Mount Hope Issue 4: Fall 2013

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Issue 4 Fall 2013

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Mount Hope is published bi-annually in Bristol, Rhode Island by the Roger Williams University Department of English and Creative Writing. Individual subscription rates are: $20 annually or $35 for two years. Mount Hope Š 2013, All Rights Reserved. No portion of Mount Hope may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including all information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission of Mount Hope magazine or authors of individual creative works. Any resemblance of events, locations or persons, living or dead, in creative works contained herein is entirely coincidental.

Mount Hope cannot be held responsible for any of the views expressed by its contributors.

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www.mounthopemagazine.com Individual Issue Price: $10.00 Inner cover photo Jean-Christian Bourcart

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Editor Edward J. Delaney Writer-in-Residence

Adam Braver

Design Editor Lisa Daria Kennedy Massachusetts College of Art Poetry Editor

Shelley Puhak Notre Dame of Maryland University

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Evan Viola

Managing Editors Leah Catania Chelsea Silva

Submissions Editor Alyssa Volpi

Copy Editors

Elise Devaney, Jacob Holmes, Kinsey Janke, Reina Laaman, Stephanie Nisbet, Nicole Sabatino EditorIAL ASSISTANTS Jacqulene Brzozowski, Megan Cederbaum, Kyler Jesanis, Courtney Little, Clara Moses, Jenna Mulvey, Amanda Newman, Alexa Roberto, Abigail Scheele, Evan Schmid, Alice Sol, Kyle Warner, Alexandria Wojtanowski

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Fiction

Jeff Burd / Public Education 9 William Siavelis / Negro History 86 Hester Kaplan / This Is Your Last Swim A1

CONTENTS fall 2013 / issue 4 / mount hope

Nonfiction

Fawzia Ahmad / The Kalabagh Years 25 Linda Ferguson / What’s Love Got To Do With It? 61 Anna Redsand / The First Avocado 95

Poetry Ana Merino (Translated by Toshiya Kamei)

/ Accidente 20 / Diario de una maestra 21

/Jardín de infancia 22

/ Quedarme en casa 23 / Madurará tu Obra 24

Interview

Suzanne Jill Levine / The Art of Translation 37

Henry Sloss / Her Picture, His Poem 34 / Berkeley, 1960 36 Moira Egan / Olea europaea 42

/ Halston Z-14 43

/ Mood Swing Sonnet (3) 44 Bruce Cohen / Absence Excuse 57

/ Regrets Only 58 / The Break-Up 60

Jenny Sadre-Orafai / Fight Song 65

/ Where You Were 66

/ In Our Memory of the 27 Month Anniversary 67 Matthew Roth / Tether 68

/ Man and Crumb: Ars Poetica 69 Kevin Brown / Lost Limbs 70 / At Least I Kept My Kidneys 71 / Timber 72 Kristin Maffei / This 84

Graphic Arts Mister Reusch / Fourth of July 1993 45 Jean-Christian Bourcart / Camden 73

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Jeff Burd / Public Education Martha Zokavich was no longer Martha Zokavich. To what seemed like every last one of the 1,500 teenage bodies stuffed into Westburg High School, she was now Martha Chokabitch, except that she wasn’t even Martha Chokabitch. She was just Chokabitch. Somebody had gleaned the name from a television show punch line and rolled it around in the dark and rough-cobbled alleys of his mind in the way teenagers have of rolling around sounds and half-words and punch lines and rhymes until they congeal into secret languages ripe with treacheries. He tempered “Chokabitch” into a sleek missile and then launched it from the back of Chemistry class one day for no other reason than it was silent and he could revel in the catastrophic laughter that exploded in the wake of the impact: Is Martha gonnahafta Chokabitch?

Martha had been sitting in front of the class where she was more able to see without her broken glasses. She heard enough to know the insult was a play on her name and clenched her jaw to hold herself against the waves of laughter that crashed around her. The exact name didn’t become clear to her for another week, by which time “Chokabitch” was a perpetual echo ricocheting off hallway walls, classroom desks, locker doors, and cafeteria tabletops. A blonde cheerleader from Government class bleated it from behind her in the bookstore line last week: “Get out of the way, Chokabitch.” Freshmen she didn’t know screeched “Chokabiiiiiitch!” when they raced past her in the halls. If a substitute teacher read a class roll and spoke her name, “Zokavich?”, there was a pause, random giggling, and then cackles of “Chokabitch.”

With no cable TV at home, and no internet, Martha was left to research the exact origins of the phenomenon by finding an internet clip on a computer in the Westburg High School library. That ended with a reprimand from the dean, a two-week suspension of computer privileges (“Inappropriate Internet Access”), and a message on her parents’ answering machine that she erased before anybody heard.

Smart bombs like “Chokabitch” were status builders. The teacher’s reprimand was nickels and dimes compared to the dividends the assailant reaped in the halls. He ascended to Trendsetter and was now among the elite dictating the popular music and fashions, passing down from on high what shows and movies should be watched and what should be thought about them. Now he could chisel names into a list of Untouchables, Martha’s among them.

Even without Chokabitch going around, school most days was barely better than being at home. Martha could pull the grades if she wanted; she had pulled plenty of straight-A report cards years ago, but what was the use anymore? Some of the classes and teachers were cool,

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but being an Untouchable meant she was shut out of most every clique. She was too skinny and clumsy for sports, and not allowed to spend time with clubs. The way she explained it to Mrs. Davison in the Social Worker’s office, there were few reasons to show up on time or at all.

Walking around or sitting in the park meant not being pushed in the halls, not having her clothes ridiculed, and not hearing a constant stream of jokes about her last name.

Chokabitch.

Chokabitch.

“Chokabiiiiiitch….!”

Each blare stirred a boiling anger that she kept the lid on for fear of being beat up if she lashed out. On the occasion the anger did come out, it was usually in tears when she was in Mrs. Davison’s office or far enough away from the school to be certain nobody would see them.

Three weeks into the viral gag, the name was running through a dream about her classmates. Faceless figures with hands cupped around their mouths were standing in the alley and on the fire escape outside her bedroom, throwing their voices like jagged rocks that cracked against the glass until she snapped awake.

She sat up in bed and struggled to clear the fog of sleep that made a mystery of the clothes strewn on the floor, the crooked dresser drawers, and the door-less closet across from her bed. She looked to Sissy’s bed, expecting to see her sister sitting cross-legged in a sweatshirt and bell-bottoms, smiling sympathetically and telling her she had been dreaming, to lie back down and she’d rub her back for a few minutes. Outside the window, down in the alley, a garbage truck was backing away from a dumpster. Hearing the truck’s reverse siren meant she was going to be at least twenty minutes late to school.

There was also blood. Martha could feel where it had soaked through her pajamas and into the sheets and mattress pad. She had known it was coming, but didn’t know exactly when it would arrive. The school nurse was right: Until you know your cycle better, you’ll have occasional embarrassments. Even if it was behind closed doors and only Martha knew about it, it was embarrassing. It’s proof that I’m gross. There was no controlling it, or the way she spouted tears or ground her fists together when the accompanying emotions kicked in.

Martha eased out of bed, careful not to make a worse mess, and grabbed paper towels from behind her dresser. She blotted the spots on the sheets and her pajamas and made a mental note to run a load of wash in the machines in the basement first thing after school while Dad was sleeping off his afternoon beer and before Mom got back from the housekeeping service and they started drinking again. She checked her change cup beneath a pile of socks in the back of a dresser

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drawer and counted two dollars; enough for one load.

There was other money—a handful of wrinkled tens and twenties that Sissy had somehow got hold of. She had stuffed the bills, along with a folding knife, in an envelope marked “Emergency Only!”, and stuck it beneath a flap of torn carpet in the back of the closet before she left in the middle of the night two months ago. Martha had thought to look there as she struggled to find clues as to where Sissy had gone. The secret spot had been invaluable to them for as long as they had lived in the apartment and wanted to hide anything from little girl treasures to love notes, to, now, a knife and emergency money. Was laundry an emergency? Not really. She put the money from her mind, much as she had since she discovered it. The knife, though, had held her interest for over a week. She unfolded it using both hands at first, but then found she could do it with one hand if she held the metal handle tight and pushed up on the peg that was screwed into the side of the blade. After fiddling with it and somehow not cutting herself, she could quickly expose the four-inch blade and make it click when it locked into place. It seemed like a nifty trick, but when would someone ever use a knife that way? She figured that “Emergency Only!” meant the knife, too, so it had remained untouched in the envelope since she taught herself the trick to opening it.

Once the spots were blotted and the towels were wrapped in a plastic bag and thrown away, Martha gathered a black t-shirt, a pair of faded jeans Sissy had gifted her, and a faded red sweater that Sissy had abandoned when she fled. Finally, she grabbed her backpack. The whole ensemble smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Maybe it would air out some on the way to school.

She unlocked her bedroom door and padded down the hall past her snoring parents to the bathroom. She stepped inside, locked the door, and flicked on the lights. She turned the faucet enough to run a thin, quiet stream of water. Five minutes of hot water would be enough to wash away last night’s embarrassment and ease the cramps that were clawing their way up her ribs.

She felt her brown hair from her scalp down to where it curled in at her jawline. It was flat where her head had rested on the pillow, but only a little oily—nothing a brush and water couldn’t fix.

Martha scanned the shelves beneath the sink for the box that should still have several pads in it. There was shaving cream, razors, peroxide, an assortment of brushes, and a short stack of stiff, threadbare towels, but no box of pads. School would have to wait until she could steal some pads from a CVS to get her through the day. Some aspirin would help, too. Maybe the nurse’s office would come through if she could talk her way around the “no aspirin” policy. Maybe Mrs. Davison would give her some.

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The water was tepid when Martha ran her fingers through it. It would have to do. She stepped out of her pajamas, wet a washcloth and lathered it with a wafer of soap, and ran it across every inch of her pale skin she could reach. She dried, powdered, and stepped into fresh underclothes and the smoky jeans and sweater. There was no sense in doing anything with her hair. If she was going to steal, she’d use her father’s navy ball cap to cover up. She’d have to recomb once she got to school, if she could find a bathroom where she wouldn’t be harassed by the nice girls who set their hair with curlers, who didn’t have to pray for hot water, and whose bathrooms were stocked with pads and aspirin. The nice girls who had no fucking idea.

Martha turned off the light, unlocked the door, and eased it open. Dim light from the hallway wedged into the bathroom and widened until the door was open enough to walk through. She shrugged her backpack on her shoulder, stepped into the hall and turned towards the stairs, and stopped dead. A surprise “oh” dropped from her lips. Her father was leaning against the wall between the bathroom door and the stairs. His belly hung over the waistband of a pair of yellowed briefs. His hair was porcupine quills opposite the part above his left ear. He looked at Martha while rubbing several days’ growth of beard on his jaw. She felt his eyes trace her up and down.

“Whydya lock the door, baby?” His voice was graveled from cigarettes.

Martha felt an ache in her stomach different from the cramps. Her eyes darted to the side. “I… I didn’t lock it.” Too late—the stutter betrayed her.

Quicker than she could blink, he stepped to her. His skin reeked of stale alcohol. He grabbed her elbow and twisted it towards her ribs. “Bullshit. You unlocked it before you stepped out.”

Tears welled in her eyes. There was a sensation of heat that quickly grew within her, like a match had been struck in her core and the flame was growing. To her left, she saw her mother raise her head from where she lay in her bed. Martha pleaded with her eyes for help, but her mother put her head back down and turned over.

Her father breathed in her face. “Watch yourself, Martha. I’ll take the damn tumblers out of the damn knobs. Won’t nobody be locking shit around here.” Martha was still. She wiped her face clear of expression and held her breath.

He leaned in as close as he could without actually kissing her. “I’ll take your door off the hinges. It’d take me ’bout two seconds. You want that?” His fingers dug into her joint.

“No.” Martha squirmed in his grip. “I’m gonna be late for school. They’ll call again.”

Her father eased the pressure on her elbow. His eyes narrowed to slits. “They call again,

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it’s your ass.”

“I can’t stop them calling.” Martha felt the advantage. Funny how the school can save you from miles away, but they don’t do anything about what happens in their own halls. “Can I go now?”

Her father stepped aside. “Make me some coffee before you leave. And you need to be back here by one o’clock.”

Martha released her breath and walked to the stairs. “You don’t just leave early. I don’t make the schedule. I’ll come back when the day is over.”

“I’m sayin’ get here by one. You might go in for your mom if she’s still feeling sick. She misses another shift, they’ll fire her.”

There was increasing heat from within now, like a furnace had kicked on beneath Martha’s ribs. Her face reddened. “I’m not feeling too good, either.”

“Too bad, girl.” Her father eyed his fingernails. “You want to get her fired? Where’d you be then?”

Martha went to the kitchen and set up the coffee pot. She pulled a wrinkled McDonald’s bag from the refrigerator and stuffed it in her backpack without bothering to see what was in it.

Had she moved any quicker to the front door, she would have been running.

It was shaping up to be a good day to take shelter in Mrs. Davison’s office.

* Martha’s walk to the CVS was a half hour of passing in and out of crowds like she was nothing more than air. Who took time to notice a mousy girl in a faded red sweater who should be in school but instead is on the prowl? A tall man in a gray pinstripe suit walked by with a phone to his ear. A woman in a dark coat and sunglasses stared at her feet as she waited at a corner for the walk signal. A cab driver in a black cap pulled up his newspaper and read headlines while he waited at a red light.

Outside the neighborhood, there was always the hope that she would see Sissy. She would cut through a park and see Sissy walking a dog, or turn a corner and see her sitting in a restaurant window sipping a Coke and watching people walk by. Or Sissy would walk up behind her, tap her shoulder, and ask, “Where’s my favorite sis been?” before smothering her with a hug.

Hope is stupid, but still it hung like a cobweb in Martha’s mind. Sissy was gone and never said where to; not because Martha would tell, but so she couldn’t tell. Sissy wouldn’t be found until she wanted to be found. But she was somewhere. She had to be somewhere. Mrs. Davison suggested that maybe somebody had seen her at a homeless shelter or a woman’s shelter or a soup kitchen.

Maybe at the bus station. Would Sissy come out of hiding if she knew her little sister needed her?

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Once Martha found the CVS, she went to the dumpster behind the store. She pulled her father’s ball cap out of her backpack, tucked her hair underneath it, and pulled the visor low over her eyes. She wedged her backpack behind the dumpster and thought about what Sissy had taught her, almost saying it aloud: “Only steal when you have to, not because you want a candy bar. You ain’t in no position to be greedy. If you get caught, you got a better case to plead and maybe a sympathetic pharmacist or cashier or rent-a-cop will let you go instead of getting you arrested. But don’t get caught. If somebody stops you, drop it and run. They want their stuff back more than they want you. They’ll forget your face because you don’t steal from your neighbors.

You go out of the neighborhood.”

Martha entered the store behind a pair of old ladies in polyester pants and orthopedic shoes who stopped to read the sales fliers inside the door. There were three people lined up at the register, none of whom noticed her. The cashier was turned away looking for a carton of cigarettes in the display case.

Martha strode to the far end of the store, cut down to the middle aisle, and came up the feminine-products aisle. Without stopping, she snatched a small package of pads, tucked them into the back of her waistband, and pulled the black shirt and red sweater over them. As she approached the front of the store, she fell in step with a man in blue coveralls walking to the door with a carton of Marlboro’s in his hand. She was out the door and behind the store within seconds. Her hands jittered to the point that she almost dropped her backpack when she pulled it from behind the dumpster.

* Martha leaned against the bike rack near the athletic entrance on the north side of Westburg High School and massaged her temples to ease the sharp piercing feeling she seemed to get when she was anywhere near the building. She watched the clock set thirty feet up into the building’s brown brick facade. When it reached 9:29, the bell to end second period would ring, and a few seconds after that enough students would rush through the doors to sneak a smoke, cut class, or go wherever that it would be easy to walk into the building like she’d been there all morning.

White block letters beneath the clock reminded everyone that it had been donated by the Class of 1995. Below the letters, a long white banner rippled in the breeze, creating a wave that ran the length of the letters that spelled out “A Blue Ribbon School!” What does that mean?

Was it like the awards her grade school teachers made up so that every student got some kind of reward at the end of the year? She had walked home the last day of fifth grade clutching a

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certificate that announced: “Politest Student: Martha Zokavich.” She had never understood the recognition. She had hardly spoken to Mrs. Pedersen for most of the year, so how would Mrs. Pedersen know? Was it because Martha had told on boys who stole milk out of the cooler at lunch? That wasn’t being polite; that was doing the right thing—back when that still mattered.

So how did Westburg High School win a Blue Ribbon Award, whatever that meant?

Maybe they reached the magic number with test scores after months of teachers pleading with their classes to take the tests seriously. But did the people who gave out the blue ribbons ever come and see what things were really like at Westburg High School? Maybe they’d think twice if they saw kids smoking dope in their cars during lunch, or sipping from flasks in bathroom stalls, or teachers winking at the Super Athletes or students whose parents owned local businesses and telling them, “Don’t worry about your grades. They’ll work out. You’ll be eligible for the football game this Friday. You’ll get that scholarship.” The awards people should walk around with her for a day and see how kids were tormented when they didn’t show up wearing Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister or the latest Nikes. Certainly they’d think twice when they saw the day-to-day grind of students who got free lunches and who were forced to stand in the “free” line at the bookstore “for convenience sake” when classes went to pick up copies of The Great Gatsby or To Kill A Mockingbird. Certainly they’d be surprised at how those students scrambled to stay out of the halls during passing periods. How they sat by themselves at lunch. How nothing is more important than getting out of the building as fast as you can at the end of the day. If the awards people knew all that, maybe the banner flapping in the breeze would read, “A Brown Ribbon School!” Martha smiled at the thought.

Three chimes sounded from within the building. Martha didn’t move until there was traffic in and out of the door. Once she entered the building, she walked briskly toward the Student Services office. With any luck, Mrs. Davison’s office would be quiet, and Martha could sip a small cup of coffee and relax looking into the kind lady’s warm face and caring eyes.

She put her head down as she walked, all too aware that her hair was matted and shambled from her father’s ball cap. She tried to seal her ears against the strains of locker doors slamming, grumbles about bitch teachers who pulled quizzes last period, and girls squealing over attention from the biggest or loudest boys. She thought she heard “Chokabitch” somewhere behind her. Even if it was just an empty echo in her ears, the thought of it brought her mind back to the scraping in her ribs and stomach that had worsened in the last hour.

Halfway to her destination, she ricocheted off a fat boy in a football jersey who backed into her as he stepped away from his locker. The jolt to her shoulder spun her halfway around.

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She avoided looking at him when he yelled, “Watch it, runt!”

When Martha entered Student Services, the receptionist pressing a phone receiver between her ear and shoulder and buffing her fingernails didn’t look up. Martha walked past her, turned right down a hallway lined on both sides with office doors, and walked to the end of the hall where the Social Worker offices were clustered. She stopped in front of Mrs. Davison’s door, paused to hear movement or voices on the other side, and then knocked.

No answer.

She knocked again and whispered to herself, “Please please be here.”

No answer.

“Mrs. Davison’s not in today, dear.” Martha turned to see the receptionist waddling towards her down the hall. She felt her lower lip quiver and clenched her jaw to stop it. A blast of cold emptiness swept the anticipation of comfort from her mind. She stood and stared at the receptionist. Somewhere behind her a clock ticked.

The receptionist still had her emery board in her hand, and poked it at Martha when she spoke. “You’ll have to go back to class.” She cocked her eyebrows. “You check in with me next time you step in this office, young lady.”

When Martha found her voice, she immediately hated what sounded like a dry whine.

“Is she going to be in at any point? I mean… can I wait for her?”

The receptionist stared back at her, expressionless, and then said, “We don’t give that information to students, dear.”

Martha took a breath and asked, “Can I get a pass? I’m going to be late, and I have to use the restroom.”

“I don’t think so. If that makes you tardy, that’s your problem to deal with.” The woman stood and waited for Martha to walk back up the corridor.

The bell to start third period rang as Martha left the office. A few students raced past her, ruffling her hair in their backwash. To her left, a couple slobbered on each other before finally separating. A boy with his hands thrust deep into his pockets and the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head walked past her in the opposite direction, whistling and shuffling his feet.

Martha felt sweat beading on her forehead as she walked to the restroom down the hall and around the corner from her Geometry class. Once there, she propped her backpack on the ledge between the sinks and mirrors, took off Sissy’s sweater, and fished in the front pocket of the backpack for her brush. She turned the water on; cold this time. She let it run while she grabbed paper towels from the dispenser at the end of the row of sinks.

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She cupped cold water in her hands, pressed her hot face into it, and sighed as the coolness soothed her skin. She raised her head, drew a deep breath and exhaled, and returned her face to the cold water that was now running over her cupped hands.

Martha grabbed the paper towels and pressed them to her face. When she pulled them away and opened her eyes, two girls behind her were looking at her as she looked in the mirror.

The girl on the left wore a bright-pink sweater and black leggings. Her blonde hair was pulled into a top bun. She may have been from Government class; who knows? There are too many to keep track of. The girl put a hand on her hip and cocked her knee. “What are you doing, Chokabitch?”

Martha shifted her gaze to the sink. Without looking up, she replied, “Just leave me alone.”

The blonde looked to her friend, a redhead wearing blue yoga pants and a white v-neck t-shirt. “Do you smell that?”

“Smells like smoke,” the redhead clucked.

“Did you smoke, like, a carton of cigarettes?” The blonde pressed. “That’s disgusting.”

“I don’t smoke,” Martha offered. She turned the water off and watched as it swirled clockwise down the drain and gurgled. She blotted sweat from her forehead with her quivering left hand. Her right hand gripped the sink. Her stomach rumbled. Just leave me alone.

The redhead looked to her blonde friend. “Cigarettes will Chokabitch.”

Peals of laughter echoed off the bathroom walls as the girls cackled. “Did you hear that, Chokabitch? That was funny!”

Martha gripped the sink with both hands, expecting chunks of the porcelain to break off and crumble between her knuckles. She shook her head slowly left and right.

“Are you listening, Chokabitch?” The blonde stepped to Martha. “You look at us when we’re talking to you.” She clawed at Martha’s shoulder and spun her around.

The moment blurred in Martha’s mind. Sissy’s only lesson about fighting raced through her thoughts: “Go for the nose.” Her right hand collapsed into a knuckled knot. It flew up with the added momentum of the blonde girl spinning her.

There was a crunch of cartilage as Martha’s fist collided with the blonde girl’s face. The girl staggered backwards. She covered her nice-girl face with her hands and made a coughinggasping sound behind them. Blood leaked through the gaps between her fingers. Martha barely had time to grasp what she had done before she was on her side on the floor with the redhead’s full weight on top of her and her voice screeching in her ear, “You bitch! You fucking rat bitch!”

*

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It was nearing noon as Martha stood in the tenement stairwell that led to her parents’ apartment. In the two hours since she left Westburg, the lunch rush had started in full force. Traffic was thick. Belches of exhaust from city buses clouded the air. Angry cab honks and growlings of various car engines punctuated the low murmur of the city grinding through the day. Timing was everything at the moment. If Martha was on, she could grab some clothes and the envelope in the closet and leave while her father slept. If she was off, she’d have to be prepared for something else.

Martha had felt a strange serenity after the fight in the bathroom, like a fresh energy was coursing through her veins. The worst she got was a bloody nose that she quickly staunched, but she didn’t know how it happened, exactly, and couldn’t feel the damage that had caused it. As she sat in the dean’s office and awaited her sentencing, her cramps evaporated. Her head felt light. It was a strange feeling of—happiness? She hadn’t felt anything quite like it for weeks, at least since before Sissy left and the “Chokabitch” phenomenon had swept campus. It was enough to crease her cheeks with a small smile. After citing the school’s zero-tolerance policy for fighting and thus cutting off all discussion of who started the fight and who did what during the fight, the dean called home and requested a conference to discuss Martha’s five-day suspension for the fight and other concerns that included grades and attendance. Her father’s rough voice came across the speaker on the dean’s phone: “That ain’t gonna happen. Just send her home.” The dean droned on about staying off school grounds and calling the school for her assignments, but none of it registered in Martha’s mind as she rose from her chair and left. Five days at home. Two more over the weekend. Seven straight days wasn’t going to work. She had been lucky to dodge her father this morning and a few other times since Sissy vanished, but now there would be no stopping him.

Once at the top of the stairs, Martha walked to the door and waited to hear movement on the other side. Hearing nothing against the sounds coming from the television, she placed her hand on the doorknob and slowly twisted it when it didn’t resist, opening it enough to peek through. Her father sat on the couch with a can of beer in his hand, still wearing the yellowed briefs he had on when he had blocked her in the hall a few hours earlier. Her heart dropped. She immediately thought to close the door and regroup back in the park, but it was too late. Her father looked up from the television and saw her peeking at him.

She threw the door open and scampered for the stairs. Her father stood up from the couch, sloshing the beer as he placed it on the floor. He yelled at her back, “Where the hell you been?”

She mounted the stairs without looking back. Her breath came fast.

“Get your ass back here, goddammit.”

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Martha turned at the top of the stairs and saw her father had already made it to the third stair. She swung her backpack off her shoulder. Her parents’ bedroom door was open. The bed sheets were mussed in a faint outline from where her mother had been sleeping.

She reached her bedroom, threw her backpack on her bed, and grabbed the door as her father cleared the top step. Their eyes met. Spit flew from between his teeth when he snarled, “You’re fuckin’ gettin’ it now.”

Martha slammed the door and locked it a second before he pounded hard enough to rattle the door in its frame. He pounded again. The thump of the impact reverberated in Martha’s chest. He stopped for a moment, and then she heard, “I’ll break this fucking door down! Try me!”

Martha raced to the closet, pulled the envelope out from underneath the torn flap of carpet, and stuffed it in her back pocket. Without pause, she grabbed whatever clothes were within reach and crammed them into her backpack. She grabbed a picture of Sissy and her sitting on the couch unwrapping Christmas presents and stuffed it between a few t-shirts and pairs of panties.

From the other side of the door, her father yelled, “You ain’t gettin’out, girl! I’m gonna break this door down!”

He was half right. She believed he would break the door down. But she was getting out, even if the window frame had been anchored into the sill with a half-dozen screws since Sissy left. She yanked a drawer out of the dresser, dumped the clothes on the floor, and carried it over to the window.

There was another thump against the door. The door panel cracked in the middle and the frame splintered at the hinges. If he threw himself against the door one more time, he’d be in her room and she’d be cut off.

Martha slowed her breathing and reached into her back pocket. She pulled the folded knife out of the envelope. Her hand looked tiny holding the metal handle. She put her thumb on the peg and pushed up. The blade clicked when it locked into place.

For the second time in a few short hours, she felt fresh energy coursing through her veins.

Jeff Burd is a graduate of Northwestern University. His work has been published in Dislocate, Imitation Fruit, New Scriptor, and by the Society for American Baseball Research.

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Ana Merino / Accidente [Accident] translated by Toshiya Kamei

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I

I

The day’s work is done after many hours.

La jornada termina después de muchas horas.

In a sealess port with freeways of engines stifled by the cold no one invents service stations or outlines fluorescent curbs.

En un puerto sin mar con autopistas de motores ahogados por el frío nadie inventa estaciones de servicio ni perfila bordillos fluorescentes.

The heat withdraws on the radio waves that transmit vowels by interferences.

El calor se recoge en las ondas de radio que transmiten vocales por las interferencias.

II

II

An invisible wall surrounds my street, cracks the sidewalk and goes around the corner.

Un muro invisible rodea mi calle, agrieta la acera y dobla la esquina.

There are no motionless shadows or hidden skies.

All that’s left are marks on the road and the smell of tires that try to flee.

No hay sombras inmóviles ni cielos ocultos.

Solo quedan marcas en la carretera y olor a neumáticos que intentan la huida.

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Ana Merino / Diario de una maestra [A Teacher’s Diary] translated by Toshiya Kamei They learn to write, to put vowels together with dreams, to make cards with drawings and promises: “Happy Mother’s Day,” “I’ve been good this year.”

Aprenden a escribir, a juntar las vocales con los sueños, a escribir tarjetones con dibujos y promesas: “Feliz día de la madre”, “He sido bueno este año”.

They learn to write, believing that their wishes always come true: “I want a train, a doll’s house and a paint box.”

Aprenden a escribir, pensando que sus deseos siempre se cumplen: “quiero un tren, una casa de muñecas y una caja de pinturas”.

They learn to write and are surprised by new words in the dictionary: “Infinite, impossible immortal, immense.”

Aprenden a escribir y se sorprenden con las palabras nuevas que hay en el diccionario: “Infinito, imposible, inmortal, inmenso”.

They learn to write but they don’t expect anyone to write them.

Nor do they know there are nights that dawn stabbed and deserve a simple letter traced by fingers, full of lizards and pigeons, to keep a grudge from waiting for them to go out to play and breaking their toys in memory.

Aprenden a escribir sin esperar a que alguien les escriba.

Sin saber que hay noches que amanecen acuchilladas y se merecen una sencilla carta trazada con los dedos, llena de lagartijas y palomas, para impedir que el rencor espere a la salida del recreo y le rompa a la memoria sus juguetes.

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Ana Merino / Jardín de infancia [Kindergarten] translated by Toshiya Kamei My son is buried in the museum in Otterlo by the trees in a forest that scratches the statues.

Mi hjo está enterrado en el museo de Otterlo junto a los árboles de un bosque que araña las estatuas.

Like all children who die he has a mouth dry from calling his mother, feet sore from walking in the midst of war, and skin peeled by hunger.

Como todos los niños que se mueren tiene la boca seca de llamar a su madre, y los pies doloridos de andar entre la guerra, y la piel desvestida por el hambre.

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Ana Merino / Quedarme en casa [Staying Home] translated by Toshiya Kamei Staying home, submerged in the creases of time and waiting for no one.

Quedarme en casa, sumergida en los pliegues de las horas, y no esperar a nadie.

May my eyes listen and forget the world.

Que los ojos escuchen y se olviden del mundo.

May the silence tuck me in and breathe on my neck its smooth indifference.

Que me arrope el silencio y respire en mi nuca su suave indiferencia.

May living be this, with no words of needle or knees of crying,

Que vivir sea esto, sin palabras de aguja ni rodillas de llanto,

with the naked time on the edge of the bed and my mouth asleep in its timid kiss.

con el tiempo desnudo al borde de la cama y mi boca dormida en su tĂ­mido beso.

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Ana Merino / Madurará tu obra [Your Work Will Mature] translated by Toshiya Kamei

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You’ll fall with your footsteps.

Your work will mature with this new gesture of a wrong step and the face over the ground.

Caerás con tus pisadas.

Madurará tu obra con ese nuevo gesto de un paso equivocado y el rostro por el suelo.

At times mistakes hide another direction where errors don’t taste like failure.

A veces los tropiezos esconden otro rumbo en donde los errores no saben a fracaso.

At times, even though it hurts, we have to fall and from deep down touch the infinite in the eyeless worm that comes to greet us.

A veces, aunque duela, tenemos que caernos y, desde lo más hondo, tocar el infinito en la lombriz sin ojos que viene a saludarnos.

Ana Merino (born 1971, Madrid) is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Iowa, where she directs the MFA program in Spanish Creative Writing. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Preparativos para un viaje (winner of the 1994 Premio Adonais),Juegos de niños (winner of the 2003 Premio Fray Luis de León), and most recently Curación (2010).

Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations include Liliana Blum's The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (2008), Naoko Awa's The Fox's Window and Other Stories (2010), Espido Freire's Irlanda (2011), and Selfa Chew's Silent Herons (2012).

Other translations have appeared in The Global Game (2008), Sudden Fiction Latino (2010), and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (2010).

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Every year during the merciless summers of hot Pakistani plains, my father managed to transport his family and considerable belongings to the foothills of the Himalayas. For several weeks, we would escape the torrid heat of the city and live in the only physical paradise I have known. Then, as it is now, Kalabagh (‘Black Forest’ in Urdu) was a little green hamlet at an elevation of 8,000 feet. Its existence is owed to the Pakistan Air Force, which founded it as a training camp for wilderness survival for its aspiring young cadets. Due to some administrative foresight, its gem-like location was subsequently developed to be co-shared by vacationing Air Force families. In the summer months, its rustic, elegant bungalows were allotted to the wives and children of aspiring officers and revered retirees of PAF. This was probably the sweetest benefit in my little girl’s mind of my father’s Air Force career. Too young to remember his active duty days, I grew up knowing that a privilege like spending three, four, or if we were lucky, five weeks in the company of pine trees and undiscovered paths must have been a sign of his respected status as a pilot in his younger days.

Kalabagh was the most joyful experience of my youth in Pakistan.

The cooler air and the eternal aroma of the pine needles both worked their wonders in that hill station. Separated from the more-public and touristy Nathiagali nearby, Kalabagh’s visiting population was controlled by the number of dwellings—only about twenty or so—all aligned on the steep hill that was its main street. Since it was an Air Force compound, there were no signs of commercialization or any infiltration of an outside “public” presence. The cottages were all grouped around the main building, the Officer’s Mess, where young ambitious cadets mingled with the senior officers’ families.

The ritual of passing a few weeks in the shadows of the Himalayas was, then, a cause for celebration that knew no bounds. The approach of the long hot days as early as April were in actuality an announced anticipation of when our family: my brothers, me, and my parents were to leave for our beloved Kalabagh. Whether we lived as far south as the very urban port city of Karachi or as near as Tarbela Hills, we needed Kalabagh as our compass, to reorient ourselves each year (which we did for about twelve consecutive years). This power of renewal was a pilgrimage for us mortals. I’d like to think that our visits, in turn, pleased all earthly gods if they were ever present in the ‘land of the pure.’ For Kalabagh was not only an escape from heat but also a window to another, more promising world. We suspended for a brief time all the familial tensions, the required and often boring upkeep of our class boundaries in the plains, the burdens of socially erected codes of interactions—the side effects of an upper-class society. And, we did

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not know that we were bound to such society till we broke free of it and were instead on the primitive pathways created by the villagers who lived around Kalabagh.

I remember the year we couldn’t go to Kalabagh. I wept for all the missed opportunities.

I ached for the pine crunching under my feet, the towering trees dancing in the fresh air, the wood fires warming us after downpours, which would chill us even in summer. I internalized the sorrow and the grief of such a possibility and as if separated from a lover, I ached for the gratification of a simple life in the mountains. There were gatherings into the evenings, tambola parties, or even a rare appearance by the then-President of Pakistan, Ayub Khan, who would surprise us with his affability as we all stood around him in admiration. Someone took a photograph in front of the Officer’s Mess, which sat in the middle of the main thoroughfare’s steep incline. I was too little to comprehend what was going on, but remember someone pushing me this way, another person directing me the other, and peeking out amidst my aunts’ proud position near the kindly man who everyone called “Mr. President.” I did as they said and now I just have the old photograph of the occasion.

Is this where I internalized a love for places? That when separated from them, I longed for them. Surely, the early ties that are established between self and space replay themselves later in our lives. Sara Teasdale writes: “Places I love come back to me like music,/Hush me and heal me when I am very tired.” I replay scenes from Kalabagh as I drift off to sleep, as if a soothing lullaby of a time and place gone by. I do not long for it to escape my present, but, rather, I revert to its memory for solace and quiet.

But, on a recent visit to Kalabagh, I couldn’t match my childhood version of paradise to the gated community that our internal Kalabagh had become. It was difficult to accept that the winding path that was once strewn with rocks, trees’ roots and fern-like greenery was now made of touristy cemented steps. I wanted to remember the thrill of discovering new bends on these very trails, leading to the nameless places and unsaid delights that I knew as a little girl. On my recent visit as an adult, I could not.

And so places, like people we love and have known, become those internalized joys living just below our skin’s surface—their presence in our souls separated by a thin surface by only the passage of time and place from our current realities.

In Kalabagh, each member of my family explored and expanded his or her individual self. My older brother still swears that his early lessons in manhood came when he tagged along with the young cadets on their training in the wilderness. This must have miraculously freed my younger brother to know his own childhood with his own lens of boyhood. I could do whatever

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I pleased or made my own fantasies being surrounded by the mountains. My parents left each other to discover their own versions of a better life. It was an unsaid rule about Kalabagh that the generosity of the landscape will sooner or later influence its lowly inhabitants. The quarrels and frustrations were set aside only to be picked up again when we descended to the plains.

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Kalabagh’s bounties did not only benefit our immediate family, but thanks to a generous stroke in my father’s nature, one or two of my mother’s younger half-sisters were invited every year to accompany us as well. The young women kept us and our mother company. We would arrive from a populous Karachi, then from the long and tedious flight in a small Cessna flown by our father to our maternal grandfather’s humble home in Lahore. Our sweaters and shawls packed, we viewed our stay in our grandfather’s home only as one leg of the long journey from the Arabian-Ocean city all the way to northern Pakistan. While we all entertained each other and congratulated ourselves just to be in each other’s company in Lahore, the true purpose and the ultimate destination was of course none other than Kalabagh, the land of our pure dreams.

In those years we would arrive at our final destination, all piled in the back of an Air Force truck. This was the most efficient mode of transportation then, when the road’s conditions were best left to the most hardened driver from the northern areas, who knew how to negotiate those tight turns and other local and experienced drivers on those mountain roads. Arriving in the truck announced our big cargo: pots, pans, household goods one may need for the stay in the mountains, even rugs sometimes to duplicate a home away from home. They would deposit us at the base where the welcome center existed and porters would carry the luggage, the household paraphernalia up the steep unpaved road to our doorstep.

It was not long before a total sense of abandonment for all seeped in each one of us. The rules, regulations and even grievances that one may have had, vanished as if by magic as soon as one made the bend and saw the familiar Air Force blue sign. If the mountains could create music, we would have all started dancing, intoxicated with our own liberation. This must have led the aunts to indulge in a heightened sense of self-expression. Without prompting, they would start humming a song all together, in unison, as if it were a hymn to the beauty around them. Kalabagh had allowed them to listen to an inner, happier voice that had been curtailed in the strict puritan atmosphere that my erstwhile grandfather must have wanted for them in the plains. They would burst out in songs whether we were en route to the mountains, sipping tea on the terraces, or just playing a card game on the grassy lawns. I cannot disassociate their songs and laughter from my own experience of the hill station; their melodies remain softly lodged in my heart to this

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day. They sang about life, companionship, longing, nostalgia and, of course, love. I came to know about such complex emotions from the 1950s, 1960s Urdu love songs as they were my first lessons of romantic love expressed in words. My favorite song loses its meaning in translation but the unexpected release is replicated in its pleasant imagery:

…it still remains a mystery how unexpectedly Spring crept up on us [for here we are already] the night has become a blushing bride whose moist eye-lashes fanned the sweet delicate air… …and what if our eyes crossed then.

In this case, some forlorn lover had written his heart’s desires, for his beloved. Our time in Kalabagh was epitomized by my aunts’ melodious voices in songs such as this one. And since there was no restriction for them to wear their chadors as in the city, we watched them wear their pretty clothes and put up their hair as they celebrated their femininity in those mountains.

Perhaps this is why I don’t remember questioning why they wore the traditional opaque veil in the city and not in the mountains. Perhaps the answer was apparent even to my little girlhood: the local men in Kalabagh instinctively looked down when in the company of women. Avoiding eye contact with a strange woman or a man is not an indication of deceit or falsity. It is rather a mannerism of respect in a Muslim social setting and is received as such. As the men lowered their looks—as it is mandated in the Qur’an—this freed the women from their chadors, which is not mandated in the Qur’an. This liberated us in the ways that our urban Muslim lives could not. It was in Kalabagh that we could live out our lives as Muslim women liberated from male interpretations of the Qur’an.

The women in our vacationing party never felt they could not move about at their leisure and pace. If they so desired, they could go discover one path for its views, or if they so fancied, they could pack picnics for dusk time and just be merry under the Himalayan peaks, or even organize bonfires. To experience this freedom as a child was an extension of some privileges that I already enjoyed in the plains; for my aunts though, it must have been a difference worth noting.

The urban Muslim life was replete with set rules and confining codes of behavior. To have had access to this freedom was an opportunity for which they ever remained thankful to my father.

But because we could not accommodate all of the aunts, there was a lottery system to

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their yearly vacations with us. When one of them didn’t win it, she was heartbroken and retreated to her bedroom to grieve such a devastating loss. As a grown woman, I know that when one of the regulars looked back at the Kalabagh years as the one happy place left in her life, she harbors the memory like a quiet prayer in her heart that brings her solace during times of duress in a difficult marriage.

The coterie of cooks, guards and overseers of the Officers Mess remained consistent over the years, so they, too, became part of the whole experience for us. They remained loyal to their duties and functions as most of them had worked at the hill station for many years. Their hardy lifestyles kept them robust. Only their wrinkled skin would tell us the years they had worked there.

It was considered polite to talk to the “staff” with respect for all the years they had devoted to this service, and to defer to their opinions, whether it be about the price of onions in the local bazaar, the availability of the mountain green pepper, or then again their stories about their service in some English war. Such memories were filled with both a longing and a desire for a disassociation. The wars were, of course, not theirs to fight, but because they were colonized

by Britain, the wars became their burden. The “staff” cook would take pride in telling anecdotes about experimentation with dishes that he must have learned to satisfy British taste buds. After hearing his stories, we acquiesced and ate whatever he would provide us, as his knowledge of the mechanics of a mince pie had to be acknowledged. Or, we would be subjected to the old mali’s (gardener’s) expertise in tending so loyally to the amazingly beautiful hydrangea bushes that flourished outside the Officer’s Mess or the Chief of Staff’s Residence. Those bushes may have been the romantic fancy of some Meme Sahib—wife of a former colonizer—distanced from her beloved English seaside town, where her hydrangea bush grew to all the beautiful shades of seagreens and periwinkle blues. To this day, when I see the glorious hydrangeas at the footsteps of a weather-beaten New England home, I reminisce about the quiet bond between the Kalabagh malis and their plants. Surely, the cluster of flowers was not the fancy of a Pakistani Begum, who would rather have had her mali plant more jasmine bushes. The more jasmine bushes the better, because there are innumerable adornments to be made out of those small heavenly buds. One of the simplest pleasures of being a woman in Pakistan is that one can buy these pieces of jasmine jewelry—clusters of buds sewn together to make bracelets and necklaces to be worn for only one evening, the time it takes for the flowers to wilt…only to wait for the following day for more moti jewelry.

And then there were the visits by the shawl wallas or the shawl sellers in Kalabagh. In

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those days, we did not go to the bazaar to shop for those beautiful shawls because in Kalabagh, the seller would bring them to us. I knew such men from afar. They carried their metal trunks on their heads, centered perfectly on top of a makeshift support of an old cloth wrapped tightly in a circle to soften the burden. As one of these men would approach our cottage, my heart would swell at all the delicious possibilities of colors, patterns, wool that was the purpose of the shawl walla’s visit to the women from the plains. All hand-embroidered, the shawls were displayed to the women who sat around like an audience in awe of the wealth of fine thread and its fascinating hues. One after another, the seller would whisk them out with the quick movement of his wrists, as if liberating them from their folded existence in his trunk. He would unfurl them at our feet, both for our visual and tactile pleasure. The shawls were made by the women of their villages. I now regret that we never saw the women embroiderers themselves. I wanted to know what made them choose one color over another, what inspired them to direct their needles in one stitch and not another. Those stories will remain untold, locked in their hearts.

Invariably we would reach out and touch the softness of spun wool, all the while keeping our admiration in check because display of overt admiration would spoil the chances of a good haggling session. So we sat around the seller, with our poker faces, holding back any enthusiasm about his wares, not letting him know which one we truly liked. We concealed our weakness for one color or one pattern over another. As my heart would flutter with the unfolding of the sensual embroidery and I could scarcely conceal my delight, my mother and my aunts would prepare me in advance not to be overenthusiastic about a particular shawl, no matter how much I liked it. So I wouldn’t show my appreciation of my chosen piece, but furtively glance at it as it got buried in the display. I was learning important lessons of a dialogue which must skirt an issue and yet name it—another name or sense of bargaining and how a woman is to carry herself in front of the male merchants in Pakistan.

Pakistani women are adept at a game of wills and commerce as they go about their daily shopping. Young women learn this way of market demeanor from the older women in their family, and initiate themselves in talking to the merchant class in manners that are acceptable.

Even shopping becomes an established relationship between the person buying and the seller, with all the etiquette and comportment required from each party for the transaction to flow smoothly.

Among other things, I unlearned these lessons, as they are not applicable when I go shopping in my American life. But I find myself reverting to them instinctively when I visit a privately-owned grocery store that would stock the spices, condiments, and bread that I need for some Pakistani dish. I probe and question the shopkeeper, I establish a certain entity by questioning the quality

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of the meat I’m purchasing. I request a certain product, complain about another, comment on the size of his new shelf—in brief, I instinctively establish my role as the respectable shopper. There is usually a predictable acquiescence from the merchant’s part and an expected knowledgeable presence on my part. We both play our roles as if rehearsed in advance, and we both acknowledge each other’s place in the transaction. I doubt if the outcome of the buyer-seller interaction would be any different in the absence of such a dialogue, but I can’t help but revert back to my ways of being the Pakistani-woman-who-shops with all the cultural ways of being. It is rare that I do this, because I will visit an “ethnic” grocery store only once in a while. But I do it more as a salute to a dying interaction between the merchant and the Pakistani woman that I once knew in Pakistan.

And, so, it is only in a vacuum that I can rehearse a way of being encoded as a female other from an Eastern culture.

In such daily transactions lies the public persona of the majority of middle-class women in Pakistan. They weave their public selves from what they encounter in the bazaars and shops that they frequent. Far from the passive role that they are often prescribed in the public eye, they negotiate, cajole, conceal, even demand their way through their lives outside of their homes. Any burqa-clad woman will attest to this. It is in this honed business of self that most women approach their daily lives outside their homes. Only very few of the educated upper-class women manage to find themselves in positions in the public sphere that leads to public policy roles or changes.

In this fashion they are a rare icon of the progressive Eastern female in a male-dominated society.

But it is with certain irony that the numerous roles of woman-agency that are accomplished on an everyday level in the lives of countless Pakistani women remain overlooked and often even misunderstood by not only the world, but by the upper-class women themselves who remain smug in the safety of their relative wealth and perceived better situation.

Rarer still were visits by the precious-stone sellers in Kalabagh. They, too, would come to our door and have some treasure in their tin trunks, their little stones carefully wrapped in tissue papers. The gem seller employed a different approach in displaying his stones. But, like the shawl-wallas, we gathered around him as well and listened to his stories about his gems as he tried to entice us with his fares. Nonetheless, as a little girl, the visit that I coveted the most was the baker’s. I would wait for him at the steps, longing for his presence and just pretending that I was admiring the range of mountains beyond the valley. I could trace the trucks and cars winding their way up the road at a distance but in fact, I was sitting there waiting for the baker’s

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appearance. When the baker did finally arrive, opening his steel trunk to show a cornucopia of pastries, I could swoon in sheer delight from the warm, musty, sweet aromas wafting out of his trunk. As he put his heavy load down, and bent over to unlatch the top, I could imagine the sight of those puff rolls, lemon tarts, and my absolute favorite: macaroons. These macaroons were gooier, chewier versions of macaroons I now buy in North America. Somehow, though, the subsequent American version of the Pakistani pastry loses the original pleasure stored away in some cells in my tongue; like a lover not trying to replicate the one important and all-dimensional love with lesser versions of amorous adventures, I don’t try to regain that paramount taste through imitations of the Pakistani mountain baker’s original-yet-humble creations. Living in the United States has meant at times a sad abdication of original tastes, sensations, and smells.

Sadly too, the sojourns had to come to an end, and soon it would be time to say goodbye to our visit in Kalabagh. After having roamed in the sweet bliss of the mountains, we would hang up our leafy crowns as if in quiet abandonment of a silent kingdom. The effect of having visited a paradise was more apparent upon our return. One would remain in a daze once one descended to the common terrestrial life. As if fallen angels from paradise, we were reminded again of the trivial engagements that awaited us.

Now when I think back, memories of the Himalayan landscape linger like a soft reminder of a past life, and Kalabagh rests like a forgotten laurel of happiness. If I would like to relive a joyful memory about Pakistan, I think of the dew on the ferns, or of the tall trees and the musky smell of rain on their pines. I know now that it is from such a childhood appreciation of the harmony between place and self that I use as an ideal in the adjustments and negotiations I’ve had to make in my American life. When this happened due to my surroundings in Colorado, I finally felt at home in my life in the United States.

Fawzia Ahmad was raised in Pakistan and lives in Colorado. She holds an M.A. from Notre Dame and a Ph.D. from Boston University, both in French Literature. She is an instructor in French at the United States Air Force Academy.

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Henry Sloss / Her Picture, His Poem i.

The camera sees discord Between your smile and eyes, Reports you restless, bored; At least it never lies.

Why that flat stare above The brimming bubbly’s rim: Were you, my untrue love, Already fucking him?

Still hidden by dark bangs— Five decades old this pic— Dark purposes, dark pangs, Dark appetite for dick.

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What can they matter now, Your treachery, your daring; Who knows the why or how; Who wouldn’t be past caring?

Not I. Who would I be, What would I write, without The push of injury And the pull of self-doubt?

And you, my darling bitch, Do you still lift your skirt To any stray cur’s itch?

What life there is in hurt.

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ii.

Look at you, with that mouth!

Your language, darling man, Your manners have gone south.

Has old age made you mean?

I don’t still lift my skirt.

Do you still drop your pants, Not notice when you flirt Someone it disappoints?

If you could check out chicks, I could check in with boys, Dally with swelling dicks, Thrill to the self ’s abyss.

Sorry I made you sad; I love you still (don’t laugh!), Delight in what we had, The rush of love’s rash life.

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Who do you think you’d be Without the love you knew— First and indelibly With me—and you know now?

And love moves you to write The lines you still believe Will prove the wronged self right.

What life there is in love.

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Henry Sloss / Berkeley, 1960 In those bright days—the void Unthought of, where days lead— Living for knowledge vied With dying to get laid.

Whatever that meant. Who Among us (our Sex Ed Came from ‘stories’) knew how It would be to succeed?

We hoped to learn with girls, Who, smiling at our wiles To get at fleshly grails, Might let us have their wills.

I knew a girl like that, The first I ever saw Naked—as a thought Too beautiful to say.

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I’d never been in love, Maybe she hadn’t either— Too happy, scared, alive Not to betray each other?

Perhaps. What did they know Of all they had been given To lose, those children, new To losses long lives govern.

Henry Sloss was for forty years a professor of English in the U.S. and Europe. He has retired now to reading, writing, and family.

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Levine graphic [37]

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Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation Mundo Cruel: Stories by Luis Negron, was published by Seven Stories Press in February 2013. A recent winner of her third PEN translation award, her other current published translations include poetry by Gabriel Magana titled Nothingness in the Rough (Dialogos Press, 2012) and Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, a novella by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, co-translated with Jessica Powell, also just published by Melville House. She was interviewed by Mount Hope’s Caitlin Holton.

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CH: Do you find it more important, when translating, to bring your own voice and art to the piece or to step back and let the piece speak for itself?

SJL: When I translate I desire more than anything to write in English as I imagine, or more accurately, as I hear the original author write in his or her language. So I believe that I let the piece speak for itself, but not by stepping back as you put it, but rather by stepping through the looking glass, into the original writer’s art, or voice. An act of ventriloquism, as one friend called it, or a reincarnation of sorts, one might say.

It may well be that the writing I choose to translate, whether it is minimalist poetry, or baroque prose, somehow resonates with my own voice, or voices, in order for me to feel able to translate it. All this is not to say, however, that the translation will have the same charm as the original, that is, for me as a reader. Though there are moments that are very exciting, when I feel that my voice has truly become the other’s—and vice-versa.

CH: Tell me about your newest translation work, Mundo Cruel, coming out in February.

SJL: Mundo Cruel was a surprising discovery for me. It is a totally spoken book, even the supposed written stories like “Guayama” which is told in epistolary form. At first I thought it was very raw, very basic. But as the young editor who introduced it to me was so genuinely enthusiastic and as I was still missing my times spent with the last wonderful novel I just finished—Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale, which won a PEN prize this year—out of a need for a new literary love, almost, I started to translate the first story by Luis Negron; I soon realized that the words flowed and that there was a very clever irony in their simplicity. Before I knew it I was in love with the world that came alive in this book, a world both tragic and outrageous. As the press release reads, “Masterfully satirical with a discrete solemnity at its core, Mundo Cruel’s most remarkable element is its language.” I couldn’t say it better, especially because, for the translator, the art is in the play of language, in intense engagement with tone and style, and so it happened

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with Luis’s book. His subtlety and yet his fidelity to the voices of his characters reminded me of Manuel Puig, the brilliant master of the spoken word whom I translated fanatically in my youth.

CH: Much of your work has been translating pieces by deceased writers. How is it different working with a living writer? Does the process change when you add another person?

SJL: Actually, Caitlin, many of the writers I translated—Cabrera Infante, Puig, Sarduy, Donoso, Cortazar—were alive when I translated them. My book The Subversive Scribe describes precisely what you say, working with a living writer. The main thrust is that, as in other kinds of creative collaborations—for example, Borges and Bioy Casares when they wrote together, or as in filmmaking, always an act of collaboration—the collaborators are co-creators and sometimes even create a third person. Collaboration, like solo translation, often involves keen conflict, that is, subtle choices and nuanced decisions, but the conflict is good—sometimes you have to take a break and then return—and ultimately makes the new work, in most cases, even better than it might have been otherwise.

CH: Is Spanish the only language you’ve translated from?

SJL: I know French and, alas, very little Portuguese and Italian. I could translate from them and have translated some texts by Brazilian writers, but my literary affinities lead me, less frequently but still, to Spanish.

CH: Have you ever tried translating for English to Spanish?

SJL: I’ve actually had to translate myself from English into Spanish, and I was eager to sacrifice my own wording or phrasing to make the translation elegant—which of course is what translation is often about.

CH: Have you ever had any of your work translated to Spanish or otherwise?

SJL: Yes. Articles and essayistic books of mine have been translated into Spanish, The Subversive Scribe, for example, became Escriba subversiva, which I like, though it is an odd wording in Spanish—I read it in Spanish as a kind of pun: Write Subversively! Or Subversive (Female) Scribe.

CH: How was the experience?

SJL: The experience was double-edged as it gave me a more personal view of how far

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the translation has to stray, in terms of literal detail, in order to create a text that works. It made me feel, as the original author, that the translation is okay but, except for practical reasons, I as a reader could live without it. But then again, the translation was not meant for me but for its new readers, in Spanish.

CH: Is poetry something you’ve been doing your whole life?

SJL: As my dear friend Greg Rabassa once said, a translator is a timid writer, that is, a writer who mainly translates. I feel like Tweedle Dee or Humpty Dumpty rephrasing what I just rephrased—but there you have it. Anyway, it’s a good point, the one that Greg makes.

Yes, I’ve been fiddling with poetry and even creative non-fiction, ever since I can remember, almost as long as I’ve been reading. Reading and translating and hanging out with poets and writers like Nicanor Parra, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Bioy Casares, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Cecilia Vicuña, Marjorie Agosin and so many others was one’s life blood. For me connection— with people as well as books—is so much a part of the work, the realization of affinity and the fireworks it produces.

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CH: Your new chapbook of poems is titled Reckoning. Is there a story behind that? Do you find yourself more comfortable with other’s words than your own?

SJL: The story behind Reckoning is twofold. One thread is the autobiographical impulse—which I share with almost anyone who writes creatively—and the other is my particular journey as a translator. This book depicts a constant passage between the poetic forces of others and my own writing and its gathering of my own poems and my translations of a miscellany of poets (from Alejandra Pizarnik to Miguel Angel Zapata) builds on a polyphony that brings together peculiar fragments that shape, shall we say, my identity.

Reckoning is my first attempt to gather my poetic scribblings as a book, a chapbook to be exact. Borges stressed that the only way to be finished with a text is to publish it—that is, it’s never finished, but at least you can have closure when it’s published. I decided that as I was constantly working and reworking poems—my own and the occasional translation I did as a favor, or because it spoke to me, or because a magazine editor had commissioned it—over the years, some of which I first wrote in my twenties and thirties, why not choose the ones that worked best and make a book.

A few friends pushed me to do this, and advised me on the order of the poems, as I wavered and waxed hot and cold on the idea, embarrassed to expose these efforts to (hypothetical)

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readers. This answers your last question, yes, I am more comfortable with the words of others, but I may be getting to the point where that feeling is changing.

CH: How does this book differ from the last?

SJL: What makes this book different is not only that it combines original work and translations—many poets have done this before me, after all—but that the combination allows the reader to explore the dialogue between my own texts and my translations, to discover how a translation could be just as or more intimate than a so-called “original” and how the translations and the originals work together to form the persona or personae, the voice (or voices) that generate them. The title, which is the title of other books and poems—there is no copyright on titles—comes from a translation of a late poem by a gay writer I knew since I was very young, the Cuban Severo Sarduy who died of AIDS in 1993. My translation of his poem is, again, as much about my own feelings, my own experience of life as it is about his, and as are my own poems, maybe even more so, hence it seemed the right choice.

CH: At the end of the book there is the section, “After Words,” where you talk about a dream you had in your thirties. Can you tell me about that?

SJL: I leave this question for last, it’s the hardest to answer but also it’s the question I like the most. That dream, about an imprecise translation, and involving the theme of death, seemed to bring together again the autobiographical and the translator’s odyssey to her own writing. My mother died of a fulminating brain tumor, the kind they still can’t cure, when I was quite young.

This death shook me horribly; I was a very young sixteen, emotionally closer to twelve. And my father died of grief soon after. Anyway, we all have our versions of the story that formed us, and I guess this one was mine.

Still working on it, but that’s okay too.

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Moira Egan / Olea europaea

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I’ve always loved the stark juxtaposition of those shimmery silver leaves, so delicate, and their gnarled, dark trunks, thick and ancient, “an ideal image for all uncommon couplings.”

scarves, fine polyester blends in colors bright but fading in the sun; plastic rosaries.

What would Francis think of all of this, I ask myself, and one spot of hope I can see

And who doesn’t just love the oil of the fruit, the really good stuff, fluorescent green in its first pressing, or yellow like molten gold: the extra virgin, or EVOO to those

is the black-haired young guy sanding a large piece of wood while bopping to The Cars.

Is he the greatgreat descendant of the man who painstakingly smoothed and rounded that fine olive

in the know/on cooking shows (though I have friends who’ve confessed: I want to kill her when she says that!)

I’m convinced olives keep the skin young, fine allopathy to cure the dehydration

pew in San Rufino?

And the kind, un-madeup woman who lovingly tends to her olivewood goods in the shop that’s called, I kid you not, Poeisis.

What if each pilgrim who buys

from the wine, ah the wine.

Niçoise, Gaeta, Kalamata—give me olives.

In Assisi, narrow, hilly streets are overrun with tacky tourist shops selling their monk-shaped mugs;

one of Francis’s Tau’s carries away some of the abiding peace of this place (a modern miracle, that) and takes some fierce faith out into our world riddled with wars and plastic?

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Moira Egan / Halston Z-14 The sidewalk. Bergamot. Adrenaline.

These velvet bastion ropes, though post-heyday and frayed, might well keep you from getting in.

And will he check I.D.? (You’re underage.)

The bouncer doesn’t ask. You slip right through.

A sigh. A breath of cinnamon. A sprig of jasmine from the hedge. The powers you—

And there he is, in front of you, gray wig, arms folded, skinny avatar of cool.

He looks at you, he smiles and tilts his head.

An honor, though they’ll give you shit at school

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because you left with Amber Eyes, whose moss and musk and leather jacket slung across his shoulder—Lust.

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Moira Egan / Mood Swing Sonnet (3) All Mediterranean afternoon you float, the tide rocks, rhythmic, sexual, cradling, bath-water-perfect temperature, the salt enough to keep you buoyant, but not sting your eyes, fixed, semi-focused, on the sky’s hypnotic blue, you dead-man on your back, so blissed out you don’t notice that the tide has pulled you well away from land, and quick.

The sky’s hazed with a weird metallic gray.

The wind kicks, ruffles up the water’s surface, as gulls screech, circle shoreward. Mελτέμι! Έλα! Come back! the distant shouts. You force yourself against the riptide, then make land.

Next day you hear that two teenagers drowned.

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Moira Egan lives in Rome; she is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hot Flash Sonnets, and co-editor of Hot Sonnets. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Barrow Street, Boulevard, Gargoyle, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and many others; in anthologies including Best American Poetry and The Book of Forms.

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Bruce Cohen / Absence Excuse Dear Ms. Vowel-Saturated Whoever or is it Whomever?

I assume you are a Ms. as you have never, based upon my casual imagination, Been sucked in or whirl-pooled into a serious tryst or fling. I feel compelled to be candid: You don’t seem in the least bit attractive, but I deal with much uglier people than you Every day so maybe you shouldn’t give up hope if you have any. To the point—Tess or Claire, I can’t decide which name I would have chosen, my daughter, will not be in school today, Or tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, as she will never exist for a plethora Of reasons I am not comfortable alluding to in this semi-public note as they might be, Shall we say, inappropriate, awkward, too personal. If she were alive she would not Be the kind of girl who is a math-whiz or Spelling Bee Champ. Rather, she’d be texting Under her desk at the speed of light during your tedious explanation of basic algebraic equations & your inane critical analysis of Descartes. I’ve heard a rumor that diagramming sentences Is passé. She’d Google some quickie quotes for her dull plagiarized essay.

You might even have second thoughts this correspondence is a forgery as she’s used the fakeNote trick before to get out of last period so she could cruise around town with her portable Bong & slug brew with some boy her brothers say is a loser. Feel free to let me know What assignments she missed during her lack of existence—I’m sure she can make them up, Assuming she undergoes a sort of reincarnation from her present condition of nothingness.

Given your disfigurement, I’m wondering if you ever had a real date. I wonder if you consider It a disfigurement. I wonder what you do after school—if you drop by the Spirit Shop For a flinty Chard that lacks any complexity before making a Beeline to your sparse apartment Where the potted plants look dead but are hanging on. You would have clicked with Tess In your capacity as Social Committee Advisor to the non-existent Senior Class.

She’s good at being a chameleon to themes, cutting out crinkly stuff & gluing it to other stuff & stapling that stuff in the gym before dances. She’s very popular; All the boys who aren’t shy ask her to dance, especially the Gay boys. Do you know how To dance? Did a boy ever ask you to dance? Did you practice in the mirror alone Or with your own father? I was hoping to stick to the truth but the truth is so EffingIllusive. I must confess I would have relished having a daughter, but I’m too old now, & anyway, I had that snip-snip-procedure which I heard can be reversed. Uh huh—yep, Not having children is reversible so maybe the opposite is also true, That the creation of life is also, excluding death of course, reversible.

Given the former fact, Claire may, after all, return to your homeroom next week.

It is my sincere hope you will not hold her permanent absence against her.

Please give me a call if you have any questions even though my number is unlisted.

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Bruce Cohen / Regrets Only This is what it means to be an American father: I always Loved music so my old man pinched a stereo that “fell off the truck” but dinged all my original recordings, Made them skip, even though I replaced the diamond needle & weighted the crooked arm with Scotch Tape & Indian pennies.

When he left for his extended stay in heaven without life insurance It was clear the concept of angels was a misconception. God’s Associates were more akin to Insurance Claims-Adjusters Screwing you out of your life’s fondest moments. How do You trust anyone who boasts they have No Regrets?

It ain’t like there’s a shortage of things you prayed would Turn out differently. At each reunion the girl who doesn’t Show up is the girl who bludgeoned her parents with sharp garden Tools—no one is fooled by the late arriving transvestite who you Could just tell even then. There are a hundred types of forgetfulness Wedged between I can’t find my car keys & who am I now!

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I am at that age where I shouldn’t have too many individual Regrets, when my life is settling into a conglomeration Of one massive regret. Each evening I do fill my wine glass Above the imaginary line of wine etiquette normalcy.

You are afforded only eighteen opportunities to adjust your life— Most of us ignore them, zipper our parkas & trudge head down Into the bitter wind, high-stepping the unpredictable precipitation.

You look around & it’s no wonder God’s a terrible insomniac.

You have to admit people were a very fancy idea.

The girl who murdered her parents, when she comes up for parole, Is just an idea her sister nixes. The mixed bouquet, After a few days, regrets its involuntary violent departure

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From the cultivated soil though it has earned journeyman status At the slow art of decay. Despite my better intuition I scuffed Through the morning grass in my good shoes & dew stained The tips & my private-American was not the language of choice So I felt a little left out of the life-conversation & I had a little, At least I thought, to contribute, even though, I have been a lazy, Angry, irresponsible father myself, setting a horrible example, Pounding the coffee table, threatening what I didn’t even mean, Nicking the antique mahogany with my father’s wedding ring.

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Bruce Cohen / The Break-Up Only One Person Knows About: What I Witnessed On My Way Home: (& The Cell Phone Call To My Wife) Trying to make it home before the roads get really treacherous, I see a girl windmill— —throwing a retro lava lamp, handfuls of arbitrary boxers, her boyfriend’s Vintage Telecaster and his perfectly worn-in Salvation Army leather jacket out their third Storey window. There’s little tenderness in this world but millions of snowflakes.

Some prior briefs are still snagged in the limbs of an elm, clearly planted years ago, Too close to the house, before it was subdivided into four argumentative apartments, Now doing a flapping cotton imitation of albino-elephant-ears. At the core, Aren’t we are all inexperienced grocery baggers too careless to pack the eggs on top?

Isn’t each of us a famous astronaut, killing time orbiting our shrinking planets, The gas tank dwindling, till streetlights come on—they remind us of not wanting To get home—of undiscovered stars and the probability of life in other solar systems?

Doesn’t each of us secretly desire a ray-gun and X-ray glasses ordered from the back

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Of comic books that never work right? Darling, where do you want to eat tonight?

I crave Chinese but not Cantonese, something spicy. Is there any movie out you’d want To see?

I believe there are limits to apologies, albeit liberal ones. Sincerity diminishes Over time but takes on cartoony-personality-traits like comic book heroes Who can surprise you with salvation just as you’re about to crash into the asphalt.

But at a certain point, you just can’t go back. At a certain point less life Is ahead and you step out that third storey window, but like cartoon-physics You don’t fall till you realize you’re walking on nothing. The girl’s flinging Like Frisbees, like 50’s Martian spaceships, her boyfriend’s CD collection now.

Close your window sweetheart; don’t let that comforting heat escape, Those molecules seeking something else. Maybe they just want to blend Into the falling temperatures, incognito in their new lives void of you both, Like that strange girl wearing your boyfriend’s favorite leather jacket.

Bruce Cohen is a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut. He has published three collections of poetry and his poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.

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Ferguson graphic

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Imagine you’ve fallen in love—not with a person, but a thing; not with an object, but an activity. A seed must have been planted some time ago. Maybe it lay in the wisp of a memory from your childhood friend’s recital, in the froth of the white tutu that skimmed her legs. Or maybe it was inside the jewelry box with the pink figurine that began twirling as soon as you opened the lid. Whatever the reason, the desire to dance suddenly blooms inside you now like a riotous plant, and at the age of thirty-seven, you take your first ballet class. In that hour, your muscles burn, your t-shirt and gym shorts are soaked with sweat, and you don’t know a tendu from a grand jeté, but you’re hooked anyway.

After that, you go to ballet class every week. You go when you’re tired, when you’re coming down with a cold, and when you should be at home working. You’re even reluctant to attend your grandmother’s 95th birthday party because it means you’ll miss ballet. Secretly, you think such devotion will make you an exceptional dancer—the kind that lifts the audience with her as she leaps into the air—but that doesn’t happen. It could be your age, since most dancers start training when they’re four or five. But to be honest, you were never all that coordinated, not to mention that you have the flexibility of a fence post. There must be something wrong with your sense of rhythm too, because whenever a group of people start clapping to a song, you’re always a little off. In fact, you can’t think of a single quality that makes you suited for dancing, other than the passion that fuels your persistence.

Besides these physical challenges, ballet is, for you, the ultimate brain teaser. Even after one year of classes becomes three, then five, then eight, there are new combinations to learn every week. Each sequence of steps feels like a high-school calculus problem you can’t solve without serious help. As much as you want to believe you’re graceful and accomplished and quick, that you’re smiling as you sweep across the floor, that your body is as light as tulle, all it takes is one glance in the mirror to see that your mouth is a tight knot of tension and that you’re lurching forward on the wrong foot. In this sense, your frustration with ballet has brought out your leastattractive qualities. You’ve left more than one class with your face burning with embarrassment, and with your head a snarl of snarky thoughts, jealous of other students who have more aptitude.

Still, you love ballet. You love the soft pink slippers that get all worn and dirty around the toes, the long arms and graceful hands, the intensity of a room filled with dancers determined to master a new step. You love the metal barres with their peeling white paint and the vocabulary of rhyming French words—tombé, pas de bourrée—and the music that beckons each dancer to rise to its challenge, to leap beyond the familiar sphere of home, family and work into a world where sweat and strain and stubbornness can mingle with light and air and grace.

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And then there’s performing.

As much as you love class, the spring recital is magic. On stage, in the lights. Costumes, clapping, and the camaraderie of waiting in the wings with the other dancers, who all encourage and compliment one another. Every year your studio presents a collection of pieces performed by different classes. Along with the younger students, who with their smooth faces and slender limbs look like real dancers, the adults also get their time in the spotlight.

As a beginning ballerina, your roles are all character parts, which involve a lot of posing and mugging between relatively simple steps. The first year you’re Raggedy Andy, complete with baggy-blue overalls, striped tights and a red-yarn wig. Another time you’re a harem girl, sporting voluminous hot-pink pants reminiscent of I Dream of Jeannie. In these get-ups, the audience isn’t likely to notice if your legs aren’t completely stretched, or your toes aren’t perfectly pointed, and as you take your bows, you feel the buzz that comes from making people laugh.

The year you turn forty-five is different though. Your class is doing a serious piece set to Mendelssohn’s beautiful “Venetian Gondola.” The dance doesn’t call for posing or exaggerated gestures. It’s just you and the other dancers in leotards, tights and short, sheer dresses performing pretty steps. Fast, difficult, pretty steps that require some expertise. If you make a wrong move, there’ll be no cartoonish costume to cover it.

To compensate for your lack of talent, you’re determined to do everything in your power to make sure you’re ready for the show. You begin by leaving little notes listing the sequence of steps all over your house—upstairs by the telephone, the table by your bed, the bulletin board above your desk. You even make sketches, reminding yourself of the position of your feet, the angle of your head, and which arm to extend. Mostly, though, you practice. Pirouettes (turns performed while balancing on one leg) have always been your downfall, and sure enough, you have to do one at the beginning of this dance. Luckily, you work from home, so you can jump up from your desk at any time and pirouette in your narrow kitchen, again and again.

One evening, you’re practicing at home before a rehearsal, and it isn’t going well. You tell yourself to give it a rest, but you can’t—you’ve decided you have to get in one good turn before you leave for the studio. Of course the more you try, the more tired and sloppy you get, until your arms and legs begin to resemble the appendages of a drunken puppet. After the twentieth desperate try, you finally make yourself stop, realizing that this frantic approach isn’t improving your technique. Any dancer will tell you that in order to execute a difficult move, you have to believe that you have the skill to nail it, and your repeated failures this evening are doing some damage to your psyche. Completely frazzled, you’re driving to the studio an hour later when,

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unbidden, a picture of one of the other dancers in your piece pops into your head. Nicola is pregnant with her first baby, and suddenly you can imagine her holding her son. With this image comes a wave of happiness and, strangely enough, love. You’ve made many friends through ballet, but you don’t know her as well. Tall and thin and athletic, she has long, thick, dark hair, and a dignified, almost regal, bearing. While she seems like a nice person, the two of you never talk much beyond the occasional comment on the rain or the difficulty of the dance.

Still, here you are, feeling this strong, unmistakable affection for her as if she is a dear friend.

And just like that, you know how to prepare for the performance. From that point on, you need to stop trying so hard, to stop focusing on yourself so much and just enjoy the music and the movement and the other people in the dance. Ballet teachers are always telling their students to remember to breathe, and that’s what you have to do—to breathe and look around the room, to see who you’re dancing with, and to appreciate them. To take pleasure in Meghan’s graceful lines, Clare’s smile, Birgit’s strength and Rehl’s courtliness. To stop concentrating on your inadequacies and just enjoy chatting with the other dancers as you all walk to your cars after a late rehearsal. Ballet, after all, is as much about love as muscle—the love of reaching for what looks like an impossible goal and the incomparable pleasure of moving in sync with other people.

Now you’re forty-nine. No matter how hard you try, you may never be flexible enough to do the splits, or skilled enough to execute a perfect pirouette. But love is something that comes naturally, the thing that can take us all to the place where Mendelssohn went when he wrote his music, the thing that leaves us all awestruck, like a new mother holding her infant. When you watch the video of the “Venetian Gondola” piece now, you see that love on your face. You didn’t turn into Anna Pavlova the night of the performance, but you weren’t just stumbling through a series of steps, either—you were dancing.

Linda Ferguson’s work has been published in many journals including Perceptions, Pure Francis, Fiction at Work, Saranac Review, Square Lake, and Equal Opportunity Magazine. She also teaches dance and creative writing

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Jenny Sadre-Orafai / Fight Song You finally understand how the campus green glitters with hammocks, floating, failed sailboats in the spring and summer and the one student in every spring class who asks the professor, why can’t we have class outside today? and, all the professors have the same answer: bees. And, finally glimpses of football players, padding in large grips, rushing to what must be practice. Finally taking Spanish I and only mouthing el clima es agradable día de hoy because you are too self-conscious for anyone to hear your version and when you eat, it’s mostly chocolate candy out of vending machines and you don’t feel bad about it because you are so young and your body can take it. And your Fundamentals of Chemistry lab partner and how it is never like the movies, he is never that attractive and your hands never touch when mixing smoking chemicals in tubes. Finally, only the blue lights in cages above EMERGENCY phones hiding in early and smoky morningtime.

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Jenny Sadre-Orafai / Where You Were

Queen Elizabeth was with Philip in Kenya when her father died. She was watching elephants from her hotel in the trees. My father was with his three sisters when his mother died. I was with my bed, hallucinating a fox. After the fox left, I called him, but he was taking a shower.

Was it like a movie? The protagonist crying in the shower with lots of water and lots of tears and lots of blank cups? Was Elizabeth instructed not to cry? It will shake this tree. It will cause the elephants to trample this nest.

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Jenny Sadre-Orafai / In Our Memory of the 27 Month Anniversary Weigh the civilized history in wind and climate and animal and plant and ocean and land.

The history of an uncivilized romance you call a myth.

Someone else says legend.

No one will say epic.

You will say: we didn’t have real history before we met. The rest of the months are rustling ribbons in some girl’s hair we haven’t met.

She’ll lose them on a plane or at a friend’s house after saying prayers before dinner.

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I will say: dear most sturdy, I’ve never made it this far out in the waves, this far out in the heart. The hurt is bearable most days.

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of four chapbooks Weed Over Flower, What Her Hair Says About Her, Dressing the Throat Plate, and Avoid Disaster. Recent poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in RHINO, PANK, Sixth Finch, iO, Poemeleon, Boxcar Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and other journals.

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Matthew Roth / Tether The eye is a mouth to ruin, a throat the bruised world passes through, softer as it goes. Soon, the station lights blink out, walls fall away to some humdrum dream of what a wall might be. I’m left, my ear chained to a chainchoked dog, far off, who knows no end of care. I want to want the air like that, to strike the first surprise a sudden turning sends my way: a rock, a cloud, the quaking tamarack [68]

out back my sisters tied me to one fall.

I tried for hours to wish them back, though later they cried and kissed me till I wished them all away. Faces fade.

Each square of window glass recites its long division of the air.

Only the stars are hard tonight, too bright each blade the darkness carves and sharpens to a point.

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Matthew Roth / Man and Crumb: Ars Poetica Look here, a man and here, on the countertop, a crumb.

The clock, struck dumb between chimes: ordinary time with nothing to deliver.

Look hard enough and you may detect in both figures the slightest shiver.

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Matthew Roth’s first book of poems, Bird Silence, was published by The Woodley Press in 2009.

His poems have appeared in many journals, including Verse, Fence, Minnesota Review, Quarter After Eight and 32 Poems. He lives in Grantham, Pa.

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Kevin Brown / Lost Limbs I do not know why I have lived life with two arms, or how, having spent my childhood in the woods behind our house leaping from limb to limb, swinging from branch to branch like the George of the Jungle cartoon I watched every afternoon, alone, until one limb broke, left me lying on my battered back, laughter echoing like locusts, found me more frequently [70]

than every seventeen years.

On make-shift football fields, my freshman year, I threw my joints at juniors and seniors who weighed more than the anger that fed my fear, more than the fear that fed my hate, helmets and hurts pinning my shoulders to the ground beneath a pile of pain. One-armed, I would have had difficulty cutting the cube steak my mother overcooked, but I only needed one finger for rage, five for the fist that followed, was beaten as badly as if I had one arm tied behind my back, or cut off

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completely, left lying in the woods behind my parents’ house, still gripping the last limb to snap, holding on as if it could save us both.

Kevin Brown / At Least I Kept My Kidneys Our heads were someplace else, we say, as if we leave our body parts scattered places and times we have been; my right arm, for example, hanging on the monkey bars behind my elementary school, where I hung longer than my classmates could, the only competition I would win in school. My eyes were lost

in an off rhythm that lets me know I am on the edge of leaving it with her or her or her one last time.

long ago, left with a woman I watched walk past me in a park in Paris, stumbled home to see with my other senses. Or the gall bladder I gave away before

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I was thirty, lost behind the lard I kept in the kitchen above the refrigerator, where no one ever looks.

I left my leg on the ladder, above the competition climbing up behind me, always sought a spot for it underneath a desk in the corner office.

And my heart?

Oh, my heart, misplaced so often I am surprised to find it in my chest, beating

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Kevin Brown / Timber My grandfather lived the life of a lumberjack on weekends—an accountant, actually—went to the woods to help young men fell forests for their families, needed houses to be husbands in, did not want to be wedlocked himself. But one weekend, after Harold’s house was complete, they went to the city to celebrate, and when he saw her, he felt chainsaws in his stomach, felt his legs lopped off at the knees as if he were nothing more than a hundred-year oak. She smiled slowly, sap dripping

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in December, and he knew he would find more uses for his finishing saw, let the long axes rust.

Kevin Brown is the author of the collection Exit Lines, two chapbooks, and the memoir Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again (2012). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Connecticut Review, South Carolina Review, and other journals.

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Camden Jean-Christian Bourcart

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Camden, New Jersey, is located less than two hours from New York. There, I discovered the face of everyday poverty hidden behind stigma and stereotype. Through everyday observations, incidental, significant details of destruction and helplessness, but also emotional gesture, I confront the realities of those who have been out of the system for too long, victims of what the sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls a “territorial stigmatization” of whole neighborhoods as “no-go areas” as an important structural element of the new “urban exclusion in the twenty-first century.”

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Camden photos

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Jean-Christian Bourcart was born in 1960. He has been the recipient of the Prix Nadar (2011), the Prix Niepce (2010), the Prix du Jeu de Paume (2006), the World Press Award (1991), and the Prix Gilles Dusein (1999). He also wrote and directed two feature movies and fifteen video works. His work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Genève; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris.

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Kristin Maffei / This This is what all your drinks could taste like if you used the right amount of powder—cold colored sugar water next to your chicken, fried, doused in honey.

This is the way the other girls used to play sex with you pushing against you on a bean bag or on the alcove rug until you had a baby doll. It was interminable.

This is the day you heard it would rain, so you didn’t do the laundry, or the day you didn’t hear it would rain, so you did do the laundry.

This is how you met him, gnarled yourself around him and grew heavy on animal fats & rest.

You, laced up leather boots and baked sweet breads.

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This is where the lifejacketed mannequin was dragged into the maelstrom. You saw auroras over the water and knew the world was ended, one cold solar eclipse away.

This is the happy early days, the lake running in vermillion your footprints petrified in the mud next to it.

Twelve hours of sun, twelve hours of dark.

This is you at the museum, the conjoined twins’ skeleton the hall of silence, of touch, of fallen scientists.

How you shared fry-bread, cobbed corn, iced cream.

This is the fortune-teller telling you you must wait and the gypsy couple in the subway car playing accordion like your favorite cousin, the child with hat out for coins.

This is you finding him burying the bodies under your parents’ deck. You, home from trying on coats and him there with a shovel, but you won’t tell.

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This is the park that was never a forest until you found yourself lost there.

This is how you thought the word park meant playground.

This is the time you heard screaming in the woods but kept driving.

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Kristin Maffei is a poet and editor living in New York City. She was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Oxford, and is currently a Goldwater Fellow in Poetry in the MFA program at New York University. She is an Associate Editor at Oxford University Press and co-founder of the collaborative literary ’zine Call & Response. Kristin is co-curator of the NYU Emerging Writers Series at KGB Bar. Her work has appeared in Underwater New York, qarrtsiluni, The Little Jackie Paper, In Flux, and on a few buses in Oxfordshire.

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William Siavelis / Negro History

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Oscar Wertheimer, a stooped, unshaven old man, was making his rounds, taking food from other people’s plates—half of a sandwich, a few potato chips, a spoonful of Roman Kowalski’s special baked beans. Mr.Wertheimer had retired from Sheridan High School’s science department years earlier, but he returned every spring to the men’s Annual Faculty Steak Fry, a phenomenon that had survived the Sixties and the women’s movement. It had done so, not because sexist behavior was tolerated in the town of Sheridan, but because no feminist was that interested in it.

The end of the school year affair had everything for the boys: jokes about female administrators— especially the unmarried ones—throwing the football around, beer from the barrel, and the talent of the emcee, Coach Balducci, to embarrass anyone there who was vulnerable. “Hey, Fred, stand up. (Oh, wait, he is standing up.) Tell us about your new relationship. Your wife’s out of town.”

Coach was the unchallenged master of these ceremonies in the Cook County Forest Preserve, a few miles west of Sheridan. Robert Green, an old friend of mine, and I sat by ourselves at a picnic table, made for six. It looked as though we would be the next stop for the befuddled science teacher.

Bob had a history with Mr. Wertheimer, going back to his years as a Sheridan student.

I learned of it after school one Friday at The Club—the meeting place of a group of the high school’s black staff who established it as a refuge where they might have a drink in their “dry” town, safe from the blue-haired WCTU ladies. White guests were welcome. Bob was a big man, not tall, just big, like a heavyweight boxer. He had a round face that smiled often, a wide nose, and bright, dark eyes that also smiled. His hair was full, a modest Afro, neatly trimmed, as was his moustache. “That SOB”—rarely did Bob curse outright—“was in charge of my home room; there were more than a hundred of us. The bell would ring and he’d say, ‘The next person who walks into this room—late, of course—will be a Negro.’ Now why’d he have to say that?”

“Cause he is a racist son-of-a-bitch. Just say it, Robert.” Jerome Winters, Bob’s colleague on the school’s security staff, pulled no punches. The lanky, light-complexioned man continued.

“Shit, he gave me ‘counseling’ in General Science. I managed to pass the course, despite being the only black face there.” He drew his chin in and deepened his voice. “Jerry, you did a decent job in General Science, but I think that you ought to focus on getting a job. We have some excellent technical courses here at Sheridan for you boys. There aren’t many opportunities out there for

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Negroes in the sciences.” Expressions around the room said that all had received such advice, if not from Oscar, from one of his colleagues.

I had a Wertheimer tale of my own, but back then I was not secure enough to tell a story about race in a group of black men that I had just met. The murder of Martin Luther King had made everyone more cautious. My story was set in the coaches’ lounge. I was there to get a Coke from the pop machine, and, in the process, I walked in on a discussion of whether it was time for Sheridan to have its first black quarterback. Jack Garner, an assistant coach, brought up the names of two juniors that he thought might be ready to take the job. Being coaches, they all had strong opinions on each prospect. Mr. Wertheimer’s only contribution was a question: “Can either of them remember more than two plays?” He walked out before anyone could respond.

Bob and I knew each other only by name for about five or six years before an incident that scared the hell out of me brought us together. Because a near riot with students from an all white school had broken out after a football game the previous Saturday, the air of Sheridan High was thick with tension the following Monday morning. Each of us teachers was assigned to patrol a section of the school during one of our free periods in order to keep the halls clear of anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there, outsider or student. I stopped a kid leaving the resource center and asked, “May I see your pass, sir?” How could anyone resist such courtesy? He gave me an “Are you serious?” look and continued walking in the same direction. I followed close on his heels, pathetically repeating my question.

Halfway to the end of the corridor, he looked over his shoulder saying, “Don’t mess with me you bald-headed motherfucker,” and then went on. Furious at my helplessness, I continued to follow him, albeit at more of a distance. We met Bob coming from the other direction.

“What’s goin’ on here, James?” he asked, spreading his arms so the young man could not avoid him. The lanky, good-looking kid stopped, but wouldn’t answer the question. He did, however, let Bob lead him to the security office while I followed, envious of Bob’s confidence, humiliated by my lack of it. While the angry adolescent stewed in the office, Bob listened to my version of the confrontation outside the door. As he handed me an incident report form, he said, “I’ll be in touch soon. In the mean time would you fill this out and get it back to me?” A few days later, he stopped me in the hall for what I thought was a follow-up; in a way it was. “Bill, you know the kid you stopped in the hall?” He was being generous.

“How can I forget him?”

“Well, he was suspended for three days, but he was back again earlier today, looking for the ‘bald-headed mother fucker.’ He had a gun.”

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“Jesus!” My stomach dropped. “What do I do?”

“Relax. He was arrested for trespassing, a gun violation and threatening you. His trial will be coming up soon. They’ll put him in Juvy for a while.” Quite a while I hoped, but didn’t say.

That called for an after-school drink and pizza, on me, at Rocky’s, where we discovered that we lived three blocks from each other and that we were both recently divorced. Both of us had married too young to get it right. Once we were single, there suddenly appeared some lovely, mostly unattached women at SHS who didn’t seem to care if you were tall, dark—in any sense —or handsome. And, equally important, they didn’t “obsess about age.” (My expression.) Too old to be children of the sixties, we, nevertheless, delighted in that wonderful period between the availability of The Pill and the advent of AIDS. In the spirit of the times, we supported our rebellious students who took to the streets in the name of civil rights, but, for the most part, we didn’t join them there. After all, we were well over thirty and not to be trusted. The Negro history issue, though, drew us into the fray.

One Monday morning in December, while I was on the way to get my mail, the path to the main office was blocked by a throng of students—a hundred or so—mostly, but not all, black.

It was a “sit-in,” a common occurrence in those days, but not at Sheridan High School. Ironically, the sitters-in were less noisy than the usual crowd that gathered on any winter morning around the large, inviting fireplace just outside the superintendent’s office. Bob Green and Jerry Winters stood guard, but their presence was hardly necessary. The serious group of students listened quietly as their leader Jean-Paul Christophe called the group to order and explained strategy. “Dr. Lloyd will be here soon. When he arrives, he’ll have to make his way past us. We’ll open a path for him, but I’ll meet him at his office door and tell him that I represent you and what we are here for.” I was amazed at the serious and confident bearing of the usually casual, jovial Jean-Paul.

“Are we together on this?” he asked. A few people said “Yes;” most just nodded. He repeated, “Are we together on this?” A roaring “Yes” followed. Their demand was that we add a new course to the social studies curriculum, a development that under other circumstances would have made teachers and administrators happy and proud. But the course was Negro History, something that had become a political issue.

Dr. Lloyd had agreed to meet with the leaders of the sit-in, a group called BSA, Black Student Association. It had to be an unnerving experience for the dignified Dr. Lloyd to be pressured by anybody to do anything. He was the unchallenged autocrat of an institution that sent large numbers of students off to Yale and Harvard and whose charges consistently got into those places with the highest scores on the SAT, ACT, College Board or any other exam anyone

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might throw at them. I knew him only by reputation and the memory of a community meeting, sponsored by the Sheridan Democratic Party. There he had faced a barrage of questions on the achievement gap between white and black students, the Eurocentric history curriculum, and the grouping of students “by ability”—to some, code for race. Visibly shaken by the aggressiveness and disregard for his authority exhibited by the crowd, he seemed to know that his era was soon to be over.

Two days after the sit-in, I picked up a message from my mail box that read simply, “Dr. Lloyd would like to see you at 3:30 p.m. Friday in his office,” signed by Mrs. Watson, his secretary. These infamous invitations from the superintendent struck fear in the hearts of all those who received them, in part because you had a day or more to think about what they didn’t say.

Was it about my divorce and the librarian I was going out with? No, the assistant superintendent, Dr. Forest, had already called me in on that one to ask how he might “be of help.” Had I said something in class that a girl misinterpreted? That gets you fired on the spot… Hell! I was going to get an award, a bonus. Why not?

After I shooed the kids out of my eighth period class, I went straight to the superintendent’s office. In the past, my business was usually settled efficiently by Mrs. Watson in Dr. Lloyd’s outer office. This time she escorted me into the inner sanctum. As she opened the door for me, Miss Wesley, the History Department chair, and my boss, stormed out muttering, “Over my dead body.” Unfazed, the crisp and efficient secretary announced, “Mr. Pantellos is here, Dr. Lloyd.”

Even the room was intimidating with its high ceiling, tall churchlike windows, and giant mahogany meeting table. The scene was softened only by the view of a lovely, snow-covered courtyard through those windows. Distracted, Dr. Lloyd motioned me in, still muttering at the departed lady, “If that’s how you want it, that’s how it’s going to be.” He turned his face to me.

“You know, that woman probably said ‘No’ ten times before anyone asked.” He paused for a second, realizing that I was lost. I remained quiet, knowing that anything I said would be wrong, like when your wife asks if a snug dress she adores makes her look fat. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pantellos.

This does, however, involve you…possibly.” He directed me to take a seat in front of his desk and took his place behind it in a plush leather chair that he rolled up toward me. Leaning forward he asked, “What do you think about teaching two sections of Negro History?”

I breathed easier, but only for a second. “Well, uh…I’m not sure that I’ve got the background or that I’m the right person.”

“I’ll be honest with you. I’ve already asked Mr. Thompson, and he doesn’t want to do it. Says he doesn’t think Negro history should be just for Negroes and Negro teachers. Man’s got

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a point.” Harold Thompson was SHS’s sole black history teacher. “And his specialty is European history anyway. To tell the truth we don’t have anyone who is fully qualified, but you’ve got a minor in social history and your thesis was on racism and … “ “… American foreign policy,” I added.

“Yes, that’s in the same ballpark.” Before I could respond, he said, “We’ve got a situation here. I can get two of your classes covered second semester. If we announce this one before Christmas break, I’m sure we’ll fill at least two sections. Judging from all the fuss, we could probably fill ten, but two would do. After that we will have the summer to give this issue the attention it needs. What do you say?”

“Can I think it over for a day and get back to you, Dr. Lloyd?”

“Of course. Let me know as soon as you can.” We rose simultaneously and he led me to the door. As I turned to leave, he asked, “Are you interested in some tickets for Northwestern basketball?”

“Sure, I love basketball. Thanks very much.” They were in my mailbox the next morning.

I called Bob the minute I got to my apartment. “Bob, I need your advice on something.

Can I come over tonight?”

“Come after seven. They’ve got us all working the football game. Everyone’s a little nervous these days.”

Bob’s place on Juneway Terrace was only a ten-minute walk from mine. When he came to the door, he still had his white shirt and tie on; the security staff was the best dressed group at SHS at a time when everyone else was going casual. “You want a beer, Pan?” The kids had come to call me Mr. Pan to avoid having to pronounce the whole name, and Robert had picked up on it.

“Sure…Bob, I want to talk to you about this Negro history class that I think I’m going to teach.”

He went to the kitchen and quickly returned to the living room, two bottles of beer in hand. After setting one in front of me, he sat back into his favorite leather chair with the other.

“My man, you got your hands full. I hope you know what you got into.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whatever you do, somebody’s going to be on your case.”

“Yeah, but it was one of those offers you can’t refuse. It came from above.”

“I heard.” Bob heard everything “on the grapevine.”

“What do you suggest I do besides leave town?”

He took a long swig of beer, put the bottle down, and sat back for a moment. “I would

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recommend a hit and run. Teach the best class you can and get out the first chance you get. You might be a nice guy and all, but you’re not what the sit-in kids and their parents have in mind, even though Greeks are kind of off-white. But maybe the BSA will see your class as okay for starters.”

“What do you think they want after starters, for the main course?”

“I’ll tell you what I remember from my American History class. I heard about two black people—Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, the peanut guy. The ones who fought back like Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass you never heard about in school.” He paused for a few seconds, pensive. “How about this: No matter what we studied about black folks it was from the point of view of white folks. You can help with that. You’re the teacher.”

I kept Bob’s paradox in mind throughout my semester as the Negro History teacher— emphasis on history—and it got me through the spring semester without being run out of town.

Our two basic sources were books written by two respected black historians—Benjamin Quarles and John Hope Franklin. The times were such that Franklin, whose work was cited regularly by almost everyone interested in black history, was being assailed as an “Uncle Tom” because he was not enough of a political activist. Of course, the primary means of having black people speak for themselves was to be sure that every student in the class was heard from on a daily basis. One section of Negro History was all black and the other was half and half; both included some of the liveliest and brightest kids in town. That so many of the black leaders in Sheridan were willing to come to our class and be teacher for a day, added authenticity to our class. I provided the material and the guests, asked the questions, and let the kids talk. And so they did. I was having a fine time.

As far as I knew, my Negro History class didn’t offend too many people. In fact, halfway through the semester, a woman from the Sheridan YWCA asked me to teach an adult, eveningschool version for eight two-hour sessions. I took the job at the “Y” because I needed the money and, to tell the truth, I was feeling more comfortable with the subject. My confidence lasted until I saw my new “students,” some of whom were Sheridan’s leading liberals, black and white, and a group of old-time Sheridanites who had lived more Negro history than I could cover in several years of teaching, among them Bob Green. I sat my class in a circle and asked all to introduce themselves. Among them was a minister, a physician, a professor, and two lawyers – one specializing in civil rights. Many had surnames shared by large numbers of SHS students.

When I asked them what they hoped to learn, I realized from their ambitious answers that they had a lot to teach each other and me. One guy threw me for a loop the second night when he

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announced, “I see no purpose in separate Negro History. Don’t Negroes want to be Americans?

Do we have Greek-American history in the public schools, Mr. Pantellos?” In the tradition of desperate teachers everywhere, I put the issue to the group. My brilliant maneuver instigated a discussion that might have gone on for a week, had it not been cut short by visitors.

Black Panthers don’t knock. There were four big guys, two wearing black berets and the other two sporting impressive Afros. All were dressed in black leather jackets with buttons that read “Free Huey Newton.” Three had on sun glasses despite the hour. Based on what I had read about the Panthers, I assumed that they were armed, but no weapons were visible. Despite the shades, I could see that one of them was Gerard Hudson who had attended my first period Negro History class earlier that day. I knew that Black Panther college students recruited high school kids, but I was surprised to see Gerard. He was too mild-mannered to be a revolutionary. I hoped that the near-sighted kid was wearing prescription sun glasses if he had a gun in his pocket.

Legs spread and arms held wide, the apparent leader of the group bellowed, “What do you all think you’re doing here?”

“This is a history class,” I answered, both afraid and angry, hoping to overcome the former by the latter.

Before he could respond, a student named Mrs. Robinson, a matronly black woman, said, “Gerard Hudson, what are you doing here? This is a school night. You should be doing your homework.” The whole atmosphere changed. Even the spokesman in black leather cracked a momentary smile. He gathered his dignity. “We know that this is a class in Negro history, and that’s the problem. We are here to speak to our black brothers and sisters and tell them that they need to stop being Negroes, to stop playing the racist oppressor’s game. We don’t go to the oppressor to have him teach us who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. He’s the same guy who promised us forty acres and a mule a hundred years ago and still hasn’t delivered.

Y’all need to get up and walk your black asses right outa this room.” Nobody moved.

All waited quietly for the young man to be heard. From the back row, Bob studied the Panthers intently, but said nothing. The leader waited, scanning the room.

James Gaines, an SHS custodian, broke the silence. “If we walk out, what do we accomplish?”

“You accomplish your manhood, sir. You join us and other black people, and we teach ourselves our own history. And you join the Black Panther Party. You can leave this place and be one of us tonight.”

“Why don’t you stay and teach this class what the Panthers are all about?”

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“You don’t get it, man. Black folks will do what they need to do in their own way. If you like it, support it. If you don’t, don’t. It doesn’t matter.” He turned abruptly, military fashion, and walked out, followed by his entourage.

After the Panther episode, four of us gathered at Barbara’s apartment. A few weeks earlier, when Bob introduced her to me as his girlfriend, she protested, “Aren’t I a little old to be your girlfriend? There needs to be a better word for me.” An attractive woman in her forties with two teen-aged children, she had a point. Becky, whom I had met in the school library, better fit the bill. She was pretty, stylishly dressed, and not yet twenty-five, with an air of innocence about her. With my thick head of skin and widening middle, though, I was certainly far from being a boyfriend. While we sat around her coffee table attacking the cheese, crackers, and peanuts, Barbara emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of chardonnay and a tray of glasses.

After taking what I felt was a necessary two gulps of wine, I asked, “Bob, what did you think of tonight? You didn’t say anything. I don’t know if it was a success or a failure. All I know for sure is what the subject of the next class will be…if there’s going to be one.”

“You did all right, Pan. You couldn’t really control that situation. For what it was, you did pretty good.”

“What about the weapons?” Becky said, agitated. “The Black Panthers believe in carrying guns.” School librarians needed to be up on the black revolution.

“Becky, you’re from Indiana, right?”

“You know I am. Everybody knows.” She was a Hoosier and proud of it.

He opened his suit coat dramatically, exposing a holstered pistol at his belt. “I never drive through Indiana without this on me.” Becky and I almost spilled our wine. Barbara, evidently, had seen it before. Bob pulled the gun out of the holster and displayed it. Small enough to cradle in his hand, it had a short, gray barrel, a hard rubber handle, and a shiny steel cartridge. He shifted it from one hand to the other, prompting me to blurt out, “Is it loaded?”

“No point in carrying it if it isn’t loaded, Pan.” Becky persisted, “So what about Indiana?”

“When I was a kid, our family used to drive through Indiana on the way to Alabama. We didn’t make a stop until the middle of Kentucky. Indiana is Ku Klux Klan country. You can’t even stop to take a piss, much less to eat. I bet you didn’t know that, did you. Black folks all know it.”

Interested, but offended, Becky said, “Well, what about Kentucky?”

“Oh, we knew about them and Tennessee too, but Indiana pretended to be in the North.

They weren’t obvious.” That seemed to make matters worse, but Becky let it drop.

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I was equally nervous. “But security isn’t supposed to be armed at SHS.” “I don’t ever bring this to school, Pan, but I needed it tonight.”

“Why?” “You know that kid with a gun we stopped at school last week? Well, he’s out, and I don’t know what he might do. Like the Boy Scouts say, ‘Be Prepared.’”

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At the men’s Annual Faculty Steak Fry, Coach Balducci got to our table before Mr. Wertheimer did. “I’d like to call your attention to two of our celebrity guests—the stars of I Spy. On behalf of the SHS men, I welcome Mr. Cosby and Mr. Culp. I’m sorry that we have no fried chicken.” To say anything in response to one of Coach’s barbs was like facing off with Don Rickles, so we just raised our beer cups in a mock toast to his “wit.” As we did, Mr. Wertheimer reached our table, his plastic plate bent by the weight of the food piled onto it. We were next. Though we had taught at the same school for a decade, he looked at my face vacantly before turning his eyes down and grabbing a handful of my potato chips which he added to his mountain of food. He turned to Bob, his hand ready, but the rest of his body restrained by what he saw in my friend’s face. Despite the fear that the old man’s eyes betrayed, he made a move toward Bob, who, in response rose quickly from his seat. For some reason, I did the same, clumsily lifting my leg over the bench to free myself from the picnic table. Before I could reach him, Bob had stepped around the table’s edge toward the ancient teacher. He grasped the old man’s elbow. “Maybe it’s time for you to leave, Mr. Wertheimer. I’ll take you home.” Bob turned him toward the parking lot while the old man protected his plate of food. “Can you tell me where you live?”

William Siavelis was born in Chicago’s Greek community and grew up on the city’s west side.

For most of his life, he taught high-school history. In his forties, he began to write short stories that, among other things, reflect his life and that of his family in the city. Married with children and grandchildren, he retired from teaching in 1995, giving him more time to devote to storytelling which, like history, chronicles our lives.

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A look of secretive delight passed between my mother and father at the breakfast table, and my mother said, “We have a surprise for you.” She went back to the kitchen and brought what looked like a bumpy black pear to the table, cupped in a hand that was rough and pink from rubbing our clothes clean on the washboard. She passed it around, so we could feel the warty skin.

“Some people call them alligator pears,” she said, “but its real name is avocado.” Then she took a paring knife and sliced it in half. We all watched the inside come to light—the smooth, silky flesh, a soft, warm yellow around a huge red-brown pit, shading to cool green at the edges and framed by a thin ribbon of black.

When my parents introduced us to something new, they took childlike pleasure in their secret preparations, in surprising us. I knew that there was as much enjoyment of each other in it as there was in unveiling the novel and in watching our response. What they taught us about the first avocado pulsed with soft green-and-yellow life. Avocados must have been on sale at the Piggly Wiggly in Cortez, and I can see my parents in the produce section, standing elbow-toelbow, looking over the pile of wrinkly black fruit, saying, “Let’s get some. Shall we? Can we afford it, do you think? It’s a good price. We should. Let’s surprise them.”

After she cut it open, my mother took the avocado back to the kitchen and added it to several she’d already mashed. A stack of toast stood on the table, buttered earlier by my father. My mother brought in the fresh green pulp with fork signs patted into it, set it on the table and began to slide the avocado onto toast in thin layers. She told us it would taste best with a little salt. “But taste it without first,” she said.

I let my tongue slide over the satiny, slightly sweet coolness. Then I sprinkled a little salt on it and watched the crystals dissolve into beads of sweat. The salt brought out the avocado’s buttery lushness, letting a light sweetness lie beneath it.

I asked, “How do avocados grow?”

“On trees,” they said.

“Where?”

“In California and Florida.” I saw those long states on my mind’s map. I saw glossy-leaved trees with black pears and forests of other magical fruits—globes of brilliant orange, grapefruits larger than softballs, tiny dark green limes, and gleaming, fat lemons.

* During the summer of my first avocado, when I was eight, my father brought me with him from Teec Nos Pos to Beclaibito on a weekday. He was a missionary in Navajo Country and

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went to Beclaibito several times a week to visit homes. I usually went only on Sundays; my father took me this time because of the sheep dip, the gathering that surrounded a long, narrow cement trough filled with chemically treated water for killing ticks that lodged in sheep and goat’s wool.

He left me off to play with Irma Ahasteen while he visited homes.

People had herded their sheep and goats from miles around to Beclaibito—on foot, on horseback, by horse, and wagon. It took some of them days to get there, pausing for the animals to eat sparse grass and salt weed, setting up camp each evening, and finally camping by the dip, visiting with others while they waited their flock’s turn. Humans, dogs, sheep, horses, and donkeys shouted, barked, bleated, brayed, and stirred up dust. When a flock was called, the herders got the animals into a corral and over to the chute that led into the dip. Workers wielded metal rods with crooks at the ends to take wide-eyed animals by the neck or prod them in their fat, wooly backs through the swirling brown water.

Irma and I pedaled our bikes around the teeming life of the sheep dip. We smelled camp coffee brewing and fry bread browning in hot fat. We churned through the dust of shallow arroyos that branched away from the dip and stopped to watch the animals get their baths. We watched women in long satin skirts and velveteen blouses with paisley scarves on their heads butcher a sheep, laying the glistening entrails on the inside of the peeled-off sheepskin. We thanked the ladies who offered us hot, puffy fry bread and greasy cold ribs and shook plenty of salt on the ribs and stripped them shiny clean.

Every once in a while, we took a break from the sheep dip in the Ahasteens’ cool stone house. A big chunk of Navajo cake, wrapped in Bluebird flour sacking, lay on the wooden kitchen table. Navajo cake is made only at the time of a girl’s puberty ceremony, her kinaaldaa. First a big hole is dug in the earth and lined with cornhusks. Then a sweetened mixture of nutty-tasting, hand-ground Indian corn and raisins is poured in, covered with more husks and earth. A fire is built on top of it all and kept burning while the cake bakes for hours.

The Ahasteens offered me my first taste ever of Navajo cake. I took a lump of it and rolled its sweet grainy density on my tongue, pressing it to the roof of my mouth and slowly licking it down, feeling the raisins softly burst. I loved the satisfying heaviness it made in my throat with each swallow. I kept coming back for more. The Ahasteens laughed about how much I loved Navajo cake. They’d gotten it from someone else after a kinaaldaa. “Because it’s good luck,” they said, “to give cake away to lots of people. When you give away a lot, the girl will have lots of babies. It’s good luck to eat it, too. You’re going to be very lucky.” I’ve only eaten Navajo cake a couple of times since then, because it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time and

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knowing the right people.

* When we lived at Teec Nos Pos, Jean and George, the traders from Beclaibito, were our friends. Later they moved to Sunrise, Arizona, west of Winslow, over a dirt road. We went there once to visit them. Like most traders’ houses then, the one in Sunrise was attached to the trading post. The living room had thick, sparkling white adobe walls, a fireplace, polished-cement floors covered in Navajo rugs that had been traded for coffee, flour, sugar, and canned goods. I remember the floor as sunken, and I imagined that it had been transported from the Middle East on a magic carpet. A bank of large windows lit up half the room, and half of it stood in gray light.

Brilliance and shadows played mysteriously with one another.

The kitchen ran the length of the living room, and it was in that kitchen that I tasted my first pizza. Jean called it “pizza pie,” and she had made it herself. “It’s Italian,” she told us. “I think it’s named after the leaning Tower of Pisa.”

I took my first bite, the triangular tip, and let the flavors and textures flow across my tongue—sharp Parmesan, thick rubbery mozzarella, tangy tomato marked with piquancies I had never tasted before, and crisp golden crust with the yeastiness of homemade bread. While I ate, I listened to my mother ask Jean about the ingredients. “Do you think you have to use mozzarella and Parmesan?” my mother asked. She was already thinking about how the recipe could be changed to match her missionary budget. My parents bought Colby Longhorn cheese by the log, the size of a short section of stovepipe, and I could already see the pizza arriving at our table with bubbly orange cheese. It wouldn’t matter to me, as long as that wonderful flavor in the sauce stayed the same—that blend of stringency and sweetness.

The next morning at breakfast, George said, “There’s something here in Sunrise you really ought to see. You might not ever see another one. It’s what’s left of one of the Japanese concentration camps from World War II.” “Concentration camps?” I asked.

Surprisingly, my mother, who was usually politically to the far right and as stringent as the pizza herbs, answered with indignation and compassion. “Yes. We put Japanese who were American citizens in concentration camps during the war. The government was afraid they were spies. There was a Japanese girl in my nursing class, and she had to go. She didn’t do anything. It was terrible. It should never have happened.”

The news disturbed me. I knew the Germans had built concentration camps, but like many of my generation in 1959, I had still not learned of the horrors that occurred in them. I

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knew only that we judged the Nazis for having them, and now I heard that we had had them, too.

And what, I wondered, were people supposed to concentrate on there?

Jean and George drove us out a mile or two, to a treeless stretch of crusty pink desert, where we saw long, low, weathered buildings, boarded up, surrounded by barbed wire and watched over by vacant guardhouses on stilts. Bleakness and hopelessness settled in my chest.

That was the weekend of my first bite of pizza. * A year later I learned the names of the herbs that made the pizza sauce so tantalizing.

Tragedy had come to our family, and in the odd way that mundane things are juxtaposed with oversized events, it was during this tragedy that we learned to eat real Italian spaghetti. To us spaghetti had always been pasta broken into roughly bite-sized lengths, mixed with sautéed bacon and chopped onion, then doused with tomato juice and baked. No herbs or flavoring of any other kind. We ate it pretty often, and we liked it.

My younger sister Trudy had been diagnosed with leukemia, and the whole family moved to a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC, while she was part of the research program at National Institutes of Health. Miss Charest was the dietician on Trudy’s floor. To me she was glamorous—young with dark curly hair, snapping dark eyes. She wore bright cardigans over her white uniform and spoke with a rapid Boston accent. Miss Charest took an interest in our large family, and one time she brought a pot of spaghetti sauce to our house. She cooked pasta in our kitchen and didn’t break it up. The wine-red sauce was thick and rich, redolent of herbs that reminded me of pizza. Lovely brown meatballs, tangy with Parmesan cheese, floated in the sauce.

Miss Charest told me the taste I loved came from two herbs—basil and oregano—and I savored their names along with the tastes.

* I didn’t expect death to taste like anything, but it did. When my sister died, we drove from Maryland to Michigan to bury her. At the funeral home I stood with my parents by the coffin the Government had bought for us. A faint, acrid smell floated above the sweetness of the formal bouquets. We went to my uncle and aunt’s house for supper after the visitation. My aunt had made fruit salad. The mayonnaise on the silver-plate spoon recreated that smell, deathly sharpness mixed with sweetness. “It smells like the funeral home,” I said.

The adults said, “It does not. It’s all in your head. Don’t be silly.”

But I couldn’t eat it. The smell hung in my nostrils, and I couldn’t get rid of it. I couldn’t eat mayonnaise after that for a long time because it tasted like death. When it sits on a silver-plate

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spoon, mayonnaise turns green.

* It was Neale who introduced me to Earl Grey tea from the yellow and brown Twinings tin. Neale was six feet tall, six-four with her Afro. Her skin was rich coffee-and-cream brown. She introduced me to much more than Earl Grey, spreading before me a feast of color I didn’t know existed—dark chocolate, milk chocolate, burnt brown sugar, butterscotch—in the writings of Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison; in the music of Odetta, Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, and Roberta Flack.

I first tasted Earl Grey on the Saturday before Easter in 1973. I’d driven to the mission early that morning, so Neale could make me breakfast before I went to work in my classroom.

While she chopped green onions, she taught me to call them scallions and then folded them into an omelet. She boiled water for tea and took down the magical tin. “Twinings,” she said. “It’s the best tea. From England. Do you know Earl Grey?”

I shook my head.

“It’s so special,” she said. “A special flavor. Wait ’til you taste it.”

The tea was scalding hot, infused with the taste of perfume. I had tasted perfume before. When I was seven or eight, my mother gave me an iridescent green box that had held her perfumed talcum powder. I started hoarding candy in it, keeping it for months. I don’t remember how my parents found out about my odd little habit, and I didn’t understand why they were so upset when they did. They ordered me to eat it all in three days or give it up. I chose to eat it, even though every piece had a tinge of perfume to it. The Twinings tin said the perfume in Earl Grey tea came from bergamot oil. I thought I would never drink any other kind of tea again.

After breakfast I said I needed to go, but Neale said, “Wait. There’s something I want you to hear,” and we went to her room. A week earlier we’d seen Diana Ross play Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. “You need to hear the real Lady Day,” Neale said, and she cued up “God Bless the Child.” Everything inside me stilled to the quavering voice from decades away.

Again I said I needed to leave, and Neale said she didn’t want me to; she didn’t know why. I agreed to stay. We curled up on her bed and read Rilke from a thin volume. In the evening we cooked spaghetti, and Neale said, “Don’t break it. Leave the pasta long.” I told her about Miss Charest’s spaghetti. At the table she showed me how to twirl the strands on my fork, using a soupspoon to hold the fork and pasta in place.

Neale had sipped from a glass of Jack Black while we cooked. By the time the sky was dark, she’d finished more than half the bottle. I took it away and took her face between my hands.

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“You don’t need it,” I said. I thought if I loved her enough she wouldn’t want it any more. The whole day up to that moment slumped between our bodies. Cupping my hand beneath her jaw, I drew her face close and put my mouth on her soft full lips, my first taste of her. I brushed her cheeks with mine, so she could feel her own rich smoothness. We showed each other our body selves through all that Saturday night, into the first hours of Easter Sunday, and that was the beginning of our seven years together. I had never been so elated by Christ’s return to life as I was that Easter.

* We were both as needy as children then, and the size of our need eventually brought about the end. “God Bless the Child,” Billie sang for us. When we broke up I ran away to San Francisco, the City of Dreams. Before then, my gay friends used to talk about going to San Francisco like it was the Promised Land, a refuge where they would at last get away from their hard, half-hidden lives in smaller, meaner towns. I’d scoffed, “It won’t be any different. You’ll still have yourself and all your baggage to deal with.” But I was wrong. After a few weeks I noticed that I stepped more lightly in San Francisco.

One night I stayed in the Haight with a friend. Before daylight I boarded the Six Parnassus, heading for Market Street. As the bus pummeled its way down the steep part of Haight Street, I looked around me at the still-dark windows of the bus and at the reluctant pre-dawn riders. I transferred to the Fourteen Mission and watched the gray light reveal fruit and vegetable vendors raising the grates over their shops; fishmongers setting out tubs of crushed ice; skinny palm trees at Sixteenth Street reaching for faded stars. I got off at Twenty-Fourth Street and went into a Filipino market. There my fingers played over yellow papayas and blushing mangoes. I picked up an avocado and gently pressed its neck to feel for firmness and yield. Putting the fruits into my string bag, I walked up Bernal Hill. On my right, a strip of low-hanging morning cloud wound itself around Twin Peaks like a lavender feather boa. It was 1980, one of the last mornings before the world would learn of the pandemic that was to turn the the City of Dreams into a City of Death.

Anna Redsand’s Young Adult biography, Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living (Clarion, 2006), has won four awards. Other work has appeared in Third Coast, Fireweed, Friends Journal, Hembra, and Rockhurst Review.

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