free People shirts, mismatched Hush Puppies, and argyle knee socks. What decade is it now? they ask each other, laughing, when Mercy’s mother comes home tired from work, all out of parenting. When she slaps Mercy, no one seems surprised.

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POETRY

Say It Isn’t So, Ho by Laura McCullough Her mother yells whore, and I can hear their fight next door. What dream snake will keep Mercy awake, as the baby bumps her ribs? She doesn’t think she’s the fool her mother calls her. There’s been trouble, double what she dreamed. Mother and daughter. You can’t teach her nothing, her mother tells me at the fence. Please try, she asks, but what can I say? What about your doctor, teacher, priest? I suggest. There’s nothing to be lost. Try, she begs. How can I not? Mercy may need bedrest, she tells me the next day, but it may or may not work, and she needs health benefits. Mom’s job doesn’t have any. The baby is due soon. Where is the daddy? I ask. Mercy has held fast to silence, told her mother nothing. She knows though. Atlantic City, she tells me, playing poker; risking it all, hoping to win. He’s a pro, Mercy says, patting the belly no longer a secret. She looks so happy, radiant even, the beautiful lead in an underfunded, undirected film.

Laura McCullough is the author of five published collections and is the founding editor of Mead: the Magazine of Literature and Libations. She attended Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing and Literature. McCullough is an Associate Professor of English at Brookdale Community College, where she founded the creative writing program. 84

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