Issue 62: Open Hands

OPEN HANDS / 62

Spring-Summer 2022 $15

ruminate

RUMINATE IS A COMMUNITY OF CREATORS CULTIVATING AUTHENTIC SELVES, NOURISHING CONVERSATIONS, AND SUSTAINING LIFE TOGETHER THROUGH ACTION AND ART.

Ruminate Magazine is Ruminate’s print journal that invites slowing down and paying attention. We delight in laughter, deep reading, contemplative activism, telling stories, and asking questions.

We are particularly excited about sharing work from voices that aren’t often heard.

PLEASE JOIN US.

Cover Image: MATT JONES . Chickadee Series, 2022.

Digital Photography.

Ruminate Magazine is published on FSC-certified paper.

SUBMISSIONS

We welcome unsolicited fiction, nonfiction, and poetry manuscripts.

For information on our submission guidelines, please visit our website at ruminatemagazine.com.

SUBSCRIPTION RATES & SERVICES

Subscriptions are what keep our printers printing and our authors, judges, and editors paid. Please consider subscribing to Ruminate Magazine by visiting ruminatemagazine.com. If you receive a defective issue, have a problem with your subscription, or need to change your address, please email info@ruminatemagazine.org.

Library subscription services are available through EBSCO and WT Cox Subscriptions.

GENERAL INQUIRIES

We love hearing from you! Contact us at info@ruminatemagazine.org or visit us online at ruminatemagazine.com or @RuminateMag. DISTRIBUTION

Ruminate Magazine is distributed through direct distribution.

Copyright © 2022 Ruminate, Inc. All rights reserved.

masthead

EDITORS

Jess Jelsma Masterton & Cherie Nelson

FICTION EDITORS

Joe Truscello & Emily Woodworth

POETRY EDITORS

Michael Mlekoday & Hope Wabuke

NOTES EDITOR

Josh MacIvor-Andersen

PHOTOGRAPHY

Matt Jones

SENIOR READER

Amy Sawyer

ASSOCIATE READERS

Chaun Ballard, Tara Ballard, Jerome Blanco, Rebecca Doverspike, Henry Hietala, William Jones, Hanna Mahon, Michael Moening, Kelly O’Brien, & Evan Senie

friends

YOUR GENEROUS DONATIONS

allow us to keep the lights on and the fire going for the artists, writers, and readers of our community. This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous donations gave us the financial support to make this issue of Ruminate Magazine possible.

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you!

BENEFACTORS

Keira Havens, Randall VanderMey, Brianna Van Dyke, Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, Walter & Ruthanne Wangerine, & John Zeilstra

PATRONS

Mackie JV Blanton, Judith Dupree, Kelly Emslie, Kim & Steve Franchini, Kristin George Bagdanov, Diane & Tom Hitpas, Wambura Kimunyu, Scott Laumann, Amy Lowe, Carolyn Mount, Anne Pageau, Bruce Ronda, Sophfronia Scott Gregory, Lynda Smith Bugge, & Jennifer Stewart

SPONSORS

Lucia Coppola, Amanda Hitpas, Lary Kleeman, Carol Lacy, Beth Anne MacDonald, Richard Osler, Ryan Rickrode, & Paula Sayers TO BECOME A FRIEND OF Ruminate, VISIT ruminatemagazine.com/donate

contents

NOTES

Poetry Prize vi

POETRY

8

29 Cupboard Idyll, Robyn Groth

Readers’ 10

30 i send my eyes, Chris Talbott

Editor’s

Contributors’ 84 Last 88 FICTION

Pause Game, 19 Kevin Clouther Between the Fog and the River, 45 Gabriela Halas The Railing, 67 Victor Ladis Schultz NONFICTION

The Unknowable Places in Between, 33 Jason Vrabel Creatures of Ritual, 53 Jamie Hudalla

31 Hoarfrost, Merie Kirby 41 One Day We’ll Be Fossils, Bethany Bowman 42 Sacrament, Marissa Ahmadkhani 43 Call It Miraculous, Stephanie Niu 49 after the holidays at home, Maria Zoccola 50 Nocturne in Black Mother, Op. 2, Denise Miller 51 How Ravenous the Wolf, Paul T. Corrigan 59 taxonomy: bird, Caroline Harper New 61 Adjacent to Light, Bethany Swann 80 Billy Holiday on the Radio, Laurie Vaughen 81 God of the Imagination, Richard Osler 83 May Day, Heather Jessen

2021 broadside poetry prize

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

DENISE MILLER

MARIA ZOCCOLA

Nocturne in Black Mother, Op.2

after the holidays at home

HONORABLE MENTION ROBYN GROTH

Cupboard Idyll

F I NA L I STS BETHANY BOWMAN, PAUL T. CORRIGAN JOANNE DURHAM, HEATHER JESSEN RICHARD OSLER, SARAH KEY MERIE KIRBY, LARA O’CONNER STEPHANIE NIU, CHRIS TALBOTT SUSAN O’DELL UNDERWOOD, & LAURIE VAUGHEN

C O N T E ST PA N E L I STS JAMAICA BALDWIN, CHAUN BALLARD, TARA BALLARD, JANINE CERTO, MICHAEL DECHANE, KATE GASKIN, & AMY SAWYER

FINAL JUDGE HOPE WABUKE WRITES:

Nocture in Black Mother, Op. 2 “Nocturne in Black Mother, Op. 2” is an exquisitely executed poem with rich imagery in addition to strong formal and craft elements. It has depth of meaning, depth of language, crystalline forms and rhythms, and a strong volta. The imagery is stunning.

There is the ghost of the duplex form running throughout, which is also compelling.

The poem steps into an important conversation about violence against Black lives and the precariousness of Black life, about a parent’s love and anxiety about a child’s safety; indeed, about the precariousness of all life that is both specific and universal. The work done in this poem heralds the coming of a striking voice in contemporary poetry. after the holidays at home “after the holidays at home” is a wonderfully executed poem that is both narrative and imagistic. It does not falter anywhere. It reckons with ideas about family and discomfort, with the question of whether to stay or leave. This poem is deceptively quiet, but upon sitting with this poem, one sees that it is full of deep eddies of meaning that mirror the central image of the river layered throughout the text.

Cupboard Idyll “Cupboard Idyll” is a surprising and beautiful poem that does lovely things with language—the use of repetition and the playful sonic landscape of this poem are two elements of the poem that showcase the precise ear for the musicality of language that speak to Groth’s poetic talent. Indeed, “Cupboard Idyll” is reminiscent of the best of Gertrude Stein.

editor’s note

When I was a little girl, my Grandma Ruth used to tell me how to catch a monkey. She told me that monkeys were gluttonous creatures, that the way to go about catching a monkey was to play on their vices—their insatiable appetite for sweet things, their dexterous hands that can open latches.

My grandma grew up as a missionary kid in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a child, I was enamored with this part of my grandma’s past. She would show my cousins and me how to snack on the back half of a lemon-flavored ant. She would pull out the beautiful printed fabrics she used to wear, wrap them over the top of my clothes for dress-up. She would bring out old pictures, the green-yellow images of her father being carried by men from their village on some kind of litter, one where she is a baby and smiling and sitting on some kind of rock or table next to her family’s pet monkey.

I once asked Grandma Ruth how she managed to get a pet monkey. She told me about the way her father would set traps to catch them, placing a piece of fruit at the bottom of a narrow hole he had dug into the earth. She told me that the key was the size of the hole— that it needed to be wide enough that a monkey could fit its hand through to grab the fruit, but small enough that, when the monkey’s hand formed a round fist, it wouldn’t be able to get it back out again. This is because the monkey, so greedy for this forbidden fruit, would refuse to let go, stand there, hand tethered to a hole in the ground, unable to escape.

Grandma’s instruction about how to catch a monkey quickly turned into a lesson with a clear moral: When we hold tight to something that we think is delicious or good for us, it’s usually an evil that can ensnare us. Or maybe that this trap was like sin—something that seemed good and delicious but would trap me forever if I tried to hold it. A truth that I swallowed whole.

Now that I’m older, I have a problem with nearly every aspect of this story—of my once uncritical eye toward the blatant reality of my family’s work as colonizers in Africa; of assigning monkey behavior human morals; of the way my great-grandfather is treated as merely a background character, absolved from any responsibility for what happens in the story.

If I were to tell this story again, rewrite its assigned meaning without “sin,” without “wrong,” I would talk about how my great-grandfather’s monkey trap could show us that

8

holding too tightly to something prevents us from having room in our hands for anything else. This continues to ring true for me. That it is less about the things that we are holding onto, more about the tightness of our grip, our willingness to let go, hold many disparate things at once, be willing to change and adjust.

I would argue that the heart of Issue 62 is openhandedness. As with many literary magazines, we continue to change and evolve past the point where we thought we were done changing and evolving. We’ve often thought of this issue as the “everything issue,” as it contains the stories, poems, nonfiction pieces, and art that we’ve acquired—a little here, a little there—over the course of another season of shifting. All in all, we’ve tried to be open to these changes, embracing our ebbs and flows.

I am also trying to embrace openhandedness individually. This summer, I will be stepping down as editor of Ruminate. I have spent the past three years here in a variety of roles, one of which has been working to grow our online space, The Waking, into the beautiful publication it is today. I have loved all my work with Ruminate, but my time as editor of The Waking has been the dearest, most tightly held of these roles. My decision to leave has been a practice of holding my relationship with this organization loosely, of allowing the circumstances of my life to evolve and change, allowing the things within my hands to shift as well. It is good and beautiful and so difficult to say goodbye.

Being able to let go, to hold disparate ideas at the same time is such a freeing experience.

We are able to loosen our shoulders, unclench our fists, and experience the freedom that comes with accepting what is. Who knows when something even more beautiful will find its way into our palms again?

Sincerely, Cherie

9

readers’ notes ON OPEN HANDS

On the morning my family stood in line for the “Tower of Terror” at Disney World, I was faint with anemia. I had forgotten my iron pills and the screams of the riders several stories above did not soothe my too-heavy head. Inside, dust clung to light-refracting webs in the eerie still-life foyer. The patrons’ 1930’s luggage was fixed in chiaroscuro shadows. I waved my hand through dust suspended in strands of broken light. A bellhop, too hot in heavy burgundy hotel garb with a gold-striped collar, beckoned me into a cavern of wooden benches and leather seatbelts. I buckled, swaying with nausea, and entered the twilight zone.

I knew what to expect—a sudden drop of who knows how many feet. I felt my son’s knees jiggle next to mine while my husband whispered a brief history of The Twilight Zone to my daughter.

I entered the 5th dimension, my eyes barely slit to appreciate the 1930’s hotel fare, and then closed them fully, in my own zone. I ungripped the wooden seat, laid my hands loosely on my knees, and leaned back. With the first drop, a swoosh like a relieved sigh lifted my hair and cooled the back of my neck. I sat on air. The suspension tickled my belly, my childlike gurgle contrasting the screams.

Up. Catch. Lift. Hold. And I remembered how my father threw me up and caught me, warm with laughter. Suspended above his head, I trusted he would not miss. Now, at forty, life had been too heavy, beginning with my father’s death from melanoma when I was six. I longed to be thrown up from the heaviness, lingering in air, trusting open hands would catch me. In the twilight of terror, the nausea receded, lightened by an unexpected lift.

LADONNA FRIESEN, SPRINGFIELD, MO

It was more than just the twenty dollars or the gas mileage it would become, a hundred miles closer to my destination, French fries to calm a crying child as I crossed borders and postal codes. It was the look on his face, the same way I’d looked at my daughter when she’d slipped and hit her head a year earlier, when her pain became my own, when my empty wallet soon became his. Years later, I can still feel his gaze as I told him about some of my young family’s struggles, not to ask of him, but because he had asked me, “How are you all doing?” in an openbook, caretaker kind of way.

For the first time in years, here was someone asking how I was, not out of

10

habit or politeness, but because he truly wanted to know. And he was just that— someone—a man who barely knew my first name, an acquaintance who never quite made it past Mr. Parry. Yet his eyes—his bottled-up face—said that he was more than just Mr. but brother, father, family, not because of blood, but because of our shared human experience, shared ancestry dozens or perhaps hundreds of generations back. To this day, I can still see his eyes, feel his face, taste my tears as the bills left his open hands. Bills beyond monetary value.

Echoes of love that I’ll forever be paying forward.

ADAMSON WOOD, SAN DIEGO, CA

Nearly six years ago, my husband, Fred, and I dragged a king-sized mattress down the uncarpeted stairs, grunting and puffing, punctuating the struggle with a few choice words. We plopped the mattress into place in the middle of the recently cleared dining room floor, sending up a cloud of dust. There, piece by piece, we built a soft-floored fortress for eight-year-old Jack, the red-haired, flop-eared mutt with stitches along his spine. We slept with him on that floor behind a blockade of baby gates and

11

overturned chairs, opening his world little by little, first dining room, then dining and kitchen, and finally the back deck where we reveled in the sun.

Today, we sleep in shifts, switching off at midnight—bed for couch—as Jack paces and pants. He wears a diaper and struggles to rise, pulling both legs under him in a bunny hop before taking a step.

He’s deaf in his old age and losing his sight, but when he smells a treat, he snaps at my outstretched hand. I hold a palm out to signal stop, and cup the other, holding the treat beneath his nose. More carefully now, he reaches for a bite of the wet food he craves and, with it, swallows the pill hidden within. As the stream of warm water at the kitchen faucet rinses the dog food residue from my palm, I wonder how long the meds will calm the pain, how long we’ll trade positions on couch and bed, how many hours we have left, with Jack, in the sun.

KATHRYN JONES, AUSTIN, TX

Ida lives in a split-level house. Every time I arrive, while I take off my shoes on the landing between floors, the quick patter of stockinged feet rush to the gate at the top of the stairs. At a scant eighteen months, Ida understands a great deal but

readers’ notes ON OPEN HANDS

speaks in her own personal shorthand.

Even her baby sign language is idiomatic.

“Hi. Hi. Hi.” She waves enthusiastically. And then she’s gone again.

I barely have my coat off when she’s back.

“Buh. Buh,” she says and hands me a board book.

While I struggle with the gate’s latch, she plops herself on the living room rug and waits.

I dump my stuff on the cat tree and plop down beside her. I read and she turns the pages. At the end, she closes the book and turns it over.

“Do you want to read it again?” I ask.

Ida uncurls her left hand and, with the finger on her right, points to her open palm again and again. Show me more.

And we read it, again and again.

KERSTIN SCHULZ, PORTLAND, OR

Under a spreading acacia tree with sharp white thorns, its tiny leaflets collaborating to provide relieving shade, I sit on a picnic table in a small park in Alamos. I am reading a novel I chose for its length relative to its size, needing to travel lightly. Nearby, an old man in a

white hat and white shirt and white pants rakes the leaves from under the trees whose lower trunks are all painted white.

He works steadily, focused on the task at hand, and I read, and we are quiet, birds chattering in the branches above us. The birds don’t sound like the birds I was used to in Kentucky. Years before, when I said this while walking arm-in-arm with Carmelita, who taught me to make tamales in Mexico, she laughed, and said, “That’s because these are Mexican birds.

Hablan español.”

Pages turn, and I forget the man with the rake, until suddenly I realize he is standing in front of me, calloused hands out, brown dusty hands cupping something inside, waiting for me to reach out and receive what he has offered. I open my palm and he drops into it three chunky tan seeds the size of very large peas, perhaps, dry and smooth with geometric sides. His eyes are laughing, watching. And then I feel it—the seeds shifting and hopping in my hand, flipping from one side to another, all on their own, animated by the tiny larvae inside them.

AMY BOYD, SWANNANOA, NC

I stand in tree pose—right foot pressed

12

against left thigh. I inhale as I raise my open hands above my head. Memories of my mother blossom in this pose. She was a literal hugger of trees. As a child, I watched her throw her arms around the obliging trunks of aspen, oak, and maple as her face radiated pure delight for their wild yet serene beauty. As her seedling, I followed her exuberant example, wrapping my short arms around scrappy lodgepole pines and the spindly crabapple tree in our front lawn. Later, as her grumpy sapling, I rolled my eyes in mortification and pretended not to know her. Now, as her grown daughter, I silently thank her for teaching me to embrace the furrowed tower of a giant red sequoia as I stand in tree pose, raise my hands above my head, and remember her arms around me.

ANNELI MATHESON, CHATTANOOGA, TN

instead. Overnight, I learned the art of nongrasping, not because I was some Buddha, but because everything—my health and fertility, my ability to care for my daughter and husband, and my ability to work—was ripped from my hands.

I was left with an invalid’s body. Over the course of a year, I was hospitalized multiple times, faced three lifesaving surgeries, and learned to walk again. And in that dark night of my soul, I learned it wasn’t nongrasping that would save me.

It was—quite literally—what I would cling to next. We do not have within us what is required to face suffering, and we cannot eradicate it with well-wishing and nongrasping. But we do have a God that loves us and has a purpose in our suffering. For me, my broken hands were forced open so I could learn to grasp the hands that set the world in motion.

KIMBERLY PHINNEY, LAND O’ LAKES, FL

In 2021, I learned about the Buddhist belief of nongrasping in a hospital bed fighting for my life. I also found there was something more. At just thirty-eight, I was battling sepsis and post-surgical complications. The doctor’s cut that was meant to save me from a cancer-like autoimmune disease nearly took my life

13

Kissing Don’s forehead, I woke him for our wedding. His hospice nurse adjusted his pain medication through his IV. She had allowed him enough so he could savor our nuptials, but not enough to induce him to miss it.

While the drugs dulled Don’s suffering,

readers’ notes ON OPEN HANDS

his therapist entered. She placed a flat metal box and a piece of stiff white artist’s paper on his hospital tray. It seemed like an unusual occasion for arts and crafts.

“I want to make you a gift, but I need your help,” she said.

She opened the tin filled with crimson ink and took my palm. Spreading my fingers open, she arranged my left thumb in the blood-red wetness. The same thumb with which I rubbed circles on Don’s open palm until his nerve pain rendered it unbearable. Then, she lifted my painted thumb, pressing it at an angle in the center of the ivory. Afterward, she uncurled Don’s wrenched fingers, guiding his right thumb onto the paper opposite mine, creating a simple thumbprint heart.

Our unique swirled ridges flowed as one in the middle, yet each print pointed outward in different directions. As love sometimes does.

Once our masterpiece dried, she framed it and placed it in my grip. The one dyed with devotion.

“To commemorate this day,” she said.

As if I could forget.

I laid my palm on top of Don’s, carefully maneuvering each finger between his curved digits.

“Look what we made.”

Gazing at the flaming whorls, he smiled, as much as his disease allowed. A few minutes later, when his eyes fluttered and his breath deepened, I peeled my hand from his. Red had bled another painted heart onto the hospital linens, leaving a permanent mark. We’d have to wait until he woke to get married.

KATE CONNORS MARTIN, HOLLY RIDGE, NC

Loss after loss. Change upon change.

Where was life heading? I didn’t know and was too tired to do much about it.

I stood in the gray and white kitchen in my socks, fingers deep in mixing dough, eavesdropping as my two-month-old, green-eyed niece cooed at my sister and her husband across the hall in the nursery where children’s books lined the walls. I was particularly looking forward to reading Corduroy with her one day.

The flicker grew steadier inside me. I didn’t know it could happen like this.

The baby’s gurgles rose and fell like a tiny bird’s song. My niece always lifted her hands when she was on her back, letting them float in the air like little wings. I stood still with my sticky fingers, listening to my sister and brother-in-law

14

be parents in the next room—echoing the baby’s coos, laughing at her silly faces, consulting with each other through the diaper change.

I hadn’t known that I didn’t have to wait to feel joy. Quietly, suddenly. Like a wave swelling in my chest. I smiled; no one saw. I was airborne.

MIRIAM RIAD, MEDFORD, MA

The circular image of my right eyeball filled the ophthalmologist’s screen. He used his pen to point to the bottom of the screen where my retina lay. It should have lain flat like a blanket over the back of my eye, but that protective blanket had begun lifting off one side. My retina had begun to detach. If it progressed any further, my macula would be affected, and I would lose my vision in that eye. The facts were undeniable. I needed surgery.

Immediately.

So, I accepted help. From everyone.

From my mother-in-law, who picked me up, and the ophthalmologist, who called the retina specialist, who got me in that day and performed the surgery the next.

From receptionists, who took the call, and all our subsequent calls and the nurses, who came darn close to crying with me, and the anesthesiologist and

15

the insurance people and my kids, who looked at the top of their mom’s head while she remained face down for ten days. From my friends, who brought me flowers and good cheer and my family, who brought me the best food. From my dear husband, who did EVERYTHING for me. I willingly received it all.

The part I approached with clenched fists came afterwards. After the ten days, when the doctor told me my retina was once again flat, and I could resume normal activity. My vision was still impaired. I was still taking drops to dilate my pupils. I couldn’t drive or work because I couldn’t focus. For a few days, I did a whole lot of not much. Then, I realized I could encourage other people. I could write. I opened my hands to receive the present.

AMY NICHOLSON, NORTHFIELD, CT

With a line and a hook, I fish a crab out of stones. I lift his ten thrashing limbs out of the water, over the waves, into the air, and onto the dock. The cutting board is filled with scales from other fishy feasts.

This fellow’s shell is too small to crack; it contains too little meat. Swiftly scuttling sideways across the board, toward the edge to water, the crustacean’s crawl is

readers’ notes ON OPEN HANDS

cut short by my see-through string. If only it weren’t there, but wishing won’t make it so. I could cut the cord and leave the steel, or cut the lure and leave the barb. But my true task is clear; it’s best to pull the whole thing out without getting pinched by pincers. How to draw it out without pulling off the claw?

After minutes of painful prying, I cry for help. My once-nurse mother, used to sewing me up, has a try at removing the monofilament and is stymied. I know that look. Down. I know that sigh. Out. I know what it means when those hands slowly turn over and come to rest on certain points of the palms, below the thumb, above the wrist, the fingers poised, as if to play piano but limp without music, the index slightly higher than its three neighbors, as if to say I told you so. But worst of all, she says nothing. There’s that silence.

Two eye stalks twitch and sway in this breath-held pause. One claw grabs the hollow-eyed trap in the other and, with three quick twists, faster than a blink or a gasp, removes the snare and launches into thin air. We stare at the ripples, wondering about intelligence.

JOHN PAUL CAPONIGRO, CUSHING, ME

Talk to strangers on the bus, on the street, in the coffee shop—you never know who you will meet. My grandmother married a stranger, left her mother, the Al-Uzair date palms by the Tigris River and the tomb of the holy sage, who protected her.

Baghdad is what happens when you talk to a stranger. A mother-in-law who is a stranger also happens. You can cook all your tears in bamya stew—no one will know the difference, as long as you add lamb, pickled lemons, and rice, cook it long enough to soften hearts for the meal, at least.

When you marry a stranger, you end up talking to the stove, to the blue kettle that whistles back, to the oven. You may as well fire up the laham meshwi kababs on citrus wood, let the smoke rise, bittersweet, let the alarm shriek. Where does it take you, such words? You eat them all.

Always take care of your hands. When you speak to a stranger, hold them out and open so they know where you stand, so they can see the burns, the cuts, and just how sore you wear your world. So they know not to add salt to your wounds.

My grandmother had the strongest hands.

16

She held them out to the burning hot tray of pita bread she retrieved without gloves. Gloves are for those who have something to hide.

Talk to the stranger, bare your left hand, let the stranger say they are a Kabbalist, let them read what they want, let them know your heart is not really yours, that you carry archival memory abandoned and buried in the tomb by the Tigris. My grandmother knew—what do we have in this strange world but open hands to bless in the dark?

SARAH SASSOON, JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

When I feel discouraged, like I’ve accomplished nothing in life; when I am unshowered, my house unkempt and my kids out of control; when I feel lost, don’t know who I am, and feel that I have nothing to show for my years on this earth—I can look at my hands. These hands have cared deeply for others, wiped tears from faces, written encouraging notes to people in need, and cooked meals for new moms.

They’ve held the hands of those in need of guidance and been placed on those in need of prayer. These hands have served unconditionally, have washed

17

more dishes than I care to count after cooking more meals than I can imagine.

They’ve folded loads and loads and loads of laundry, washed hair, wiped unmentionables, and scrubbed the dirt from fingers. They’ve done all this for others. These hands have also played, built sandcastles, guided unwieldy new riders on tricycles, scooters, and bicycles.

They’ve caught and thrown. They’ve Barbie’d, Hotwheel’d, baby dolled. They have made puzzles, drawn houses, people, and cats. They’ve created entire imaginary worlds for others to live in.

These hands have learned. They have learned piano, flute, and piccolo. They have learned how to form the perfect cookie: not too big, not too small. They have learned to braid, ponytail, brush.

They have learned to comfort a newborn, toddler, child. These hands have taught.

They have taught tiny hands to grasp, to draw circles, form letters, read words.

They have taught to measure, to mix, to wait. They have taught to love, to serve, to just be. When you think you have done nothing of worth, look down and think of all your hands have done.

ONDI MEJIA, CHICO, CA

18

KEVI N C L OU TH E R

Pause Game

J

IM’S ADDICTION CAME GENTLY. He’d expected theatrics, all-night benders and mornings in the gutter, but he never even threw up. First, he took a pill once a week. Then every day. Then every four hours.

Nobody noticed, or if they did, they didn’t say anything to Jim. Maybe people didn’t pay close attention to him. People had their own problems. Or maybe he did a good job of hiding. He felt different—better, to be honest. But he knew this wasn’t the sort of thing to be honest about because then people worried. He didn’t want anyone to worry, especially Beth.

Just this morning she’d sat at the kitchen table with her coffee and said that it was over. He didn’t ask what it was, and she didn’t volunteer. The pill was just kicking in, which felt like someone sharing good news, and here was his wife sharing actual good news. I’m glad it’s over was all he said.

There was, he thought, a dignity to that.

She let him take her hand and tried to smile. She said she had to get ready for work, and when she let go of his hand, he looked out the window to the backyard, where squirrels were tackling the bird feeder. It was the reason Beth hated the bird feeder.

He lowered the shades. He would finally take care of it after she left for work.

The kids were in the living room, zombified on their devices. He told them it was time to get ready for school, but they didn’t hear—or pretended not to hear—from beneath their padded headphones, blue for Brian and pink for Alice. Were the colors of these headphones sexist? He considered making the kids trade headphones. In Beth’s college days, she’d said you were either part of the problem or part of the solution. Years later, in Beth’s marketing days, she pitched part of the solution to a client who represented laundry detergent. The client wanted to know what the other part of the solution was.

You couldn’t worry about everything. At least, Jim couldn’t. There were three hours before he’d let himself take another pill. Sometimes, in the first hour, he worried that nothing would happen, but something always did. The second hour was best. It was the last two hours that were tough, especially when he had nowhere to be, but he was unwilling to take a pill every two hours.

After a while, Alice took off her headphones. She punched Brian and told him to take off his headphones too. He delivered a wounded look not to Alice but to Jim, who realized he hadn’t moved from the kitchen table since Beth left. He told the kids to brush their teeth. He played a podcast and started making lunches.

19

Beth walked down the stairs as the kids were going up them. “I don’t know why you listen to that,” she said.

“I don’t really listen.”

“Don’t forget to pack napkins.”

“The kids count on my forgetting.”

“You don’t have to give them candy every day, either.”

Jim liked to give them candy. It was a simple thing, and it made them happy. He was aware of the limitations on his ability to make people happy.

Beth kissed him goodbye. Her hair smelled so good. It was an honor to live on a planet where such a scent existed.

“How late tonight?” he asked.

“I’ll let you know.”

“It’s totally over?”

She nodded, looking sad. It was his turn to try to smile. He was, after all, happy.

He pulled on Alice’s socks and shoes. She was old enough to do this herself—she did with Beth—but putting on Alice’s shoes was another way to make Alice happy.

When he was happy and the kids were happy, he could focus on Beth. Her happiness was most elusive.

On the way to school, Brian walked a step behind Jim and Alice. Brian talked to himself but not in a way that actively worried Jim. Mostly, Brian talked about video games, how to defeat this person and not be defeated by that person, though he didn’t talk about people. He used a vocabulary that seemed to Jim deliberately inscrutable.

Even words he recognized, like boss, had completely different definitions.

“Do we have to go to school today?” Alice asked.

“Yes,” Jim said.

She asked this question every day, including weekend days. She had a strippeddown understanding of time, where tomorrow represented all of the future and yesterday all of the past.

“I hate school,” she said.

“You like school when you get there,” he said.

This wasn’t exactly true. Alice liked art. She liked her friends, except when she didn’t, which he could appreciate. Who likes their friends all the time?

“I like school,” Brian said.

“That’s good, buddy,” Jim said.

“Did you like school when you were a kid?”

“Sometimes.”

“I hate school,” Alice reminded them.

A light wind moved through the leaves, which were green but thinking about turning. It was unseasonably cool, if you factored in climate change. There were a few

20

weeks, or at least a few days, when the neighborhood became a different place. The colors were so vivid then, the air so dry and breathable, that you wanted to do nothing but consume it. People stumbled down the sidewalk, startled by their good fortune.

The leaves and air now were a trailer for that movie.

Jim said, “What if we—” “Skip school!” Alice screamed.

“We can’t skip school,” Brian said.

“Dad didn’t say we couldn’t.”

“Your brother is right.”

He liked to time the first pill so he felt the full rush just as he had the day to himself.

Alice stomped ahead, and Jim forgot what he was going to say. It didn’t matter. He made a point to enjoy the breeze, which lifted the hair off Alice’s shoulders. Her hair was a reddish brown that didn’t have anything to do with his hair or Beth’s. It was one of many factors that had convinced him she was an alien.

Not that he loved her less for this. He may have loved her more. He was embarrassed by how much he loved Alice. It wasn’t that he loved her more than Brian, who was objectively the better child. She’d cast a sort of spell on him. She seemed vaguely aware of her powers. He feared the ways she would exploit these powers as she got older.

No point worrying over that now, though. They were nearly at the elementary school. Already he could see kids clustered around the heavy locked door. Soon, the gym teacher would open that door. The kids revered Mr. Morehead, who’d established a private form of communication with them, elaborate handshakes and arm gestures.

It was, truthfully, a little annoying. Jim wondered how common these types were.

Certainly, nobody like Mr. Morehead had existed when Jim was in school.

He said, “What do you kids think of Mr. Morehead?”

“He’s nice,” Alice said.

“He’s funny,” Brian said.

“He’s strong too.”

The pill was reaching—had perhaps arrived at—its peak. He liked to time the first pill so he felt the full rush just as he had the day to himself. Some days, he scarcely remembered handing Brian and Alice off to Mr. Morehead.

21

That wasn’t ideal, but who doesn’t find himself walking through life sometimes? If anything, Jim found himself doing less of that. It wasn’t unusual for him to pause to register the world, as he’d paused to register the breeze, which was gone now, which made his registering it in the moment that much more important.

“Hi Alice,” a girl shrieked.

“Hi,” Alice said coolly.

“How come your dad always walks you?”

“Because he’s my dad.”

Brian looked to Jim to see if he wanted to add anything. He didn’t. He admired his daughter’s concision. He leaned against one of the beautiful old maples that announced the arrival of the elementary school.

To look closely at the bark, as he had after the heavy doors closed one day, was to observe ants advancing in defiance of gravity. Between cars passing, he could hear birds disagreeing in the branches. Once, an army of robins chased a hawk away from a nest. At least, that’s what Jim thought happened. He still wasn’t sure about the birds here, which seemed less remarkable than the birds he’d grown up with in Florida, the indefatigable gulls and ungainly cranes.

Mr. Morehead was quick this morning. A curt wave and the sidewalk was empty.

The parents, mostly moms, dispersed. Nobody talked to anybody else. Everyone was already frowning at a phone.

He felt fortunate, blessed really, to have a wife and children, to live in a famous city, to get coffee—or not—on a morning slightly colder than most.

Usually, Jim got coffee, but he didn’t feel tired. He felt wide awake. He began walking, not sure where he’d go next. He found the uncertainty exciting. He wanted to share this excitement, though it wasn’t something Beth would be receptive to. He called his friend Nick, but when he picked up, Jim discovered he didn’t know what to say.

“Is everything okay?” Nick asked. “It’s early to be calling.”

“Everything’s okay,” Jim said.

“What do I hear?”

“Sorry, I’m walking.”

22

“But everything’s okay.”

Jim nodded, which of course Nick couldn’t see. He was a good man. Increasingly, and to Jim’s disappointment and surprise, Nick was defined not by the courage of his youth but the persistence of his bad choices. Jim realized he’d called Nick, not to share anything, but to hear about Nick’s problems. He wasted little time playing his part.

“Something bad happened,” Nick said.

“Tell me,” Jim said, quickening his pace.

Everyone knew someone like Nick, whose precocity didn’t blossom into success.

People like that, Jim thought, endure life’s indignities less easily. Nick had long ago given up on conquering life. He’d settled for surviving it. Jim could relate, and he couldn’t. He’d never expected to conquer anything, but he didn’t see his life as settling.

He felt fortunate, blessed really, to have a wife and children, to live in a famous city, to get coffee—or not—on a morning slightly colder than most.

“She ended up coming,” Nick said.

She was Andrea, his ex-girlfriend, someone Jim had known well once and now didn’t know at all.

“That’s what you wanted,” Jim reminded Nick.

“I wanted her to stay,” he said. “She left before she even arrived.”

Jim waited for Nick to clarify, but it was taking a long time. “Where did she go?”

Jim asked.

“I don’t know,” Nick said.

Jim considered losing his wife, not emotionally but physically. What if she just didn’t come home from work one day? What if she disappeared while they were running an errand, wandered into a different aisle of the grocery store, never to be seen again? People fantasized about doing that. Jim wasn’t one of those people. He wanted things to stay the way they were.

“Did you look for her?” Jim asked.

“I’m looking now.”

“Did you check the beach?”

“I’ve been checking everywhere,” Nick said. “She won’t answer her phone.”

“Give me her number.”

Their conversation and Jim’s walking had synced, so when the line went silent, Jim stopped. A squirrel stopped at the same moment and eyed him suspiciously. But I’m one of the good guys, Jim thought.

“What are you going to do with her number?” Nick asked.

“Call her,” Jim said.

Nick delivered the number straight to Jim’s contacts, a simple maneuver that, nevertheless, looked to Jim like magic. All he had to do was press a button, so he did.

Andrea’s line went straight to voicemail.

23

“This is Jim. From high school. Nick’s friend. He told me you’re back in Florida.”

Jim realized he’d said all he had to say. “I was thinking of you. On account of Nick. It’s been a long time. Too long. I hope you’re okay.”

Jim stared at the phone. It was all true, yet it sounded idiotic.

He pulled earbuds from his pocket and returned to the podcast. Thirty seconds in, he realized Beth was right—the podcast was inane. It gave Jim the impression of having learned something without teaching him anything. He plucked the earbuds from his head and hurried to the apartment.

There, he was confronted with the enormity of what he didn’t have to do. He went straight to the backyard, a tiny square boxed in by other buildings. The bird feeder swayed from a low branch. He looked for squirrels. He wouldn’t hurt an animal, unless you counted mice. Although he’d started with humane traps, he discovered he didn’t know where to release mice in the middle of the city. After freeing one in the park down the street, he’d moved to traps that disguised their function. They looked like nothing so much as little black coffins. The problem was he still had to open the traps to remove the mouse. He dropped mice—petrified, legs extended, necks professionally snapped—directly into the garbage. No noise, no blood. He must have killed twenty in the last month, but they kept coming. They’d taken up residence in the walls of his ancient, expensive brownstone.

Squirrels were bigger, more public. He didn’t think he could kill a squirrel. He lowered the bird feeder from the branch. He couldn’t leave the bird feeder inside the house. No matter how careful he was, the bird feeder would leak seeds, encouragement for the mice. So he took it to the trash barrel outside, where he encountered his neighbor, who was bringing out his own trash.

“You’re not getting rid of that,” he accused.

Jim didn’t think he should have to defend himself. He stood with the bird feeder in hand, as frozen as the mouse.

“It stopped working,” Jim decided.

“I can see the bird feeder from my kitchen window,” his neighbor said. “It works fine.”

“Except for the squirrels.”

“The fact is I like watching that bird feeder.”

Jim looked at the bird feeder, which was half full and lightly coated with white shit.

“You want it?” he asked.

“I’ll take it,” his neighbor said reluctantly, as if doing Jim a favor.

He lowered the bird feeder beside the trash barrel and turned toward his apartment.

“You mind helping me hang it?” his neighbor asked. “My shoulder.”

Jim had never been inside his neighbor’s apartment, which was filled with empty wine bottles.

24

“Big night?” Jim asked.

“Those are instruments,” his neighbor said. “See how they’re different shapes?”

Jim didn’t see how empty wine bottles could be anything but empty wine bottles.

The bird feeder leaked seeds onto the hardwood floors. It was the sort of floor Beth coveted. Their floors were carpeted, a condition she attempted to disguise through enormous rugs that billowed and curled.

His neighbor led Jim into the kitchen, which had tiles from a different decade, perhaps a different universe. Jim found himself studying the pattern on these tiles, as if in search of the answer to a question he hadn’t asked. The pill was waning. He wondered how long it would take to hang the bird feeder.

“Look.” His neighbor pointed to the window.

Jim was surprised by how visible his backyard was from this window. He could see everything: the wrought iron table and four chairs, the ridiculous fancy grill, the unwatered flowers.

He wondered how many pills he could take without his neighbor’s noticing. One pill, for sure. Nobody would miss one.

“Where do you want the bird feeder?” he asked.

“There’s no obvious place.”

“I can just leave it here until you decide.”

“My shoulder.”

It was then that Jim realized his neighbor didn’t have a backyard. Jim lowered the bird feeder onto the floor. He leaned against the kitchen counter.

“You mind if I use the bathroom?” he asked.

The bathroom smelled like extinguished candles. Jim splashed water onto his face and looked in the mirror, where his reflection refused to conform to the picture he carried in his mind. His reflection was thirty-nine, but he remained seventeen, the year he turned into himself.

When he noticed the prescription bottle on the sink, he opened the lid without thinking. The pills were white and thick. They were good pills, rarely prescribed anymore. Maybe his neighbor really did have a bad shoulder. Or maybe he had a connection. Jim used to have one. He wondered how many pills he could take without

25

his neighbor’s noticing. One pill, for sure. Nobody would miss one. But could he take two pills, three pills, more? He emptied the pills into his palm and counted. He pushed five pills deep into his pocket, beneath his keys.

At home, Jim stored his pills in an emptied prescription bottle for antibiotics. It was a hard thing to explain. People had ideas about why other people used pills. For Jim, it was simple: they helped him get through the day the same as other drugs he ingested daily, like caffeine and allergy medicine.

It was true that he didn’t ask for the five pills, but didn’t he deserve payment not only for the bird feeder, which was in excellent condition, and the seed, which was a pain to bring back from the store, but also his labor? He made sure the bottle was where he’d found it. He flushed the toilet, though he hadn’t used it, and washed his hands.

He didn’t think there would be a great American opioid novel. It was addiction in a minor key.

“Okay,” Jim said, opening the door, “let’s hang this thing.”

His neighbor looked disappointed or maybe angry. He slumped into the kitchen chair, and for a moment, Jim worried his neighbor knew about the stolen pills.

“Maybe I just like the way it looks in your backyard,” he said.

“If it weren’t for the squirrels—” “It’s your wife, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Jim asked, though he understood what his neighbor meant.

“She wears the pants.”

“We both wear pants.”

He nodded, but Jim could tell his neighbor wasn’t convinced. Jim didn’t think it was his job to convince his neighbor. They both looked at the bird feeder forlornly.

“Maybe you should take it back,” his neighbor said. “In case you change your mind.”

“I’m not going to change my mind.”

“In case your wife changes her mind.”

“I’m going to leave it for the trash men.”

Gently, like it was something that might easily shatter, his neighbor placed his head into his hands.

Jim joined him at the table. “This isn’t about the bird feeder,” he said.

26

“Sometimes I feel like I’m going to explode.”

Jim felt for the pills in his pocket. He’d be gone soon, and he’d never have to visit his neighbor’s apartment again.

“Look,” Jim started.

“This is so embarrassing.”

“I can leave if you want to be alone.”

“Please, don’t.”

Jim thought gloomily of his empty apartment. He thought, specifically, about putting two pieces of bread in the toaster and how sometimes he got distracted, so when he went to spread the peanut butter, the bread was sort of hard but not so hard he could justify throwing it out and starting over.

He felt his phone vibrating. “Excuse me,” he said.

“Is this Jim?” Andrea’s voice sounded exactly the same as he remembered. “Jim, I’m returning your call.”

“This is Jim.” “I can’t believe it’s you.”

His neighbor raised his head. Jim placed a single finger before his lips as he did when silencing his kids. The gesture worked on his neighbor too. He watched Jim with interest.

“You’re calling about Nick,” Andrea continued. “Obviously.”

“He says he can’t find you.”

“That’s because I’m hiding.”

Jim refused to let himself think about the next pill. He tried to concentrate. He knew something was expected of him, but he couldn’t determine what. The pleasant blurriness of his thoughts was becoming less pleasant. He felt newly impatient. He didn’t think there would be a great American opioid novel. It was addiction in a minor key.

“Don’t you want to see him?” Jim asked.

“Of course I want to see him. That’s not the point.”

That Andrea was saying something Jim was sure, but he couldn’t determine what.

He stood, only to lean against the table. When it was his turn to speak, he heard himself apologizing.

“Are you okay?” Andrea asked.

Jim understood the question, but he couldn’t imagine how to answer. He realized the tile was sprinkled with seed. Mice would be out soon.

“Are you okay?” This time it was his neighbor.

Jim experienced the concern as a gift Andrea and his neighbor were offering, even as he felt undeserving. He wanted to say the right thing to Andrea, to hang the bird feeder in the right place. He felt capable of these things.

27

Jim lifted the bird feeder with his left hand. He still had the phone in his right hand.

Andrea was talking, and so was his neighbor. They wanted to make sure Jim was okay, but how could he possibly be okay?

When he looked out the window, he didn’t see his backyard. He only saw sky, white and getting whiter. Was it really going to snow? He’d walked his kids to school without a jacket. The trees were still full of birds.

He tried to open the window, but it was locked. His neighbor got up from the table.

Jim worked on the latch.

“Hold on,” he said to his neighbor or Andrea. “I think I’m close.”

Andrea had hung up. His neighbor had left the kitchen. In the other room, he was whispering to someone on the phone.

When the window finally opened, Jim stepped back. The air was even colder than he’d expected. He consumed it greedily.

“Sorry I wasn’t more helpful,” Jim said, “but the birds should be able to get to the bird feeder now. If they don’t, the mice will.”

He gave the bird feeder a little tap with his foot, and it spilled more seeds. His neighbor didn’t look sad anymore. More like frightened. Jim deposited one of the pills into his mouth as soon as he was out the door.

It really was cold outside! Scientists talked about climate change instead of global warming for a reason. Climate change wasn’t just about the world’s getting hotter. It was about unpredictability. The world was getting more unpredictable every day.

Jim figured it would take a good fifteen minutes before he felt the pill. It might be stronger than what he was used to. Or weaker. There was only one way to find out.

He walked purposefully past his apartment and toward the coffee shop. Caffeine had a way of sharpening his thoughts.

He thought: What if his neighbor told Beth about the bird feeder? What if he really did find out about the pills? What if she did?

Nothing, he decided, could be done about that. A bird swept out of a tree and onto the sidewalk before him. The bird picked at a hamburger wrapper and then a cigarette butt. We’re all just animals doing what we can to survive.

28

ROBYN G R OTH

Cupboard Idyll The light comes in and out, dishes come in and out, the salt never runs out. The plates all in a stack, the glasses piggyback, mugs back-to-back, bowls in a stack. The shelves always refill. We open the door.

We open and shut the door. The light comes in and out, and dishes (in and out), where time never runs out. The plates and bowls are stacked, the glasses piggyback, the mugs go out, the mugs come back.

And each mug holds some space. The door is open. The door is open, then shut.

The light comes in. The light goes out.

29

CHRIS TALBOTT

i send my eyes i send my eyes into the cracks in bark, swallowing the darkness, my ears into the bells of flowers, to hear their colors clearly, my nose into the earth, constantly scenting the freshness of death, the dearth of any other smell; the tongue into the air, for the taste of thin-tanged strings of cause & effect, strings held taut between the pegs of past & the tuning turns of future, & touch, the springs of woven electrons, the sensor-skin, i turn endlessly in, to hold mind itself like a newborn, in fear of first breath

30

MERI E KI R B Y

Hoarfrost we were water vapor, formed at night, we hung in air, drawn down in the dark to frigid branches, withered leaves, bitter texture of chain-link fence, all so cold that touching branch, leaf, fence, transfixed and transformed us, first the ones that touched, then the ones they touched, and so on into long stiff crystal pillars each changed molecule grasping another until the last one transformed was left reaching, no one willing to clasp hands, everyone else holding back, slowly dissipating, while we brief quills remained

31

32

JASON VR A B E L

The Unknowable Places in Between

L

IVING D O GS CHASE their tails; dead ones are chased by them. Or so it seemed to me, but it might’ve been reversed in my side-view mirror. Either way, I was too busy controlling my skid off the side of the road.

Traveling through Virginia in a rented Ford Escape, my family stopped in the parking lot of an abandoned upholstery shop. At one time the lone business on this stretch of Route 1, its windows were permanently opened by gunplay; its pitched roof, also victimized by some five-cent fun, sagged in the middle and shed shingles into a heap on the ground. A faded sign in the window beckoned: Come in! We’re open!

A dead dog was in the road.

My wife, Heather, silenced our iPod. I had chosen the music; she wouldn’t have opted for Vic Chesnutt and certainly didn’t want to hear him now. Chesnutt’s voice lingered, fading out behind an Olivia DVD playing in the backseat.

Our two-year-old daughter was enjoying her first car trip with a portable DVD player in her lap. She didn’t know what a car hitting a dog at 60 mph sounded like— new to me, too—and was sitting too low to see it. For her, there was no dead dog in the road or, for that matter, parents in the front seat. Only a pig playing soccer. Heather and I exchanged glances. Unsure of what hers conveyed, I opened the car door.

The dog was where I last saw it in my mirror, but no longer spinning like a curling stone between the white stripes of a four-lane divided highway. The northbound dashes turned into a continuous line, wavering in the rising vapor. Southbound, where the road tapered to a point, cars were approaching.

Not yet midday, the soft Virginia asphalt scorched my bare feet. Hours earlier, we’d sat in a notorious I-95 traffic jam: engines off, motorists gathered along the guardrail, stretching, joints cracking, asking each other, “Any idea what happened?”

Construction, of course, or maybe an accident.

Blurry, never-ending highways become observable places when stopped on long enough—birds singing from trees, tractors chugging in the distance, people waiting for something to happen. A full roadside inventory only takes a few minutes, much of which—half of a shredded tire, unusual wildflowers, Pepsi bottles filled with piss—is easy to explain, but other items less so. Did this tiny stuffed giraffe slip from a tiny hand while windsurfing through the rear window, or was it thrown by an irate parent?

Did this women’s dress shoe fly out the passenger side window from her dangling foot, or did something else happen out here? A cheer erupts, brake lights glow, engines restart.

33

When we came to another standstill, I’d already taken my shoes off when I said, “Honest to god, I’m taking the next exit and I don’t give a fuck where it goes.” That’s how, after seven hours in a car with a toddler and five more to go, I ended up running north in the southbound lane of Route 1, barefoot.

The dog’s rib cage seemed to expand and contract as I neared, but the lines in the road also seemed to be moving—illusions caused by the wavering heat, I reasoned.

The oncoming cars were harder to explain away.

I liked dogs and dogs liked me, but I’d never had a chance to care for one of my own; thus, I had no plan for this one. To the drivers of the advancing cars, a man kneeling over a dead dog might’ve looked like nothing more than a cardboard box to be skirted at high speed. Pick up dead dog and carry to side of road. Finally, a plan.

Had the ensuing moments gone according to this plan, I don’t know what would have happened next. I probably would have returned to our car, driven until we acquired a phone signal, and called 911. Then, after a few days of sun and waves and oysters, I could forget the whole thing.

As I kneeled next to the beagle-like mutt, feeling energy traveling through the road ahead of the cars upon it, she whipped her head around as if I had snuck up on her napping. She didn’t bare her teeth or pull back her ears or make a sound, but stared into my eyes before launching into the exact wrong direction—towards the median, bounding unevenly—while I scrambled in a better one. A column of twenty cars roared by without slowing, while horns blared from the other side of the median.

Beyond the quiet and bloody road, the dog hobbled along a fence at the tree line with her rear leg tucked up beneath her. I rushed back to our car.

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, a week after getting my driver’s license, I drove to a

friend’s house on a summer night. Turning onto his dark street, my headlights lit up a rabbit like a camera flash before it disappeared under my wheel. I felt it, barely. I found it alive with a crushed back half, wide and flat like a cartoon. I went heavy on Derek’s doorbell; its clang drowned out the chime from the open door of my Ford Taurus parked on the side of the road.

We stood over the still-breathing rabbit. “What do we do?” I asked, hearing the quaver in my voice. Derek was contemplative, as if there were options. “I think we need to kill it,” I said. Derek had already reached that conclusion; for him, it was only a matter of how.

The overhead lights in his garage flickered on, and I surveyed his family’s array of garden tools, some rusty and others new: spade shovels with long and short handles, coal shovels, snow shovels, hoes, rakes, an edger, and a pitchfork. The tines of the latter looked sharp and precise, and wouldn’t require swinging, or, if aimed properly, multiple blows.

34

“YOU OKAY?” Heather asked when I returned to the car. No time had passed in my

daughter’s world.

“Fine,” I said as my new plan took shape. “Give me five minutes,” I added, grabbing my shoes. I crossed the pavement, the grassy median, more pavement, and a sagging section of wire fence near where I last saw the dog. Shrubs and saplings grew underneath the tree canopy beyond it. I trudged through woods, only to find more woods, maybe endless woods—the kind of woods where a wounded dog that doesn’t want to be found won’t be.

But they came to an end. I’d never been in a trailer park before. There were pickedover cars, junk appliances, and homes that weren’t quite houses up on blocks, all of which I rendered quaint—like a private community of weekend getaway cabins— because I needed to. A woman stepped from an idling car. “Excuse me, ma’am?” She told me the folks in the blue house had a dog like the one I’d described.

My heart swelled seeing her run, even if on three legs, with blood smeared on her side.

I found two white trailers and a yellow one before coming upon a teal one that passed for bluish. I knocked and the door opened instantly, as if I’d been expected. A woman holding a baby was quickly joined by three more kids under ten. Seeing that she was younger than me, a newish father of one, left me speechless and also scared, not of her, but of being the guy who might have killed these kids’ dog—of being the stranger who would send them fanning out across the encampment until one of them found bloody paw prints and called for the others.

“I hit a dog on the highway. It ran this way,” I told her. “A lady said it might be yours.”

The woman held back a teenaged son who had suddenly appeared and tried to maneuver around her. “Mabel’s here with us,” the boy said defiantly. I couldn’t pinpoint the threat, but it was there. I told them I was happy to hear that, and apologized for the bother, to which the woman said, “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but get off my porch and don’t come back,” and slammed the door.

The dog had to be around there somewhere, but I’d done all I could. Then I saw another blue trailer.

How long had I been gone? Twenty minutes? Longer? Panic set in, knowing Heather had been watching the clock tick, minute by minute. How long should she wait for

35

me? And, with a child in the backseat, what then? How far away was help, or a phone signal? Twenty miles? Farther? I had no concept of distance out here.

But the trailer was definitely blue. I started towards it, passing another dirty white one with an old woman sitting by it in a folding chair next to a plastic flowerpot filled with dry dirt that grew only a souvenir American flag. On the roof of a red-turnedterracotta Toyota with flat tires sat a tabby cat, chewing a patch of matted fur on its otherwise bare back leg.

You set out for vacation from the place you know, thinking only of the place where you’re going— sandcastles, seashells and Pimm’s Cups on the beach— and none of the unknowable places in between.

I knocked on the door of the blue house. The window curtain moved, then the door opened halfway, enough for air conditioning to spill out around a man of about sixty, with weathered skin and a sinewy neck. “What do ya want?”

I told him.

Holding something behind the door and looking somewhere beyond me, he said, “Bitch got off her rope again.” He chewed and swallowed something. “Hang on, boy,” he said, and closed the door partway; when it opened again, his empty hands hung by his side. “Where’d you see her at?”

I told him that too. Still looking past me, he said, “Welp, here comes Clover now.”

My heart swelled seeing her run, even if on three legs, with blood smeared on her side. I kneeled with one knee in the dirt at the bottom of the steps. Clover ran right past me, hopped up the stairs and through the door. I don’t know why I expected something else.

“We’ll see how bad she is. God bless,” he said, closing the door.

IN DEREK’S GARAGE , I chose the pitchfork. But, after realizing it would require

a precision ill-suited for a teenager who didn’t know exactly what to aim for, I exchanged it for a spade shovel and vague plan for what to do with it. Derek had his own plan. After finding what he was looking for in a metal cabinet, he walked toward a workbench carrying a rifle and a box of bullets. “No fucking way!” I said.

36

“It’s better this way,” he said. “More humane. We’re not beating a rabbit with a shovel.”

“You can’t fire a shotgun around here!” I shouted.

Derek laughed. “It’s just a .22! It’s nothing. Just a pop.”

I hurried across the yard, looking back at Derek with his rifle pointing towards the night sky. While we argued in the garage about how to kill a half-dead rabbit, it died on its own. A flat coal shovel would have been better for scraping up a limp rabbit, but I wasn’t going back for it. With the point of the spade, I nudged its top half, unstuck its bottom half, and shimmied it back and forth across the pavement into the neighbor’s lawn.

LEAVING THE MAN’S PORCH in the trailer park, I wondered, Did I run off with the car key? I checked my pockets—no key, wallet, or identification of any kind— finding only the cash I withdrew near Baltimore and had since forgotten about. Who forgets they’re carrying three-hundred dollars in their Bermuda shorts? Me. That’s where I was in life. I wanted to go back to the trailer, but didn’t, because of a new worry: what if someone stopped?

Maybe it was someone concerned about a woman and child stranded in a parking lot on the side of the road. Maybe someone else, for some other reason. You set out for vacation from the place you know, thinking only of the place where you’re going— sandcastles, seashells and Pimm’s Cups on the beach—and none of the unknowable places in between. I ran.

And they were fine. If my daughter even knew I was gone, she didn’t show it; if Heather was angry, she didn’t show it either. I pulled out onto Route 1, which was no longer just a road, but a place I now thought I knew.

“Do you want the music back on?” Heather asked. I said yes. As if warning me, she asked if I was sure.

The iPod picked up where it had left off.

Vic Chesnutt was from farther south, in Georgia. He recorded an album called Dark Developments with another Georgian band called Elf Power in 2008, the year before he died of an overdose on Christmas Day. I’d been on a steady Chesnutt diet during the eight months since. The song that had been held on pause this entire time was called “Bilocating Dog.” For those who knew of Chesnutt’s lifelong flirtatious, on-again-off-again relationship with death, a record called Dark Developments was cause for alarm.

It could’ve been portent, but with Chesnutt, you just never knew. The lyrics to “Bilocating Dog” were nonsensical, almost silly, and I had assumed the song’s chorus—“it’s the curious case of the bilocating dog”—was inspired by the novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. In it, a teenager with autism in an

37

English town finds a dead dog on his neighbor’s lawn, stabbed with a “garden fork,” and sets out to solve the murder.

Not knowing if Chesnutt ever read the book, I never really cared if the song was borrowed from it or not. It provided a comfortable space—a truce, of sorts—to enjoy a few minutes of Chesnutt free from his demons, and me from mine. But now I did care. Heading deeper into Virginia, my head hummed with the fury of an atom—its electrons were rabbits, pitchforks, dogs, cars, and whatever the man had set behind his door. But there was also something else: Why is the album titled Dark Developments? And why have these words— “Dark Developments”—felt so familiar to me for so long? Where is the line between accidental death and intentional death? Do we move from one side to the other the moment we get behind the wheel of a car? Or pick up a pitchfork, shovel, or rifle? Or open bottles of sleeping pills or vodka? Or is it not a line but a space? Can that space be inhabited? By the living, or only the dead? Is that space knowable?

Heather didn’t respond; she didn’t need to. She knew my guilt-prone tendencies and desire to feel like I had fixed things, even if only to put my world back in order.

New stretches of road, distinct and disconnected from where we had been, moved us through new places we would never know or have reason to remember. Before my mind drifted off to beach balls and sunrises over the ocean, I wondered whether it was Chesnutt or Death who initiated all that flirting. Chesnutt singing “I flirted with you all my life / Even kissed you once or twice” suggested he did, but I wasn’t convinced.

That Chesnutt spent his whole adult life wheelchair-bound after surviving a near-fatal car accident at age eighteen suggested that Death had started it. But who ended it, was what I wanted to know.

I learned of Chesnutt’s death driving to my aunt’s house for Christmas dinner. My father, wife, and one-year-old made it a full car, but shimmering, foil-covered side dishes on car floors have a way of reminding us of who’s missing—mothers that never got to meet their granddaughters, for instance. I didn’t recall the NPR reporter on the radio identifying Chesnutt’s death as accidental or by suicide, only as an overdose; even if she had, it wouldn’t have settled anything for me. I wasn’t surprised by the news. I already knew that some deaths are foretold.

38

“I found her—the dog,” I said to Heather. “Her name’s Clover. She lives with a man in a blue trailer. I want to turn back.” We’d been in the car a long time, and the DVD player would soon lose it hypnotic power over our daughter. Neither of us wanted to add more miles to the many we still had ahead of us.

“Why?” she asked. It felt like a provocation.

The place we thought we’d left behind on Route 1 was not only still with us, but coming between us. As a young middle-class family that shunned extravagances, we felt deserving of a once-in-a-while beach vacation; moreover, we felt entitled to get from here to there without any goddamn complications in between.

But the heart of Virginia slowed us down, catching and holding us in limbo between the two worlds we not only knew, but belonged to. Mark Haddon, the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, said his book wasn’t about autism, but “about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way.”

“Because I have three-hundred dollars in my pocket and didn’t give the man any of it,” I said with my refined blend of magnanimity and pity.

“What would he do with three-hundred dollars?” Heather asked.

“Take Clover to the vet,” I said, feeling provoked again.

Heather didn’t respond; she didn’t need to. She knew my guilt-prone tendencies and desire to feel like I had fixed things, even if only to put my world back in order.

Heather knew dogs—not only how to care for them, but how to not breathe sighs of relief too soon after they were hit by cars. She also knew rural poverty from childhood—a shot-up upholstery shop and several shuddered gas stations reclaimed by vegetation told her there weren’t any animal clinics out here.

And even if there were…

A veterinarian was already propped against the wall behind the man’s front door.

Treatment cost five cents. Another death foretold. Whether by accident, intent, or both, it would, for me, forever remain with the others in the unknowable space in between.

39

40

BETHA NY B OW M A N

One Day We’ll Be Fossils Scientists will argue which of us climbed trees, had diamond-shaped teeth, which Adirondack lake we sprang from, how quickly we grew up.

Will they know who loved harder from our flat spiral shells or thin septa, splitting the chambers of our hearts into wet firewood?

I’m cracking. Smoking.

Let me blanket your feet in clay and ammonite, remind you that there are older creation stories—ones where whole rivers were created from a woman’s tears.

41

MARI SSA A HM A DKHA NI

Sacrament But why does it matter— what I call you, what you call me?

When your calloused hands have already christened me down to the shallows of my clavicles.

When we already lie together in bed, our eyes coated in sleep, my leg yoked to yours, your fingers drumming on my rib cage. How malleable my mouth is for you, a mess of nerve endings and of your touch.

imprints

When really, there is no word for the feel of your lips on the curvature of my spine.

42

STEPH A NI E NI U

Call It Miraculous Call it the unseen. Call it the way the light shines on the cordgrass.

In Hobart you sat in the field alone and had cold meat pies in the rain. After, scrubbed mud from your sneakers with a horsehair brush. The small gift of what happens when there is no witness.

At worst, it is the constant itch to take something from the scene: a photo, a gull feather, some blade to divide reality from dream. Look, you say, it was sort of like this, but you are wrong already, the estuary cropped and colorless in relief. Your friend nods and sips her coffee. At best it is entirely yours to keep. The moment you realize the lone marsh bird is actually three, the same song spreading until it surrounds you, calling and calling.

43

44

GABRI EL A HA L A S

Between the Fog and the River If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy….

Get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible.

—Richard Rohr

B

ETWEEN WHERE THE FO G kisses the river, and the river tongues the sleek sequin flesh of fish. Where each scale finds a ripple of light, joins the sweet surrender of water. A horizon, in currents, always moving. We arrive at morning’s periphery, tilt our faces toward the quarter moon. After its orange, earthsink globe is gone, you lean in, show me how to adjust stirrup, straps, the pattern of leather slipping into leather; your voice becomes a low tender rumble. The fog hardly lifts as the sun attempts first color between the peaks. We ride out with the river on our left. Snow alights on the lip of land and water; the fresh white fall lends radiance like starlight. Our eyes attempt to trace the outlines, the seep of form and matter. The river shifts from flow to frozen state.

Between where the fog, like wet ash, is heavy on our skin, and where forest floor brushes the edgeless, diluted sky. Sky that folds around our bodies like the burdened arches of grass that soak the horses’ legs. We ride into hillsides filled with ponderosa, fir, the late-season gold of larch, still holding their needles through days that have grown shorter, colder. I lean forward during steep inclines, feel the power of each hoof press into earth, the buckle of hips over long-dead trees. I imagine the undulation of your spine like the scale of a song, working in perfect arrangement.

Between where a pocket of air is still, before the horses’ hooves gust into that space like small hurricanes. With each footfall, a moment of release as ground becomes a real thing again. Weight in place. Shoulders give. Our hands float there, in-between a skyless sky and the horn of the saddle. I mirror you; I am learning. I watch the space between your stirrups, your horse’s body. Where your elbow lifts, away from your side. This large animal and you rock together with emphasis. I try and mimic the rhythm, the light beat against belly your legs communicate. You use a firm voice and a soft touch, then a soft song and a firm hand. We see deer moving, pause, the shape of ears hidden among low-hanging branches.

Between where our eyes meet across distance and our hands gesture, there. We talk in whispers. I am learning your voice; you are new to me. This, the horses, these hills, are new to me. My hand on my rifle is familiar, but when I met you, only a few

45

weeks back, I had not known this coming-together. The merging of bodies, this kind of hunt.

That ridge, you offer, we’ll glass from there. Your gloved hand points. I follow the sight line along a low shoulder, up towards an outcropping of rock. Vantage points, hidden swells of stone. A high place for mule deer, the lower forests for white-tailed.

I hunt here every year, you say. But usually alone. There’s only one or two others I know who love this as much as I do. You seem to be one.

I smile. I don’t know you well, but I know time here slows, and that matters to us both. Our chance meeting, where I decided to trust you, also slowed some version of time I didn’t know existed. The time it takes to know someone, compressed.

It’s less tiring than hunting on foot, I say, and we both laugh quietly.

Somehow the animals seem less afraid of humans if we’re atop these guys, you say, as your hand glides through the rough mane of my horse when I come up beside you.

But mostly it’s luck. The right time and place. But you already know that.

We sit and watch the shadows and light change in the valley below. Beyond the blur of color, we remain.

We continue to roam the hills, the ridge drawing closer. We scan tight draws for the stilled look of deer. Sometimes, their eyes catch us in an otherworldly stare. Other times, only a flutter of movement, like a wing whipped through air. There seems even less time to let go of breath, then to pause forever their panicked run. The bodies of deer as they bound away, divided among trunks of trees, become like dusk; flesh fades.

My rifle remains firmly in place, tucked in the scabbard.

As we climb up the shoulder to the ridgeline, the fog above the river continues to shift. My horse diligently follows yours.

A pack horse mostly, he doesn’t know how to lead, but he’s steady on his feet, you explained back at the truck. When we first met, I told you it had been years, close to half my life since I had been on a horse, and never like this, just open in the country.

I remember your crooked smile, the gap in your mouth from a missing tooth. You’ll learn quick, you assured me. Just remember they feel everything you do.

The fog shifts across the water and moves, nearly like a living body trying to take more space. The low clouds hover above the canopy we move under.

Here, you say, when we arrive at the top of the ridge, we’ll glass for a while. Eat something.

46

I slide off my saddle and can feel the width of my horse’s body shaping mine.

Between an opening left by boulders, I settle in next to you. We look for movement down below; fog and earth and sky blend to one like a silt-heavy river. Hues fade as moisture remains, crawls into our bones, obscures any vantage point we might have.

I cradle my rifle. Open my thermos. We offer each other what we’ve brought. We eat and look out across the gaps in the forest we’ve ridden in from, the ponderosas reaching, heavy with wet green. I scan with my binoculars, but the land is a haze, the air thick with water. From high, it looks as though the heavy mist has followed us from behind, filling in any available spaces of the lowlands.

I can’t see anything, I say, and we chuckle.

That’s hunting, and we both nod, smiling.

It’s cool up here, without the heat of the horses warming through our thighs. Only our hands move, slowly eating, sipping. Trying to see.

I ask you about your sons, three young boys you mentioned earlier. You tell me their names, ages, that the eldest is riding more, and the middle and youngest still share the saddle with their father.

Does the oldest hunt with you? I ask, eager to imagine how it could have been, to grow up like this. Away from the playground and into the forests.

He’s starting. He’s good at being quiet, moving slow. He likes practicing his elk calls.

Smiling, you glass again but we both know the futility of this gesture.

We sit and watch the shadows and light change in the valley below. Beyond the blur of color, we remain.

And you, your voice asks into a long silence, no children? You haven’t said.

I make a sound in my throat, something I think you might hear. Not yet. We’re trying. It’s been rather difficult.

You look at me then, no longer pretend to be watching for deer. I’m sorry, you say.

Thanks, I reply, and your voice let’s me know I don’t need to explain. It’s good to be out here. There’s times I never want to leave.

Isn’t it though. I feel the same.

BETWEEN WHERE THE DAY wanes and where we sense the light slipping,

the silhouettes of the staggering, surrounding range bleeds a plum-black twilight.

I can no longer tell where the trees thin, the mountains begin. Chilled air descends through layers of wool, fabric, my boots. We pack our small items into our saddle bags and stow binoculars away. We leave the ridge as the last of the light fades. The horses know the way, as do you. We steel our skin as we enter night. Our bodies, once outlined, disappear into a negative space; I no longer see your face, but I hear your voice singing softly to your horse. A familiar melody, yet not one I can place. I side up against you, hold onto your back briefly to be still.

47

I’ve never ridden in the dark, I say.

I can feel you smiling. Trust in them. They can sense where they are and can see better than we realize.

And I do. Between where the curve of my palm is filled by the shape of your back. I feel your shiver transmit from heart, to core, then my hand. The night stretches cold. I fall back in behind you, let the reins rest between my loose fists.

Between where the stones on the now-black dirt road clatter against the stonelike feet of your mare, my gelding. Our words are the stones of the past piling around us; we drop them from up high, watch them ripple outwards and finally still. It is now so dark that I’m unable to see the ears of my horse, circling like satellites. All blackness now, but for the soft shoulder of the moon moving through clouds like billowing curtains. Not enough light to see by, simply a suggestion of what could be, given an opening in the jagged dark.

We urge the horses forward, give rein to a pace suited to them alone. They begin to trot. Quicken. First yours starts to gallop, then mine. They run. Past where the land carries the river. Past the ponderosas twisting high up the ridgeline. Past where the deer settle in the trees. No edge to the road. No knowledge of the trees that border the road. My horse moves under me, forward, forward. Soundless, except for their feet pounding the earth. We cross from one threshold to another. My trust in you expands in this diminished space, the squeeze of time. The proximity to where the truck is parked.

The space between word and song. Between light and dark—not two things, but one.

48

MARI A Z OC C OL A

after the holidays at home before i took the car farther south, i went to the river to ask what i should do. it was january, i think, or maybe very late december: bare trees, silvered earth, wind pressing its cold iron against my cheeks. river so wide and so bright i could only look from the edges of my eyes, so fierce i had to pretend i’d arrived for some other sort of communion, animal or vegetable, matter arriving in a safer state. teenagers tramping along the path were feeding the water stones and acorns, fallen clumps of twigs, dry branches heaved underhand from the yellowed grass. i hunkered on the bank, listening to birdsong and the sucking gulp of the river’s consumption. in the dirt below me were hiding a thousand black-walled burrows, mammalian and packed with heat, the way it is when a body is tucked inside its home. do you want me to stay, i asked the river, but the river gave no sign, unless the sign was the water, racing down and racing down.

49

DEN I SE M I L L E R

Nocturne in Black Mother, Op. 2 for Tamika Palmer – the mother of Breonna Taylor

Lungs labor like the flurry of a butterfly, pinned but still alive. A live firefly flashes past the screen— the corner streetlight flickers on.

On nights like this, see her stand silhouetted at the screen door— handle warm from her holding, her letting go, her holding again. Again, she pushes, leans out, her head cutting the dark just far enough to see the screen door close as someone else’s child cuts the corner toward home.

50

PAUL T. C OR R I G A N

How Ravenous that Wolf ekphrasis after “And the Wolf” by Laura Jensen

How before church the women talk about How to dress like a godly lady, How long the skirt, how loose the shirt should be How the preachers warn How “it’s better to marry than to burn,” How wolves lurk around the flock, How hard the pews and sermons are How in hammering in How wanton these bodies are wont to be How much gets left out, like How Ruth, upon threshing wheat, touches Boaz’s “feet,” How don’t touch anticipates touching How no one tells the girl How warm winds carry pollen between pine trees, How the body’s parts work, How the parts want, How ravenous that wolf within, How the burning, the burning, devours

51

52

JAMI E HU D A L L A

Creatures of Ritual All I want, now that the world is ending, is to become a fever, and a quiver and something wild in the woods of another’s heat.

—Talia Young

U

NDERAGE DRINKING IS ILLEGAL—unless of course, it’s from a bronze chalice in front of a hundred witnesses and the wine is actually the blood of Christ. My fifth-grader brain tried to digest this as I sat front-pew at my First Communion, hands moist like I’d just done ten reps of monkey bars. My Sunday schoolmates wore their least stained khakis and buckle-wedges, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the word fuck. The profanity had been bestowed on me a few weeks prior when I saw it graffitied on the sidewalk, red and readable—but not sayable, I’d learned when I returned home to my parents. Trying not to think something, it turned out, was the same thing as thinking it.

Pastor W read from John about eating the flesh of the son. Fuck. Pastor W handed the first student in the pew the microphone to read the verse they (or their mother) selected for the service. Fuck. I was third in line and imagined how the expletive would sound echoing from the microphone and bouncing off the stained-glass windows. Fuck. I was having my first fuck-attack, heart slamming against my chest as I wondered if Satan was playing tug-of-war with my soul and winning.

At that time, my thoughts often led to Hell—a place designed by Gotcha-God, who was a product of my imagination and my church’s teachings. Gotcha-God was the type of deity who lurked around the corner and jump-scared me at each wrongdoing.

Gotcha-God dressed like an idyllic sheepherder but spoke like a mafia don versed in threats. As I knelt at the rail, waiting to receive grace via the chalice, there was Gotcha-God’s voice: accept me or you won’t be accepted.

I ended up the final drinker from the cup, and Pastor W didn’t tip it far enough for the wine to broach the rim. My blasphemy never broached my lips, either—so I claimed the ceremony a success. Amidst organ moans, scratchy, red-carpeted pews, and winter air seeping through the stained-glass windows, I waited to feel Something—a type of communion I couldn’t yet articulate.

53

GROWING UP IN SMALL TOWN, WISCONSIN, I was always cold. As a child, I took showers that flayed my skin pink, then curled up on the heat vent until angry red lines patterned my ribcage. I buried myself in bedsheets fresh from the dryer, cocooned and static-haired. I swam in our blow-up pool, then sprinted to the blacktop and face-planted. Mom made me stop after my stomach got heat rash, but I was on a hunt for more, for a heat that felt like a presence.

TRACEY, ALEX, KAYLA , AND HEIDI were the main characters of my

adolescence. Proximity forged our friendship and our shared history kept it alive.

Growing up together secured us a bond that lasted through high school, even when we grew different. They weren’t church kids, except for Alex, whose parents forced her to pop into a Methodist church where she talked smack about the pastor. We prank called people in basements and played hide-and-go-seek in antique shops and licked our funnel-cake lips at boys on the nights the fair rolled into town. To legitimize our group, we ordered black T-shirts with grunge lettering that read Bad Girls of the North, then took brick-building photos in cutoffs that wouldn’t pass the fingertip test.

Our moms were behind the cameras, eyes rolling at the cute phase of life we’d landed in. But for some of us, the phase would turn into identity, the cuteness into concern.

The Bad Girls of the North looked for any excuse to explore. Tracey got her license first and carted us around in her mom’s silver minivan with a crack-split windshield from sliding into a telephone pole. It didn’t matter where we were going—Minivan Shenanigans was the main event. When we spotted a yellow vehicle on the road: banana whacker. A PT Cruiser: cruiser bruiser. A Slug Bug: slug-bug-no-backs. We always returned home with our arms a masterpiece of knuckle marks and memories.

Alex was next in the license line. Her preordained accident happened sophomore year, smack into a stoplight. Then she inherited a Taurus (the Clitaurus). My rite of crashage came a year later when I love tapped someone’s bumper, distracted after Tracey’s boyfriend flicked me off as he sped past in his truck. I arrived at McDonald’s, twenty minutes late to meet my friends, leftover adrenaline leaving my system in a cold sweat. It wasn’t a big deal, they said. I pulled a chair up to their booth and tried to laugh. Bad Girls of the North didn’t panic from scuffed bumpers, but we all knew, at the end of the day, the shirt didn’t fit me. I was the Christian Kid in costume, the one whose eyes they covered at R-rated movies.

I road shotgun in the Clitaurus to Perch Lake every Saturday night that summer.

We shivered out of sports bras and boxers, the sand a scratch of cold at our ankles and my hands a flutter of hesitation. Gotcha-God lingered beyond the tree line as I turned and covered what I could, wondered how the others had left their clothes a careless pile on shore. My skin wanted to be shed too, until I noticed the way the moon highlighted their shoulder tops. My body was bone and scab, but they waved me in,

54

radically, wanting me as I was. I stumbled last to what I couldn’t yet see were holy waters, shocked by their warmth.

Perch Lake Saturdays faded, replaced by shindigs in the boonies. Shindigs: fifteen or so high schoolers with veins that pulsed Captain Morgan, a hot tub used for philosophical discourse, and a campfire stoked by a boy who overused gesticulations when he spoke and tongue when he kissed. I learned this through my entrance into the realm of Like-Likes. I wanted to experience what everyone gushed about, even if I felt too gross to sleep after, fretting whether I’d crossed a biblical line that I’d thought should really come with clearcut instructions like the baseball analogy. As a teenager, desire and shame made for an impossible game of spot-the-difference. So, I often avoided the fire-stoker and filled my red Solos with water, one foot in the party and one foot out.

Some nights, I drove home to hit curfew, but other nights, I lingered, cherishing the way people circled around the flames, woozy with chlorine fumes and rum, eyes hooded with hormones and shadow. We were drawn to the light, to some kind of spitsloppy connection with another creature who had skin on. We burned wood and pizza boxes and leftover fireworks—anything we could find for warmth.

Straddling the secular and nonsecular had become unsustainable—being a part of both groups meant relinquishing full acceptance in the other. So, I chose the way of fanaticism to resolve my constant onslaught of self-doubt.

“What about evil?” President Conrad asked me one winter evening as we huddled in the hot tub, water turning to steam where it caressed the sky. President Conrad boxed and smoked cigars and would, no doubt, take office one day. I wondered if he’d use less tongue when he kissed, but our hot-tub talks were strictly professional as others butted in, blurted opinions before returning to their flirtations.

“What about it?” I said.

“How do you explain it?”

I shrugged or shivered or both. “It doesn’t exist—like the cold,” I said. “Like a lack of heat, there’s just a lack of good.”

At the night’s end, we took wobbly steps up the hill to the highway, piggybacking the stragglers, and performed the tradition of Smooch & Smash.

55

Step 1: When the bottle of cheap vodka is passed to you, announce something you’re thankful for that year.

Step 2: Swig the vodka. Note: It will feel like dowsing your throat in lighter fluid.

Step 3: Press your lips, gentle as prayer, to the bottle’s rim.

Step 4: Once everyone has completed steps 1-2, smash the bottle on the ground like a motley pack of racoons tipping over trash bins.

In these moments, I was surprised that Gotcha-God did not barrel down the road, headlights like interrogation lamps.

LIKE THAT FIR ST NEAR-SIP OF JESUS, like swallowed Perch Lake water,

Wisconsin never left my system. When I fled town for good in something other than Tracey’s minivan, my frozen legs stiffed it to the gates of a sheltered Baptist University. This, I surely believed, would cancel out the skinny-dips and shindigs, the parts of myself that couldn’t be tucked neatly into my religious identity. Straddling the secular and nonsecular had become unsustainable—being a part of both groups meant relinquishing full acceptance in the other. So, I chose the way of fanaticism to resolve my constant onslaught of self-doubt. I attended weekly chapels and tattooed made new on my forearm and joined a megachurch. I relied on new congregations that enabled me to retire from the Bad Girls of the North.

People were easier to love up close, not flattened by a one-dimensional view. I imagine proximity could have saved us the way it formed us.

But my new Christian identity fit worse than the T-shirt—a realization that became apparent at the megachurch: a club-turned-Narthex with smoke-machine worship music, cold concrete floors, and a coffee bar. God’s people were hot twentysomethings in ripped denim, sniffing for their soulmates like Dad’s hunting dogs sniffed for shot pheasants. Rather than meditating on the holy spirit, I imagined the lead guitarist’s fingers strumming against my spinal cord. When it was time for communion, no one lined up to kneel before the pulpit. Instead, they passed a bucket around with the prepackaged body and blood of Christ. I wondered if someone manufactured the plastic contraptions. Did they order them from bodyandblood.com? I peeled back the tab and the familiar taste of coppery liquid made me miss home.

56

I spent two years at the university deconstructing my faith with the help of others who also struggled to splice the world into good and bad. Who showed me I could worship a carnal God that understood period cramps and stubbed toes and awkward first kisses. Gotcha-God no longer tried to catch me in sinful acts. Gotcha-God tried to catch me when childhood truths shifted underfoot. Gotcha-God disintegrated to reveal a truer form that had existed all along—a God that was not an object to love, but an approach of love.

I met love my senior year through undergoing the ritual of romance: meet-cute, flirtation period, try-hard dates, confession of feelings. It didn’t last but, one night, he took me to the shore of Lake Michigan and we slow danced, toes buried in damp sand. I only remember this: our foreheads propped together like campfire logs trying to absorb each other’s warmth, the sky like marmalade, and, finally, the most baffling, full-bodied experience of Something.

WE ARE B ORN CAKEY, hot bundles of flesh—then life becomes a series of

brushing against people, our heat conducting or escaping. But before our entropic hearts journey into chaos, we each start with 98.6°F. We are made of the same scratchy, red-carpeted material.

The proof of this hit me alongside the pandemic, seemingly the end of the world. Togetherness was suddenly a dangerous, fallible thing in the wake of social distancing—how did God manifest in a world where shared breaths could kill?

Everyone’s rituals were paused. Jerseys and beer no longer belonged to sports stadiums as popcorn and soda no longer belonged to movie theaters. We were all suspended, waiting for the moment we could clank the necks of our bottles together or tangle our buttery fingers at the bottom of the bowl, waiting to worship gods and baseball teams and punk bands to feel a common identity, to pass around the bronze chalice.

A few months in, Grandma called and asked me to come over. She was stubborn German brimstone, tried to convince me God wasn’t ready for her yet. I didn’t bother arguing with her theology, but I wasn’t willing to test it out, so we continued to connect through the landline. Besides her grandkids, she missed church the most.

Every Sunday morning, she and Grandpa emulated communion. They poured Merlot in cough-syrup cups and bought bread from the grocery store, but Jesus’s body contained surprise-raisins and they giggled, lips slippery from Merlot shots. They didn’t need a pastor or accompanying hymn to validate the sacredness. Equipped with imagination, I could see them on their back patio, the sun lapping at the feet of their lawn chairs.

During my turbo-Christian hiatus, I stopped talking to the Bad Girls of the North.

Tracey gave birth to her prom date’s baby and Kayla married a man seven years older

57

than her and, later, slept with her one-legged tattoo artist, while Heidi spent her weekends dropping acid and painting her body neon for raves. I condemned them behind a distant screen, scrolling through social media, collecting information as they became less human, more relic. People were easier to love up close, not flattened by a one-dimensional view. I imagine proximity could have saved us the way it formed us.

I imagine standing beside Kayla as maid of honor during her second wedding, dancing wildly with Heidi to EDM, participating in each other’s rituals. I imagine that, in these moments, the sacred and profane would no longer be a straddling act, but a place to rest. Because now I know: heat can jiggle its way across anything—even a vacuum—to jolt the cold.

58

CAROLI NE HA R P E R NE W

taxonomy: bird this bird a mockinggold this gold a marigod this god a marionette this mary a muddy bless this mess a bull fight this bull a fool’s eye this fool a sundry this sun a rungod this run a homespun this home a rhizome this rye a thighbone this bone a collar grown this green a grass womb this wound a deep room this deep a goddamn this dam a drowned dog this drown a god send this bend a lightning rod this light a goldenfraud this gold a martinet this art another threat this sweat a way to wet this land to puddled laud this mud a subtle nod to this god a talking bird or this bird a muddled god

59

60

BETHA NY SW A NN

Adjacent to Light after Angela Carter’s “Nothing is What it Seems”

I. When I was a child, I didn’t yet know all the ways desire had formed me—and so I envied the track and thorn of it, the way a blossom reconstitutes not the fruit in its entirety but the suggestion of it in faint gleams, halved then quartered.

How arrival precedes us like a blade, dull as a butterknife. In this light your version occurs as an afterthought reckless and spooling, a spare bedroom window leaking stale air. Don’t you get it?

Master narratives are over. In my version, there is only the sun haloing across the bedspread—paper trees performing paper shadows. I remember everything, yes, I remember everything perfectly: the murmur of gold at my wrists, clothing rent from spent muscle, the hush of silhouettes broken open as evening spread across shoulder blades, settled into the patina at the small of your back. Fade with me into the well-worn grooves of this vividless future. When I was a child, I believed my garland of fruit would never sink in the tide.

61

II. I’ve started paying attention to the energy behind voices, where it clamps down like a steel lid, hungry and indefatigable, or lilts like nettles under heavy snow. I thought of your shape suspended in the ice forming over the lake. I held you out against the trees: in my gloveless hand, all your zeroes unspooling.

Teach me how to read the lines of bleach that pattern your denim jacket. Light pollution is bad this year, everyone says, but waves still break glossy at the serrated edge of grief. A cinched-back sky can no longer refuse the piercing streetlight. We occur as silhouettes exacting our plentitude.

Hold my palms against the bladed fruit of evening— bare life and its gilded border. What brings the body back to consciousness: pastel souls that limn and limn, breath siphoned from horizonless futures.

62

III. When I think back to what I desired then, it appears as form without aggression: my hands folded over the absence of yours, the way I was taught to hold my wrists at the piano as if imaginary balloons bobbed under each palm.

Afternoons I rehearse diachronic scales as fathomless as minor constellations while you sear chickpeas and lime in a freshly seasoned skillet. There are no words for the shape of sand coalescing beneath a strong current, signifiers emptied of meaning. The beach is lonely at night, you say, but what I hear is, take in this gorgeous loneliness.

In the morning we swim to the sandbar to watch the sun rise.

Driftwood stylizes what isn’t spoken, syntax caressed in a cheekbone.

I cannot remember exactly how it began, but here we are, goldenrod in late July, fragments of shell indexing a cosmology of longsuffering.

Then there are nights when the sky’s metallic is just that—metal— and my mouth is enmeshed in the fang of it.

63

IV. Being adjacent to light is different from being in it.

After the wake, I told a story about getting lost on the way to the Airbnb. Skein of rain. Palm trees framed the mirrored highway, seagulls pulsing restless in the foreshortened sky—an oval in my rearview.

Why do you keep sabotaging yourself? you asked, fingers poised over screen mid-text. Your voice is a canyon ringed by air that hangs sharp and sweet. Siloed there, I hear pencils lift, a violet pressed between pages falls to the floor. Someone wants an explanation: biblical this prophecy of marrow and streetlight, summers scouring grass stains from our knees. Being adjacent to light is different from being in it—sure. This yoga channel, it feels like it runs on a fucking loop through our lives, you said, and it was true: our postures foregrounded by the horizon, suspended there against a band of neon platitudes.

64

V. After you left, even the shadows were not themselves— the ice plant rearranged itself, a lavender of witness at the edge of the lawn. How lyric could be the memory work of survival when wrought through prisms of dislocation.

Me, an aubade in the music library, you, the row of banker’s lamps casting emerald crosses on my notations. In divinity school, we spread blankets in the community garden, practicing our hermeneutic of excess and restraint, a sense-method for growing through the spear and root, what deliverance may be divulged there. My horoscope said suffering is one way of finding yourself, and I felt the hoarfrost forming over my eyelids then, but you were effortless in your knowing, numinous and beloved. On Fridays we drove to the salt marshes, wading through razor clams and patches of sour kelp. At night, toothpaste etches charcoal silhouettes into the sink, porcelain absorbing our famished tongues of gray.

65

66

VI CTOR L A DI S SC HU L TZ

The Railing

O

NE THING AB OUT the Wisconsin Northwoods: the verdure sucked you in, made you forget the strangeness of itself. The first time Gil came up, all those years ago with Heidi, they’d arrived on a summer night, and night’s stillness always soothed. He’d known where he was; he was in his body. But daytime was different. Go up on a morning like this—early May, drossy clouds, bitchy wind— and the flora, its sway, dominated you in an almost violent way. If a spruce could talk, you’d do as it said, go where it said. All those needles not just for show. The idyll of high summer a long way off, home another dimension.

Gil focused on a gash in a nearby maple—a hatchet wound his son, Omar, had delivered last summer. Ambivalently then had Gil spanked him, yet now that gash was a tether. Remember where you were when Omar chopped it. Edenic July dusk, prepping a campfire. That Up North is this Up North. You have a place here, halfMexican suburbanite with chamois hands. You have a place. Don’t let this Up North convince you otherwise. The others, the old guys, seemed oblivious to all of this. The demands on a man’s bearing were a predicament that was elder, and conceivably truer, than Gil’s; therefore did these men, in their hard-earned wisdom and through begrimed tumblers of spirit, regard what Gil could only studiedly ignore: a great big fat old heap of bear shit.

“Looks like it’s been here awhile,” said Rex, Gil’s father-in-law.

“Nah. That’s new.” This was Rex’s nephew Joe. “Couple days maybe.”

Joe worked for the county down in the Dells. Something with forests and parks. His paradigmatic chevron mustache had always stirred Gil’s envy.

“Oh, he’ll still be around,” August said. “You better believe it.”

“You guys sure it’s a bear?” Gil tried. “What if it’s just a deer?”

The looks they gave him weren’t unkind.

“Black bear never hurt no one,” August assured him. August and Rex had been friends since the Jurassic era.

“What if it’s got cubs? Don’t they get aggressive then? Isn’t this way too far south?”

August, white bearded and purehearted, put a leviathan arm around Gil and drank deeply of Southern Comfort. Gil poured some beer into his own interior.

“I tell you what,” August finally said. When he spoke, you found a comfortable position. “If you see a bear in these woods, a lot of people, they tell you to get big, to scare him. Some folks tell you to run. What you do is you go to your happy place.”

“Comiskey Park?”

67

“In your head. You find that place, and I guarantee the bear won’t have a second thought about you. It’ll be like you belong. Like you’re no different than that chipmunk there.”

“Where the hell is my ring?” Rex asked the universe. He rubbed his finger and patted down his Green Bay Packers sweatshirt.

“Just your band?” Joe said. He’d been through a couple of wives. The look Rex gave him bespoke a mix of humor, warning, and pity.

“We’ll find it later,” August announced. “We’d better get to work before we’re too drunk to use a circular saw.” The old guys started to file out of the side yard.

“Cheers,” Gil said, a minute later, to the trees or their shadows.

OPENING THE FAMILY’S shared cottage for summer was an annual rite going way back. Over the next five months, different shoots from Rex’s family tree would arrive at different painstakingly negotiated dates to enjoy their allotted vacation Up North, but two things were nonnegotiable: 1) Rex always got the week of July 4th, and 2) only men were allowed for opening weekend.

This year, their special project for opening weekend was to build a railing along the stairs from the cottage down to the lake. (The trek downstairs was getting precarious for older folks.) Rex wanted to use the wood from a kingly oak that had crushed the place in the 1960s. No one was stupid enough to argue with him about this, but they argued about everything else.

“Left side’s better.” August pointed down the stairs. “Better grade.”

“We’re all right-handed,” Rex said, meaning everyone who needed the railing. “It’s harder going downstairs than up.”

“Where’d you get this fucking posthole digger, the toy store?” Joe later said. “Knew I should’ve brought my auger.”

Rex belched dismissively. “Let’s just get it done.”

Gil’s primary role was to squint in concentration at the men’s work. While doing this, he’d hold his hands unclenched, ready, about ten inches from his hips. When someone spoke, he’d nod attentively. When someone asked him to do something—hold a wrench, say—he’d fairly leap to comply.

During a cigarette break, Joe confided in him. “That lumber ain’t even good for termites no more.”

“What, like it’s rotten?”

“It’s just old. Weathered. Weak.”

“Rex oiled it, didn’t he?”

“Waited too long. Didn’t reapply enough over the years. And there was the time Jack left it outside over the winter—that’s why he’s not here this year. Uncle Rex, he gets something in his head.”

68

Jack was Joe’s brother. Rex and his nephews sometimes feuded for months at a time over things like the bath mats Up North. Best to stay out of that.

“Get what in my head?” Rex came around the corner.

Gil tensed up, but Joe was cool. “You remember that time with the fireplace?”

“I want to know what I get in my head.”

“That’s what I’m saying. The fossils in those hearthstones could be valuable and, instead, you waste them here on our fireplace.”

“My Uncle Otto brought those stones with him from California when he built this place. He kept them when he rebuilt it.”

“I bet some museum would pay good money for them stones.”

“Not enough.”

“Couldn’t hurt none to try.”

No one was stupid enough to argue with him about this, but they argued about everything else.

Gil ventured quietly, “Aren’t fossils pretty common?”

“It would hurt me. Uncle Otto wanted them here, in his home.”

“Could be robin bones,” Gil mumbled. “Squirrels.”

“Jack thinks they’re prehistoric. Those little dinosaurs. Says they were scavengers.”

“There are no dinosaur bones in the hearth, Joe.” Gil pounced on this. “Fuckin’ A, Joe. The only dinosaur here is Rex!” Both men looked at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. Gil felt an easing in his chest, and all three sank their drinks.

“Where’s Gus?” “Bear must’ve got him.”

“Shit. We’ll have to play Sheepshead three-handed.”

WISCONSIN GERMANS WOULD have you believe that Sheepshead was a

card game, but Gil knew the truth: it was a cult. The rules were so impenetrable, so arcane, that if a clause existed stating that a specific card—played at a specific time, in a specific trick, of a specific hand—required the ritual blood sacrifice of a virgin Illinoisan, Gil would be surprised not at all. Likely, the playing of said card would

69

bear some aphasic Germanic non-name, such as frauer, and would be accompanied by hoots of appreciation for subtleties imperceptible to mere FIBs. “Who the fuck is my partner?” Gil said to his cards.

“Just watch who plays what,” August offered cryptically. Rex passed on the blind and everyone except Gil yelled.

“LEASTER!” Gil resisted the urge to ask for the trillionth time how a leaster worked; Heidi’s family had been trying to initiate him into the cult for years. Instead, he just tried to play the right suit to minimize embarrassment. Worst of all, he hated winning tricks, for then he had to figure out how to lead the game. This hand, thank mercy, he avoided the burden by winning only the last trick.

“Well shit,” Joe said, gathering the cards to shuffle.

Rex whistled. “Pour the kid another drink.”

That’s when Gil remembered: In a leaster, you had no partner, and the object was to score the least points while winning at least one trick. In doing so, you won all the points.

His drag on the smoke was the drag of a man in the wind contemplating combat—thumb pinched to index, hand a cocoon, each inhalation very deliberate as if time didn’t exist.

“Next year, let’s play Axis & Allies,” he said, and ignored their suspicious expressions.

Joe tossed the deck on the kitchen table, whose surface Gil thought about more often than made sense. Its pattern resembled gold escudos piled in a buried chest— if that chest had caved in under the weight of years and soil, and that soil now intermingled with those escudos, and some intrepid explorer had, this day, unearthed the whole treasure.

“Grab a quick smoke,” Joe said.

Gil went out with him to bum one.

The sun was gone. The moon too. If not for that rich sylvan smell—Gil was never sure whether it was sap or spoor—he could be just about anywhere. The cigarette cherry lighted Joe’s face. He wore a T-shirt advertising a band called The Screaming Walleyes.

70

“Hey, did Rex ever find his ring?” Gil asked. “Katharine’s gonna have his ass.”

“Just as long as he don’t saw none of these trees.” Joe’s love of his chainsaw sometimes clashed with Katharine’s love of a good balsam.

“Shoot, she’d have more than his ass then.” Gil was joking; Heidi’s mom was a saint.

“Auntie Kath don’t mess around.” Joe didn’t seem to be joking.

Just then, a crash in the trees. Something alive. Something infernal.

Gil flinched so hard that he burned his hand on his cig. “What the motherfuck!”

Joe turned to regard the night warily. Rex’s face appeared at the screen door. From the woods, a sound from a throat.

“Everything OK out there?”

“The bear’s back, Rex!” Gil had moved to hide behind Joe. “Tell him we don’t want any!” August called from inside the house.

“No one saw no bear,” Joe said.

“It’s the bear or Bigfoot’s making sweet love to a tree trunk!” Gil was shouting now.

“Gil,” Rex said, “come inside.”

He and Gil switched places. Gil then watched from the kitchen while Rex peered, unblinking, into the occlusive night. As if by magic, a burning cigarette had appeared in Rex’s hand. His drag on the smoke was the drag of a man in the wind contemplating combat—thumb pinched to index, hand a cocoon, each inhalation very deliberate as if time didn’t exist.

Eventually, Gil couldn’t take it. “You see anything?”

The men’s answer was to snuff out their smokes and come into the house.

“Think he’s any good at Sheepshead?” Rex asked.

“We could use a fifth.”

Gil shut the door.

NEXT DAY, WHILE WORKING on the railing, Rex stressed nipples.

“We have to make sure the pipe is secure in the nipple,” Rex said.

“How does this nipple look?” he later asked with complete sincerity.

“Make sure those nipples aren’t too far apart,” he instructed, still later. No one else seemed to be laughing, so Gil didn’t either.

Possibly no one was laughing because they were pissed at each other. At breakfast, Joe had rekindled the fireplace argument; now it was the lumber again. Rex knew Joe was against using the oak, but when August had also voiced his dissent, Rex threw his version of a tantrum. That is, he disappeared into the garage for an hour or so.

Plus, no one could agree how far down the railing should go. Joe wanted it to run all the way down the stairs. “You could slip on the stairs anywhere,” he said.

Rex thought just the upper third of the stairway. “It’s not so steep closer to the lake.”

71

August sought a compromise. “Let’s at least run it along the landing.”

Gil set his face in a mask of intense concentration as if trying to memorize an escape route. His chest emitted a hum he hoped the others would take for sage consideration. In fact, his mind had wandered to the White Sox, whether they’d ever climb out of the cellar.

“Gil?” “Hm?” He noticed all their grizzled faces staring at him. It dawned on him that they wanted him to cast a vote. The deciding vote.

“How far down you think we should build it?” August said.

Gil had assumed that, if he kept the mask in place long enough, the guys who knew about forests and hammers would decide. Now, they’d put it on him. One of the old folks could fall, so maybe they should build it all the way down. But the bickering could soon turn nasty, so maybe they should finish it ASAP. He looked at the half-done handrail. He felt the broadleaf litter underfoot. He looked at Rex. “Are bears nocturnal?” Gil asked.

“Bears ain’t picky,” Joe said. “They’ll eat you anytime.”

Gil nodded. This lake was manmade, he’d heard.

“All the way down. Let’s run that shit into the water.”

A MEXICAN RESTAURANT, this place called Victor’s, had just opened in town,

and Rex said he wanted a margarita for dinner. Victor’s was composed, mostly, of Mohave murals and sports television. If Gil remembered right, the building used to be a strip club, all nude. They ordered a couple of pitchers, and August asked the waitress what was good here. She shrugged at him. He looked at Gil. Gil shrugged at him too.

“I’ll have la cochinita pibil, please,” Joe said with a perfect accent, one far better than Gil’s. The TV by their table didn’t have sports on. Instead, it showed a stock aerial image of the ocean with the caption TRIANGLE CLAIMS ANOTHER. “Looks like they lost a plane in the Bermuda Triangle,” Rex said.

“Bermuda Triangle’s a myth,” August declared. “You can’t trust them little turboprops.”

Gil got up to go play the claw machine. He wanted to win a stuffed animal for his daughter, Mae. He knew August was right of course: On a percentage basis, there was no such thing as the Bermuda Triangle. The incidence rate of nautical and aviation tragedies ascribed to the Triangle was in line with those of similar regions. All those frigates and fishing boats had been swallowed by a perfectly explicable sea. All those fighter jets and airliners had been dashed from existence by a perfectly mundane wind. All those humans and creations of human hands had vanished into a perfectly

72

understandable spacetime distortion engineered by martians, God, or both for what, in the cosmic view, must be perfectly rational reasons.

Yet, as Gil surveyed the welter of stuffed animals, unease crept in. Yes, the Bermuda Triangle was an old wives’ tale, but if it was a malevolent force, wasn’t that exactly what it’d want you to think? The place had another name, Gil remembered now—he used to read about cryptozoology and the occult a lot as a kid—the Devil’s Triangle.

Everyone and their mama knew the folk-bit that the Devil’s best trick was to convince the world he didn’t exist. But here was a devil-zone, a hell if you like, performing the very same trick, and we moderns accepted it at face value. The ramifications were obvious. First, statistics were the new invocation, our new Now-I-lay-me-downs. We trusted numbers to protect us as folded hands had once protected our night selves from the reavers. Second, a place, a mere demarcation on a map, was alive, sentient, calculating either directly against or at cross-purposes with us, for motives quite incomprehensible to our puny human ken. How such a foe could be fought was best left to minds keener than Gil’s, he suspected, as he fed a dollar into the claw machine.

Gil did not believe, as he maneuvered the claw into position over his target, that the world would be better off with a voracious maw of interdimensional turbulence felling planes, sinking ships, and eating lives.

But equally troubling was the alternative: Fine, maybe they were safe from the Triangle. Maybe August was correct. Maybe statistical science was correct. And maybe this whole incredulous century was correct, in spite of—or because of—its arrogance. Perhaps the Bermuda Triangle, unsated by a diet that was endlessly fleshen and engined, had looked, at long last, to a worthier prey—a prey grand enough, caloric enough, to surfeit even its boundless hunger. Maybe the Bermuda Triangle had swallowed itself. Surely, this would be a happy turn of events, a raindrop removed from the cistern of humanity’s suffering. Gil did not believe, as he maneuvered the claw into position over his target, that the world would be better off with a voracious maw of interdimensional turbulence felling planes, sinking ships, and eating lives. He didn’t believe this. However, if the Triangle had indeed consumed itself, some tiny part of him held up a flame for its loss. The flame denoted bittersweet feelings. The

73

world would be safer, OK, but it also would be diminished all the same, for a world without danger from beyond was no world at all. A world without a certain acreage of underworld—or unworld—was a mere exercise in self-love, a looking into the mirror and heartening ourselves with platitudes that turn out to be—horror of horrors!— exactly fucking right.

Gil pressed the button to drop the claw. So, yes, the Bermuda Triangle ingesting itself was no cause for celebration, and it was hard to imagine, at this late stage of talismanic data, a comparable phantasm manifesting to take its place. The answer, though, could be space. If the species could expand to the stars and, thus, extend its life, the infinitude of the wider universe might be enough to restore the balance.

Two plus two equals forever as, in our wake, the animals—those few hardy or, hell, foolhardy enough to survive—tread only with the greatest caution into the zones of our onetime industry: our slaughterhouses, mines, and refineries, yes, but also our humble, rubbled homes. These then posterity’s forbidden latitudes, whose existence will defy whatever mean language Earth’s survivors might, in millennia, develop as our intergalactic descendants skirt the Andromeda Triangle, as they beware dragons lurking in wormholes, and as they weather the psychoses accompanying time dilation.

Gil pulled his prize from the machine and returned to their table. The key, he thought, was targeting not the plush you most wanted, but the one most vulnerable to the claw.

Beyond the castoff skier, the island Heidi used to swim to as a kid resisted, with rare dignity, the passage of time.

As Gil sat down, Rex was in the throes of a vigorous coughing fit. Gil slapped him on the back. “Anyone know the Heimlich?”

Rex waved a hand in feeble protest.

“Heidi’s been telling you to stop smoking for years, Rex,” Gil went on.

“Ah, he’ll be OK,” August said. “Got a little ahead of himself with those tacos, is all.”

At that, August detonated in laughter. He did this sometimes, laughed so suddenly and loudly at his own remark—it needn’t be a joke—that he startled you into laughing too, genuinely, as Gil found himself doing now.

“Good salsa,” Rex finally, gaspily, managed.

“Hey, what you got there?” Joe asked.

74

“Just a stuffed animal I won for Mae.” Gil was smiling as he spoke, thinking how his baby girl’s face would light up when she saw it. But now that he studied the thing a little closer, he frowned. The teddy bear was smiling back at him.

ALL WERE HAPPY to get back to the railing the next morning because it meant

being outside the cottage, where four decreasingly civilized men had slept after four generous servings of frijoles. Also, the weather had relented. The sun revealed, around them, green in new gradations. One obnoxious speedboat was even pulling yuppie water-skiers across the lake. The plan was to finish the rail today and return to society tomorrow.

As for the wood, the old guys seemed, by some weird Wisconsinite ESP, to have settled matters silently. Whether the wood rotted out next year or next century was up to God; everything else was up to Rex. Over heavy drink, they worked and told fishing stories.

“Hey, August,” Gil said sloshily. “Tell the one about the time you and Rex fished all day, and you hauled in walleye after walleye while, meanwhile, Rex didn’t get a nibble.

And then, at dusk, he serenely, without a word, stood up and winged his fishing rod so far out into the lake that you guys never saw it again.”

Rex used his middle finger to adjust his glasses.

“I think you just told it yourself,” Joe said.

“You told it all right.” August stood up from sanding the rail. “You told it,” he said again, “but that reminds me.

“This was, oh, twenty, twenty-five years ago. A few of us from work, we got together and went hunting. My buddy Voss knew this guy who had land a ways out there north of Eau Claire. Lots of land. Voss says you can go out there hunting deer, or pheasant, or whatever it is. Just have a good time.

“So, we go up for deer season, OK. Opening weekend.” August paused to sip SoCo from a McDonald’s coffee cup, then continued. “The guy who owns the land, his name was Bergen, but I call him Neptune, ’cause he seemed like he was from another planet.

Not like he’s a bad guy, but when you sit there and talk with him, he seems to be having almost a different conversation than you are. Like you say, ‘Hello’ and he says, ‘When?’ One of those guys.

“But I was here to hunt, and it’s great land, so I says: What the hell. Let’s hunt.”

While August spoke, the water-skier biffed. It was a hard one. Gil saw it over August’s shoulder. Looked like the line broke off the boat. Worse, the spotter was asleep on the job. Away roared the speed machine, majestic and oblivious. Beyond the castoff skier, the island Heidi used to swim to as a kid resisted, with rare dignity, the passage of time.

75

“Next morning, Neptune warns us that the tree cover can get pretty dense. If you get lost, he says, just keep the river on your left. OK, river on your left, whatever. Off I go before first light.

“Well, we did some pre-scouting the day before, and I’d set up my tree stand, oh, maybe five-hundred yards off the trail there. It’s always a little different trying to find that spot the next morning before the sun comes up.”

Joe slipped in, “Bet it was darker than my first wife’s heart.”

August ignored him. “I always say if you pay attention to the landmarks, you’ll be fine. One of my landmarks was this old ash by the trail. Looked like it’d been struck by lightning. Got me to that tree stand in full dark, no problem. So, I sit there, and I have a little drink from the thermos. I climb up. I harness myself to the tree. Set myself up nice and cozy. Stuff like that. The wind’s in my face. I says: I’m gonna get a shooter today. I just know it.”

A replica pirate ship steered into sight around the island. Flying the Jolly Roger, the Spanish caravel would soon glide right through the waters-skier’s skull. Up on deck, booze-cruising tourists chorused songs of bawdry and good cheer.

“Only, after a while, that wind, it’s got a certain feel,” August said. “A moisture. And once it starts to get light, I can see it: Fog. Fog so thick you could write a letter on it.

“OK, some guys like hunting in fog. They say the deer are more active. But in this fog, they couldn’t find their own ass, much less a buck. I know I couldn’t.

“About noon, the fog starts to burn off a bit, so I climb down for lunch. After walking a ways, I says: I should’ve hit the trail by now. I should’ve hit the trail five, ten minutes ago. It’s like that damn fog took my ash with it!

“First thing I do is turn around and check my compass. And I’ll tell you right now, I should’ve taken a reading before I got out there. I didn’t. Sue me.

“Well, the compass says I’m turned around, so I adjust course back toward the cabin. After a while, though—and I can’t really say how long it was, it could’ve been hours to tell you the truth; there’s a feeling that comes over you like the clock ain’t moving—it hits me: I ain’t just turned around. I’m lost.”

August stared at a nearby paper birch as if he were reading his story on its bark.

“People don’t realize how it can get in the big woods, your mind a million miles an hour. The thing is to stay calm. Take a deep breath.

“Then, I keep hoofing it. Soon enough, I’m marking my trail. It’s what you do, every forty yards or so. You leave a marker. I used orange duct tape. Eye level, so you don’t miss it. Or so the rescue party don’t miss it.

“Anyhow, I do this God knows how long. The trees, you can’t tell ’em apart after a while. What I want is a good hill. You get a hill, you can sit there and get your bearings. I’m thinking about climbing a tree for a look when, all of a sudden, I hear a river.

“Maybe you’d call it a creek. Whatever you call it, I damn near skipped to the thing.

76

“The sun? Who knows. It’s one of them overcast days, so gray the bastard could be anywhere. Neptune said keep the river on my left, so that’s what I do. One foot in front of the other, for so long I get hungry, but you gotta ignore it. What food I got, I might need later. Besides, there’s worse things out there than your own hunger.”

The ski boat had, by now, realized its error and circled back, but the situation was too far gone. Its crew watched, helpless, as the pirate ship emerged fully from the channel connecting the Chain of Lakes, tacked between the bog and the island, and bore roisterously down upon the frail mortal bobbing thereat. It wouldn’t be long now.

In those final moments, the skier’s head hung as for dreams unfulfilled.

Whatever its composition, by the end of opening weekend, Up North has absorbed the humans.

“OK, there’s still daylight left when I notice a fishing rod down by the shore. I can’t catch nothing with it; it’s splintered and some of the guides are broken off. I says: Someone got mad at them fish like Rex did. But this lure? This is worth hanging onto.

“So I take it off the line and go on my way.

“Well, I’m just starting to think about nighttime, hunkering down, when I hear—at first, I don’t think nothing of it—the distant sound of a car going by, that soft whoosh.

I think, eh, well he needs a new timing belt, and then I think: Hey! He needs a new timing belt!

“So, I up and haul ass for where I heard it. You know, it’s lucky. In my excitement, I could’ve injured myself real easy, could’ve got lost again, and for good this time.

Instead, quicker than I could gut a buck, I stumble out onto a little two-laner.

“I would’a got down on my knees and kissed that blacktop with my tongue if I had time, but right away, here come headlights to the rescue. The guy rolls down his window.

“I say, ‘Bergen?’ I’m just hoping he’s heard of him.

“The driver laughs. He tells me, he says, ‘About a dozen klicks back.’ He says, ‘Hop in.’

“When we pull up to the cabin, there’s all kinds of activity: some pickups, a police cruiser. They’re organizing a search.

“Well, I get out and I wade through them. Everybody’s happy to see me, clapping me on the back. Voss tells me I near gave him a heart attack.

“I ignore all of ’em. I find Neptune. He tells me how relieved he is to see me.

77

“I says, ‘Let me ask you a question. You tell me, if I lose my way, to keep the river on my left. I do that and end up in Timbuktu. Just how far up your ass is your head anyway?’

“Neptune sits there and says to me, innocent as a child, ‘I was talking about the Nile.’”

August looked at his audience in amazement. “‘I was talking about the Nile,’” he repeated, almost in a whisper. “I wanted to knock his ass into next week.”

“So, what’d you do?” Gil asked.

“I just told him, ‘Have a nice life, you dumb son of a bitch.’ I already knew the last laugh was mine.

“That lure I found in the ass end of Shitsville? It’s an old Heddon Dowagiac Minnow.

Antique. Collector’s item. Great condition. I sold it three months later for almost tenthousand bucks.”

Now, a terrific and prolonged roar, at once primordial and cutting-edge, exploded over the littoral. The pirate caravel had, at the last second, engaged its massive modern engine and come to a stop just short of the condemned. The caravel and the speedboat faced each other in something akin to shame while the fry-station sun presided in interplanetary dominion. The ski rope lay limp and frayed in the water.

The fallen skier would live.

CLEANUP DAY TENDS TO upset the humans. It’s their last day in this place,

which seems to be made up of two parts joy, two parts escape, two parts beauty, and one part each of consolation, wonder, nostalgia, and quiet clarity. Whatever its composition, by the end of opening weekend, Up North has absorbed the humans.

They’re now part of it too. And to extract themselves is a trauma. So, they snipe instructions at each other: Remove the live box from the lake. Put the grill back in the woodshed. Throw this water out by the old fox den.

Rex cooks his legendary one-eyed eggs in a little less butter on Cleanup Day. His wedding ring sits in a garbage bag in the kitchen. It has no ears to hear when he tells Joe, with a sigh, that they can have an expert out to look at the hearth. It has no eyes to see Rex’s hand pat Joe’s shoulder, no tongue to describe the moment as ruggedly tender. It has no memory to recall being misplaced by Rex or unwittingly tossed by Gil. It has no nose to smell the half-eaten pork chop to which it now adheres. It has no skin to feel itself, this morning, hoisted into August’s truck and transported half a mile to the dump. It has no sense of humor to laugh when Gil pathetically expresses garbage juice into his own face as he shoves the bag over the dumpster’s lip.

The ring cannot calculate its angle of repose. It cannot, in the noontide heat, dream of childhood swims in the lake it called home. It cannot fall ill amid this miasma of rotting fish guts, fruit rinds, maggots. It cannot stand awed before the

78

cerise totalization of the setting sun. It cannot wonder what the hell it is doing here.

It cannot crouch in fear as, from the tree line, a shadowy ursine form approaches, chuffing and rapacious. It cannot know pain as the bear devours it along with so much sundry waste; it cannot know regret.

The ring cannot know.

79

LAURI E VA U G HE N

Billie Holiday on the Radio for artist Whitfield Lovell

She’s in the gallery show— Billie Holiday on the Bakelite radios.

They stack like static compared with the movement of her voice.

We lean in. They want us to— inviting our hands to touch, turn, fine-tune all gestures of our past.

It’s a notched knob that moves a dial.

We can still recall a time before radios were embedded with clocks.

Things were merely heard, herded about by sound, by notes that swayed in our minds like a woman in heels at a compromise, a woman with a flower in her hair and holding another kind of bouquet at her nose—a microphone she’d toss.

The gallery is too loud to listen, now.

“Full” we say, full of people lingering, fingering for their own last thought— the one that they just had—and lost.

The artist nods to Billie’s day and my hand reaches for hope— the hope of tuning in to something some have called divine—a woman out on a limb, about to learn she can fly.

80

RI CHA R D OSL E R

God of the Imagination In his grace he was silence. — Wanda Coleman

What if a poem could uncurl fingers into movement, through air, and I could make a psalm of St. Kevin, for the saint whose arm, all bone and muscle, stretched out like a branch for a bird stories say was a blackbird and nested there, sat eggs until, as Heaney says, the hatchlings were fledged and flown.

This saint, a 6th-century Irish saint and this bird, a bird and not a bird if you can’t believe the words that marry a man and miracle to make a saint, words Heaney says are imagined anyway. But Kevin, this man, first, saint later, and this bird, imagined or not, how is it their story sings so loud in me, how is it something flies out of my chest, this egg, cracked and opened, and takes wing on the breath and bone of me and I dare to dream how the imagined might be true. Even you, Kevin’s God.

81

82

HEATH E R J E SSE N

May Day Good Lord, it’s like a prayer answered around here. How much ecstasy can one body register? As if spring is teaching unrestraint. Magnolias strewn underfoot, tulips air-kissing en masse, early lilacs cascading, cherry blossoms unfisting, viburnum snowballing, if snow could impale with scent. New dandelions undoing pristine with their perfect yellow pop.

Oh, to be a bee and dive within!

But to be a bee would be to be needy, so never mind! We’ll remain, what?

Smitten, but deep down indifferent? Forever transformed?

This opulent grace, unbidden.

83

contributors

M A R I S S A A H M A D K H A N I holds an MA in English from Cal Poly SLO. A Best of the Net nominee, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, the minnesota review, MacGuffin, Radar Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Journal, The West Review, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015 and 2017. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at UC Irvine and serves as the Assistant Editor at The West Review.

B E T H A N Y B O W M A N is the author of Swan Bones (Wipf and Stock, 2018).

Originally from New York’s Mohawk Valley, she has lived and taught in Indiana for the past decade. Her work has appeared in Nimrod, Apple Valley Review, and Poetry Online.

P A U L T . C O R R I G A N teaches creative and academic writing at the University of Tampa, where he is also a poetry editor for Tampa Review. He has previously published work in TheAtlantic.com, The Ekphrastic Review, Saint Katherine Review, About Place, Poets Reading the News, and elsewhere. He has won Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge twice.

K E V I N C L O U T H E R is the author of We Were Flying to Chicago: Stories (Catapult). He is an Assistant Professor

at the University of Nebraska Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where he serves as Program Coordinator of the MFA in Writing. He lives with his wife and two children in Omaha.

R O B Y N G R O T H is a poet and bookmaker living in the Midwest with her husband, three sons, and three cats. She has an MA in linguistics, and her work is published or forthcoming in Autofocus, CALYX Journal, and Otoliths.

G A B R I E L A H A L A S immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in northern Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in B.C. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including Inlandia, About Place Journal, Prairie Fire, december magazine, Rock & Sling, The Louisville Review, The Hopper, subTerrain, Broken Pencil, The Whitefish Review, Grain, Pilgrimage, and High Country News. She has received Best of the Net nominations in poetry (2021 & 2020). She lives and writes on traditional Ktunaxa Nation land. gabrielahalas.org J A M I E H U D A L L A is from a one-tractor town in Wisconsin. She currently lives in Virginia, where she’s pursuing her MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. Her work has appeared in The

84

Under Review, Unearthed, Mosaic, Poetica Publishing’s Mizmor Anthology, and Capstone Press.

H E A T H E R J E S S E N has an MFA in writing for children from Simmons University and an MA in social work from the University of Chicago. She’s a 2021 finalist for the Ruminate Broadside Prize and the Atlanta Review Poetry Contest. A former resident of Australia, she currently lives in Connecticut.

M E R I E K I R B Y grew up in California and now lives in North Dakota. She teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems. Her poems have been published in Rogue Agent, Orange Blossom Review, FERAL, and other journals. You can find her online at meriekirby.com.

D E N I S E M I L L E R is a poet and mixed media artist whose poetry has been published in numerous magazines and journals such as The Offing and African American Review. They were named the 2015 Willow Books Emerging Poet, an AROHO Waves Discussion Fellowship awardee, a finalist for the Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund, and a Hedgebrook Fellow. Their work, titled Core, was released by Willow Books in

85

2015 and has since been nominated for a 2016 American Book Award and a 2016, 2017, and 2018 Pushcart Prize. Their chapbook, Ligatures, was published in 2016 by Rattle Press. Most recently, they won the 2020 Sexton Prize for Poetry, were awarded a 2020 Storyknife Residency, and received a 2020 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship. Additionally, their commisioned plays, Ligatures and Before the Shooting, have been produced. Their pronouns are they/them. More of their work can be found at denisemiller.studio.

C A R O L I N E H A R P E R N E W is a poet and artist from southern Georgia. Her work explores natural disaster, motherhood, and ancestry in the Gulf Coast, and is informed by a background in visual arts and anthropology. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan, where she is a poetry and nonfiction reader for Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems have been published in PRISM International, Southern Humanities Review, Another New Calligraphy, The Racket, Louisiana’s Best Emerging Writers, and North Carolina’s Best Emerging Poets. More of her work can be found at carolineharpernew.com.

S T E P H A N I E N I U is the author of She Has Dreamt Again of Water, winner of the

contributors

2021 Diode Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Southeast Review, Poets Readings the News, and Storm Cellar, as well as in scientific collaborations including the 11th-Annual St. Louis River Summit. She lives in New York City. Find her online at stephanieniu.com/poetry or on Twitter as @niusteph. is a 70-year-old Canadian poet and long-term poetry blogger who has led generative poetry writing workshops and retreats in Canada, the U.S., Italy, and now on Zoom, as well as twice-weekly generative poetry therapy workshops at a major mental health facility on southern Vancouver Island, B.C. His poems have been published in U.S. and Canadian literary journals and in a number of U.S. and Canadian poetry anthologies. In 2016, Quattro Books of Toronto published his first full-length collection, Hyaena Season, and in 2012, Leaf Press published his chapbook Where the Water Lives.

Richard’s blog and website: recoveringwords.com RICHARD OSLER

V I C T O R L A D I S S C H U L T Z lives near Chicago. His short stories appear in various venues, including McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Chiricú: Latina/o Literatures,

Arts, and Cultures. He is a proofreader for Constelación, a bilingual magazine of speculative fiction.

B E T H A N Y S W A N N is a PhD student at UPenn studying contemporary poetry/ poetics and racial form/affect in Asian diasporas.

C H R I S T A L B O T T has been writing poetry on and off for many years. After a career as a business writer, he worked at the non-profit Barre Center for Buddhist Studies for a decade. He continues his study and practice, along with writing poetry.

L A U R I E P E R R Y V A U G H E N completed her MFA at the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee and currently lives and works in the Boston area. She is the recipient of the James Dickey Award and the Amon Liner Award from the UNC Greensboro.

She was also selected as a finalist for the Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry Award from Kalliope, judged by Joy Harjo. Her poems have appeared in Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Poetry Miscellany.

She has two chapbooks: Fine Tuning and What Our Voices Carry.

J A S O N V R A B E L is a freelance writer and reporter for various news outlets and a

86

recent writer’s fellow at Creative Nonfiction. His creative work has appeared in Southeast Review, Gravel, Belt Publishing, and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh.

M A R I A Z O C C O L A is a queer Southern writer with deep roots in the Mississippi Delta. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Cincinnati Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

87

last notes

Ever the middle school teacher, I think of how “open” is both a verb and an adjective. Oh! as in oh-pen, thinks the poet in me, the art of breath.

Oh!, a startle, may be as close to the ancient Sanskrit syllable “ohm” as a Westerner can manage. To Google it is to learn that Open Hands is a food bank in Atlanta, a song lyric, a legal service for those in shelters in New York City and, according to Henri Nouwen, a practical gesture made during prayer. At the recent Oscars, the film CODA prompted us to learn how to make the sign for applause with our open hands—a beautiful moment—until someone took an open hand to another person center stage. Open hands is how I remember receiving communion before the pandemic. And open hands is a takeaway from my favorite Abbey Lincoln vintage jazz album.

Her song, “Throw It Away,” says, “I think about the life I live, a figure made of clay.” Today, I watched a demonstration on how to draw open hands, which artists say are equally as challenging as eyes. As I write, I’ve revisited Lincoln and her homily: “So, keep your hands wide open if

you’re needing anything.” Google it.

Ruminate over it. Abbey Lincoln is my Henri Nouwen from the Abbey.

She was married to acclaimed jazz drummer Max Roach, a man who knew what open hands are capable of.

LAURIE PERRY VAUGHEN

I invite you to look closely at something small and ordinary. I offer just a few basic words but beg for your full attention. I believe that how much a person has received, by the end, depends on how much they have perceived. We can perceive more in one thing fondly investigated than in many things briefly noted. The more we reverently scrutinize or passionately study, the more we see life expressed in everything around us. What more can I give than a new perspective? What more can you take than a closer look? If we spend time observing, then intimating to each other our understanding, this is as close as we can come to knowing each other. We find ourselves in each other’s words, then feel ourselves more integrated in this shared world.

ROBYN GROTH

88

MATT JONES. Chickadee Series, 2022.

Digital Photography.