Rathalla Review 2013 Annual Issue

rathalla review Vo l . 2 , I s s u e 1

Rosemont College MA in Publishing and MFA in Creative Writing Programs

rathalla review Vo l . 2 , I s s u e 1 S t a f f

Managing Editor

Production Manager

Fiction Editor

Creative Nonfiction Editor

John McGeary

Tara Smith Cheryl Dellasega

Feliza Casano

Tracy Kauffman Wood

Art Editor

Poetry Editor Gabriella Lee Kara Cochran

Jennifer Murphy

Production Asssitants

Social Media Manager

Sarah Eldridge Monica Lopez-Nieto

Alan Beyersdorf Tori Bond Maria Ceferatti Kara Cochran Christian Cornier Christopher Davis Pietra Dunmore Carol Dwyer Whitney Esson Ayesha Farzana Michael Fisher Hannah Fogel Ayesha Hamid Kat Hayes

Jennifer Murphy Christian Cornier

Selection Staff

Kim Hufford Cheryl “CJ” Jones Donna Keegan Saphiya Khan Abigail Lalonde Joe Lerro Nichole Liccio Christina Litman Monica Lopez-Nieto Cynthia McGroarty Joe Magee Meghan Mellinger Ian O’Neill Rae Pagliarulo

Becky Plourde Samantha Plourd Jennifer Rieger Sharon Ritovoto Susan Ruhl Lisa Sheronas Tiffany Sumner Chelsea Terwiliger Hannah Walcher

Featured Artists

Dr. Ernest Williamson III Jackie O’Brien

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Compassionate Release

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Fiction

Michael Pikna

Regifted

page 13

Into the Dark Soil

page 32

A Plate for Elijah

page 42

Tom Gumbert Robert Earle

River Adams

Nonfiction

Spraycopter

page 21

Three White Boys

page 23

Rich Tombeno

C. B. Heinemann

Poetry

Roar of the Girl in the Room

page 6

Love Lingers on the Chaise

page 11

Fifteen Ways of Looking at a Bullet Wound

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Legacy

page 20

Chrysanthemums Tied Together

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wetting the baby’s head

page 29

Manhandled

page 39

Truce

page 40

Without Poetry

page 41

Happening Again

page 48

Philosophies

page 49

The Shortstop

page 50

Elizabeth Bodein

David P. Kozinski

Cara Losier Chaonine Jeff Mumford

Darrell Dela Cruz Bruce McRae

All written work in Rathalla Review remains copyright of its respective author and may not be reproduced in any form, printed or digital, without express permission of the author.

Nazifa Islam

Allison Whittenberg

Megan Mealor Grant Clauser Ed Krizek

Jacob Collins-Wilson

Craft

An Interview with Beth Kephart Inspiration from Anne Lamott

vol. 2, issue 1

page 19 page 30

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From the Editor’s Desk Rathalla in print again! For you holding this in your hands, knowing only vaguely or to some summary degree the theory of Marx and his ideas of production alienation, this magazine may well have dropped from the sky. But, from my perspective inside the black box mechanism of input and output, I have seen a great deal of effort—enough to make Santa’s elves look like slackers—poured into this, our second print edition.

Special thanks to all our readers on the frontlines with the difficult task of pushing only the best work forward to our editors. To our editors, Tara, Tracy, Gabriella, Jen, Kara, and Cheryl, thank you all for the excellent work and effort in helping to make final selections, for working on fundraisers, and for stepping forward when needed.

Thanks to Jen and Christian, our social media managers, for keeping Rathalla an existing reality in the frivolous matrix of internet legitimacy.

Enduring thanks to Feliza for her unending effort and knowhow. Think of all the people who’d have been saved had she been on the Titanic.

Thanks to Carla and Anne, our program directors for their help, guidance, and patience through new waters, rapids, falls, and llama crossings.

We would like to thank the following businesses and individuals for their support of our Holiday Auction: Starbucks Coffee, Gulifty’s Restaurant, Hope’s Cookies, Main Line Bistro, Pizzi’s Pizza and Beer, Zoës Kitchen, Main Point Books, Friinji Restaurant, Showcase Comics and Games, Main Line Today, Tori Bond, Anne Converse Willkomm, Cheryl Dellasega, Kara Cochran, and extra special thanks to Bertucci’s Restaurant. The event was a huge success and great fun.

Last but not least, thanks once more to Laura White, our founding managing editor, who got everything off the ground through sheer force of will.

Thank you all.

With great enjoyment and pleasure, yours truly, John McGeary Managing Editor

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rathalla review

Featured Artists Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published poetry and visual art in over 400 national and international online and print journals. Some of Dr. Williamson’s visual art and/or poetry has been published in journals representing nearly 50 colleges and universities around the world. Dr. Williamson is an Assistant Professor of English at Allen University, self-taught pianist, poet, singer, composer, social scientist, private tutor, and a self-taught painter. His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of the Net Anthology (www.sundresspublications.com). The poems which were nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology were as follows: “The Jazz of Old Wine,” “The Symbol of Abiotic Needs,” & “The Misfortune of Shallow Sight.” He holds the BA and the MA in English/ Creative Writing/Literature from the University of Memphis and the PhD in Higher Education Leadership from Seton Hall University.

Prof. Williamson is also a chess master with a rating of 2223, and currently he is the Visual Arts Editor for VerseJunkies Magazine.

America’s Boundaries

After the Ballet

Artist Delving into her Craft

America’s Fighters

The Missing Children

Jackie O’Brien always loved creating visual imagery and making things with her hands from a young age. One of her earliest memories is having a blast illustrating the characters from Snow White and twisting the story so in the end Snow White ended up marrying one of the Dwarfs. She continued her passion for art and went to the University of Delaware for Visual Communications with a concentration in illustration and design graduating in 2009. Day to day, she’s always trying to be creative and communicate visually. You can see some of her selected illustrations and designs at www.jackieocreations.com and also buy prints and merchandise at society6.com/jackieocreations.

Horses

African Faces

Fish Wants Another Due Date

Bluegrass Man

“America’s Boundaries,” “After the Ballet,” “Artist Delving into her Craft,” “America’s Fighters,” “The Missing Children” copyright Ernest Williamson III; “Horses,” “African Faces,” “Fish Wants Another Due Date,” “Bluegrass Man” copyright Jackie O’Brien. Artwork in this issue of Rathalla Review may not be reproduced in any form, printed or digital.

vol. 2, issue 1

page 5

Roar of the Girl in the Room after a photograph by Joseph Koudelka

Elizabeth Bodein Elizabeth Bodien lives near Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania. She worked as a teacher of English in Japan, as an organic farmer in the coastal mountains of Oregon, as a childbirth instructor in West Africa, and as a Montessori teacher in California. No longer teaching cultural anthropology, she has entered the world of poetry. Her poems have appeared in red lights, The Litchfield Review, The Fourth River, Frogpond, Mad Poets Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Cimarron Review, qarrtsiluni, U.S.1 Worksheets, among other publications in the United States, Canada, Australia, and India. Her collections are the award-winning chapbook Plumb Lines (Plan B Press 2008), Rough Terrain: Notes of an Undutiful Daughter (FootHills Publishing 2010), and Endpapers (Finishing Line Press 2011).

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I am the wind, the festering wind, not camping here where I began as a breeze.

I’ll blow out to mountains, the dark, curdling mountains, bend towards the city, scare down its canyons.

Maybe they’ll curse me, they will not tame me.

I’ll cripple their lines, their towers that trample.

I’ll howl at their prayers. Nothing will stop me.

Don’t try to tempt me with reason or love.

If I should tire at playing the tyrant, I may come home, if ever I find one.

But the walls must be music or I’ll flee with the night.

rathalla review

Compassionate Release I’m escorted to my father’s room by a well-dressed young woman.

A social worker, is my guess. The sort I’d become familiar with long ago as a newly orphaned eleven-year-old girl.

Kind, yet fenced off. Always in a hurry. The social worker—I’ve forgotten her name already— walks me at a brisk pace down the hall.

I try to keep up, but I’ve worn the wrong shoes for marching. Besides, I’m distracted by the slideshow of open doorways. Glimpses into lives of people whose final exit from the nursing home will be unheralded by siren. Waxen figures in varying states of undress. Slack skinned and speckled. Some still tucked in bed, arms folded and hands laced. As if rehearsing for their last big day above ground.

“We can accommodate ninety altogether, forty on this wing alone,” the social worker chirps over her shoulder.

The opportunity to recite these facts seems to put even more bounce in her step. But it saddens me to imagine all these people crammed together in such a dismal place. “Oh,” is all I can muster.

“Here we are. Go on in and make yourself comfortable. We’ll bring him by as soon as he’s done with lunch, okay?” She flashes me a cheerful look before she leaves, the smile a checkmark next to her completed task.

I fight the urge to run after her, doubting my decision to visit my father for the umpteenth time. Even the word father flits about in my head like a bird that has managed to get inside a house and is now desperately seeking a way out.

I knock and enter an accommodation (I can’t really call it a room) that is equal parts cheap motel and county hospital. In the living space closest to the door is an old man lying on a bed. His milky grey cataracts match his stubble. Except for the yellow on his chin, which could be remnants of breakfast.

“Is it time?” he says. “It’s past time, isn’t it?” His unseeing eyes train uncannily on me.

“Um, I’m not... I don’t...” I give up and walk all the way in and sit in a chair on the far side of the other bed. A dull grey curtain separates the living area, cutting the already small room in half. A person could suffocate in here. I hyperventilate as I look around. A cheap plastic wall clock keeps the time. Or tries to. It has stopped a few minutes after noon, the battery supplying just enough juice to cause the secondhand to flop listlessly against the same hash mark over and over.

A tick without a tock.

A small window looks out onto an empty field, already greening with the weeds that will make my spring a sinus hell. Not much to look at, but probably better than the view from the prison cell he occupied for forty years. It’s hard for me to feel any sympathy for what he endured there. Maybe I could if I were that social worker.

Or anyone else. Maybe in another universe there is a version of me living a normal life. A compassionate me. With a decent job, a workable marriage, kids. Without the secret roadmap of scars on her inner thighs. Filled with something alive and hopeful instead of sawdust.

Michael Pikna Michael Pikna grew up in northern New Jersey and moved to Colorado when he was twenty-one. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Colorado and began working in the mental health field in 1982. He currently works at a mental health center where he helps people who are struggling with severe mental illness. He has published short stories in various literary magazines over the years, such as the Bryant Literary Review and the Puckerbrush Review. Some of the writers who inspire him are Junot Diaz, Andre Dubus, Colum McCann, and T.C. Boyle. He lives in Aurora, Colorado, with his wife Gayle and their schnauzer, Fritz.

I get up and open the closet door. I press my face into one of his flannel shirts and smell him.

He used to tuck me in at night. I would kiss his sandpapery cheek and then he would fluff my pillow. Every night. And as he was bent over me I would breathe him in. The smell of unbaked bread. All I smell now is dust.

“Is it time, yet,” the blind man whines. “It’s been so long.”

“No!” I yell, and I feel bad right away. I can be such a bitch. “I don’t know,” I say in a kinder tone. I’m wondering just what he thinks it’s time for when an aide wheels my father in. The aide is a small dark man, Dominican or Haitian.

He lifts my father easily from the wheelchair to the bed. As easily as my father used to lift me when I was young and not yet weighed down by his sins. Could anyone lift me like that now?

Even as skinny as I am? I doubt it.

The aide hovers around my father, elevating the bed so he can sit upright, covering his legs with a blanket, gently fastening an oxygen cannula under his nose and regulating the flow on the tank. Finally, he adjusts the pillow and turns to me.

“He don’t talk,” the aide says. He points to his throat. “The cancer, it take his voice.” On cue, my father holds up a small whiteboard and a dry-erase pen.

I nod my head. The cancer, that I knew about.

The woman who called me from the prison told me as much. Told me it had spread. Everywhere.

Explained about compassionate release in a tone that assumed I might care. I didn’t. It was all just information to me. About an old man dying of cancer in prison. Being released because the state felt sorry for him.

But his voice. I didn’t know about that, and for some reason it jars me. Much more than the news of the cancer had. And then I remember how deep and plush his voice was. How it would wrap his words like a present. But what gift was I expecting from him today? An explanation? As if he would talk and then I’d say, Oh, that’s why you killed mom. It all makes sense now. I know better than that.

I beam my most reassuring smile at the aide, but he gives me a look, his eyes skeptical, head tilted back. Putting someone at ease is not my strong suite. He leaves anyway, though. And not a peep from the blind man, whose complaints about timeliness apparently have nothing to do with what the aide can offer.

My father writes on the whiteboard, in fal-

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tering red letters, I’m so glad you came.

“I’m not sure why I did.” I stare at the frail man lying there. I have a memory of loving him, but I don’t feel it anymore. As if it was something I read about in a book once. I have knowledge of it, but the experience itself belongs to someone else. His eyes are the same luminous spheres around which I orbited as a young girl.

Two bolts of blue that now anchor his decrepit body to the world of the living. His hands are the same, too. Big. Meant for cradling faces.

Kneading dough. Holding a gun.

You never came to see me. He erases this and writes, I can’t blame you.

I look down at my lap. I squeeze my thighs above my knees as hard as I can. The pressure calms me. “I was too scared... dad.” The last word falls out of my mouth with the weight of something dead. “Then I was too angry. And after that I was just too messed up.” I think of all those years in therapy trying to gently coax that eleven-yearold girl inside me to move on. And just as many years of trying to push her out with the chemicals, prescribed and otherwise, I put into my body. Every day, I push. One way or another.

I force myself to look up, to meet his gaze.

“For a long time I just wanted you dead. But that just made me feel worse. So then I thought may-

rathalla review

be I should die. At least that way I could be with mom.”

My father nods. I wanted to die too. He erases this and writes, Still do, a sad smile on his face.

It makes me feel better, closer to him. To know that he wants to die. You don’t still want to, he writes, do you?

I shrug.

It wasn’t your fault, he writes. You know that right?

I stare at the whiteboard. People have tossed those words out before, but they’re too insubstantial to stick. Short bursts of air that drift right over me. Or, like now, they can be wiped away with my father’s sleeve. But what I feel at any given moment has the weight of truth to it. So when I’m angry, I think of reasons my father should die. And when I feel guilty, I think of ways to kill myself.

I smile at my father and say, “And you look like death warmed over, you know that, right?”

He nods. The fact is, I don’t have long to live.

I remember the way he used to preface all his announcements with those words. The fact is, the bakery’ll survive a day without me. The fact is, honey, you can’t have cake for breakfast. The fact is, sweetheart, you mom and I are splitting up.

“If you’re looking for sympathy...” I shake my head.

No, not sympathy. That’s not it.

“What, then?”

He hesitates and then erases the whiteboard. I want to know that you’re OK, he writes.

I squint at the words to make sure I read them right. “Are you for real?” I say. I tick off on my fingers. “No family to take me in. Foster homes until I was eighteen. The beatings. The times I was molested. The times I tried to...” I get up and turn my back. I don’t like thinking about my life without something sharp in my hand. So I bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste blood.

I sit down and hug my knees. “Sure. I’m OK, dad,” I say into my lap. “Just peachy.” But I don’t even know what OK is anymore. To me, OK is just a story. Once upon a time there was a little girl who was happy. And then one day...

I hear the squeaky sliding of the marker and I look up to see what he wrote.

I’m sorry. For everything.

“You’re sorry.” I nod my head. “Well, that makes it OK then,” I say, my voice flat. “We’re all squared away here. You kill my mother...in front of me. You abandon me, ruin my life. But as long as you’re sorry. And then I guess I’m supposed to...” I lean back in my chair. “That’s it, isn’t it?

vol. 2, issue 1

You want me to forgive you.”

He nods. It’s what we both need.

I laugh. “How would you know what I need? What, you had a few sessions with a prison shrink and you think you know me?”

I grab the whiteboard and fling it across the room. It bounces off the closet and clatters to the floor. “You don’t know anything!” I look around the room and I feel lost. My eyes light on the clock and its ineffectual secondhand.

With each half-assed tick it mocks me: stuck, stuck, stuck...

I put my head in my hands. Hot tears spill through my fingers. “I should go before I...” “Is it time, yet?” the blind man asks again. “Is it?”

“Will you shut the... Will you just be quiet?”

And just like that, it is. Quiet. Not just on the outside, where the only sound I can here is the distant murmuring of old people playing bingo while they wait to die. But quiet on the inside, too. The quiet of being finished. Done.

I retrieve the whiteboard and give it back to my father. “Why should I?” I ask.

He stares at the whiteboard for a moment and then writes, I want to be at peace with myself.

He erases this and writes, And with you.

Before I die.

“Wonderful. You get peace. How nice for you.

Well, what do I get, dad? After forty years of feeling dead inside. What do I get?”

A second chance, he writes.

I want to hit him. To take the little board and beat him with it. A second chance? Even if I could forgive him, what would I do with a second chance? Fuck it up, probably. Besides, my life has a momentum to it now I’m not sure I can stop. Any more than my mother could have stopped the bullet once my father pulled the trigger. Somewhere along the way I became that bullet, puncturing my own dreams, killing any chance I had to be happy. And deep down I know it will all be over soon. My life. Just a few more pushes. Why stop now?

But forgive him? He might as well be asking me to rip out my liver. Then, the way I’ve treated it, my liver probably won’t be of much more use to me anyway. I chuckle at this, causing my father to frown. I recognize that furrowed brow. It had authority over me once. Over my mother...

“Why’d you do it, dad?” I say. “Because she left you? So what. You still could’ve been my father. I needed you.”

My father looks down, his marker poised

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over the whiteboard. His hand and sleeve are stained red. He stays like that for a while and shakes his head. Then he writes, I never stopped loving you.

I nod my head because I don’t doubt what he says. It’s just that love can’t be trusted. What good did it do me as a child? Loving my father just made me feel like an accessory to murder.

And what was the point of loving each other if things were going to play out the way they did?

The quiet washes over me again. I sit down and I listen. I can hear the soft hiss of the oxygen through the cannula. I’m not sure how long I sit like that, just listening. Finally, I get up and I take his hand. I let it cradle my face for a moment and then I bend down and kiss his stubbly cheek.

“I forgive you,” I say, but as the words form and leave my lips I wonder what they mean. As if they are foreign words that need interpretation.

Or an act to define them.

He smiles and his eyes well up. He tries to

adjust his pillow, which has slipped down to his shoulders.

“Here, let me help you with that,” I say. I slide the pillow out and fluff it up. I hold it out in front of me with both hands and look down at my father.

“Is it time now?” the blind man asks. “Is it?”

My father looks at me with unquestioning eyes. He slips the cannula from around his ears and lets the tubing snake to the floor.

I glance at the wall clock. The secondhand has started moving again. “Yes,” I say. “I suppose it is.”

My father nods his head once and then closes his eyes.

Saturday, April 26th 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Rosemont College

Concentrations in the traditional M.A. in publishing program include:

• Business of Publishing (includes 2 elective M.B.A. classes) • Children’s & YA Publishing • Design • Editorial

We prepare students to begin a career, switch careers, or move within the publishing industry.

92% of our students are currently employed in publishing or have secured an industry position by the time they graduate.

The re-designed Certificate in Digital Content and eLearning will launch Fall 2014. Applications are now being accepted.

Please visit our website for additional information on potential internships, classes, upcoming events, and The Rathalla Review – the literary magazine jointly run and operated by publishing and M.F.A. in creative writing students.

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rathalla review

Love Lingers in the Chaise It has winked and slipped past me in humming school hallways, on waxed floors, down stairways.

It has trysted me in empty corners of the same buildings and twisted its own summer rules, lips pressing like puckered irons through her skirt, my pants, in the clinch.

August mornings skidded along, dusty across the lawns, drifted through my window with clacking typewriters and plangencies from the arched piano teacher’s house. It swirled around my ankles, up to my waist and over my shoulders.

Even the light of February hurts my eyes. She knows my anniversaries, and brings her slow hand, cool as ivory, breath redolent of gloss and cigarettes across my eyelids. Then her murmured words slide under the comforter like kittens.

Now I am old enough, I could begin to give away my books while love lingers on the chaise counting titles with painted nails.

Those I must dust most I will hand down first and one or a few at a time will pass into other hands, dwell on others’ shelves.

vol. 2, issue 1

David P. Kozinski David P. Kozinski was the featured poet in the Spring 2012 issue of Schuylkill Valley Journal. He won the 7th annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, which included publication of his chapbook, Loopholes.

More than 100 of his poems have appeared in Apiary, The Broadkill Review, Chiron Review, Confrontation, Fox Chase Review, glimmertrain.com., Mad Poets Review, and Margie, among others. Kozinski was one of ten poets chosen by Robert Bly for a workshop sponsored by American Poetry Review and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice. In 2007, he received the Dr. Eugene J. Szatkowski Achievement Award for his poetry and visual art. Kozinski lives in Wilmington, DE with his wife, actress and journalist Patti Allis Mengers.

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Fifteen Ways of Looking at a Bullet Wound Cara Losier Chanoine Cara Losier Chanoine is a New Hampshire poet, fiction writer, and occasional playwright. She has performed as a featured reader at venues throughout New England, and competed in the National Poetry Slam in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2011. She was most recently published in Children, Churches, and Daddies, Eye on Life, and Ardent.

Her extracurricular interests include Star Trek, David Bowie, and rollerskating.

1. the reflection of your own iris in a pool of someone else’s blood is more honest than a mirror 2. the exit wound marks the bullet’s struggle to gain freedom from the flesh 3. layers of clothing wick away the blood cut them free assess the damage at skin level 4. there is an absence 5. the borders are always messier than you’d expect 6. the beating of the heart churns the blood from the wound if you shoot something that is dead it won’t bleed the same way 7. your hands can only cover so many holes 8. the scar will be ugly and thick 9. you can never put it back 10. a dozen, careless perforations are less deadly than a single, wellplaced shot 11. there are still broken things you cannot see inside, they burst easily as ornaments of blown glass 12. the mortician will stitch it closed and cover it with a slit-back shirt 13. it is a well too deep for dropping pennies, to murky for wishes of survival 14. it is a sculpture I have titled it animosity 15. it is a prayer; in the name of something please heal us we are asking to be saved

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rathalla review

Regifted I walk down the long hallway from the dormitories to the interview area. No longer does the social worker offer to hold my hand, nor do I want her to. She stopped last year when I turned six, though I wish she had stopped years earlier. I’m not a baby, and this is nothing new to me.

I’ve made this trip to meet my new foster parents seven times.

I don’t remember the first time, since memories before my first birthday elude me, but I imagine the excitement of the happy couple was similar to what I’ve seen since. Each time the couple sits nervously smiling as I enter the room. Each time they tell me how happy they are to have me. Sometimes they refer to me as their “little miracle” or their “gift.” One couple actually told me I was a present from the divine. But, inevitably, in the end they return me here until some other family decides that I am a gift for them.

The time between families has stretched with my age, and the social worker says it will probably stop soon and I’ll spend the rest of my youth here. Right. Not me. I don’t need this place to survive. I don’t need a family. I don’t need anyone. And that’s exactly why they fear me. Well, one of the reasons.

A buzzer sounds, followed by the click of the lock disengaging, and the social worker pushes the door open. I put on my happy face so as to put my new foster parents, a thirty-something couple named Mark and Charlize, at ease. Mark reaches out and rubs his hand over my head, which makes me cringe. I’m familiar with the gesture, this jostling of hair, but I have none. Bald as a baby’s behind. Always have been, always will be. My baldness is one of the “creep factors” cited in my file, one of the reasons for my past returns.

I cringe because something strange happens whenever someone rubs my head. Each time the effect is different, and this time my sense of smell is heightened. I inhale sharply and I know—Charlize and Mark had sex.

I can smell it all over them. Even through the smell of soap I can detect it.

I’d say from the strength of the aroma that it was morning sex. Perhaps the excitement of adding me to the family culminated in passion. The thought that I might have played a part in the brief happy exchange of physical love between them makes me happy.

Then another thought occurs. Maybe they decided that once I arrived their opportunities for lovemaking would change, so they’d better take advantage of the situation. No more walking around the house naked, no more giving in to passion whenever and wherever they liked. Now it would be a carefully guarded, mostly pre-planned event. That thought makes me sad.

“What’s wrong?” Charlize asks. I quickly assume my shy persona.

New parents love that, especially the moms. She kneels in front of me and smoothes my shirt with her hands. “We’re very excited that you’re coming to live with us,” she assures me. I make myself blush and she can’t resist. She pulls me into an embrace and, when our ears touch, it happens.

I so want this to work. You may be the last hope for our marriage.

Dear God, please let this work.

When the embrace ends I manage to retain my happy face. I knew

vol. 2, issue 1

Tom Gumbert

Tom Gumbert lives near Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife Andrea (Andy). When not writing he enjoys reading, watching movies, and spending too much time watching the Ohio River. His publishing credits include Write This, Black Heart Magazine, Down in the Dirt, See Spot Run, The Vehicle, Inwood, Indiana’s Harvest Time, Milk Sugar, and The Wayfarer. His story “Dear Diary” is scheduled to be published in the next issue of Do Not Look at the Sun, and his anthology Nine Lives will be published by All Things That Matter Press. He is currently submitting his novel.

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it. It’s never about me, always about them. I don’t care. I don’t need anyone.

In the car I maintain my shy persona so they’re not offended when I ignore their banal chatter. I focus on the landmarks and the occasional instructions from the GPS. Though I’ve never been allowed to leave the orphanage, living with seven different families has afforded me the opportunity to learn my way around the city and surrounding communities. We pass the park where family number three used to take me when I was three.

For three months we had what I now know was the most normal of family relationships. Kathy and Alan and their twins, Bryan and Brianna, seemed nice enough. I never saw anything to be alarmed about.

But then someone told the caseworker about Alan’s past drug use and, all of a sudden, I was back at the orphanage.

A few miles later we pass the house where I spent a month with family number five, George and Sharon Starsky.

All was going well and I thought they might be the ones— but then I had to open my big mouth.

It was innocent enough. I didn’t intend any malice.

I was simply curious. George liked stroking my bald head, and when he did I heard his thoughts. Most were boring thoughts about work and paying bills and when would the foster care check arrive and why couldn’t the Reds put together a winning team, but one thought recurred more often and more intensely than the others. Candy. He obsessed about candy and how tasty it was. And then there was the thought that I didn’t understand and, since I was always curious, I had to ask. So one night

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after dinner while Sharon dished out homemade apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, I asked him.

“George, do you have nipple rings?”

“What?” He laughed nervously and looked at Sharon. “Where did you hear something like that?”

“Do you have a sweet tooth?” I asked.

He leaned toward me with a strange expression on his face as I blurted out, “I don’t understand what it means.”

“What what means, honey?” Sharon asked.

“Nipple rings and eating candy.”

Their marriage, and our time together, shattered like the bowl Sharon dropped on the tile floor. It wasn’t until after the explosive argument that culminated in Sharon chasing George out the door with a butcher knife that I learned that Candy was the sixteen-yearold girl George had hired as a summer intern at his insurance company.

Families one, two and four lived on the west side, and they almost never ventured past the invisible wall down the city center. People are strange. Like family number six, the Masons. My six months with them was like a six-month sentence in hell, which is ironic since they were “born again.” They never should have been born the first time. Zealots are a scary lot, much more capable of harm than good. I wish it wasn’t so.

The car turns onto a two-lane road and past a sign indicating that the area is called “Milford.”

We pass a cemetery and lots of small houses close together and I imagine living in one, crammed next to some family of five whose children believe

rathalla review

that their sole purpose in life is to torment me. But, to my surprise, we continue driving. Mark turns left into a neighborhood of large older homes whose intricate lattices and woodwork are painted in bright, beautiful colors. The yards are much bigger here, too. Even if I can’t fit in with others, I think, maybe with enough space I’ll be able to at least minimize my contact with them.

When we pull into the driveway, my thoughts are relaxed enough to allow me to pick up Mark and Charlize’s. She’s relieved that we’re home and excited about showing me the house. He’s anxious.

As she shows me the house she’s clearly seeking my approval, though I’m not sure why. Does she think I’d prefer the orphanage over a home with my own room and a lock that I control from the inside? And if I don’t like it here they can always return me and try for the adoption gold standard—a baby.

She asks me what I’d like for lunch.

“Do you have spaghetti?” I ask.

“Spaghetti and meatballs? Maybe some Spaghetti-O’s?” She smiles.

“I was hoping for spaghetti carbonara or, if you didn’t have that, perhaps linguini alfredo.”

She stares, mouth agape, and I immediately regret this slip.

“You speak very well for a seven-year-old,” she says.

I shrug.

“Did your last family eat a lot of pasta?” she asks.

I can hear her thoughts as she tries to recall the backgrounds of the previous families. I’d love to tell her how I read about those dishes in Good Housekeeping and they sounded divine.

How I’d prefer watching the History Channel and Biography to Nickelodeon and Disney. How I’d prefer reading Discovery to Highlights, and Stephen King over R. L. Stine. But that’s exactly the kind of information that scares them, so I simply shrug again.

The rest of the day is uneventful. Mark tinkers with the lawnmower in the garage. I could show him how to convert the engine from gas to solar, but I know what would happen if I did. I also pick up on his desire to be alone.

Charlize tells me I can watch TV or play in my room or outside. She tells me that some of the neighbors have children my age and asks if I would like to meet them. I shake my head. No way.

She goes to the den with the latest Ann Patchett novel, which I read a month ago at the library.

I hid it behind a large kids’ magazine for the hour it took me to finish.

vol. 2, issue 1

I stare at the fire in the woodstove and recall all the nations, in alphabetical order, in the National Geographic Atlas I read at family number seven’s.

I focus to ensure I don’t miss any.

“Cameron?” Charlize is shaking me. “Cameron, are you alright?”

Charlize’s forehead is wrinkled with worry and her green eyes are wide with fear. I feel so badly for her that I reach out to her and she pulls me into an embrace.

I let her rock me and tell me that everything is okay, though I already know that. I don’t particularly like physical contact, but I do understand how it can be comforting to some and clearly it is to her. I read her thoughts and am shocked to know how terrifying my unresponsiveness was to her. I’ll need to be careful about concentrating so hard.

At bedtime she insists on helping me into my pajamas. Though I find the thought insulting, I sense how much she needs it. Her thoughts tell me that she needs to feel needed, and wanted, and relevant.

Mark leans against the doorway with his arms folded across his chest. As she slips my shirt over my head she gasps. “It doesn’t hurt,” I assure her, and she reaches out to run a finger over my shoulder.

The bone protrudes upward, a third-degree separation compliments of family number six.

Convinced that their proclamations of love and kindness and “unconditional forgiveness” were legitimate, I relaxed and allowed them to witness some of my gifts. They responded with fear, anger, and violence. It was unfortunate that I hadn’t developed my telepathic ability at that point, as I would have been able to avoid their attempts to “drive the demons out.”

Mark stands up straight, starts to come into the room, then stops. He doesn’t know what to do. I can feel the ache in Charlize and decide to ease her concern. I lean forward and kiss her on the cheek.

She’s stunned, but in a good way. According to my profile this isn’t something I do. Tentatively she moves closer to me and slowly, as if afraid of hurting me, wraps her arms around me. I let her. I can feel her spirits rise with each passing second, and eventually she kisses me softly on the cheek and releases me.

I climb into bed and she asks if I want her to read me a story. Mark, still fidgeting just inside the doorway, turns and leaves. She really wants to, so I let her. She stands at the bookshelf and reads titles for me to choose. It’s all so juvenile, but when

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she reads the title The Giving Tree I sense a change in her mood and say, “That one.”

She smiles as she takes it from the shelf. “This was my favorite when I was your age.”

I already know that. *** The days have turned into weeks and months and now I’ve been here for nine months—the longest of all my stays. So far so good. I’m learning how to trust them and how to share my gifts without revealing them. For Mark, I telepathically planted the solution to his nagging engineering problem so he could present it at work as his own.

Both his confidence and his pay increased, and he seems a little less sad now. He’s still guarded around me, though, as if somehow I’m a threat.

Charlize needs to be a caregiver, so I allow her to treat me like a normal seven-year-old. This is difficult for me, but I want to make her happy. I even let her hug and kiss me. And I’ve discovered something strange: The happier she is, the better I feel about myself.

They’re good people, and I know they would never hurt me. At least not intentionally.

Both of them think a lot about their son Chris, who drowned in a neighbor’s pool when he was four. After a year of therapy they decided to have another child. That was five years and three miscarriages ago. The weight of their sadness is crushing, even now. *** The first time it happens I’m walking from the living room to the kitchen. Charlize called me to dinner but I never made it. One minute I’m striding past the couch, the smell of meatloaf stimulating my olfactory senses, and the next I’m waking up in a hospital bed with Charlize and Mark staring down at me.

“You had a seizure, Cameron. Do you know what that means?” she asks.

Of course I do, but I shake my head.

“Your brain had a reaction to something.” She’s attempting to simplify something she doesn’t fully understand. “It made you faint, which is like instantly falling into a deep sleep. Your body jerked like you were having a terrible nightmare and we couldn’t wake you.” She looks at Mark but he remains silent, hands shoved deep into the front pockets of his jeans, his face pale.

“The doctor wants to run some tests and the staff will take great care of you.” Before I can even

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ask the question, she answers. “One of us will always be here with you.”

Charlize stays all day and Mark stays all night, through countless tests and CAT scans. Charlize tries to cheer me up, which is sweet. I’m not sad, though—just extremely curious.

Mark has started to read to me. First he read an article from Wired and later, at my request, a variety of books and magazines. My choices amuse him and he thinks I don’t understand the material but am requesting material I think that he’ll like.

He’s also afraid. I can’t lose him. I just can’t.

On day four, a specialist talks to them about the CAT scan and I catch bits through her thoughts: exceptional brain activity … recommend cognitive testing … strange imagery suggests possible infarction though resembling calcification. They’re baffled and order more tests.

On day seven I’m allowed to make trips to the bathroom and down the hall to the playroom, though never for very long and never without an escort. The toys in the playroom hold no interest, so I sit on a bench talking to Mark and watch the other children play. Two bald eight-year-olds play with Silly String, which inspires me to explain string theory to Mark.

I tell him about the tests I took the day before and how much fun they were. There’s a strange look in his eyes. It’s as if he sees me differently—as if, for the first time, he understands me.

That night, Mark has a surprise for me. He’s brought a movie and decided that we can break the rules and watch it after lights out. I scoot to the far side of the bed and he lies beside me and together we watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I relate to the movie not because I’m aging in reverse—that’s absurd—but because I know how lonely it is to be different.

When the movie ends Mark squeezes my hand and then I know why he’s scared. It’s because he loves me. I turn toward the wall so he can’t see my tears. When he thinks I’m asleep I hear him whisper, “You’re gifted.”

Just before dawn I get up to use the bathroom and it happens again. Mark and Charlize are both with me as they take me for an MRI. They’re frightened and I want to tell them that everything will be fine, but I can’t because I’m scared too. For the first time in my life, I feel as if I have something to lose.

The consultation with the specialist takes place in a room too far away for my telepathy, but I read Charlize and Mark’s thoughts as soon as they return. Charlize begins by trying to assure me that everything will be fine. She uses childlike terms that I find both endearing and annoying. When

rathalla review

she finishes, Mark looks at me, trying to decide.

“I know you understand more than most your age,” he says. “If your tests are accurate, you probably understand more than the two of us, so I’m going to give it to you straight—just the way it was explained to us.”

Charlize reaches out and squeezes his arm.

“It’s okay,” he assures her. “Cameron, the CAT and MRI show some abnormalities. You have hundreds, maybe thousands, of hypodense streaks in your brain. This is unprecedented, as far as they can tell. Normally a hypodense image indicates a tumor, though some of the doctors think these streaks might be calcifications. No one really knows.”

Charlize takes my hand. Her hand is so soft and warm that, despite the terror I sense within her, it’s comforting.

“So what’s next?” I ask.

Charlize thinks, No, no, no. Mark decides to tell me. “There’s no consensus. They could do surgery to open your skull and see exactly what’s going on. Or they could assume they’re tumors and begin an immediate aggressive treatment with radiation or chemotherapy. At least one specialist thinks we should assume they’re calcifications and treat accordingly.”

Charlize releases my hand and put hers to my cheek.

“What do you think?” Mark asks.

Instead of feeling discomfort I revel in her touch and, for a moment, I’m speechless. “What happens if we do nothing?” I ask.

They glance at each other.

“The fear is that your seizures will continue and increase in severity and cause you harm.”

Mark pauses. “And eventually death.”

Charlize cries out and tries to hide her tears.

I don’t want to die. “Exploratory surgery,” I say quietly. “A curious mind wants to know,” I add with a grin.

The procedure is performed two days later.

A small section of my skull is cut and removed.

What should have taken one hour takes three.

When I wake up back in my room I check my head and find a large bandage a few inches above my right ear. I can bear the pain.

Mark is asleep in a lounger and Charlize is curled in his lap. Her head rests on his chest and his arms are wrapped around her. I watch them for a long time but am unable to pick up their thoughts or dreams, even though they’re only a few feet away.

At first light a nurse comes in to check on me.

The noise wakes Mark and Charlize, and they smile when they see I’m awake. Charlize kisses

vol. 2, issue 1

my cheek and Mark takes my hand.

I tell them that I feel changed and they say it’s probably the pain medication.

After breakfast Mark tells me that the doctors discovered the cause of my seizures.

“Tumors?” I ask. “How long do I have?”

“Oh no, sweetie,” Charlize says. “You’re going to be just fine.”

“It’s very unusual—unique actually,” Mark continues. “The treatment will require several procedures and possibly take up to two years.”

“Two years? That’s crazy,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

Mark sits on the end of the bed. “Well, the doctors have no idea why, but your hair has grown inside your skull instead of outside. You have a thin layer of skin on the inside of your skull and your hair is growing down into your brain.”

My hands instinctively touch my smooth scalp.

“The good news,” Charlize says, “is that the doctors agree the condition is treatable. They were able to successfully remove the hair from a small section of your skull during surgery. They think that even if some of the hair breaks and remains in your brain, it won’t have a negative health effect once it stops growing.”

“So they’re going to perform a series of surgeries to open my scalp and remove the hair from my brain?”

“Yes,” they say in unison.

“What effects will this have on me?”

“The seizures will end,” Mark says.

“And on my cognitive functions?”

Mark frowns. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

“If the hair growth is causing the seizures,” I say, “it’s probably causing my brain stimulation.”

Mark nods. “I never thought of that, but yeah, I guess that’s a possibility. Another possibility is that your brain will retain all that you know and can do, but your continued—” he frowns and looks around the room as if searching for something. “Your continued cognitive development,” he says, his eyes shining as he finds the term, “becomes normal.”

“So I’ll learn at the rate of a normal seven-year-old.”

They glance at each other.

“I know the periodic table. I can do calculus.

I gave you the answer to your engineering problem,” I tell Mark. “I try to make you forget about Chris. And you want me to be normal?”

They’re clearly stunned by my confession.

How could he know? And I realize that they don’t care about my gift.

“Is there a chance I could die?” I ask.

They’re clearly unprepared for this question and Charlize, tears already streaming down her

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face, turns her head away. Mark’s face is white and he swallows hard. When he speaks his voice is soft and the words quiver. “Surgery always carries a risk,” he begins. “Surgery on vital organs increases the risk, though the doctors feel that the risk of the surgery is less than the risk of not having the surgery.”

I nod. He runs his hands through his hair.

Throughout the day I try to imagine myself as a normal seven-year-old. I imagine being in class, unable to answer basic addition and subtraction questions as the whole class laughs at me. It’s humiliating. I envision sitting at dinner with Charlize and Mark, not knowing their thoughts and feelings. These thoughts repulse me. A normal seven-year-old—it’s not what I want to be and exactly what they want me to be.

That night I convince Charlize and Mark that I’m fine and that they should both go home and sleep in their own bed. After a lengthy discussion they reluctantly agree.

After midnight I quietly slip out of bed, find my clothes and dress. I make it outside undetected

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and know that I probably have a few hours before my disappearance is discovered. The night is clear and warm and it’s only as I start down the sidewalk that I realize I have no idea where I’m going. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need anyone. I can survive on my own.

I walk through the quiet night alone with the moon and stars and my thoughts. My mind is on autopilot and I work complex mathematical problems, recite epic poems in multiple languages, and ponder how best to use my gifts to better mankind.

As the sun lightens the sky I look around and realize that the street is familiar. I stop, staring in wonder. I’m in front of Charlize and Mark’s home.

My home. My heart races. What if they see me? I don’t want to lose my gifts.

A light goes on in an upstairs window and I pause. They love me. And I love them. I find myself walking toward the door, yet when I reach it I hesitate. I’m afraid of losing my gifts, of becoming normal. Then a thought comes over me, so simple and so powerful. I don’t need the gifts. I am the gift.

I ring the doorbell. This time I will not be re-gifted.

rathalla review

An Interview with Beth Kephart Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of sixteen books, a teacher of memoir at the University of Pennsylvania, the strategic writing partner of Fusion Communications, and a frequent contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, and other publications.

Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir (Gotham, August 2013) was featured in O Magazine, named a Top Ten September Book by BookPage, and was recently named a finalist in the 18th Annual Books for a Better Life awards program. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent (New City Community Press/Temple University Press), published earlier this year, was named a Best Children’s Book of the 2013 by Kirkus. Going Over, a Berlin novel (Chronicle Books), is set for release in April.

Rathalla Review: Why memoir? When in your life did you realize that you wanted to really invest exploring memoir?

I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision. I simply began to read memoir, to expand and elongate the autobiographical poems I’d always written, and to wonder what would be possible in a story built solely of the truth. I learned memoir by reading memoir. I learned to write it by living. I wrote many, many essays before I attempted to write a memoir proper. It just sort of happened to me.

RR: How is memoir more than just remembering what happened? How much interpretation is in your process?

I don’t think it’s about interpretation so much as it is about asking questions, identifying themes, and exploring connections. If the only thing a book contains is a memory of “what happened,” it’s probably not deliberately artful and not searingly universal and not essentially transcendent. Everyone is going to see “what happened” differently.

The real memoirist tries to place the events within context and to see, within them, something bold, something relevant, something that will matter not just to the writer but to the reader.

RR: Memoir writing still has narrative structure, but life doesn’t (or does it?).

Does adding narrative structure to “historical” events mean reinterpreting events?

This is a great question, and I could go on and on in response. But let me answer simply here: Structure is often the story, in a memoir. The order in which a story is revealed, the juxtapositions, the white space, the decision to include maps or poems or photo-

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graphs—choices are made all along the way.

But, again, I would avoid the word “interpretation” here. Memoirists (real memoirists) seek authentic answers to real, and important, questions. They evoke the past, suggest possibilities. Interpretation is an act of explanation, and that is a separate thing.

RR: What does your basic “preparation” for sitting down and writing? What’s your preferred environment, snack, music, lighting?

Oh, good goodness. I wish I had the time to prepare. I run a boutique marketing communications business that keeps me very busy. And I teach and review and write essays for various publications.

I don’t prepare so much as force myself up out of bed at a very dark hour, on occasional days. Most of the time, believe it or not, I simply am not writing. With the exception of my blog (beth-kephart. blogpost.com), which I write every day.

RR: What is your proudest writing accomplishment?

I don’t actually ever feel great pride or see myself as having accomplished the big things, with the great exception of being a mom and a wife and a friend. I do, however, always take pride in the achievements of my students. And it was fun to have Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir (my new book on the form) be named a finalist in the 18th Annual Books for a Better Life Awards program. That was recent, so it stands out for me.

RR: Who are your favorite writers (of any genre) that you recommend for anyone and everyone? What is is about these writers that you think is important/distinct/timeless/evocative/anything?

I am not a woman inclined to pronounce about favorites, for my shelves are full and my heart is even more full with all that I have learned and loved along the way. But I do adore Michael Ondaatje (every book, including the poems) and Colum McCann and Alice McDermott and Patricia McCormick and Terence Des Pres and Alyson Hagy and so many others. I adore them because they are authentic writers—careful, never arrogant, always humble and precise before the page.

Interview by Carol Dwyer and John McGeary.

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Legacy Jeff Mumford

Jeff Mumford is currently a project manager at an engineering organization in Las Vegas, NV. He studied creative writing at Florida State University before taking a laborer position with a contracting firm in order to travel and live overseas. After a five year hiatus, Jeff returned Stateside and finished his degree at UNLV. He has contributed to various sports websites and has been part of an internet radio sports talk show. He has never won any prizes for writing; however, he is not fundamentally opposed to it and would accept one should it be offered. This is his first published piece of poetry.

The warped, weather-beaten boards of the porch darkened the face of the small home as dusk drew shade down over the windows and door; the only thing that caught the light of hushed day was a boy sitting on the front step.

A long silence was stretched across the scene like the fading horizon. The boy kept still as shadows shifted: his grandpa leaned towards him. The porch groaned as the chair rocked forward, and the old man’s feeble voice cracked when he started to speak. He would have said: ‘Follow your dreams, don’t give up, don’t be led astray;’ but he’d never followed his own advice, and knew the boy would know his life and words were lies.

June 20 – 27

MFA in Creative Writing at Rosemont College

www.rosemont.edu/writersretreat

Suburban Philadelphia

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rathalla review

Spraycopter Our fat black lab, Shadow, is watching me from beside the deck. He’s dumb enough to chew rocks but smart enough to serve as a babysitter sometimes. It is a beautiful summer day, and I am six or seven years old. I’m in the backyard playing in the big wooden sandbox made of thick, unpainted boards. The top layer of sand is warm and dry, but deep down where I have dug, it is much darker, cool and damp. It feels good in my hands.

I am moving my toy dump trucks and excavators around the job site, transporting vast quantities of sand from one corner of the wooden structure to the other and back again. Behind me, my mother is folding clothes from the line and I can hear each garment wheeze as she drops it into the light blue basket, the one that’s broken in places so the little plastic latticework looks like a snarl of rectangular teeth.

Shadow hears it first. He stands up and looks off over the cornfield, the neat rows of tall grassy leaves and tassled ears statuesque in the breezeless afternoon sun. And then it is all I can hear: the distant whump, whump, whump of the helicopter blades. My tongue suddenly feels huge in my mouth; I taste my own saliva and something metallic. Fear, probably. It is a speck in the cloudless sky, low on the horizon and growing quickly.

I turn toward my mother and scream “SPRAY COPTER!” I run to her through the maze of hanging t-shirts and pants. Shadow begins to bark, and as I peer around the pale, squishy leg I’ve attached myself to I can already see the sinister bubble of its cockpit and the long black arms spread over the treetops. I am sure that it will kill us all.

I try pulling my mother into the house, but she wants to get the last of the laundry. “Go ahead, I’ll be right there” she says.

I am reluctant to leave her. I want to be brave enough to stand here with her, but I am not. So I run frantically up the splinter-giving steps of the deck and into the kitchen, barely pausing to open and shut the screen door, which is warm from the sun and slides easily in its track. My mother frowns as I slam it shut.

The spraycopter is almost over us when she finally comes up the steps. She calls to Shadow, who is barking now and leaping into the air at the thing that has upset me, but he refuses to leave the yard. She sets down the basket of laundry on the table and then I see it fly over the backyard, just tens of feet off the ground. The noise is deafening, and I can feel the thumping of the rotors in my chest. Tears burn on my face as I watch Shadow continue to bark and leap, bark and leap. The spraycopter takes a few more passes, each one more terrifying for me than the last. Finally, mercifully, it finishes its job and begins to get quieter and farther. Eventually it is silent again except for Shadow, who finally yields to our calls and comes slowly up the steps, his legs stiff and achy under his barrel-like body.

When I think about the spraycopter now, I wonder why it produced such absolute panic in me. I’ve never felt anything

vol. 2, issue 1

Rich Tombeno

Rich Tombeno is a high school English teacher in a distant suburb of Boston. He currently studies Creative Nonfiction in the Solstice MFA program at Pine Manor College, and his writing can be found online atsixsentences.blogspot. com. He is currently working on a memoir, Willing Sacrifice, about hunting with his father.

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like it since then. Not when my mother’s heart stopped one night after dinner, not when a grizzly bear walked past my unarmed friend and me in Alberta while we were camping, not when a steel treestand fell on my head from twenty feet up. Not even when my girlfriend has wanted to talk about marriage. I understand now that those afternoons of terror were scheduled, contracted visitations courtesy of the farmer who owned the cornfield, but they always felt random. It never occurred to me

that there could be any useful purpose to something so awful. Now I wonder about the chemicals we no doubt ingested, inhaled, and got all over our skin from playing in the yard.

My mother swears that Shadow, showered by toxins as he tried to protect us, got cancer from his refusal to come inside. I don’t know.

Maybe it was the chemicals. Maybe it was just old age. Or maybe it was fear that turned his own cells against him, eating him from the inside out.

Chrysanthemums Tied Together Darrell Dela Cruz

Darrell Dela Cruz graduated from San Jose State’s MFA Program for Poetry. His work has appeared in The Round, Two-Thirds North, Sheepshead Review and will appear forthcoming inEuphony, The Chaffin Journal, and The Dos Passos Review. He tries to analyze poems on his blog retailmfa.blogspot.com or rather he acknowledges his misinterpretations of poems.

I. To be arranged they have to be separated.

Blooms and then petals taken off for the construction for a heart, perhaps, or maybe a wreath – shapes of condolences.

Yet, in the mulch, the stems lay strewn together. They cross each other like waves of arrows shot at a single target.

II. Saint Sebastian – tied down to an anonymous tree as arrows pierced through his sides like thorns. This is the Romantic depiction of his devotion.

He suffered there until a person took him down from the display, tended his wounds on monochrome beddings where he dreamt of only words.

The image gone. He was left to wander down any path, but all led to the same greeting: clubs and spit.

His second death internal.

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rathalla review

Three White Boys The first time The Summits filed into our rehearsal room, early in the summer of 1970, I was too overawed to say a word. We were a pimply teenaged rock band that hadn’t yet played a gig, but they were the Real Thing. Tall, well-dressed, in their twenties, and black. They were professionals. They had a record out that was getting radio play. They had credibility. They even had James, an agent/manager, who came in wearing a scarlet shirt unbuttoned to his navel to expose a big chocolate chest liberally strung with gold chains. How Jimmy, our guitarist and leader, convinced them to audition us to be their new backup band was a mystery to me.

James didn’t dawdle. “I want to thank y’all for taking the time to get together with us. We just moved here to D.C. and need a band. I’ve got gigs lined up, so we need to do a lot without much time. Jimmy tells me you boys don’t mind hard work, and that’s what it’s gonna take. This here is Reggie, Ralph, Al, and Ben.” We shook hands with The Summits, each of whom exuded a different cologne.

Reggie was a short, husky guy with bright eyes; Ralph had a huge Afro and was tall and lanky; Al wore a black fedora and sunglasses; while I figured Ben was the star because of his baby-face and athletic build. Al picked up a case and pulled out a saxophone. “I’m gonna let The Summits here show you a little bit of what they do, and then maybe you can play something for us so we can get a chance to hear you.”

The Summits lined up before us, snapped their fingers in rhythm, and began to sway as one. Ralph sang in a bass so low and rich I wondered how such a lean body could produce it.

While he laid out the bass line, the others slid in with perfect harmonies. They swung around to sway in the other direction, fingers still snapping. “Take a sad song, oh yeah, and make it better.”

They moved and sang with exquisitely synchronized movements in their Motown style version of the Beatles song, and I felt thrilled and embarrassed at the same time. They were so good I would have paid money to get into the audition just to listen, but I also felt like a hopeless amateur. There was no hesitation in their movements, no second guessing, no quaver in those voices.

They exhibited the kind of supreme confidence that I could only dream about. When Al began a solo on saxophone that oozed like molten bronze while the rest of the Summits hummed in harmony behind him, I almost cried.

When they finished, Jimmy, Dave and I applauded, glancing at each other.

“All right, how about if you boys play us a little something?” James rubbed his hands together and smiled. “Play anything you like.”

The Summits sat down and helped themselves to the cokes and beers that Jimmy brought downstairs in a cooler.

Dave and I were still in high school. Dave played bass and didn’t smoke, drink, or take drugs, and slaved away at learning to play the bass. Paul McCartney was his hero, and he was

vol. 2, issue 1

C.B. Heinemann

C.B. Heinemann has been performing, recording and touring with rock and Irish music groups for nearly twenty years. His Celtic rock band, Dogs Among the Bushes, was the first American Celtic group to tour in the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism. A graduate of the University of Maryland, C.B. Heinemann has written three novels, and his short stories have appeared in Storyteller, One Million Stories, Whistling Fire, Danse Macabre, Fate, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Cool Traveler, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Car & Travel, and Big World Travel. His short story, Freiburgitis, appeared in Outside In Literary Journal, and was included in an anthology of short stories, Whereabouts, published by 2Leaf Press.

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determined to make it as a musician. Jimmy was eighteen and lived with his dad in a brick colonial in the suburbs. His dad was always away in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, leaving Jimmy to be king of the house. Jimmy drove a ’55 Chevy and had been a classic greaser until the first time he heard Jimi Hendrix and underwent an epiphany. He grew his hair long, smoked loads of pot, and practiced the guitar like a fiend. He bought all of Hendrix’s albums, a few by Johnny Winter, and spent his days and night forcing his fingers to play what his heroes played. That obsessive slog paid off, because in just a couple of years he became a monster lead guitarist. Being a legal adult, he drank Budweisers and smoked Marlboros. He always had some dopey but pretty girl in his bed, stoned out of her mind.

Once, while talking about an upcoming party we were invited to, I asked if he was bringing his latest girlfriend. He looked at me as if I suggested he eat cat food. “Bring that heifer to a party? I wouldn’t take her out in public.”

I never understood why girls would have anything to do with him, but he never had problems finding them.

The Summits were waiting. Jimmy turned to Dave and me. “Changes, right? Two, three, four…” He closed his eyes, and I could have sworn that little mustache of his bristled as he roared into the opening riffs of the Hendrix song we practiced a thousand times. Dave and I came in together right on the beat, our eyes on Jimmy’s face, but Jimmy was already in another world, sending back barely intelligible messages from his guitar through the amp. His playing was as unflinching as the Summits’ performance. His guitar wailed, wah-wahed, moaned, and flashed into a flurry of notes so fast and complex that the Summits looked at each other and nodded. Jimmy’s head jerked back, his mouth opened slightly, and he really cut loose. His guitar wept, pleaded, and screamed while his mouth moved as if the sound was coming from deep inside him.

My self-consciousness faded as Jimmy carried us. All worries about what the Summits or James might think of us fell away like nothing, and we lost ourselves in the music.

Jimmy turned to us, raised the neck of his guitar, and the howling storm dropped to a whisper. All that was left was that pulsing, relentless riff on bass and guitar with my drums whacking out the beat without deviation. Jim-

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my sang, though he wasn’t much of a singer, and that riff slowly swelled. He kept singing, the riff kept building, until it reared itself up into an explosion that threatened to knock out the walls.

All together we stopped, Jimmy played a short exit riff, and we came in again together for one last crashing chord.

James ran over and shook our hands. “Oh man, you boys are good! So tight! And you never lost that beat, that’s the main thing. That beat was just right there, beginning to end, bass and drums together. Jimmy, you are incredible!

Come on, do something all together—something you can all do.”

At Reggie’s suggestion we jumped into a blues shuffle jam. Al played a solo, and then one by one, the Summits took turns on the verses and came together in harmony on the chorus—Everything you do, you know I feel blue, but everything you do isn’t true—it makes me blue. I had never heard the song before, and suspected it was improvised on the spot, but it fell together without mishap.

After that we practiced every other night, and Jimmy, Dave, and I often got together before the Summits arrived to go over difficult passages.

It was tough work, but James was always there to keep us focused. The Summits didn’t merely work on their harmonies and arrangements, but synchronized those with their dance steps, hand movements, and even the way they turned their heads. They had to work a lot harder than we did, but they were tireless. Unfortunately, I didn’t see much of my other friends, and had to give up playing baseball on weekends because those were long rehearsal days.

Finally came the night of our first gig. James brought fake ID’s for Dave and me so we could get into the club, though neither of us drank anything stronger than orange juice. I told my mom we were playing for a teen club. James drove us all in his van down Georgia Avenue into Washington, DC. It was an all-black area, and some neighborhoods were still barely cooling off from the riots of the late sixties. Dave and I felt apprehensive, but didn’t want it to show.

We pulled up to a nondescript joint called The Georgia Avenue Club. Clots of guys in big Afros and bell-bottoms were hanging around outside, and the interior was solid gray cigarette smoke.

When the Summits sauntered in, they were greeted with complicated handshakes and slaps on the back. When we three white boys trailed in carrying drums and amplifiers, silence dropped like a rock. Dozens of pairs of eyes followed us through

rathalla review

the smoke. I heard one guy at the bar mutter something about “those hippie crackers.”

Ralph stopped in his six-foot-six tracks and looked around. “Hey man, these boys are with us and they’re our friends. They’re good dudes, all right?

And damned good musicians.

We ain’t gonna hear one more word about them, got that? When you hear these boys play, that’ll shut some of you brothers up.” He then let out a big bass laugh and snapped his fingers.

At once, the mood lightened up, people resumed talking, and nobody paid any attention to the white teenagers with their long hair and wispy sideburns.

We set up on a stage at one end of the club while a disco light rotated over our heads, shooting its glittery rays in all directions. The Summits got as much stage space as possible, which meant that Jimmy, Dave and I ended up squished against the back wall. I was so nervous that I didn’t know where to look, so after setting up the drums I sat and stared at Dave while he tuned.

After a brief sound check, during which James tried out the mics while The Summits stood in their brown and black jumpsuits on the side of the stage, the club turned off its own eardrum-crushing sound system. James rambled for a moment into a mic before finally announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, direct from the Motor City, The Summits!”

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We started the riff to “Get Ready” while the Summits trotted onto the stage. As we repeated that riff over and over, they performed an elaborate dance-and-twirl routine that brought the crowd to the front of the stage. On cue, they slid to their mics and sang harmonies that soared over our gritty beat before twirling as one and returning to sing again without missing a millisecond. The crowd went crazy.

We flew through our repertoire—which included some Temptations numbers, a few R & B standards, and several songs the Summits wrote themselves.

All featured their intricate harmonies backed by our thumping beat.

In the middle of each set the Summits took a short break so that Jimmy, Dave, and I could do some of our material, which were mostly Hendrix songs and blues numbers. The audience howled and clapped after our songs.

We played a few more gigs in D.C. that were slight variations on the first. We got tighter and James grew more excited. As he drove us home, he talked about recording contracts, flying us out to Los Angeles, and getting into bigger venues.

I was becoming further removed from my other friends, and found myself at age sixteen living and working in a world of adults.

Late August was approaching, and with it the gig that James kept his eye on from the beginning—the Summer Celebration Concert at

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Rockville Mansion that was going to be televised all over the country. When at last the big day arrived, James brought The Summits up from D.C. in his van while Jimmy drove Dave and me in his Chevy. The day was blazing hot and so humid I was covered in perspiration that had no place to go. I felt terrified when we rolled up and saw the mansion grounds ram-packed with people, and a huge stage set up at the front of the mansion itself, filled with lights, sound equipment, metal scaffolding, and electronic gear. To one side of the stage, television vans sat jammed together with big black cords running everywhere over the rain-starved yellow grass.

We followed signs to the performers’ parking area, in the back, and as soon as we got out of the car we were greeted by men who carried our equipment to the stage for us to set it up while other men in green City of Rockville blazers led us through a back door and into the mansion. One of the men, a big guy in a flattop who looked like an ex-Marine, showed us to our dressing rooms upstairs while explaining that The Summits were being interviewed in the kitchen. I deduced from his comments that nobody was interested in interviewing the three white boys, which came as a relief.

My dressing room was the first I’d ever had. It was a large former bedroom with a sloping ceiling under the roof and a view of the crowded mansion grounds and cable-littered stage. I even had a dressing table with a mirror surrounded by big light bulbs. All I brought with me were the white short-sleeved shirt and gray slacks that James bought for the white boys to wear for the show. I put on my clothes and stared into the mirror, wondering what people did in dressing rooms. I didn’t have make-up, wigs, champagne, or groupies. Each of us had a separate dressing room, where each of us separately wondered what we supposed to do there.

I pulled my hair back into a ponytail, let it loose, then tied it back, unable to decide which look to go for. At last I decided to leave it loose, long and flowing, because after all, it was the perfect occasion to do so.

After that fashion breakthrough, I sat on a wooden stool and watched the crowd while the sun lowered itself through cushions of red and orange. A girl was onstage playing an acoustic guitar nearly as big as she was and belting out country songs. She wore an aqua-blue, floaty mini-dress,

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and her dark hair tumbled down her back to her waist. Big silver earrings sparkled through the strands that fluttered back in the breeze.

The crowd was made up mostly of families sitting on blankets while groups of teenagers slouched on the sidelines. The show was free, summer was winding down, and it was a perfect excuse for locals to get out of the house and feel like they were doing something. I leaned out of my window and saw more people streaming in. An air of expectancy tightened the atmosphere. I was still soaked in sweat.

Looking down, I noticed that my hands were trembling.

Trying to shake off stage fright, I rolled up my jeans and t-shirt, stuffed them into a plastic bag, and walked down the hall to Jimmy’s dressing room. He was sitting in the window playing his unplugged guitar and gazing out, also wearing his white shirt and gray slacks. A cigarette dangled from his lips. “I wish I had some dope with me. And there are a lot of sweet heifers out there. We’ll have our choice of ‘em after we play. I wonder how long we get to use these dressing rooms?” He turned to me. “How would you like your first lay in a dressing room after a TV appearance? There’s something you won’t forget, sport. Why don’t you come pick one out right now? Hell, I’ll do the talking for you to get it started, if you want.”

“No thanks. I’m just trying to get hold of my nerves.” I looked out the window and shied away with a wince. “Man, you see all those cameras and lights? It looks like the whole world is going to be staring at us.”

Jimmy spat a stream of smoke around his cigarette, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “They’re not going to be looking at us. They’ll all be watching The Summits. Nobody cares about us--it’s all about those guys. Let’s just have a good time and snag a couple of heifers when we’re done.”

Dave staggered in, his glasses askew and sweat forming big wet circles under the armpits of his white shirt. “We’re on, guys.”

We hurried downstairs to the front doors, which led to the backstage area. The lights onstage were black, so nobody could see us, but the crowd was buzzing. A few whoops rang out. A gang of those ubiquitous City of Rockville jackets helped us onto the stage. I got behind the drums in the dark, adjusted all the stands, re-tightened every bolt, turned my

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snare around, tightened the high hat screws yet again, and checked my sticks for cracks.

Jimmy and Dave took their places. Big lights glared over the audience, which had grown so much that I couldn’t see the end of it. I felt like we were at Woodstock. Taking one last, shaky breath, I tightened the snare drum again and watched the wings.

Jimmy turned to me, eyes wide, and counted out the opening to “Get Ready.” Hoping I wasn’t seeing things, I whacked my snare once to open the song. My drum sound exploded into the crowd and lights gushed over the stage. The guitar and bass roared in with the familiar repeating riff, and a huge, roiling cheer filled the air. Over and over we played that riff, and the crowd started clapping along, creating an earsplitting din. The excitement flashed from smolder to flame.

Fireworks shot into the sky on either side of the stage, which startled me so badly I almost stopped playing—and then out they came, dancing and spinning in gold and red jumpsuits with big flared bells and long sleeves that hung to their knees. They danced, they snapped, they sweated, they sang with everything they had while we three white boys didn’t dare let up an inch. The crowd was on its feet, howling and screaming, while more fireworks shot into the sky behind the crowd.

Television cameras rolled and turned, photographers ran and crouched all over the stage with cameras glued to their faces. The big lights were on us, and I could barely see what was happening. I focused on Jimmy and Al, because their winks, nods, and hand motions let me know what was coming.

“Get Ready” went on longer than usual because Al took a long, growling sax solo while the rest of the Summits went through a series of moves that I’d never seen before.

Jimmy took a solo, then turned and motioned to me to take a brief solo. While I rolled around the drums in a quick series of paradiddles, I clutched my sticks so hard I nearly broke my fingernails.

When we ended, more fireworks blasted off on the sides and fountains of water shot into the sky while pink and blue lights whirled around them. The audience was going berserk and adrenalin spewed into my bloodstream so furiously that I could barely keep my head from flying off. Jimmy slashed into the opening chords of one of the Summits songs, and they stepped to the mics, swaying and snapping in those per-

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fectly synchronized movements. I was able to take another breath and play without the desperation I felt at first. I even began to enjoy myself, and looked over at Dave, who turned to me with a goofy smile.

The whole crowd was dancing, and at last it began to dawn on me that our big show--the show that James obsessed over for weeks--was turning into a success. When The Summits did their version of Hey Jude, the crowd was theirs for good.

With another swirl of lights and more squirting from the fountains, we grooved into our last number, Ball of Confusion. The Summits did most of the work. Each of them took a turn, from bass Al to high tenor Ben, pouring their guts into it, then meshing together in exquisite harmonies. The dancing, the spins, even the way they each bobbed one leg, never faltered.

Sweat was flowing from their pores while our beat pounded and throbbed.

At last we hit the last note and held it out while fireworks exploded, water jetted into the sky, lights danced crazily over the crowd, and people screamed themselves into laryngitis. City of Rockville jackets hurried us off the stage and up to our dressing rooms. It was only when I closed the door behind me that I realized I was so sweaty I looked like I jumped into one of the fountains. I washed off in the sink and changed back into my jeans and t-shirt. A knock threatened to break the door. “Come on, man, come on down the hall to Ben’s dressing room. We’re having a party.” James’ voice verged on hysteria.

When I got to Ben’s dressing room, the Summits sat slumped in chairs, relaxing and drinking beer. James was leaping around in ecstasy.

“This is just the beginning, man, this is just the beginning!”

I felt strangely detached from the experience. James called Jimmy into another room to have a private talk, so I decided to go outside and walk around. Most of the crowd was gone, and technicians were taking that monstrous façade down and packing it away in big trucks. Some men even packed our equipment into Jimmy’s car.

The night was breezy, with the first leafy scent of autumn barely sneaking into the mix. The pines and cypress trees that lined the swath of lawn in front of the mansion heaved and rattled. School would be starting soon—what would happen to my new

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career? Would I have to quit the band because I was still in high school, or would I drop out of school so I could keep going?

I had a feeling that James and Jimmy were talking about that very question in the upstairs of the Rockville Mansion.

A group of kids my age stood around smoking cigarettes and laughing under a big pine as I passed. One girl with long blond hair and glasses turned and looked at me. She wore a blue and white flannel shirt and jeans, and was very pretty. “Hey man, aren’t you the drummer with that soul band?”

“Yeah. How’s it going?”

“You guys were pretty good, though I’m not really into that kind of music. Are you from around here?”

“I live in Kensington. How about you?”

She gestured with one hand. “I live three houses down that way. I figured I might as well come down since I wouldn’t be able to escape the noise anyway. So, do you go to school at Einstein or Walter Johnson?”

We continued talking under the pines while her friends wandered off. We talked about our schools, how much we hated going back in a few days, and music. She was funny, with a sarcastic sense of humor, and I felt more relaxed than I’d been in months.

A familiar honk trumpeted behind us, and I looked over to see Jimmy’s car with the headlights on waiting in front of the mansion. “I’ve gotta go now. What’s your name? Hey, maybe I’ll come up again and we can talk and stuff.”

“Sure, I’ll give you my number.”

When I climbed into Jimmy’s car he made facetious apologies about interrupting me while I was “getting a piece of heifer.” He was tipsy, and rambled on all the way home about James’ big plans.

A week later we rehearsed, this time at James’ basement apartment in D.C. I could tell that The Summits were growing fond of us, and Ben held up a Hendrix album. “I think we should start incorporating more of the stuff you do into our own sound. You know, that wild guitar sound, that psychedelic music thing.”

“We could merge our kind of music and vocal arrangements and dance with what you’re into,” added Al. “It could be our thing, our unique sound.”

James was still over the moon about the Rockville show. “Look guys, I’m working on setting up some recording dates. We need more material and need to tighten up the sound a lit-

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tle, but it’s time. I’m talking to some people I know in New York and LA. This thing is starting to take off. I’ve been getting non-stop calls since the last show.” He glanced at Dave and me with a forced smile. “Of course, we’ll have to arrange things around your school schedules.

We’ll work out something.”

On the ride home, Jimmy said that James was hinting to him that Dave and I might want to think about leaving school and taking GED tests. The suggestion set off an internal alarm—James’ plan sounded like my mother’s worst nightmare. Although it was all very exciting, I felt nervous about the direction my life was headed and decided not to say anything to her until the band had more concrete offers.

Two days later I got a call from a subdued Jimmy. James had been murdered in his apartment—the same apartment we practiced in two days earlier. The Summits were on hold indefinitely. Jimmy said Ralph was worried that they might be next. He didn’t say why.

I couldn’t talk to anyone outside the band about it. My mom was glad I was safe and out of that kind of dangerous situation, and other friends didn’t get it. I think a few of them suspected that I was making up the entire Summits story.

Jimmy bought an old school bus and took off one day, never to be seen again.

Dave and I talked about starting another band. A few months later I got a call from Al. I was amazed to hear from him, and asked how they were doing.

“It was pretty rough after James got shot.

We were all in shock. We thought The Summits were all over. But I just wanted you to know we’re doing all right. A couple of us are getting together out here in California with another group. They’ve got this great singer named Lionel. Good songwriter, too.

We’ll see what happens. Anyway, we just wanted to say hello, thank you guys, and wish you the best of luck. It’s better for you to stay in school, anyway.” He chuckled.

“You know, we had some great times with you three white boys.”

School was already underway and my time was filled with getting used to new teachers, making new friends, and re-connecting with old friends. I still had that Rockville girl’s number, and one day I finally decided to give her a call.

rathalla review

wetting the baby’s head If you want to baptize a child, for God’s sake, wouldn’t milk be best instead of water? Or wine?

You may bless either and call it ‘holy’.

These self-evident rites, could the party not be held outdoors?

Say, by a river, the question of a river rolling toward the answer of the sea.

There’s your water.

Why not baptize the child in a garden; it’s little pate wetted by a spigot or a lawn sprinkler?

I guess you guess the blessed medium is liquid; but couldn’t the sun be poured over the dear?

Couldn’t the air serve? The wind?

Or hope that it rains, if you need water.

And, poor thing, whether male or female, you’ve togged them out in some cumbersome dress; to be worn once and then enshrined, at best handed down, yellowing, through the generations.

Better to baptize the child naked.

Naked as the day it’s born.

In all your good God’s glory.

And why a priest or some same difference?

Let the oldest and the youngest one attending share out such sacramental duties.

Hell’s bells, if you’ll pardon the language, why baptize a child at all?

He or she was born blessed in the light of all of this.

A god knows what he’s doing.

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Bruce McRae Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 700 publications, including Poetry. com and The North American Review. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets, is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on YouTube.

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Inspiration from Anne Lamott Best-selling author Anne Lamott transformed Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church into ‘The Church of Anne Lamott’ on November 28, 2012 when she visited to discuss her latest book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. The pews and balconies overflowed with her adoring fans laughing at every joke, hanging on her every word, and hopeful for some new revelation about writing and living. Lamott reiterated much of the advice on writing and life she gave in her national bestseller and writer’s bible, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which was published in 1994, after the wildly successful Operating Instructions first put her on The New York Times bestseller list in 1993.

“I only know two things about writing,” she reasserted. “You take very short assignments, and you write a terrible first draft.

Everybody writes awful first drafts—way too long and overwritten. Any book you love, remember was a terrible first draft.” Notice she didn’t say “shitty first draft,” the expression for which she has become famous in so many writing workshops. I guess this was in deference to the venue, or perhaps she revised the phrase since “coming out as a Christian“ (her words to describe her very public spiritual journey). I have to admit that I’m not as big a fan of her latter-day, more “preachy” emphasis, but her perceptive storytelling ability, ruthless honesty, and self-effacing humor continue to amaze and amuse me and make me wish she were my best friend.

About her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow she said, “My publisher suggested I write this … I really do like to write about things I come upon … I wanted to write a book [about my spiritual practice] that my brothers and 19-year-old son would get.” This new book is more about living than writing, but it contains lessons applicable to writers, artists, and anyone devoted to taking notes on the human condition. When asking for help or helping others, Lamott says, “Go inward and speak from a place of intimacy and depth.” This is great advice for writers. Be appreciative. Appreciate anger as well as love. Just say “Ohhkay” when you’re angry. And give yourself

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up to the “Wow!” She clarified, “You know, when you are majorly obsessed and you can’t stop your ranting mind, you go outside and look at the starry night. Don’t you always say, ‘Wow?’ We never say, ‘Well, not so great …’’

There are things in life that never cease to provoke the “Wow!” response. Remember these and keep them as a prayer.

According to Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow took only four months to write, while it usually takes her two years to complete a book.

She emphasized, “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor—almost satanic. Learn to make more mistakes and let things be.” She admitted that this is something that comes with age, or “A-G-E syndrome”—her latest kvetch. According to 59-year-old Lamott, the process of aging enables you to see how precious and vulnerable you are and to be okay with the fact that “no one cares.” So, you can stop worrying about how you look, about how you come across to people, and about the fact that “your arms and neck will never look any better.”

As for writing practice, she says, “Sit down every day at the same time. Don’t wait for inspiration. Just show up! Keep your butt on the chair. I have an idea, I scribble notes, and there are 37 critical voices inside me. Two voices like the story. You write it for those two people.”

What Anne Lamott mostly believes in is pen and paper. Once you have those two things, she asserts, “You get to write everything you want. And you own everything that has ever happened to you. No one can stop you!” And, if you can, inject humor. “Laughter is carbonated holiness,” she says.

Her last words that night expressed the most important truth for everyone, writer or not, to hear and truly believe. “We are loved and chosen and we have a lot to share.”

Amen!

Article by Tracy Kauffman Wood.

rathalla review

Into the Dark Soil Robert Earle

Robert Earle has published stories in more than fifty literary journals across the U.S. and Canada, including Mississippi Review, Quarterly West, 34th Parallel, The Common, Chamber 4, Toronto Review and many others. He also is the author of two novels, The Way Home and The Man Clothed in Linen, and two books of nonfiction, Nights in the Pink Motel and Identities in North America: Search for Community.

He was a diplomat for twenty-five years and now writes full-time in Virginia. He has degrees in literature and writing from Princeton and Johns Hopkins.

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Angela didn’t know anyone was coming, only that Frank was in jail in Buenos Aires, pending extradition to Italy. She hadn’t known he would be in Buenos Aires, either. She read he was there on the Internet before anyone called her. Someone named Phil from the embassy in Rome told her, “Sit tight. We’re working this out.”

She fixed fruit, bread and tea for breakfast and ignored the computer, not that difficult to do in the hills outside the medieval city of Viterbo. Living in her small stuccoed home with its large patios, swimming pool, guest cottage, and big garden gave her no small pleasure.

She was a passionate classics major at Vassar. The opportunity for Frank to have his final tour in Milan and then settle in Viterbo pleasantly unnerved her. Everything old in her life was new, everything new was old. Her knowledge of Latin and the Romans was old, but coming into direct contact with all that now made it raw and vital.

She was a silver-haired woman of sixty with a nose that bespoke her Italian heritage (her maiden name was Agnelli, like the famous industrialists) who had lived in eight Spanish-speaking countries and spoke fluent Spanish but poor Italian and could hardly read Latin or Greek anymore. She had two daughters in the States and three grandchildren and Frank in Buenos Aires and a sense that panic would be pointless, a judgment Frank reinforced in one short phone call. “I have this under control.” Not that she wasn’t panicked, but if she cut and buttered the bread cleanly, likewise the fruit, and let the tea steep and sat on the patio and looked over the flower beds and performed the mental exercises someone once told her about, she reclaimed some of her natural, calm, poised self.

The mental exercises entailed one of two things. First, you could half shut your eyes and let the blurriness draw out the colors and shapes of what you were looking at in semi-abstract patterns that generated emotional effects you could name. These effects might be jarring, consoling, intriguing, sumptuous... many things. Angela did this on the patio for a while. They had found the place, which extended beyond the garden to a little stream and then a hillside they didn’t cultivate but might at some time.

They said yes right away; that was how they beat the Roman money that probably would have outbid them. It still was expensive, but they sold off their house in McClean, Virginia and rummaged an investment account, and bought the place outright, maybe sixty kilometers from Rome and an equal distance from their favorite beaches and harbor towns on the Tyrrhenian. But she wasn’t good with distances. She judged things by the time it took to get from A to B, and in Italy, that was impossible, so she began doing these exercises again, settling into the moment: the scarf of flowers along the patio wall, the bright slash of lawn interrupted by the turquoise summons of the pool’s water and then the garden’s rows of Vergilian wisdom--the Georgics.

This last image led to the second mental exercise, which led

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to Frank, who was the gardener, and had been when she met him. The exercise was to go back in time and find some way to remember the specifics of the past. You could pick an event, buying vegetables from Frank at a roadside stand in South Jersey, for instance, and then you could recall the date by the model year of the car you were driving and you could recall he had the same wide, greedy grin then that he had now, and you were wearing a skirt and a swimsuit under it because you and your friends--there were two of them, Toni and Mary--would want to go straight to the beach when you got there, just whip off your skirts, grab the towels and trek through the hot grassy dunes that led to the flat plane of the beach and the white froth and green sea water and hazy horizon...and he said, “When you head home, stop again. We sell fresh all summer. You cook?” “Yes, I cook,” she said.

“Not bad for a girl your age.” “My age? I’m eighteen. How old are you?” The sly greedy grin: “Nineteen. Gotcha there.” That kind of exchange...fragments, but real...the coconut scent of the suntan lotion because you all wanted deep tans...the scent of the corn and squash and tomatoes and carrots he’d sold them... looking hard at every clumsy, flirty boy but wanting to be with your girlfriends and even as as teenagers basing your conversations on memories. So much happened before you were seventeen, eighteen. Unimportant but intimate things, tender things, frightening things, all worth sharing in a kind of rattle of words between dips in the suspect waters of the Atlantic full of seaweed, seepages from the East Coast and who knew where else? They did stop again to see this cute, cheery guy and buy vegetables from him, and he asked for her phone number, and she said, quite practically, “Look, I live in Morristown. It’s a long way from here.” “What, you don’t think I have a car?” Actually, he didn’t. He had a 1957 Chevy pick-up truck, or his family did.

From the patio she could see the cars on the road and if one turned onto their drive, as now, it came straight at her for twenty seconds, purling plumes of dust. The man parked his Fiat with a crunch. Then there was a spot of silence while he seemed to be consulting something in his lap. Then he got out and introduced himself, Tim Garner, Frank’s lawyer. He wore loose, pleated slacks, huraches and a guayabera. He was pleasant, self-confident, and focused on

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her, not Frank. Are you okay? Do you have access to your funds? Has anyone explained the nature of this case to you? How did you manage to make this property so beautiful, so natural?

You’re from Jersey, too? Which was you favorite post as you and Frank moved around? Casual, natural, friendly, Angela-centered questions, verging on but not quite patronizing. He was being sensitive, she could see that, demonstrating his calm by not rushing.

“It’s better I don’t go into the details with you,” he said, “but I should say that the policia di stato will be here shortly. They haven’t so far, right?”

“I’ve only heard from Phil at the embassy. He said everything would be fine.”

“You’re okay with that?”

“No, I’m not okay with any of this, whatever it is.”

“Good, totally understandable. Look, basically they’re going to ask you one question, but before that they’re going to threaten you with seizing your property and evicting you pending the trial because you’re either lying or not cooperating.”

“What trial? You’re getting him out of Buenos Aires, aren’t you?”

“That’s underway. Not going to be a trial. He’s just a retired agricultural attaché and whatever happened in Milan had the highest level approval from the previous Italian government.”

Two Alfa Romeos turned into Angela’s driveway. Four officers of the policia di stato got out and introduced themselves. Two seemed fluent in English, two didn’t.

Tim had given her a look of “Here we go” before those introductions and then settled back down and chatted with the English-speakers as she watched them all from the kitchen, where she prepared tea.

There always had been two Franks. When he majored in agronomy at Rutgers (they called it plant science), she accepted the fact that he would think differently and impenetrably about almost everything.

He’d take the material world as the foundation of all things and even go deeper, into the dark soil beneath, and she’d see mankind as life’s foundation. So he was obscure to her but she didn’t mind that, even after he went into the government and became more obscure. That didn’t matter because for many years he maintained

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those greedy, flattering feelings toward her, and these she understood, because she had the same feelings toward him: lust, being turned on, wanting more touching, dancing, fucking, drinking, seeing one at a distance, seeing one another face to face, smelling each other, enjoying their escape from their families. Her father was in the markets, meaning he was an executive at a stock brokerage, and he thought farming, which was how he categorized the current and future Frank, was not smart. Frank was strong enough to let him have his fun.

And Angela was strong enough to sit with his parents--Alberto and Letitia Locheri-in their Sears house in South Jersey and insist that nothing had no point, including her obsession with Vergil and Catullus and Hesiod. She had begun studying Latin in tenth grade, Greek freshman year in college. The classes were tiny; the instructors were sweet zealots. Some sang poems, some chanted. No one else knew what they did in those classrooms, but they knew they were keeping endangered humanity alive, cherishing the same desires and passions and conflicts that had eternally sprung up,

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season after season, from the times of the gods themselves.

As the decades passed, Frank and Angela’s bond drifted from the erotic into the familial--not entirely but substantially. Their parents died, one, two, three, four. Their two girls left home, married, and had children.

This was where the place outside Viterbo came in and likewise the exercises, and Angela had found peace there. Massive peace.

She lived by living and by weaving the past and present together. Initially, while he was establishing the garden (and she was redoing the house and furnishing it) Frank seemed as peaceful as she was, but then he said there were some lucrative things he could do back in Latin America where he had the best connections. The word was “consult.” She gave him leave. She’d given him leave the whole time.

He did something throughout his career as an agricultural attaché and during their tours in Washington, and she knew generally what it was but not specifically and didn’t want to know. Not all the spouses were the same way; many resented Angela’s distance, her stand-offishness, beginning with keeping her maiden name, extending through the money she spent on having her clothing made by the most talented seamstresses she could find and the exclusive schooling she managed for her girls and her apparent indifference to Frank often being away somewhere, unaffected by the loneliness that bedeviled other spouses.

Plus, cliques formed in every embassy, and she managed to be part of all of them and none of them at the same time, self-reliant, comfortable at the ambassador’s residence or staying home. Who was she to demand constant attention? Frank was just an agricultural attaché; that’s what she said no matter who asked. So of course he had agricultural projects in the turbulent regions of country after country, connections with legitimate farmers and agribusiness types, and deep insight into the drug and political culture where embassy officers seldom dared to travel. But Frank did, and she knew, because he was so smart, that whatever he was doing, he was doing it expertly. Which was why, no doubt, he found that having retired and established the garden, he had to go back and do some more of it.

Which led to this.

The lead Italian was a captain named Franco Di Blasio. He spoke at length, indictment-style.

rathalla review

“Mrs. Agnelli, you are married to Mr. Frank Locheri. On April 13 last year, Mr. Locheri and five other men kidnapped a Muslim imam named Alim Sa’id from a street in Milan, where he was a legal resident. They flew him to Cairo, Egypt. He is Egyptian, true, but I emphasize he had legal residence in Milan. In Cairo he was tortured to reveal information about Islamic extremists with whom he allegedly had associations. I do not know what he revealed, but when he returned to Milan last month he brought suit against your husband. He is blind in one eye; he suffers constant pain in his ribs and shoulders; and he is undergoing hip and knee replacements. Your husband participated in this criminal affair because he worked for the United States government as an intelligence agent. The United States government says it had the Italian government’s agreement. The newly elected Italian government points out the fundamental incapacity of any government to agree to such actions.” Di Blasio paused, but only briefly. “For all these reasons, we have asked Interpol to detain your husband, and this has been done. He is in Buenos Aires, destined to return to Italy for trial. I come to see you to ask only one question. The truthful answer to that question and your cooperativeness will weigh in the Italian government’s decision as to whether this property should be seized pending resolution of Mr. Locheri’s trial. If it is seized, you will be expelled from Italy.”

The precision with which Di Blasio spoke revealed nothing about his investment in this case, i.e., whether he was simply carrying out orders or disliked American foreign policy or saw a good chance to advance his career. In a sense he was simply a round-faced fellow with a mole on his left nostril and short arms and short legs who was making a circuit around the perimeter of whatever was going on. He was not a decision maker.

Didn’t pretend to be. Ignored the tea Angela made him until he finished speaking and then drank it in one long swallow, so perhaps he was more nervous than he let on, or perhaps not.

For her part, Angela realized she had attitudes of indifference toward the officials of other countries that might once have been justified--they were under diplomatic immunity, they lived in official housing, they could always leave a country in twenty-four hours or less (and had, twice) but she didn’t have immunity anymore and didn’t know who Tim was. He just sat there, hadn’t coached her...didn’t want to go into details? Weren’t de-

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tails everything?

“We own this house, my husband and I both,” she said. “Whatever you allege has nothing to do with me.”

Di Blasio said softly, “Under these extraordinary circumstances, you might find that is not true.”

She looked to Tim, who had made no effort to intervene, and realized that he was the United States government’s lawyer, not Frank’s and certainly not hers. But at last he said, “The question?”

Di Blasio asked, “Where was Frank Locheri on April 13 of last year? Do you know, Mrs. Agnelli?”

Angela said, “What is the law in Italy about the privacy privileges of husbands and wives?”

Di Blasio said, “We are not in a court of law. We are conducting an investigation prior to entering a court of law. If you do not know where Frank Locheri was on April 13 of last year, or if you do, this is a matter of fact, not privacy.”

“Can wives be compelled to testify against their husbands in Italy?”

“I am not taking formal testimony.”

“Frank didn’t work for the United States government on April 13 of last year.”

“Are you certain of that?”

Angela realized she couldn’t be. She only knew this: “His official retirement and pension came into force in June of the previous year.”

“But he could have been reemployed, could he not?”

“I thought you said you had one question.”

“You did say that,” Tim now said helpfully.

Di Blasio swallowed. Was that emotion, drawing excess saliva down one’s throat? Angela looked at the colleague immediately to his left; this man, with a blade of an aquiline nose, was taking notes. The other two men, she now realized, were drivers or bodyguards or flunkies of some other kind. Why two cars? She squinted at the foursome and explored their dark effect; they were like the extended wings of a bat or a dead limb that hadn’t yet fallen. Nothing good. In any case they obstructed her view of the flowers, lawn, pool, garden and hillside where she thought they ought to let a local farmer graze his sheep. They’d been asked about that once but declined because Frank had grapes in mind for that hillside, part of his rationale for going after the consulting money. Indeed, her impression was that they weren’t popular in the neighborhood because Frank did his own gardening and she didn’t have a full-time maid. Maybe someone who didn’t like them already had said something about April 13, and they were trying to catch her in a lie. Also, they did all

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their shopping in Viterbo proper, not stores speck- filtration system. Angela had said in response, ling the countryside. She treated Viterbo proper as just the way she would say something, “Now, reher little Rome. It was a fort to begin with, Cas- ally, Frank, why would you do that?” She meant trum Viterbii. Pope Eugene III lived there in 1145. change the patina of the entire property. The old She loved the blue gray Palace of the Popes and house, old walls, old patios and so forth required a the bell tower of St. Lawrence cathedral and the complementary old pool with a yellow-tiled Neplittle Gothic church of Santa Maria della Saluta. tune on one side wall eyeing green and blue-tiled “What day of the month was April 13 mermaids on the other side wall. “Go do your garlast year?” dening, leave everything else to me.”

“A Saturday. Does this help you recall your She realized the five men had trailed her, husband’s whereabouts?” so she walked further, toward the garden: long Tim leaned forward to whisper in her ear: “Do rows of tomato plants, the green tops of carrots, you have any monthly receipts, phone records, spindly pepper plants with tiny peppers formphotographs, or checks that might link Frank to ing, spreading eggplant and squash vines and being here on April 13?” cucumber vines...

Angela didn’t answer. She thought, first, that She turned to Di Blasio. “He always worked no one knew what had happened on a normal on the garden on Saturdays. That’s what he day a year ago unless it was a birthday or holiday was doing here on April 13 last year.” or anniversary. Then she began to do the second DiBlasio didn’t like this. He said, “No, he exercise as a remedy. April... April...what was the drove up to Milan, donned a balaclava, and joined difference between one day in April and the next? his old comrades in this illegal activity.”

Who cared? Was Frank in the country then? Was “He was an agricultural attaché, don’t be there an airplane stub somewhere? No, that work ridiculous.” in Latin America had begun in the summer. She “Madam, excuse me, we know for a fact what swam alone all summer; she remembered that. Or he was. We have in our possession a message with most of it. his name on it, an advisory to the U.S. intelligence Normally she didn’t do her second exercise station’s counterparts.” with audiences watching. They steeped, like tea, “You mean to the Italian intelligence agenthe water of time darkening with cies? And they said currents of intertwining events. okay?”

Di Blasio said, “Of course, if you She loved the blue gray Palace “They had no do not know, you do not know.” authority to say of the Popes and the bell towShe asked if she could have a er of St. Lawrence cathedral okay.” moment alone. Di Blasio said that “Maybe not, if she meant to go into the house, and the little Gothic church of maybe they he would like to accompany her. Santa Maria della Saluta. wouldn’t dare, so She had meant to go into the house, you must mean but she didn’t want him there, so higher, someone in she said, spontaneously, no, she only meant that Rome. Who? The minister of interior? The minisshe wanted to step out by the pool to think a mo- ter of justice? The prime minister?” ment alone.

Di Blasio said sharply, “I am not here to de“It would help.” bate. I have asked you a question. You have an“How would it help?” Di Blasio asked. swered it. Now, is there any way you can prove Tim said again, “Isn’t Mrs. Agnelli’s request what you say? This is a part of my question, reasonable? One question, remember?” perhaps the decisive part. A person can say anyDi Blasio wasn’t going to be toyed with. “Yes, thing, but what is the proof? If there is no proof, but the question hasn’t been answered.” He jerked I regret to inform you that it is very unlikely that his thumb back over his shoulder. “What out there you will retain possession of this house, these will provide an answer? Isn’t the answer more grounds, and that garden.” likely in the house, to be preserved or destroyed?”

At the moment Angela assumed Frank was Angela got up anyway and took the path heading to the U.S., and she realized no matter through the flower beds to the pool. Frank had what she said, he would never come back here suggested replacing it; it was an old pool with lots again, but she didn’t want to go live in a rented of patching and irregularities and an antiquated apartment in D.C. with all their money tied up

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rathalla review

in Italy. It wasn’t the plan. It wasn’t what they had fallen in love with. Frank had established the garden and wanted to terrace the hillside and grow grapes there. That was the truth of it.

Would they eat the grapes? Some, yes. Preserve the grapes, turn them into jelly? Some, yes. But sell them and perhaps eventually figure out how to transform them into wine? No doubt. If they lived long enough, that would be the “final miracle,” Frank’s transition from truck gardener to vintner. He’d get wine out of the dirt. Neat trick for a South Jersey boy.

She walked into the garden between the tomato plants to get further away from the men trailing her. It was like a chase, but a very little chase. She was prey, they were predators, each a stand-in for something else: she for brutal U.S. government counter-terrorism tactics, they for offended Italian sovereignty. That was it. The new Italian government despised and tried to undo everything the old government had done because the old government was headed by a despicable boob, slime in a suit.

She said April to herself and thought of the weather and continued on thinking in the second way. He liked to work in the garden on weekends because throughout their peregrinations it had been the only time he’d been able to do so. He’d done it in suburban backyards, on apartment balconies and rooftops, and in communal gardens fringing Bogota and Mexico City. And in April here the highs and lows would have been receptive to his rake and trowel and hand cultivator and old leather apron festooned with seed pockets. One morning very, very early, she recalled, she awakened and he wasn’t in bed. Where was he? She looked toward the bathroom, no light on there. She went into the sitting room. No lights there. She looked out the back window and there in the distance was a bright LED headlamp moving along in the garden. Frank was planting seeds in the pitch dark. Why? Who knew? She went back to bed. When she awoke, he was gone. The note said, “Probably back tonight.” That night he returned past her bedtime, but she heard him, got up and walked out into the house, wrapped in her robe. Once again, exactly as in the morning, the light on Frank’s head shone down on the ground where he slipped his trowel into the dark soil and slipped in tomato seeds...tomatoes because he was where the tomatoes grew, lots of them, which Angela turned into sauces and soups and juice and canned for the winter and Frank liked to eat fresh off the vine. He’d go out in the garden in August

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with a salt shaker, pluck a few, bite in, salt and bite in again. When he was sated he might kneel and press his face into the tomato plants because he loved their smell in the hot sun so much.

So he may or may not have done what they said, and if he did, how could he be so stupid when he was supposed to be out of that? But either way, he wasn’t coming back to Viterbo. And the imam, if that’s what he really was, what could she do for him? What did he deserve? Angela had no idea. She saw no justice in any of this--these men, this question, the destruction of her life.

When Frank began consulting, she had taken over the gardening. At first she resented it. She preferred cooking and reading and writing letters and swimming and playing with Latin and Greek vocabulary cards and doing all the little things necessary to making the beautiful little household go.

It was her home and felt like it always had been.

But eventually she came to enjoy the smells of the plants and the earth and the feel of the tools in her hands and the scraping crunch of digging and the magic of the teeny, tiny seeds and the heft of the baskets of weeds she removed and the way the plants perked up when she watered them, their leaves fattening with life.

She turned to Di Blasio and walked past him.

She didn’t have to say it, but she wanted to. “Follow me.” She led the five men to the patio and told them, “Sit down, gentlemen. I’ll only be a minute getting you proof.”

She returned with Frank’s worn green legal ledger and paged back through it, certain of what she’d find, none of it involving spying or counter-terrorism. All the entries were dated.

Some had to do with too much or too little rain, or pests, or soil conditions, or the growth rates of various vegetables, one kind of squash versus another. He’d measure their length and girth and used his tarnished old scale to weigh them.

And every time he planted seeds, he made notes.

What could be more important than when you planted your seeds?

On April 13 of the previous year the notes read: “Got all the tomato seeds in. Big, big job.

Exhausted. Knees ache. 125 plants. Will have to buy more stakes but first want to know how many will have to be thinned so we don’t crowd out the brussels sprouts.”

Di Blasio asked if he could take the book. Angela pulled it away. This book was the most important document in Frank’s life, more important than birth, marriage, or death certificates. Whatever he did elsewhere, he did not record or discuss. But

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he’d pore over this book, writing the main observations in his neat tiny lettering on the right hand page and additional notes on the left hand page.

“Thomas Jefferson used to keep a book like this,” he once told her. “It’s my traveling garden. Some day I’ll have a permanent one, and this will tell me what to do with it.”

Di Blasio pressed her. “We will give you a receipt and possibly return it to you, although I frankly doubt it. Now we have evidence, and evidence is permanent.”

Di Blasio’s English speaking lieutenant volunteered to photograph it.

“The whole thing?” Angela asked.

“I can do that, too,” Tim said, “and I’ll definitely get you a copy.”

The two men then used small digital cameras to take pictures of the 137 pages that had been used in the 160 page ledger. When they were finished, Di Blasio apologized for taking up so much of her time.

Angela snapped, “You should apologize.

And you should apologize for threatening to seize my home. You’re no better than the last government no matter what you may think.”

Di Blasio accepted this verbal slap with no comment. He led his men to their cars. They raised a trail of dust on the way out.

Angela said to Tim, “Where is he now?”

Tim looked at his watch. “Miami? Probably spend the night. Then D.C. I can get you a

ticket, no problem.”

With Di Blasio gone, Angela let herself go, too.

She had a sickening, powerful intuition that if she left this little place outside Viterbo, she’d never see it again. She knew Frank would promise her something else. Maybe in Colombia, maybe in Guatemala.

She could hear him swear he’d find a way to make that happen, but she didn’t want it. She wanted to stay here in her new old past. It felt right. It felt like her. Just this, always this to the end.

“No. All you have to do is tell him I’m here, or I’ll tell him myself if he calls before you see him.”

“I think you should leave, Angela,” Tim said.

“I really do. Today we won but tomorrow...?”

She didn’t have a “tomorrow” exercise, but if she had enough time and peace she would invent one.

“No thanks. I’m staying.”

She watched another plume of dust rise behind Tim’s departing car. Then she went to the tool shed and got her sun hat, long gloves, and hand cultivator. She’d weed and redirect some rambunctious eggplant and squash vines. You had to watch those guys; they’d go anywhere if you let them. As she worked, the sun would warm her like a hand spread across her back, pressing her down face-to-face with the rich dark soil, making her perspire, but that was okay. After she was finished, she’d swim.

Manhandled Nazifa Islam Nazifa Islam grew up in Novi, Michigan. Her poetry and paintings have appeared in Anomalous Press, splinterswerve, The Fat City Review, and Flashquake among many others, and her debut poetry collection Searching for a Pulse (2013) was released by Whitepoint Press. She sometimes updates her blog Thoughts Interjected and can be found on Twitter at @nafoopal.

She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at Oregon State University.

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You broke my heart. Do you remember?

You grasped it tightly in your meaty hands— too large to be kind, the fingers much too short for beauty—and snapped it right in two before pushing the pieces clumsily back together with a sealant of glue and hoping to make the same shape.

rathalla review

Truce Allison Whittenberg

Allison Whittenberg is a poet and novelist (Life is Fine, Sweet Thang, Hollywood and Maine, Tutored all from Random House and The Sane Asylum). She greatly admires the work of Dorothy Parker. She lives in Philadelphia.

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For the girl abused by her father, The terrible is the beautiful In between, he showed range Embracing a new word from the family dictionary: Fun A pumpkin nearly half her size that he let her pick They came home from the patch and clawed out its guts He put the face in the window Without a recipe, they baked happiness on that stunted, grey afternoon A can of condensed milk and molasses The outside, cold as reality Inside, warm, warm as television They laughed when the pie turned out to be a horrid tasting neon orange mess Because that day, they were not tragic figures; They were horrible cooks.

rathalla review

Without Poetry we are delusions we are vipers we are menacing paupers crawling with shadows

shameless with street our torches scream louder than our lungs

everything but the world in our eyes we will eat our own hearts first

toss the static in the gutters no perfume can calm our blood no song can make us remember

or forget

our skies are made of steel yet they hold nothing in without our rage

we have no will to speak

Megan Mealor

Megan Mealor is 28 years old, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, bipolar disorder survivor, and brand-new mommy. She graduated from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in 2003 after receiving the Emerging Artist Award, the National Penwomen’s Association Literature Award and the National Arts Recognition Short Story Merit Award. She recently returned to college to pursue a Masters in English Education to teach creative writing to young children and has had work published in Digital Americana and 4 and 20 under Megan Hall, and she will be featured in an upcoming issue of Midnight Circus. She lives with her husband, baby son Jesse, and two tuxedo cats, JubJub and Trigger, in a townhouse that’s way too small but also just right.

our deaths pass by like flickering gasps of night

and the flowers are always wilted

on our graves

vol. 2, issue 1

page 41

A Plate for Elijah River Adams

River Adams got shell shocked by a collapsing civilization, learned itinerancy by falling out of an airplane, and was adopted by a language on the wrong side of the world. She is a writer, a teacher, a theologian, and runs the website OnMountHoreb.com (Mount Horeb, Third Door on the Right). Her fiction has appeared in publications like descant, The Long Story, Workers Write!, Phoebe (Oneonta), Quiddity Literary Journal, The Evansville Review, The MacGuffin, Out of Line, RiverSedge, Crosstimbers, and more.

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“Mommy, I’m sorry! I broke Elijah’s plate…”

My four-year-old’s face is quivering and ready to explode with a hot fountain of tears and a siren, so I hurry into the dining room, kiss the crinkled nose, and rumple his still-baby-blond hair. “It’s okay, Mattie. I’ll get the pieces. You go get another plate. Run!” He dashes for the cupboard, not a trace of despair that flooded his world five seconds ago, all worry erased with one touch of my hand.

I envy his short memory. Gathering shattered china off the carpet, I remember all too well why it is there. The year I turned 15 and the Passover that shattered my life. I remember Elijah’s face.

Thank you for my son, Elijah.

“Mommy, why do we put a plate for Elijah? He never comes to eat.” He is back, standing over me with another dish already. How does he know what I am thinking?

“Remember, sweetie, I told you about the prophet Elijah? He was very brave and very just, he even stood up to a king. But he was kind to good people. Eloheinu Himself listened to his prayers and then took him up to Heaven. In a fiery chariot—” My voice falters. I stand up and busy myself, just for a moment, wrapping up the shards of the broken plate and throwing them into the trash. Matthew is already in his seat at the dining room table. He’s had a long day.

“Mommy, tell me the rest.”

“Elijah comes back to help us when we are in danger, you see?” I sit next to Matt at the table and pull his unruly head to my side. “And someday he will be back for good, before the Messiah comes, and then all the bad things will be over, and everything will be joy, forever. But we don’t know when it’ll happen, so we wait for him, and we set a place for him at dinner just in case he comes tonight. Okay?”

“Okay!” That’s not Mattie. “As long as hungry men get to have some dinner too!” My husband Jon has finally emerged from his after-work shower and is now lifting the lids from every dish on the table one by one, sniffing loudly and rolling up his eyes to demonstrate just how close to a hungry fainting spell he is.

“Hands off!” I slap him on the wrist. “We’ve just been waiting for you.”

I open the pots and dish out potatoes, chicken meatballs, and stewed cabbage, pour plum juice into glasses. Jon has turned Matthew upside down and is tickling him, roaring something about hidden treasures in little boys’ belly buttons. Piercing squeals are shaking the house.

Thank you for my husband, Elijah.

Every day there are four plates on my family’s dinner table.

Four glasses. Four chairs. It’s not a Jewish tradition—the tradition demands that we leave a chair and a cup of wine for Elijah, nothing more, and only once a year, during a Passover Seder. After the wine is poured for the fourth time, children run to the door and open it to see if Elijah has stopped by. I found it funny when I was a child.

Then I found it ridiculous. Then I learned what it’s like to wait for someone’s return—and not to know when he would return. Or if he ever would.

rathalla review

My son is still too young to realize that something is unusual about his family dinners, though he will soon, and then I’ll have to explain it to him one way or another. My husband knows and bears with me. It’s my tradition. My life.

Thank you for my life, Elijah.

“Settle down, men. Jon, you’ll give him a headache. Okay, sit down. Ready?” I close my eyes and speak the words that open our every evening meal. “Baruch ata Adonai. Blessed art Thou, our Lord. We thank you for the good day that has passed and for the day to come. We thank you for the food we are about to share. Elijah, Angel of the Covenant, herald of salvation, calmer of Lord’s fury, restorer of families. Your place is prepared for you, the door is open for you. Come share our bread with us. Amen.”

I walk to the door as my two most beloved people dig into the food I have prepared. Their forks are clinking against ceramic edges. I open the door and look outside. He is not there. He couldn’t possibly be there, but for a second I linger near the open door, waiting. Waiting for Elijah to return. *** I had just turned 15 that year, right before Passover. On Passover eve I was dragging my feet home from school and pouting. Not only did the 15th of Nissan railroad my birthday into near oblivion, but I was missing the basketball game of the year. All my friends—and the dreamy Steven Forman—would spend that evening on the court, sweating and screaming, slapping hands and bumping shoulders.

And the victory party after… And I was on my way to scraping down the fridge with a Q-tip, so heaven forbid some leavened crumbs wouldn’t stay stuck in the cracks.

I knew exactly what was happening at home: Dad was getting on with the cleaning, barking at the girls when they happened in his way; Mom had dropped a dairy spoon into the ground chicken and was arguing with Grandma about how much of it she had to throw out; my sisters were putting finishing touches on the holiday table—a snow-white tablecloth, six place settings for us, and an antique-looking goblet for Elijah, Grandma and Grandpa’s inheritance. After the preparations got done, we’d dress up in the best clothes and gather in the dining room just in time for sunset, and then Passover would begin.

It wasn’t all bad, actually. I used to like Passover quite a lot, the holiday commo-

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tion and all, the celebration. The house that smelled like all the best foods at once. At least there’d be no studying for two days, and I’d get to have wine. It’s just… I was too old for it all, and I was… embarrassed. Looking for hametz the parents themselves had hidden—knowing perfectly well it was behind the couch because it was always behind the couch—then faking the surprise of discovery and excitement over the reward. Asking the same four questions every year, knowing the answers by heart. Same bitter herbs to remind us of the bitterness of slavery. Same salt water to remind us of the spilled tears. Same story.

Passover. A celebration of regained freedom.

A remembrance of the night when the angel of death passed over the Hebrew homes, sparing us the fury that swept away every firstborn of Egypt. It seemed so silly.

Fifteen. I was fifteen. What did I know about death?

I walked and anticipated the childishness of ritual. Toward the end of the story, everyone would pour some wine from their glasses into Elijah’s goblet. Perfectly good wine, wasted. Then all three of us children would have to march to the door and open it, like Elijah could really be standing there, hello! And what does Elijah have to do with it anyway? He’s been dead for, like, 3,000 years. Of course, I would just have to say that out loud and hear my sister screaming, “Elijah is not dead, Chava! He went up to heaven in a whirlwind! In a fiery chariot!” My little sister Ruth. Always gets so upset, it’s even fun to tease her. “Chava, stop bothering your sister! Are you done with the refrigerator?”

In all that sulking I passed my turn and realized it only having gone three blocks in the wrong direction. Shoot. I switched my backpack over to the other shoulder and turned around to walk back when I heard a weak “meow” from an alley. It sounded like a kitten. I stood and listened. Another meow, this one pitiful and desperate, full of longing or pain. Or hunger. An abandoned kitten… I stepped into the alley slowly, bending over to start looking behind trash cans.

Something grabbed me, twisted, hit, pulled me back by the jacket collar, and a hot rough hand pushed into my face, covering mouth and nose—pressed my head so far back that my neck was snapping, and there was no air and no room to fight. Another arm closed

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across my torso, holding both shoulders. Trying frantically to kick but hitting emptiness, I screamed, and my hushed moan slid down the alley walls. I couldn’t breathe. Two more seconds, and the desperate need to inhale filled my consciousness, pushed out every other thought, the alley, the struggle, and tore at my lungs, squeezed my eyes out of orbit, and terror, terror was all that existed until there was nothing at all. *** I came to from the cold, it seemed, or from the slamming of car doors. Everything hurt.

Something hard was pushing on my temple.

I raised my eyelids just enough for a tiny slit of vision and tried to figure out where I was.

Through the veil of eyelashes I could see a metal ceiling, a narrow window, hinges. I was lying on the floor in the back of a van, my wrists and ankles wrapped together with duct tape. The door opened, and I shut my eyes.

A man’s voice said, “She’s still out.” And the door slammed again.

The murmur of voices—I thought there were two, both male—kept getting louder and quieter, closer and farther. Sometimes it sounded like they were arguing, and soon one of them snapped very close, “Damn, what is it now?”

Suddenly I realized that I was wasting time lying there in a daze. Lord knows where I was and what they planned to do with me.

I sat up and stifled a wave of nausea. The voices receded.

The tape was too tight around my wrists to wiggle them free. I tried pulling at the ankles, letting it cut into the skin. Soon it felt looser. I doubled my efforts and felt a trickle of blood on my heel. Lubrication, I thought, and tried to pull one foot from under the tape. It came out with surprising ease. A moment later I was peeking out the window—a wooded road shoulder and barely visible roof outlines beyond the trees.

The men were talking on the other side of the van, and I tugged at the door handle as quietly as I could. It turned with a long, nasty groan.

Oh, no. Please, Eloheinu. Hear me.

I hit the ground awkwardly, with my fists and left shoulder, plopped on my side on top of something angular—a road jack. It was all so loud, I thought, so horribly loud—no way they hadn’t heard. My only chance now was speed, and I darted into the trees, no longer

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concerned with noise or stealth, just running, sprinting, no matter what direction, tripping on roots and jumping up and running again, branches into my face. I lost the sense of time.

I wanted to pray but couldn’t remember the words. Please, Eloheinu. Help me.

Instead of prayer, the words of Passover Haggadah streamed through my head.

The story of Exodus I would’ve been hearing this very moment if I hadn’t been running through the darkening woods, gasping for breath, shielding my eyes with bound hands. The words floated up to the surface of my mind and filled the void the shock and terror had left in it. We were slaves to the Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm.

Please, Eloheinu. Stretch out your arm.

Help me.

The forest let out suddenly onto a road.

Fields on the other side, several houses in a string to my left. A town. People. Salvation. I turned left and kept running, faster now, along the shoulder. The first house—I pounded on the door, and again, but it was dark and quiet. No one home. Second house, the same. All of them.

No cars in the driveways. No barking of dogs.

Dark windows. It looked abandoned.

And He said to Abraham, “You shall know that your seed will be strangers in the land that is not theirs, and they will enslave them and make them suffer…”

I turned another corner and slowed to a walk, trying to control my breathing. In the thickening twilight it was becoming hard to see, but there, at the far end of the street, heavenly light was pouring onto the sidewalk, highlighting a sign, OMNEVA STREET LOCAL BANK. And we cried out to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our suffering, our labor and our oppression. *** He was outside, packing something in a box, and I saw him only from a few yards away, when he heard my footsteps and stood up to look. He was young, I know now. Not over 30. The bank’s open door spilled light onto his raven-black hair, just a bit too long and disheveled for a respectable haircut, onto his face—the sharply angled jaw, thin lines of the nose and lips, an Asian cut of the eyes, onto his mud-spotted shirt with rolled-up sleeves, onto the hands he held away

rathalla review

from him as if they were dirty or wet. ly, cocking his head to one side and trying to look I thought how quiet it was. Even the wind into my face. had died down.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” He had a low, But the Lord was not in the wind. soft voice. Calm. Like the Earth.

We stood facing each other, and the first And after the fire came a gentle whisper. few seconds brought only surprise to his face. Then the voice said to him, “What are you doing Then he looked me up here, Elijah?” and down—his glance “Chava.”

But the Lord was not in the earthquake. lingered on my scratch“It’s going The Lord was not in the fire. es, bleeding knuckles to be all right, and ankles, the duct Chava. Let me tape still around my hands—and surprise left. just get your hands free, and we’re going to go in“Please help me—” I tried to swallow but side and call the police. You’re safe now. Everycouldn’t, and coughed. “They’re after me. thing is going to be all right.”

Please help me.” I think I was mumbling. I He kept talking like this, soothing, nonwas starting to shake. stop stream of words. A river of warm sound But the Lord was not in the earthquake. that carried me with it, away, somewhere.

The Lord was not in the fire.

“It’s a good thing I am such a procrastinator.

He fished something out of the box with one Almost everybody’s left already. You probhand, never letting his eyes off me—some scis- ably saw. This will all be a big lake some sors—then came over to me and knelt down. I re- day soon, you know. And the bank’s really alized then that I had been sitting on the ground. closed. I’m just packing up some things, getHe took my hands and began to cut the tape, slow- ting the signs off and such. Here you go.” He

Study English or Communications with an emphasis on creative writing at

Rosemont College

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rathalla review

peeled the last of the tape off my skin. “Do you think you can stand?”

This is when I heard it, in the near-dead silence of an abandoned town—the roar of a speeding van tearing through the air. It was them. I didn’t need to see it. Their light beams angled around the corner and took dead aim at my chest. The engine revved up.

“Chava!” He was pulling my hand.

“It’s them…it’s them…”

He was pulling me up, but I couldn’t. Staring into the growing headlights, I was done.

Frozen. The end. I could feel him scooping me up in his arms and running up the steps, but my eyes were still fixed on the approaching, blinding death.

May the Merciful One send us Elijah the Prophet, may he be remembered for good, and may he bring us good tidings, salvation and consolation.

He carried me inside, past some desks and boxes, and in a corner of a tiny room put me on the floor. Screeching of brakes in the street, slamming of doors. A wall of thick bars rolled in and separated us. Punching of keys. From the other side he secured the door, waved me away. “Stay in the corner! You’ll be safe here.”

Clicking of locks. Fast, heavy footsteps. A phone flew past the door and crashed into a wall outside the bars.

Voices. I know that voice.

Please, Eloheinu! Please.

“Come out here, girl! We’re not gonna hurt you!”

An arm reaches in through the bars and grabs at the air. I am too far.

“Fuckin’…! Shit! Damn it.”

They talk outside.

Please, Adonai.

I crawl along the wall to the bars and look out, barely one eye. They have him. One of the men is holding him up, elbows behind his back. His head barely reaches the man’s neck. And on his face…

Pain.

Oh, Lord, Eloheinu, why won’t you hear me?

“Open up the damn door.”

The other hits him, fist under the ribs. He falls, doubled over, gasping. They swing with their laced boots against the writhing body.

They pull him up again. He can’t hold his head. In the light of the halogen office bulbs, the fluid pouring off his chin looks black.

I passed over you and saw you wallowing in your blood, and I said to you, “By your blood you shall live.” And I said to you, “By your blood you

vol. 2, issue 1

shall live!”

“Open the fuckin’ door, or I will fuckin’ kill you, I swear to God!” The man swings, and again, then pulls out a knife.

And we shall eat of the Passover-offerings and of the sacrifices whose blood shall be sprinkled on the wall of Your altar for acceptance…

Red on a white wall, on the floor. They wrap duct tape around his wrists, throw him on a desk.

Facedown. It leaves black smudges on the grainy beige plastic. Clothes tear with an uneven whine. …but you were naked and bare…

He turns his face to me and opens a slit of the eye, moves swelling lips.

He says the last thing I will ever hear him say.

“Chava… Don’t look.”

He took us from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, and from mourning to festivity, and from deep darkness to great light, and from bondage to redemption. *** They told me I was found two days later, still locked in the anteroom of a bank vault in the middle of a condemned town. The men who had abducted me never managed to open that door. They didn’t kill me. They didn’t take me. But they took his body, and it was never found.

A year later I was back home for a triple celebration: my sixteenth birthday, my return from the hospital, and Passover. Another Passover.

When the Lord will return the exiles of Zion, we will have been like dreamers.

Just a bad dream.

He goes along weeping, carrying the bag of seed; he will surely come back with joyous song, carrying his sheaves.

I listened to the commotion of Passover eve: Dad’s struggle with a vacuum cleaner, Ruth clanking the dishes, food hissing on the stove. The aromas I was meant to smell again. The words I was meant to hear.

I stroked the fancy wine goblet set aside for Elijah.

Come back, Elijah. I’ll be waiting for you.

“Chava, honey… This is an extra plate.”

Mom had learned to look at me the way sick children’s parents do—like they are trying to see into the center of you. She never used to be this gray. “We don’t need this plate, honey. I’ll put it away for you.”

I took the plate from my mother’s hands and put it back on the table, next to the goblet.

I looked her in the eye.

I said, “It’s for Elijah.”

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Happening Again Grant Clauser

Grant Clauser is the author of the book The Trouble with Rivers. By day he’s a technology writer. Poems have appeared in The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Cortland Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and others. He’s interviewed poets for the Schuylkill Valley Journal and The American Poetry Review. In 2010 he was Montgomery County Poet Laureate. He started the Montco Wordshop in Lansdale, teaches poetry writing at Philadelphia’s Musehouse and runs the blog www.unIambic.com.

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It’s strange how wind can twist itself into a body like a dancer made of snow throwing herself across the yard and into the street.

Every gust of wind is something new, an animal escaping from a cage, sniffing the winter ground and charging after invisible cold.

Tonight you made the sounds of deer in your sleep, an ear rustle whisper and twitch of nose.

Is that a lion stalking in the attic or just the wind arranging itself on the roof?

A white flag tail of warning spreads across your face.

rathalla review

Philosophies And what of this treatise on philosophy waiting on my desk?

Black ink on white paper pages worn and dog-eared. Penetrating eyes scan its letters attempting to find truth for the mind.

Still Truth is elusive. There is more of it in a lover’s kiss than in all of Wittgenstein. More of it in a parent’s caress than in all of what has been written. Even Pythagoras, who understood the eternal through mathematics could not replace a loving embrace

vol. 2, issue 1

Ed Krizek

Ed Krizek was born in New York City and now runs a sales and marketing business in Swarthmore, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. He holds a BA and MS from University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA and MPH from Columbia University. He is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Delaware County, has published over fifty-five articles, poems, and short stories in various publications, and won prizes in several poetry and short story competitions. You can see more of his work at www.edkrizekwriting.com.

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The Shortstop Jacob Collins-Wilson

Jacob Collins-Wilson, a high school English teacher, has had poetry published in Crack The Spine, Barely South Review, The Finger Literary Magazine, and Burningword Literary Journal. He will be or has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net series. He can be reached by everyone at emailingjacob@gmail.com.

Between pitches the shortstop kicks his initials or some other design into the dirt.

It’s ritual. All baseball is ritual.

Each out he kicks another pattern, another letter.

He times his spit so it hardly touches Earth before he sweeps it into dust with his cleat.

The shortstop is patient. Watchful.

He’s the man tracking not only the ball but the play too—the cutoff man— listening to cleats sprinting the bases, watching the play from the back of his head.

He plugs holes in the infield. A back-hand play sliding away from first in a fury of dirt is as second-nature as lacing up his spikes.

When mud clots on the pitcher’s spikes it’s the shortstop who calls time to clean them.

When the pitcher suffers late in the seventh it’s the shortstop who calls time, tells a joke to calm the nerves.

The shortstop has the best glove, eye, arm, sense.

When pitchers are peppered and forked, the shortstop carries the team rubber-armed and melting but never sweating from the heat he creates.

He finds his glove on the bench just by smell always remembers how whenever they end up winning the sun comes out in the fourth, sifting through the clouds like a seeing-eye grounder.

He remembers to grind a pinch of dirt into his palms before every pitch always runs his hand through the grass so he can know how grounders feel and when it’s a pop-fly, a shortstop never worries because he knows the clouds will always bring the ball to his glove because god too was a shortstop.

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rathalla review

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M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Rosemont College Suburban Philadelphia

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on.

A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk poetry, creative nonfiction, short-story, novel, waiting for dramatic the next writing, or writing for children and young adults book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

MFA in Creative Writing at Rosemont College Suburban Philadelphia

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft.

Suburban Philadelphia

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

poetry, creative nonfiction, short-story, novel, dramatic writing, or writing for children and young adults

MFA in Creative Writing at Rosemont College Suburban Philadelphia

M.F.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Publishing at Rosemont College

MFA in Creative Writing at Rosemont College Suburban Philadelphia

rosemont college rathallareview.org