Issue 45: Unfinished by Ruminate Magazine

UNFINISHED / 45

Winter 2017 $15

ru’mi-nate: TO C HE W THE C U D ; T O MU S E; T O MED I TAT E; TO THI NK A G A I N ; T O PO N D ER

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Cover image: Amy Reckley. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 9 (detail). Screen print and mixed media drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK.

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contents

NO T ES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artist 32 Contributors’ 81 Last 85 NONF I C T I O N

The Anatomy of Gratitude, Leslie Colis Ward 20 Prodigal, E. VyVy Trinh 28 City of Dead, Alex Simand 69 From a Balcony Overlooking the El Yunque 78 Rain Forest, Tonia Colleen Martin FICTION

The Changeling, Matt Jones 44 Love Is Sleeping on Broken China, Marisa Handler 50 VI SU A L A RT

Domestic Cyclone, Amy Reckley 33-40, 57-64

PO ET RY

16 Elizabeth Asks, Maggie Blake Bailey 17 Mary Remembers, Maggie Blake Bailey 18 Bookend Quote from Bro. Yao, Amanda Hawkins 19 Elegy at the Crocker, Amanda Hawkins 26 All These Months Since Your Diagnosis, Emily Ransdell 27 Seasonal Work, Emily Ransdell 41 Trying to Conceive, Jen Stewart Fueston 42 Reading Langston Hughes to Our Unborn Child, Dante Di Stefano 43 The Whip-O-Whirl, Janine Certo 54 In the Hall of the Great North American Mammal, Mason Henderson 56 Observing a Girl Stepping over Worms, Jake Crist 65 Exit Report, Jehanne Dubrow 66 I Carry It with Me, Kerri Vinson Snell 72 Watching Smoke Signals in Late Autumn, with Fog and Cowboys—, Charity Gingerich 73 Dear Jonah, John Sibley Williams 74 Planting, Berwyn Moore 76 Southern Tongues Coda (Precision Dying), Mark Wagenaar

2017 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

SP ONSOR E D B Y S T EV E A N D K I M F RA N CH I N I

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

M A G G I E B L A KE B A I L E Y

A MA N D A H AW K I N S

Elizabeth Asks

Bookend Quote from Bro. Yao

HON O RAB L E MEN T I O N E MI LY RA N S D EL L

All These Months Since Your Diagnosis

F I NA L I STS J A NI NE C E RTO

BERW YN MO O RE

J A KE C R I ST

EMI LY RA N S D EL L

DA NTE DI STE FA N O

K ERRI V I N S O N S N EL L

J E H A NNE DU B R O W

J EN S T EWA RT F U ES T O N

C HA R I TY G I NG E R I CH

J O H N S I BL EY W I L L I A MS

M A SON H E NDE R S O N

MA RK WA G EN A A R

2017 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

F I NA L J U D G E S H A N E MCCRA E W RI T ES :

The first time I read “Elizabeth Asks,” I thought it was unfinished. Don’t get me wrong—its conclusion is striking, and opened up thinking in my mind, which is what I often, maybe always, look for poems to do. But the last line seems so plain, so stark, that I thought, “There has to be more.” And there is more, and the more is each person’s life as it is borne both from and by the poem’s last line forward. “Elizabeth Asks” unsettlingly makes apparent both how little power we have to affect the designs of others upon our lives, and how little prepared we are to wield great power over the lives of others when we discover we have it. The feeling you get that it’s unfinished is how you know it’s true.

grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School. McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule (2011), Blood (2013), The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015), and In the Language of My Captor (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. McCrae lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. SHA NE M C C R A E

editor’s note

I’ve been writing this since the night I pulled off the road at Big Sur and my eyes caught the insanity of the stars, since the months by the kitchen window watching the snow come down like fallout from a despair I had no word for, since I stopped searching for a name and found myself tick-tock in a hammock asking nothing of the sky. —from Richard Blanco’s “Since Unfinished”

I, TO O, HAVE B E E N W R I T I NG T HI S.

I’ve been writing this since I first learned the words done and undone, finished and unfinished. I’ve been writing this since taking piano lessons from my grandmother in that room with the red velvet wallpaper and the fancy armchair next to the piano, since feeling her respect for the piano and herself and me—taking all of us seriously, giving me permission to do the same. And I kept writing this when I entered middle school and then high school and our lessons became less of a lesson and more of a marveling over music as I would play a little and then she would play a little and then my grandfather would come in and turn on the brass lamp on top of the piano, saying don’t you ladies need a little more light? because this was his way of joining us, his way of adding to the beauty that is never finished. I’ve been writing this since my babies were born and I, as Mother, was born with them, and so much love and so many fears for tomorrow and the next day were born too.

I’ve been writing this since I started feeling the shy edges of my soul, like a body in the dark running her hands across the wall, searching for the light switch. I’ve been writing this since yesterday when I began to wonder if my grandmother purposely left the light off so that my grandfather could come turn it on. I've been wondering how we leave so many lights off, so many pages blank, unknowable, wondering if that’s an invitation rather than a curse, an invitation for others to create light, or for ourselves, tomorrow or ten years down the road, to reimagine. I’ve been writing this since this morning when I read a line in the Psalms that asked God to “turn to us in mercy,” and my heart flip-flopped it and read “turn us into mercy,” and I whispered, yes, turn us into mercy. I’ve been writing this now—since, yes, our lives are never perfectly resolved or reconciled, since we go on holding our clumsy and beautiful multitudes in all our unfinished ways.

With gratitude,

readers’ notes ON U N F I N I S H ED

I’ll see you later, m’hija were the last words that my father said to me. He walked out the front door with my mother one night in early January of 2003 on their way to a birthday party for one of his nieces. The next morning, he would have been on a flight to Mexico to finalize a sale of his parents’ property, but he never made it on the plane. Through tearful eyes, I watched him walk slowly along the driveway, gasping for air and holding on to my mother’s shoulder. “Jairo, you’re not well. Let’s stay,” my mother pleaded. He replied with a soft grunt, let go of her, and walked with stubborn determination to the car. I was in tears because we had been talking (or attempting to talk—we were never any good at it) while he waited for my mother to ready herself for the party. I was freshly out of high school and not dealing well with the fact that my education had reached its end, despite finishing top of my class. He had started to apologize for not being able to change our immigration status; for not being able to work, and my siblings and I having to work full time; for being emotionally absent; for rarely being sober; for being unreliable, irresponsible, self-loathing, afraid. Or I like to think he would have apologized for all of that, if I hadn’t interrupted him with my sobs. The next time I saw him, he was cold, grey, and displaying concern on his face. I still believe that I will see him later. Maybe then he can finish what he wanted to say. YAJAIRA N. CALDERON, DOWNEY, CA

In quilting, “UFOs” or “unfinished objects” are those quilts in various stages of completion. Examples of UFOs include but are not exclusive of: fabric all cut in tidy piles to be sewn together; or, blocks made but not sewn together; or, blocks together but borders not attached; or, quilt top completed but not yet an assembled quilt sandwich (top, batting, back); or, quilt sandwich is assembled but quilting not done; or, quilting done but binding not attached or completed; or, quilt completed but lacking quilt label or lacking signature of maker; or, quilt finished, label or signature attached, but not given to the recipient or on the specified bed, wall, table, or church quilt auction. Some imagined social scientists hypothesize that high numbers of UFOs reveal creative, easily bored minds with the need to move on to new colors and combinations of patterns. This hypothesis is repeated by quilters to excuse the number of UFOs, although the theory has never been scientifically proven. JUNE MEARS DRIEDGER, LANSING, MI

The immigration officer’s fingers tighten around my arm to pull me out of line. “Why are you visiting Japan,” he shouts at us as he snatches the passports from my hand. My husband tries to explain that we are visiting for a few days on a layover as we make our way back to the United States from a wedding in Thailand, but the officer cuts him off and speaks directly to me. I repeat the story. He enquires about our identical last names. 10

“We’re married; he’s my husband,” I motion with my arm toward my husband. He asks me twice more to identify him. I point as if we’re contestants on The Price is Right. He hesitates before slowly returning the passports and announcing we are being questioned because we fit the description of an unknown man from the African continent who has been illegally importing drugs and Eastern European women; him, the possible African, me, the white woman. We just stare clutching our American passports. The seconds seem to linger in the air like witnesses until the immigration officer finally lifts a hand to the agent stamping passports and signals to let us through. JESSICA GRANGER, BLACKLICK, OH

When I was little, my father would tell me stories of when he was a kid, or a young man: past conversations, old girlfriends, people he met—his memories. Most of them were quite entertaining, but sometimes he’d stop in the middle of telling them, and I’d say in my little-kid voice, “And then what happened?” And he’d shrug and say, “Nothing happened, really. That’s the way it was.” That’s it? I’d think, and I’d go off and do whatever it was that I was doing before. Every story hungers for an ending, some semblance of closure. One without an ending feels like a building half built, with no roof on it. However, as I’ve grown older and have formed memories of my own, I’ve found no roof on some of my stories. The pursuit of endings is maddening. I imagine my future child asking, Dad, what happened after you said that? or Dad, what happened after that night? And I’ll try to quickly build a roof out of paper-mache, but the

glue will melt in the hot sun and the roof will collapse, and I’ll have to admit that what I have is not a wondrous Artemision but a ruined Parthenon, and I’ll say, He just walked away, or We never saw each other again. Maybe there was an ending, but it happened off-screen. Maybe the ending was so banal I forgot it. Or maybe I’ll say, And then we were friends again, or And I saw her once more, twelve years later, in London. JOHN MURPHY, HERNDON, VA

A blackbird picks up thin stems of straw grass that have blown onto the deck. She grabs a sprig and flies up under the eaves. She has chosen the top of the patio light fixture for her nest. As she goes about nest building, her mate sits on the deck railing—guarding, I assume. The female comes close to the bottom of the sliding glass door of the deck. She grabs a twig, stops, drops the twig, looks inside. I stop and look back. We have a moment, she and I. Then she picks up the twig and flies to her nest. I turn back to write. "Give us one more example," the instructor said, "about your mother, to help us understand the peril, the cut-off love. It should be easy. Four sentences are all you need." But it is not easy. It is a story that slips away from me no matter how brave I try to be. I hope the birds' nest will be strong and safe, that their chicks will hatch and live, that my presence does not disturb too much, cause them to abandon their eggs. I know so little about blackbirds, only a poem. It all seems so tenuous, how any of us survive. LAUREN CRUX, SANTA CRUZ, CA

readers’ notes

It’s the thousand unfinished pieces of life that vie for my attention in the dead of night while the rest of the world sleeps. But then morning comes, and with it the tedium of the day becomes my diversion from that inner longing for completion. ALISA WILLIAMS, MISHAWAKA, IN

I have more incomplete paintings than finished ones. Some sit idly due to more pressing projects sweeping me away, lost to the tide of forgetfulness, but most of them remain works in progress because I gained what I needed from the piece before it reached fruition. Boredom, in other words. Despite good reasons, the unfinished paintings remain stacked against the wall. There’s an unwritten obligation that whatever we begin must be concluded. To leave things undone seems to rob us of achievement, making us feel less somehow, instead of instilling pride in having created something in the first place. However, be them finished or not, every project becomes a teacher and carries us to a new place. SIN RIBBON, SAVANNAH, GA

Late fall is my favorite time of year, a time of deciduous glory, a last flinging of yellow, orange, and red before the browns and evergreens of winter command. “Why can’t the earth just get over it,” said a visiting friend, “just drop the leaves all at once, and then we can get on with the Christmas lights and something happy?” “If everything is dying,” I say, “it’s surely

a lovely dying.” Roots grow deep, after all, under the forest floor. Even the brown leaves of the pin oak, hangers-on until the end, must go. Even I must die, I think, to those dreams about me that become idols if they persist, to realize I cannot hold the world, even my little one, in check. I have no control. I must let the world spin and seasons turn. And yet I have to keep believing that great and good and mysterious things are going on down under, in me, in those I love, in the world even, though I can’t see them. Soon it will be winter, and then I’ll really have to believe, have to accept that buried under the snow or on the other side of a bitter wind lies light, that new life will sprout in what dies. I bend and snatch one yellow leaf from the wind. I carry it inside and place it on my windowsill. That’ll be my fall. That’ll be my melancholy hope of spring, even in my dying. STEVE WEST, RALEIGH, NC

It’s raining. I haven’t seen rain in months, and that was a drizzle. It’s actually raining. The birds are loving it, taking baths in the puddles. I put on my raincoat and boots and venture into the backyard. But here in this beautiful rain, I see stories. I see things in the puddles, images of hot, sweltering bodies now cooled by a lovely rain. I slip off my pajama bottoms under my raincoat. Wiggle out of my pajama top under my raincoat. Walk over to the pool, the pool I haven’t used since I don’t remember when.

I remove my flip flops, slide out of my raincoat into the cool water with drops on my face, my hair clinging to my face. I see all kinds of stories in the trees, reflections in the pool. A lonely woman submerged. A desperate friend reaches her in time. Stories about hope. Stories about survival. Stories about parched, dried humans soaking up a welcome rain, coming alive, breathing life. I glide to the side where my empty raincoat waits and slip it on. I sit on the side, lift my head to the sky, and catch raindrops on my tongue like I used to do when I was a kid. I’m a kid again. I have ideas and dreams and a future. And rain. JEAN BLASIAR, PASADENA, CA

There’s an unpainted strip in the farright corner because of how we taped the walls. I’ve purchased some light fixtures, but I haven’t wired them. I don’t have any curtains on any windows. The toilet sucks—actually, it doesn’t, which is the problem. The flush isn’t a flush so much as it is a nagging usher at the end of a concert. “Alright, time to go. Show’s over.” I ripped off the old baseboard, which was cheap and snapped like twigs. But now I walk down the hall, and I see the old paint, or the old wallpaper which was behind the old paint. Along with the absence of new baseboard, I’m also lacking new doors and doorframes. Because I’m afraid of choosing the wrong baseboard and doors and doorframes. Because I don’t know what baseboard I want. Because I don’t know what doors I want. Because I don’t want to open the house to anybody until I’ve got the way I want it. The way it needs to be. Because no one can see the house until it’s perfect. Because no one can see me until I’m perfect.

There is, however, a sunset that pours into the living room every evening. The light starts opposite me and then, breath by breath, approaches in graceful procession. The tree in the front yard speckles the light. The hours pass, and the light climbs up the back wall. I sit against this wall and am revealed. All that I am, and all that I’m not. I am seen and known and loved. Amen. DOMINIC LAING, PORTLAND, OR

When I stopped drinking for thirty days, I got my dreams back. They were bold visions in primary colors. The ocean was blue; the sky was red. There were fields of yellow that blinded me. After the first nights, the colors melted together and became something new. My friends were in shades of grey, and it felt as if they were in a cobweb and I needed to pull them through. Animals were graceful pinks and putrid shades of green. I thought my teeth were falling out one night. Then another night, I woke up startled and sweating because I dreamed about the clown again. I haven’t thought about him since I was a girl. Most of all, I kept dreaming about the blue ocean. Either I was in its embrace, giving in, or on the shore afraid. Some nights, everything was blue and impossible. I read this would happen. Alcohol changes brain activity—neurons and synapses start to connect and fuse together in different interlocking charms. Or that’s what I like to think. “What would I see tonight?” I wondered as I drifted off to sleep, aching to see the world differently. RACHEL M. REIS, SACHSE, TX

readers’ notes

Days before I turned sixty, I sat on the other side of an invisible wall and looked back on my flat, old life and had no desire to return. I began laughing. My mind shouted, “I’m a beginner! There’s an infinite amount I don’t know and don’t even know I don’t know it!” I had entered the sacred land. A land I ceased to believe existed in college, but hoped I could find when I first smoked marijuana. I searched, using many street drugs, then quit when I realized using them was like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon but never being able to go down in. I pursued it for five years with a Zen master, then for twenty more years as I attended an Anglican seminary and served as a priest. But I didn't find it there. For four more years I sought it, sitting in silence at a potter's wheel, with only elastic clay as my companion. Finally, I became a Greyhound bus driver. I loved my home life, was passionate about serving my passengers, and found peace doing my daily meditation and prayer. I felt no need to want enlightenment and gave up the search. Then, five months later, when I sat down to write in my journal, enlightenment burst into my life! Yet, it was not an end but was the beginning. The beginning of trusting each infinite instant to be my teacher. JOHN KING, BURNS, WY

On a shelf in my closet is a five-year-old, spiral-bound copy of 150 pages of my creative thesis. I went back to school to

write this book, the book I started ten years ago, the book about the year my husband and I put our time, faith, and money into anything we thought would save our fouryear-old daughter from a brain tumor. She died fifteen years ago, but the grief never ends. It stands next to me at every family event and runs alongside every happiness I experience without her. Each year on October 13th I remember when our story began, and I am haunted by thoughts of what could have been. My grief and my story remain as unfinished business. When I read what I have written about my daughter Divine, it doesn’t seem enough to make anyone understand what we lost. I don’t know how to get to the place where I can write the end. I am beginning to think I won’t. YOLANDE CLARK-JACKSON, MIAMI, FL

Becoming a mother to three in less than two years splintered my days and my vocations into seemingly unredeemable slivers. I had no categories, no metaphors to understand this fragmentation of time and being. Part of me wanted to wish away the creative impulse burning inside my bones in order to focus solely on wearing the “good mom” badge—devoting myself completely to washing dishes, rocking babies, and sweeping floors. The other part dreaded being reduced: I feared losing part of myself if I gave up art-making. There is an Australian tapestry workshop that shares fascinating photos of groups of weavers sitting in front of expansive, in-progress tapestries. They

weave their tapestries from the bottom upwards on looms as large as my living room. The designs are complicated and nuanced. Scores, maybe hundreds, of tapestry bobbins filled with different colors of thread hang down from the tapestry. Each bobbin waits until the weaver is ready to pick it up and incorporate that bobbin’s color of thread into the design again. They’ll be picked up later, and for now, they wait. Now my bursts of creative energy and agency are followed by seasons of artistic quiet. The creative bobbins hang down and wait as the house-cleaning and child-caring and soccer-practice bobbins are employed. The painting and writing bobbins will be picked up again at the right time. MICHELLE BERG RADFORD, TAYLORS, SC

“Florence, Florence, you’re not going to believe me.” “How can I help you, Jerry?” I was used to Jerry calling in at night. I had known him all my life. I had memories of him from when he was young, before his mental health problems began. Tonight, I was working the midnight shift at the Sheriff’s Office. At this point I thought I had seen it all in my work career. I didn’t think there would be any more surprises. Jerry again, “There’s a big blue rabbit in my driveway.” “Is there someone with it?” “No, please come get the rabbit.” “I’ll take care of it.” Taking and directing calls was my job. Responding to the calls was the responsibility of the police officers in the squad room. I gave the call to the officer on duty. He gave me a “10/4,” and I did not hear from him again. I did not give it another thought.

The next night, coming on shift, I walked through the squad room. Do you know what I saw leaning into the far corner? A seven-foot stuffed, blue rabbit. I guess I hadn’t seen it all. FLORENCE HERVEY, INTERNATIONAL FALLS, MI

The things that vex you in the nighttime are things like wondering what you’d say to your younger self, if given half the chance. I’d find myself sitting there, reading a book, happy. And what would I tell myself? Maybe I’d go back to high school and find my younger self—the one with glasses and longer hair, wearing jean shorts and tank tops, and black hoodies, and combat boots, just to be edgy. I’d find this girl, this nice girl, unchanged by the wickedness of the world—too early for that. Surely there would be something I could say to her, to help her along what would be a long, arduous, difficult journey through the future of her life. And the thing that’ll really get you is realizing that there’s nothing you could have said to make the future go any better—that things are set on a certain track like a railroad, and that track goes through such rough terrain, but at least it didn’t hit the minefield. And then you shake your head, sigh, go to sleep. Because where once you thought there was unfinished business, you realize that there’s nothing to complete after all. And all you can really do is weep, for the things you’ve gone through, and forgive yourself for the things you think you should have done. LESLIE D. SOULE, RANCHO CORDOVA, CA

MAGGI E B L A KE B A I L E Y

Elizabeth Asks Now after those days his wife Elizabeth conceived; and she hid herself five months. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Luke 1:24 The holy question of how much will it hurt. Mary, come and braid my hair, the men inside us have spoken and we know they will speak again. But for now I am adrift in my own body. Mary, where are the limits of promise? No one offers a miracle a crib. No one says, Elizabeth, do you need blankets? Can your old fingers knit what is needed? Will milk come? Will the weight of my limbs rise from my body like mist burned by daylight? Practice with me, Mary. Let me rub your temples and sing softly. None of us knows how to mother.

MAGGI E B L A KE B A I L E Y

Mary Remembers Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age; and this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Luke 1:36 Elizabeth had myrrh. After the last lost baby, Zacharias bought her a small jar. At night, she worked the salve into her cracked hands that folded and refolded the linen of their bed, unblessed until angels came to say otherwise. And I came to her door. For a spell, we anchored together, rounded bellies turning in the dark, reciting our stations of ache and hope. Elizabeth would place her thumbs where my neck met my shoulders when no one else touched me. Tonight these men give back to me the scent of that room. Everyone else gets to have birds. I want her hands to push me apart.

AMANDA HAW KI NS

Bookend Quote from Bro. Yao At this point in my life I’ve lost most of my belief. The old woman tree out back is dying. One limb at a time she dies like the woman I loved. The first time I looked up I hadn’t known the season had shifted to spring and her branches were throbbing with bees. When I look up now I don’t see leaves, I see the August sky. My students try to tell me compromise and change are a kind of loss of self. They say this because they do not understand the complexity of argument. Also, because they believe the world is a mix of insoluble differences. What does Bro. Yao say? I don’t listen to men on principle, but his azaleas poem made me cry. Something about how he returned to his loss, how he climbed back into his own old yard to see those flowers, untended and dark, but blooming. An old professor of mine confessed surprise he became Lutheran after being raised Baptist— he never imagined he could go that far. At this point in my life I am also surprised I am this far from and this close to my beginnings. The plan is to remove the tree this winter and plant the strawberry fig. I asked a friend what she believes is the difference between loss and grief. She said you have two hands plant the damn tree. Every morning brings some new thing.

AMANDA HAW KI NS

Elegy at the Crocker The way the word feels in the mouth like the Flemish oyster, wet and cupped, light bouncing hard off the pearl edge, accepted in the brine. Like that of the cherries, bound up and pressing out of their skin, shining from within the plumped height of their momentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;so chest pressingly pink-almost-red, like the inside of an eyelid, closed and facing the sun. We said what we wanted were the small paintings, the promise of nothing but the purest blackâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;berries in a flower bouquet we could hardly detect but for the one speck of shine. There were five or six insects hidden in plain sight, like some hide love or grief. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how much I needed to see until I was there, pawing through the billows of the pale pink rose, noting the cherries like lanterns, the berries like knobbed black holes. How both exposed not a darkness pressing in around them from without, but a dark that was a gathered depth in which to sink.

The Ana tom y of Gra titud e

L ES L I E CO L I S WA RD

WH AT WOU L D T HAT L O OK L I K E , I wonder, the anatomy of gratitude?

A pair of folded hands? A bowed head?

Here’s what I noticed today: Bare tree limbs. A field of dried grasses—seven shades of brown lit by a slanting autumn sun. An ancient apple tree bowing to the crumbling stone wall. The sky is hard gray, the light rain is off again, on again, and the air carries the kind of cold that sneaks inside the openings of my jacket, up the sleeves and down the neck. And while it is not a day that should easily woo me away from a fireplace or cup of tea, I’m out walking the dirt roads of northern Vermont with my two dogs, drawn into the landscape of this late November afternoon. Eventually the tree-canopied road opens up to a place where the woods give way to field, which, just a few short years ago, would not have interested me; all that would have registered were dead twigs and dullness and neverending muddy brown. A prostrated man in front of a Buddhist shrine? When I was younger, November was my least favorite month. It had nothing to recommend it. November was cold and wet and sandwiched between two months I loved. It had neither the glory of October’s foliage, nor the sparkle and festivity of December. It didn’t have the polished shine of June or the fecund excessiveness of high summer. November was the month to endure. Which is why, when I was planning my wedding twenty-one years ago, I chose an August weekend and married on the shores of Lake Champlain at the end of a farmer’s field. The bright summer light and the wide blue skies reflected how clearly I saw my future. I was thirty-five, I had had my flings, my relationships, my heartbreaks. I knew my heart’s desire. During our courtship we would lie in bed and play a game—“Why do you love me?”— and take turns with our answers: You taught me to make a great cassoulet. (I might start.) You don’t care if it starts pouring rain when we go on long bike rides. (He would answer.) You can recite Yeats’ “The Second Coming” by heart. You read poetry to me at night. You’ll skinny-dip in any swimming hole we bike past. I wouldn’t pass up the chance to be naked with you. You’re the sexiest person I know.

No, you’re the sexiest person I know. You never lose your temper. How do you do that, never lose your temper? You have fierce love. When I lose my temper, you always say you love me “because of, not in spite of.” (I loved that most of all.) I took my vows with the bold promise and clarity of a summer’s morning. My dogs’ soft eyes when we return from vacation, grateful to not be abandoned? Grateful for the least favor they could ask for—please come back? But these days, I see the November landscape with different eyes. I count eight, nine, maybe a dozen shades of brown from palest tan through honey and caramel and burnt sugar right down to bittersweet chocolate. There are shades of russet and mahogany, too, and a brown that carries a hint of purple. My dogs and I pick our way through the tall grasses and head towards the woods on the other side. Three deer reveal themselves at the field’s edge, some ten or fifteen yards away. We stop, standing as still as the deer who pick up their heads and stare back at us. I imagine the deer, who cannot discern orange and red, see the outlines of what is before them: the numerous blades of dried grasses coming into focus as they sway in the wind, the differences in the sizes and shapes of the various seedpods before them, and then me, a large obstacle in my red wool jacket, neither tree nor shrub nor wildflower. A jarring break in the harmony of the landscape before them. And the landscape before me, in spite of the warm harmonious colors, is spare. Layers and layers of sparseness. November has swept this landscape clean. Brilliant red, yellow, orange foliage—gone. The succulent green of the chlorophyll-filled grasses—faded away. The last wildflowers of early autumn, goldenrod and aster—dried up. What is left is the architecture. The stalks on which the blazing beauty stood. The enduring grace of an old Vermont farmhouse, the economy of line, the utility of proportion. The steep slate-tiled roof. The repetition of clapboards, measuring three-and-a-quarter inches each, not more, not less. The unadorned door. This is not the beauty of my perennial garden in July, a riot of girls dancing in their first ball gowns, their coming out, their whispering sexual desire to anyone willing to listen,

any passerby at all, and who could blame them? Nor the explosion of red and yellow and orange forests in Vermont when foliage season arrives, forests busy telling everyone, the people on the tour buses, the cyclists in their bright yellow jackets, the locals working in their gardens, letting them all know to stand up and notice this flashy moment, this crowning glory of their life cycle, which is really announcing their death. My dying mother’s face in the presence of her grandchildren. When we were in the middle of our oldest son’s descent into substance abuse, a game of “Why do you love me?” would have been too scary to play. Instead, we traded that game for an ongoing match of “If I could just change you . . .” and it went like this: Can’t you, for once, make him stick to the rules we set down? (I might start.) Don’t cast me as the weakling because I don’t agree with the rules you set. (He would retort.) How long are you going to live in denial? How long are you going to believe only the worst about him? I hate that you are always trying to be his best friend instead of his parent. I can’t stand it when you lose your temper and yell. If I had someone backing me up, maybe I wouldn’t be reduced to that. If I thought you would listen to my ideas, I might be able to back you up. I can’t stand that you don’t see how alone I feel. I can’t stand being judged by you. We stripped each other clean. What do you do when your world, as you understood it, collapses? When the constructs on which you built your simple daily expectations begin to crumble? When the “if, then” statements that you took for granted begin to fail you? On a frigid winter afternoon when I escaped into the woods, my youngest son thought I was upset because dinner needed to be cooked and he needed a ride to soccer practice at the same time his middle brother needed a ride to his soccer practice in the opposite direction. He thought I was clenching my jaw and snapping at him to pick up the sweatshirt and socks he left on the kitchen table because I was tired of my daily slog. He could not understand that his oldest brother was spinning faster and faster into an alcohol-cocaine-ecstasy dervish where the centrifugal forces of his addiction were overpowering the gravitational forces of my love and I couldn’t keep him in one piece anymore. I wasn’t even sure about me. I went into the woods behind my house that winter day, a day when the temperatures

were below zero, a day when the air froze the hairs in my nose the instant I stepped outside and took in my first breath. Breathe, I told myself, with each push of a ski forward. I thought my lungs might fold in under the weight of my life if I didn’t remind myself to breathe. The cello’s velvet tones arcing and dipping and arcing again in Saint-Saens’ The Swan. The modern dancer’s austere grace; the arabesque suspended for the long note. That afternoon, I slipped into the silence of the forest, land someone saw fit to protect some twenty years ago, a piece of land (small compared to the world, but vast in its meaning to me) that doesn’t care if a child takes drugs, if a family is held together with dental floss (think thin strands of tensile strength fiber that, while bearing tremendous weight to keep the whole whole, can’t help cutting into the very matter they are keeping together, causing blood to rise in thin beads on the exposed and bruised surface). A woman quietly gliding into a silent sanctuary, a temporary peace held by dark trees within a clean white space on a cold winter day. Is the sharpness of gratitude felt in inverse proportion to the size of the gift granted? Yet, in between the horrible exchanges, my husband and I skied together in the cold of winter, winding our way through the forest, taking turns breaking trail after a new snowfall. We cooked dinner together each Sunday for our three boys, grilling, braising, roasting, and taking comfort in tastes and textures that would never be controversial between us. We biked through Vermont’s hills and didn’t turn back when we were pelted by rain. And when my father died in May, and my mother died five months later, in the middle of the worst of it, only my husband understood my grief; only he could give me comfort. And when our son needed to be taken to rehab two days before Christmas, the man I accused of wanting to be his friend more than his parent got on a plane with him and delivered him to treatment. Is gratitude always connected to the edge of loss? The dogs bark; they want to get moving, but I don’t want to start walking just yet. I look around the field in the afternoon light and see what is absent. There is no boldness in this field. There is no certainty. No brilliant pink or dazzling yellow assuring me of

anything. One would not feel inspired to initiate a dream here. Still, there are the straw-colored grasses with feathery tops, holding the seeds of next yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s crop, a bush with soft scarlet combs, cattails on the south side where the field becomes marshy, offering their chocolate pods up to the sky. Naked trees border the field, their branches arcing dark and strong across the sky. The remnants of goldenrod, almost colorless now, are a delicate profusion of stalk and leaf and seed. This is what lasts when the blush of summer and the burnished fanfare of autumn are gone. This is what is left after the cold sweeps in and the daylight fades, and the winds and the rain come and go. The curve of river stones. The bend in the gorge. The rounded peaks of the ancient mountains. I no longer think it was the dreariness of November that repelled me in my younger years so much as its humbleness. It is not an easy beauty. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a beauty you must earn the right to know.

EMI LY RA NSD E L L

All These Months Since Your Diagnosis I’ve tried to practice forgiveness: forgave the choir of crickets and bickering crows beneath the bedroom window, the low-slung stalk of the cat with that hummingbird caught in her mouth. The sightless moles that bulldozed the grass as they built their dark basilicas beneath us, their altars of roots and grubs. Forgave cabbage worm and slug, cosmos grown leggy, day lilies dead and gone. Under the strung lights of August’s cathedral, we had watched the Perseids fall one by one. We passed a bottle of Albariño and you asked if I’d go along to shop for the wig. Now it’s December. Ice stoops the fenceline junipers, cold rain lashes the firs. Our friends will gather for Christmas dinner like always, dressed to the nines, bringing pies and a hothouse poinsettia. I’ll bring the same champagne as last year and a centerpiece for the table, boughs fresh-clipped from the backyard thicket of holly trees, bright with red berries, bright with sharp shining leaves.

EMI LY R A NSD E L L

Seasonal Work Eight hours of mop water, Pine-Sol and sweat, half-smoked cigarettes and the brine of limp condoms left by guests. It was the summer before college, our first away from home; none of us would admit how much we missed high school and that we saved the letters from our moms and dads. Days, we polished and cleaned. Nights, we went to the bar. Not the lakeside place where the ski show ran, party lights and buckets of long-necks, tables crammed with college-boy camp counselors, waitresses all from Back East. We liked Anne’s, where the varnished bar glowed like honey in the amber light. Anne ran tabs till the pension checks came on the first of the month. Old Style was only a quarter, ten bucks got everyone drunk. This was our family now. Outskirt locals after the softball win. Anne's kid, feeding Slim Jims to the dog. Kenny, the tiniest man we had ever seen, passing around the same folded photo night after night—a horse, muscled and slick, its thick neck ringed with white carnations, a slight young rider bent to its ear. Shoulder to shoulder we drank all summer, oblivious to their losses lined up like empty glasses before last call. We were eighteen and wouldn't know grief if it sat down and bought us a drink. At the end of August, we'd lock up the boathouse and haul in the docks, bring the wicker rockers in off the porch. Uniforms laundered and hung for next year's crew, we boarded our busses out of there—for Madison, Ann Arbor, West Lafayette, South Bend.

Pr odig al

E. V y V y T RI N H

missed a Sunday mass. Still, by the time I was in high school, Jesus couldn’t compete for my attention, which had been stolen by Harry Potter, a pretty girl at school with frazzled black curls, and general fascination with my own wild interiority. All that talk of sin and blood and hell, the mental pirouettes required to will oneself to believe one was ingesting the actual body of Christ—the whole thing began to embarrass me. I never fought for the right to skip church, choosing instead to tag along and spend the hour daydreaming. Still, my mother, who had been the one to shepherd us to church and catechism class all through our childhood, sensed my straying and was disappointed. My adolescence passed quietly, without mention of confirmation. Many things about my upbringing differed from that of my mother, or that of my father, for that matter. My childhood home did not have a bomb shelter, and when I was sixteen I got to go to a summer camp for “young writers,” and I did not in the middle of the night run toward the beach, wade through the water, and climb onto a small wooden boat that might, or might not, be rescued at sea by a German cruise ship, or maybe the American navy. One year my younger sister received food stamps because they were a part of her compensation as an AmeriCorps volunteer. The arrangement baffled my parents, whose entire lives had been devoted to mobilization up and away from the food stamps that had fed them as teenagers. A few constants did remain, though, across their childhoods and ours, at least on the surface: a father-child love that was communicated mostly through grunts, the meals we ate at home—rice, assorted meats stewed in fish sauce and sugar—and, of course, the rhythm of the Catholic Church: birth in December, death and resurrection in April. WE ALM OST NEVE R

twenty-two I worked in a school and taught social studies to eighteen rising fifth graders with whom I was having a wild love affair. I was particularly smitten with Cresin and Emily, who, when I told them we’d soon be studying ancient Egypt, danced down the hall, each with one hand pointed in front and one hand pointed behind, both elbows bent. That summer we all kicked it in some era several hundred years before Christ was born. We closed our eyes and imagined the Tigris and Euphrates rivers overflowing and drowning our entire families. We debated the Code of Hammurabi, which offered murder as an appropriate sentence for all crimes. We each made a Facebook profile for an Egyptian god of our choice (mine was Anubis; it was just supposed to be a sample for the students, but I got really into it). That summer I thought a lot about life in antiquity—how at my age a woman might have already birthed and lost several children, how hunger was such a usual state of being that I wondered if our ancestors had a distinct word for it. I thought about how even so, even when their lives seem like mere survival with not a breath to spare, they worshipped. They prayed, they sang, they carved epics into stone, they looked up at the pattern-less scatter of light in the sky and weaved story out of them. I wondered for a moment if the foreverness of human worship was evidence of God, but then I decided it was actually evidence of our capacity to spin purpose out of chaos, our eternal hunger for meaning— rawest, maybe, when one has to make meaning of hunger. TH E SU M M E R I T U R NE D

anxiety, with triggers I’m told I should catalogue. The most consistent spark, I have found, is sitting alone in front of a computer and forcing my body to produce hundreds of academic words for an entirely theoretical exercise, which is an unfortunate trigger for a graduate student. In these moments, in these seizures of soul, I return to my motif, the daydream of my future: I’m sweeping a floor surrounded by an orbit of children. I have never been able to tell, in the daydream, if any of the children come from my own womb. (Is a womb a womb if it never carries a child, or is it then only called a uterus?) Truthfully this dream has sat in my chest gathering urgency since I was nineteen and woke up under a net-covered cot in a small room on a tree-shaded campus in southern Vietnam. The campus was a group home for children and adults with HIV run by Catholic nuns who were no older than I am now. In the glowing afternoons the kids would, in groups of five at a time, pile into a little plastic bench swing that was shaped like a horse or maybe a dragon, and I would rock it back and forth and narrate a story of a ship on the ocean: first it would be calm, and then a storm would come along, followed by an enormous crocodile, which in Vietnamese translates as “ugly fish.” The kids—especially To-Vy and Hien, I remember—couldn’t tolerate the boredom of the calm waters, but they also shrieked deafeningly whenever I transformed into the crocodile. “Change back, change back!” they would immediately cry. It was the kids, the idea of them, that pulled me to spend my summer there, but I found myself watching the nuns as much as I watched the children. I watched the rhythm of their lives: wake before dawn, cook breakfast and ladle out portions in circular tin trays, wake the children, lead prayer or sometimes a song and dance for Jesus, teach dictation and reading in one of the two classrooms, cook lunch, sweep, tuck the children in for nap time, cook dinner, sweep, pray, sleep, repeat. They were the most majestic artisans of peace, crafting it out of unlikely materials—time, rice, rosary beads, soil, donated primers and old pencils, attention. I watched them, fixated by a kind of longing. When August ended I became another asshole from the West who said goodbye to the kids and their caretakers so that I could go back to my liberal arts college, where I skimmed through huge scholarly tomes an hour before seminar and effortlessly offered my loud opinions in class, which were generally opinions rooted in an anti-everything tradition and which generally earned enthusiastic nods from my peers, and occasionally a few snaps. In the daydream of my future I am sweeping the floor of a similar home, and I don’t say goodbye until the kids are the ones to leave—to go to college or to the city or to whatever it is their wild, precious lives call them to do. I’m terrified to admit this is my dream, my future as I picture it. I’m scared it’s silly or impossible or that I’ll will myself to forget it because money, because convention. I’m scared my peers—with their outcomes-driven policy aspirations or their anti-everything activism—will point a finger at me and shout, “Savior complex!” But the truth is I’ve never met a kid I wanted to save, though I’ve met a bunch of different kids I would like to share my life with. I DEAL W I T H A DA I LY

across Paris with sickening coordination, I watched as one by one my acquaintances filtered their online selves through the red, white, and blue of the French flag. The images were so uninterrupted that they induced in me the closest WH EN GU NM E N OP E NE D FI R E

thing I have ever felt to a panic attack. What will my country do now, I thought, to ensure its sense of security? What will we do, now that people in Paris were made to feel the uncertainty that only people in Baghdad or Bujumbura or Baltimore are supposed to feel? I had discovered a new trigger. I crawled into my bed and wished that I knew how to pray the rosary—and wished that I had a rosary. Two weeks later when I was home with my parents and sisters for Christmas, I stole one. I took the prayer beads from the drawer in my parents’ room where my mom keeps her souvenirs from retreats—hymnals, pamphlets, and candles. I stole it because I couldn’t bear to face my mother’s glee. I was afraid that if she caught me, her eyes would flicker back and forth between my face and the rosary in my hand with an expression that said: I knew someday you’d come back for that. I’m not yet ready for that look. I’m not yet ready for her to throw a party and slaughter a cow and uncork all the wine in celebration of my homecoming. After all, in this moment all I have is a storm of questions, a crocodile of doubt still looming large. Is this what it was all leading up to, then—the ancestral toiling over barren earth in brutal winters, the urban migration of my grandfather who didn’t own shoes, his flight by boat into unknown diaspora, my parents’ late nights in college translating homework assignments into Vietnamese and back into English. Was it all to give me an existence so comfortable and steeped in reason that I can safely outgrow an illusion that was so vital to all who came before me? Have I worshipped so deeply in the cathedral of empiricism that I have no need for beads or whispered recitations? Do my degrees, my papers littered with footnotes, arm me with more truth than the nuns who spend their days sweeping, mothering? The body of Christ, food stamps—it’s take them or leave them in my world of limitless choice and filtered democracy. How lonely it is to sustain myself on something entirely different from my forebears. There’s a literalness to the faith tradition I was born into that I still can’t fully embrace, no matter how wide I open my heart; I am, as they say, “working on it.” For now, I pay close attention to the absence of my anxiety, the quiet that comes when I am watching my sixth-grade student read aloud with a fluency she once thought impossible; when I am marveling at my firework of a kid sister while we fold paper stars and outdo each other’s puns; when I have hiked a mountain and taken in the vastness of everything: the stretch of treetops, the pattern-less scatter of light in the sky. I offer my awe and hope that, for now, that is worship enough.

artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s statement A MY RECK L EY

entire practice as drawing. The questions that I explore in my work are grounded in the contemporary aesthetic dialogue that combines two- and threedimensional practices into an elastic definition of drawing. Borrowing fragments from the natural and the constructed world, my drawings are never completely nonrepresentational, nor do they appear finished. In response to specific locations, whether a physical space, a single piece of paper or an architectural structure, I propose a fluctuation between perspective and physical presence. I reflect upon a particular set of conditions asserted by existing spaces (corners, rafters, stairs, ceilings, walls, edges), and engage options within those spaces with specific materials, gestures and divisions. Comprehensively and concretely depicting what is not thereâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a sense of movement, potential energy in a stationary situation, an implicit meaningâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I am able to explore the possibilities. By using a variety of methods in traditional and nontraditional media my processes serve to communicate drawing as a practice that is both object and action, formal and conceptual, noun and verb. Working back and forth between conceptual two-dimensional drawings and threedimensional translations, I am particularly interested in the negotiations and elaborations that take place between the parallel processes. What is set out in great detail on paper evolves beyond human scale in physical space. Pushing a particular illusion further, I utilize common elements and recognizable surfaces to encourage the viewer into finding shared emotional/psychological/spatial relationships or even feelings of nostalgia. I often choose faux materials and temporary fixes. I elevate familiar and utilitarian materials to a height where otherwise unseen aesthetic qualities are embellished or amplified as much as they are intentionally misused or overstepped. For me, drawing is the most immediate visual method of inventing, expanding and articulating simultaneous realities. My thinking and the action of making both reveal a curiosity that tempts the possibility of instantaneous change. I am interested in the potential of an instance where space, location, and time teeter between reality and imagination. In my Domestic Cyclone series, I considered how structural domestic elements and less tangible ideas like indecision, fantasy, or order can come together to communicate a moment that is both frozen and fluctuating. Interpreted through two and three-dimensional drawings, concept drawings, and installation, Domestic Cyclone is a whirlwind of thought, emotion, and reaction that will never be completely integrated or resolved. As a form that is both destructive and alluring, the cyclone suggests a twisting mass of contradictions, decisions, desires, beliefs and questions that are circling round, chasing, and running away. Simultaneously, turning clockwise and counterclockwise, we spin crazily within this organized chaos while keeping our eye on it from a careful distance. I TH INK OF M Y

AMY RECKLEY. Domestic Cyclone. Wood, contact paper, foam insulation board, foam core, vinyl floor tiles.

AMY RECKLEY. Domestic Cyclone (installation detail). Wood, contact paper, foam insulation board, foam core, vinyl floor tiles.

JEN STEWA RT F U E STON

Trying to Conceive Last month the test was negative and another you did not cohere. They measured blood in little vials, gave me pills to make the bleeding come or go, and every day, I dipped a sticky slip of paper in a little cup. They laid me out on tables, peering in to see if you were there. But you were not. There was not even a you to not be, so nothing has been lost at all. Just time. It's hard to conceive how things might be if you were. My belly growing taut and thick, my mind arranging space for you in ordered lives, and how we'd decorate, dust off the bassinette. But every month's an otherwise, each possible eludes us, swept off like seedlings washed downhill by rain. This, the nature of things. What finally comes to being comes with shadows, carries with it all the absences that rest in everything.

DANTE D I STE FA NO

Reading Langston Hughes to Our Unborn Child There is a Tigris in you, little one, and an infinite Euphrates running through your mother. We are rowing right now in the ancient dark, in big boats, toward each other. The thought of you already baptizes me again. I am upheld in you. You are floating in an ocean of cells you will soon constellate for us. You will carry a country inside you. I will give you the shirt off my back, once it has become song. I will compose you a nation made of hem and horizon. I will give you every river in me. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll river out undying star for you. â&#x20AC;&#x192;

JANI NE C E RTO

The Whip-O-Whirl As a child, I called out for my mother and would find her resting on the patio glider. I nestled between her thighs as she ran her fingers through my hair. My childhood self believed the clouds had benevolent eyes, but I’m middle-aged now, and I’ve got my arms around my mother on this ride in Kennywood Park, high above the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny where the steel mill meets the sky. We’re one of twenty cars, dangling on a horizontal wheel, picking up speed, our car swinging outward, the hydraulic arm tilting, ascending the entire frame, turning us now vertical, the wheel accelerating at ninety degrees: a face on the watch of the hand of God, the screaming no belts, no restraints, the force pinning us to our seats. I’m in back, she’s between my legs, clutching the cage, as again and again, we rocket to space: upside down at seventy feet and plummeting, and over her shoulder, I can see that her eyes are closed, but my mother simply cannot stop laughing. And with each and every whip at the base, she’s exclaiming my name.

The C

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after dad died. She wanted me to track down someone named Esplanade Alamayou, but she didn’t know how to use a computer. She was tired of the feral cats making love in the woods behind the house and then giving birth underneath the hood of a broke down car. “One barbed penis would make a believer out of me,” she’d say, but then a wave of loneliness would grip her. “Love is a hard thing to give up, Vollie. Will you put some food out on the porch before you go?” I had to be careful backing out of the driveway. The feral cats liked to lounge right under the wheels. I once read about a burgeoning branch of science called neuroparasitology that claimed that cats contained a parasite that could invade and then control human minds. That’s what mom was dealing with. Inner turmoil. Her autonomy had been interrupted. Somewhere in that ancient skull of hers was a war for the soul of a woman who would either love again or adopt many cats. When I looked for Esplanade Alamayou, he had no Internet presence other than his inmate profile that was a part of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Offender Information Search. I read to her over breakfast: “Unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. Possession of less than a gram of cocaine. Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—” “Preposterous,” she belted out. “He was a fine young man when I knew him. He and your father were friends.” I took a bite of dry toast and said, “He’s eligible for parole in 2046.” Mom batted a hand at me and said, “Sheesh. Who’s got that long?” Her face dropped and her cheeks sagged, then she raised an eyebrow and asked, “Where’s he in lockup?” I think what she missed most about dad was just having another body in the house. Her judgment was awful. Her eyesight was fading. Cat feet danced across the roof, and she cocked her head up to say, “It should rain more, Vollie,” as if I could do anything about the weather. Sometimes I thought it would be easier if she found someone else, not necessarily for her, but for me. Her sleep was irregular. She called me at all hours of the night to ask what I could do about the dreams she was having. “Your father never dreamt in color, Vollie. Always black and white. I’ve been watching too much television.” “But I’ve left books with you. Why don’t you read them?” “I already have my own story,” she’d say before the receiver clicked. After I hung up, Otto rolled over and swatted me through the sheets. “You gotta tell her to stop calling so late,” he groaned. Mom didn’t know about Otto, and much like dad, she never would if I had any say in the matter. I wanted the rest of her life to pass peacefully and without disappointment. “Come on,” Otto had said before, “Just take me with you one time. We can tell her that I’m there to work on something. Anything. You can tell her you paid me to cut the yard.” I fixed my gaze on him and said, “She thinks it’s unnatural.” “Okay,” Otto sighed. “I guess I’ll just stop hoping.” He didn’t like how much time I spent at her house. It was almost an hour’s drive out of the city. Otto said, “Hire a caregiver. Better yet, get her on Match.com. It’s cheaper.” MOM K E P T M E B USY

But Mom couldn’t do online dating. She didn’t want her picture taken. “Can’t you just describe me?” she’d ask. “A picture is worth a thousand words anyhow.” I paused, my fingers lingering above the keyboard. “I think you’re using that phrase wrong.” She batted me on the shoulder. “Oh, no one’s got time for longhand anymore. Did you check the mail when you came in?” I turned in my chair to face her. “Yeah, why?” “No letters?” she asked. “Mom,” I insisted, wondering if she wasn’t above writing to a man locked up halfway across the state. “Tell me you didn’t.” She let out a breathy sigh. “The most a man will compose these days is a thought. God forbid he take the time out to actually put pen to paper.” Sometimes I thought it might be a kind gift to bring Otto over to the house, to plant a kiss on his lips and send mom to an early reunion with dad. The thought seemed to me both equally sweet and cruel. Otto said, “You should just write her back. There’s nothing wrong with pretending. I mean, you do it all the time already.” But I didn’t know anything about this Esplanade Alamayou apart from his criminal record. What had been the nature of their relationship? Who had been less intimate with my mother than me? I was unfit to forge any sort of bond. She didn’t have much of an appetite anymore, so I only came over once a week to take out the trash. It was too much for her. Watching her try and roll the county-issued can up the slope of the driveway was like watching an aged Sisyphus roll his stone. After I got it out to the curb, I went inside with her and checked stocks of toilet paper and canned yams and dish soap. I said, “Do you need anything while I’m here? What about cat food? Should I pick up more?” She lowered herself to a chair at the kitchen table. “Oh I don’t know. It’s irresponsible.” “Feeding them?” I asked. “Letting them go on the way they do,” she corrected. I said, “I could catch you a kitten.” She shooed my comment away. “The mother would be heartbroken.” Then she brightened and said, “Maybe a calico, though. Those are the ones with a little orange in them, Vollie. They’re good luck.” I put on a pot of tea in the kitchen and wandered out into a backyard overgrown with honeysuckle and garbage. How did you catch a kitten? With a trap? With cold fish? I once read somewhere that the iodine in tuna made cats frail with hyperthyroidism. And then there were the agoraphobics in their New York brownstones, the crazy cat lady shut-ins who died alone and became food for their furry collection of felines. Either way, something was going to consume you in life, whether from the inside or the out. I tiptoed through leaf litter so dense it was like walking on foam. Mom yelled at me from the back porch, “Watch out for the raccoons. You can tell the difference, yes?”

I stepped on a twig, and it cracked beneath my feet. The woods ahead were sparse, but mired in shadows. I had spent time between the trees as a child, running away and hiding and confessing all of my secrets to the fat pink worms I toed out of the soil. Sometimes, when I wasn’t sure that anything could be trusted, I’d pluck the worm back up in two fingers and split it in half. I don’t think that hurt them much. And if it did, then they couldn’t remember that kind of rift in the way that people could anyway. “Vollie,” I heard mom yelling from the house. “The tea!” I shook my head. She had always been a loud woman. I turned over my shoulder and put a finger to my lips. “Shhh, you’re going to scare them all away.” But part of me knew that wasn’t true, because if it were, then where would I be? Probably somewhere far off in the woods with my hair matted and clothes in tatters, language a forgotten thing that hummed in the back of my throat. That is always what I used to think about, even when I was young: if I ran away, then would I forget myself? Who I was? Maybe I would bring Otto by the house, but I would wait until she was really deep in the throes of her last days, until she was delusional and nostalgic and full of regret. I’d read that a cat’s purring could be therapeutic, that the vibrations healed bones and lowered stress and blood pressure. Sometimes Otto would nudge me in bed at night and say, “Just write her back. It’s sad that she sends all these letters to this guy without ever getting a response.” Maybe he was right, because what was a cat except a creature who spoke only in reassurances? Whose aloofness was merely play? While I searched near the husk of a broke down car with its rusted fender melded to the earth, I imagined her sitting down to the table with two mugs of piping hot tea, how she would always wait until it cooled off to take her first sip. But me, I grew up hoping to scald my tongue, to burn away whatever words threatened to cleave the silence that hung between us as she tapped her fingers along the table’s edge and steam rose in front of her face. There was a different life waiting on the other side of that silence, one where we talked about more than what the weather should and shouldn’t do. Sometimes I felt capable of braving it. Other times, I still preferred the kind of quiet the trees behind the house provided. People used to think that cats could see fairies, that their purring was used to spin human mothers into an enchanted sleep that allowed their babies to be stolen away and replaced with changelings. I had been reading too much about cats lately. I wondered sometimes if I had grown up on the wrong side of the woods—if somewhere that I could not see, there was another world hidden away where I really belonged. I sometimes felt that I was trying to find my way back to a place that I couldn’t remember, that mom was really waiting in the kitchen for someone she would recognize, someone who would take the seat across from her and open his lips and tell her all about his life as his tea cooled on the table. I clicked my tongue in hopes of luring in one of the calicos that she was after. It was the best we could hope for: an intermediary. Something to soothe the distance between us. I heard her calling from inside the house, “Vollie, your tea,” her voice far

away and strained as if she had always been searching for me, calling for me to return to her, as if she was worried that I might not. Nearing dusk, I stalked back inside and dug through the kitchen cupboards for a tin of something salty to entice the kittens with. One mug of tea sat atop the kitchen table, so I peeked into the living room where I found mom seated at the giant desktop computer I had set up for her a few months after dad passed with the hope that the Internet might see her through things. Without turning to me, she said, “Have you found me a companion?” She lifted the mug and slurped her tea. “No,” I said. “I need to go to the grocery store and buy something to set a trap with. I don’t think the cat food will do it.” “Can you take my picture before you go?” I crossed the room and stood over her shoulder. “What are you looking at?” “I have questions,” she said, setting her tea down near the keyboard. “Questions that need answers.” The mouse icon hovered over a desktop photo of a blooming water lily. It was the computer’s default image, but I could still remember how she asked me if I had taken it with my own camera. Sometimes I got the sense that she wasn’t technology illiterate, just overly proud of displaying a piece of art she believed to be her son’s, and therefore unwilling to pull up so much as an Internet browser that might block it for even a second. “I can answer your questions. What are they?” She threw her hands up. “No, you’ll sugarcoat everything. You’re too soft.” I let out a deep sigh that slowly morphed into an exhausted laugh. “I thought you liked that about me.” She seemed about to protest, but then her demeanor changed. “You’re right,” she said. “Your father was always too blunt. I miss it, and yet, I don’t. Tell me: did you find any calicos? I’ll need you to check them for ticks, behind their ears, under their tails. Can you give a cat a bath?” I wandered back to the kitchen and grabbed my tea. The liquid was warm against my lips. “Are you asking me if I can personally, or if cats are supposed to get baths at all?” “This is exactly what I mean,” she said, angling back toward the screen where she seemed to stare intently at the pixelated water lily. Was she angry? Lonely? Annoyed? Confused? I too wanted answers that were not easy to get. I chugged back the liquid in three large gulps. Tea spilled down my chin, and I wiped it away with my forearm. Otto buzzed in my pocket, and I sent the call to voicemail. “I’ll go to the store before I come back next week. Think you’ll be able to survive until then?” “I have my letters,” she said, sounding either dejected or wistful. “My spelling though, Vollie. I worry that I’m unintelligible.” “You have very pretty script,” I said. “Too pretty to resist.” She smiled. The lines around her eyes made her seem skeptical and tired, warm almost. I decided then that I would take her picture next week. I would take her picture and get her an online dating profile. Then we could talk about her favorite movies and books and travel and cats and everything she wanted out of life and put it all into words.

My phone buzzed and buzzed again and again in my pocket, and she said, “I swear there are bees buzzing around in these walls. I can feel them stinging me in my sleep.” She eyed me suspiciously as if she were wondering just who I was. Either that, or she was simply concentrating on locating the origin of the buzzing, on figuring it out. Where it came from. What she could do about it. I couldn’t tell if old age had greatly improved or greatly diminished her powers of perception, if she was imagining more or less of me. She scratched at her forearm. Her nose twitched, and she said, “It’s a good thing I have thick skin though, Vollie, or else I’d be covered in welts.” I sent Otto’s call to voicemail again and made a mental note: call Otto back, buy tuna and cat shampoo, exterminate bees, silence the buzzing. Before I knew it, she’d be calling me over to rip out the drywall and sniff around for honey at three in the morning. Maybe I could bring Otto over for that, to tear down walls, to search for sweetness beneath what surely must have hidden years and years of black mold and rot. “Yes,” I told her, “It’s a good thing.”

Love Is Sleeping on Broken China

M A R I SA H A ND L E R

made was a model airplane. My father bought me the kit. It was a replica of a French biplane from World War I, the Hanriot HD, with a two-bladed wooden propeller. In the evenings, when he got back from work, he sat with me on the floor in my bedroom. He read me the instructions, gave the odd word of advice. But mostly he just watched as I figured it out. When I’d put all the parts together, and it was a whole airplane sitting squat on the weather page of the San Francisco Chronicle, we sat quietly looking at it, the clean lines, the shafts of wing above and below the body. “Good,” my father said. “Good boy.” He was sitting on my bed, bent at the waist, his face just above and behind my own. He squeezed my shoulder briefly, hard. Then he lowered himself onto the carpet beside me and handed me little plastic tubs of paint and a brush. I opened it carefully, dipped the brush into red. I’d painted before, watercolor boats, tempura finger painting. But those were scribbles I did because I was told. This was different. This was a real thing I was painting, and real paint I was using. I did not look up at my father once. I knew how to do it. I started with one end of the top wing and worked my way across. The acrylic went on smoothly and the brush was like a new appendage, a third hand, something I’d always had but never used. There was only gray filling the pale delicate wood and my father’s breath beside me, slow, with a heaviness in the exhale, as if he were falling asleep and almost snoring, except he wasn’t, he was as rapt with attention as I. Three evenings I painted. On the third we stayed up late, and my mother leaned in the doorway. “It’s ten o’clock, Stanley,” she said. “He’s only five.” I looked up at her and on her face was fear. She wanted to pick me up and carry me out of there. She wanted to wrap me up in her so tight I’d forget which parts were mine and which were hers. I looked back down at the biplane, at my father’s hands spread out on the thighs of his jeans. They were thick and tense and sure. “Fifteen minutes,” he said without looking up, his voice gruff with a finality I knew she would not challenge. She said nothing. Her face closed up, and she shut the door too loudly behind her. I don’t know how much longer we took, but it wasn’t fifteen minutes. I finished it that night. Shining grey with red, white, and green stripes on the tail. It was perfect. It was clear there was nothing more to do. Reluctantly, I put the brush down. My hands were covered in gray and red and white and green, except for the fingertips on my left hand, which I used to maneuver the plane by the wheels while I painted. I stared at the scrawls of paint on newspaper beneath the disciplined lines of the plane. My father looked confused, like he was trying to remember where he put his keys. “Well,” he said eventually. He exhaled heavily through his nostrils. “Well, well. There she is.” In his voice was surprise. He was proud, I think. He squeezed my shoulder, gave me a light cuff on the back of the head. “You showed ’em, boy,” he said. I didn’t know who I showed, or what, but I nodded. I wanted him to sit there with me looking at that plane forever. But he heaved himself to his feet. “Bedtime,” he said, and walked out the door. I set the plane on the table next to my bed, turned out the light and got under the covers. With the curtains open, the light from the street shone on it. I could hear voices from my parents’ room, my mother’s sharp and rapid, my father’s low, sparse. I fought TH E FI R ST T HI NG I EVE R

sleep for a long time looking at the biplane. It was something I had made. If I squinted my eyes I could see tiny people around it, a runway. The propeller started to spin and the engine roared to life. In the morning my mother chided me for going to bed with paint-covered hands. “Look, ma,” I said, pointing at it. She looked. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her mouth was pulled down into an expression that would become permanent. “Yes,” she said. “I see.” She ushered me into the bathroom and scrubbed my hands until they were pink and raw. When the kindergarten teacher had us jump rope that afternoon, they hurt so much I swallowed back tears. But I kept jumping. I jumped rope longer than anyone else that day, and every day after.

curator, working with the photography collection, my father. Occasionally he took me in to work with him, maybe once or twice a year, showed me something he liked. He never said much, but what he did say taught me my first lessons about line, shape, and color. I remember the time he showed me John Gutmann’s Promenade Deck. It was small, gelatin silver, without much variation in tone other than the black circle on the lower right mirroring the porthole. Symmetrical lines of the ship and the horizon, flat sea with something crawling on it in the distance, and a tumultuous sky shot through with light. I was ten years old. It was a few months before he was killed. I didn’t know what it was about that photo, but I couldn’t stop looking. He left me alone with it when he went to the corner store to get us sandwiches. I think maybe it was the way it confined me and expanded me both. The walls and the space. I didn’t have the words for it then, and I still don’t. But mostly it was the black hole, empty of dimension other than the faintest seam of light, like a cannon had fired into the image. Alone, I felt myself fall into that hole; it was terrifying and intoxicating, nothing to hold onto. When my father came back, for the first time in memory I resented his presence, did not want him there. When I removed my eyes from the image and looked at him—he was talking to me, holding up a paper bag of pastrami on rye—it was as if he bore no relation to me. He was just a man in a suit like every other man around here, and I saw lines on his face and the bags under his eyes and his movements controlled and abrupt, and I saw that just underneath the words he was angry and sad and very tired. What’s wrong, he asked. Nothing, I said. Let’s eat, he said, and we left the photo and went to sit on a bench outside. For the first time I listened to what he said with some detachment, as if he were a child, or I his colleague, and I watched the muscles of his face as they moved to the words he was saying, sometimes with them, sometimes against them. This is a man who lies, I thought. He lies to his wife, and he lies to himself. But what was hardest was that I could see he was trying his best not to lie to me. And he was failing, although he didn’t know it, although he would never know it. H E WAS A N ASSI STA NT

around that same time that he broke all the dinner china one night. He’d come home late and drunk and my mother was waiting up. I was waiting up too, behind I TH INK I T WAS

my door, peering under it at his shoes moving around the kitchen as my mother told him he’d ruined her life, he was ruining himself, he ruined everything, he was ruining me too—I hardly even spoke to her anymore. He dropped each plate one by one on the floor, punctuating every one of his sentences with a crash. He must have known—they must have known—I wouldn’t sleep through that. Yet they couldn’t stop, neither of them, and I sensed this, the power of their locked-in hatred, stronger perhaps than love, they were bound to each other in something neither wanted to rupture. I felt my own irrelevance; I belonged in the wings, I had no right to compete with this. I watched the plates shatter in fascination. It was when she said he was ruining me that there was a sudden frightening silence. Then he began to weep. I could hear he was trying not to, or trying to muffle it. “That’s not true, Frieda, take it back,” he said. Begged. “Like hell I will,” said my mother quietly, and walked out into the yard. I was stunned. My mother had won. The shoes did not move from where they were before the fridge. For a long time, they were stationary as my father wept, huffing out of his nose—he must have been holding his hand over his mouth. Then he lowered himself to the floor, onto his belly. He slept like that. And eventually I slept too, on the floor, behind my door.

learned of love. Love is a long battle; love is solitary confinement; love is sleeping on broken china. TH AT WAS W HAT I

MASON HE NDE R SON

In the Hall of the Great North American Mammal Visitors contemplate stillness. Behind one glass, two bears standing like men. Behind another, a herd of buffalo, stiff in their skins. Some seem more alive than others: a skunk, wrestling its way up a tree looks a little too caught in the act, while a wolf, flipping a rabbit’s soft heel from the snow, obviously believes in the thing that he’s found. Like a photograph, the heel’s truth catches in the glass of his eye. I saw a buck like that once. Two points of fog on a hill—I could hear him scenting me before I saw his breath on the cold or his antlers, heavy with moonlight. Like the dead wolf, he was still as I passed and yet I knew the glow he wore like a crown on his head could’ve shot straight through me had he wanted it. What a thing to carry. What a trick to know. Down from the wolf’s kill, king crabs hang like the bearded old and there the hall changes—primitive hooks and traps for fishing wait, spears that passed for decades father to son now sit, racked on a wall. From left to right they grow smarter, sprout barbs, next claws, next rings woven for throats, next and next and next and—my own father taught me to listen down near the ground for the snort of deer, down where stillness casts out its heart. Our history, no different than

that. Back down the hall a family of buffalo listens. The hungry wolf catches his prey and I think of what I hid from my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the deer I found and the thing that he carried, the way he looked on, fire in his horn and in his heart, a fear, not of me, but of the thing I might do. â&#x20AC;&#x192;

JAKE CR I ST

Observing a Girl Stepping over Worms Right now some vital word is written In the writhing of earthworms who have driven The determined lungs of their bodies Through earth to the sidewalks and roadways, Some natural scrivening in the slither. For here’s this little one, who like a close reader Contorts in careful bends and on parsing Tiptoes scans the subtle coursing Of the script, the surfacing, protean Characters closing up and curling open. Only her mind, it would seem, is lured By a philology of dirt And slime; the rest of the foot traffic Struts forward, phones out, crushing the slick Missive. Indeed, some kernel, some gist, Some silent, creeping kerygma must be the grist For her belly-to-the-earth exegesis. An old story, perhaps—one that precedes us, One that speaks us into speaking— Does it wriggle its way through dust seeking Air, another telling? Such literacy Requires kneeling, knuckles in mud, the body Courting clay, mire, stone—the soul countersunk In earth. One must become like the monk Who does not lift a spade, shovel, or trowel To break the ground until he has sifted the soil Free of worms. See his hands: One full of earth, the other pulling strands, Twitching, from the clod. He works alone, Day and night, all week, all month, on and on. He falls asleep; and each time he wakes The worms have all crept back. But no breaks: Keep picking the dirt, he tells himself. When the dirt is empty the temple can be built.

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 7. Screen print and mixed media drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK. 42 x 30 inches.

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 2. Screen print and mixed media drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK. 42 x 30 inches.

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 2 (detail). Screen print and mixed media drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK.

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 11. Screen print, collage, and mixed media

drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK. 42 x 30 inches.

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 11 (detail). Screen print, collage, and

mixed media drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK.

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 8. Screen print and mixed media drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK. 42 x 30 inches.

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 4. Screen print and mixed media drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK. 42 x 30 inches.

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 9. Screen print, red string, and mixed media drawing

materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK. 42 x 30 inches.

JEHANNE D U B R OW

Exit Report In this report, the author will retrieve her heart from the gods— you’ll know her heart by the way it was feasted on. In this report, she’ll unchain her wrists from the rock. When the ocean arrives, she’ll already be gone. In this report, she’ll guide her ship unruined through a strait of teeth and swirling. In this report, she won’t be a monster at the heart of a maze. Or will be monstrous and follow the thread, rescue her bull-headed body from the punishment of kings. In this report, she won’t be held in the downy smothering of a swan. Nothing will trick her with desire’s shifting shape. In this report, she'll make everything gold—the table where she sat so many years, the years themselves now hardened in their cruelty. Such glimmering in this report. In this report, she won’t be turned to stone when facing herself in the polished shield of this report. The snakes of her won’t stop their hissing. In this report, the wax won’t melt, her wings incapable of not beating. Look, how she loves the heat, the feather-singe, and the water far below, like a darkness she is leaving.

KERRI V I NSON SNE L L

I Carry It with Me The Lenten rose blooms early this year like so many othersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I believe in unseen fathers, seldom-touched fathersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;forced embraces where our faces lean in the same direction and our heads bump a little. If you believed that garden alone in the hymn is symbiotically dependent upon men, grown and strong, smoking and watching their little girls meandering a bicycle on a sidewalk locked like brakes in the suburbs somewhere in the Californiaof-Little-People (Nanyehi) I would believe it too. Do you remember when one of your neighbors, after too many Coors, stuck in his driveway with an unfixable Chevy Malibu, set fire from his lighter to his useless oil rag then tossed the burning flag toward me as I twirled the bike in the cul-de-sac? It floated overhead then caught spark of a pop-music breeze, the flame brushing my shoulder as it fell just inches away from me. You gave him that look that could kill and you raced toward me and with one hand on my shoulder you stomped out the fire. It was the '70s and my mini bell-bottoms kept getting stuck

like eucalyptus leaves in the spokes of the training wheels, Jim Croce in the transistor radio next to your ear blaring I got a name. â&#x20AC;&#x192;

Dead of

City

A LEX SI MAN D

where my grandfather is buried via a circuitous route of switchbacks, traffic circles, and u-turns. Eldar’s used BMW 5 Series sputters up the hills on the outskirts of Baku, slowing for the cobblestone streets; the city smells of construction and tandoor churek wafting in from the bakeries. Street vendors sell qutabi—thin pancakes stuffed with meat or greens—from their cramped stalls, men handling the money while their wives fuss with dough in the back. Eldar’s stereo pumps Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” Nobody in the car but me understands the lyrics, though my father’s face shows distaste, his nostrils flaring and his lips pursed. Traffic jams threaten to clog every intersection, but we drive so quickly I find myself grabbing on to the seat in front of me. The word jostle comes to mind. I am shocked that we do not encounter a car accident on the way. Every few minutes we pull over to ask about the location of this particular cemetery. Salam, Eldar says, then dives into a dialogue with a taxi driver or man on the street corner, all hands and grunts—both of them waving and pointing with their entire bodies. Choh, sao, and we’re back on the road. My father insists we call it the old Soviet name when asking for directions, Wolf’s Gate, volchivay varota, but no one seems to recognize this name; the city has changed since we left twenty-eight years ago. The streets bear the names of new heroes; entire buildings have shifted three meters away from the street, jacked up off their foundations and shuffled back to make room for wider boulevards. This must be jarring to the memory, I think; it isn’t the unexpected that astounds but the subtly familiar. Gleaming glass and concrete structures jut from among the Soviet and pre-Soviet apartment blocks, and this is okay. The Three Flames lap at the sky—three flowing skyscrapers perched atop the city more like swaying molten glass than buildings. Only the names of the dead have remained, etched into marble and covered in thick layers of dust. Around us a collection of cemeteries, a city above Baku like quarters of a town inhabited by its predecessors. The dead look down upon the living, considering their motions without judgment; or at least they will not tell what they think. The living, for their part, cannot see the sky without their eyes passing over the dead—a constant reminder of what awaits them. I find this arrangement curious, frightening, and comforting all at once—to be held so close to our loved ones when we die. Of course, this all assumes our loved ones do not gather all their things and move to Canada. I wonder how we would live in the West if we had such intimate relationships with our dead. Would our optimism give way to cynicism, our cheerful chirping supplanted with the sullen sighs peculiar to men who congregate in alleyways? Being home, in the city in which he was born, induces the part of my father’s sympathetic nervous system that causes him to tell stories incessantly. He runs his fingers along his white mustache and pinches one end of it. My father speaks quickly but calmly; there is no chance of being interrupted by Eldar, who listens with a reverence reserved for a man who’d known his father more intimately than he himself knew him. I’d thought this storytelling a peculiar property of my father’s, a nervous tick, but I soon realize that it is the way of the land. We’ve been here less than two days, and I’ve already noticed this about people: they are all storytellers. They tell tales not from a desire to entertain but from a need to preserve. The stories are the gnarled roots that fill the silent grounds. And the ways they tell stories are unapologetic, meandering shamelessly but with incredible intent; the morals always in mind but never rushed, as if the arc is as important as the tip—unsettled journeys that speak to the hum of life in this place, the intersections that WE ARRI VE AT T HE C E M ET E RY

spring forward at every traffic circle. Each street we pass, my father recites its Soviet name and points at a scar on his head—implying but not explaining correlation. I have forgotten a meaning more potent this close to the Caspian Sea. Eldar finds the driveway, an unmarked and unpaved turn from the main road, and we ramble down it, kicking up gravel, lurching, passing through the thick stucco walls of the cemetery. Around us are the dead entombed in concrete, for all the graves here are paved—no lawn, and only a few trees. I see faces staring at us from among the graves; gaunt, pale, eerie faces wrapped in prayer shawls watch us warily. Every tombstone etched with the face of the deceased and their name in Cyrillic—the dead here hail from the Soviet era of life, which differs from today mainly in its alphabet. These faces all joining a cohort upon passing. We pass a single happy heifer, who jogs down the gravel road and leaves steaming heaps of cow dung in the narrow pathways between graves. She seems satisfied with herself, swishing her tail and bucking her head with more energy than either a cow or a person among the dead should have. Even cows should succumb to the melancholy weight of death in a place like this, I think, and then I fall in love with the cow, who chews cud with disinterest. I wonder idly if she knows where she is—if she might smell the blooming aroma of decomposing bodies from the ground—and if she cares, or if adjectives such as ominous and superstitious are foreign to her. I am foreign here. My tongue feels swollen when I try to speak Russian, and Russian is not even the native language (though everyone speaks it). The language is Azerbaijani; its roots are so distant I cannot even fathom meaning. The best I can do is smile and wait for the conversation to end before I bow slightly. I am disappointed by my foreignness. I had hoped to arrive and immediately feel swaddled by a feeling of place, to be filled with recognition, to have a welcome party with balloons and noisemakers waiting for me at the airport. You’ve finally made it back. Don’t ever make us wait that long again. There was no welcoming committee. Instead they deported us when we arrived because we came without visas. Our entreaty: Deport us? We are from here! My father explained that he was born in the Mikhailovskay Hospital, in the heart of Baku. The men at the visa desk nodded and smiled as if this matters, as if this hospital still existed, and because my father is old, but they did nothing to accommodate us—because the world does not accommodate them. Certainly a pair of foreigners with Canadian passports should have known better. We wanted to be like locals in our ignobility. Eldar stops his car on the border of the Armenian and Jewish sections of the cemetery. No walls between them, just a thin strip of land denoting a border. This, too, as in life— the borders in this land pushed and pulled by nameless forces over millennia. Though all the graves seem as haphazard as a favela, the Armenian graves are scarcely a collection of rubble piles. Eldar notices me taking photos of this odd expanse of crumbled granite and concrete and tells me that, during the war with Armenia in the ’90s, Azerbaijani’s who’d lost loved ones, who’d come to this cemetery to bury them, in a fit of vengeance took sledgehammers to Armenian gravestones. Nobody had bothered to fix them, which seems strange to me. The ruins remain as a perennial indicator of the rage these people must have felt. My father points out with a smile, at least they didn’t dig up the corpses. I find this remark distasteful, but Eldar nods. We play a game of Find Your Ancestors. A treasure hunt for that name written in Russian: СиMандуев. It feels morbid at first and then appropriate. This is, after all, the full purpose of our trip here—to find the bones of the dead who live through us, who have not

yet disappeared from our imaginations, whose bodies continue to decompose in death as we in life. My father’d been given directions to grandfather’s grave, but it takes us some time to find it anyway. The graves are packed so close together we are forced to walk along its partitions, careful not to walk over the bodies, carrying our own superstitions with us even though there is nobody to witness our deference but the dead, who cannot see. The heifer walks the rows with us as we search for my grandfather and his sister, my father’s father and aunt. The cow seems even more joyful now, tossing her head side to side and chewing the dried grass between graves. She follows us indistinctly, as if we were mostly absent. The concrete partitions that separate the graves are of different heights, obviously built at different times, and the graves themselves are grouped in pairs, though it is hard to imagine how bodies were laid to rest so close to one another in their narrow slots. Perhaps the graves were originally intended for single corpses, but were then divvied up to serve the growing number of dead. Perhaps it was done in the same way that sprawling pre-Soviet apartments in Baku were split into communal living spaces with shared toilets—six children crammed into one room, laid on like rugs on the floor. Perhaps it was the same government official who was responsible for both. Most of the pairs are husbands and wives, some brothers or sisters, and the occasional father and son. The latter seems the most tragic. We manage to find my grandfather’s grave, and his sister’s beside him. Their portraits etched into the stone, their faces staring at us from their two-dimensional universes. Grave expressions on their faces. I laugh at my joke then feel guilty, then believe they’d have enjoyed the levity, then don’t know what to think. I’d never met my grandfather, only heard terribly unspecific stories about him: he worked in a shop; he was a serious man; he smoked a pipe. Chiya’s thick glasses and broad forehead fill the space on his gravestone. It is the same image that adorns the wall of our dining room at home, and I wonder if this is the only photograph of him that exists. His sister seems small beside him, a slight woman with a bright shawl wrapped around her tiny head. This, too, as in life, I think. We clear the brush, decades old, from around their graves—dirt and pine needles turned to peat: a reflection of the churning that happens underneath. Worms ooze from the dark earth, which stains the white soles of my new running shoes. My father wipes thick dust from Chiya’s gravestone with his bare hand, which feels like a ritual; I wonder who taught him this. I wonder if he’d witnessed Chiya wipe his bare hand on a gravestone the way I am witnessing him. I’d like to ask, but it feels indelicate in this moment. Later, I will forget. My father tells a story. This one about a great uncle who walked into his temple and told his Rabbi that he thought he was going to die that day. He ate a meal, tucked himself into bed, and fell asleep forever. God’s will we all die this way, says my dad. Without fuss and without bothering anyone. His great uncle lived to over a hundred years. This is a happy death story. Eldar’s father died when Eldar was a toddler. The heifer looks up as we walk back to the car; she swishes her tail and chews her cud as if nothing important has ever happened.

CHARI TY G I NG E R I C H

Watching Smoke Signals in late autumn, with fog and cowboys—: In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts. — “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel,” Sherman Alexie

My students are trying on the cloak of imperialism. They wear it loosely, like the carcasses of soldiers picked clean by birdsong and apathy. When Thomas says “me and Victor was born of flame and ash,” my students think “love,” think “marshmallows.” They are so accustomed to casual fires of victory and camping.

The treeline billows above the fog today,

the quilted arm of God at rest in a meadow—

yellow and red trees stitched together by wind and migrating birds.

Sunrise cuts through my pragmatism and weariness like a ceremony I’ve not been invited to— white fog spinning itself at the ankles of trees, the veil of a bride new every morning.

Our ancestors weave themselves in and out of these forests, the smoky fog, the campfires of the bright, blind meadows in the sun of the frontier—the always frontier of the sun.

JOHN SI B L E Y W I L L I A M S

Dear Jonah If you can imagine each rib a bow sawing some music from the hollow gut of a violin, then surely the dead whale here rotting away in the sand can be called rousing. Harmonic. In a way, beautiful. Let’s say the boys fighting with our dogs for viscera to smear all over the fresh white shirts of girls they love are our saviors. Grace-lights. Hand-me-down Army boots filling with blood, their names divided by hearts tattooed into trees. Imagine the knifework it takes to rend bone from bone. I find it difficult to imagine what we’d do to each other during times of peace. An arena fills with refugees a few miles inland. Power lines sag from the heft of homebound calls. Without shrapnel, your father’s chest would simply be another unplayed instrument. Let’s say we are playing our hearts out. Innocent again, with that wide-open belly of a whale calling us, finally a death you can almost call song.

BERWYN M OOR E

Planting As if the unplotted earth, its glint and heave, could refuse the tiller, the hand that starts and stops at will. Inevitable wreckage. As if, when you dislocated your left shoulder birthing your first born, you could not push. As if the boy down the street, mute after the fire, could resist the bully’s taunt. For two hours, cheeks puffed, he held the robin’s egg, filched from the nest, in his mouth, until the small beak pecked and pecked the slimy shell, and when the boy opened his mouth, a whole bird fluttered out− more eloquent than speech or song. You forget how to sleep. Darkness quivers with molecules you try to count. Both gift and curse. Under Orion’s watch, you trowel a patch of dirt, plant cinquefoil, butterbur, mugwort. As if you can shuffle stars, swap seasons, rebuff the owl’s echoing accusation. Remember that summer when someone’s child toddled too close to the water’s edge

and disappeared in a galaxy of fear. How you pulled him out, silvery and bubbling. This, then, is your miracle of sod and bloom: the sage and coriander sprouting, the fluted angelica rising above your head, its umbels like wings awash in wonder.

MARK WAG E NA A R

Southern Tongues Coda (Precision Dying) Ain’t no dark till something shines —Townes Van Zandt I don’t know what the dog stares at as I wash the pus from his belly (pissing blood a week, vet can’t say why), body still enough to be pointing game, (is this the soundless way the next life will be bayed?) or why he chews the early wind-scattered samaras & long grass beside the drainage ditch in which three deer in the last three months have come down to die. Sometimes I feel I’m privy to just a verse or two from the animal gospels, though ask just about anyone working with the near-dead, the almost-gone, they’ll tell you the will or soul or just plain stubbornness will keep a person here until they decide to let go. Precision dying, you might call it. On her last morning Mama held out more than four hours, time enough to drive Virginia Beach to Raleigh. I don’t know how to make you believe no hydrangeas bloomed the year she died. If there are more neurons in the brain than stars in the Milky Way, where is the Star of Letting Go? And what does its last light reach as it pulses out. Some little planet, some field, empty save a man who washes a dog

in an evening that was promised to no one, in a twilight that did not invite us. Soon, the dark river. And a moon like a salt lick halftongued down, & still, so many iridescent eyes. This is what we do when we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what to do, when we have little but lack or labor in the way of salve. Wash the body. Say something.

F ro m a

b a l c o ny

o o l k r i n e v g o

Y u l n E q e u h e t o f r n e i st a r TONIA CO L L EEN MA RT I N

overlooking the El Yunque rain forest, I remember the kitchen pinging with light. My father emerges from nowhere, slams me playfully against the wall. Placing his forearm against my throat, barely pressing because I know enough to freeze, while I plead with him to let me go, he grabs a knife from the silverware drawer. He’s done this before. I always protest, always plead for him to stop, but there is also something about his attention I crave. I get so little of it. If terror must be experienced, so be it. I take terror over abandonment. He swings his arm up, gripping the knife, blade pointed at me. Thrusting it at my abdomen, making a last second switch from knife handle to blade, he pokes me with his finger instead. I scream before I understand that once again I am not bleeding. It’s all been hilariously funny, but not to me. I laugh because it puts me on my father’s winning side. Maybe the game with the knife was just a way of grooming me for what I continue to learn: blood is not the only evidence of a wound. This rainbow, for example—I look for signs to explain it, but there are none. I sit in a plastic chair, dig through my backpack and pull out a soggy journal and a pen. I don’t write about the robbery on the way to the forest. I censor the details of stopping to eat and having the windows beat out of the van, our valuables stolen. No one was hurt, thank God. But the inconvenience, the proximity to violence, waiting for the police, waving of arms to augment the translation, still grips me. I scribble words like bright tattoos, my eyes agape at the Peter Max rainbow dripping color from the sky. Where does it say that the stairs to the clouds begin here in this glad wounded sky? Nowhere. So I say it now. This is the beginning: fifty years after my father trained me to override my fear. Where does it warn that romantics will be over-indulgent here, tempted to lust after robin eggs and wrap themselves only in sky? Nowhere. I say it now. This is the beginning; this blue cons even the self-respecting honeybee away from labor and into dance. Here, where sweetness laces almost every leaf edge and petal. Even on the heels of theft and desperation, it is false to believe that unless the dance is done correctly, we will lose our way. Throughout all these years God has been busily laying out a feast. His abundance seems suddenly unavoidable, lush to the point of purple prose—a stumbling block to the logician seeking just cause for sensational beauty. All those William Stafford elephants, walking tail to trunk, urging me to truth and to smallness, have taken me here to this rainbow stretched over a green canyon, under an enormous bowl of rain-drenched sun. Out of reverence to the Sky God whoMA is RY alsoL O the Sea God and the Poor Rich God and TZ the Star God, I am grateful for this roller coaster morning; I'm grateful for every betrayal, every misconception, every failure, loss, argument, death and violent awakening that brought me dumbstruck to His branching arms and indigenous ornamentation. To all the if onlys and what ifs, holiness speaks through the colors of the rainbow and says, “Your desire has an answer.” This place both deepens and slacks my desire. Here it is useless to deflect charity, gratuitous green snuggles every speck of shameless blue. One does not crave untasted fruit. Somewhere before I have tasted this. Not the me of my body but the me passed down through Eve. And something even grander is yet to come. The Psalmist of my memory chants: “I will lift/levanter/inclinación my eyes/ojos unto the hills/colinas, from whence cometh my help/remediar. My help comes from the Lord, the Maker/fabricada of Heaven/firmament and Earth/tierra. He will not let your foot slip—he STAND I NG ON T HE BA L C ONY

who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” And yet I founder, aware of my father’s impending death and wonder if I can bear witness as he goes from living to dying. How will I view his dimming transfiguration? Even this beauty is tempered by his disappointed face when I have questioned him about a history I don’t understand. If only I could stand in the arch of this rainbow long enough to be scored by its colors and carry its mark home to him. I wish he could see me in this light—awestruck with color, surrendered, incredulous. It has been said that I have been wronged. A verdict based on my testimony, on what I remembered. But what have I forgotten? And why do I continue to love? How much more confused about love will I have to be to understand? And how much pride will I sacrifice to agree that violence resides in me? How often do I hurt hope before it hurts me?

contributors

has poems published or forthcoming in Tinderbox, Tar River, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. This Mother's Day, she received her MFA from the School of Letters program at Sewanee, the University of the South. During the year, she teaches high school English in Atlanta, Georgia, where she lives with her husband, toddler, baby, and puppy. She is currently completing a manuscript that considers the visitation of Mary and Elizabeth, as told in the Book of Luke. MAGGI E B L A KE B A I L E Y

is the author of In the Corner of the Living, which was a runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in Alimentum, Cider Press Review, Crab Orchard Review, Emrys Journal, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at Michigan State University and lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where she can be found cooking Italian with her husband, running with her dog, or practicing yoga and meditation. JANI NE C E RTO

is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, the Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, the Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Along with Maria Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of the anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America forthcoming from NYQ Books in 2017. D A N T E D I S T EFA N O

is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently Dots & Dashes (SIUP 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, and Southern Review. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas. J EH A N N E D U BRO W

is from Uniontown, Ohio, where she currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Mount Union. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the JAKE C R I ST writes: “From October 2017 to Kenyon Review, Arts & Letters, Ink & October 2018 I will be a chaplain resident at Letters, and FIELD, among others. She the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center in was a 2016 Tennessee Williams Scholar in Cleveland, Ohio, working primarily alongside poetry at the Sewanee Writer’s veterans with PTSD and various mental Conference. She is happiest deep in illness, and also homeless veterans. I've been summer, making fruit pizzas, discovering a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and my the joys of the hummingbird moth, and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in watching the hibiscus buds turn to Boulevard, Plume, Poetry, Rattle, dinner-plate sized blooms. Shenandoah, and Threepenny Review.”

CH A RI T Y G I N G ERI CH

is the author of the award-winning memoir Loyal to the Sky, and her essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous publications. She earned her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received multiple fellowships in creative writing, including a Fulbright and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. She teaches creative writing at Mills College and Stanford, and works one-on-one with clients as a writing coach. She is also a performing and recording singersongwriter. You may find more at www.marisahandler.com. MARI SA HA ND L E R

appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, the Atlantic, Post Road Magazine, and other publications. He is currently at work on a nonfiction book about the complex relationship between science and myth. BERW YN MO O RE 's third book, Sweet

Herbaceous Miracle, won the 2017 John Ciardi Prize and will be published by BkMk Press in 2018. Her poems have appeared in Five Points Journal (where she won the 2015 James Dickey Prize), Bellevue Review, Measure, the Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, and JAMA. AMANDA H AW KI NS holds a Master of Arts Among other topics, her poems explore the in Theological Studies from Regent College intersection of poetry and medicine. She in Vancouver, BC. Her poetry has been teaches English and a medical humanities published or is forthcoming in Tin House, course at Gannon University in Erie, the Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week, Pennsylvania. Orion, Flyway, and Watershed Review. She T O N I A CO L L EEN MA RT I N holds an MFA in lives with her beloved and two children in writing from VCFA. Her work endeavors to Northern California where she teaches bear witness to the humility and anguish of English at William Jessup University and leads a writers’ workshop titled “Religious imperfect love. Her stories and poems contend that the world’s fleeting beauty is Casualties: Writing into the Wound.” not an answer but a suggestion of what will MASON HE NDE R SON grew up in South be when chronology wraps around itself and Bend, Indiana, and spent as much time as rolls into eternity. And that true freedom possible in, on, or around Lake Michigan. comes by way of dining at the table of the He received his MFA from the University of Divine Other to which we can bring nothing Maryland in 2015. His work has most but our wounded selves. recently appeared in Arroyo Literary A MY RECK L EY grew up on the shores of Review. He currently lives in Baltimore, Lake Michigan and has since lived, traveled Maryland, and teaches creative writing and exhibited worldwide. Recent workshops for young writers in Maryland, accomplishments include: climbing a glacier Washington, D.C., and Virginia. in Iceland, homemade soup dumplings, and cashing in eleven years of sunny days in MATT JO NE S has an MFA from the Colorado to call “America’s High-Five” University of Alabama. His prose has

home once again. Amy Reckley received her MFA in drawing from Colorado State University, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from SACI College of Art & Design in Florence, Italy, and a BA from Kalamazoo College.

as an assistant professor of English at McPherson College, McPherson, Kansas. In 2015, she graduated from Ashland University’s MFA program.

lives in Longmont, Colorado with her husband and EMI LY R A NSD E L L divides her time between two adorable sons who unmercifully get up Camas, Washington, and the Oregon coast. very early in the morning. Her work has Her work has appeared in the Cortland appeared in a wide variety of journals and Review, Tar River Poetry, Prime Number, anthologies, including the Cresset, and elsewhere. In 2016, she was a finalist Windhover, Relief, and the Other Journal. for the Rattle Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Visitations, was published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press. She has ALEX SI M A ND lives and works in San taught writing at the University of Francisco, though he was born in Russia Colorado, Boulder, as well as and grew up in Toronto. He holds an MFA internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and from Antioch University Los Angeles. Alex Lithuania. writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and E. V YV Y T RI N H is a resident physician at poetry. His work has appeared in North the University of California, Davis in both American Review, Matador Review, the Family Medicine and OB/GYN Hippocampus Magazine, Apogee, departments. In a previous life she served as Mudseason Review, Five2One Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, and other publications. His co-director of BRYTE Summer Camp for Refugee Youth in Providence, Rhode Island, short story Election Cycle was a winner of a community that feels like a hybrid between the 2017 Best Small Fictions Prize. Alex is Hogwarts and heaven. The daughter and the former editor for Lunch Ticket’s blog, nonfiction, and the Diana Woods Memorial granddaughter of Vietnamese refugees, she lives in Sacramento, California, and enjoys Prize. spending time with her three sisters. KERRI VI NSON SNE L L , more than MA RK WA G EN A A R is the author of The anything else—teacher, partner, mother, Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds grandmother, athlete, friend—considers Rising), Voodoo Inverso, and Southern herself to be a writer. This sometimes complicates but always enriches her life as Tongues Leave Us Shining, which won the Saltman Prize and will be released next a source of faith. Her poems have summer from Red Hen Press. He is the previously appeared in Relief Journal, Mikrokosmos, Foothill: a Journal of Poetry, husband of Chelsea and daddy of two-yearold Eloise, who continually amazes him and and Oklahoma Review. In 2016, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Snell works his wife.

J EN S T EWA RT F U ES T O N

lives in rural Vermont with her family and feels most centered when wandering in the wild beauty outside her home, and most content when preparing food for the people she loves. Her life work has been a collage of adventures in education, business, the non-profit world, and mothering. She recently received her MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is thrilled to see her first published essay appear in Ruminate. LESLI E C OL I S WA R D

is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Disinheritance. A seven-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of the Inflectionist Review. Previous publications include: Yale Review, Atlanta Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Massachusetts Review, Columbia, MidAmerican Review, Third Coast, and Poetry Northwest. His latest poems are being greatly impacted by his new role of father to twin infants, whose beauty and curiosity and eagerness and innocence are all-inspiring. J O H N S I BL EY W I L L I A MS

last note C ONTR I B UT O RS O N U N F I N I S H ED

I’ve long admired the unfinished, and the purportedly unfinished: Gogol’s Dead Souls, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Larry Brown’s A Miracle of Catfish, most of Kafka’s work, and of course, The Aeneid. I’m drawn to the fragmentary and the incomplete because both suggest an endlessness which accrues to poetry in my mind. Then, I think of my dead father and all that’s left unfinished between us. Lately, I’ve been writing to, and about, my unborn daughter. It occurs to me that the poems and journal entries I’m writing now are the beginning of a conversation with this little girl that I will never finish. Her life will remain for me the greatest inexhaustible, mysterious, ongoing epic of mine. DAN TE D I STE FA NO, P OE TRY

Years ago, I went to see a Matisse retrospective at the MoMA. I walked through each room feeling his art change, here saturated color, now light, detailed interiors, then simplicity of form and finally, in the last decade of his life, the playful majesty of his daring cutouts. Imagine, to be so established, to be approaching eighty and dare to create in a totally new way! As I left the museum, I danced as if Matisse had filled me with his brilliant saturated color, with his dazzling inspiration, with the choice to create anew again and again and again. LESLI E C OL I S WA R D , NONF I C TI ON

In the morning, when I step into the shower, the warmth of the water revives the last of yesterday’s perfume. Suddenly, briefly, there’s a note of orange blossom, wet on my skin. The dry petals plump up again, unwithered and lush. This is my favorite thing about wearing fragrance, the many lives it has, its tenacity, how desperately it wants to become the body. And then, as if I’ve imagined this resurrection, the soap rinses all the flowering scent away. J EH A N N E D U BRO W, PO ET RY

Sometimes I think of life as a game board. Not The Game of Life with its people pegs and plastic cars—nothing with so many rules and such great certainty—just a game board in which each state is its own space. You can move forward or backward or side to side. I have made great leaps, first from Texas to Alabama and then from Alabama to Ohio. In the most stereotypical way you can possibly imagine, I want to go out West. I have never much liked rules, but I think all the time about winning and what that will look like, literally. I picture mountains mostly, just mountains off in the distance. MAT T J O N ES , F I CT I O N

last note

Life: the ultimate unfinished project. Who knows when it's going to end? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in fifty years. If I let myself think about it, I find this somewhat mind-blowing. Kind of like an interactive koan. Once upon a time I had a breakdown, and I watched myself fall into little pieces, and at some point I thought: well, I got thirty-three good years out of this. Maybe that’s enough. It wasn’t, apparently. But it did slow me down. Much like death, I had no choice in the matter. I kvetched and raged, but finally I gave in. Seemed I was destined for a considerably slower life than I’d planned. Eventually I discovered I rather liked it. Why race to this finish line?

A more mysterious word might be “finished.” At what point can an object, person, idea, country be said to be finished? When a chair leaves its conveyor belt, every bolt and screw in just the right place? But then there’s the unfinished life of the chair, those who will rest in it, pitch it back against a wall in anger, break and repair it, maybe die in it. And there’s our youth, which continues on without us, changing ever so slightly each time we revisit it. And, of course, our country, like all romanticized notions made physical. And death with its unanswerable questions. My poem, “Dear Jonah,” begins (“If you can imagine . . . ”) and ends (“Let’s say we MARI SA H A ND L E R , F I C TI ON . . . ”) on hypotheticals. The reality of the images presented can and should be called I have never finished a piece of writing; this into question. The “song” that threads is neither lament nor brag, but a statement through it must remain unfinished. about the amorphous nature of the human J O H N S I BL EY W I L L I A MS , PO ET RY psyche. Writing, like memory, like glass, flows If I could keep this word, unfinished, in as long as you allow it to occupy your the forefront of my mind, I would rush and attention. Finishing is the act of taking a worry less. I can’t claim one single finished snapshot of an emotional and metaphysical endeavor—the garden, daily blooming and state. It is not reproducible, which is what decaying; the house failing in secret places; gives it beauty. A seashell plucked from novels I’ve written, arrived at their final a shipwreck. I wouldn’t have it any other pages, brought to a close, but remaining way. in the unfinished stage of their life spans; ALEX SI M A ND , NONF I C TI ON children half-loved. Unfortunately, I will

never be finished eating. Knowing all my work is unfinished, in process, continually unfurling, is a solace. I have all of time and eternity to work on what I need to complete. The “it-is-finished” proclamation can be attached to only one miracle and, in the end, the only one that matters. TON I A C OL L E E N M A RTI N, NONF I CT I O N

I find some of the most compelling art to me is that which is half complete—the face or shoulder of a girl shaded appears real and pops off the page, but the rest, say, the other shoulder, or the body, or the legs, are at varying stages of done. I especially love the chicken-scratch sketches of rogue graphite lines where I can track the progress of attempt and fail and attempt again at getting the form of a shape. I love this, mostly, because I love to witness the processes of life. An intentionally unfinished portrait or landscape with a bit of perfection is a glimpse at both the in-the-slog unfinished and also the telos that might have been. AMAND A H AW KI NS, P OE TRY

When I was a kid, I saw the live action remake of Casper at the drive-in. I’ve forgotten most of the finer plot-points— Bill Pullman plays the quintessential sad-dad, Christina Ricci falls in love with a ghost, etc.—but I do remember that the film’s whole universe revolves around this

concept of “unfinished business,” the idea that certain all-important tasks could, upon death, get you stuck on earth as an untethered spirit if left unresolved. As a chronic procrastinator, I found that pretty terrifying. Now, my favorite movies (and poems!) are those that leave something out, some answer or question that’s suggested but never really dealt with—ghosts or not, they feel unfinished, yet, somehow, complete. MA S O N H EN D ERS O N , PO ET RY

Poetry is for me an unfinished refinement. The words must move on the page and never settle, yet be in impeccable order. Writers come to the blank page, a place where the utmost honesty is required, honesty that does not always tell the whole truth. A poem exists as a guitar string to play the music of tensions. It seems to me that the tensions in the world are changing, and if not organically, then at least in the heightened sense of futility in language. For every person who wants to instantly post a barb, instantly do anything . . . why not read, instead, a poem, a flick of remembrance whose half-life of preparation was half a life. My poem “I Carry It With Me” is about the incomplete spaces in relationships, and how the white spaces of relationships bring to the foreground tiny increments of connection, and how that both dissolves and concentrates time. Unfinished. K ERRI V I N S O N S N EL L , PO ET RY

I will turn forty in a few months. In a culture that values youth above all things, which compiles lists of "thirty authors under thirty," it's difficult not to feel a failure if you've hit midlife and not yet produced your masterpiece. On the other hand, I recently talked with a professor near retirement who is working on a book he knows he couldn't have written any earlier in his life. It's easy in your early adult life to imagine reaching forty having spent up all your passion, but from my vantage now, I feel a keen sense that I'm not even close to spent. Those that I admire going forward are those who keep pushing themselves creatively, stretching beyond their easily accessed natural talents. We're all unfinished in our creative lives. We never arrive. For that I'm grateful.

At first, I didn’t see a connection between my two poems in this issue, but when I learned the theme for the issue would be “unfinished,” it hit me: that was the connection. The poems work like two opposing forces, both unfinished. “Seasonal Work” is about being young and still oblivious to sorrow, while “All These Months” is set much later in life and tries to come to grips with the terminal illness of a lifelong friend. Both poems convey a sense of things feeling unfinished—one feels impatient, eager to get to it, and the other is reluctantly learning to let go. EMI LY RA N S D EL L , PO ET RY

JEN STEWA RT F U E STON, P OE TRY

AMY RECKLEY. Concept drawing for Domestic Cyclone 9 (detail). Screen print, red string, and mixed media drawing materials with hand-cut holes on Mylar and two layers of Rives BFK.

Issue 45: Unfinished

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