Issue 6: Epiphany

faith in literature and art

epiphany /.

fiction pennies and chewing gum from Colleen J. ClaytonDippolito /. essay water as heavy as stones from Jessie van Eerden /. poetry the faith of cinnamon giants from Paul Willis /. art faces of saints from Brittney Williams

06 ISSUE

Winter $8.00

Julie Pointer. Mother and Child. Solar intaglio print. 8.5 x 15 inches.

Julie Pointer is a senior at Westmont College studying art and English. Her latest medium of choice is printmaking, but she is in the midst of working on her senior show involving prints and collages. Julie’s artistic sensibilities were greatly inspired during the semester she lived in Orvieto, Italy, and hopes her future endeavors will lead her back to Europe. She is currently pursuing a small venture in card-making and other paper amenities, which are sold in a small shop in Austin, Texas, where Julie lived this past summer.

why

ruminate ?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse

; to meditate; to think again; to pon

der

RUMINATE is a quarterly magazine of short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, memoirs, and visual art that resonate with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke— longing for the significance they point us toward. Every RUMINATE issue has its own theme or focus with the hope of drawing rich connections between art, life, and faith. Please join us.

Cover: Brittney Williams. The Face of a Saint. Acrylic and collage on canvas. 20 x 16 inches.

See Brittney’s biographical note on page 25.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

Issue 06

Winter 2007

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.

RUMINATE is distributed by Kent News.

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Copyright 2007/2008 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.

RUMINATE is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses.

s t

a f f

Brianna Van Dyke Amy Lowe Whitney Hale, Lacee Perrin, Nicholas Price, Jonathan Van Dyke Allison Korrey Alexa Behmer, Stephanie Walker, Libby Kueneke Anne Pageau

editor-in-chief senior editor associate editors intern readers design

contents Hannah Faith Notess

Notes Editor’s From You Last

47 48 4 5 56

Poetry

Mary Ann Sullivan 49

52

Luke Hankins Newspaper Photo

Colleen J. Clayton-Dipolito

Easter Baking 9

11 Black Jack and Sacrifice

Stephanie Dickinson

center piece 10

28 Klara’s Boy

I Find God Out Back 18 Flood Watch 19

Paul Willis Mariposa Grove 20 Red Rock Falls 21

Leonore Wilson

All in a Day

Fiction

Lisa Roney

Sally Rosen Kindred

Questions for the Agent Apologies to the Shakarkandi Wallah

Grace Albritton

Shotgun Favorite 6

Felicia Zamora

Gathering South Asia Through Our Eyes

Michael Creighton 50 51

Bethany Carlson

Epiphany Returning to the Psalms of Lament

Nonfiction Bethany Carlson 7 Simple Science

Jessie van Eerden 46 Laundry

Fourth Station: Jesus Meets His Mother 22

Art

Barbara Adams Abiding 23

Mary Van Denend What Saves Us 42 Lost & Found 43 A Thousand Geese 43

David Oestreich Another Flesh 44 A Weekly Apocalypse 45

Brittney Williams cover

24 25

The Face of a Saint Catch Be Calm

Julie Pointer inside cover

Mother and Child

Vincent Berquez back cover back cover

Dover The Road to Taller

Joy Deeann Carson

and who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this 27 she spent all she had and was not helped at all 26

ruminating

EDITOR’S NOTE

My husband is agitated that I am hanging on to our home’s landline. Granted things have changed

from the days of “the telephone chord curled against her lips” as Bethany Carlson describes in her poem “Shotgun Favorite.” But, I just don’t want to let go of our phone – the one connected to my home, not my person. There is something collective or communal about a home phone.

It was the phone I fought over with my brother when he realized that girls were more than just irritating interruptions; it was the phone I carried into the bathroom and sat on the floor believing in my unalienable right to a private conversation. The phone rang and was usually picked up with no knowledge of what lay at the other end of that pulsing sound wave or optical fiber, always a surprise. And my phone number, just one, not office, cell, and home, was a part of my identity: 465-8258. I loved the sound of that rotary phone 4 click, click, click; 6 click-click-click; 5 clickclick-click. People knew my number, it was an actual place, the place I sat down for dinner with my family at five o’clock sharp every weekday, the place where I lost time playing outside past dusk and hearing my Mom yell “Amy! Bedtime!,” the place I pulled the covers over my head at night to drown out sounds of frequent yelling. It was not some air wave connection that could find me on aisle 4 of Wal-mart or in the waiting room of my gynecologist. It connected my friends, family, and even strangers to my home, where I felt most me, painfully and sometimes happily me. So, here I am in 2007, fearful of relinquishing the home phone and afraid I will have no place to be found, no grounded connection.

Our theme for this issue is Epiphany and after struggling to find some large important event to write about, our contributors shook me back to reality and reminded me that epiphanies often occur in simple, everyday moments. In fact, it seems these simple moments were created for epiphanies. I read Paul Willis’ poem “Mariposa Grove” at the end of a busy, thoughtless day and found myself emotionally undone by the quiet revelations of a “wet meadow in deep woods.” In this issue, our artists have given us many wonderful gifts of simple transformation where “snapping peas between my teeth” feels like grace, “neutrons splitting isotopes” astound us; a cup of coffee “dissolves dreams, satisfies, and bides time,” and a photograph in a newspaper reminds us that joy is possible in the midst of intense suffering.

The season surrounding Epiphany, the twelfth day after Christmas, the night the Magi brought gifts to the newborn Christ, is a celebratory time. It is anticipated, longed for, and finally comes to fruition with food, gifts, and fellowship with friends and family. It is my temptation to think these events are trivial, that the act of creating, preparing, and eating food, or spending days thinking about and buying gifts for friends and family, or hanging lights for hours to then spend more hours removing them after a month or so is silly in the midst of the great suffering I see around me. And, maybe there are times that it is silly and should be set aside for pressing needs. But, I am reminded as in Ishmael Beah’s book A Long Way Gone that it is in these ordinary events that the human spirit finds rest. It is these ordinary events this ravaged, guilt-ridden boy soldier longed for. It is in pursuit of these ordinary events that wars are fought and endured.

God punctured time and space, changed the course of history with the birth of a weak infant to parents of little reputation and power. He provided the most epiphanic moment in history to an unremarkable time, place, and people. And for this, I am encouraged, because, except for my daydreams, I live in the ordinary and need to see the extraordinary in the tiny bug my daughter

4

insists on keeping in her pocket during church, in the face of a friend listening shivering in a car outside a coffee shop, in the laughter-filled home that can, for a little longer, be reached at any time through a line of light extending from your home to mine.

Wishing you many ordinary extraordinary moments,

Post Script: In this issue, one particular story stretched the staff of RUMINATE, challenged our understanding of the structure and intentions of a story. Stephanie Dickinson’s “Klara’sBoy” is a story of murder, beautifully written and developed. We are shown events in a murderer’s childhood, abusive relationships and unrealized hopes; the murderer is humanized and even found to be worthy of pity. But the author, as do all good authors, puts the question of this murderer’s value and worth in our hands. We must decide whether one of the most horrific criminals in history can or should be forgiven, can or should be saved, and whether his murder or any murder is ever justified. What was the epiphany in this story? Was it one that was never seized? One that could have occurred in this boy’s childhood, a teacher confronting him about his cruelty to rats, or a mother standing up for him when his father threatened a beating? Or is it our epiphany, one that we might have while reading at the end of the day or in bed and struggling, hoping for this child to be scooped up and loved, to be shown grace, to be changed. In the end, we found our faith strengthened by the wrestling this story creates, and we hope the same for you.

ruminato

rs

NOTES F

Send your thoughts, questions, and comments to

ROM YO U

editor@ruminatemagazine.com

Great magazine! I picked it up at a denominational meeting this summer and really enjoyed reading it. The poem in Issue 03 by Joe Ricke on Gomer and Hosea was excellent. I’m a church planter in Tucson, Arizona, and I’m interested in this kind of broken-grace-beauty emphasis in the new community God will (hopefully) bring together by His Spirit. So again, great stuff, and thank you.

Phil Henry Tuscon, Arizona Since its inception, I’ve been a grateful recipient of your beautiful creation. And though I am eclectic in my spirituality, I appreciate that RUMINATE always has something that inspires reflection, grace, and growth.

Juliane Van Buskirk Dolores, Colorado I am an editor of a quarterly theological journal, called Lutheran Forum, and I recently discovered RUMINATE and am greatly intrigued. I have often longed for a publication that allowed the art and literature of confessing Christians but didn’t require them to check the complexities and ambiguities of life at the door. Thank you for your time and your labors.

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson Princeton, New Jersey 5

:::::::::::::::::::: Bethany Carlson

Shotgun Favorite You begin with what you know: raindrops dripping off the curved lips of your mother’s begonias, the dog-eared corners of paperback favorites, and the way the backyard smells (faintly of rotting wood) before sunrise.

Here the dust settles against the sun: clean homes aren’t as charming, you know.

In the kitchen, your sister is whispering faintly & you see the telephone cord curled against her lips as she twists it against her body like a favorite lover. It’s ironic, you think, that hearts have no corners.

Days like these begin best with motion & so we turn corners, the white flash of driveway contrasting with the sun rising: the color of deep purple hearts. Your favorite song slices through clean April air as you drive knowing we’ll end up lost, late, apologies flowing from lips when the last landmark no longer glows faintly.

About 15 minutes pass until a highway sign faintly reminds you that you haven’t eaten breakfast. At the corner you think Okay, push a stale granola bar between your lips nearly forgetting to chew. You glare at me, at the sunrise & swear at the ducks crossing in your lane, knowing your dad loved them (and so do you). Your favorite pastime was fishing trips in Michigan. You were his shotgun favorite, the two of you riding around in that battered blue pickup, faintly lettered ACME Bros. on the driver’s side. I know you say you don’t miss that life. But the corners of his plot are always stamped down with your sunrise visits. You think this is weakness, won’t kiss me on the lips.

On Friday night I slip into a miniskirt & we lip sync to the Rocky Horror Picture Show at your favorite diner till morning. Please talk me through these sunrises, you are thinking. We park between faint lines in the first spot we see. And we are grateful: the corner grocery will be full of faceless people we do not know.

Sunrises are cruel, gas station cappuccinos burn. Cracked lips know this, can swallow words like God doesn’t have favorites.

Faint outlines of buildings spread skyward: hearts without corners.

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issue 06 //

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::::::::::::::::::::: Bethany Carlson

Simple Science

There is something in me that wants to love a magnet, something magical about the pull and spin of particles that makes me feel as if I too can fly. I am tempted for an instant to believe that fourth grade science had it wrong, that the law of gravity is irrelevant.

But there is a shipwrecked danger in abandoning borders. So I settle for this: the concept of matter, anything with mass that takes up space, is reassuring. Today we are the same as the planets.

We equal matter the same way the universe equals matter, atoms pulsing through it all like minnows pulsing through a stream. Then there are textbook patterns to consider—swirls of celestial bodies settling into space—and I wonder why I rely so much on vision.

Because sometimes what we can see isn’t always what we should notice. The curve of an eyelash, the flicker of a smile—these things are deceptive. There are dark currents of honesty in the magnetic pull of intentions, the way some hearts murmur at rest, unconscious to the world. I have a friend who talks in her sleep.

Afterwards her roommates laugh at her, and she can only apologize for what she might have confessed in between dreams. What a way to wake up each morning—flushed with the tingle of alarm, dread crawling through the web of your stomach. Sometimes I think there are two poles to a heart, like the two poles of a magnet—the negative side can be pretty ugly.

Magnets give the earth its spin, hold things in place in the universe. In geology we learn that there is more to the earth than topsoil; it’s easy to forget that layers extend to the core hundreds of miles below the lithosphere. We see only the contrasts in nature—white bursts of lightning in a summer storm, with no sense of the nuclear fission, the neutrons splitting isotopes the way a jackhammer might crack open a geode. Even then, we notice only the pretty purple crystals. I’m fascinated with simple science: the weight of gravity, the definition of matter, the pull of magnets.

God. The power to make it all stay put.

Bethany Carlson graduated from Indiana Wesleyan University last spring. She is currently in the process of applying to grad schools to pursue her MFA in poetry. Bethany’s interests include classical piano, etsy.com, and Photoshop. Her interests do not include mental math or cooking. She recently won 2nd place in the poetry category of the 2007 Conference on Christianity & Literature Writing Contest.

7

Luke Hankins

NEWSPAPER PHOTO a picture of children skipping in Africa through a swarm of locusts barely visible white teeth, flailing arms and legs the caption tells me what I see – children playing in a locust swarm – one of Mystery’s million swarming manifestations: Only children know how to play in a plague.

Luke Hankins is a student in the Indiana University MFA program, where he holds the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. He is an associate editor of Asheville Poetry Review, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Marginalia Online, The Modern Review, The Other Journal, Poetry Southeast, Southern Poetry Review, and the anthology, Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writing from Rising Generations.

8

Lisa Roney

Easter Baking for Joe

Heavy rains hamper the yeast, and I must coax the proof with electrical warmth and uncertain incantations.

The vast mud of this spring has divided you from me, and soon will divide you from your dying brother forever, and yet, I turn the dough with my palms, and the buns rise with your breath.

I drizzle them with sugar, in the sign of the cross, a trace of sweetness remaining in this ritual.

Outside the window, buds wave hello from the pear tree.

Because spring hopes eternally for a resurrection, both praying and loving seem right, even in doubt, even unanswered.

Lisa Roney teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where winter is short but hurricane and tourist seasons are long. She has published a book-length memoir, Sweet Invisible Body (Holt), and short work in Harper’s, Sycamore Review, So to Speak, and RE:AL. 9

Felicia Zamora

center piece newspaper ink imprint imprint skin canvas, the pressing reading each, reading other

our stories inked

on flesh

we art

how yeasty our spilt sand; the plow choking harvest

ensconce the beneath root

suffocating under steel tonnage

we vessel upon a scale

gravity pretends us worms feign mammoths our tusks inurned in dirt

in the moist

we do not whisper

to our brothers and sisters

charade charade charade Felicia Zamora works as an academic advisor in the College of Business at Colorado State University. She is also a student in the MFA program at CSU in creative writing. Other published works may be found in Poetrybay, Academic Advising Today, and Walt’s Corner.

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issue 06 //

WINTER 2007

Colleen J. Clayton-Dipolito

Black Jack and Sacrifice I was purely obsessed with gum as a child. Black Jack Fever my mother called it. Bribe, bawl, flatter, fight, lie, thieve—I’d do any of it. Nothing was beneath me when it came to the pursuit of gum.

But that first stick? That was altogether different. That first stick has burned forever bright as one of my fondest memories. All of my adult life, whenever I see or smell chewing gum, I think of my brother Cooper and that half pack of Black Jack he won.

I was in the first grade, he was in the sixth, and the occasion fell somewhere in the first half of November, 1952. A bitter wind forewarned of the coming winter and the last remaining leaves fell like crimson stars from an oak that stood in front of the school that we had the fine fortune to attend or rather, to walk to and from, five pestilent days a week.

Going into it, I assumed that the day would be like any other. The eager bug of knowledge had yet to sink its pincers, so to put it mildly, I was less than an enthusiastic pupil. It would not be until much later, high school perhaps, that I would realize the equalizing effect that knowledge can have on a classroom divided by wealth, perceived or otherwise, and the lack thereof. At that point, a typical school day for me was one spent brimming with tedium, sprinkled with snaps of jealousy and wrapped in an overall bitterness for life. It was all I could do to make the tiring slog to the front steps, sit at my desk for seven hours straight and behave. A good day meant I’d made it to the last bell without being sent to the corner for some sort of nonsense that I was always, and mysteriously, smack dab in the middle of. Any education that may have seeped in at that point was purely accidental.

I did know enough to note the differences between myself and the other kids which made the notion of schooling all the more agonizing.

I knew that I hated the two threadbare dresses I wore on alternating days, hand-me-downs to be sure, given to me by a cousin. They hung funny, too short around the knees, and I was always walking sort of hunched over, trying to veil the perpetual crust of knee scabs 11

and connect-the-dot constellation of mosquito bites mapped out on my knobby legs.

I knew that the town girls rode buses or were driven to school and smelled nice and were clean when they got there and that no matter how hard I tried, I ended up stringy haired and covered in some sort of muck—sweat, sap, rain, mud, whatever— by the time I slid into my assigned seat. And I knew as well that most of my classmates had lunch buckets filled with savories that varied from one day to the next while a cornmeal biscuit wrapped in cloth was as sure to show up for lunch as my nose was to show up on my face. And I had a smoldering resentment about all of this.

That November morning, with books and lunch bucket in hand, I straggled along behind my brother, over hill and dale, grousing and sighing, bemoaning the long day ahead of me. As we approached our destination, without thinking and all on their own, my feet slowed to a snail like pace until finally, unable to prolong the inevitable, the school rose up in front of us. My brother and I waited for the bell to ring, milling about, kicking up dirt and leaves under the oak with the other mountain kids.

What a turn of the wheel when my brother up and decided to enter the penny pitch around back of the school’s tool shed. My brother had found the meager cent

FINALLY, UNDER THAT TREE OF falling crimson stars ON THAT WINDY NOVEMBER MORNING, LADY LUCK WHISPERED INTO MY BROTHER’S EAR: Today . . . is the day. earlier that week just laying in the school yard looking up at him through an oxidized coating of green rust. Over the days that followed I would see him playing with it, rolling it around in his pocket, worrying it between his fingers, waiting for the powers that be to speak. Finally, under that tree of falling crimson stars on that windy November morning, Lady Luck whispered into my brother’s ear: Today . . . is the day.

As much as I wanted to experience, however vicariously, the thrill of the penny pitch, it was only a moment before my usual contrary and self-preserving demeanor piped up and I attempted—a little weakly I’ll admit—to put the kibosh on it. I wanted him to pitch but didn’t want to lose that penny in the process. I disguised my disapproval in Puritanism so that I could declare complete and total innocence when our mother, who had spies everywhere, found out.

Maybe you shouldn’t. It’s gambling y’know.

Being older and a boy, my brother brushed my halfhearted protests off and went about his business following the gang behind the tool shed where the slab foundation had been over poured for some reason and formed a smooth playing surface hidden from view of the school. Nice girls shied away from such seamy places and from such foolishness in general, but my curiosity and proclivity for the wicked had me hot on his heels. We had never been participant to penny pitch or any of the other strictly prohibited school yard betting sport that seemed to carry on without incident or repercussion behind the tool shed. He told me to beat it but I followed along, threatening him with a pinched up face.

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You let me watch Cooper Grant Adams or I’ll tell on you! You bet I’ll tell. I’ll tell our mother that her only son is a gambling heathen to be sure!

Stand back and don’t you say nuthin’ he said.

Arms crossed, I stood and watched as the game got underway.

The first two boys overshot and their pennies ricocheted off the shed and bounced clean off into the grass. Then Del Winston, the resident thug, decided to pitch which was a surprise to everyone. Del usually didn’t pitch penny. He had more money than most boys his age so preferred a higher stakes game of dice with the well-heeled high school crowd. We would find out later that Del was hard up for cash and was taking it where he could. He was eyeballing a rifle that his father refused to buy him because the last time Del was handed a firearm, he shot every gobbler and hen in Blackfoot Bottom, out of season and for mere sport. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, he left rafter upon rafter of wild turkeys dead and rotting because he was too bone lazy to haul a single one home to clean. The killing was all that interested him. The Winston’s caught the devil from everyone and Del’s rifle was confiscated and held in the sheriff ’s personal gun locker, without bail, until Del turned sixteen.

Del’s pitch was a passable effort but nothing that couldn’t be bested eventually.

Boar season was full under way and it had been a year since Del had shot the life out of something so he was fairly prickly to win, by tyranny if necessary. He turned and shot a malignant glower over the crowd. He zoned in on Roger and Randall Lewis who were known for their good aim but who also favored the puny side of slim. The Lewis brothers and most other boys shriveled under Del’s daggered look and his penny sat uncontested, a clear two inches from the wall, pitch after pitch after pitiful pitch. Most of the boys were throwing the game altogether, fearing for life and limb should they win or God forbid welsh out. Del began parading around as if the game were all but won. I looked over at my brother, the smug swagger on Del’s face was making Cooper’s jaw tighten and his knuckles twitch. Del had convinced himself beyond doubt of his superior skill while Cooper and everyone else standing around knew full well and good that it was fear alone keeping that sorry little pitch unchallenged. Cooper, who had chosen to go last, readied his weapon.

I scarcely believed my eyes as I stood back in the crowd and watched that corroded likeness of The Great Emancipator leap from my brother’s fingertips and sing through the air. Slack-jawed, I gaped and lamented at how that penny, if

13

added to the others we had scavenged, could buy a multitude of goodies. Treasures untold.

A penny equaled a million dollars in my childish mind and as far as I was concerned, it was a million dollars down the crack. My idiot brother was throwing out all of my untold treasures on a stupid penny pitch that—having never played before—he had exactly zero to no chance of winning. I wanted at that moment to grow a long arm, catch that penny in mid-air and run with it. But at the same time, I wanted him to beat Del Winston. Lord, did I want him to win. I prayed he would knock Del Winston’s pitch to kingdom come.

Cooper’s penny landed with a plink, rolled in an arc, spun like a top and fell silently flat, resting its copper rim a hair’s width from flush against the side of the shed. Hands down and by God, he won. And the crowd. Went. Nuts.

Twenty-four boys pitched their pennies that morning but destiny smiled on only one: Cooper Grant Adams of Buck Fork Hollow, Logan County, West Virginia. Destiny multiplied that rusted singular pittance into twenty one whole cents and three magnificent pieces of Black Jack chewing gum. We would pay dearly later in the month, Coop with a black eye and me with a busted lip, courtesy of a still unarmed Del Winston. But that is another story altogether.

The second that penny fell, Cooper’s head snapped around and his face searched the crowd for me. Our eyes landed and locked, a grin escaping the both of us. No words needed spoken, we’d hit the mother lode and both knew it. I elbowed my way through the throng to grab up the pennies, throwing poisoned dart glares at anyone who looked itchy to try and seize their ante back. Yes, even at six, I was a greedy little thing. I took care of the snatching and grabbing and let my brother bask in the glow, everyone slapping his back over and over.

Del Winston skulked off, one penny further from his dream.

Added to the Mason jar stash under Coop’s bed, the money would eventually be given to our mother who would go on to use it toward pantry staples that we were forever in need of.

We told her we’d earned it doing odd jobs for the school janitor and she narrowed her eyes momentarily before looking around at our spare furnishings, her gaze stopping at the faces of Gertrude and Betula, our toddler twin sisters we called Gertie and Bug. She simply nodded and walked away with the money in her apron, no doubt vowing to tithe double that Sunday, praying for all of our filthy souls until the guilt would finally leave her.

The gum however? That was ours. Coop determined we would chew it during the long walk home after school. As I sat in class, my mouth watered thinking about it. Non-stop, I fidgeted in my seat as I could think of nothing but getting that gum onto my tongue and between my teeth. There were three pieces in our plunder, one for him, one for me and one to split between the twins when we got home that evening. I admired and likewise detested my brother for being able to wait the whole day with it in his pocket. Seven hours and he never 14

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busted into it. I seriously doubt that the thought ever crossed his mind.

Around ten o’clock, the weak-kneed hunger set in. Breakfast did little to sustain me as it was burned off completely during the grueling walk to school.

I was rarely able to wait until the lunch hour to open my bucket. The hunger would become so intolerable by ten that daily during free time, when the teacher stepped out of the room to fill her coffee cup, I and a few other scrawny waifs from the hollows would abscond to the coat racks to feverishly choke down our paltry rations of corn meal biscuits. I often suspected that the teacher stepped

YES,

even at six, I WAS A GREEDY LITTLE THING.

out of the room deliberately whenever she heard the tell-tale grumbling of some undernourished child’s body. She was a kind woman by nature but also addicted to caffeine so it is hard to say what her intent was in leaving the class unattended for five to ten minutes at a time. In either case, come actual lunch, we hollow kids would sit empty-handed, waiting for recess to begin so we could go outside to skip rope or play ball.

But the day of the gum, I could not concentrate even on playing and kept missing the rope and losing the rhythm and words to the songs. The gum hovered in my field of vision like a mirage taunting me and finally when the last bell rang, I bolted out the door as though the building were on fire, running to meet Coop underneath the tree out front.

I stared wide eyed at the mystical contents wrapped in the blue and black packaging that lay in Coop’s outstretched hand. It read simply: BLACK JACK CHEWING GUM 5 STICKS ADAMS TM. It even had our name on it. What a wonder.

I’d seen others chewing gum at recess and after church but had never gotten within three feet of an actual piece myself. Coop had been afforded the opportunity to sample gum a few times over the years, during school holiday parties when it was passed out by a benevolent teacher or a well-off member of the business community. I myself had not yet attended a free gum party and so the

15

gum lay in Coop’s hand like an enigma, hypnotizing me with its store bought packaging and licorice scented vapors. As I stared at the gum it suddenly occurred to me that I might be dreaming, so I snapped out of my stupor and nabbed the piece up before it disappeared altogether. I unwrapped it and popped it straight into my mouth, savoring its anise sweetness for only a second before swallowing it all whole.

You ain’t supposed to swallow it! Coop yelled. Now look what you done! I havta share mine now!

Disgusted, Coop ripped off the packaging and tore his own piece in half, handing it to me with his brow thoroughly furrowed. As my eyes began to fill, Coop sighed and gentled his tone.

Now don’t swallow it, okay? Chew it. Like tobacco.

I nodded and took the gum. I lasted maybe thirty seconds on my second go. I bit into the little wad of gum and tried to keep one half between my teeth while swallowing the rest. It all went down the old garbage chute anyway. It was just that the chasm in my stomach stretched and howled as we started that taxing walk home and I reasoned that if I could bite the piece in two and swallow half of the half then maybe my gut would feel a smidge fuller then settle down and stop plaguing me with its relentless garbling. I

WHENEVER I WOULD NOD OFF AND

sag down his back,

HE WOULD SHRUG UPWARDS A LITTLE, LOCKING HIS ELBOWS TIGHTER AROUND THE BACKS OF MY BONY KNEES. would be able to make it home then without getting woozy, forced as always to climb on Coop’s back, punch-drunk from glassy-eyed hunger.

Not wanting to further disappoint, I fake chewed, smiled and waved whenever Cooper would look back at me, his mangy sick cat of a sister, dragging behind, ever anemic and low of constitution. I hung in longer than usual with the walking however. Made it all the way to the creek bed using nothing but sheer willpower and silent prayer. But eventually my pathetic lower appendages started to give out and I became enveloped

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in the familiar fog. I began floating through the malaise, drifting inside that perpetual hungry state of being that would forever haunt my memories. Coop bent down and I climbed on board and was so relieved to be getting a ride that I forgot to keep up the fake chewing charade and Coop caught me.

Danggit he muttered.

With all of our belongings dangling around his neck, Coop carried me, like always, the rest of the way home. Whenever I would nod off and sag down his back, he would shrug upwards a little, locking his elbows tighter around the backs of my bony knees.

I’m sorry I swallowed it Coop. I offered. It was good though. Thanks.

It’s alright he said. I should have waited ‘til we got home. We’ll have it after supper next time.

The words ‘next time’ hung in the air a moment before I fell asleep completely.

I awoke when we arrived home and Coop set me down carefully in my usual spot, in the rocking chair by the stove. He backed into it before releasing me down and stretching his stinging back. I settled into that chair, bleary eyed and disoriented but when I looked at my brother, when I rubbed at my eyes and saw him handing Gertie and Bug their half sticks of gum to peals of delight, it occurred to me for the first time, and with a remarkable clarity and deep understanding, what the meaning of sacrifice was. I watched the person who tolerated me and my shortcomings to no conceivable end. I watched the boy who bore the brunt of a fatherless, brotherless childhood. I watched him walking around our little house, stopping here and there to work out the crick that I had given him with my weight, those pennies jingling in his trouser pocket, the babies chasing around his feet, their lips smacking in appreciation. I watched my brother, with his hands on his waist, walking, walking, with his back arching, his shoulder blades protruding through the back of his shirt like an angel stretching its wings.

Colleen J. Clayton is currently pursuing an MA in English from Kent State University. She is a wife and a mom and works as a program coordinator for a nationally affiliated child-mentoring agency. She is currently working on broadening this short story into an historical novel set in the 1920’s during the West Virginia Mine War.

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Sally Rosen Kindred

I Find God Out Back Lord of the screen-door swinging, Lord of exile and sweet fright, you happen most days after four if it’s not raining.

Always far back near the black barbed wire while the windows hiding my broken mother bruise over. Take today: I’m seven, belly-down in April grass.

The Book at my head is purple and singing through bold colors of blood, sheep, and cedar.

The Book knows this thing I’m always hungry for–– sudden overgreen of my yard’s late skin.

I think it even knows my name.

Is she drinking, chopping onions?

Will I have to leave all this for the simmer of the kitchen’s browns?

My bare feet are tongues caught in the scratch of light’s green teeth going gold.

Afternoon ribbons my toes in cold, lifts the iris leaning down to play its bitter violin, the moonstone underbreath of rain, the dark page turning. Is the meat cooked?

Is she sleeping? Did she forget to call me in?

If only I had a pillow of stone.

If only crimson ladders would come down!

The Book says The Lord is my Shepherd, and though the Lord seems too wrecked with anger and hunger I believe it because Jacob sees what I have seen: angels climbing up and down in the stunning crowd of stars that I smell coming.

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Sally Rosen Kindred

Flood Watch Try to believe it was only water hurtling up our streets like children sprung from sleep, water filling the soft curbs and stretching its hundred thumbs up past the dim line of dawn, painting the sky in dirty milk— water like ashes, water like teeth closing over the low walls, water like gray trumpets choking the meadow in the soup of their broken songs, and water through the thin shoes, the skin over the knee, rising, chafing the elbows to silt, water scattered like garnets across the collarbone: water all over the evening news, water named Abel or Bonnie or Fran as if the name somehow made a difference, water at last a matter of conscience and still more of it wheeling down, water the color of God’s own hands come down to scrape the shredded lips of Creation, water a song or a story or only wet light, fierce as our thirst.

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of Garnet Lanterns, winner of the 2005 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest. She received a 2007 Individual Artist Award in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Florida Review, and Poetry Northwest, and are forthcoming in Passages North and Runes.

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1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

33333333333333333333 Paul Willis

Mariposa Grove Wet meadow in deep woods.

On the edges, grass combed brown and flat by the heavy hand of snow.

But greening up in the center— moss, shoots, water trickling through the muck.

A sequoia log dams the flow, holds it richly, pooling hope beneath the faith of cinnamon giants, ragged crowns. Thick roots reach and reach, gather what remains unseen, terra infirma, this sodden stage of ferns, of fungus, marigolds.

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—Yosemite National Park

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

33333333333333333333 Paul Willis

Red Rock Falls The waters come curling over the mottled granite, combed by a log that is wet and heavy with decay.

Azalea, alder, hazelnut hang over the plunge pool, green upon green, and the creamy blossoms of dogwood mount up like clear stars in the afternoon.

If I knew of a reason to leave, I might. The white fir, almost black against the brightness of the sky.

Paul J. Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA, and a loving visitor of the Sierra Nevada. He is the author of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild (WordFarm, 2005) and of two forthcoming volumes of poetry: Visiting Home (Pecan Grove Press) and Rosing from the Dead (WordFarm).

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Leonore Wilson

Fourth Station: Jesus Meets His Mother They struggled to embrace but could not, any gesture would be meager.

She who looked so small to him, an orphan really— pale, disheveled, though his fingers longed to touch the wet paper of her flesh, browse her faded raiment that smelled of balsam and cinnamon, the warm unleavened bread she baked.

But he quickly tamped down his thirst for her, she who had endowed matter with argument and thought, she whose heart was sometimes like a grappling hook when she paced the fields or anchored him to the kitchen table after he had disappeared for hours; now she raised her palms to him like a vase awaiting its flower and briefly he felt the sensation of childhood happiness again, the longing in him beginning to flame, in that carceral silence he could make out the simple cries of goat bells in the distance, the thimble-slip of doves, but he was only tunneling between worlds . . . far louder was the sound of a sword pulled abruptly from its sheath and he remembered his labor was not yet finished— he saw the familiar slope of his mother’s back slump as if shouldering the knowledge—he was neither her son, nor a preacher whose purpose seemed to root, but merely a creature without a choice, penned and raised and bound for slaughter.

Leonore Wilson teaches at a private university in San Francisco, California.

Her work has been in such magazines as Quarterly West, Laurel Review, Madison Review, Third Coast, and Poets Against the War.

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Barbara Adams

Abiding These acres of ours back up and squat on Boggy Creek.

Ringed by flat-top hills that once grudgingly revealed their green copper flesh to men disguised as steam shovels, this soil tolerates the small plow and patiently bears our feeble attempts to change what is natural.

When we put up a new metal barn to take the place of an ancient wooden structure that gradually faltered under the weight of serving, my husband knelt among those old foundation stones to touch a last time what his father had built there.

The fence is also new, shiny, and stretched tight, corner posts fresh with seasoning.

The old wire, brittle like ancient newspaper, now crumbles to rust in a pile near the creek.

But this land wears us like a pair of old shoes.

She can remember others like us, and her secret amusement shimmers under every rock, flows from creek to root and back again, confident she can wait us out.

Barbara “Bebe� Adams lives with her husband on the family farm near Creta, Oklahoma, where they raise cattle and goats. She is a mother and grandmother who graduated from Cameron University in May of this year with a BA in English and creative writing. Concentrating mainly on poetry and creative nonfiction, her work is drawn from living amid the quiet openness and rugged beauty of rural Southwestern Oklahoma.

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Brittney Williams. Catch. Acrylic and collage on wood panel. 11 x 8 inches.

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Brittney Williams. Be Calm. Oil and collage on wood panel. 22 x 33 inches.

Brittney Williams is a senior at Memphis College of Art, concentrating in painting. She hopes to someday teach art to high school students, illustrate children’s books, and develop her career as a professional painter. Brittney’s influences and support come from her painting instructor, Susan Maakestad, her parents, and her fiance, Brad.

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Joy Deeann Carson. and who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this.

Acrylic, fabric, and collage on panel. 48 x 28 inches.

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Joy Deeann Carson. she spent all she had and was not helped at all. Acrylic, fabric, collage and charcoal on panel. 24 x 48 inches.

Joy Deeann Carson was born in Texarkana, Texas, and currently lives in Memphis. She uses drawing, painting, and mixed media collage to express a common thread of repetition that ties women throughout history together––with particular focus on women from the Bible. Joy Deann writes: “In a world where so many things are relative and society focuses on individualism, I desire to show that people are connected at the core, crossculturally. Women today deal with the same issues of abandonment, guilt, doubt, and insecurity and can look to women from the past for guidance.”

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Stephanie Dickinson

Klara’s Boy

I have the boy, his little hand in mine, and we are walking toward that bunch of leafy trees, to an arbor between them where bees buzz. I wipe a smudge of tangerine-colored dust from my nose and study him. Sun through his brows makes spiked shadows on his cheeks. The boy’s eyes are just now getting used to the daylight after being in the classroom. Four fingers extend from each of his hands, the thumbs are on the longish side like big brothers. His fingernails are flat, everything as it should be. Just six years old, his mouth is pink and smooth.

“You’re Klara’s boy,” I say, expecting his warm not quite trusting hand to squeeze mine, but then it doesn’t. It wiggles out of my grasp. There is a discoloration on his ear, a plush yellowish blue, but whether it is fresh I couldn’t say. A bruise. He shows me a better place where we can sit, next to the creek. Then I open the cake box tied with string. “Do you care for a sweet?” Marzipan. Sweet almond. Topfenstrudal.

Was it weeks or a lifetime ago when we were debating in a Good and Evil philosophy class whether it was ever right to take a life? One student argued that it was morally indefensible to ever kill and I brought up the boy. If I hadn’t the professor likely would have, the boy being the supreme example of an “upsurge of the deviant into history.” Wouldn’t you eradicate him and save the innocents if you had the chance?

Green water rises between his knees, against my legs and thighs, warmer in places, then cold again. It is still forenoon, the same glowing tangerine sun, the same late spring day. The school room windows are thrown open and you can hear voices of the students reciting. Adam naming the animals. Each voice has a green leaf in it. Tinkling. I get up from my crouch, the boy floats face down in the water, my arms mindlessly stroke the thick air as if I am swimming. I am wading in clothes that want to strangle my flesh, knickers and underskirts that swirl and billow. Painted Lady butterflies and bright light from all sides, and then I go back to the boy and draw him farther into the water.

†

But let me return to yesterday.

My eyes tasted so many shades of green since I arrived and although I knew where I was—Fischlam, Austria—I needed time to acclimate and find appropriate clothes. I had no money, only my mother’s engagement ring to turn into schillings, so I asked in the quaint shops until I found a jeweler who bought and

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sold stones. The sun shone brightly outside but it went dim as soon as I stepped inside. Lifting his splintery eyebrows, the jeweler examined the cut of the diamond, the spherical white gold band. Mustiness exuded from his clothing.

“Gestehen, confess where you got this?” He nodded at me to take a chair. “Sitzen.”

But I kept standing. How stiff his shirt collar was and impossible for him to turn without taking the whole head and right shoulder with it. Then I noticed how ornate the solitaires and broaches the jeweler surrounded himself with were. Amber stones in vaulted crowns like gobs of marmalade. A mélange of pink sapphire and diamond-studded lozenge silhouettes. He’d never seen anything like the clarity of the stone in my ring. “American,” I said. That explained it. He had a sister in Chicago.

I asked him the date and the day as I’d been traveling, and had lost my sense of time, along with my wardrobe. 1895. April. Tuesday.

My ear found a clock with gears and cogs, a pendulum ticking away the minutes so frightening to children. It began striking the hour. Three times. A sound I hadn’t heard since my great-grandmother stopped the grandfather clock and purchased a digital radio alarm. She was a mother at twenty, a grandmother at forty, and at sixty, a great-grandmother. She turned sixty-three when she became my sole guardian. My mother and grandmother were killed when a grain elevator exploded. Our farm had been called the Three Mothers.

“Wie?” the jeweler snorted. Who would buy it? It was a beautiful ring, and I could see that he thought so too, its simplicity was its genius. My mother’s engagement ring didn’t sanctify marriage and a blank line appeared on my birth certificate where the father’s name should be recorded. “Es Tut mir leid aber.” He was telling me sorry, it’s too austere. The ring winked between his thick fingers.

I mentioned that a great-great-grandmother had worked as a lady’s maid in Linz. I spoke High German as a child. I did not alert him to the fact that the last time I set my alarm clock and got into bed it was April 2007. My great-grandmother believed fissures existed in time. You could stumble through one of those rips and weren’t people constantly disappearing especially children and young girls.

Everyone laughed when my great-grandmother claimed her father had been born in the Black Forest of the eleventh century. It was in the blood of some families to be time murderers.

The sun falling through a row of trees just outside perfumed the shop. You could almost lick the green from the air as light seeped through the window and pulled in the branches and leaves. I was warm, not a fan or air conditioner in sight, nowhere a three-prong plug where a dedicated wire might fit. Perspiration beaded my forehead and chin. A bell jingled and a woman in her early twenties strolled in, lost in her clothes, she had so many of them on. Knickers, an under slip, over slips, petticoats. “Guten Tag.” The jeweler and the woman addressed each other politely, “Frau Kepler.” Her high-necked black dress fit her hips, and then flounced out around her thighs, trailing on the ground in the shape of a large garter snake.

“Herr Schoender.” She placed her gloved hand on the counter. Whatever gar-

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ments she wore made her move like a rose dragging the entire bush, her face the bloom, the rest of her the roots and webs. She inquired after his health and tried not to stare at my naked hands. Then she saw the sparkle of my mother’s ring between the jeweler’s fingers. Her eyes were a brilliant blue above the lace and tucks of her dress collar. Frau Kepler could not pull them away from my mother’s ring. “Ich mag.” I like.

Herr Schoender asked me to step with him to the opposite side of the room where he paid me in schillings for the ring. I had to let him look at me and not tremble. What did he see? A traveler in a flowered spring dress made from a

Whatever garments she wore made her move like a rose dragging the entire bush, her face the bloom, the rest of her the roots and webs. fabric not familiar to him. In Chicago, he might be thinking, they present themselves like this. The absence of jack hammers and car alarms and sirens and cell phones hurt my ears but then I noticed the presence of a leaf brushing the window.

“The Fischlam school building. Do you know it?” I ventured to ask this jeweler with the weed antennae poking from his brows as he’d probably lived all his life in this green whisper world.

He told me he did, pronouncing the place name Fischlam quite differently.

“How would I get there?”

Providence had sent me it seemed. Sometimes there was a reason you’d gotten through an orifice of the time turtle, an undertaking you’d be bound to carry out. The boy’s family farm was in Hafeld on a small hill hidden by orchards on both sides. Apples. I knew much about the boy’s family, especially his slow-witted sister, the elementary school in Fischlam, and then Lambach where the boy studied in the third grade and lived in the Benedictine Monastery. He had a lovely singing voice. An old wooden staircase led to the classrooms and up another staircase to the sleeping rooms. The stones used in the Monastery were beautiful and in the yard over the well, an archway and a shield where the crooked cross

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had been carved. I thanked the jeweler and took the money.

Frau Kepler had recommended a dressmaker on the next street and I made my way there. Horses neighed and bicycles flew by, one having one large wheel and a high seat. The streets were narrow, splitting into two and then three lanes, some leading nowhere. Handsome trees everywhere, a whole street grown over with frothy seed leaves like clotted green lace. The dressmaker Frau Bee was a tiny woman who cocked her head when I told her my fib of an ocean crossing and a lost trunk. That I liked to hike and bird watch. The clothing I desired would allow me freedom of movement.

“Ja. Ein deine schuluniform.” And I nodded, yes, like a school uniform. Exactly. And it didn’t have to be new, it only needed to be quick. Already impatient I asked her for a glass of water. I was terribly thirsty, having not drunk anything since arriving, and I needed to pee. “Das bath?” I asked. She showed me to a door behind which stood a chamber pot with a lid. From a hook a bouquet of dried flowers tried to mask the silty scent of urine. Was there running water anywhere? Flush toilets? I relieved myself and wiped my hands on a towel. Frau Bee did not give me water.

My feet ached as it took energy to walk dragging these dresses, the undergarments and petticoats scraping against my thighs, while the pointed boots tightened their grip around my toes. There wasn’t anywhere to rush to yet, it was all so slow that I felt as if I were suspended from a piano wire. I strolled past a beer garden; there were trellises and vines and a group of young men in caps, toasting each other. Grasping their mugs, they rubbed them against the table until they made a humming then lifted them toward the sky streaked now with sunset. They drank and the mugs came crashing down, almost as one man.

It was too late to go to the school and find the boy. I kept searching for a café with clean water and a hotel where I would practice being confident as in a woman from America requesting permission to escort her nephew home from school. That might not be enough; a note from the father or mother might be required. I would have to write one. I passed through the spring’s breath, the trees seeming to walk also past the houses and shops. Green larval cocoons strung themselves from new buds, alongside the twig and leaf. I slowed and the dress bunched around me, and then I tripped and put the heel of my boot through the bottom of the skirt. Like the women many of the windows were overdressed in damask and lace.

The thirst made my blouse’s high neck tighten at my throat. I took a right down one of those narrow streets where I stumbled upon Café Linz. Dusk entered the small sweet shop with me where tea candles flickered. I asked for strong black coffee and water, a carafe, if possible. Chairs huddled around tables and in the corner a balloonback armchair and a writing desk offered solace to a man hunched over a pen and paper. He spoke aloud as he wrote searching for the correct words. Like politicians who start out at a trickle and then fanned by applause build to a wave surge of smoldering sophistry. In his mature years the boy’s voice threw out so much blackness you needed your hands to see with. A charred bird of a voice. Words like wrought iron doors hissing not growing kisses or lilacs.

“Sachertorte?” the waitress suggested. I agreed. It was served on china, the shiniest

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plate, like those licked chicken bones that my great-grandmother would nibble on. I slid my fork through sweet chocolate dough as if it were a newly scooped ditch, one that was terribly soft to excavate because the diggers were allowed to use only spoons. The sweet chocolate dough was like that. And then the layer of apricot jam in the middle.

“The Sachertorte is too dry,” the serving maid said, coming with a saucer. “A heap of whipped cream needs to be added.” In the demitasse cup I tasted coffee brewed in slowness and musky cinnamon. “This dessert was created for Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich” she said.

From a low table I plucked up a book by a Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Schreber, which I leafed through. The objective was to keep an infant from crying and the use of spanking. Never comfort a child when he cries. Nein. A spanking will make you the master of the child. I could hear words of the boy’s feeble-minded sister. “Our father was of great harshness in the education of his children and only spoiled me as the pet of the family. Often my brother was late getting home from school and got a spanking. Sometimes our father used his hand or belt and if supper had long to wait, he employed the stick.” For my thesis I had written an analysis of the boy’s syntax as compared to his sister’s.

The serving girl wanted to gossip, around here it was mostly the same old faces, stiff like fir trees, nothing new. “What is it like in America?” She’d heard I was from Chicago and that a distant ancestor had lived here, a lady, a baroness who owned a deciduous forest. A baroness wouldn’t have left her home country absent a revolution, but a lady’s maid like my great-great-grandmother was a different story. She would have wearied of emptying the slops and stringing up corsets.

My journey began to catch up with me and I could have curled up under the table or against the door that was kept open by an iron cocker spaniel door stop. I asked the serving girl if she knew of a hotel where I might stretch out. After the coffee and chocolate my blood pressure was rising into the red zone. I’ve always had a racing heartbeat and at six-years old, the same age as Klara’s boy, I was condemned to bed for months.

My illness was spent in great-grandmother’s huge bed, eased by homemade chicken noodle soup and kolaches. The girl tried to press on me the Sachertorte’s closest competitor the Sacher-Masoch Torte that used red currant jam and marzipan instead of apricot. Or what about the Schillerlocken? A puff pastry filled with vanilla cream in honor of Fredrich von Schiller, the German poet.

Luckily the sweet shop owner also let rooms and the serving girl led me up a narrow flight of stairs. Two doors opened off a landing and she showed me into the nearest.

After the girl lit the Aladdin’s lamp, I pressed a coin into her red-knuckled hand and she bowed and left me. Here a wash basin and a pitcher. The scent of a spring day struck me and I trembled in the breeze from an open window. The kerosene’s clots of soft yellow suffused the darkening room. A fly buzzed, fidgeting inside a rose-painted floor vase.

I raised the window and looking up I thought of the feverish stars where I came from knocked out of the sky by the false light of the cities, the traffic all headache and ears, electromagnetic signals bouncing back and forth, sleep stolen by boom boxes and midnight road repair and satellites orbiting the planet and instant communication criss-

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crossing all creation. Death of silence. All the chatter and in-car navigation devices giving coordinates and everyone knowing exactly where he is by the insomnia that stretches in every direction.

Death of solitude. I washed my face in tepid water and undressed, one layer after another, finding myself in the mirror, a pale anxious face with large brown eyes and dilated pupils like signals of another future. I shook the pins from my auburn hair and let it unravel over my shoulders.

Providence had chosen me and I knew how to do it. Hadn’t I been raised on the Three Mothers Farm and witnessed my great-grandmother at sunrise slip the gunny sack over the shivering hen, letting the sack’s dark put her almost to sleep before bringing her back into the sun. Then a

In his mature years the boy’s voice threw out so much blackness you needed your hands to see with. sweep of the axe and the hen’s body dropping and running, dropping and running and the neck spurting blood like a little boy peeing. I would shake. I always wanted to comfort the blood and ask forgiveness of the feathers. My skin would goosepimple in the seconds between the taking and the killing—the awareness moment.

I fell back onto the bed, smelling the line-dried pillowcase. To taste the wind from sheets was something I’d almost forgotten. Piano trickled from the roof of a house into the gutter. “He wanted to go to the Academy and become a painter but nothing came of it.” I heard that sentence the instant I closed my eyes. The sister’s words. “My brother liked to throw rocks and lead other boys to chase rats. He believed that all boys like marching and painting their names on the sides of buildings and brawling. Once our mother asked if she suddenly became a rat would her son throw rocks at her. My brother answered that it was better to be prey than predator.”

I pummeled my head against the pillow until at last my body disappeared into sleep. My brain waves went walking along a road under a sky gray as a grist stone. It wasn’t long before I came to four women huddled together in the ditch: the mother in an undershirt and shorts, her daughter, maybe seven years old, naked with arms at her sides and not trying to cover her flat pink nipples or pubis, the grandmother in long underwear bottoms, forearms crossed over her breasts, and another woman, the daughter-in-law backhanded her beautiful hair out of her face, a reddish color like a strawberry before turning blood-ripe. They did not speak. They crowded together, the mother’s arms around the grandmother, the girl against their bodies. The pretty one with all the tangling hair cocked her head, staring them down, the ones barking orders from the opposite ditch. I heard myself say, “I will do it. You can count on me.” Then the women were surrounded by men in black uniforms who wore the crooked cross.

†

I awoke to a bulkiness in my head. It was opposite of the hollowness that filled my awakening in the 21st century. I must get up, bathe, take the subway, buy coffee, tip the love cup, and pass the security sensors. This was the heaviness of the task compared to the comfort of the goosefeather

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quilt and the stretching of my toes over a mattress that went on forever. The house had long been stirring and I could hear the sheets in the next room being changed and a serving girl muttering to herself. Coffee brewing scented the hallway with its dark strong breath. It was the deepest quiet I’d ever listened to and I lifted my hands to the blurred light. My face felt sticky as marmalade and that same jelly trickled between my breasts. Nerve sweat could turn fever-sticky. I could smear my fingerprints over the morning light like sticky entrails.

I ate a big breakfast. Boysenberries in cream, palatschinke, pancakes, cup after cup of delicious coffee. I bought the desserts which they put into a cake box. My stomach began bubbling and I tried to take my mind off the boy. I started to recite the highpoints of the year 1895. The word feminist was used in an English literary journal for the first time to describe a woman with the strength to fight her way to independence. A motorcar designed by Elwood Hayes was tested on Pumpkinville Pike and Germany’s 53.2 mile Kiel Ship Canal connecting the North Sea with the Rhine was completed. Schwinn bicycles had their beginning as did the Underwood typewriter.

The sun shone pale as the rim of a water glass put down among the clouds. I set out on the long walk to the elementary school, the pointed boots biting my toes. A mass of gray clouds pushed away the blue and the whole sky filled with the quaking of leaves, a rustling that drove itself into my body. The beauty of that tinkling sky was proof that a creator existed. The ugliness of a sow eating her imperfect offspring a proof that He did not. I was hearing other words in my head, that interview I’d read with the boy’s mentally deficient sister. “When our mother was sick my brother bought her sapphire earrings. I remember them dangling on thin gold wires. Our mother’s ears had always been pierced but our father did not buy her any jewelry. Uncle, she called him, always Uncle. Once he beat her about the face. He pulled one of the gold wires through her ear.

Please, Uncle, she cried. Please.”

I shivered, yearning for my great-grandmother’s wisdom. Shouldn’t the father be stopped instead of the son? But how much of the father already seethed inside the son?

Beech trees and fir grew at the edge of the clearing and in the center of the acre sprouted a gingerbread structure with stairs and gabled roof and a door of patterned wood. I recognized the schoolhouse and on the far end of the property the creek that burbled between rooted banks, a stream with grazing sheep and a thickening of honey locust. I felt a beating in my body as if I had ten hearts not one. Like my great-grandmother’s hens were scratching through flesh and trying to scuff seeds out of my chest.

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I walked through the grass but a rain must have fallen earlier. The eyes of the grass blinked and their lashes wet themselves to my stockings. I took small steps dragging the dress through the damp meadow and by the time I reached the edge of the clearing recess had begun. I glimpsed the sour schoolmaster, grey-bearded with a monocle.

Seven or more of the bigger ones were playing. They chased something, a ball or can.

A student with pale spectacles kicked the object, not looking to the left or to the right or even straight ahead but down past his rolled pant legs. I stayed hidden behind a tree, watching. When I looked up I noticed the next stand of hardwoods where a gigantic spider web encased a tree. I’d never seen such a thing, as if snow covered the beech in shimmer.

One student stuck out his tongue. They were leaping over each other, their mouths wagging. Another ran past kicking and stopping to scoop something up. “Adolph has a hunchback aunt,” the taller one in pale spectacles jeered. “Adolph’s sister is an imbecile.” I saw the boy for the first time. Dark-haired with that cowlick many remarked on,

The sun shone

pale as the rim of a water glass put down among the clouds. a lock of hair that would sweat itself across his forehead when he pontificated, and his mother Klara’s large spooked blue eyes. He scowled at the jeerers and his chin went up. My hands clenched. The string of the cake box cut my fingers. He lifted an eyebrow stopping them in their tracks and then waved for the taller boys to follow. Each scrambled to pick up a stone or a stick, galloping and guffawing, even the spectacled boy chuckling, but not the dark-haired boy, he did not laugh.

I heard more scuffling and saw they’d surrounded an animal that at first I took for a black cat but soon recognized to be a rat, thin and elongated. They must have flushed it from its burrow, and the creature, a brownish black with a tail longer than its head and body, blinked at the brightness with its poor eyes. It must be sniffing and listening for a way to escape, between which boy’s legs. The boy with the cowlick, the six year old going on seven, took from his jacket pocket a wire contraption and baited it. From where I hid I could smell the sweetness of bacon. One of the boys threw nut meat on the ground and when the rat went to it the rest of the pack shouted and threw stones and hurled sticks striking it. The rat tried to flee pulling its strange cordy tail, skittering one way and then the other. These students could not know that in a hundred years scientists discovered that rats were not only excellent climbers and swimmers but that they were intelligent and laughed making vocalizations not audible to naked human ears. Yes, rats chirruped when tickled in certain areas so sensitive they were named

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tickle skin. The sticks seemed to have pointed tips and after a flurry of thuds and whacks and excited laughing, they’d succeeded in wounding the rat that squeaked and dragged its little body and the group seemed content with that.

“Nein,” the dark-haired boy shouted. He gave the contraption to the spectacled boy who looped the wire around the rat’s neck and swung him up over his head. Then all the boys clamored to swing the rat now that its blood was trickling through the air.

“Schüler!” the schoolmaster called out. Pupils return to your desks.

The tall spectacled boy freed the wire from the neck of the rat and gave the contraption back to its owner. A whistle blew. The students in their lederhosen trotted toward the schoolhouse of a waning nineteenth century. The dark-haired boy walked at a jaunt but did not run. His face wore a smeary expression as if the lips were sucking on an anise candy. I came out from behind the trees and found the dying rat, its neck almost severed from its body, the snout frothed with blood. I knelt down and the rat’s hind paws quivered and the body relaxed. I set aside the cake box and scooped the newly dead creature into my hands, cradling its head in my right, its body in my left. I took the corpse to the creek and washed it, tore off some cloth from my underthings and wrapped the animal and placed it in the grass.

I saw how the boy had ordered the bigger boys with one word “Nein” to attack. “Nein.”

His family was inbred like many others in this Austrian backwater, his mother happened to be his father’s niece. And his sister commented on other oddities. “Our mother’s sister lived with us. We called her Auntie Cluck because she resembled a chicken with the stone of bone on her back and her shoulderblades sticking up like wings. Auntie Cluck kept the two fowls Herr Rooster and Frau Hen. I often watched the rooster as he rooted about at the end of the orchard. He was tame and a companion. The day came when my brother plucked up a stone and told me to toss it at Herr Rooster. It was only a game yet he ordered me again to hurl the stone. I threw it and Herr Rooster toppled over. Like a charade.

But no matter how many tears fell on him, my feathered friend would not get up.”

36

Standing beside the door holding a wooden pointer, the schoolmaster’s brows arched like daddy-long-legs, the rest of his face trying to hide under the overabundant shrubbery of his facial hair.

“Herr Schoolmaster,” I said.

He bowed from the waist. “Fraulein.”

At last inside the schoolroom I breathed in the quiet of desks with inkwells. I explained that I was the boy’s aunt, his father’s youngest sister visiting from America. Aunt Effie. I’d been sent to fetch him home. I had a note because the boy himself would not recognize me. The schoolmaster took the paper and unfolded it. He held his head to the left side, and stared at me and the cake box. Always beware of an offering especially sweets, vinegar and rotten eggs might be more acceptable, his expression seemed to say. First I must offer him a pastry, I thought. I must look at him like he is a man first and a schoolmaster second. students pretended to be making their alphabet letters. The schoolmaster, issue 06 // The WINTER 2007 his beard yellowed around his chin and soiled with tobacco, his lips almost black, glared

out over the boyish bent shoulders, each clad in a white shirt and blue suspenders. I expected him to object, ask for my passport, some proof I was who I claimed to be. I lowered my head and then looked up at him shyly. “Du magst Deine Topfenstrudal?” So do you like strudel? I tapped the top of the cake box. “Marzipan?”

“Tasty. Tasty, indeed.” He smacked his lips. “Sweet almond.”

Sun shafted in the windows and struck the students’ hair. I had to stop my hand from reaching out to touch the shine of them all. After the schoolmaster threatened the class with punishment if they misbehaved, we stepped outside onto the veranda where I offered him strudel and cookies, watched the crumbs rain from his black lips, saw the pointy tip of his tongue extend to fetch them. The schoolmaster inquired after the boy’s parents and I answered that the mother had been ill and the father had written to me in America. I waited to hear his reply. But he rewarded me with the sounds of his jaw cracking as he chewed each sugary mouthful a disciplined twenty times. He mentioned apple beer in the cellar. Maybe another time I would like to sample it Beyond the veranda I could see the three women and the girl climbing the hill in their bits of underwear. Like doilies. Arms at their sides, the mother, daughter, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter tottered on the lip of a ditch, wavering before the spring leaves, in the degrees below zero between.

“Fraulein, I will prepare the boy for his journey home. His parents complain that he arrives well past supper.”

The boy’s sister seemed to whisper in my ear. “Our Auntie Cluck, the hunchback, cooked for us when our mother was too tired. The pork she’d bake in a cookstove and then pour lard over.

The leftovers we’d take to the cellar where we had a cupboard and a pantry and the stone floor. Our father sat with us for supper although he ate only bread and curdled milk and my brother and I liked to watch him cut his thick slice of bread and whittle it into five strips and then dip them into the milk.

Then he could always sleep well.”

The boy followed the prints of his teacher’s boots across the stone landing. Tracking up the walkway he wiped his soles in the schoolmaster’s marigolds.

“Tante,” he said, squinting up at me. You could see the red marks a thrashing had left over the backs of his legs. His lips had already taken on a permanent pout.

“I am your aunt,” I said, nodding. “Your father sent for me.”

Would he suspect a trap like the wire noose he used for swinging rats? His father

37

illegitimate yet ever the household tyrant kept his side of the family hidden. The customs official might somehow have produced a relative, a long lost sibling.

Aunt Effie of Chicago. The boy’s face brightened, becoming pleasant when he spied the cake box. His eyes focused on my hands cracking the lid so he might take a peek at three tortes like royal triplets.

A paradise. The Sachertorte. Sacher-Masoch.

Two petite flies lit.

Before his hand reached out I pulled away and opened the cake box even wider letting the treats blow him their kisses. His eyes widened, becoming enormous.

I told him, “We must walk.”

He did not care to; instead he wanted to sit on his haunches and gnaw chocolate dough and apricot jam. Nein, his favorite word, that he spoke like a boy much older than six and a half, a precocious boy filled with misery, a father’s daily beatings.

I started out and he stood unmoving. Would he follow me to the water? A shiver started in the center of my forehead and I felt it in my teeth. A quivering bird in my stomach. I twisted my wrist and if it had been a chicken neck, I might have wrung it.

“Right here.” His foot stomped the ground and then he wheedled. “Tante.”

“Can we walk along the creek?” I asked, “It’s so pretty.” I promised I would let him eat all of the sweets and not make him choose one if he showed me the stream. Yes, all three. He agreed and we headed toward the trees that guarded

His lip curled as if I’d been enunciating badly. the flowing water. I asked him about the sheep and who they belonged to, scratching their straggling fleece on the bark all day beside the creek. Were they unhappy? They had weak eyes and confused stomachs. In the stillness when the willows could be heard breathing, their switches striking each other, I opened again the box of sweets and watched his eyes widen with the blue light inside them, but instead of taking the torte he grabbed for the box with both hands.

My turn to say the word. Nein. He wanted everything all at once, and then perhaps he would run. I had aroused his suspicions.

“So do you like your school uniform?

He didn’t answer.

“Wie viele Schuler sind in Deiner Schule?”

His lip curled as if I’d been enunciating badly.

Two more sheep were trailing along the trees, their fleece caught on the bark fluttered like hair caught in a comb. I asked the boy if he liked sheep. Nein. He preferred wolves. I offered him his first choice of a pastry. I tried to guess which ones his fingers would pick. He took the Sachertorte and held it almost daintily.

In went the moist apricot jam. My head swam with watching him. Some of the

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gestures were already apparent, a bite of torte, then holding a portion of the sweet in his cheek, mulling it around like a political epithet, almost sucking it through his teeth. Then I saw them in the trees. Two girls raised by the neck from opposite ends of the same rope thrown over a limb. Slowly they went up and down. The darkhaired girl was larger and weighing more managed to reach her tiptoes, but gravity pulled at the blond and eventually both girls’ necks broke. Black leaf shadow. Twigs and leaves in their hair like they’d been hiding with animals. There were men in dark uniforms watching, their trousers wrapped around their calves so they would slide inside their jackboots. “Das Seesaw,” one of them said, lighting a cigarette.

Then he went to the body of the light-haired girl and raised her skirt.

We reached the bank of the creek and I opened the box and let him again choose between the two remaining tortes. He picked the Sacher-Masoch with red currant filling. Like a gill now his lips gulping in the torte with the red jam. A piece of chocolate smeared across his chin and a fly settled upon the lid of his left eye and I brushed it away. “My brother was a scrapper. A little rogue.” I felt the intensity of his gaze although he appeared not to be looking at me, but licking up the tips of his fingers. An ant crossed his knee next to a dollop of red jam. The boy asked me to press my finger on the ant who clearly wasn’t intending to stay.

I shook my head. “First we’ll wade before we eat another sweet.”

His chin jutted out, he refused to take off his socks. I sat and pulled the hem of my dress above my ankles and began to unhook the horrible buttons. This time I noticed that he watched with growing interest; perhaps women didn’t take their shoes off in the presence of their children, or else women did not have feet. The breeze wanted to waft the green from the creek and willows threw their hair into the water. A perfect spot to ambush the Moloch lying in wait for this child. I would save him. How many words had been thrown into the air trying to explain him? Madman, neuter, racist, spellbinding orator, charismatic, vegetarian. The boy saw so much human meat in the Great War that he could not stomach the feel of slippery flesh in his mouth. He was terribly fond of pastries.

How cool the air felt to my cheeks yet the inside of my head burned. I followed his tongue straining at crumbs. He stuffed the rest of the red jam into his mouth

and hesitated, stealing a glance at me. I nodded and set the cake box between us.

You must eat, little psychopathic god. Eat. The boy squeezed up the last of the torte and now gazed at the puff pastry. The Schillerlocken sat firmly upon its paper lace. He slipped his fingernail between and the doily lifted. Under it were twin girls lying in a wooden bunk told to sit up by the black-haired doctor who caressed their cheeks. Afterwards, he had them put their hands over their heads and when they raised their trembling arms he used a hypodermic needle to inject poison into the first twin’s heart chamber and then the second twin. Their beautiful intelligent eyes went out. A lullaby concocted with phenol, petrol, chloroform.

The boy’s eyes almost rolled in his head. The child before his crimes. Innocent before the last marzipan jewel encased in white chocolate. He promised his followers a fuller life in death. Already the Eastern Front simmered in his eyes, the little Cossack ponies bleeding in his nostrils, the soldiers at sixty degrees below zero, anuses congealed. The pack horses lugging the supply wagons and guns, muzzles pulled back, mares and geldings grinning wildly, freezing in bitter black night while the men groveled on all fours, a herd of mud neighing and dying. Master race.

I heard the leader’s sister’s voice burbling with the creek. “I lent my brother money when he was broken. After our mother and Auntie Cluck died, I sometimes tried to cook but the fire in the stove burned hot, the food dried up and was too crippled to eat. He liked apples only if they were cut for him, sliced into fours with the bark peeled.”

The sugar made the boy seem drunk and he swayed, taking off his shoes. He dropped a stone from his pocket, and then tiptoed down the bank. His eyes traveled over the bushes. Had Providence warned him? Schoolboy with the sweet apricot and chocolate greed, his eyes not without their suspicion. In the brightness I could see the hand of the father on his body. A bruise on the ear gray like a piece of mold and a yellowing under the right eye, a red welt on the chin, a black and blue fingernail on the left hand. There among the trees, sitting on a fallen log are the three women and a girl of seven. In each of their hands a pale blade of grass.

The smell of green rot in the willows swept downward toward the ground.

It was time.

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†

Flies sup on the last crumbs of white chocolate. Their feelers twist like jeweled umbilical cords. I knead the water, wade deeper toward the middle of the creek where the fleece and turds are golden against the foam. The sun is shining through his earlobe, small and threaded like a cat’s ear. How like lilies the bottoms of his feet. The water passes my hips and wraps my skirt around my legs. Yes, he has five toes on each foot, flesh feet and not hooves, eyes not ant pilgrimages in his sockets. And when I turn my head there is the dark-haired woman and the blond seesawing in the trees only now their hands are free and they sit in a swing, kicking, enjoying the breeze. The sky turns to a heavily wooded cleft, tiny embankment with no place to climb. His narrow chest is whiter and his lungs have filled with water. I close my eyes and use my fingers, to feel for the inside of praying, a slightly indistinct mutter. The women draw closer, their bodies covered in leaves and whisper.

Direct quotes and inferences are taken from an interrogation interview with Paula Wolff conducted by an officer of the 101st Airborne Division CIS Detachment on July 12, 1945, available in the online collection of the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

Stephanie Dickinson was raised in lush rural Iowa. Smitten by wanderlust, she’s lived in Minnesota, Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, and now New York City. Arriving on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she decided, like Joseph Conrad, that she’d lived her life and now would write about it. She is in love with the natural world and finds fascinating those interstices where what is elemental meets the decorative. Her “PigFarmer’s Stepfather” received a Distinguished Story Citation in Best American 2007 Short Stories and “Watch the Flashlight Girls Run” won the StoryGlossia 2007 Fiction Prize. Road of Five Churches, a collection of her stories, is available from Rain Mountain Press.

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Mary Van Denend

What Saves Us Half on the earth, half in the heart, the remedies for all our pains wait for the songs of healing

Joseph Bruchac

ART SAVES LIVES— A bold pronouncement on the bumper of a little black Honda tells what I’ve come to believe: that a sonnet might heal us, an aria could save us.

Perhaps the light of Christ might just show up in a Cezanne.

Remember how David played his harp to quiet the mad ramblings of Saul?

In my town, harpists still play for dying patients, lowering blood pressure, easing their pain with strings instead of needles.

Did you know that in the rubble of Sarajevo a drama company formed, performing for anyone who would come to a bombed-out theatre? Even now, young men in prison cells write poetry as if it mattered, turning hardness of hearts like soft clay on a wheel.

Peter at fifteen, his basement room a black tomb of anger and despair, where Marilyn Manson blared in his brain and the walls hid psychedelic secrets–– It was Mozart, it was good wine, and the Psalms.

It was that other wine at another table that carried us through the valley of the shadow back to still waters.

What saves us may simply arrive as Yo-Yo Ma on his cello while lentils simmer, or some lines by Mary Oliver read to a pattern of light and leaves that the wind offers up.

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Mary Van Denend

Mary Van Denend

Lost & Found

A Thousand Geese

When the school year ended, there was always the same heap waiting in some back corner office: the dirty mittens, single socks tangled up with scarves in garish colors, a buckled notebook, its bleeding lines beyond deciphering, perhaps a knotted jump rope or two.

No one expecting to lose anything in those winters of paper snowflakes, wet boots dripping by the radiator, blue lips and numb fingers after the end of recess bell.

flood the sky like a tidal wave of flapping, honking angels en route to glory land or Montana–– They arc across the clouds, swirling and swooping in a mass movement choreographers could only dream about.

Somewhere in Texas a boy dreamed of white slopes climbing into clouds like whipped cream peaks on a Christmas cake, imagined the perfect cone he’d one day scale with ice picks, knots learned in Boy Scouts.

He practiced on backyard live oaks, hollowed-out caves of sandy dirt and tree roots for base camp––lost a shoe one day, his knife the next.

But he could hide for days, he knew, with enough peanut butter and water, his bird whistle.

Winter’s stubble quickens as a chorus of wild-winged messengers swells the rain-filled field with exuberance overflowing, and dawn’s watery light welcomes its first prayer of the day.

Pictures of Mt. Hood in glossy travel brochures are always set in May–– against brilliant blue skies, above meadows flowering with pear and cherry orchards.

They never feature the storms swirling the summit in December.

They never show search & rescue teams in neon orange, the heat-sensing helicopters pouring over steep sides and crevasses, someone peering through gale force winds for want of a glove, a scarf, a hatchet, or a hole in the mountain where a body could hide for weeks.

Mary Van Denend lives and writes in western Oregon, though her childhood was spent in many places. Poetry of place speaks deeply to her. She has published work in regional journals such as The Asheville Review, Eloquent Umbrella, Wellspring, and others. She is the mother of four grown children and a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing.

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David Oestreich

Another Flesh We have been sitting, still as stones, for some time—one at each end of the couch, allowing peace to steal carefully back into the room.

She asks me why her tears inspire no more in me than cold distemper.

I know no answer; I can think only of the lizard which, seized by the bird of prey, hears its own cries as those of a separate creature—distressed, vulnerable—and grows hungry.

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David Oestreich

A Weekly Apocalypse The mingled scent of sweat and gasoline; the measured step; the rhythmic drone; the flight of moth and cricket across even swaths of green; the cruel whisper blade to blade; the multiplying fallen rows; the gathering of all unstanding to be blanched and burned.

David Oestreich is a human resources professional living in northwestern Ohio with his wife and their three children. A musician and occasional composer in his church, he enjoys spending his spare time creating and preserving small moments of beauty in the form of poetry.

45

Jessie van Eerden

Laundry

In summer I caught the towels beneath the lip of the wringer and dropped them into a Rubbermaid laundry basket like limp fish into a bucket. The towels had swished around the agitator in the belly of the Speed Queen washer, a big white pail of suds on four legs, its wringer sticking up like a crooked arm, a drain pipe snaking down its side. My mother pulled the towels from their rough bath and fed them through the yellow cylinders of the wringer into the rinse tub, careful of her fingers, and then adjusted the wringer two notches toward me and sent the towels through again, from the rinse water to my waiting hands and my basket. The towels, then the denims, then the thin pillowcases I had to coax. I held them just long enough to smell myself up with Tide and wrinkle my young skin, then dropped my catch to the basket to be carried out to the clothesline. And all summer Mom kept saying we used the old Speed Queen instead of an automatic toploader because it was easier on well-water, wouldn’t run us dry, since we could do twelve loads in the same water bath and not have to run fresh water for each. But it was a drought summer, and in early fall when the air got chilly enough to dry the towels stiff as leather, the well ran dry anyway.

She drove us in the truck out to Beatty Church and we filled milk jugs at the hand pump, the same place we got water for a foot-washing or a baptism at Beatty.

I remember the ways we used the jugged water that first night, in particulars, for we had to be sparing. In a shallow sink, we washed the eggs just laid by the hens, scrubbing loose the clods of shit and sawdust, and I had my mouth washed out with water and soap when I called it shit on the eggs and not manure, and my sister heated water on the stove to clean our faces with before bed. The water made itself holy because of those particulars.

I cried on our third dry day, but Mom said that once, when we were babies, she ran out of cloth diapers, so she took the ones only peed in and hung them out to dry on the line, not because the well had gone dry but because she was too worn-out to run them through a wash. She hung them out tinged yellow, dry soon enough. And it wasn’t so bad, so we’d be fine. The rain would come, the water table would rise.

And when we hauled the pump’s water again from the truck to the basement, and the gallon jugs hung heavily in both my hands, I learned that water could be as heavy as stones, and that you had to wait, sometimes for days, for the world to be renewed.

A West Virginia native, Jessie van Eerden holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her essays have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Geez Magazine, and Bellingham Review, as well as a few other journals. She is currently working on a novel and teaching writing as the Milton Fellow with IMAGE and Seattle Pacific University. She and her husband Mike have spiritual roots in a tiny Mennonite fellowship in Indiana, a group that eats soup and bread together after worship each week, and they are seeking such a community in their new home city, Seattle.

46

Hannah Faith Notess

Epiphany By then, we had all gone back to work.

The fields gave up a sharp stink of new beans.

The maid who took the garlands down rolled them tightly in her arms. Brown-edged petals curled into dust. The room cleared for the birth had lost its smell of metal and blood.

Animals groaned and shifted in their stalls.

Too late for the new year, far too late they arrived, the inconvenient guests.

We had to shake and turn the mattresses.

Too late they came, with ropes of shriveled fruit, with badly-wrapped parcels we could not exchange for anything in the market. Their caravan filled the street outside our house. Their songs of praise went on for hours, annoyed the neighbors.

How we thanked them, but then prayed they’d leave and take with them the terrible weight of holiness bundled somewhere in their luggage.

How strange to think, even after the birth, that I thought it could still go.

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Hannah Faith Notess

Returning to the Psalms of Lament The architecture of the Lord is perfect, a sun-scorched tarp, a dusty cairn.

Worn-out walls made of howls and wails, yes, I used to live in this tent city.

Who has known the mind of the Lord? I have not.

Who has kept his commandments?

I have not, but I have lived with them as surely as skin lives with a scar.

I’ve missed the heart-cracking crescendos, the squadrons of enemies just waiting to be cursed.

I’ve missed the split-open honeycomb that is the law.

A song familiar as the sagging spot worn in a stair.

Hannah Faith Notess is working on her MFA in creative writing at Indiana University. She is also editing a collection of personal essays about growing up female and evangelical. Her poems have recently appeared in Slate, Crab Orchard Review, and Rattle, and are forthcoming in IMAGE and 5AM.

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Mary Ann Sullivan

Gathering South Asia Through Our Eyes for Maggie Of water won and wonder woo And water lost and arbor under Sat and yellow pink and yellow seat and granite bench and there we sat Ever long the last and last Walks and through and arch and long The arms and robes of Muslims forward walk and Wind and blown We talked And sat and yellow pink and yellow seat and granite bench and there we sat the scarfs of Pakistani men were long and on the shoulder down and robes of Islam longer the women Pakistani soft and gentle tender south and south of Asia south for once and first Kashmiris known and gather motion gather words through eye and eye and pulled in mind and held in mind like camera ‘neath an arbor

Mary Ann Sullivan is pursuing a Doctor of Arts with gathered under pink and pink and yellow share and share and rides and car and parked on brick for mom, and mum, and mom and green Gathering south Asia through our eyes Gathering pink and pink and pink with dearest, dearest pink.

in leadership from Franklin Pierce University, where she is experimenting with nonlinear, multi-dimensional literary content delivery using digital media such as FLASH. The New York Times Book Review called her first novel Child of War, set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, an “earnest first novel.” In the summer of 2007, she produced a 30 minute documentary, Democracy in Pakistan, interviewing Pakistani leaders who were both guests of the U.S. State Department, and the Pakistani Educational Leadership Institute at Plymouth State University. Sullivan wrote “Gathering South Asia Through Our Eyes” shortly after producing this documentary.

And sprinkling down south Asia piece and piece and gently falling Piece of dearest pink and pink and yellow 49

Michael Creighton

Questions for the Agent As the two men wait at the airport ticket counter, there is no question from the way they stand— right hands buried deep in the pockets of their well worn jeans, left feet gently tapping the faded carpet—that the younger one has been studying his graying— but still sturdy—companion since before he himself could stand, much less fit hand in pocket or make that tap, tap, tapping with his small boy toes.

The blunt cut of this grown boy’s hair, the black shine of his boots, and the drab green cloth of his bag leave no question about the nature of his profession.

And now, as the younger one turns to talk to the ticket agent, I see the other let his hand rise to a point just shy of his son’s hair, where it hovers for a moment, held up, it seems, by the gusts of warm air that blow from the grimy vents near our feet.

And as he pulls it away, I see from the look that crosses his suddenly old face, and the sound of words stuck deep in his throat, that the real question in this father’s mind is not the one we’ve all heard him ask three times already—So when do you think you’ll come back this way next?—but something simpler, and a great deal more urgent.

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Michael Creighton

Apologies to the Shakarkandi Wallah Nestled in spent coals, in a clay bowl that sits in a box on the back of the Atlas cycle he is pushing through this market, is all that remains of his day’s work: a single, once-warm sweet potato.

Since morning, he has peeled and sliced and sprinkled dozens of these with lemon and spices, and now, with less than an hour to go before dark, I see him lean hard on his handlebars.

I know what it would take to send this man home early: one half-plate for me and one for the kid picking through the garbage bin on the corner just ahead.

But today I can’t find the stomach for cold shakarkandi. And now he is swinging himself up onto his cycle, wobbling, on his way to the next market; and now he is calling: shakar— shakarkandi!

Michael Creighton is a fifth grade teacher who lives in New Delhi with his wife and three kids. His poetry has appeared in kaleidowhirl, The Sunday Oregonian (US), The Asian Age (India), and Verseweavers, the Oregon State Poetry Association’s annual anthology of prize winning poetry.

51

Grace Albritton

ALL IN A DAY I begin in the rafters observing

Day as shafts of gold against cedar.

My nest is silent––awaiting birdsong, Steaming cup dissolves dreams, satisfies, bides time,

While wind chimes sing soprano,

Paddle fan harmonizes alto.

Blessings cover me like dew on grass, but my body is wrapped warm.

A scarlet cardinal darts by the window

And cries, “Time’s up!”

Duties romp in like pups yelping to be fed,

Email grows an umbilical cord to strangers,

The hydrangeas dramatically demand water, Friends and relations beg relevance,

And as the hours circle like bees there comes the finish—

Life has been lived, sins forgiven, My nest again awaits birdsong and a whippoorwill obliges insistently—

Moon over my shoulder drenches the bed,

I, again wrapped in blessings As watching dogs bark at night’s dark mysteries,

Secure, I end at the bottom—

Amen.

Grace Albritton lives in a tree top house in the middle of an oak grove with her two best friends, a chow and a black lab. She has always enjoyed poetry—writing good and bad verse for a lifetime. Grace’s faith in beauty and the power of the spirit have been her foundations for living, and she writes, “I am constantly surprised by life and hope it never changes.”

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Celebrate t of art and Christianity

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It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God investigates what it means to be a creative individual who is a follower of the creative God. In this book “artists show how we can be the creators—not just critics —of culture. Thoughtful, insightful essays wrestle with theology and practice of the creative enterprise. You'll see hints of classics from Madeleine L’Engle (Walking on Water), Hans Rookmaaker (Art Needs No Justification), and Richard Niebuhr (Christ and Culture).”

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Extraordinary books on Faith and Art for ordinary saints

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“Objects of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith is a glorious, hip, well-produced, insightful and altogether spectacular contribution to the advancement of the Kingdom of God in the field of the arts. . . . Objects of Grace has . . . interviews with a dozen working artists, who, alongside fabulous full-color plates of their work, talk about what they do. And why. . . . These energetic conversations illuminate not only these fascinating folk and their faith-filled aesthetic, but show ways to embody one’s faith in a concrete career.”—Byron Borger

Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith and Mystery is a collection of Gregory Wolfe’s editorial statements that preface each issue of Image.

These short, evocative essays constitute a new Christian aesthetic for our time. They remind us of the way that both faith and imagination reach beyond the limits of reason to intuit the mystery of redemption.

days 3

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Elizabeth Berg Michael Chabon Gail Godwin Mary Gordon Edward P. Jones Yann Martel Kathleen Norris Katherine Paterson Luci Shaw Krista Tippett Franz Wright and many others

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ruminated

LAST NOTE

As we close

the end of our first complete year, we have a few exciting changes to share with you.

The paper you are now holding contains recycled material and is FSC-certified, meaning that the wood used to produce this paper came from a responsibly managed forest that was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. This marks the innaguration of what we plan to make a printing standard for RUMINATE. We want our readers to know that we believe our concern for quality production and design will only be enhanced by this decision, and we are equally excited about the opportunity to couple our desire for aesthetic beauty alongside our calling to be stewards of this earth. So it is with delight that we deliver this issue into your hands––perhaps its paper will inspire the re-reading of poems, the passing of a story between friends, and maybe even framing the art (yes, some of our readers have been doing this!).

Also, in order to better meet the needs of our organization, we have recently become a nonprofit corporation. This is a significant milestone for us because since its inception RUMINATE has been made possible only through the generosity and commitment of our friends at Darwill Press, the invaluable time and expertise from our volunteer staff, and the financial support of a few dear readers. But as we look toward the start of a new year and face new financial challenges, we feel confident saying that RUMINATE can not continue to exist without the faithful support of many, and it is you, our readers and our friends, who make up this “many.”

And so, we hope you will consider financially supporting RUMINATE. If you would like to make a donation, please visit our website for more information or email us at editor@ ruminatemagazine.com. It is an honor to publish the work of our talented contributors, and an equal pleasure to bring you good reading that inspires and challenges, and invites us to all be stewards. Thank you for joining us on this adventure!

With gratitude,

56

Vincent Berquez. Dover. Tempera on canvas. 17 x 9.5 inches.

Vincent Berquez is an artist, poet, a curator and sometimes works in broadcasting––but mostly is an artist and poet. He has published in Britain, Europe, America and New Zealand. Vincent has recently shown his paintings at the Lambs Conduit Festival and is taking part in a group show called Gazing on Salvation at St. Pancras church for the whole of Lent 2008 and will recite his poetry at the end of the holy period. Also, he will be exhibiting his collages at Sacred Spaces in London.

Vincent Berquez. The Road to Taller, France. Tempera and acrylic. 20 x 20 inches.