Rathalla Review Spring 2013 issue

rathalla review

a publication of Rosemont College digital issue • spring 2013

rathalla review Vo l. 1, I ssue 2 Sta f f Managing Editor

John McGeary

Production Manager

Social Media Manager

Feliza Casano

Jennifer Murphy

Fiction Editor

Creative Nonfiction Editor

Poetry Editor

Art Editor

Tara Smith

Tracy Wood

Gabriella Lee

Tori Bond Pietra Dunmore Whitney Esson Ayesha Farzana Joe Lerro Christina Litman

Jennifer Murphy

Selection Staff

Cynthia McGroarty Joe Magee Meghan Mellinger Samantha Plourd Chelsea Terwiliger

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Inspiration from Anne Lamott by Tracy Wood page 36 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.

artist

Jackie O’Brien

craft

Everything Named

by Travis Taylor page 22

The Deadliest Four Letter Word by Richard King Perkins II page 12 Philosophies by Ed Krizek page 13 Happening Again by Grant Clauser page 14 Between L and N by John Timpane page 21 White Azaleas by Jeanne Obbard page 34 Love Lingers on the Chaise

by David P. Kozinski page 35

page 26

creative

True Jews and Other Living Dreams

by Terry Barr

Bess Tells All

by Cynthia McGroarty page 15

page 11

nonfiction

Re-Gifted

by Tom Gumbert page 7

poetry

page 4

featured

fiction

Truce by Allison Whittenberg page 5 Roar of the Girl in the Room by Elizabeth Bodien

Jackie O’Brien

I

’ve always loved creating visual imagery and making things with my hands from a young age. One of my earliest memories is in 1st grade we had an assignment to recreate Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and I remember having a blast illustrating the characters and twisting the story so in the end Snow White ended up marrying one of the Dwarfs.

I continued my 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 I’m always trying to be creative and communicate visually.

You can see some of my selected illustrations and designs at www.jackieocreations. com and also buy prints and merchandise at society6.com/jackieocreations.

All artwork in this issue of Rathalla Review coypright Jackie O’Brien and may not be reproduced in any form, print or digital.

artist statement

Aesthetically, I believe my work can sometimes look self-taught and very expressive. Technically, I enjoy painting with acrylic paints, but recently I’ve been experimenting with mixed media.

I always want to keep learning new techniques and growing as an artist. I hope all my artwork conveys a message or thought of the human condition and connects with the audience. For me the most interesting pieces of art make you reflect on a certain life experience or emotion and can transport you to a different thought or perspective.

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Truce For the girl abused by her father, The terrible is the beautiful

Allison Whittenberg 5

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.

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.

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Horses

Tom Gumbert

Re-Gifted I

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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

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.

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 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 fo-

cus 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 under stand and, since I was always curious, I had to ask. So one night 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-year-old 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 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.

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 hurt-

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.

8

ing 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 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. § he 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. § he 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.

T

9

T

“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 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 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

When he thinks I’m asleep I hear him whisper, “You’re gifted.”

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 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-yearold.”

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 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-yearold—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 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.

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

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Roar of the Girl in the Room

after a photograph by Joseph Koudelka 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.

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

Elizabeth Bodien 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).

Lovers

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He has a wife, Vickie, and a daughter, Sage. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications including Prime Mincer, Sheepshead Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Fox Cry, Two Thirds North and The Red Cedar Review. He has work forthcoming in Bluestem, Poetry Salzburg Review and The William and Mary Review.

The Deadliest Four Letter Word

Richard King Perkins II

Tarnish me with your degrading ways like a squid reaching up from the ocean’s cellar.

I object when you try to take my lips from me and inject me with healing serum— unreflected, unechoed, the weakest cure of all, a karmic certainty, so that the unloved can close their eyes and sleep.

I cherished you like the first orange wedge I gave away, offered you grapes and leaves of mint as dull wrens fled from the rain-breeze of my contentment.

Water continues to descend baleen upon the dry kelp of winter, chipping away at cold statues, leaving small craters lacking the audacity to become lakes.

A barn swallow given to honesty—its cage— knows it is a fearsome thing to call anyone ugly.

Stunning my mind like a vicious cricket or a diadem of frenzy bolted inside my forehead; destabilizing thought; leaving lemon peels in a glass pitcher; you’ve practiced the enunciation of epithets.

I can apply opaquely for a cigar-box coffin— where the land falls away, seawater passing through pores to a depth so violent and profound, that no added force, no dying star, can agitate it further.

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Philosophies

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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.

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.

Happening Again

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.

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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Cynthia McGroarty Cynthia J. McGroarty is a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College and works as a freelance editor and adjunct English instructor. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Toasted Cheese, The MacGuffin, BloodLotus, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Story South Million Writers Award, she recently completed work on a historical novel.

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Bess Tells All

A

car appeared on the horizon, too far away for Bess to know whether it was Charlene come at last to pick her up. Already the morning sun was raising a shimmer of heat from the macadam and baking the fields in fierce yellow light. October was warm this year. The linden tree in the front yard was still green; the cornstalks across the road had hardly withered. Bess rocked back and forth on the peeling porch boards, contemplating the linden.

Her father-in-law had planted it long ago, and even though she had never known him—he was dead before she met March—Bess had the habit of silently thanking him on summer evenings when the linden rose lush against the sky and threw off its mysterious perfume. There was much good to be had in the planting of a tree.

Good that went on after you.

The car passed the driveway and drove on. Bess checked her watch. Ten o’clock. Why couldn’t Charlene be on time for one blessed thing?

“She was late coming into this world and that’s how she’s going out,” Bess muttered to Buck, who sprawled on the far end of the porch with his head on his paw.

The older she got the harder she’d prayed she would not be around to witness Charlene’s going out. Bess had survived two children and that was more than enough. Besides, she wanted to go to her grave while part of Richard was still walking around on this earth.

Richard had occupied her thoughts more and more in recent months, so much so that she had taken the old photograph book from her dresser drawer and set it out next to her brush and tissue box, where its presence gave her a kind of comfort.

She ought to tell her daughter the truth, dive right in like a swimmer into a winter sea. But every time it was on the tip of her tongue, she lost her nerve.

Another car came into view, and when it reached the entrance to her long driveway, it flashed a blinker and turned in, bouncing over a rut in the gravel. Charlene was as practical as her blue Ford but she was a God-awful driver.

She pulled up and waved through the window, heedless, as if she hadn’t kept Bess waiting for nearly half an hour. Another minute passed while she fussed with something in the front seat then she stepped out of the car and banged shut the door in her emphatic way.

“You’re all ready!” she chirped, standing at the foot of the crumbled slate walkway in a pair of linen trousers and a satin blouse.

“Quite some time ago,” Bess said, letting it go at that. Nagging her daughter for being late was like blaming a bird for its wings.

Charlene approached the porch steps with a springy gait. She was still pretty—vivacious, they would have called her back when—her grey hair cut into a long bob that swung a bit when she walked, thick hair that had once been almost black, like Richard’s. Today it was pulled back at the sides and fastened behind.

“Ready for your party, birthday girl? It’s going to be fun.” She halted on the next to the last step, sized Bess up and frowned. “Momma, where’s your new dress?”

Bess worked her way to the edge of the rocker, grabbed her cane from against the wide flat arm and pushed herself to standing. She paused to let the blood drain back into her legs. Buck ambled over and stood between her and Charlene.

“I’m not wearing it,” Bess declared. She steeled herself for the inevitable resistance.

“But we got it special just for today.” Charlene dropped her shoulders and stepped onto the porch.

“You look so pretty in it.”

Bess caught a whiff of the powder Charlene was

so fond of, a smell like apricots. She smoothed the skirt of her blue cotton shirtwaist, fixed around the middle with a white belt. “I want to wear this one. I like it,” she said.

“But that pink set off your eyes and—” “I’m not wearing it and that’s that,” Bess finally asserted. “I’ll wear it on Thanksgiving, and then you can bury me in it.” She flicked a hand to wave off whatever might come next. Then, in an attempt to silence her daughter on the subject, she said, “I seem to remember a little girl who insisted on cowboy boots with Sunday dresses.”

Charlene smiled and her vivid blue gaze turned soft, overwhelming Bess with a thought she could not hold back.

“You have your father’s eyes,” Bess said. Not exactly a full-fledged dive into the sea, but at least it got her up to the ankles.

Charlene bent over a tad to look Bess in the face.

They used to be about the same height, but Bess had shrunk a few inches over the last fifteen years.

“Daddy had hazel eyes, Momma.” She moved close to Bess’s cheek and, as if prodding Bess to recall some detail stolen by creeping senility, said gently, “You remember.”

Of course she remembered. But today a different memory consumed her and wouldn’t be denied. “I didn’t say Daddy’s, I said your father’s.”

Charlene stood erect again. “What are you talking about? Daddy, my father. It’s the same thing.”

“No, honey. In this case it’s not.”

Charlene’s gaze was all scrutiny.

“Are you sure you feel all right? How about I go in and get you a drink of water before we go?” Glancing toward the front door, she added, “Did you take your medicine this morning?” Water and medicine were Charlene’s miracle cures, especially when it came to Bess.

“I don’t want a damn drink and yes I took my pills.”

Buck was now sitting back on his haunches, looking out over the front lawn, waiting patiently for something to happen as he watched birds forage

under the linden.

“Charlene, I’m trying to tell you something, about…about Richard. Richard Grandy.”

Charlene squinted down into Bess’s face, the corners of her mouth pulled south. “What do you mean? Who is Richard Grandy?”

“He was your father, your real father.” Bess paused to let her words sink in. “You would have grown up as Charlene Grandy, and I would have been Mrs. Bess Grandy, if a couple of rowdies in a speeding car hadn’t run him over.”

Huffing audibly, Charlene turned toward the front yard. Buck looked back at Bess if only to cock his eye. “Momma, we don’t have time for nonsense.”

“Maybe we ought to sit down a bit,” Bess said.

“We can’t. We’ll be late getting back.” Charlene spoke as stiffly as she stood, not bothering to turn around. “I told Don and the kids we would stop on the way to pick up the cake. And we have to be at the restaurant by noon.”

“It’s only 10:30, and since when did it bother you to be late, missy?”

Charlene wheeled to face Bess. “And what do you mean by telling me in the middle of a perfectly fine morning that Daddy wasn’t really my father? What kind of thing is that to say? Old woman!”

If Bess had a dollar for every old woman her daughter had slung her way in recent years, she’d have enough money for a down payment on that old folks’ place Charlene had suggested for her on more than one occasion. Senior living was the term her daughter liked to use.

Of course, Bess couldn’t deny her age, all eighty-five years of it. She was practically a fossil, for Lord’s sake, worming her way pretty quickly into the bedrock of the ages.

A well of feeling rose in her as she regarded her one remaining child. This sudden revelation about Richard would hit Charlene hard. Charlene had always been March’s little girl, all facts of biology aside. When he died twenty years ago some wind had gone out of her sails and it had taken her a while to get it back.

“Charlene, I’m trying to tell you something, about…about Richard.

Richard Grandy.”

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Bess dropped into the rocker with a grunt. “Daddy didn’t want you to know. But I thought it was time you did. Things need to be set straight. I’m bound to go sooner rather than later.”

Charlene turned away and muttered something under her breath, then declared, “I’m going in to get a drink of water.” She disappeared through the screen door. A moment later a kitchen cabinet slammed shut, causing Buck to rise up on all fours and face the front door with a question in his eyes.

“It’s okay, Buck,” Bess said, holding out her hand to summon him. “She wants to thrash around a bit, and I don’t blame her.”

Buck settled beside her and Bess smoothed his brow. “Such a fine boy you are, and the last one I have. All my other boys are gone.”

Her eyes went watery with thoughts of her sons, one dead just hours into this world and one who’d survived Vietnam only to die of an aneurysm at age fifty, and her husband—dear, sweet March, who’d stuck with her in those days when she hadn’t made it easy. Bess had always figured that she and March would grow to a ripe old age and then March would die in his sleep, in his favorite pajamas, and she would go sometime after him. Sixty-eight was not ripe enough, in Bess’s opinion, but March’s heart went bad. Three days after his bypass operation he was gone.

And then there was Richard, of course.

“Maybe I’m cursed, Buck,” she whispered. She took her hankie from her purse, which she’d slung over the arm of the chair, and wiped the sweat from her upper lip. The day had grown close. Then she dabbed her eyes.

The screen door opened behind her. Charlene stepped out to the porch. “We really have to get going, Momma.” She stood at Bess’s left elbow, waiting.

Bess didn’t budge. With Charlene you had to fight fire with fire. “I am not moving until you sit down and let me say my piece,” she said.

“There is no time to—” “Then you go on without me.” Bess looked out upon the linden and the wide bank of lawn that spread beyond it. Buck, glued to his spot by the chair, did the same.

Charlene heaved a sigh. “This is ridiculous. I don’t care about Richard Grandy, whoever you say he is.”

“Then you take your blissful ignorance back home and inform them all that the birthday girl isn’t available.”

Still looming over the rocker, Charlene went quiet. A moment later, she said, “All right, then. Since I don’t appear to have a choice, I’ll call Don and tell him we’ll meet everyone at the restaurant.”

“Good,” Bess replied. She waited as Charlene fished her phone out of her purse and made her call at the other end of the porch.

“Are you happy?” Charlene said, walking back to Bess.

“I will be as soon as I tell you all I need to.”

Bess motioned for Charlene to sit in the rocker beside hers. “It isn’t my intention to hurt you, Charlene. But I’ve been thinking a lot about Richard, and how it simply wasn’t right that his own child knows nothing about him.”

Charlene sat down and swiveled her head deliberately toward the road.

“I loved that man with all my heart,” Bess began.

“You should know that first. And it nearly killed me when he died.” She stopped to collect herself. The honk of geese rose in the distance and a moment later the birds winged overhead, rushing on toward Meadville and parts south. When their noise had subsided, Bess went on with her story. “I met him in a bar. He was in uniform, holding forth with a few friends. I happened to walk by on my way to the ladies room and I stumbled and he reached out to grab me. ‘Now that I saved your life you need to do something for me,’ he said.”

Bess paused to reflect on that long ago moment that she’d managed to preserve in her ancient memory—Richard slipping off his stool to face her, still holding her arm. “Imagine lightning being blue,” she said. “That was your father’s eyes, and darn near to your own. You know, he had this funny little slant to his mouth when he smiled. It was like some kind of charm. Same slant you have.”

Bess hoped to thaw her daughter a bit, make her feel connected to Richard in some small way. But the attempt suddenly seemed foolish. Why would Charlene feel connected to Richard, a man she’d never known or heard of?

“After that we became glued together in the way of mad love,” she said. “He was in the middle of his

Army air training but we saw each other as much as we could. Six months later he was due to ship out. I knew the life expectancy of a bomber pilot going off to the war in Europe was an iffy thing, and I prayed with all my might that Richard would make it back.”

“And he didn’t,” said Charlene, still staring off toward the road. “Is that what you’re telling me? You got pregnant and he never came home.”

“No, honey. My virginity was still intact when I waved goodbye to Richard on the train platform. It wouldn’t have been if our plans to slip away that last night hadn’t been foiled by some unforeseen duty on the base.”

An uncomfortable moment passed during which Charlene looked down at her hands.

“You can imagine how happy I was when he returned almost two years later,” Bess said. “I had waited for him, despite the enthusiasm of a boy named Trevor, and I still loved him. A friend of his had given him the use of an apartment for a few weeks. We got a taxi over there from the station and barely made it to the third floor with all our clothes on. Oh my, but I burned white hot for that man. I was twenty-two and discovering real honest-to-goodness sex. I felt full of wonder, like Dorothy in the Emerald City.”

Charlene reprimanded her with a soft “Oh, Momma” and rocked in her chair. “I don’t know if I want to hear anymore.”

“Just settle down and listen. He was full of life, your father, and full of plans. He was going to go to school to be an architect as soon as the war ended.

Said a building craze was coming to places outside the cities and he wanted to be in on it. When I found out I was pregnant a few months after he got home, I called him on the phone right away, sniffling. ‘Why are you crying?’ he said. ‘I never heard better news in my life. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs when you get off work.’”

“And then you set a date?” Charlene seemed to have gotten caught up in Bess’s story, if only a little grudgingly.

“I never saw Richard alive again. I got a call just before quitting time that he’d been hit by a car. He was carrying a bouquet of red and pink roses and had a ring in his pocket. I must have lost myself for a little while because the next thing I knew I was lying on a couch in somebody’s office, and people

were leaning over me, saying, ‘Take it easy, Bess.

Calm down. Take it easy.’

“My mother had to hold me up by the waist at the funeral. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her about the baby, about you, but I told her that night, and she told my father. We all agreed I would go off to my cousin’s house on the other side of the city and stay there until you were born. My mother seemed to take it all pretty well, but inside, I suspect, she wanted something more for me.”

“So what really happened back then?” Charlene ventured. “I guess you didn’t meet Daddy in 1944, like you said you did.” She paused, and then like a pitcher hurling a fastball, she let loose. “Am I even sixty-three years old? Or is that made up, too?

Should I be applying for social security?”

“I met Daddy in 1947, when you were almost two.

But the rest of the story we always told you”—we, let March take some of the blame—“was true. I was working as a secretary at the time and I did live in a tiny apartment on 22nd Street, with you, of course.”

“An important detail you left out.” Charlene stood up and steeled her fists. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you? You’re making my whole life a lie.

My whole life!” She crossed to the railing where the porch wrapped around the side of the house and stood with her back to Bess.

“Phooey, Charlene. Your life is exactly the way it was when you drove up here this morning. You grew up a on a dairy farm with a daddy who spoiled you rotten. You climbed trees and wrecked every pair of Wranglers you ever wore, and when you drank apple cider you always overdid it and got a stomach ache.”

“Yes,” Charlene snapped, “and by the way my real father was dead and you never had the decency to tell me.”

Bess waited while her daughter’s fiery words burned out. “Lord knows I wanted to tell you long ago, but as I said, Daddy—” “Daddy’s been gone for a long time. You could have told me after he died.”

“You know how you were then. How would I dare add this to your burden? Besides, I wasn’t sure what purpose it would serve.”

Bess rocked silently. Maybe telling all hadn’t been such a good idea. Maybe no purpose had been served.

But Richard…he was the one she’d done it for.

“Well, it’s no less a burden now,” Charlene said.

Bess beckoned her daughter with a soft, “Come sit down, dear.”

Charlene turned to face her but didn’t budge from the railing. Sunlight washed under the porch overhang and burnished her hair to bright silver.

“I grieved for a long time over Richard,” Bess said, “not just for me but for you, because you had lost him as much as I had. But without even knowing it, you were a comfort to me. You had so much of him in you. It was a little gift you gave me every day.”

Charlene sniffed and bowed her head. She returned to her chair, sat down and took a tissue from her purse then dabbed her eyes. “What about Daddy? Wasn’t he enough for you?”

“I can thank Daddy for so many things, honey, although good dancing wasn’t one of them. He was a clumsy dancer. Did I ever tell you that?” This attempt to lighten the mood seemed to have no effect on Charlene.

“You know, a country life wasn’t what I had in mind when I met Daddy. Richard and I had dreamed about an apartment in the city, lazy Sundays with coffee and the newspaper, outings to the movies and the park. I never once imagined having Holsteins for company.”

The mention of the cows took Bess back to the days not so long ago when the pastures of the Davies farm— nearly a hundred acres—were dotted with the grazing Holsteins. With March gone, then Tommy, Bess had sold the cows and all the farm equipment, having no desire to keep things going. Gussy Moran, Tommy’s foreman for years, had found a dairyman down in Croft who wanted the whole kit and caboodle, and for a good price.

Bess didn’t think it would hit her so hard, losing the cows and everything, and the way the farm went quiet and still. The morning after the last milking house was taken down and shipped out, she woke up and walked out over the ridge in her nightgown and looked across the blank land and cried.

March had brought her to this place that had once seemed so strange to her—March, who’d wheedled

his way into her heart even when she had made up her mind not to let him.

“That night I met Daddy I didn’t feel ready for someone new,” she said to Charlene, who had devoted her attention back to the road. “I told him that I had a daughter whose father died before we got the chance to marry, hoping, I think, to scare him off.

But he still asked for my number. I gave him it to him but for a whole week I didn’t answer the phone.

I thought no man could say, ‘Hello, Bess,’ on the other end of the line like Richard could.”

Charlene rocked in her chair. Bess wondered whether her daughter had ever felt the same way about a man, about Don. It was hard to tell with Charlene. She kept private things close, and she’d always preferred to confide in March, anyway. Bess had resented this partiality for a long while, and the space between her and her daughter that never seemed to be filled.

Charlene was Richard’s child, hers and Richard’s. Why should she cling so enthusiastically to a man who wasn’t her flesh and blood?

“You make it sound like you loved Richard more than Daddy,” Charlene said.

“It’s no use to compare, honey. We love everyone differently, and I loved Daddy when all was said and done.” Bess was unsure whether to say what she wanted to say next. But this was her day to talk it all out. “It took me a few years to decide I’d done the right thing by marrying him, or at least done something I could live with the rest of my life.”

Charlene’s phone chimed. She rooted in her purse, took it out and studied the screen.

“You can leave it for now, can’t you?” Bess said.

Charlene slid the phone back into her purse and looked at Bess with a face void of expression.

“So you thought you’d made a mistake in marrying Daddy?”

“I spent quite a few gloomy nights crying to myself, early on. One night Daddy saw me and asked what was wrong. I lied and said I didn’t know. But

“Yes,” Charlene snapped, “and by the way my real father was dead and you never had the decency to tell me.”

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he did, and told me he didn’t want to keep me locked up here like Peter Pumpkin Eater’s wife. Then he suggested I take some time to decide where I belonged. Just like that, as if figuring out where you belong is some conclusion you can draw after a few days’ consideration.” Bess shook her head. “But I could see the worry in his eyes.”

“I can’t blame him,” Charlene shot back. “The poor man thought he was going to lose you.”

“By the time I decided I might belong here, in this place with Daddy, as far as I could work it out, I was pregnant with Scottie.”

She fought against the memory of March crying on that terrible night when Scottie was born, when the doctor came to them in the hospital room and said there’d been complications.

“He took Scottie’s death hard. He loved you to pieces, and did to his dying day, but he wanted a child of his own. Then we had Tommy, and he was on cloud nine.” After a brief silence interrupted only

by Buck’s soft snoring, Bess murmured, “Thank heavens he didn’t live to see Tommy pass on.”

Charlene sniffed and dabbed her eyes again.

“You’ve seen everyone pass on, and I know that couldn’t have been easy, but…” She sniffed again and straightened her spine. “Well, you said you didn’t want to hurt me, but that is exactly what you’ve done. You’ve given me another father and taken him away in one fell swoop. What if I didn’t want to know about him? What if I was happy with things as they were?”

The sight of her daughter in such a state sent a surge of pity through Bess, as well as a glimmer of satisfaction.

“He was your flesh and blood and the man who made you. You should grieve for him. It’s only right.”

“Don’t tell me what is right. You aren’t exactly the expert, are you?”

“You’re as sturdy a woman and, I might add, as obstinate a woman, as I know. I wouldn’t have told you if I thought you’d crumble to pieces. And in the end, you got a damn fine daddy in March.”

They sat in silence, the sun’s heat pushing through the porch roof and baking the lawn. Buck slumbered on, oblivious to the secrets unfolding beside him.

March—there was so much Charlene didn’t know. Things no one knew. That long period when Bess and March were at odds, unable to agree on

anything, trying their hardest to hide it from Tommy and Charlene. Then the long road back to calm and civility.

And Kip. Bess liked to remember Kip as an angel sent down from on high. In fact, he was a maintenance man—filthy from working all day on the farm’s machinery, hands always marred by a cut or laceration, an occupational hazard. He was barely thirty, almost ten years younger than Bess, when March hired him. He could fix just about anything.

As it turned out, that included Bess.

She and Kip enjoyed some fine conversations but he wanted more than words. Even in those troubled times, when she’d felt like giving in to him, when she’d gone so far as to let him kiss her, something had held her back from the brink. Nine months into his employment Kip left, leaving her a note that caused her to come to some conclusion about her life with March. If I’m going to have an inch of you I want the whole mile so I must move on, he wrote.

He signed it Love always Kip, with a p.s. that said Charlie Danniger over in Meadville is a damn fine mechanic. Tell March to give him a call.

After that, Bess was determined to give March as close to a mile as she could give, and to have a little something for herself as well to balance things out.

So she enrolled in college and got her teaching degree. March didn’t balk as much as she thought he would, and from then on peace began to settle again over the Davies household.

“So what now?” Charlene piped up beside her “What am I supposed to do with all…all this?”

Bess rocked a bit. She hadn’t thought that far ahead, except to imagine that her daughter might want to know more about Richard once the subject was broached.

“I don’t know, honey. What do you want to do with it? I guess it’s up to you.”

Charlene shrugged. “I can’t very well ignore it, can I?” Bess recognized a familiar look coming over her daughter’s face, eyes fixed on some intangible thing, mouth pursed.

“You know,” Bess began, “it’s funny to say you miss what you never had. But I did. A door opened with your father and behind it was the life that wanted so much to be lived but couldn’t be. I moved on but that door never closed, not completely.”

Charlene started to speak but caught herself. She turned up her wrist and checked her watch then stood and hoisted her purse. “I’m afraid we need to get going,” she said.

Buck alerted and sat up. Bess reached out and tapped his head. She felt unburdened now, like she’d set down something heavy, even if Charlene might never come around. “Ready to go, boy?” she said.

“Go? Where is he going?” Charlene walked behind Bess’s rocker and stood again by her side.

“I thought he might come with us. We could drop him at the house before we go to the restaurant. He hasn’t been out much lately.”

Charlene waited a beat then said, “I don’t have the cover for the back seat.”

“He had a bath yesterday. Will that do?”

“You’re pressing your luck, old woman,” Charlene said, already reaching down to help Bess from her seat.

“I suppose I am,” Bess said. She heaved to her feet and grabbed her cane.

Charlene locked the house and together they descended the porch steps, Buck trotting ahead of them.

Bess smiled at the linden as she got into the car.

“You know, you really ought to consider moving out of that house,” Charlene said as they pulled out of the driveway. “It’s not getting any easier for you to stay there.”

Bess ignored yet another prod toward senior living and watched as the last few tracts of open land in the county flew by the window. Lately she had thought about setting up one of those easements for the farm so it would remain intact and never be developed, if only to save the linden. She didn’t need the money that would come with selling the place to a builder, and neither did Charlene and Don. Bess hadn’t told Charlene about the idea. That news was best saved for another day.

They drove in silence for a while then Charlene said, “Do you have any pictures…of Richard?”

“Yes, I do, honey. I certainly do.” Bess smiled to herself. “Would you like to see them?”

Charlene nodded. “I would. Not today, but soon.

Soon.”

African Faces

Between L and N

Mastectomy begins with the letter m And then a clot of ugliness. It ends With my. With me. “But I am them,” She said. Her doctor: “Think about it.” Friends Advised her: “Life is everything. Lose them. Live.

If not these pleasures, others.” Even he: “I’d trade them for you. Let them go. Survive.” . . . “Alternatives?” her doctor said, when she 21

Brought no into his office.

“I came to say I must be in his hands, his hands on mine And me. Touch is our love I won’t betray So burn me, poison me. I won’t say it’s fine.

If these leave me, some woman in me ends And if I die with them, we die as friends.”

John Timpane John Timpane is the Media Editor/Writer of the Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has appeared in Sequoia, Vocabula Review, Apiary Mixtape, Cleaver, ONandOnScreen, Painted Bride Quarterly, Per Contra, Wild River Review, and elsewhere. Books include (with Nancy H. Packer) Writing Worth Reading (NY: St. Martin, 1994); It Could Be Verse (Berkeley: Ten Speed, 1995); (with Maureen Watts and the Poetry Center of San Francisco State University) Poetry for Dummies (NY: Hungry Minds, 2000); (with Roland Reisley) Usonia, N.Y.: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); and a poetry book, Burning Bush (Ontario, Canada: Judith Fitzgerald/ Cranberry Tree, 2010).

Everything Named T

Travis Taylor Travis Taylor is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. His fiction has most recently appeared in The Conium Review.

He lives and writes in Detroit, Michigan.

he husband, who was named after his father and doomed to share his father’s primary weakness, was not home when the girlfriend, standing under the ornate entablature of the couple’s Georgian Revival, showed up and told the wife. The wife, long-limbed and graceful, was baking an apple pie at the time and answered the nervous wrapping at the door with flour-covered hands and a smudge of butter greasing her left cheek. She had to look down at the much younger woman from the raised entry.

With her chin pinned to her clavicle she listened to what the other woman had to say.

The wife’s flour-dusted hands worked the fabric of her paisley apron as the girlfriend spoke. Her liquid eyes lifted and she stared over the younger woman’s shoulder at the manicured lawn, past the stone sundial protruding from its bed of hydrangeas and the curb of Hickory Street beyond, to the Buchanan’s yard where croquet wickets from Labor Day weekend still pierced the lush lawn like the handles to a dozen secret doors.

The younger woman spoke in a pinched voice and rushed her words. The wife’s gaze advanced beyond the pitched roofs and brick-red chimney stacks of neighboring homes and came to rest on the filmy haze of downtown.

As the girlfriend finished, the wife, distracted by a red streak that fluttered across the blue sky, forgot the words she had been sharpening in her mind. The red scar was a banner from a low-flying prop plane.

Silence settled into the space between them.

“Of course,” was the only thing the wife could think to say. But she couldn’t say that. Not to the girlfriend.

The girlfriend had said too much. She had embellished some of the details, fabricated others. The relationship between the girlfriend and her professor, the husband, was physical, but little else. She’d wanted to convey this and to say she was sorry and to com-

municate to the wife some nameless reassurance she was neither entitled to offer nor capable of expressing.

But when the wife appeared in the door, powdered in domesticity, looking very much like the girlfriend’s own mother, she unhinged her jaw and let fall out a smattering of near truths. In her mind, a story of love, of adolescent longing for an older man—her literature professor, a respected author, an almost celebrity— was the gentler approach.

They stood in a cone of not noise, like the implosive silence that fills the space after a thunderclap. When the girlfriend spoke, she shattered the silence. “But it’s over now.”

The wife nodded absentmindedly, still watching the plane and the banner that chased it. She could not read the words. She searched for the words that went along with the feelings breaking loose inside her. “I—I wonder,” she said, “what that banner says.” She immediately regretted saying such a stupid thing. And then, finding nothing else in her to say, she glanced down at the girlfriend, turned, and closed the door behind her.

The girlfriend stood for a moment like a scolded child, head down, hands at her side. Then she peeked out from under the eave of the entablature.

She read the words on the banner, made a face, and walked to her car.

The sun cast deep pools of shade below the rust-colored beech and basswood trees in the yard.

A faint breeze carried the scent of burning leaves and charcoal through the neighborhood from across hedges and wrought iron fences. Above the distant hum of the red airplane the girlfriend heard the growl of a leaf blower, the murmur of a passing car, the fragile laughter of children.

It was a lovely neighborhood. It really was.

The girlfriend was happy to leave it. §

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he husband was at the marina indulging a new obsession—a small sloop he’d purchased from his agent after a major Hollywood studio purchased the rights to his last novel.

He was no sailor, but the boat, with its looming mast and heavy sail, its cramped and musty cabin, had slowly shifted from the periphery of simple interest and an attempt to increase his social status to a full-blown phantom buoying his every thought. He’d never actually taken the boat out of the marina, where it was tethered to a slat of dock alongside slip number twenty-seven. The twenty-one foot vessel nodded in the lapping wake of freighters trudging back and forth along the river.

But otherwise it didn’t move.

The husband, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cabin, nodded along with the rocking waves. He’d amassed around him ramparts of old logbooks, receipts, maps—everything bearing the sloop’s name, Breakneck II. Despite his agent’s advice and the wary looks of sailors who docked nearby, he’d decided to rename the vessel before taking it out to open waters in the spring. The first step of the potentially damning process (for he’d learned that superstitions abound in the nautical world) was to obliterate every trace of the boat’s current identity. And so he had scoured the ship, gathered everything labeled Breakneck II in a pile on the floor of the cabin, and was busy shredding these items with a pair of shears engraved with BRKNCK II. Every time he visited he discovered a new item tucked here or there with the ship’s name on it. This was something else he was learning: Everything was named. Later, he’d throw the pile of shredded and torn documents, the tattered rain slickers, the snapped pencils, the frayed and dissected lanyards, the crushed compasses and more, in a burn barrel he’d set up in his backyard.

Explaining the process to the girlfriend had been a waste of time. When he’d first taken ownership of the sloop two months ago she’d propped

herself on the pillowed bench running along the starboard side of the cabin, head rolling in the notched jam of the rectangular window at her side, lolling with the waves breaking against the flecked paint of the hull, not listening to what he had to say. The orange tint of her legs pouring out from her lacey underwear like rays of sunshine was reason enough to tolerate her inattentiveness. But still, he persisted. She was a student, after all. And what a student needed most was a lesson. He felt he could impart some knowledge before she left him. And she was going to leave him, he could tell. Experience clued him in before she’d even hinted at the idea.

That first day, having already begun to gather items in a pile to be destroyed, he’d said to her, “It’s a process, however irrational, however archaic the fear that fuels it may be; there is a way of going about such things, an order that needs following. Evidently, all sea-faring vessels are recorded by name in the Ledger of the Deep, Poseidon’s personal log. Sailors swear that the unluckiest ships, those that spring leaks, those whose sails tear widest in gale storms, those who no lighthouse can guide home, are the ones that defy the god and change names. So, to avoid this wrath, the first thing I must do is erase the ship’s current name from the ledger and, with luck, the memory of the god.” He paused to glance out one of the rectangular windows.

“Then it’s smooth sailing.”

The girlfriend stretched like a cat, wrapped one of the pillows in her arms and asked what he planned on naming the ship once its virginity had been renewed.

She giggled at her own quip. The husband scowled playfully, tossed the printed cardboard drink coasters he’d retrieved from one of the many cubbies in the cabin, and jumped towards her, tugging on her waist, his teeth already fastened to her

He’d never actually taken the boat out of the marina, where it was tethered to a slat of dock alongside slip number twenty-seven.

ear lobe.

Three days ago she showed up in his office. He feigned sorrow at her speech, though he thought it unnecessary considering the purely physical nature of their relationship. Love was an absent component. She said she felt guilty about the wife, was nervous about being caught. The husband suspected the real reason behind the breakup had more to do with the girlfriend finding a new boyfriend, a young man he’d seen her draped over outside the English building. He nodded, took her face in his hands, and said that he thought she was a very smart girl (though he didn’t). He told her not to worry about her grade. The husband found a deep, resounding relief in the ending of the affair. It was the first time he had dated a student, and the precarious, potentially damning quality of such a relationship had grown exhausting. He had tenure, but that could only be counted on for so much. He felt lucky to be getting out while he still could.

The husband was sitting cross-legged on the cabin floor thinking about all this and shredding and stuffing items into a garbage bag when he heard a low bellow from outside the open hatch of the cabin. He set the shears down and stuck his head out into the glowing day.

A hulking gray tanker trekked up the river.

It blasted its horn again as it moved under the open expanse created by a lifted drawbridge, its girders ratcheted up in full salute. A squabble broke out between groups of seagulls. They careened into one another above the husband’s head, pecking and screeching. As he watched the ugly birds he caught sight of a red prop plane.

Squinting and shielding his brow with his hand, he tried to read the banner fluttering from its tail. When the tanker’s horn sounded for a third time he gave up and ducked back into the cabin.

As he closed the hatch his cell phone began to vibrate. §

T

he wife called her best friend after closing the door on the girlfriend. This friend had attended the University of Michigan with the wife, was a fel-

Bluegrass Man

low anthropologist, and was the only person who knew about the wife’s affair a year earlier.

“Of course,” the wife said when the best friend answered. “Of course, of course, of course!” She was shouting into the phone.

“Of course what?” the best friend asked.

“Of course!” The wife stomped her foot, a child’s gesture of frustration that caused the china hutch to rattle and the prim plates to shiver in their orderly towers. “He’s been cheating on me!” The wife retold the girlfriend’s tale and then, with her free hand, reached up to latch her fingers around her throat. “Of course,” she whispered, the flour marking her neck as her fingers dug deep and ground the words from her mouth, “Of course.”

The best friend, who lived in North Carolina, felt the reach of the wife’s anguish. “Do you want me to come there?” she asked instinctively.

A great choking sob split the line.

“I’ve done this. This is my fault. Don’t you see?”

The wife was standing in the middle of her perfect dining room, her favorite room in the house. The walls were soft with floral wallpaper and the floor was stained a deep brown, a color rich as tilled earth.

“Why would you say that?” The best friend cleared her throat and thought maybe she knew why.

“You should have seen her,” the wife went on.

“She was so young. But there she was, on our front stoop, come to fess up, admit to it all.”

The best friend had never married. She joked at family gatherings that she was married to her profession, though she had ceased to find the joke funny anymore. When the wife first told the best friend about the affair—he was a visiting anthropology professor at Wayne State, a striking older man, someone the best friend could have seen herself with in another time, a collaborator on a study the wife was conducting on Ottawa Indian marital practices—the best friend had wanted to condemn her actions. Her knee-jerk response was fueled by resentment towards the wife’s ability to find another person to love her when she, the best friend, was completely luckless in matters of the heart. She’d let the jealousy wash over her and then fade away.

Neither woman spoke for a moment.

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phone again.

The girlfriend had sent him a text that afternoon, something she had been fond of doing while they were dating, even going so far as to send him a nude picture once. The message she sent that afternoon had been decidedly less carnal: HAD TO TELL HER. YOU’LL B FINE. A drumbeat was trying to get loose of the husband. He’d battered about the ship the rest of the evening, combing it for more sailing paraphernalia branded with the ship’s name. Buoying on his thoughts, he wobbled about the ship checking his phone, rereading the message, and waiting for a phone call that never came.

And then it was night.

He stopped off at the marina bar. Two miniature lighthouses that rose just above the roofline flanked the front doors. Weak lanterns twirled listlessly in their glass heads, their decorative glow barely enough to guide patrons from the parking lot to the front doors.

Two shots of whiskey and a honey-brown beer later, he stepped outside and faced a mostly empty parking lot. It was cold, and gusts of wind were breaking over the bank of the river, lacing the air with the sound of skittering leaves carried across the blacktop. He wanted to rail, to shout at the girlfriend, but she hadn’t answered his calls.

The windows of the house were dark as he pulled up. The beams of the car’s headlights swept through the parlor window and struck the bind§ ings of his large collection of literature, shelved ith the sizeable sack of burnables tossed and in neat order, and then the room fell back in the trunk, the husband was on his way into darkness. He retrieved the garbage bag filled home from the marina, motoring through the with Breakneck II’s shredded identity and headed last remnants of the day. Wrought iron lamp- for the backyard. posts ticked by as he pulled into the cobbled On his way, the husband stopped to peek in streets of his neighborhood. Every misshapen through a window. A faint glow of light came from paver sent a tremor through the car. the formal dining room. He set the sack down in a His hands danced on the steering wheel. He bed of lemon-colored mums, placed his jittery finreached over to the cup holder where his cell gers on the sill and pressed his face to the glass. phone sat. He reread the message, set the phone He felt like a thief , the darkness a heavy coat he back in the cup holder, and resumed the dance forgot he was wearing. He stood there for a while, of his hands. Before long he’d picked up his his breath leaving a film on the glass, before he

“What now?” the best friend asked.

“Nothing,” the wife said. She let go of her neck, marked red and powdered white, and let out a long, low sigh. “That’s just it, there’s nothing to be done.

I’m as guilty as he is.”

“But that’s perfect,” the best friend said. “Maybe now you can tell him. It’s like the two cancel each other out. It’ll be a clean slate.”

The wife imagined this scenario, the conversation, the guilt lodged in her throat, and she hated everything about it. She hated the girlfriend then, too, though not for what she and her husband had done but for being so bold in her confession, so ready to stand up against the firing squad. Where did she get the nerve?

“No,” the wife said. It seemed to the best friend that every word was a final expulsion of an already exhausted breath. “No,” she said again.

“Why?” the best friend asked.

The shriek of the smoke detector broke over the house then. A thread of smoke snaked from the kitchen. The scent of burnt crust and scorched apples punched the air, singed the cavities of the wife’s nose and engulfed the picture of the pie—perfectly crimped edges and flaky crust—that she had held in her mind all morning.

“I’ve got to go,” the wife said. “It’s burning.”

The best friend stayed on the disconnected line mulling over the possible antecedents, uncertain whether she should do anything more than place the phone back in its cradle and go about her day.

W

picked up the sack and moved on.

A large burn barrel sat on the brick patio.

Heavy, and dipped in black paint thick as tar, it looked like a cauldron. When the motion-sensor lights clicked on he dropped the garbage bag and yelped loudly, as though the light were an attacker springing from the shadows. He composed himself and looked over his shoulder toward the house. The wife stood in the dining room window, which was now fully aglow. She raised a hand and gave a little wave. The husband smiled and waved back.

He picked up the garbage bag and, digging his eager fingers into its sagging plastic skin, tore it open and dumped its contents into the barrel.

The wife was at his side then. She wore a heavy coat and pulled a box of matches from one of its pockets. When the husband the husband took it from her, their cold hands touched for a moment.

“What do you think you’ll call it?” the wife asked. She’d never asked this before, and both she and the husband were surprised to hear the question. The wife bristled in the chill air and gathered her coat around her. The husband struck a match and tossed it into the barrel’s open mouth.

“I’m not sure,” he said. And it was the truth.

As the fire took hold, devouring the items and lashing out along the rim of the barrel in searing tongues, heat gained ground in the cold space of the patio. Husband and wife drew closer together.

“Whatever it is,” the wife said, “make it lasting.”

They glanced at each other. “You know what I mean,” she said. “Make it timeless. A classic.”

It was not long before the contents of the barrel were burnt and gone. The husband and the wife stood side by side as the last ember faded. They stood for so long, so perfectly still together, that the sensors could no longer detect them. The patio lights snapped off and they were no more than the darkness pressing in on the glow of a single lit window.

HAD TO TELL HER. YOU’LL B FINE.

True Jews and Other Living Dreams My Father’s House

I

Terry Barr Terry Barr is a Professor of Creative Writing at Presbyterian College. He lives in Greenville, SC, with his wife and two daughters. His writing has appeared in Scissors and Spackle, moonShine review, The Montreal Review, and The Museum of Americana.

’m walking behind my father in a city that looks like Birmingham, the city he adored—the city he called home even after he moved to the suburb of Bessemer upon marrying my mother. I can’t see his face as I struggle to keep up.

Only the back of his head is visible—the curly, salt-and-pepper hair that is so familiar to me. I never understood why he needed to brush that hair, as it always stood the same despite sleep, despite physical exertion, despite shampoo. His dark suit is funereal, and as I follow him, I know what lies ahead of us. I would like to stop this journey—spare him the pain—if I could, but I know I can’t, so I don’t hurry. Though I’m no longer a little boy, it doesn’t feel strange to be unable to match his long, quick strides. For this was always our way as we walked the streets of our neighborhood, downtown to the bakery or apothecary, or to the stands of Bessemer Stadium. He would hold my hand then, making sure that I wouldn’t get separated or lost. With my hand in his, I always felt safe.

On this street that must be in Birmingham, he stops now, and so do I, still a few feet behind him.

I seem unable to reach him, but I can see him pointing at a massive, three-story brown-brick structure. The windows on each floor are long and looming, ornate facades and cornices line the top and flow down the sides in patterns I don’t recognize. And I never will recognize them, for as we stand there staring, the building dissolves as if it has been magically made to go “Poof,” leaving nothing but thick, swirling smoke. Even in my

dream I know this is impossible. Brick doesn’t go “Poof,” and buildings that are an entire city-block wide do not disappear into nothing.

Just as I get the feeling that I might know this building, my father says, “That’s where I grew up… and now it’s gone.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, though he never turns toward me.

“It must be hard for you, Dad, seeing it like this, and losing it again.”

“Yeah… it is.”

He continues walking. I follow, honoring his wishes as I always have, willing to accompany him wherever he leads.

“I don’t think you’re going to like seeing what’s up ahead,” I say.

He sighs but steps decidedly, purposefully. He knows where he is going, and I realize that he always has.

It’s a gray day, the growing fog making our path even more obscure. And as he walks, he is becoming obscure too, impossible to keep in sight.

I still hear our footsteps, but I can’t see either of us. I call out to him. He doesn’t respond, or at least I don’t hear him.

And then I wake.

My Father’s Death

I

f you listen to the noble authorities you’d believe that there are only two kinds of people: the valiant and the cowardly. That’s what I believed in my childhood at least. In high school English, I read that “conscience make[s] cowards of us all.” So be it. I have a conscience, an over-developed sense of

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empathy. I’ve heard myself described as a “gentle soul,” but no one to my knowledge has ever spoken of me as “valiant.” But does that mean I must be a coward?

Maybe I am when it comes to death, the “undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

Coward or not, I admit it—death scares me, and it always has, ever since childhood, ever since Sunday School.

I’m in a beginner’s class, just one step up from the nursery. We’ve been singing “Jesus Loves Me” and “In the Temple.” Our teacher, Mrs. Self, looks us over, all fifteen of us dressed like our mothers’ fondest picture. In the sweetest voice imaginable, she asks: “Where do you think you’ll go after you die, after your body and life here are no more?”

I am only five; I have no answer for her. Only fear.

“Don’t worry little ones! Like the song says, Jesus loves you and because he does, you’ll go with him when you die. You won’t need your mothers and fathers anymore. You’ll be with your heavenly Father!”

Fifty years later, I wonder if I’ve ever recovered from that scene, that time. That question and final statement. I’ve often thought about its answer too, but not long ago I read “…there is no answer to such a question…it’s the question itself that is meaningful…to ask for an answer is to misunderstand the nature of the search, which is never-ending.” I cannot subscribe to conventional religious thinking, so I have no idea where I’m going after this life. Yet, I believe that my thinking, my desire and courage to wrestle with such questions, is the point. And that gives me comfort. But the comfort of knowing that I must struggle with thoughts about my own death doesn’t help me resolve this story about my

father—the story of how my Jewish father received tance as the pair meet on a busy street corner. As a ritual death sentence when he was twenty-six they walk away, the story ends with his chanting the Kaddish, the traditional “prayer for the dead.” years old. From his mother.

When I first read the story, I didn’t understand the ritual of saying Kaddish for a living being. I § assumed, in accordance with the story, that the heard this shiva tale from my mother after my daughter had been shamelessly wanton and that father had lapsed into Parkinson’s-related de- the matchmaker pawned her off because though mentia. As I listened, I reflected on this man she was no longer a good, observant Jew, she was whose touch had been so steady, whose mind had still his daughter, and he wanted her married and been paper-cut sharp, but who now shuffled down provided for. At the time, I felt pretty thankful that hallways on nearly-frozen feet, spilt his food with I knew no one like that. No one, that is, who would palsied hands, and wet his bed nightly through say a death prayer for a living daughter or son. I adult diapers. didn’t know much then about what it meant to be “Your grandmother refused to attend any of devout and strict in the Jewish religion. I knew, our engagement parties—unless we agreed to be though, that shame causes us to make powerful married by a rabbi,” my mother said. “She sim- and absolute declarations—cutting off our heirs, ply pitched a fit, and your Daddy said there was banishing adherents for their sins. nothing he could do to change her mind. So we At the time I first read Malamud’s story, I didn’t met with the Rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, but the consider all the things that might cause a Jewish trouble didn’t end there.” parent to declare his or her child dead. I didn’t Mom paused to light a want to, nor did doing so seem to matter to my cigarette. “No, she wasn’t life. satisfied. Even our willingUntil, that is, my mother’s story reached ness to be married by a Rab- through the years and yanked me back to the bi couldn’t stop her from de- moment of their wedding as if I were a measured claring that as a Jew, your piece of flexible tape summoned by the pressing of Daddy was dead to her. Lord a metal button by the all-controlling hand of my Have Mercy, she actually sat Jewish past. shiva for him.”

I know that marrying outside the faith causes Too stunned to respond at rifts, terrible battles over which faith to raise the that moment, my mind fled children and grandchildren in. I know that we through the years, not to want what we want and often demand to be right. my imagined reconstruction But I don’t understand pronouncing dead a son of my parents’ wedding or who has fallen in love and who has determined for of my grandmother wearing himself as an independent adult man (my father black clothes and a veil, but to that story that had was twenty-six when he married my mother) to long haunted me—Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic marry the girl of his dreams. I don’t understand Barrel,” in which a matchmaking Rabbi strategical- telling your child that he is dead to you because ly introduces one of his clients to a young woman, he is a Jew and his intended wife is a gentile. And after first insisting that this woman “isn’t for” his I don’t understand, after all of that drama, declient: manding that whatever kind of Jew you now think “She is a wild one—wild, without shame…Like an your son is, that he be loyal to you for the next animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was a sin. forty years. Or having your demand met.

This is why to me she is dead now.”

I was fifty-three years old when I first heard The girl is the matchmaker’s daughter, and af- this story, and now, three years later, its shock ter he sets up the date, he watches from a dis- and power still jolt my bones. I’ve been writing a

I

I’ve heard myself described as a “gentle soul,” but no one to my knowledge has ever spoken of me as “valiant.”

But does that mean I must be a coward?

Man in the

lot about my father these past few years, trying to tell our story: the half-Jewish son who wants to be closer to his Dad—who feels Jewish to his soul and wants to champion and defend the father who was so quiet about his faith. In my writing, I’ve been honest about my father’s shortcomings: his marital difficulties and his blind loyalty to his mother, and the time he accidentally pushed me down when we were racing around the track at Roosevelt Park. But I’ve also been adamant about his standing up for me against bullies who thought I was a sissy for wearing my hair long, about his loyalty to his job, and the dependability of his work that provided for all of us. And about his passion for Alabama football which he passed so deeply on to me.

I’ve written of my discovery at age six that he was a Jew, of the matzoh with grape jelly that he shared with me every Passover day. Of my wonder and pride at watching him and my mother dress up and leave for Friday night temple services while I stayed at home with my maternal grandmother. Of the first time that I went to temple with him at age fifteen and my deep pleasure when, at the conclusion of the service, sitting on the very back row of Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham, my normal, English-speaking father turned to me, shook my hand, and wished me “Shabbot Shalom.”

I never questioned that my father was a dedicated employee at Standard Jewelry.

I never questioned that my father loved my mother, my brother, and me.

I never questioned that he loved the University of Alabama.

Or the United States of America.

Or the Jewish religion.

Or his mother.

But with my mother’s story, I began wondering about these last two loves, and of the father I thought I knew so well. And I began reconsidering the stories I knew about him and my grandmother— stories that I’ve retold in attempts to show others how quirky and colorful my grandmother was. Stories like my grandmother’s belief that the communists were fluoridating our water; that UNICEF was a Soviet plot; that Negroes wanted to intermarry and take over the white race.

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Stories like my Jewish grandmother apologizing for Joe McCarthy: “McCarthy wasn’t so bad. He got rid of all those communists in our government!”

I was in my thirties then, and I wanted to argue with her—shout my outrage at her ridiculous beliefs. But then I looked at my father, and I couldn’t be disrespectful. I couldn’t disrupt this order. Still, I wondered—other than Roy Cohn and my grandmother, were there any other Jewish apologists for McCarthy?

I wanted to question my Dad about his mother’s distorted interpretation of history. But I knew better. You didn’t question him about her, ever.

My mother questioned him once, the time when she sent fresh vegetable soup with him to give to my grandmother when she was sick. He returned a few hours later with the soup, untouched.

“Didn’t she like the soup?”

“No, she said that it had fresh vegetable in it, and fresh vegetable are poison.”

“Poison?”

“Yeah, from all the pesticides the government sprays on them. Only frozen vegetables are safe.”

“Oh Alvin, that’s crazy! Besides, I serve us fresh vegetables all the time!”

“Don’t you DARE call her crazy, and if I want your damn opinion, I’ll ask for it.”

I’ve wondered for most of my life why my father listened so closely to his mother— why he never dissented from any opinion she uttered? Why he didn’t see that she was a fanatical tyrant?

There have been times, too, after hearing that story when I think that she was doing my father a favor by declaring him dead. She was releasing him from bondage. If only he’d gone along with the ritual order of things. But as much as I wished he had, and as much as I’ve tried to understand why he didn’t, my wishing and hoping and thinking have gotten me nowhere. Only here, standing in the shadow of this dead building.

It is said “A dream itself is but a shadow.” Maybe so, but neither in my dream nor in any reality I know, can anyone describe the scene of my grandmother’s sitting shiva and saying Kaddish for her apostate son. No one can tell me exactly what was said or the exact circumstances under

which it was done. Nor can anyone tell me whether my grandfather joined in this family curse— if he agreed to it or sanctioned it.

This past winter I found my grandfather’s wallet, the one my Dad kept in the top drawer of his bureau for almost fifty years, the one he brought home after my grandfather died in his hospital bed. I noticed that of all the photos in it— of his sons and daughter and of the children of close relatives— there was but one single shot of his wife, my grandmother, buried way back in the inner folds of the cracked alligator hide.

I thought about his death then, this man I never knew. My mother says I would have loved him, and that he would have adored me. I wonder what influence he would have had on me? Of what influence he did have on me, and on my father? I wonder sometimes if he guided my father at all?

I doubt that he had any effect on my grandmother. She never asked permission to do or say what she wanted, so I doubt that she consulted with my father’s father, sister, or brother in her decision of ritual death. And even if she had, they wouldn’t have had the nerve to stand up to her Old Testament wrath--her vengeance and self-righteousness. For all I know, she pronounced my father’s siblings dead, too, for each of them married gentiles, people of whom my grandmother vocally disapproved.

Her primal commandment: “Thou shalt not marry a….”

But my father, and both his siblings, did, against her commandment, which is refreshing, I think.

Think about it: my father, in one of the most fundamental choices a person can make, defied his mother, the fanatical tyrant. And then she had to live with his choice. She had to go on living, knowing that whatever she had done to him, he stood up to her at least this one unforgettable time.

But not only did he defy her then, he defied her again by continuing to be that thing that she said he could never be again— a Jew. And I followed him.

My grandmother never knew of my journey into my Jewish self. I wonder now what she would have thought of this scene.

It’s our last Chanukah together— my father,

mother, daughters, wife, and I—in my parents’ kitchen. I light our menorah candles and then my daughters and I sing: “Barukh atah Adonai. Eloheinu melekh ha’olam…”

The candles blaze, and my daughters’ eyes dance with the fire of joy. And we aren’t even “real” Jews.

That is, other than my Dad, none of us is affiliated with a temple. We don’t keep kosher or honor Shabbat. The first thing I’m asked when I tell someone that I’m half-Jewish is, “Which one is Jewish, your mother or father?”

“My father.”

“Oh, well, then you aren’t really Jewish.”

It seems like anyone who even remotely knows something about being Jewish has heard, from someone else, that being Jewish is strictly matrilineal.

But I keep asking: “What if, nevertheless, I feel Jewish?” Doesn’t my father count for anything?

I feel like I’m getting to a different place with this “real Jew” business. Maybe I’m seeing something appear on the horizon of my Jewishness.

Maybe I’m seeing something else disappear.

Still, reality cannot be discounted.

Back in my parents’ kitchen, it’s clear that my Dad doesn’t know the Chanukah song. He watches as we sing, smiling. He had a great baritone voice and often sang old Sinatra standards in his nightly shower. I’d hear him as I sat in our den, and I’d wonder at his strength, his memory for forgotten tunes. But he can barely speak now, much less sing. The last words I ever heard him utter, shortly after this night, were two phrases.

The first, “Sho ‘nuff,” reflected his southern culture. The second, “Where’s your Mother,” reflected his fear—the fear of knowing that he was about to go alone into that other death. The funny thing is that though his mother was dead, I expected that in his dementia, he’d be calling for her. But he didn’t. Ever.

Still, he’d cry at other things. Strange things.

Once, I saw him watching an episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger,” and for some reason, Chuck Norris’s face in close-up made my father cry. On another occasion, he cried long and hard after The University of Alabama’s baseball team won

an SEC tournament game with a walk-off home run. The players bounced around home plate, on top of each other in youthful giddiness. And my Dad just cried and cried, like I used to whenever TV Lassie raised her paw in goodbye as the ending credits rolled.

There’s always something inside that dies first.

So on this night of Chanukah, as the songprayer ends, my father begins crying as our menorah blazes in the December dark. And I believe I know why. He still wants to be a good Jew. But then, he always was a good Jew. He supported his temple annually. He attended faithfully. More importantly, though I know that like most Americans he looked for as many deductions on his income tax as possible, my father lived by the commandments handed down from God to Moses—every one of them, and especially one of them—the fifth commandment. He honored the golden rule and instilled it in me. He believed in his God humbly but devoutly. And he taught me never to use the word “hate,” though in that, I haven’t always obeyed.

To me, a good Jew lives a quiet, studious life, devoted to his family, to his community, to leading a life where doing a “mitzvah” was expected daily, without thought or expectation of reward.

That was my father, the good Jew, who supported locals businesses, who came home every night promptly at six, dried the dishes, and played ball with his sons. Who called his mother every night without fail, despite every reason not to.

He died two weeks after that Chanukah, on Christmas Eve. He left no instructions as to where he wanted to be buried. His family lay in the Emanu-El cemetery just west of downtown Birmingham.

My mother’s family is in the secular Cedar Hill cemetery in Bessemer. On the day he died, my mother asked me what we should do with his body. She supposed that he wanted to be buried next to his mother.

“But Mom, if he had wanted that, he would have said so. No, we can’t do that to him. I don’t want him to lie next to her for all eternity. You’re the one who really took care of him, Mom. I want him next to you.”

She sighed then. And she agreed.

We were also forced to use my mother’s Methodist minister to perform the funeral as the rabbis of Dad’s temple were out of town. Ironically, the rabbi of my father’s temple was also absent when my parents married, for when my parents asked him to perform their wedding ceremony, my Dad’s rabbi refused.

“He wouldn’t marry us because we weren’t going to raise our children as Jews,’ my mother said, as she exhaled the last puff of smoke.

I wonder now. Why didn’t my grandmother pressure their rabbi to marry them if Judaism meant so much to her? Maybe because doing so meant that she’d actually have to enter the temple. On those Friday nights in the early 1950’s, instead of attending service like Dad did, my grandmother chose to attend Little Man Popwell’s gambling den across the county line with some of her male friends. After Little Man’s joint was raided--the very week after my mother, father, and grandmother, at my grandmother’s insistence, played roulette there—my grandmother discovered The Boom-Boom Room, a swinging-by-Birmingham-standards night club, where she could hang out with her daughter, my Aunt Carole. Such a picture, I don’t want to imagine.

I see now that to talk to their rabbi about her son’s wedding would have been to shame herself as a fair weather Jew. In the end, the Rabbi who agreed to marry my parents traveled from Montgomery, a hundred miles away, to unite this couple. Clearly he didn’t know about the Kaddish.

Or maybe he did and just didn’t care.

However, he did send my parents an anniversary card every year until he passed. But I don’t recall their receiving one from my grandmother, ever.

And if their marriage got off to a shaky start, I

can’t say that in its forty-eight year history it ever found firmer ground. My grandmother never welcomed my mother as her own family, or even as her son’s wife. My mother remembers this story, and I do too.

It’s Thanksgiving, and I’m fifteen years old. My grandmother and my Aunt Carole are hosting the meal this year, which means they’ll buy the already-cooked turkey from the local cafeteria and my mother will bring all the vegetables and the desserts. We’re to meet at my aunt’s apartment, but that morning Daddy awakens with high fever and chills. He has to stay in bed but insists we go ahead to my aunt’s because they’re expecting us, and he can’t stand letting them down. So, completely against her wishes and instincts, my mother drags the food, my brother, and me over the mountain to my aunt’s. We walk in the front door, on this bright Thanksgiving morning, and when my grandmother sees that Daddy has failed to appear, she asks, “Where’s Alvin?”

“Oh, he’s home sick with a 102-degree fever.”

“Well, if I’d known that he wasn’t coming, then I wouldn’t have come either.”

My mother paused for just a beat. “Then I guess you’re not glad to see us!”

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant...”

But the damage was done; my mother’s beliefs about her place in this familial world all confirmed.

And she held this day against both my grandmother and my dad. It wasn’t the only such day in her marriage.

I thought through these stories as we laid my father to rest. The Methodist minister sang in Hebrew and refrained from mentioning anything from the New Testament. Dad’s first cousin, Leonard, came to the funeral and brought me some real kosher corned beef. I spoke at the service,

To me, a good Jew lives a quiet, studious life, devoted to his family, to his community, to leading a life where doing a “mitzvah” was expected daily, without thought or expectation of reward.

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and I think I did my Dad justice—about our family life, my mother’s success in nourishing us all, and my father’s dependability in providing for us.

I carefully and intentionally omitted any reference to his mother. Still, there’s a part of me that worries that I added to his eternal grief by having him buried in non-sanctified Jewish ground—that I undermined the Jewish identity that he tried so hard to maintain despite his mother’s edict. Maybe by deciding to bury him away from his mother, I was deciding on a revenge strategy for him. I think, though, that if there is any revenge to be taken on my grandmother, it is I who need to take it. So I don’t feel bad about my decision.

I didn’t cause him to dishonor that commandment: “Thou Shalt Honor Thy…” I liberated him.

And in doing so, I think I set myself free as well.

Free to take my own path. I never consulted with him when I chose to “become” Jewish. I simply saw my path, began following it, and then informed him. Since he couldn’t consult me about how I wanted to be raised, maybe he saw no problem with being left out of the later loop of my religious/ethnic change.

Haunted as I am now by dreams and memories, as a little boy in Sunday School, I was supposed to memorize The Ten Commandments. I don’t know how hard I tried, but I never did learn them all.

However, one commandment stuck out for me— this fifth one--for whenever I heard it, I heard my father’s voice, admonishing me for not following it. Not that I wasn’t honoring him and my mother, but because I was not honoring his, or rather, not honoring him for honoring her. It’s his voice I hear even now: “ …Father and Thy Mother.” And I don’t know if this voice is my memory of him, my dream of him, or my fear of disappointing him, of angering him, of not following him.

During the last ten years of his life, I did follow my father to temple whenever I came home. I know he was pleased, even though I didn’t particularly care for or appreciate the service. In my mind, I was trying to connect with him, to fulfill him. And in my mind, I continued following him as we fasted on Yom Kippur, ate matzoh toasted with grape jelly during Passover, and visited the gravesites of all his family on their birthdays.

In my memory, my father never once declared that he wasn’t a Jew. And in my memory, my grandmother, at moments of her own convenience, knew he was a Jew, as evidenced by that one Passover Sunday at her apartment. My Aunt Carole brought over a definitely leavened pizza with mushrooms and anchovies instead of partaking in the salami and matzoh sandwich that the other Jews were eating. My grandmother took one look at the pizza, then at her daughter, and then declared to my father, “Alvin, you and I are the only true Jews here.”

My grandmother taketh away and my grandmother….

Made him a “true Jew” again? Did those words sustain him until he actually died? Maybe. But maybe they only confirmed what he already knew about himself, and about his mother, too.

My Father’s Pain

W

hen my mother told me of my father’s ritual death, I was too stunned to speak. I’m often slow to ask the questions that flood my mind. It’s like I can’t get the words out, can’t fit them into any coherent order. But this time I knew that no question would do justice to my confusion, to what I believed was my father’s pain. Yet there they were, the questions of his life: How did my Dad look when he told my mother of his “death?” What exactly did he say? What was his tone, and how long did this story take to tell? Was he apologetic? Sad? Ashamed? Uncompromising?

What did my mother think then? How did it feel to be the cause of this familial, Jewish rift? How did it feel to know that because of who she was, she ritually killed her future husband—that she would be marrying a dead man?

Why did she go through with the marriage at that point? Was it because she was only nineteen, and fairly rebellious? Too stubborn to turn back? Did she simply love him that much? At nineteen, can you possibly love someone that much? Did she really know then what love was?

I haven’t asked my mother these questions. I am not a valiant man. Nor have I asked until now what

impact this traumatic episode had on my father’s view of his family, of his future wife? Of himself?

If your mother says you can’t be a Jew anymore, do you listen to her? Obey her? Ignore her? Can you still be a Jew if you want to be? Can you ever forgive this woman, or forget her words even if you still go to temple? Do you wonder for the rest of your life if you’re a “true Jew?” The thing is, my father never wondered any of this. I don’t know if he even thought about it. He could be oblivious to the emotional needs of his family, and once I even counseled him to do something different for his anniversary instead of giving my mother a similar piece of gold jewelry. She once showed me that he had given her basically the same gold pendant three years in a row.

“So Dad,” I said one late August evening as we were driving home from work, “why don’t you and Mom go somewhere for your anniversary this year?

You could take her back to New Orleans. That’s where you spent your honeymoon, right?”

He thought for a moment, then replied, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.” Then he turned the radio up because it was news time in that election year of 1976.

I thought I had planted the germ, but the virus never carried. That October on their anniversary, they stayed home, and Dad bought Mom a set of gold earrings. I never tried to intervene in his personal business again.

He never told me stories of his courtship, engagement, or wedding. And as far as I know, his pre-dating life never existed. About his religious beliefs, all he told me was that he went to Sunday School as a boy and was confirmed in the temple since, back, then, Reform Jews didn’t Bar Mitzvah their young.

If Dad was troubled about being or not being a live Jew, he never said to me, and he didn’t lose sleep over it. His snores at night seemed untroubled anyway. He loved his mother until her death, and my mother until his. He never seemed to suspect that the woman he loved and married resented his mother, or if he did, he repressed it all.

I, however, have thought about it fairly constantly for the past thirty years, hearing my mother’s complaints, fearing that she might get up enough gumption one day to leave him. My mother has

said on too many occasions that for my father, his own mother was number one in his life. “The rest of us are somewhere far behind.”

And, after all, it was my mother who has told me most of what I know about my Jewish family. But I was the one back then who, after seeing Molly Picon on “Gomer Pyle, USMC” cooking Jewish delicacies for Gomer’s platoon tried to get my Mom to agree that gefilte fish and kreplach were as good as fried catfish and chicken and dumplings. I was the one who asked, demanded, to know that a mixed marriage could succeed. I was so sure she was going to tell me something like, “Yes, with some work and compromise, you can be happy with someone from another faith.”

Instead I got, “I don’t recommend it. People from different cultures have too much to get through.

Christian people are warmer, too. I guess because Jesus gave them such an example of love. I don’t know. Other people can be so cold. No. I don’t recommend it.”

And yet, as I got older, got to be “of marriageable age,” she reassured me of her intent that I should follow my heart. “I’ll never interfere with your choice of whom to marry. Not like your grandmother did with your Daddy and me.”

I took her at her word. And I thought about her pronouncement when I eloped with my girlfriend, an Iranian emigre. My wife. My mother was shocked, and to be fair, so was Dad. Maybe I married in secret because I knew how my grandmother had meddled, how she had ruined any chance for my parents to be happy. Or maybe it was because I remembered that quaint love ballad from the 70’s, that song by Paul Stookey.

“A man shall leave his mother, and a woman leave her home….” A song that made me wince back then every time I heard it crooning from our AM car radio. For as we know, my father didn’t choose to leave his mother, though it seems that on some level she cast him off, and my parents didn’t create a new home of their own, but instead lived in my mother’s mother’s house. And maybe it was this act of independence that not only separated me from my parents, but also determined for all of us that I could make my own decisions, including ones for the rest of my family.

Decisions about faith and culture and family. Decisions like where to bury my father. After all, he left it up to us. To me. And I made the decision. As I write this I realize that I have been at peace with that decision—with where he is now, and where I am, with him in mind but no longer by my side.

My parents gave me more than they ever knew, certainly more than they imagined when they married. Rebels they were, marrying outside of their own faith; forging ahead with a wedding that so many people were against. They created me and set me off on this sure path—a path I’ve been walking a long time without them, I realize now. Fortunately, unlike them, the person I am walking with is someone no one ever tried to keep me from marrying. I learned from their rebellion. And I learned from their mistakes, the things they couldn’t help and the help they needed but didn’t receive. In the end, maybe that was how it was meant to be. How I was meant to be. §

A

fter his death, I took possession of my father’s prayer book. Sometimes I think that if I hold it long enough and examine every fragile, thin page, it will tell me what he thought and felt as a Jew and as a man.

To my knowledge, his temple never banished him, never removed him from its rolls. He received its bulletin in the mail every week. He sent in his financial obligation yearly. He received his Rosh Hashanah tickets every fall.

As a married man, he seemed comfortable, at ease, resigned to his life and fate. I remember seeing him trudging home from work, reading his beloved Birmingham News, and falling asleep every night in his recliner. He’d complain about work like most people. He’d argue about monthly bills with my mother. He seemed to resent her spending any money on unnecessary items—like new clothes or furni-

ture. He really got angry over doctor’s bills, as if my brother and I got sick on purpose. I realized much later that his anger masked his fear—his fear of our dying. I’m only intuiting this now, for he never said that he feared our or even his own death. But after his mother finally died, he confessed to me on the way home from her funeral, in the darkness of the winding road home, that when he was a little boy, his most fervent wish was that his mother and daddy would live forever.

“I was with my daddy the night he died, in his hospital room. He asked me to stay with him that night, but I couldn’t. I was exhausted and had to go to work the next day. So I left, and so he died maybe three hours after I left. I’ll always regret not staying. But my mother lived until she was 99! That’s something!”

Yeah, something, I thought. Too bad that your wish almost came true. Too bad for all of us. I imagine, though, that he wished the same for the rest of us, though again, I never heard him say anything else about death.

Just like I never heard him say. “I love you” to my mother. I know he did love her. It’s just that he never loved her in the way she wanted him to. He never romanced her with flowers, never worshipped her like she claimed he did with his mother. He seemed to save adoration only for the woman who killed him. He took his commandment seriously. In the end, I think, he was a believer. I believe that he always believed in himself and in the life he chose to create, whether or not his choices satisfied or pleased anyone else.

On the Saturday afternoon of his wedding, he listened to the Alabama football game on his Motorola AM radio. He was nervous about the game, but relaxed about the wedding.

For him, one outcome on this day was in doubt—the other outcome? Never.

“Thank God, Alabama won,” my mother, who must have been extremely nervous, says. And

My parents gave me more than they ever knew, certainly more than they imagined when they married.

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that night, with the foreign rabbi, with his family finally agreeing to attend, he is smiling and happy, this new Jewish groom. In fact, everyone is smiling, at least in the pictures I’ve seen. Especially my grandmother. It’s as if no one had died at all—as if all had been forgiven. And who knows, maybe it had.

My Father’s Dream

A

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s I considered my dream, I first believed that it meant that we were revisiting my father’s childhood and that he was disappointed and sad that everything was gone. I thought that the structure that disappeared was an apartment house where he had once lived, the first of his family’s many residences that we would pass on this dream-journey. All of which, of course, would tempt us to enter, only to vanish when we got too close. A later thought was that this now empty field was the site where Alabama played Auburn in the two schools’ initial football game against each other back in the 1890’s. It looked like the place I’ve seen, and given our love for Alabama football, it felt right too.

But then, someone far wiser than me—someone whose brain isn’t as slow as mine to pronounce the right words in their proper order, and who has the courage to ask the right questions when they need to be asked—pointed out another possibility. The building—a very important detail—was not my father’s house where he lived, but rather the temple where he was raised. It was the temple where he had been a true Jewish boy and man. It was the place that taught him that his calling, the dream of his life, was to marry the woman he loved, be faithful to her, and raise a family with her, with as little conflict and acrimony as possible. And he tried to do this, though like most of us, he didn’t always succeed.

Still, he succeeded in one way that I’m not sure he ever realized. The Jewish man that he was— for in my heart and mind, I know him in no other way— is a man I’m trying to be. I’ve followed him all my life, but only in the last twenty years as a Jew. As a biological half-Jew for sure, but one

who honors the rituals and traditions I watched him so faithfully observe, even if he didn’t know the proper words, even when he couldn’t speak at all.

As a husband, father, teacher, scholar, and writer, I’ve dedicated my life to making our dreams come true—to ridding him finally of any doubt about who he was and what he left behind. He gave me this wisdom. He taught me how to honor what’s most important, especially when the one thing you honor most has failed to honor you, or turned her back on you.

I immerse myself in my dream again. But this time, before he leaves me to fade into that distant fog, my father turns around and meets my eye. We recognize each other fully, who we are, what we want. And when we are in the midst of this fuller knowledge of each other, my father nods at me. In that nod, I see it all clearly. I can be whatever man I choose to be, as he did.

I can listen to others and partake of their wisdom. They can have an effect on my life, but my father, I believe, has given me the wisdom and courage to hear their words and do what I want—what I must do to follow my own path. If he’s left me on the path, giving me all the wisdom he could, if I can’t see or find him anymore, I know that I’m not lost and I’m not alone. He didn’t abandon me or kill me in any way. On the contrary, he educated me to find my way, to be a good man. And a good Jew. He has helped me see that it is I who will find the structures that have been eluding me in my dreams. For, half-Jew that I am, I hold the answers to how I will be fulfilled and who I will become. They are all there, in the questions I ask, in the nature of who I am.

White Azaleas she says don’t you remember when you were having your meltdown she says it like she has just met the word she says you know when you had all the strange health issues— I say that’s not how I’d put it she is not listening

Jeanne Obbard Jeanne Obbard received a Leeway Award for Emerging Artists in 2001. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Philadelphia Stories, Anderbo, and the anthology Prompted.

she tells our family story like she’s told it before she says your sister was inexplicably happy she says everyone was a friend of hers she says that day they wanted to put on their shorts it was so warm she says fell from her bike she says hit her head she says in the hospital, they shaved off her hair to operate she says after the warm spell, the cold spring resumed she says the white azaleas always bloom then, after the cold snap she says who could believe, after that, in a caring God? she says we buried her cut hair with her

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Love Lingers on 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, 35 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.

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.

Inspiration from Anne Lamott B

est-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 ador ing 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 “Ohh-kay” when you’re angry. And give yourself 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!

Tracy Kauffman Wood

Tracy Kauffman Wood is the Creative Nonfiction Editor of the Rathalla Review. She holds an MA in Education and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Rosemont College.

She is published by womensmemoirs.com. She facilitiates a monthly Open Mic for Writers at Firinji Cafe in Ardmore and blogs at: whocanstopadream.blogspot.com

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Turkeys

Tur T Turkey Turke T Turk Turke Turkeys Tu Turk Turkeys Tur

submission guidelines R

art guidelines

athalla Review strives to publish the finest fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and art. We accept submissions on a rolling basis and there is no reading fee. Our reading periods are August through October and January through March.

• • • • •

• •

• • • •

•

the end of the three-month period.

• We publish a fall and spring online issue. You We select one Featured Artist for each issue will be notified if your work is accepted online. of Rathalla Review whose work is incorporatIn addition, your work may appear in our annual print issue, which is published in the spring. ed throughout the magazine, including on our cover.

All submissions are to be submitted through our submission manager. Please attach imagWe accept short stories or novel excerpts in es as a .JPEG, .PNG or .PDF file. Submissions All submissions should be typed, 12-point font, varying lengths up to 7,500 words. We look for should be formatted to 8.75 inches by 11.75 double-spaced with a minimum 1-inch margin. fiction that features sharp writing, carefully craft- inches to account for trim.

Please submit 3-4 pieces indicative of your DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME ON THE ed plots, and, above all, compelling characters.

Novel excerpts should be able to stand alone as a body of work for us to consider. Please include DOCUMENT. complete work. a short bio of 4-5 sentences as well. If you have Number all pages and include the title in either an online portfolio, please include the link. the header or footer.

Include your word count on the first page.

Only work submitted through our online subFind out more about submitting your work to Up to three poems may be submitted simultamission form will be considered. Submissions Rathalla Review at rathallareview.org, where neously.

Please indicate the titles in the title field. will be accepted as either a .DOC, .DOCX, .RTF, Give the titles and line counts for all poems in the you can find our most up-to-date submission or .PDF attachment.

Do not use special characters in your file- appropriate fields of the submission form. Please guidelines, our online submission form via Submittable, and links to current and previsubmit multiple poems in separate documents. name: ! @ # $ % ^ */ ous issues.

Please do not zip or compress attachments and please do not embed your submissions in the “Cover Letter” box on the form. (A nice, friendly note is okay!)

Your cover letter should NOT include any perWe accept essays or book excerpts in varysonal information.

We do not accept previously published work, in- ing lengths up to 7,500 words. We look for nonfiction that features sharp writing and careful cluding work published online.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted. Please craft. Book excerpts should be able to stand let us know immediately if your work is accept- alone as a complete work. ed elsewhere.

Please do not re-submit previously submitted material unless expressly asked to do so by the editor. We read our submissions carefully, and just because we don’t accept it doesn’t mean another publisher won’t.

We will send notice by email regarding the acceptance or rejection of your material within three months of submission. Please do not contact us regarding the status of your work before

general guidelines

fiction guidelines

poetry guidelines

creative nonfiction guidelines

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From the Editor’s Desk

39

We had another great semester. Thanks to everyone. The team made this a very easy transition for me into the Managing Editor role.

Special thanks to Gabriella Lee and Jen Murphy. Both also stepped into new roles. Gabriella took over as our Poetry Editor in her first semester here at Rosemont. Jen continued in her role as Art Editor and once again brought in a great artist, but she also became our Social Media Manager taking on Rathalla’s Tweeting, Facebooking, and blogging needs.

We had a great influx of help from Pietra Dunmore, Tori Bond, Joe Lerro, and Christina Litman who all became more deeply involved this semester, adding fresh ideas and energy.

Distinguished effort goes to Tracy Kauffman for promoting the magazine through Open Mic Nights at Firinji’s Restaurant. Tracy also organized and hosted two events at Firinji’s: she gathered Rathalla’s published writers from the fall for a reading, and she created Rathalla’s first Dinner with an Author event, where Cassandra Hirsch shared her continuing journey of publication.

Tara Smith remained as our Fiction Editor and kept our ideas grounded and realistic—a much larger feat than it sounds because our ideas are often flighty and surreal.

Feliza Casano’s above-and-beyond efforts have become common here at Rathalla, but we hope they never become overlooked. Our production manager had a number of tough deadlines before AWP and laid out a beautiful magazine. She has diligently pushed through on our second online issue, and all her work has a signature Feliza flair that we love. She has beautifully matched the layout style and design to the work of each issue’s feature artist while maintaining Rathalla’s own continuity under varying influences.

By far the biggest and most fun adventure of the semester, Rathalla attended the AWP Writers’ Conference this year. The event was fun and a huge promotional success. Our team gave away six boxes’ worth of our first print issue (five and a half in the first two days). We had several conference attendees return to our table to say how much they had enjoyed reading the magazine.

Special thanks as well to Meghan Mellinger and Samantha Plourd for just being themselves — because we certainly couldn’t.

This letter wouldn’t be complete or accurate without continued thanks to our program directors, Carla Spataro (MFA Creative Writing) and Anne Willkomm (MA Publishing). Thanks for letting me drive. Shouldn’t my steering wheel be attached to something?

Sincerely,

John McGeary

Editor, Rathalla Review rathallareview.org @RathallaReview Rosemont College MFA Program

Rathalla Review is the literary magazine of Rosemont College as a collaboration between the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in Publishing programs. rosemont.edu facebook.com/GoRosemontCollege Twitter @RosemontCollege