Issue 02: Humor's Grace

faith in literature and art

Humor’s Grace /.

prose runaway truck ramps and shirtless meditations from Susanna Childress and Josh Mackin /. poetry trees are clapping and the evolution of lint from Margaret D. Smith and David Feela /. art origami

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02 ISSUE WINTER

2006

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a tive n Ruminate is , poetry, crea es th ri o st rt o re sh xity and tr u space to sha h the comple it w te a n re tu so ra rt that re rum for lite and visual a issue is a fo ch a E . h nudgit e fa il h ian lives w y il a d r of the Christ u o f nce o e strive to to the existe use of this, w a that speaks ec B e. p o h as a greater ppling pleas, ing us toward g for the gra n ti te n u o m cc u a ith. R ina ty art authentic fa publish quali n a f o s ce d n uiet assura d over a goo well as the q ho has pause w n so er p y ging for the for ever stroke— lon was created sh ru b ct fe Istory, a per sue of RUM word, a real ard. Each is w to s u wing t in ra o d they p ope of significance e with the h em th r o s in us. s own focu ith. Please jo fa d n a NATE has it fe li , art ons between rich connecti

The cover image, II Pollo Santo, was created by Kathryn Robison last fall while studying abroad in Florence, Italy. Kathryn likes writing stories, walking under ladders, preaching of her traceable lineage to Abraham Lincoln, Toscana and balance. She dislikes the dark and Neo-gnosticism.

The inside cover image and inside back cover images, Bang and Crazy, were created by Mat Barton.

Mat is most famous for his novels No Means Yes and its sequel... Lesson Learned. Believe it or not, Mat’s work has appeared in print before this publication; however, most of it was self-published and printed in such small quantities that only a few of his close friends have dust-covered copies tucked away in the back of their bookshelves. If you recently attended a college in California, you may have seen his prizewinning animations: Edmund and The Visitor and Portable Love. His comics have appeared in The Blackboard, The Daily Titan, Ride On and several seldom-visited websites.

The back cover image, Out of Bounds, was created by Eric Smith. After studying computers and math at Pepperdine University, Eric Smith became the full-time youth director at Malibu Presbyterian Church. He enjoys a good smoothie and takes pictures when his right brain gets too fidgety.

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RUMINATE (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly by RUMINATE MAGAZINE, INC., 140 North Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521.

Postage paid at Fort Collins, CO. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher.

WHERE TO WRITE Send all subscription orders, queries and changes of address to RUMINATE, 140 N. Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521 or send an email to editor@ruminatemagazine.com. If you are moving and want to ensure uninterrupted service, please allow six weeks of notice. (The post office will not automatically forward magazines). For information on back issues, advertising rates, RUMINATE submission guidelines, artist groups, and RUMINATE resources, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.com. We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art—you may submit online at our website.

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Copyright

2006 RUMINATE MAGAZINE. All rights reserved.

Much thanks to darwill press in Chicago, Il for taking on the task of printing RUMINATE—without Darwill there would be no RUMINATE.

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Brianna Van Dyke Amy Lowe Lacee Perrin Nicholas Price Jonathan Van Dyke Anne Pageau

WINTER 2006

editor-in-chief prose editor poetry editor visual art editor consulting editor design director

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

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a f f

I have received the first copy of RUMINATE. an innovative w I’m thrilled! W ork — and the hat neat thing is, it self,” and unlik is so distinctivel e anything else y “it.

All those intric details (smudge ate and quirky s, lines, off-set lit tle m argins, etc.) that so.” A LOT of are placed “jus thought and in t spiration (and into this. There perspiration!) w is excellent wor en t k within these and contributo pages — your rs both. Glory staff’s be!

Judith Dupre e Pin e

Valley, Califo

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What a wonde rful surprise to find RUMINA We’ve been tota TE in the mail lly distracted fr today. om our regular afternoon/even responsibilities ing as we keep all fin ding more to de print, the storie light in. I love s, the poetry, th the e photos, everyt hing—it is beau tif ul.

Reta Melby S an Antonio , Texas

My work appe ared in the first issue, and I am quality, creativ delighted with ity, intelligence the and beauty of job. This is an this first issue. effort we can al G re at l be proud of. H allelujah.

Rev. David vo n Schlichten Lat

ruminators NOTES FROM YOU

robe,

Send your thoughts, questions, and comments to

Pennsylvania

editor@ruminatemagazine.com

I was thrilled th is week when a friend sent me zine. Congratul the link to your ations on such magaa great first issue! my favorite po Paul Willis is on ets, so I admit: you had me at e of “A Fish Story.”

Joy Sawyer D enver, Col orado

What a delight to receive the m aiden issue of vehicle for faith RUMINATE. ful artists you ha I pray the ve created beco who contribute mes a blessing and read. to all Janet Penhal

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I’m a writer who ’s moving from nonfiction to fic around looking tion and I was for possible plac poking es to submit m RUMINATE. y work and ran It is by far the across most touching may God bless presentation I your new ventur found— e. Why don’t yo subscriber and u just count m we’ll figure out e as a a way to get th transfer? PayPal e money to you ? Corsican saus (bank age?).

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*Durga helped us discover that our online merchant ac national orders (w count had a glitch hich is now fixed). with interBut we are still ac cepting Corsican sausages.

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ruminating

EDITOR’S NOTE

O ur reader’s support

of RUMINATE’s first issue has been the bread that kept us going. Which proved essential, because this second issue, Humor’s Grace, was a great test of endurance (mostly because the initial endorphins wore off and the sleepless nights took their toll).

And yet we found laughter and your letters coming alongside our prayers for wisdom and strength, encouraging us through the muddle.

Thank you. And again, I am proud to admit that, despite our muddle, RUMINATE’s artists have emerged—their grace has spoken.

One of our contributors, Yahia Lababidi, wrote: “Our Metaphysical eyes are expert at collapsing distances, seeing through the apparent to the infinite.” So too does humor collapse distances and see through to the infinite. Billy Collins said that humor is a door to the serious; it seems that humor is also a door to grace. We discovered this door opening unto comics and being short enough to miss the bullet, holy chickens, and ordinary objects (flamingos and origami to name a few), the possibilities of runaway truck ramps, dreams about Noah, letters to E.B. White, the alphabet, and His multitudes.

And appropriately enough, and in case I wasn’t getting it, in the past few months my ten-month-old son has truly learned to laugh. He laughs at paper bags and wind chimes, and our black lab Samson— collapsing all my definitions of mundane, just as each of our contributors have collapsed, retrieved and then given great liberties to our definition of humor. We have discovered that humor is intuitional; it is wit and irony and sarcasm, mood altering, whimsical and full of delight.

And when it is really good, it is grace. We hope this is evident for you and that you are able to move through the door and into the gift.

Many blessings,

Brianna Van Dyke

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generous deposits made to our account by an unknown benefactor.

By Yahia Lababidi

yahia lababidi is an internationally published writer of Egyptian-

Lebanese origin. The featured aphorisms are excerpted from Yahia’s forthcoming book Signposts to Elsewhere (Sun Rising Press, 2006), which poet Naomi Shihab Nye has called “a succulent, stunning collection of images and thoughts more well-lit than the old swinging torches of the lamplighters.” Yahia Lababidi’s articles, essays and poems have appeared in journals world-wide, including: Leviathan, Cimarron Review, The Idler, Dream Catcher, Montreal Serai, and Bidoun: Middle East Arts and Culture.

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Present yourself

By Margaret D. Smith

If you give yourself to Yahweh like a newborn at sundown, he will say you didn’t need to go to all the trouble, but secretly like your father he loves presents.

So present yourself-unwrapped, open-handed, spent from the exertion of stripping away to skin and bones, nothing to say for yourself except a wail of tears-a living, breathing mystic sacrifice in your birthday suit.

Give him what he only wished for, a child.

Give him nothing more, just the way you were born.

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By Margaret D. Smith

Once again the gray river shivers at the edge where we the white grasses form a brave line before—what? What will they do to us that has not come to pass? Our graves make fine fodder. A new generation is rising green among us. The cities far away will hear us. We will go down with shouts: the field trees are clapping their winter branches.

Winter leaves about to

By Margaret D. Smith

Can’t you see, the silver light makes gargoyles of us all, potent in the way we guard cathedral woods but lovely in transparency.

Delicate bones now, spinning in our restless ghost love, give us this at least: we need no lotions potions oceans as we once did.

All we crave is each a place to lie down next to one another’s gift of skin, as old as it may be, and grow down to the holy ground together.

margaret d. smith is a writer, artist and musician who has published two books of nonfiction and four books

A Holy Struggle: Unspoken Thoughts of Hopkins (Shaw, 1992), with photographs by Luci Shaw and foreword by Walter Wangerin, and Barn Swallow (Brass Weight Press, 2006). Her poems have been published in more than 50 publications, including Paris Review, Christianity and Literature, The Handmaiden and The Christian Century.

Margaret’s latest venture is creating one prose poem (or is it a short-short-short story?) per day for a year. Lately, God has been telling her one thing over and over: “Time is short; tell the truth.” And no place seems better to carry out that kind of truth-telling than in a poem. of poems, including

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Meditation, Shirtless

By Josh Mackin

My mother wants me to water the plants.

The task—in comparison to the great pains she suffered as I passed through her womb nineteen plus years ago—is admittedly slight. Nevertheless, I’ll admit, the mandate still rankles. While not on the same level as, say, bloody placenta or seven hours of agonizing labor, my physical comfort stands withal as something precious, to be nourished, a small fledgling caught in the breezy maelstrom of unnecessary household chores. Spending all day bumming around the house in one’s underwear demands a special type of integrity, in my opinion, and it’s the kind of integrity that deserves respect. Watering the flowers is not respect. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite of respect. There is nothing anywhere close to respectful about forcing a young man outside to water his mother’s flowers in this most banal of suburban rituals, especially when he has spent the majority of his day in his underwear eating Lucky Charms indoors.

So here I am deciding to temporarily postpone the ignominy of flower-watering in lieu of something weightier: meditation. Shirtless, pants-less meditation.

There is a book staring at me from the shelf above the computer where I type this. It’s an unassuming black paperback, visibly worn with flecks of white from where somebody nicked it against a table or bed corner, unemphatic lettering printed down the spine in a bleak grey font that’s all business. True Spirituality, it says, almost depressingly, and if the book could talk I imagine it would croak out some kind of frail wordless cough-hiccup, the low moan of dry, dusty mediocrity.

Mediocrity. What a frightening concept. A life lived, but not lived well. I imagine myself in ten years, pale-faced and clean shaven, creased behind a desk someplace in an iridescent white-light world of coffee cups and water coolers, closed in on all sides by cubicle dividers, chit-chatting with a co-worker about her kid’s ninth birthday party. She shows me pictures, and I pretend to be interested.

It gets worse. After a day of trying to waste as much time as possible without getting caught by my boss, I go home to a meager studio apartment where I have a cat for a wife. We eat together, a cold supper of corned beef and left-over pizza, and then I watch television while kitty relieves herself in the laundry basket for the umpteenth time. Bad kitty, I think, but have trouble vocalizing the words. Soon sleep comes, and I wander into strange dreams about googling the history of corned beef on my new wireless laptop. At four a.m. I wake up in chills on the couch, the television glow still branding my face with a tawdry episode of Elimidate, and I idly rub the blearyeyed contemplation of suicide out of my system for the third straight night in a row. “This is the way the world ends,” T.S. Elliot says, “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

True Spirituality. The title makes me laugh. It reminds me of the evangelist’s foolhardy arrogance—the cocksure assertion that writing a book means anything: that words on a page could turn to flame if they wanted, and fly away on smoking wings to resurrect a world of the living dead. It’s the madcap belief that things have meaning; that God might somehow effect change in a world that is wild, and large, and free. It’s a pipe dream; a fool’s emissary—the saucy avouchment that I’m not already too far gone to be saved.

The bushes I’m supposed to water at this time in July are wilted and a sickly green, like an off-color Kermit the Frog. If flower gardens were cities, these bushes are the poor part of town. They’re the kind of foliage your eye just slides right over, common through and through; unremarkable. Tucked against the white-linoleum siding of my mother’s house, they’re nothing if not an eyesore.

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“As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once said.

Amen and thank God. We live in a world that we, at last, understand. I know where wind comes from. I know why roses are red. I know that people are nothing more than a complex mix of sexual impulse, societal indoctrination, and psychological stimulus. I know water was never anything but H20, after all.

But if water is water, then the folly of true spirituality has given way to the folly of human knowledge, and our world becomes a place of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. And that means I’m right back there on the couch, strung out like an addict on Friends re-runs, recovering nightly from a job that’s slowly killing me. For all my skeptic posing, a life without true spirituality ends in suicide. I just don’t see the point

SO I WILL PUT MY PANTS ON AND WATER THOSE BUSHES, BECAUSE THEY HELP ME BELIEVE.

So I will put my pants on and water those bushes, because they help me believe. They remind me that there is more to some things than meets the eye. Because I know: come around these parts in, say, September or maybe October, and that putrid green will transmogrify like organic alchemy into a white-against-red so brilliant the colors literally leap gun-blazing like some Old West sheriff into your retinas, double-timing it down the optic nerve, to finally have themselves an old-fashioned barroom brawl in your pituitary gland, clearing the place of those lovely little things called endorphins which then skip into your bloodstream throwing flowers and singing the Hallelujah chorus.

The bushes remind me of the unseen world lying behind, inside, the seen. They remind me of myself, of life, and of other people: one day, one day, the bushes say, we’re all going to shine.

But skepticism dies hard, and in my struggle I remember again the story of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He’s dying and can barely speak, but with his closest friend at his side, he nevertheless has something important to say. He struggles with the words, and they come slowly, heavy with great effort and exertion as his old body begins to shut down. “Sam,” Heschel says, “never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame.” The words catch on his thick tongue. “Sam, Sam, I asked for wonder, Sam, and he gave it to me. He gave it to me.”

Watering the plants, I pray the same prayer: the plea for true spirituality in a world of astonishing light and depth; the plea for a life of wondering belief. If that is a type of madness, then so be it.

Forgive me for quoting Nietzsche, but: there is always some reason in madness.

josh mackin is a junior English major at Messiah College in

True Spirituality, Frederich Buechner says, means paying attention. It’s living with your eyes open.

It’s living a life of wonder.

Grantham, Pennsylvania. He was born and raised in the Philippines, and most of his dreams still take place there. Besides small campus literary journals, this is his first publication.

Call me weak—neediness certainly has something to do with it. Call me foolish—there is so much I don’t know. But when Jesus says, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth,” the humanity in me cries right back, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” If there’s one thing I know, God help me, it’s that.

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How to Answer a Poet

By Joy Sawyer

Why will poetry dance at the break of morning?

Because we’ll shed this long night like a stiff tuxedo & run naked down the hall

Who knows the naked poem’s secret passion?

One who dresses in sheer words & removes them when necessary

Where do undressed poems hide when ashamed?

Under the shag carpet that leads to the pantry of platitudes

What did the platitude say when confronted by poetry?

“I say this for your own good, & for the sake of those you love…”

How to love? How to love?

Love seldom comes in the name of love, How to love? but through these strange and sweetened tongues.

joy sawyer is the former poetry editor of the Mars Hill Review and author

Dancing to the Heartbeat of Redemption (Intervarsity Press), and The Art of the Soul (Broadman & Holman). Her poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Books & Culture, Lilliput Review, New York Quarterly, and Theology Today. She teaches at the University of Denver. of

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By Jeremiah Webster

In the life after death, poets are the only ones in the same line of work. Doctors have nothing to scalpel. Tax collectors take up photography, full retirement for penitent lawyers and congressmen. jeremiah webster writes poems somewhere in the Midwest. He and his wife live with midori the parrot.

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Taking the Runaway Truck Ramp

By Susanna Childress

On the way there I have my head against the window.

Except for the bumps, it is cooling my headache, and I like the reflection of my knees right in front of my face. It has just started raining and Briley is happy because he likes to drive in the rain; the windshield is applauding too with little plops and streaking because he refuses to use the wipers. Briley is not his first name. Jeremiah is. But he doesn’t let anyone call him that, not even me, and that’s fine. By the time you learn Briley is his last name, he is already Briley Briley to you and Jeremiah sounds very much like the Israeli prophet he is not. Jeremiah Briley and the scrolls of sanities and oddities. He writes with his staff in the sand, J + M, he opens his arms, I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul.

That’s Whitman, I say.

Yes, he says. Too easy, he says.

We swerve a little. Briley is leaning forward so that his chin is almost touching the steering wheel and he concentrates on the blurring in front of him, but he likes it, I can tell, his eyebrows are up on his head. He could drive through all of Michigan like that. When my headache is gone and the rain is gone, I will take Indiana.

The raindrops on my window streak towards my forehead, pressed to the glass. I watch as far as my eyes will let me when they go by. Sometimes they stop and wait right in front of my eyes, quivering. It feels like a funny kind of tears: they are running to my face instead of down it. Citizenship? Two Canadians. Hometown? Up above Toronto, sir, Fenelon Falls. And her? Same.

Where you two headed? Florida, sir. Oh? Some sorta Spring Break? No Mister Border Guard sir, I’m starting graduate school, she’s driving down with me and flying back Tuesday. She have a plane ticket? Yes sir.

Can I see your I-90? Sure. You have any fruits? Alcohol or tobacco? Firearms or weapons?

No, sir. We do not.

When my neck gets tired at the window, I shift and put my head on the guitar case lying between the seats. It wouldn’t fit completely in back so Briley put the neck on the front arm rest. I listen for sounds from the strings when we go over bumps or tracks, but the guitar is asleep and not even snoring a vibration. I cannot sleep. Traveling makes me feel small and practical, Briley we are one car among thousands we are one. The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof ’d garret and harks to the musical rain.

Can’t double-Whitman, he says.

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n when I have Who says, I say. I close my eyes. Eve sleep. I am quit listening for the strings, I cannot , running thinking of the best streets in Ontario king of thin am I m. them with a body of crea this game, play I what to pull out next. Briley and flat awake, see, to keep us lively. To keep our eyes s and miles watching the road whisk itself by, mile ng. Anything of shivering gray. We quote everythi with hours ies we can drag up from sluggish bod into pace to go in such positions. The mind slips ire. Just one with the road. Do I know any Baudela Nabokov. stupid line. Any Marianne Moore. Any Naruda. Stevens. Woolf. Borges.

It goes on and on. Miles and miles.

kers when I I am somewhat angry at the mile mar y fifth mile really stop and think about them, ever etre anyway, or so. I am annoyed by their unkilom I will not but they are sneering, and I am glad pops of the lolli n see them on the way back, gree the clouds roadsides, I will be far above them, and metres for me will roll over themselves in counting h Of this, that while I try to sleep uncertain of the lengt That will not Bee— in is between, It goads me, like the Gobl state—its sting.

the guitar Dickinson, I say, raising my head from on the arm rest.

What, he says. d.

Oh, I say. I forgot to say that one alou

to drift like I am looking out the window, waiting birds to the a lillypad off to sleep. I see a patch of and down up r othe right. They are following each like waves of side up, side down side up, they look looking up at pepper, shaken to the skymeal. I am ts to pass us. the birds when a light blue truck star n. How higa Mic in It’s illegal to pass on the right to own a man e do you know that? It’s illegal for a singl n facts for five single sheep in Indiana. I’ll take littleknow es eye conhundred Alex, The man in the truck mak do. I look cars ing tact with me like people in pass put something away, but in my periphery I see him staying right up in the window of his truck, he is

beside us. I look. It is a picture of a naked woman. She is fully naked and she is leaning to the window with his face above her body and he is smiling with his teeth. I say nothing and look full away, feeling her nakedness as it is my own, as it is just then, my own, and I say to Briley, There is a porno show in the window of that truck. Briley looks over, and it becomes a hard look, right at the man, with his chin straight at the truck, the angles of his face pointing like something unsheathed. I am afraid he will go off the road; he is not even minding the lines and he keeps his black eyes on the man, his face curling with, to my mind, something holy.

And finally when the man realizes there is a boy in the car with me and the boy is looking very straight at him, he loses his smile, he speeds up and around us till he is seven cars ahead and counting.

I would’ve liked to stick my hand out the window, make another bird up there, a special one just for Pervert In a Blue Truck. But I don’t, I take a drink of water from a cloudy bottle I got back at the border and scrunch down in my seat, letting my hands rest on my stomach. I am too aware of my open skin to say anything to Briley just now. I feel I’ve been naked before, up against a window and this is what I get, displays of strangers and their private sins. Briley is talking to me, and when I look over I see the anger has curled out of his face to something around his cheeks, dusty pink, a frustration he can barely manage. Marla, he says, It is the instinct which has gone wrong One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. Don’t look them in the eyes, he says, their naked kneeling women will take on your face, you understand? I have to be twenty men for what he is, he says. He says, I take the suspicion of being him from every woman. Don’t look them in the eyes Marla.

That’s Lewis, I say, Isn’t it?

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Yes, he says, but relunctantly, afraid I’ve missed the point.

The boy before Briley took me out to a four-star in Toronto. I said We can go someplace else, please, it’s nice but it’s not necessary. I said I don’t want you to pay for this, it’s only our first date and I don’t think I like you you are a little frightening in that Boy Wants way. He said Oh don’t worry, you’ll owe me. I said Oh yeah, like a quarter a week? Something like that, he said. He was not smiling, not kidding like I was. At the end of the night, after the Maple Leafs game, I was near the door handle, I said Thank you for the lovely evening you are a prig. Oh no problem, he said, this time smiling, You’ll be paying me back.

We stop in early Indiana for gas. It has stopped raining, and it is not so much wet and chilly as just chilly. The cold sometimes smells like peanut butter. When Briley gets back in the car, the cold comes thickly in. It smells sweet and pasty until we are doing seventy-five and then it wears away.

Briley you will not come back you will take up many piercings in some Tampa shop you will give the sands of St. Pete an extra rush and grow your legs out till they brush the currents of very blue minds, the hardbacks on upper shelves will be marked with your territory lips. You will stay and read about our weather, hours of days north.

It has started raining again, just a bit. I stop reading at the end of a perfectly dismal story. The car next to me has a football helmet in the backseat, the boy driving with his windshield wipers going triple time has small curls around the forehead, they are slick and he is talking on a cell phone.

You’re my second favorite American pastime.

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Two boys before Briley I was feeling very restless and somewhat confident. There were strawberry stops at least three nights a week, and he always got the reddest ones for me. I would sing Ode to my Sweet Berry Fruit. This boy was as benign as he was illiterate, and very good at baseball. He was from the States, somewhere near Wrigley Field. I met him after his games when he smelled like dugout, when he talked all the way to Shae’s Fields about his change-ups and Ribbies. He would rub his palms when I sang in the car, one knee guiding the steering wheel, he would rub at the red dust of his creases when I off-rhymed my own verses, and he would buy me small cartons of strawberries. I ate them without washing them, ate them slowly and not wasting any juices; he talked about baseball scholarships and Uncle-with-connections in BC. At the end of the night he laughed at the seeds in my teeth and tried to coax them out with lines as sweet as all I’d eaten, his littleboy face, the very basics of flesh and existence, nothing more, like the tart of an early fruit, the pang of coming-on hunger. Goodnight, Sport, he’d say, You’re the best third base around You’re my second favorite American pastime. Goodnight, I’d say, Thank you for the strawberries maybe someday you will taste them.

Near Kentucky we stop for lunch and take it to eat in the car. It is parked and Briley and I sit sideways in our seats. It is not a good time to kiss him but I want to anyway.

He is finishing a yellow, morningsmelling juice when I lean Exhilaration—is within— 1

He kisses like a maniac. I don’t know why I was surprised the first time he kissed me, but I was. We were outside some cafe and he told me with his face, standing in front of me with his full lips, the kind boys don’t even know they have, and his eyebrows working his forehead There are layers here like wallpapers like pages like seven or eight flavors I think it’s time to. When he kisses me he puts his hands in his pockets up to the knuckles, with his thumbs sticking through his belt loops. He always does that. One time, maybe our third kiss, I took his hands out of his pockets, I was guiding his wrists to my neck, but he stopped my hands and pulled them back, hooking a pointer finger of mine into the edge of each pocket, crowding my fingers with his own. I was stuck to his hips and he was kissing like a maniac. I don’t care who you are woman: I know a man is looking for you and his soul is a corn-tassel kissing a south-west wind. 2

I decide to drive through Tennessee. Briley turns on the radio and all we find are Willie Nelson stations. It fits, though, and we decide we like it. When it gets dusky enough to feel as though you should be through an evening, thinking of how soon you can go to sleep, that is when we pull off and find a hotel with an unloud marquee. After we put in our name our name and get the key, we find a gas station nearby so in the morning we can be straight off. He walks with the tops of his shoulders flat and pointing at opposite poles; he sees the men with their followingeyes but doesn’t acknowledge them, that is how sure he is of us.

Three boys before Briley I was too young. I was feeling neglected so I let him kiss me after chapel, show me how to rollerblade backwards at twenty to curfew, teach me thick vocabulary from his physiological

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d with psych book in between tracing my han phone his mouth. When he whispered on the very e som et, I felt us building a large secr When foggy castle with rooms and rooms.

by I he unheld my hand as people walked ing the thought he was adding buttresses, shap about one no tell turrets. When he told me to ght thou s—I us—in such slowly logical narcotic excitperhaps this was an unhealthy and very doll, on ing affair; he’d say Come over here, sure when pres t wan my lap. He’d say You don’t Do you ? we come back next semester, do you Okay okay want people teasing us all the time? and me bay Let’s keep it here, sweets, just a you de deci can We . thing bee you’re right you’re right now for say, later if it’s really what we want, he’d let’s try it quiet.

He got marI finally came to my Gingko Biloba. he was ried in December to a girl no one knew dating. Maybe he wears his ring.

e lose its hoIn the hotel room that will never quit teeth and tel room smell, I shower and brush my asleep until he get into bed with my hair wet. I am so he knows turns off the light. I roll onto my back Sport. He ht dnig Goo I am awake. He does not say fingers his s puts his hand on my stomach. He cup not hard or over my bellybutton. My stomach is t. His hand flat, I do not have a tiny, flat, hard wais es his etim Som does not go that far. It never has. and soft , skin thumb will stray back and over that that I thought hairless, and the first few times he did , ran both my he wanted sex. So I tugged him over his neck and of line hands from his chest to the hair waited for him to start.

When I felt ow I was a part of them. tucked byline, and someh r and slept t as a half-T, I curled ove ou arm his , eep asl l fal him e who you ath his shoulder. I don’t car like an extra arm underne cor na is looking for you and her soul are man: I know a woman is e, I said d. 3 I want to keep this on tassel kissing a south-west win that night. Yes, to keep.

key are his black eyes a lock and its In the mornings I look at ment. its bow are one musical instru one mechanism. . .a violin and 4 se.

Much Madness is divinest Sen

h earth tattoos are every fift In Georgia, billboards like Fish Three Miles, Poppa Flop blink or so: Fresh Pecans FurAll Exit 146, King Frog House Exit 140, We Bare n’s tio Na s Frog, Biller Firework niture You’ll Love King st t, Crib Fireworks Large Largest Fireworks Outle ide, Daley Fireworks LargFireworks Outlet Nationw Nation, Byron Georgia A est Fireworks Outlet in the Peach of a Town.

d e over to my house we ha The first time Briley cam Or ’s ley Go at August crop peaches, frozen from the big the ge treefingers, in chard. Sliced like soft-oran ipino missionary lady, wooden bowl from the Fil slippery peach juice out we pulled them and the on. My mother said h a matching wooden spo wit the like still lay and back his n He has an He didn’t. He turned on dessert dishes in the kitche the r ove He k. chee his on boy I’ve ever known, darkness. I heard the pillow slide earring. He’s the smartest they cannot t wha l stea ards Cow la.

Mar said she said. He is wise faced me, I said. He has an earring, . earn ot cann they t wha d knows and knows earn Cowards steal he is 3-D he is focused an ll strokes, I’m is the brush of Van Gogh’s sma he s ng thi ds wor e thos d ppe not anything, I want to Then the dark was loud and it wra anything to be his canvas, I’m a rush. in y bod my with e ther g lyin me, d, he has an earring. over and over be, I said. Darling, she sai felt I see, to one no for hing blus d, ly virgin I know.

But even as I edge ther, I said, He is the on Mo chin no , own his e wer proud of him. The words

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We are in rolly country again, have been since late Indiana. But now the roads climb up and down with double yellows squirming out inclining inclining with every roll. I had never heard of Runaway Truck Ramps—I suppose we don’t have either the kind of hills or truckers to worry with it. But in Georgia, there they are, advertising themselves at the tops of hills and then all the way down. Briley tells me what they are for. Say a truck gets going too fast down the hill and his brakes give out, he can take the Runaway Truck Ramp, an off-exit of about 400 feet, mostly thick sand and gravel to slow a Runaway Truck down.

I ask Doesn’t it hurt the truck? Well, he says, his brakes are already shot; it’s either grit pillow, full of levers and smoke, or meet a mountain and other friendly trucks. Oh, I say, I see. I had supposed a crash was a crash, but this, like throwing tomatoes at play dough; a softer way to just-miss death, the only way to save your brakeless truck. Eros Turannos: not the girl beaten and bruised kind, the kind infinitely not-quite-as-requited, and you, infinitely racing down the mountain. Low-Georgia I am itching to pull off a Runaway Truck Ramp, just to see what it is exactly and pull into the hard molasses that saves truckers from kissing mountains.

Cowards steal what they cannot earn.

23

We are in Florida.

Someone is raking leaves in my stomac h, only for the rustling and colour s I would think they were just raking, the tines scraping in the box of sky laven de r and cor nerless, the moon rattles like a fra gment of angry candy.

Don’t use e.e. agai

nst me, he says.

Or maybe he does n’t say it; maybe I just think he might, any second .

What he says is th is, though he’s whisp ering and I pretend to sleep, straining to hear th e recitation Remember your Creator in the days of your you th, before the days of trouble come an d the years approach wh en you will say “I find no pleasure in them” . . . when me n rise up at the sound of birds, bu t all their songs grow fai nt; when men are afraid of heights an d of dangers in the str eets; when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper dra gs himself along and desire no lon ger is stirred. Then ma n goes to his eternal home and mour ners go about the street s . . . The words of the wise are like goads, their collec ted sayings like fir mly embedded nails—given by one Sh ep he rd. Be warned, my son, of an ything in addition to the m. Of making many books the re is no end, and much study wearies the body.

Ecclesiastes, he wh ispers. Marla, he wh ispers.

Chapter 12.

We pull onto UCF’ s campus about fo ur o’clock. From the car I lift boxes and bags the way I would lift an elephant’s trunk, af raid

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leathery face. At six of where it connects to the half hour to the beach, we are done. We drive a er bags. I smell the salt with dinner in hamburg ehow it is familiar. ten minutes away, and som der his arms. The body He wears bergamot oil 5un Sometimes it makes him dies; the body’s beauty lives. salt. I tell him he is smell like soap. Others, like k d I am careful not to loo Vida Marina already, an h get there I feel sleepy wit for the sunset. When we thushing, like layers of sta the constant sounds like d, san g ftin in the plush shi ic, I want to put my face gers even though there is and it is warm on my fin each heard the mer maids singing, wind on my neck. I have y will sing to me. to each. I do not think that the

tup.

Shutup, Eliot. Shutup, shu

I watch him, not angry.

I ath many, many people— I have found him underne d fin ys away only to find—to have peeled layers of bo w no t jus am own skin. I what? Something like my all I’ve ever trained for all e yb understanding, and ma even , and keep on finding him these years is to find him on of me, even with his face after he is there in front g, as din fin l stil am on mine, I mine, even with his mouth I y wa the t been breathing, no though all along I’ve not breathing for me. am breathing when he is up and which is a shame. I stand I can only call up Eliot, ver ne We ng the licking shore. walk away from him, alo the en was no teasing. I had be promised anything. There trail s, tugging like shadows to backdrop of many scene mystith bo ing eth every along som each and each and each’s er. promised anything. Ev cal and solid. He hadn’t

him lookme to the airport. I feel In the morning he drives ahead, while and I look straight ing over to me every little sorry. is he this haircut. I know waiting like dry bodies for front of looking at each other in And when finally we are

I have found him underneath so many, many people— I have peeled layers of boys away only to find—to find what? Something like my own skin.

Baggage Check, he touches the middle of my chin with one finger. He tugs down just a bit to pull open my mouth, just open enough to feel air on the back of my throat. He does not kiss me.

Marla, he says. I won’t be the coward of a thousand miles away. I won’t wrap Maybe around you and keep you chafing, he says. You must do the same for me.

My fingers start to go numb, just a little. I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. What does e.e. know. I mean, really. Really. love is the sky and i am for you long enough and just so long 6 When there is no more, he says, when I am Jeremiah, I will be the same to you as this day.

He kisses me a very small, logical kiss, the kind that is barely a kiss, no taste and only a smooth tip of tongue across the bottom lip.

On the plane, I do not cry. I do not read. I do not count. My fingers are rubbing over one little patch of furry seat cover. The window is pouring to me many sunshines, and there are clouds, rolling over themselves. We fly over Runaway Truck Ramps.

Emily Dickinson Carl Sandburg 3 Carl Sandburg 4 C.S. Lewis; Emily Dickinson 5 Walt Whitman 6 e.e. cummings 1 2

*See Susanna’s bio on page 29

25

*

*

* T o b e o v e r e d u c at e d i s

t o

b e a n d

o v e r f e d u n d e r n o u r i s h e d

By Yahia Lababidi

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On My Husband’s First Sinus Infection of our Marriage

By Susanna Childress

He does not suffer well. This is because

he is beautiful, astounding

as the eye of a peacock feather,

tinctured blue and green, feathers within feathers, shivering, a beauty beyond what even he is aware, cheekbones sheltering the glory

of his ductless spleen, the blood’s

able proteins, each cell’s flagellar

motor, yes, down to that detail, and yes, too, with that in mind, every buckle of the spine chicaning its Grecian looks up the neck to the brow,

the nose, lashes giraffe-long

over the open tide what could be

sea-gray or sea-green of his eyes and what’s more is his own unknowing, though in some yawning pocket of that striking sundown

body—perhaps his finger creases—

he must be aware of it, a magnificence most of us

can only fathom: umber, buttery ribbon of firefly’s gut, weathervane’s volte-face, the rent of verility over the orchard

from last year’s fire, now, his whole

head hot as paraffin wax, ears

red-tipped mangoes ripening on the sill, lips a pallid clair de lune, he offers music, he’s brimming with it: accordian lungs, carotid

viola, toms of phleghm like lungs

themselves, bless him, my stunning husband

prostrate beside me, tacit, grumpy as peat bog, willing the bronchial tubes to muscilate, or at least to sleep so hard the bonnyclabber

will not bother—this man whose even

bilious corners speak enzyme,

rhizome, intelligent design— will wake tomorrow feeling not a lick better, will rasp among the antibodies, silt my hand to his cheek

and say to my fingers

as if fiberoptic points of joy, Principessa,

have you any broth of bone for me? And when I bring a tray, steaming with soup, a single Cymbidium orchid tucked beneath his spoon,

he’ll sit up slowly,

gazing into the bowl

with a forlorn welcome for his own face, and pray his prayers aloud.

27

The First Few Weeks

By Susanna Childress

When finally you’d return

from an errand—another book of Auden, Derrida, or the small

canisters of oatmeal, dried apricots, olives—your flat foot sounding down the corridor was enough to flush my neck

with red pendants; you, too, felt it, would skirt table and chairs and land, at last,

on the divan, where we leaned like great brown seals into each other’s necks: sun-mottled, brimming. What did we do every day? Eat apricots, read

out loud, read for hours— your gentle throat throbbing,

earnest brow dark as a hem—and now, after I have sunk full into your charity, is the time to tell you: I forsook the poems, the essay’s

bright mien, all that splendid brooding which truths be True: I confess,

dear heart, I was not listening at all but practicing the weightless hum of love, its incandescent swim. Evenings, I studied

light on the side of your face; I wanted, in desperate simplicity, to whisper,

Do you know, the way these slight hairs shine, right here, you’ve the subtle halo of a question mark for an ear? Just beyond our flat,

huge heads of blue hydrangea, summer-strewn, spilt over the city

and someone playing Mendelssohn, God love them, with every window thrown open.

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susanna childress is a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at Florida State University and currently teaches at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her first volume of poetry, Jagged with Love, was selected by Billy Collins for the 2005 Brittingham Poetry Prize with publication by the University of Wisconsin Press. Susanna has recently published poetry or short fiction in The Missouri Review, Image, The Notre Dame Review, Third Coast, Gargoyle, and Runes.

29

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A man thinks a disagreeable thought and decides to ignore it.

The thought, feeling abandoned, decides to forget the man. They disown each other and go in separate directions.

My thought behaves just like Cain but I am Able, the man thinks.

This new thought pleases him, so he keeps it close to his heart.

The man acts like Abraham and I am his sacrifice, the ignored thought thinks.

And so a new thought is adopted and raised like a son.

The world gets populated with disciples from myriad related ideas and eventually everything passes from the old to the new, and one day it occurs to the son of the ignored thought that he has no idea where he came from. It’s as if his beginnings have been forgotten.

He loves the thought that acts as his father--and now the grandfather of his own progeny—but as for identities, he can’t help wondering. I can’t remember, the ignored thought thinks when confronted by its son.

It’s important, try harder, the son encourages.

So the ignored thought agrees to visit a therapist and is regressed to bring out all of its repressed thoughts. One of them, of course, is the man who originally thought it.

Talk to each other, the therapist encourages.

The thought recognizes the man who ignored him and opens his arms, but the man rushes forward to slay the thought.

Lay not your hand upon my father, the son commands, for by your actions I see how terrible it is to be ignored.

The Idea Is Made Flesh

And the man repents, and because of the son’s understanding, the entire concept is saved. And together they pull the therapist from his chair and sacrifice him in the fireplace to show their gratitude.

By David Feela

31

Multitudes

By David Feela Any Truth holds a multitude’s attention.

Take the Sermon on the Mount, the first fast food with fewer than a billion served.

As each hand reaches for fish and loaf the line gets shorter and since there’s nothing else on the menu the line moves steadily: two fish, one loaf, one fish, three loaves, two loaves, hold the fish.

It’s a miracle, people swallowing what’s available then coming back for more.

And they say, Jesus wept.

I can sympathize.

The Truth looks too much like a fish when people are hungry but fill their bellies and off they go, down the hill, heading home.

The taste they’ll remember one or even two days later but since a multitude always moves on the faithful pick up crumbs long after the hill has emptied, filling their baskets with what has been wasted, as if to prove there’s room for a billion more.

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The Evolution of Lint

Bless Me

Before pockets, lint had to find its place in the

It’s crazy to think

world.

that aside from the thoughts

By David Feela

By David Feela

Nobody cared if a few mysterious fibers

stuck to a shoulder.

Considered over a lifetime,

swarming inside my head,

they kept the shepherd warmer. In the city lint

everything else is impulse, reaction, nerve.

transformed itself into a liturgical season, sacri-

Etiquette has so much to do

fice and suffering were its tenets, the hair shirt

with learning appropriate behavior.

its glorious manifestation. If lint had an agenda

Sneezing, my head falls

for world domination, nobody noticed. If lint had

to the floor,

argued for its own sovereign state, nobody would

then wobbles back into range

have taken it seriously. Instead, lint found its way

like a bubble in a carpenter’s level.

into the finest castles, the baskets of commerce,

Facing my body

the carts and carriages of the nobles.

it mouths, Bless You.

Lint opened

its nests to the poor, clung to a thousand sails,

I can’t actually hear the words

colonized strange lands where clothing stayed

and I’d like to say, Thank You

optional and the belly button served as shelter, its

but my mouth is down there

primitive cliff dwelling.

being polite

Who would have guessed

that lint could have survived such perils, then

and I can’t fault it for that.

returned under the epaulet of an admiral.

I’m proud of my head

Without

lint our lives would have stalled, for if two or

for going on without me,

more fibers had not gathered we’d never have been

saying what needs saying

bound to its name.

without thinking.

david feela is a poet, freelance writer,

writing instructor, book collector, and thrift store pirate.

His work has appeared in regional High Country News’s “Writers’s on the Range,” Mountain Gazette, and in the newspaper as a “Colorado Voice” for The Denver Post. He is a contributing editor and columnist for Inside/Outside Southwest and for The Four Corners Free Press. His poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments (Maverick Press), won the Southwest Poet Series. and national publications, including

33

Noah and Company B

y

Stephen Sangirardi

Man does not live by Bill Moyers alone, and so last week I bought my daughter one of those little Golden Books about Noah and the Ark. She’s fascinated by the story.

The gathering of the animals reminds her of a gigantic zoo, and on those pages where all the creatures are densely assembled two-by-two, I ask her to find the hippo, the ostrich, the bear, the flamingo...and then she happily scans the page and chooses between the pair and the many. I also point out to her the great rain that followed and the other things the Bible urges us to tell, like the lightning and the thunder which forced our friends into the big boat in order to escape God’s rage.

Because of these sessions with my daughter, I had a strange and vivid dream last night about Noah. There was, however, another reason for my dream. Having developed a bad cough the other day, I was forced to see my doctor, and he prescribed a rather potent cough medicine made up of codeine. I’ve taken this cough syrup before, and it has a peculiar effect on me, much like the effect opium had on Coleridge. The results are strong and not wholly undesirable, and so I am secretly glad whenever I get one of these bronchial attacks because the Federal Warning labeled on the vial-Controlled Substance—immediately tells me that the good doctor has once again given me good stuff. As I say, my eagerness to swallow the syrup and then some, ahem, could have easily accounted for the clarity of my vision.

I suppose I was an unseen visitor, a ghost privy to a great historical event, for none of the creatures addressed me in this dream where all of the creatures spoke, not only to each other but to Noah as well. Nor did Noah speak to me, and yet heaven knows he was in need of immediate counsel considering the trouble he was to find himself in.

This was my dream: All the animals seemed to be gathered in the cavernous lower deck of the Ark. To my surprise, there was a din that took on the ambience of cabaret buzzing, and the image that came to mind, for some reason, was Dickens’ description of the GinShop, its “bar of French-polished mahogany, elegantly carved.” I suppose I was also reminded of Melville’s Spouter Inn at the beginning of Moby Dick. There was even music provided by a most unusual band, but I’ll say more about that later. (Now, the more literal reader might expect a word or two about what was reeking in that bestial place, but I must point out that there has yet to be a dream that permitted the olfactory sense. Therefore, I have nothing to say about what scents were wafting throughout the ship. And, since this is the place for disclaimers, let me state for the record as well that the dream occurred in black and white, and for some reason, which Noah must have addressed ahead of time, there existed no animosity among the animals, no predatory urges, etc. It was as if every creature realized that they were all, well, in the same boat. )

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There seemed to be logical yet astonishing groups at each table. To name a few: Crustaceans were seated at one end of the floor, gesticulating with their claws, almost as though they were applauding some spectacle; avian flocks chattered above on the rafters; and ruminants appeared aloof from the less meditative creatures, like the simians and carnivores, and were situated deep in the back near the stern whose enclosure must have been more suitable to higher, more abstruse topics. At this point in the dream I had difficulty making out what they were discussing, but I did hear a passing dove say something about the vagaries of Genesis. His exact words I cannot recall. I do know that whatever he said was meant for other birds that nested above the crowd.

Not all the groups were segregated, though. I saw the apparent integration of the two elephants and the two seals who sat around a table playing, of all things, poker. The bulls were wearing visors, and the females every now and then took perfect aim at a cuspidor. I must admit that I found the accuracy of the latter quite remarkable; maybe under different circumstances they would have been candidates for some dexterous circus. All in all, every animal seemed quite at home with this vast menagerie, and then -it suddenly dawned on me that because each one had his or her particular mate, it would have been nearly impossible for accusations of infidelity to arise, unless the notion could have been spread by some Iago on board. No, I could not conceive of the elephant and the seal, for example, copulating in mirth, and so I had cause to think that the poison of jealousy that could destroy so many had been eliminated by Divine Providence for the sake of a more harmonious crew. Considering what was soon to transpire, the last thing Noah needed on board was a soap opera instigated by some jilted lover. I’d even go so far as to say that cross-breeding such as between the lion and the tiger—resulting in the liger—never took place. During my short time “aboard,” I saw neither feline within ten feet of the other, and this was quite reasonable for as everyone knows lions are from Africa, and tigers, Asia. This was not the place for hybrid hi-jinx.

Besides, space was at a premium. There simply wasn’t enough room on the Ark for adultery or experimentation or for illicit lovers to find a private parlor.

What happened next, however, disabused me of the idea that this assembly was traveling in Arcadian bliss. I overheard a conversation I will remember long after my past and future dreams evaporate from memory. Against the nearest wall, about ten feet where I stood, the two Thompson’s gazelles were in the praying position and arguing with the other about whose prayers were more acceptable to God! In fact, each began to cite specific instances, like the time he led an expedition of parched comrades to a watering hole which had been up to that time concealed on the vast savannah, until the location was finally revealed due to the

35

mighty efforts of his unceasing prayer. Because of his discovery, his cronies at that time appointed him chaplain and seer of his group. After hearing this, his mate—and I am convinced that the two had only recently met on this boat by the way they were vying with each other—recounted her own story. She and her cronies were ambushed one time on the plains by a lion, and she quickly ordered her friends to run away while she stood ready to sacrifice herself to the lion’s hungry jaws. With a prayer on her lips she readied herself for death until her life was spared when a spear, apparently thrown by some human, pierced the attacker in the side. Therefore, she was convinced that a similar Deus ex machina would save them now from this raging storm by dint of her prayers, and not her mate’s. Her tut-tut companion protested strongly and was about to offer an even stronger example of his faith...except that his consort strode away content to have the last word. I did not hear the rest of his story, but I’m sure it must have entailed feats of miraculous panache. A number of things came to mind. First, couldn’t God have selected a more compatible pair for the journey? When it came time to reproduce, would they then argue about the time, the place, or even the position of the copulants? And why had God chosen such overbearing gazelles? If the two had been born-again Antinomians, they could not have been more arrogant about their beliefs or their spiritual capacity for bringing about the desired excrement of a constipated fawn. The reader will forgive me my scatological reference, but I was shocked by the way the gazelles were playing the one-upmanship game. Truthfully, they weren’t Thompson’s gazelles at all; if anything, they were “Thomist” gazelles bludgeoning each other with their heavy faith. They reminded me of squabbling theologians debating some quiddity of Scripture. They should have been left behind to drown, and replaced by nicer representatives of their kind. I was quite afraid that they were going to contaminate the others with their self-righteous ideas. But if God wanted them in the Ark, then who was I to question Divine wisdom? It takes all types to populate the world, the querulous as well as the meek.

I was distracted from these thoughts by the limericking of a horse who at first glance bore a coy resemblance to a contemporary poet whose name I have forgotten. What struck me as rather unusual was the way the stallion (as I soon discovered) rose on its hind legs while reciting verse: There once was a Jew named Noah whose boat became the earth’s shelter.

With a thousand beasts he flowed toward the East abetted by a ton of Vodka.

There once was a chap named Noah who knew the wrath of Jehovah...

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Leave it to a Bard to explicate the customs and the times. The horse was right! When I looked closely at the rest of the animals, I saw for the first time that many of them were drinking some beverage from huge casks. They were drinking not so much out of gregariousness but from boredom and harnessed desperation. Thus said their fatigued faces. When I attuned my ear, I heard the group of bears--polar, black, and brown--derisively toasting the thirty-ninth day and night of this journey. The thirtyninth day! I was frozen to the spot when I heard that number.

So, I had somehow been transported to the penultimate day of Noah’s excursion!

That explained the Angst that pervaded all of the passengers. This was no Peaceable Kingdom as imagined in the Hicks’ painting. There was a noisy restlessness even in the behavior of those we normally consider stolid. The owls, for example, were hooting in a breathless way. No three-second interval came between each hoot. No sooner did they hoot once than another hoot followed, like a nervous twitch or even a skipping record. The orangutans, which for some reason sat apart from the other simians, demonstrated their prehensile use of the thumbs by twiddling both of them...almost frantically. Maybe they were embarrassed by the antics of their close relatives. For at another table the gorilla, gibbon, chimp and baboon engaged themselves in loud arm-wrestling, overturning a few neighboring tables in their wake, the kind of ruckus to be expected from a knot of Irish laborers too serious about their stout and standing a round one too many. Oblivious to the row he and his comrades were causing, the gorilla ordered more drink from the penguin who somehow found himself waiting upon them. Things did not bode well. An eruption was brewing, as any blind man could have seen.

At last, then, I got a glimpse of Noah himself, more Impresario, it seemed to me, than Hebraic skipper, whispering in the ears of his three burly sons who evidently were to see to it that the simians caused no further commotion. And stop the commotion they did by passing around a long pipe that the rogues gladly inhaled. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the sons had given their brother primates, but whatever it was, the pipe’s contents had certainly sedated them. Noah then approached the band area, where I saw in the midst thereof four robed musicians: a hippo at piano, a zebra on flute, an ox behind the drums, and a koala on bass. What a vessel this was! Any second now, and I expected to see someone, beast or man, selling real estate for the land God intended to bequeath to the survivors of the Flood. Instead, I heard Noah say to the quartet, “Boys, how about something a little less doleful, like a sprightly trot?”

His wish was their command. They played a lively tune, and for the time being the mood there below became more jovial. But it was no trot they played. So imagine

37

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my surprise when the Komodo dragons started dancing cheek-to-cheek in spite of the fact that the music clearly suggested a mambo or at the very least a rumba. Were these dragons listening to the same music I was? Or is it true that there’s simply no accounting for reptilian taste? In any event, the ancient truth I had read somewhere was confirmed: music does have power to soothe the savage beast.

I think this relative peace would have continued if not for the hysterical shrieks of a giraffe who, with neck bent down because of the limitations of the ceiling, trotted to the microphone and wrested it away from the crooning koala: “Noah, Noah, you of wicked wit and gifts! When does the rain stop? When will the rain stop? The month you predicted has passed and still the storm rages, and my neck tightens in a Gordian knot! The Almighty you have irked with your hogsheads of ale, your casks of wine, and your other diversions. The simian, feline, vulpine and teal have drunk the curses you have brought upon us, and so the rain will not cease, the rain will not cease. You are trying to ease our sorrow with strong drink, but we have been on this ship much too long!”

Poor thing, she seemed bent on saying much more, but anxiety got the better of her, and her sobs soon found comfort in the shoulder of the slouching mate come to solace her. There was no doubt that her words had an effect on the other animals that heard her, and even the ape, cat, wolf, and duck, who under different circumstances might have become offended by her insinuations, became aroused against Noah. It was all becoming clear to me. For thirty-nine days the animals had been cooped up in the Ark, and they were now understandably fed up with the journey. They needed respite. They needed terra firma.

I saw Noah and his sons exchange uneasy looks; apparently, the situation called for more effective measures than the mere passing of a pipe. Noah rushed up to the microphone and spoke to the crowd: “My friends, you know and I have told you that I am God’s viceroy. He has neither forsaken us nor cursed us because of these hogsheads. You know and I have told you that I have sanctified the planks of this boat.

Would you rather be out there...” Here he paused and pointed dramatically to what lay beyond the safe boundaries of the ship, “...drowning in God’s wrath?”

His plea was cut short by a loud and imposing rhino wearing, of all things, pincenez. He occupied a broad space in the middle of the floor and bellowed as he spoke: “Noah, you and yours will be walking those planks if this rain doesn’t stop and this boat doesn’t touch ground. Why, the whole bunch of us has been grumbling, and we are starting to think that the gods have no more use for humans!”

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Polytheism, far worse than cannibalism, had struck...along with the threat of mutiny!

At that moment I was grateful for my invisibility lest I would have been threatened too. Of course, I sympathized with Noah, but when I got a glimpse of the snarling teeth and the whetted claws I understood Peter’s fear, even though he had sworn at supper that he would never desert his lord. The other formidable toms—the lion, tiger, and buffalo, et al—joined in and applauded the rhino’s threat. How human these creatures seemed! For didn’t the Israelites threaten to turn on Moses after spending forty days in the wilderness, even though they had seen evidence of Moses’ relationship with God in the seven plagues and the parting of the Red Sea? How quickly the beasts on board had forgotten Noah’s uncanny prophecy about the Flood in the first place and the foresight with which he had built this Ark. But forget they did, as they suddenly began creeping closer and closer to Noah and his. Where was God now when Noah needed him the most?

The outnumbered humans huddled closer together in the band area: Noah, his wife, their three sons and their three wives. This wasn’t the first time they had experienced the bane of being the minority; let’s not forget that on dry land, they were the only people in the land who hadn’t debauched themselves. This predicament seemed worse. After all, they weren’t up against human beings this time. Again Noah tried to wield his authority: “I warn you. The Most High is not mocked. He chose me to lead you to safety, and any harm that befalls me will surely befall you. I have captained this ship. To rebel against me is to rebel against God.” His words seemed to have dissuaded the animals from their mutinous intentions, for they stopped creeping forward and remained where they were. It was clear that none of them wanted to tangle with the mysterious force that had caused this endless rain.

And perhaps they wouldn’t have barked and growled any further had it not been for a portly pig who held a megaphone and shouted into it. Strangely enough, I was reminded of Squealer from Animal Farm: “My brothers and sisters,” he began. “We should consider this matter from a different viewpoint. Perhaps God wants us to sacrifice Noah and his kin if we want the rain to cease!”

“Don’t listen to that nonsense,” Noah protested above the din, but the fickle masses had turned their attention to their porcine brother.

“We are tired of your postponed dates, old man! Two weeks ago you promised that this rain would end, but it hasn’t. We’ll give you a flood, old boy. We’ll make you deluge your pants as you’re tied to the mast, and it won’t be from this downpour.”

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The titter produced by that comment never sounded so ghastly to human ears. Continued the pig: “I say we jettison the whole bunch of them if by tomorrow the rain doesn’t end. We shall offer our own sacrifice. Yes, yes, let’s see how ‘chosen’ Noah really is, or if by usurping the Ark, we are devoutly following the divine will! Animals of the boat, unite! Unite, I say!”

A cheer arose from biped and quadruped and the feathered alike.

Well, what could Noah and his family do against a horde of such angry mutineers? Or what could I offer who was but an invisible observer? How could I tell him that on the fortieth day, tomorrow, the rain would stop and Ararat would be found and Noah’s name would go down in maritime history? How could I tell him to remain calm, that all things would be well, when I could be neither seen nor heard?

I was helpless, yet I knew that everything would be well. He would have to wait until tomorrow before his name and his reputation were vindicated in Golden Books everywhere.

For the time being, his family was at the mercy of hoi polloi. They were jostled by the larger males, tied up in hemp, and led on board to be strapped to the mast. There, the furious rain lashed them more than thirty-nine times. I heard Noah’s wife and the others crying out unto Noah. I heard Noah crying out unto God. I heard him pleading with God for the termination of the rain and the discovery of some land. After all, hadn’t he done God’s Will? Hadn’t he endured the mockery of all his neighbors when he first undertook this giant task?

Before awaking, I heard the frenzied prayers of Noah and his people as urgently cried as any petition screamed by Columbus before the jetsam and the flotsam of the sea proclaimed San Salvador.

stephen sangirardi is an English teacher at Clarke

High School in Westbury, New York. He is fifty-two, a father, and a husband who has been sporadically published in the past thirty years.

His most recent publications include a sonnet in Adagio Verse Quarterly and a personal essay in the recent March/April issue of the magazine Neurology Now. the current issue of

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*

*

*O

u r

M

e ta p h y s i c a l

e y e s

are expert at collapsing distances, seeing through the apparent to the infinite.

By Yahia Lababidi

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the alphabet we learned to write in school was spartan, pressed between parallel lines, eschewing swirls curls whirls, but we need to ask always, all ways, with tireless wonder, what lies beyond the alphabet? thank you, God, for creatures no ark can any more hold: aardvarks, baboons, camels, donkeys, emus, frogs, gnats, horses, ibexes, jaguars, koalas, llamas, moose, newts, octopi, porcupines, quail, rhinos, snakes, turtles, unicorns, vultures, whales, xylophages, yaks, zebras

Beyond the Alphabet

By Carl Leggoc

thank you, God, for jelly beans and lima beans, wrinkles and periwinkles, tractors and chiropractors, orthotics and orthodontics, brontosauruses and thesauruses, butter cups and cups of butter, dandelions and sea lions, butterflies and French fries, pickles and tickles, sharks and larks, lips and slips, bumble bees and sturdy knees thank you, God, for the alphabet, the creation in letters like your letter to us inviting the imagination beyond the alphabet, in love with words and the Word, knowing the world filled with the Word’s spirit

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Heart’s Delight

By Carl Leggoc

like Turkish delight dipped in Belgian chocolate, the prophet Jeremiah ate God’s words, his heart’s delight because we do not live on bread alone, we need words like honeycomb after winter’s sojourn in the desert an apt word is like an apple of gold, precious, admired, desired even, but not always easily digestible true words are stones that can be laid down across the bog, a sturdy path for others to walk amidst the lilies

carl leggoc is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia where he teaches courses in writing and narrative inquiry. He has published three books of poems: Growing Up Perpendicular on the Side of a Hill, View from My Mother’s House, and Come-By-Chance.

Much of his poetry is autobiographical and seeks to understand what it means to be a human being in the

21st century. Poetry is an important part of Carl’s God with intimate wisdom.

ongoing effort to know

words are seeds sowed in a farmer’s field where wheat and weeds grow side by side, different texts for interpretation like a lamp that cleaves darkness, words are sun and moon and constellations of stars beyond the counting to ignore thoughtful words is like peering in a mirror, seeing our faces, only to turn and forget what we look like because too many words can be like tramping on an anthill, wisdom is learning to hold the tongue, to speak silence for our heart’s delight, the word dwells among us, full of light and life and truth

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THE EDGE OF THE UNKNOWN

By Ellen Fangman

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You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labour in a torture-chamber and dissecting-room, I make my observations under the blue sky to the song of the Cicadas, you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life. And why should I complete my thought: the boars have muddied the clear stream; natural history, youth’s glorious study, has, by dint of cellular improvements, become a hateful and repulsive thing. Well, if I write for men of learning, for philosophers, who, one day will try to some extent to unravel the tough problem of instinct, I write also, I write above all things for the young. I want to make them love the natural history which you make them hate; and that is why, while keeping strictly to the domain of truth, I avoid your scientific prose, which too often, alas seems borrowed from some Iroquois idiom!

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MY LIFE HAS BECOME ALMOST AS INSTINCTUAL AS THAT OF THE DUNG BEETLE, AND I WALK IN THE GROOVES I HAVE SET FOR MYSELF.

A doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, ellen fangman is part of the adjunct faculty at Creighton University, University of Nebraska at Omaha, and Metropolitan Community College. If the muses are good to her, she will complete her dissertation, a memoir, this summer.

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Great Blue Heron

By D.R. James

Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it.

Mary Oliver, “October”

Tracing Your Two Lines

Busy inhabiting my world— blazing car, radio blather, coffee buzz that wouldn’t last—

There’s the one that goes round and round with each revolving day, sunset to sunset.

For that, your eyes, looking west, would

I somehow caught a left-hand glimpse, so quick I didn’t see you flinch, yet so outstanding, you could’ve been a plastic cousin to the prank flamingos that another morning enthralled my neighbor’s lawn.

Stark still, ankle-deep in that transitory water, only the one side, one-eyed, wide as disbelief, you looked just like you looked, posed in the Natural History Museum, 1963: for again, all those slender angles, the spear of your bill, that deathless intensity marking your stick-form way, only now in a mid-May puddle poised between the intersecting rushes eastbound, 196, southbound, 31.

And you, still doing

By D.R. James

streak the long exposure like faint tail lights arcing away over recurring hills.

The other

is different. It doesn’t depend on where you stand, which way you face.

No matter, it releases from the daily spin and wanders, a twirling girl’s sparkler in the dark.

Try pointing to any spot on a globe—make it, say, the capital of a troubled country—and after that miniature world turns your finger in perfect circles, watch your fingertip trace the course it takes as you continue your trail from here to eternity.

You’ll see it zigzags

a singular presence over the earth’s assorted surfaces, drawing its own conclusion— just as you are in this world, scratching out a meandering, your own universe, your own one-line sketch of this precious existence.

d.r. james is entering his 20th year

Hope College’s English Department, Holland, Michigan, where he teaches writing, world literature, and the teaching of writing. He also directs the college’s writing and study skills tutoring program. James’ first chapbook, “A Little Instability without Birds” was released in the summer of 2006 by Finishing Line Press. in

what you’ve never known you do, still finding your life wherever you find yourself— while I, still fixated as always on finding myself, as if that were to find a life, saw again how wildly I am alive— how I always want to know it.

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By Shari Stenberg

Just last week, I turned in my dossier to apply for tenure and promotion at the

university where I teach. The process marks yet another juncture in academic sanctioning, which was preceded by trials including doctoral exams, a dissertation, a grueling job hunt and the publication of a book. This final step, tenure, is the ultimate hazing; if successful, I am awarded a permanent spot (save for unforeseen budget crises) in the guild; if not, I’m fired.

That is to say, if I receive tenure, I am allowed to stay exactly where I am.

It’s no wonder that I know several academics who, once granted tenure, experienced both exhaustion and depression. The symptoms stemmed not so much from the marathon toward it, but from the false promises of the finish line. These colleagues realized they had been motivated by the illusion of a professional nirvana, a blissful state of enoughness, where one can bask in her achievements, while experiencing relief from the pressure to achieve more.

What came instead was a version of postpartum let-down. This is it? There were still classes to teach, grade appeals to answer, committee meetings to attend, and departmental battles to surmount. And worse, there was no longer a rabbit to chase.

I began the road to tenure with much fervor. I’m a first-born, high-achiever type, and I like to succeed. For me, success is satisfying largely because it indicates I haven’t failed—yet. Success is also a way to stave off the anxiety that walks at my heels. It provides momentary relief, like a cigarette or a bag of Peanut M&Ms. If you met my family, you’d know I come by my anxiety honestly. My mom feeds on a steady stream of CNN and Fox News, which sustains her appetite for catastrophe. 24- hour broadcasts provide her ample stores from which to draw when she wants to offer her adult children examples of why we must be more careful, more guarded, more paranoid. After the young woman was kidnapped in Aruba: “You never let my granddaughters out of your sight, do you?” Always, subtly indicted.

My dad, too, has honed his worrying over the years, and this activity is typically in service of one primary dream: that his three kids will be “settled”: gainfully employed and financially secure. But his children keep getting in the way of his plans for them.

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With the exception of choosing a career as a professor instead of a pharmacist, my dad’s preference (high-paying job guaranteed, right out of school), I’ve been the child who most easily bends to his wishes. Pleasing other people is a way to slow the spin-cycle of my thoughts, to loosen the constrictive knot in my throat. Eventually, though, the remedy loses its effectiveness, or worse, the cure makes me sicker, because this particular game can never be won. No pleasing is enough pleasing. No external reward ultimately quenches my thirst.

Anne Lamott, whose writing is one of my healthier cures for anxiety, uses the metaphor of the mechanical rabbit to describe her own deflated response to finally “making it” as a writer. “I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she’d been chasing for so long—discovering it was merely metal, wrapped up in cloth. It wasn’t alive; it had no spirit. It was fake. Fake doesn’t feed anything. Only spirit feeds spirit, your own and the universal spirit.”

It took me approximately one semester as a professor (one semester and a lifetime) to begin to detect something fishy in my approach to happiness. I had what I’d long wanted: a job as a professor of English at a school I admired. The process of attaining the job had been sufficiently torturous, requiring the usual giving over of my power: “Does this person/committee/institution approve of me? Am I adequately shaping myself into their desired candidate?” Perhaps it’s my Lutheran Midwestern upbringing, but somewhere along the line, I learned that all achievements were only truly earned if accompanied by enough pain. So, check.

I spent my first semester in a mild state of panic.

While some refer to the first year of the job as the “honeymoon” stage, mine felt more like the week of sorority rush I attended in college. If you want to get “in,” you follow the rules. Drink your ice water with lemon and make polite small-talk. For God’s sake, don’t mention the three B’s: boys, booze and bars. The girls will take notes on your performance and make a decision by the end of the week. I couldn’t stand the idea that these girls, who trotted like trained ponies to the manicured lawn of their sorority house to chant, “We’re Alpha Phi (fee) not Alpha Phi (fy), ‘cause Alpha Phi says E, not I,” would decide my fate about anything. I dropped out of rush.

But I regarded tenured faculty members with much more respect than the sorority sisters. This was a house in which I wanted membership, my own office with a nameplate. My university offered its version of rush, in the form of 7 a.m. “new faculty breakfasts,” where we sat bleary-eyed and eager, nibbling starchy bagels and absorbing information about “faculty life,” including, of course, the process of and requirements for tenure.

These gatherings, the administrators explained, were designed to promote community among new faculty, and to offer information that would at once decrease our anxiety and encourage us to begin working for tenure now. That message was reinforced by informal conversations with colleagues, who repeatedly shared the cautionary tale of the English professor who spent too much time on service and not enough on publishing. Everyone liked him, and he was an inspiring teacher, but he was denied tenure because he didn’t research and write enough. The moral of the story: you may have gotten the job, but you’re going to have to stay on your toes to keep it.

I soaked in these stories like an A-student sponge; by December of that year, I had insomnia, worrying about my student evaluations (and what they would mean for tenure), fretting about getting my book published (and what not doing so would mean for tenure), and desperately missing the feedback loop of being a student, where praise and approval were a regular part of my diet.

Those of us who have issued a restraining order on our anxiety are taught to manage it by asking, “If the worstcase scenario happened, would I survive?” Would I survive if I lost my job? I wasn’t so sure.

But if this anxiety that jarred me from sleep was destructive, it also had a more positive side: my unhappiness led to my hunger for, and thus my openness to, something else. The

If you met my family, you’d know I come by my anxiety honestly.

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upside, I’ve found, to times of intense turmoil is that I become a seeker. In the words of Rabbi Abraham Heschel: “Rushing through the ecstasies of ambition, we only awake when plunged into dread or grief. In darkness, then, we grope for solace, for meaning, for prayer.” The groping is the gift of the shadow, if we welcome the darkness, if we trust that light can, that light will, emerge.

I spotted a glimmer on a crisp fall day, that same year, when my husband and I traveled to Des Moines for our goddaughter’s baptism. It marked the first time I’d been to church in years. While the theme of the sermon now escapes me, this moment remains vivid: the minister asked us to consider how much time, energy and commitment we dedicate to our jobs, to institutions, in this culture that cares so much about work. The answer: plenty.

“But the truth is,” he said, leaning into the pulpit, “institutions don’t love us back.” Institutions don’t love us back. When I would later learn that our university president froze our (meager) salaries due to budget constraints, I felt betrayed. Here I had given this institution not only most of my time, but the greater part of my psychic energy. I let it lure me away from a lazy Christmas day with my family, upstairs to my childhood room, where I feverishly typed my annual report, rewarding its merciless petitions for attention with my worries, enticed by its seductive need for me. If I didn’t answer its calls, catastrophe would ensue. It was the holder of my worth, the determiner of my merit.

Institutions don’t love us back.

A second glimmer. That December, I dragged myself to a gathering at the home of a new friend, Amy. I’m an introvert, and when socializing will require small talk with strangers, I have to fight the urge to recoil under a blanket. But I made myself go, and I enjoyed my time there. Just as I put on my coat to leave, Amy’s kids and their babysitter bounded through the door. It was a lovely reunion after, at most, a few hours of separation; Abby and Gabe lapped up their mother like thirsty puppies. She chuckled, delightfully taken aback by the power of her children’s physical force and their hunger for her. Gabe’s mommy-need met, he rubbed his eye and nestled into Amy’s chest. I busied myself with my coat and gloves, embarrassed to find tears in my eyes.

Years later, I would hear from the spiritual director at my church, “When tears emerge, God is near. Let them come.”

In an email to Amy, thanking her for the invitation, I confessed my teary moment. “You’re ready,” she predicted. “It’s time.” Time, she meant, to think about my own motherhood, my own children. And indeed, in two

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months’ time, my daughter would find her way into my womb. She would teach me about the kind of love I witnessed in that moment.

As the literal withholding of my “merit” raise nudged me to seek my merit elsewhere, my love affair with my career—with approval, really—began to disintegrate. I sat at the dean’s annual convocation that fall, the chairs packed into rows as tight as straight jackets and watched as the retirees received recognition for thirty-some years of service to the university. I fanned myself with my program. “Professor Andrews looks forward to spending her free time gardening and hiking,” read the dean.

“That’s gonna be us one day,” my colleague leaned over to whisper. I raised my eyebrows at her, and shifted in my seat, feeling impatient kicks of the 36-week-old fetus who resided in my belly.

Even with the companionship of my unborn daughter, I felt hollow. I knew the cavern wasn’t going to be filled by thirtyfive years of work in an institution. One more nudge to search for something that would love me back.

The something I chose to seek out is shunned by most academics. A spiritual life.

Why? Because I’ve known a few people who seem to have it together. Their eyes reveal an interior source of light. They remain open and unclenched during times of tribulation, at least most of the time. They are not driven by fear, consumption, competition. They have tapped into the Jesus I encountered through

theologian Marcus Borg in my college religion class—the Jesus who is a counter-cultural prophet, a loving Bad Ass, a soul sister.

I saw this first hand in my new friend, Amy, who, amidst repairing a marriage in turmoil, mothering two young kids, and pursuing a Ph.D., sought out spiritual guidance, hoping to reclaim closeness with God. I watched her become stronger, less dependent on her role in a dysfunctional marriage. Another of her friends, she told me, feared losing Amy to Christianity. I knew the fear; I’d had friends turn themselves over to God before. It meant they had to stop drinking beer, attending rock shows, and in one case, wearing jewelry. But not Amy. She became stronger. Spunkier. Funnier. More centered. She knew that Bad Ass Jesus.

I began my quest for the spiritual with the same fervor and determination that had fueled my work as a student. I was methodical. I was diligent. Most of all, I was secretive. After all, this quest would earn me not approval, but odd looks, even at the religiously affiliated university where I teach. The spiritual is not intellectually hip.

Joan Chittister writes that “we don’t ‘find’ spirituality or ‘get’ spirituality or ‘develop’ spirituality. We are simply spiritual creatures who spend a great deal of our lives trying to avoid or deny the implications of that”.

This is especially true in the academy, where your faith isn’t something you advertise—your faith in God, that is. Your faith in theory, poststructuralism, Marxism, post-feminism, that’s expected and accepted. But that isn’t called faith. It’s called intellectual positioning. Faith in God, especially the Christian God, is typically deemed a marker of intellectual bankruptcy.

Followers of Foucault will tell you that you are ensnared in a regime of truth. Followers of Neitzche will tell you God is dead. Haven’t you heard? Followers of Marx will diagnose your false consciousness. God is the opiate for the masses.

Critical thought, the god of the academy, is intended to cut through the narcotic haze of dominant culture, of which religion—particularly Christianity—is a major culprit. And frankly, I don’t disagree. When, in his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush preached, “With the might of God on our side we will triumph over Iraq. God will watch over our troops and grant us a victory over the threat of Saddam’s army. God will bless us and keep us safe in the coming battle,” I felt sickened. But somehow even George Bush’s attempts to make the Christian God both American and Republican, could not entirely deter me from Christianity. After all, we academics insist there are no fixed meanings—everything is up for debate and appropriation. Christianity could, should, mean something else.

I signed up for a Lenten retreat with a Jesuit, feeling a little sheepish about being the only nonCatholic in the group. As is often the case when I’m doing something that doesn’t contribute

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(directly) to my productivity at work, I wanted to back out at the last minute. I sang the usual chorus to myself: I’m too busy; I should be doing something else; this is a waste of my time. But since Amy and I signed up together, I figured I better show up, at least for her sake.

After the first couple of sessions, though, attending was no longer onerous.

I looked forward to sitting in the presence of the group leader, Father Larry Gillick, whose softly lined face was etched with kindness and wisdom. His worn Mister Rogers clothing, brown or blue cardigan sweaters and “indoor” loafers, composed a picture of humility, of comfort. Though he was blind, he looked at us intently as we spoke. He saw us.

On the first day of the retreat, he asked us to share what we would be giving up for Lent. But first, he talked about the “giving up” not meaning candy or alcohol; that was too easy, too simple. Lent was not a fad diet to be followed until the magic five pound weight loss of Easter, when chocolate could be devoured without restraint. Lent was about discovering that which impedes our relationships with God, and giving that up.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, I decided to give up control. Now an untenured faculty member with a six-month old infant, my relationship with control mimicked the Saturday morning cartoons I’d watched as a kid, with Wile E. Coyote in endless pursuit of the unattainable Road Runner. I tried to grab it, and just when I felt it in my hand, it slipped between the fingers of my clenched fist. I explained to my fellow retreat members that it had become pretty clear to me that I was being controlled by my desire for control, by my false sense that I could own it if only I worked a little more, pleased a little better, worried a little harder. As the minister at the United Church of Christ we’d been attending put it, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but control.”

A spiritual therapist of sorts, Larry helped us to understand what lurked behind our vices. Fear was a common intruder, he said, and one that certainly stalked me. But what was I afraid of ? Lack of approval, to be sure. My love of being a student had to do with more than intellectual curiosity; I fed on the approval of my teachers, which I tended to acquire fairly easily. A student who does more work than she needs to, who is attentive, who hangs on the teacher’s every word, usually does. I loved that my teachers loved me, even if that love was contingent upon my performance. The problem, though, was that every success was only a delay of inevitable failure. Every report card that displayed a neat row of teepee As was tainted with the dread of the looming B. Then who would I be? From where would my value come?

Once I became a professor myself, I transferred my desire for approval from my dissertation committee to the tenure committee. I didn’t think of them as a group of people, but rather an ominous, powerful judge hovering above the university, keeping scrupulous score. When in my first year of teaching, a friend and I published an article in a top journal in our field, it wasn’t satisfaction in 54

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the fruition of our ideas I felt. It wasn’t excitement about our argument being made public. It was relief that, at least for now, I wasn’t failing.

And once I had racked up enough publication points, once I felt pretty sure my students were well-enough pleased, I began to worry that the tenure judge would find other reasons to eject me from the game: a disagreement with the wrong person, a position taken too strongly, a “no” to an invitation to serve in one more way. All potential fuel for my expulsion. If they couldn’t get me on credentials, they might get me on etiquette. (My mom is very big on etiquette.)

In Larry’s office, though, it was as if the pressure were temporarily suspended. This little room, where seven of us sat crowded on tattered furniture, felt like a safe zone to me: a place where no one could tag me, “You’re it!”

We spent one such afternoon articulating our different understandings of God; most of us described a struggle to let go of a judgmental God who functioned like my tenure committee. As he so often did, Larry shared with us a story. It began with his father, and Larry’s deep-seated need to please him.

This need was so profound that when Larry mowed the lawn, he cut meticulous diagonal lines in one direction. Then he began again, this time creating diagonal lines in the opposite direction, lest he miss a single blade of grass. It took him years of study, reflection, and growth before he finally discovered it: God was not his father. God does not thrive on our efforts to please God. Then, Larry shared his revelation that baffled us all: “God doesn’t have expectations.”

His statement did not go over well in this crowd of good students; good students thrive on rules. “What about the ten commandments?” one woman asked.

“Suggestions,” Larry said, “invitations, not imperatives.” In fact, Larry gently pointed out that we

Lent was not a fad diet to be followed until the magic five pound weight loss of Easter, when chocolate would be devoured without restraint.

typically take our own values, fears, and expectations and project them on God. God, though, has no expectations. We’re already good enough. We’re already loved. It’s a done deal. There’s no earning it; there’s no losing it. His fingers swept over the pages of his Braille Bible, as he searched for a verse to offer us. Then he paused. “Lent is a time to make my own image of me the same as God’s image of me.”

If we look at God, and at love, this way, then my whole life was a house of cards; no elaborate architecture, no amount of breathholding or manipulating, would sustain it. The structure, at its core, was flawed.

You would think this awareness would bring relief. I’d given up church in graduate school largely because I couldn’t tolerate one more layer of pressure to be good, one more reminder that I did not measure up. And yet, for someone who spent the balance of her life striving for achievement, God’s disinterest in my professional and moral resume was not only baffling, it was a little disappointing.

I wasn’t alone. Helen, a fellow Lenten retreat member, whose clear, incisive gaze conveys perfect calm, surprised me by sharing her struggle to comprehend Larry’s view. “I’m always looking for the right spiritual discipline that will help me overcome my failures,” she said. Helen wanted to sanitize her humanity, to give her self a spring cleaning; only then would she be ready for God’s presence in her life. Larry, though, wanted her to revel in her clutter and dust. With a hint of

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mischief, he offered one more insight, “Jesus embraces our limitations and asks that we do.

To reverence what you cannot do is praising God.” I carried Larry’s words around in my head, letting them mull and simmer. Slowly, they began to flavor my life.

After all, I now understood what it meant to offer love without expectations. I knew it the night of my daughter’s birth, when she lay next to me on starched white hospital sheets.

The nurse reassured me that allowing Zoe to sleep next to me was not rule-breaking; my daughter was used to the promise of my body, the reassurance of my heart beat. And I hers. As I lifted her to nestle her tiny soft head, warmed by an elfin stocking cap, in the nook under my chin, I felt the pleasure of being trusted with the juiciest of secrets. I felt love, no conditions attached.

I began to assimilate Larry’s words intellectually in the pews of our new UCC church, a community that welcomes questions, understands skepticism and sanctions disagreement.

The writing teacher in me thinks of it as a “process-based” church—more focused on the exploration than the answer. Here the minister often preaches about the historical Jesus, whose life served, and serves, as a radical challenge to social norms and values. This Jesus was not an enforcer of arbitrary rules; he rejected the purity system that defined his time and advocated for a social vision based on compassion. He spent his time not with highest achievers, not the best pleasers, not the wealthiest or the most powerful. No, he hung out with the lepers, the sinners, the children, and for heaven’s sake, even the women. He loved the people society had forgotten to love, or worse, had deliberately chosen not to.

These are my people. After all, we all have parts of ourselves held hostage by a modern day version of leprosy. Parts whose sores are oozing, infected with anger, resentment, narcissism, sin. Parts that are never going to get us tenure. God loves even those, maybe even especially those, parts. How about that?

I couldn’t get through a church service during those Sundays without crying. Sometimes it was a passage in the sermon that spurred the tears, sometimes a hymn with a particularly resonant line, “Be still, my soul, for God is on your side.” Sometimes the tears came during the greeting, when a fellow congregant stretched out her hand, her warm eyes holding mine, “Good morning. I’m glad to see you.”

As theologian Borg describes it, hearing, really hearing, the gospel of Jesus is not about believing, as so many Christians would have us think. He calls this “secondhand religion,” which basically involves achieving the status of “good student” in relation to the Bible and the church. Follow the rules, obey, and you’ll be saved. (Kind of like tenure). Firsthand religion, in contrast, is about relationship; it’s about connection.

Helen wanted to sanitize her humanity, to give herself a spring cleaning; only then would she be ready for God’s presence in her life.

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loft erupted with an array of brightly colored shirts the group favored over standard white robes. The director’s hands flew like hummingbirds to expand and diminish the sound. Magic.

I told one of my friends about my irrepressible tears during church. As we talked, I pinned it down to the contrast I felt between the sanctuary of the church and the hazards at work. They were the same tears that I choked back when my daughter toddled to greet me, arms outstretched and fingers blinking like stars, after a department meeting fraught with petty battles. While I might have taken solace, I could only grieve the imbalance between worlds, wondering why one couldn’t be more like the other.

From my pew I focused on a few of the singers, whose faces conveyed contentment and delight, an expression that looks familiar on my daughter but foreign on grownups. As their gospel harmonies and energetic melodies snuck into my body, I wanted to move, too. But I remained still. The exuberant chords created by all those individual voices produced a strange realization: I was lonely.

Dissatisfied with this disparity, I made a decision that may not seem at all monumental or courageous. I decided to join my church choir. That is, if they would take me.

My life from age five to eighteen had been shaped by music.

Regretful that he’d never learned to play the piano, my dad enrolled me in lessons when I was in kindergarten. While I excelled at this skill, it was my discovery of singing in high school that I loved most. I loved being embraced by harmony; I loved that my alto line, skeletal on its own, took on flesh and breath when stirred with the soprano, tenor and bass lines.

Ironically, I loved most the activity for which I had no great talent. A better writer than singer, I probably could have achieved more in the journalism office after school. But I let myself be lured. In the choir room, I held onto every note, every harmony, because I figured, this was my chance to sing; after high school, you had to get serious, you had to stick to what you were good at.

In an e-mail, composed hastily before my nerve expired, I explained to Jim, the choir director, how much I wanted to be part of the group, but I felt, to be fair, I had better confess my limitations.

I’m really not that great a singer, I apologized, but I would love to participate. I inquired about auditions, nervously gearing up for rejection. I couldn’t help but think that to be rejected from church choir would be an ultimate humiliation.

I got a note back almost immediately, filled with exclamation marks. “You’ll be welcomed with open arms!” he wrote. No audition, just come. Sing. The group is comprised of many, he wrote, who may not deem their voices “solo” quality, but who simply want to lift them to God.

I followed that tenet all the way through college and graduate school. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy scholarship or writing or teaching—I did.

But I forgot how music allowed me to escape from rigid self-monitoring.

Music led me, expertly and agilely, in a dance I didn’t know but trusted I could learn. I forgot how delicious was the surrender.

It seemed too simple. I didn’t have to do anything to earn a welcome into this community. I could simply come. The Spirit of Grace had No Expectations.

For someone like myself, singing in public represents a fairly substantial risk, my high school experience not withstanding. Inquiring into my ethnic heritage, a therapist I once saw said she wasn’t at all surprised to hear of my Scandinavian roots. “I can almost feel the reserve in your bones,” she said.

I had to give myself a mental shove to step across the threshold of the choir room door that first night. Jim seemed to recognize a lost soul and ushered me

This reserve might have served me just fine if I wanted to join the Chancel choir, which sings serious, classical music. But it was Spirit of Grace, the contemporary choir, that drew me. This was despite the fact that this choir sometimes clapped.

They sometimes even swayed a little. On the Sundays Spirit of Grace sang, the choir

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in, with a boisterous “Welcome!” and a “You’re going to love Spirit of Grace!” He led me to a music slot with my name already on it and introduced me to others in my section. “This is Shari; she’s an alto.”

I was showered with hellos and welcomes, and Lynette, whom I would come to know as a spiritual den mother, turned to me, her face lit. “This is the best thing I do,” she said. “I just wait for Wednesdays to come. The only problem is the high doesn’t last long enough.” I smiled, nodded, tried to reciprocate the warmth. I felt a little like I did on job interviews. Here’s our world; do you fit?

I spent the first several rehearsals comparing myself to those around me, always to highlight my own deficiencies. The blond woman who sat to the right of me (had I taken her usual seat?) had a voice that reached far above the alto range; I’d heard her sing brilliant solos on Sunday mornings. I just hoped her strong voice drowned out mine, so she couldn’t hear me. The woman to my left had joined within the last year, but she was already volunteering for a solo. I tried to justify my presence. I reminded myself that at least I knew how to read music. And I would show up on time. I was a good student, anyway.

A month later, for some reason larger than me, I volunteered to offer the weekly devotion—a few minutes at the beginning of the rehearsal that allows each member to share a bit about herself along with a meaningful passage or quotation. I found myself wanting, and not wanting, to first identify myself by my profession. My need for acceptance, approval, drove the former impulse; if I told them what I did, perhaps they would see me as worthy. And yet, it was precisely this impulse that I hoped to escape in this room.

I drafted and re-drafted my thoughts for a week, preparing for the equivalent of a conference presentation. I finally decided that I would share my dilemma, my utter dissatisfaction with the values that had shaped my life thus far, and my attempts to find something else.

When the time came, I stepped cautiously to the front of the room, placing my notes on the black music stand turned lectern. “I was really nervous to write to Jim to tell him I wanted to join choir,” I spoke into my notes. “But I loved hearing you sing on Sunday, and the more I listened to you, the more I knew something was missing in my life.” I looked up, expecting to see the blank faces that greet me on the first day of freshman comp. Instead, soft smiles met me. “We’re not supposed to have faith, where I work, and so I stayed away for a long time.” A nod or two.

“Jim told me you’d welcome me with open arms, even if I’m not the greatest singer.” No glares in Jim’s direction, no surprise at all. Just a few chuckles.

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I thanked them for welcoming without any proof of my achievement, without any promise that I would work to achieve more, without any question at all.

WINTER 2006

I got it. Grace, itself. Grace, living and breathing, right there in the choir room.

As Lamott writes: [Grace] is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Grace is sitting in Larry’s office, soaking in the comfort of others’ shared fears and joy, luxuriating in the light of Larry’s gentle wisdom. Grace is being cradled in the warm quilt of choral harmony, reveling in the chords that no person can create alone. Grace is in the release, even for just a moment, of the burden of expectations. It’s stepping out of the race for a drink of cool water, without fear of getting left behind.

Grace is a dance around the living room carpet with my daughter, who delights as much in the falling as the spinning. Grace is the prayer Jim offers before most of our rehearsals and performances: this is not about us, dear God, this is about you. Grace is singing for ears with no expectations.

I don’t, however, live in grace. I don’t remember, always, even often, to look for grace.

And while I tell my closest friends that choir is my “real job,” I do have to leave the choir room and go to work. There I too often get caught in the lure of Expectations, which snares me in the mindset of achievements counted and battles won. It punishes with isolation. I feel momentary panic at the amount of work I am not getting done on a weekend spent with my family or a morning of choir rehearsal. I reprimand my bruised self for having fallen.

And then I get back up. I try to see myself as God sees me. I try to remember that the spiritual journey is not one of racing toward external rewards, but of recovering, of stillness, of listening. I hear Larry’s quiet voice: “God is not the found. God is the finder. We find God finding us.” The spiritual path is not without periods of opaque fog or treacherous foot holes. It is not without moments of loneliness. But no matter how uneven, no matter how many wrong turns or tumbles, I have found that it is better to be on this journey than not, this journey that replaces the crusade for approval with the shelter of grace. Even if I sometimes hide from it.

shari stenberg lives in Nebraska with her husband and two daughters. She

Creighton University, where she is Associate Professor of English and director of composition. Her essays have appeared in College English, Composition Studies, and symploke-, and her book Professing and Pedagogy: Learning the Teaching of English was published by NCTE in 2005. Though she is now tenured, she still considers Wednesday night choir rehearsals her real job. teaches writing at

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ruminated

LAST NOTE

SPIRITUAL ASTHMA: Yearning tempered by shortage of breath.

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Yahia Lababidi

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