Issue 12

faith in literature and art

12 /.

fiction so much squinting

from Matthew Ira Swaye

we drain the swamp and this is what God is and Sarah Estes Graham

/.

art

/.

poetry

from Richard Sederstrom

word and image from Tyrus Clutter

ISSUE

Summer 2 0 0 9

$9.00

Detail

Tyrus Clutter. Altarpiece of the Martyrdom of St. Bon. Mixed media with oil on book pages, bottles with wine and bread. Closed: 27 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches.

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 fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates 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. Please join us.

FRONT COVER Natalie Salminen Rude. Pattern of Chance. Digital image on canvas. 24 x 20 inches.

Natalie Salminen Rude lives lovingly in McGregor, Minnesota, with her brilliant and beautiful husband Josh and their greatest work of art to date: Ezra Monroe, their wondrous baby boy. Having lived deep in the heart of the Florida Everglades for a few years, Natalie’s oil, encaustic, and graphic design work is now shown in galleries in South Florida, as well as Minnesota, her home state. Her latest work appears in Luonnollisesti Suomalainen, an exhibit sponsored by the Duluth Art Institute, showcasing the work of eleven Finnish American artists. Natalie dreams of sailing to Japan, keeping bees, and collecting bromeliads. If she could figure out a way to do them all at once, she would. Natalie delights to have good people visit her website: www.nataliesalminen.com.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

Issue 12

Summer 2009

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.

SUBMISSIONS We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round. You may submit online at our website at www.ruminatemagazine.org.

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this operation and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid. Please consider subscribing to RUMINATE and supporting the quality work produced. One year, $28. Two Years, $52. 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.org. Library subscription services are available through EBSCO. DISTRIBUTION RUMINATE MAGAZINE is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company, 1402 Avenue B, Scottsbluff, NE 69361 and through direct distribution.

Copyright © 2009 RUMINATE MAGAZINE. All rights reserved.

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

s t

a f f

Brianna Van Dyke Amy Lowe Stephanie Walker, Stefani Rossi Alexa Behmer, Whitney Hale, Libby Kueneke, Lacee Perrin, Nicholas Price, Jonathan Van Dyke Edie Adams, April Berry Anne Pageau

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

contents

Poetry Karen Kelsay Creating a Pastoral Scene

7

Notes

Patricia Butler The Uninvited Goat Birdsong

8 9

John Philip Johnson The Ascension

10

4 5 22 44

Sarah LeNoir When You Were Being Made New

Fiction

17

Matthew Ira Swaye

Ashlee M. Davidson Apology to a Beggar Woman on the Steps of Notre Dame

18

11 Falfurious 28

Leland James Hard Candy Lace

Editor’s From You Artist’s Last

Tony Woodlief The Glass Child

19

Sarah Estes Graham Cave Air Golden-Haired Mary

Tyrus Clutter

Eric Potter Evensong

27

37

cover

38

Rosanne Osborne Complicity The Passion

39 40

Barbara Crooker June

inside back cover

Natalie Salminen Rude

Richard Sederstrom Moss

Altarpiece of the Martyrdom of St. Bon Altarpiece of St. Thomas Eliot 23-24 Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Joseph 25-26 Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Georges

inside front cover

Jenny Gillespie Proud Warrior

Art

20 21

41

back cover

Pattern of Chance Grace for the Fallen

ruminating

EDITOR’S NOTE

I am the door,

says Christ. And I am stilled, completely taken by this image of God as an entrance. It’s because our second child, a baby girl, was born last month and she has me thinking, thinking about arrivals, births, and entrances, and about the beauty surrounding them.

This is her story: I was attending a local writers conference and after a very busy day—writing workshops, surviving an hour of public speaking (I led a session on literary magazines), and a poetry reading from Denver’s poet laureate Chris Ransick—I drove home through the beginnings of a very wet spring storm and went into labor. She was born the next morning: our beautiful IlaJane Van Dyke. 6 pounds, 15 ounces, and 7 inches of new snow.

I can’t help but ponder that stimulatingly literary day and question whether the hum and buzz of all those writing-minded souls was the impetus for her arrival. Maybe she heard Chris Ransick reading those lines about the river’s water and “mornings when magpies squawk the world awake” and just decided she couldn’t wait any longer—that ours was a world worth meeting.

It makes sense. For nine months she has heard me mumbling aloud over three issues of RUMINATE—speaking the poems, my favorite lines from an essay, and testing out the wording for the cover: Windblown wild carrots or wild carrots, windblown?

And most of me thinks she has not just heard, but also felt me working on RUMINATE—definitely the belly-heaving sobs as I read Tony Woodlief ’s “The Glass Child” but also the internal hmms and ahhs, the deep exhale after pouring over Tyrus Clutter’s altarpieces.

How could she not have felt these? After all, we were connected in inexplicable ways. As Debra Rienstra points out in her book Great with Child, my body grew a new organ for heaven’s sake! So why wouldn’t she, in return, grow a fondness for words, a tenderness for beauty?

Yes. I think she would, and has. She has it written all over her little face—scattered across her cheeks and over her parted lips, words like wild carrots and magpies.

When I was pregnant with my son, RUMINATE wasn’t yet conceived, and as you can imagine I had more spare time.

I remember spending many evenings faithfully playing the piano for the baby—especially Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata.

I played this piece again and again because I thought it had such a strong voice that the baby couldn’t help but listen, couldn’t help but be moved.

For him, labor began at the movie theater in the middle of the Johnny Cash movie Walk the Line. When the contractions began it felt like the entire theater was shaking, that each person in the audience was tapping their foot with every downbeat.

It was like he couldn’t help but join in. Perhaps music was already pulling on his little heart, preparing him for his entrance.

And then he heard Johnny Cash and it was all over—he was awakened.

Even more than speculation about my children’s taste in music or literature, all of this has made me wonder if art isn’t one of the strongest stimulants in our world—if it isn’t inducing life all around us. Forget all the old wives’ tales: the raspberry tea, spicy curry, or my favorite one—jumping up and down (as if this really would bring a child into the world!). Instead, what one needs for the birth of a child—or for that matter, the birth of a poem or a painting—is a good line about the river’s water or a great rendition of “Ring of Fire.”

What I really love is that we all seem to have this capacity for beauty to beget birth. In a sense, we are all “expecting,” just waiting for a moment of beauty to induce new life, new words, new saints—even new door openings. Perhaps this issue of RUMINATE will provide that moment.

Welcome and enjoy,

Brianna Van Dyke 4

ruminato

rs

NOTES F

Send your thoughts, questions, and comments to

ROM YO U

editor@ruminatemagazine.org

Thank you very much for the time you took to read my submission and to respond. I have a high regard for RUMINATE and its mission. I look forward to reading more. Wishing you all the best.

Jenn Langefeld

o’fallon, illinois

I used RUMINATE today in a national design meeting and was once again so thrilled to know this literature exists and is put together by such a passionate team. Thank you for the inspiration.

Michael Behmer

longmont, colorado

I am thoroughly enjoying the RUMINATE issues, not only the content but the artistic design and feel of each one. They are art in every way, and I find peace in their reading. I especially loved Richard Osler’s “Easter” in Issue 11. Keep up the great work!

Ellaraine Lockie

port townsend, washington

I loved your latest issue and especially enjoyed the photographs by Brett Carter. I’m also a photographer, and those images particularly struck me—they are beautiful.

Christina Manweller littleton, colorado

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Friends of RUMINATE We would like to thank our Spring and Summer 2009 friends, whose generous financial donations have helped establish RUMINATE at the intersection of faith, literature, and art.

Benefactors

Scott Ackerman, Kim & Steve Franchini, Kelly & Sara McCabe, Ralph & Lisa Wegner, John Zeilstra

Patrons

Grace Albritton, Dorothy Baird, Lawrence Dorr, Judith Dupree, Katie & Ryan Jenkins, Katie & Tim Koblenz, Andrea Lawson, Marylee MacDonald, Peter & Reta Melby, Paul Miller, Brian & Anne Pageau, Mark & Michele Pageau, Janet Penhall, Chris & Becky Pittoti, Richard & Rachel Rieves, Josh & Nicole Roloff, Bruce Ronda, Dave & Kathy Schuurman, Neal & Becky Stephens, Matt & Lisa Willis

Sponsors

Alohi Ae’a, April Berry, Dale & Linda Breshears, Everday Joe’s Coffeehouse, Daryle Dickens, David Feela, Tina Fountain, Christopher Gaumer, Stephanie Gehring, Amanda & David Harrity, Ashleigh Hill, Norma Hopcraft, Joanne Irwin, Nathaniel Lawrence, Brian Lowry, Mary McCabe, Chris & Barb Melby, Donna Newman, Richard Osler, Karsten Piper, Rachel Roberts, Claire M. Rygg, Lucy Selzer, Luci Shaw, Shannon Smiley, Gwen Solien, Joseph Spence Sr., Shane & Jean Sunn, Carol Tremble, Gillian & Roland Tremble, Anna Tschetter, Ellen Tucker, Darlene Van Dyke, Kelly & Brandon Van Dyke, Barbara Warner

To become a Friend, mail: RUMINATE MAGAZINE 140 N. Roosevelt Ave. Fort Collins, CO 80521 editor@ruminatemagazine.org 6

Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

Karen Kelsay

Creating a Pastoral Scene A turning point— like a needle piercing a canvas, pushing up from the blind underside to revisit the world.

With each small tug a thread appears, connecting a row of holes that align like silent days.

Today, I work in a field of blue, blending small patches of sky around trees, struggling

Karen Kelsay grew up in Southern California, writes poetry about nature and loves the sea. She enjoys writing formal and free verse poetry. Her first book was published in June of 2008, and her poems have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Westward Quarterly, Soundzine, the New Formalist, and several other magazines.

to find the pattern between hills and clouds— heaven and earth.

7

Patricia Butler

The Uninvited Goat She crashes our conference at coffee break, unmindful of stares, does not care, but comes, wanders among us, nibbling fingers and thumbs, snuffling through pockets and poking her nose up sleeves, looking for whole things— not crumbs—and one of us succumbs to this young goat with no sense of propriety, no sense at all.

She must be a she-goat, a Mary Magdalene school-of-thought goat: no ceremony standing in the way of what matters.

Without invitation, she begs no permission, but plunks hooves up on the table and rummages through our herbal teas. I marvel at her ease: how without so much as a thank you or please, she helps herself to whatever she sees.

For protocol she obviously has no use, and protocol suggests no next move. Her beard sways over a gurgling bell, dangling from her collar and matted, musty smell. With thin goat lips she teases napkins and wrappers from chocolates and cups, then cocks a square-pupiled eye at the muffins. Nostrils flare.

Abrupt as a sneeze, she bleats and butts that tin into the air, and as we laugh, breaks wind.

She snubs our judgment. The conference resumes, but no cerebral thought can compete with this wonder of a goat not aiming to please. What else could she teach? I linger at the window as she saunters away, with a flick of her tail, celebrating in her own goat way— celebrating, and that is how I remember the day.

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Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

Patricia Butler

Birdsong At dawn the blackbird snips at the quiet like scissors through hair, clipping short sleep with its curly-cue song that cuts through the air.

A native New Yorker, Patricia Butler began writing as a child. Inspiration comes on airplanes, art museums, and through her extended family. Other than writing, Patricia enjoys painting, wine, travel, Siamese cats, and any activity in, near, or on an ocean. After twelve years in northern France, she recently relocated to Atlanta, GA, and is exploring Southern culture, idioms, and all roads that have “Peachtree� in their name.

9

John Philip Johnson

The Ascension

Instead of rising in the sky, what if he had stayed, laid down on the ground, and said goodbye with an ineffable smile, dissolving into a puddle of something like water or a starless night sky, his smile disappearing until he was no more than a glint on the surface before sinking into the land.

Then we would say of him he is not a transcendent god.

We would say of the tree, Oh, there you are.

We would drink in the parousia of afternoon sunlight and say to our friends I love you like dirt, like ashes in the wind, I adore you as you are lost to the underside of things, to the pulse of quiet which answers the thrust of light.

John Philip Johnson has published in numerous quarterlies; recent acceptances include Southern Poetry Review and Chicago Quarterly Review.

He lives and works in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife Sue and five fairly happy children. More of his work can be found at johnphilipjohnson.com.

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Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

Matthew Ira Swaye

FALFURIOUS

Try as he might, Saul could not hate them. Yes, the bees busied themselves about his head and he sat swatting them away, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to hate them. They had, he thought, in all likelihood, allergies of their own. Saul ran his nails back and forth across his scalp and shook his cap clean. The midday sun was merciless. He endeavored to stand: The Law of Gravity: the reanimation of so many unfortunate angles: legs, bowed and rickety, joints insisting through leathery skin, the limbs were like kindling—everything taut and forced and now unfolding into a cruel approximation of Man. “Apples,” he said. Up on his feet, he cleared his throat: “Ap-ples.” Not a wormer in the bunch, never touched the ground, plucked di-rectly from the tree. “Fresh, red apples, here,” Saul said. “Each a gem.”

He cleaned a fleck of dust from the skin of one of the apples.

He kicked up some dust—an opaque cloud. His black boots were white. He was now, he thought, little more than his dirt-speckled cheeks or the silver stubble of his chin or, of late, the— A lone bird filled the sky. It dipped and dove down, looming larger still, only to climb, a moment later, westward, up, darting, soaring, adrift, then, high above the now mute factory and its giant wheel. Then, the bird was a mere pupil-fleck, a vanishing wingspan dot. Was it, Saul wondered, an eagle, or was it a vulture?

He coughed.

He was, he decided, fundamentally, little more than his old throat, his bald scalp, his bowlegs . . . Weathered and alone, he stood in the road. Alone with only the occasional honeybee—two, three—and with his imagination. With his apples: they were red. His nose had long since ceased its sun-scathed peeling. Just pink cartilage there; these days, that’s all there was. Exposed and baking. Over the years he had sometimes treated people badly.

Saul squinted, now, into the familafine dust whose seeming ingenuity knew no bounds when it came to penetrating, say, the gaps between even the most well-sealed of kitchen windows—their re-caulked and re-caulked wooden frames. Re-re-re: a fine powder coated everything. The top of the icebox. The wooden table and the wood stove. The meadow-motif, stained-glass picture window was no less coated inside than out. Inside a glass bowl, minnows practiced their lethargic figure eights beneath a layer of film at the surface.

Indeed, no one was exempt from the dust’s transgressions.

Newtown had been in a perpetual state of waiting, coated, as it was, in the slough of a more providential age. They woke—all of them, townspeople, Orphans—each

11

day, to the realization that nothing had changed. They’d rub the accumulated sleep from their eyes and lips. They’d stand, then, arms stretched forth, squinting through another of life’s gray billows.

Saul stood, upright in the road, kicking up dust.

Sweat poured down his body. It pooled in his boots.

To the south, where the land bellied out, there’d once been a sprawling orchard. Out of the utmost respect for the land’s former tenant—a lake that their ancestors (Millers, Andersons, and Joneses, mostly) had been careful never to christen—the residents of Newtown had continued to bestow The Blessing of Namelessness upon their now longlost orchard. Generation-to-generation, like The Lake before it, it had never been given an official title. (So very deep, in fact, was the residents’ respect for the current ruinlande which stood wiltingly in The Orchard’s stead, that when referred to—indeed, less and less frequently with each passing year—“The Orchard” it remained. It was said with the raise of an eyebrow. Said with the inevitable chuck of a thumb over one’s shoulder. With a sad, soft smile. The head atilt, a sigh: The Orchard.)

Cider ants and the attendant bats, turkey feathers, dank mash, Edenfruit. A gray grouse, a gray grouse, a gray grouse in a varied nectar beam of light . . . The Orchard was home to the very saplings of Saul’s youth. He was no stranger to its pagan rituals of rot and re-birth, no stranger to branch-scratched arms and legs and belly and back.

And oh, how he’d liked to lie supine on the lower limbs of the mature trees, eyes closed, dreaming of this or that: of angels—guardian angels, he imagined, they would have to’ve been, in the tender imagination of a boy that age. But always, even when lost in vivid swirls of barefoot daydreaming, was he mindful of the bees. He was ever mindful of the bees’ buzzing, buzzing to and from the Queen pupae. The larvae they’d especially selected. To whom they fed their royal jelly. To and from their would-be-Queen, they’d buzz. There she was, hanging vertically in their hive, her beeswax cocoon honey-brown and abuzz and almost imperceptibly— Until, at last: the dawning of a new day, a rooster crows and the wide-eyed Queen Bee, having chewed away the tip of her cell, throws the deep-sleep from the corners of her eyes and crawls out into the early morning dust to assume her throne, unaware that all of humanity has been waiting (and not, incidentally, without mounting impatience) some

Chin Up. chin up, he told

himself. Yes, life was, apparently, at least half-lived in retrospect.

12

Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

two thousand-odd years for The Messiah’s return, for some sign—something, anything. . . . A gray grouse, a gray grouse . . .

Saul cleared his throat.

Each a gem, each plucked di-rectly from the tree. It hurt to think.

The dizzying sun’s refraction rippled the landscape, confusing every convergence.

Ruinlande. Saul squinted. The weather was personal today. There were great rust rings under each of his arms and at his neck.

And the dust! (He was no stranger to dust, seventy percent of which, as they’d taught it in school—grade-school, fifth grade or sixth—consisted of the slough of human skin.) Now crunching its grit in his back teeth and feeling a wave of nausea, that vague kind of nausea which, even at this late date in human history, had, Saul thought, a way of stealing from a man (whose advanced age and otherwise meek stature—his skeletal build, say, and whose relative solitude—not loneliness, per se, no, although he was indeed very much alone, but solitude, say . . . a man for whom solitude and fragility had, over time, resulted in more than mere vulnerability, but in something rather akin to an acute immunodeficiency) the kind of vague nausea, Saul thought, that had a way of stealing from a man such as he what preciouslittle— Chin up. Chin up, he told himself. Yes, life was, apparently, at least half-lived in retrospect. To-morrow, he thought, to-morrow . . .

The cars had pulled away days ago. All of them and the trucks, too—laden with leaden to-morrow faces hard-pressed in windows, palm prints, salt-cheeked faces, Miller noses, and the classically high Anderson foreheads and widow’s peaks. Here and there, a proud Jones chin. Oh, the expressions on the faces of the men: their sad brows said it all; “Goddamn Falfurious, place’s finished; I just hate seeing that big wheel standing still.” The cars had pulled away. It was as if they—the men—had finally come to understand themselves as the remnants of a pre-Important time. But, to’ve lived to see such sorry-swept faces! Their grimaces, Saul knew, were, after all, nothing less than the mirror of his own. The trucks had all left days before. “Somebody oughta’ find little Billy Falfurious,” one of the men had said, “find that little bastard and tear ‘im a new . . .” The trucks’d all gone bumping by. Not even their tracks remained. It was hard not to take it—obsolescence—personally.

Falfurious. Fal-furious. What absurd things happened to the timbre of men’s voices (yes, Saul decided, his own included) when pronouncing the names of Important Men. Who was it who’d taught them, Saul wondered, all of them, to speak in such reverent tones—to infuse the name Falfurious with such a trembling vibrato, even, say, apparently, when oft’ blasphemously preceding it with the modifier “Goddamn”? Had they been taught to bend their voices so? Was this a learned behavior? Could it, then, be unlearned?

Saul faced south, squinting through the dust. Up there, somewhere, was the hill where the apple blossoms had once grown. He’d been baptized beneath those trees. And somewhere, somewhere down there was the cutbank’s sand valley and the rolling contours of the land that once, not so very long ago, could be counted upon, even when under attack by scab or rust or fire blight, for nearly a thousandweight of apples a year.

13

The town had rejected, afar as Saul knew, no fewer than seven commercial offers. Far as he knew, each of the seven’d been rejected outright.

Saul knew quite a bit. (Knowing, anyway, was mostly remembering.) He remembered green grass, nearly blue. Men using clothespins to hold young branches at desirable angles. In The Orchard, as he dreamt away his boyhood summer afternoons (with angels, guardians, yes-yes, and seeing, also, after blink-brief showers, the rainbows, thin as hallucinations, which, cumulatively, came to form his adult understanding of The Bold And Impressive Fallacy of A Rainbow), clothespins were sometimes used by teams of men, very real indeed, to achieve the desirable angles for optimum yield. Saul remembered the men, too, in teams, pruning previously neglected trees. But, then a mere boy (eyes half-mast) and deep in conversation with the figments of his imagination, he was perhaps only faintly aware, if at all, of the whir of two-man saws and of the removal of large limbs.

Young Saul had liked to lie barefoot on the low, wide, daydreaming branches. When the bees circled his dark curls, he’d purse his lips. His eyes closed tight, then—buzzzzz— and keeping deathly still.

In the afternoons, when his mother called, “Saully! Lunch!” he sometimes kept still as stone. Sometimes he’d treated folks poorly.

Saul lifted his cap. He wiped his brow.

Was there, then, he wondered, such a thing as guardian angels?

Knowing, Saul thought, was mostly remembering. And imagination, in the adult of the species, turned to faith, or died out altogether.

The heat! He wiped his brow. He remembered the May of Falfurious’ impressive arrival.The construction that followed. Saul’s Pa’ had put him up on his shoulders so’s he could see the big wheel turn in the water.

Pa’ was not the first man to die after dinner, wringing his hands and wondering if his thoughts were even his own.

There’d always been violence in the world. But, hadn’t there? Yes-yes, certainly, Saul thought, the smallest of branches were quickly snapped up for kindling and, afar back as anyone knew, there’d been an . . . an . . . why, an almost uninterrupted— Hello? A voice in the distance? A squeak? Saul was sure, now, sure, that he’d heard a squeak. Of the female variety. He squinted out over the low, dry hills.

“Falfurious sealed the doors shut,” a woman was saying.

“And run everybody out?” she said.

Her voice ran over the hilly terrain, flat and cracked, cried-out: “Wants to set up shop down river? That what you heard? What’ll I do here?”

Saul imagined her—this woman, this woman’s voice—her hand to her flushed neck, vocal chords, fingers, face. Imagined her, her hand along her collarbone, asking, “What’ll I do?” It was an excellent question. Saul thought it was an excellent question and he shuffled quickly forward, each step nearly quicksanding the previous’ recovery to throw

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Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

Saul imagined her—

this woman, this woman’s voice—her hand to her flushed

neck, vocal chords, fingers, face.

his voice up and away, out into the distance: “Apples!” he said. “Ap-ples! Ap-ples! Apples!”

He pulled his cap low, shielding his eyes from the sun’s setting rays. His back ached. His old and aching back. He was tired, shot through with a dull pain. His thoughts were slowly thought. He put the bushel basket down.

His fingers poked through a hole in his pants pocket. Were folks still calling it a river, then? (Yes, of course, Saul thought, for he who admits to following a riverbed has perhaps not adequately deluded himself with Hope.) He kicked up some dust. It smelled like dust.

He couldn’t remember whether he was 81 years old or 82 years old or 83 years old.

“Lord?” he said. “What’ve you got in store for me?”

Ol’ Saul was no stranger to Blessed Assurance, The King Of Love My Shepherd Is, or Because He Lives. He was no stranger, for that matter, to Dear Lord and Father of Mankind or Love’s Redeeming Work Is Done or The Strife Is O’er, The Battle Won . . .

No stranger to the dust’s horizontal attack.

Saul squinted south. He often tried to imagine how the orchard’s old amputees must look: when the inevitable winds blew, something in their nature must’ve felt the faint tingle of phantom branches. Saul was suddenly almost grateful for the granular blindfold that stood between his childhood and himself.

To-morrow, he thought. Chin up.

Had anyone, in leaving town, stopped afront his three-room house, boarded shut— When in Rome—its façade sand-blown and flagging, to remember, however briefly or partially or agitatedly, even, the stooped old fool who lived there? Who’d been young, upright and winsome and’d lived there, right in there, once upon a time, with his mother and father and brother eating applebutter and toast and . . . Would the wanton youngsters of some future generation—a new age—long after the town’s exodus had become lore, hearsay, fiction, blasphemous and then Forgotten, come walking through the town square, over thick grasses, whole acres regenerated green, near-blue blades, magical and dense, to pull the boards free? To carefully pry the planks from the door and go inside? Would they?

Saul liked the idea of his mother’s old, paste necklaces going to some use.

15

He yawned. His lips were cracked. Blood was blood. It tasted like blood.

Desire, the dust, the sun’s descent, his throat.

Until all there was to do was squint.

Plum tired was what he was—tuckered, inside and out. No shelter, no shade. There was no salve. Only the broad cataract of dust and the occasional bee, buzzing about his head. He was—conservative estimate—80% water and 20% desiccated hopes and, he supposed, also, fundamentally, if he was for once honest with himself, something of a cherisher of solitude. One of God’s faithful servants, though—solitary and faithful and bone-dry. A faithful old servant’s what he was: empty, brittle, and hoarse, lowdown among the tumble and cement and dust, holding tight to his red and ruddy crabapples—each of them small, shriveling, past its prime . . .

He was nobody’s wonderful son.

Gravity swooped down like a bird of prey. Saul sat among the brambles and thorns.

The Law of Gravity. Once upon a time, he’d studied physics. The Law of Gravity upon the crown of his head. Buzzzz. Saul swatted the noise away. He was not filled with hate. Finally, there was something of a breeze. He sagged. He sagged some. Weeds and cement and low tumble . . . He’d just sit on this gray white stump here, this little gray white stump, for a moment, before making the long walk home to his boarded-up life.

Human slough! Imagine?

Alone with the dust. The dust that so frequently—interminably, say—stung your eyes, so that all there was to do, for years on end, was squint. Squint and shrug and wait.

Afar back as anyone can recall, generation-to-generation-to-generation, they’d waited, all of them—townspeople—some two-plus unyielding millennia for The Rapture.

Or even Some Fissure.

Saul yawned.

Had they missed it, then? So much squinting. Had he, Saul wondered, closing his eyes, simply blinked and missed it?

Matthew Ira Swaye did undergrad at Brown and an MFA at Columbia. He lives in Harlem with his two cats, Tyler and Duckle.

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Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

Sarah LeNoir

When You Were Being Made New I saw you in that secret place, folding and unfolding, joint to bone, mouth and marrow. I sifted through your body, changing your eyes from blue to green, then blue again, because it suits you.

Your eyebrows follow the orbit of the earth, circling below your temple lines, wrinkled by a thought, or a word. The solid jaw that clenches at thoughts of death, the muscle of sorrow that contracts, keeping the tears from staining. I traced those lines and filled them in—muscle and flesh, carefully rendered.

When it rains your mouth is a bird’s— gaping wide to take the new manna, water from heaven. And you dance in it.

Feet turning and clothes clinging to your skin.

You said you just wanted to feel me there.

So I stretched out your fingers like feathers, one by one, five of them on hands that cup open to receive.

You were never more beautiful.

The planes on your face reflect the light, as muscles flex to move atlas and axis across this bright sphere. Your figure is echoed in the shadow of the sea, the branches of Ash beneath your skin. Each vessel, a ribbon, the red contours carrying my words near your heart.

Where your ribs, rigid, cage the beating blood.

Lip to lip I kiss you, breathing in that life that feeds, and whispering, your name.

Sarah LeNoir is a Tennessee transplant who lives with her husband in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Ashlee M. Davidson

Apology to a Beggar Woman on the Steps of Notre Dame I was eleven, climbing the deep steps leading into the cathedral, when I stumbled over you—huddled in the doorway, wrapped in a coat worn so thin that in places it was sheer.

The November wind cut through my thick mulberry coat stung my cheeks and whispered its icy secrets into the recesses of my ears. Tiny snow crystals spun past, catching like tossed wildflowers in my tangled hair, like slivered shards of glass in the loose silver topknot of yours. I clung to my father’s hand; he engulfed my smaller, mittened one, crushing my fingers together painfully. You cradled a blue, chipped tin mug in chapped hands, your knuckles red, cracked knobs.

Ashlee M. Davidson is a creative writing major at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. She is from Huntsville, Alabama, and enjoys spending time with family and friends, traveling to exotic (or any, really) locales, and learning new things. She has two wonderfully supportive parents, an amazing younger sister, a beautiful two-year-old little girl that she nannies and thinks of as a little sister, and two rambunctious dogs.

You glanced up at me suddenly with deep brown, rheumy eyes, and I wanted to stop, but was tugged along, staggering as the crowd broke around us and merged together again like a stream parting briefly; wanted to offer you my mittens, but couldn’t coax my fingers from their warm, wool encasements; wanted to speak, but couldn’t find my voice, so I lit a candle for you in that hallowed darkness.

When I stepped back out onto the cobbled street, out from under the chastising gaze of Madonna and the saints, the wind had died, the snow fell in gentle spirals into the Seine, gargoyles crouched protectively overhead, and you were gone.

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Leland James

Hard Candy Lace Bright canopy of leaves Green, yellow, orange, and red.

Shot through with sun, midday and more: The canopy stirred by the breeze.

The body electric, What’s left to sing, here below: Color and light, sweet breath of leaves, Hard candy lace shot through with sun, stirred by the breeze, a taste of Fall.

Of the Source I sing, not of the body, not anymore.

Leland James is the pen name of Leland James Whipple. He is

the author of two novels and a book of essays. He has published in both academic and popular periodicals, ranging from Galaxy Science Fiction to the Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine. Recently he has focused his writing on poetry, winning the 2008 Portland Pen Poetry Contest and the 2008 Writers’ Forum Short Poem Contest and placing runner up for the 2008 Fish International Poetry Prize. He has also had several honorable mentions and publications in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Israel, including Inspirit, New Millennium Writings, RUMINATE, By Line, Harûah Breath of Heaven, Voices of Israel, joyful!, Shine, St. Louis Writer’s Guild, Cyclamens and Swords, and the Dawntreader.

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Sarah Estes Graham

Cave Air This is what God is. Water. This is what survival is. Swimming. You don’t realize until entirely immersed. Until your suit is a purple skin. Until the lines of your body have begun to mean something. Until you look at your hand pulling you forward the way a fish jumps into what it was not made for. When it is your own hands that pull you through the water, you begin to think you are strong, that strength is something like a woman loving the air, but not the air she breathes into her own lungs. The air that moves through the blood as if the body was not made of water, that moves through the generations as if they were not made of bodies. My grandmother’s hands were like stones that never smoothed. I am the air I have chosen. My mother would not swim. She cannot would not let me go into what she most fears. A daughter who wades without thinking. Whose feet are molded to the bottom of her canoe. Who sails into caves just for the darkness. The kind that is like sleep or just before.

The deep air where nothing is named. Deer move through the dawn like birds.

I wear nothing but bare feet, burnt skin, my purple suit. Pull my canoe into everything. Caves, water, love. The land I was born to. Takes me the way a man wishes he could inhale what he cannot understand, what wants to be inhaled, what lets her body slip over the curves of the boat into black water.

Sarah Estes Graham’s poems, essays, reviews, and articles have appeared

or are forthcoming in Agni, Cimarron Review, Fourth River, Innisfree, New Orleans Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. Sarah has received grants from the Bread Loaf Conference and James River Conference, and she won a $10,000 prize for her essay on Iraq. Her manuscript was short-listed for the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press.

She received her MFA from the University of Virginia and has an MA in theology from Harvard. Raised in rural Illinois and suburban St. Louis, Sarah has lived in Belgium and Japan and traveled across Mongolia and Siberia. Her work blends the geographic/spiritual resonances of the Midwest with cultural practices encountered abroad. Sarah is also of Blackfoot descent. This mixed lineage informs her cultural explorations of divergent cultures.

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Sarah Estes Graham

Golden-Haired Mary My family sits downstairs in our blue living room, time toeing the nightly news.

A surge in price. Bears, bulls and

baseball scores, the mealy grain of a lunch ticket in a sweaty palm.

Always

the scalding hot water of duty.

Dinner linens dry over the back yard where the neighbors’ voices muffle and flap in the breeze.

I can hear them talking mildly about my family again.

Judgment settles,

a fine dust over the line of boxy houses, angling towards the stony corner church, little Bethlehem with its endless bells and late hour chimes— every day a warning.

The statue of Mary lifts off the roof of the church

every day at five o’clock as if her time has come.

But it is only light on the slate evening courtyard, a few last children dribbling a soccer ball near the gate.

I am falling off

this rusting wagon.

The cruel hungry neighbors,

the long wheat plains of faith, every season a rehearsal of boredom or death,

and Fall, rotten rather than crisp.

Forgive me my unbelief, Mary in the sky-blue dress.

But we already know who wins in the end.

You’ll get your penance

whether I believe or not.

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ruminating

ARTIST’S NOTE

Tyrus Clutter is a painter and printmaker originally from the Midwest. His work has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout North America and Europe and can be found in several hundred private collections as well as in the Print Collection of the New York Public Library, the collections of the Museum of Biblical Art, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Spring Arbor University, Calvin College, and Union University. Images of Tyrus’ work have appeared in journals and magazines including the South Carolina Review, Chiron, the Christian Century, and Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture. From 2003 to 2008 Tyrus served as the director of the international art non-profit CIVA. He continues to produce art, exhibit, teach, and speak on topics of art, art history, and aesthetics around the country.

Tyrus Clutter: Word and Image We live in a society that progressively places greater stock in Image as the primary form of communication. The use of film, television, video, print media, and the internet has forced us into a fast-paced state of communication in which we have less time to digest just what the meaning is within the images we see. However, the written Word still holds an equally viable role within this image-based culture.

In American culture the strong preference for the Word in Protestant Reformational and Puritan thought has equally been countered with the Image-laden practices of traditional Catholic and Orthodox religion. In an attempt to bridge these seemingly opposing ideologies, this work stems from an underlying investigation of a particular Christian belief— the biblical pronouncement of Jesus as the Word of God. Yet he is also called the incarnate Image of the unseen God. This work investigates this tenuous relationship between Word and Image. It proposes that Word and Image are not opposite extremes but are essentially two sides of the same coin. Informed by both semiotics and deconstructionist philosophy, the images reveal themselves as texts that, under a close reading, disclose additional layers and meanings.

Both Word and Image are symbolic, creating subtle shades of meaning that are not always obvious upon first examination.

These four altarpieces are part of a larger series that examines the “personal saints” of the artist. These are not canonized saints, per se, but are likened more to the “great cloud of witnesses” that compose the full Body of Christ.

Not only are words and images enmeshed to create a synthesis of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox theologies, but the figures represented take on hybrid forms.

The outer panels of each work display these non-canonized saints in poses taken from their canonical counterparts. T.S. Eliot becomes the doubting Thomas, Georges Rouault becomes St. George slaying the dragon, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer takes on poses from the life of St. Bonaventure. However, it is not the miraculous deeds of the canonized saints that is the focus, but the words, thoughts, and deeds of these 20th century heroes of faith.

Eliot is found examining the hollow interior of his earlier, faithless self. The poetic thoughts of Rouault’s Catholic renewal are the foundation for the panels in his altar—the tools of his artist’s trade form the reliquary. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom for the true Church marks his central image. And Joseph Cornell, the unorthodox saint and father of assemblage box-constructions, reveals his unique thoughts on the Christian scriptures, found in his journals and letters.

Each “saint” was chosen for specific ideas, actions, and works that, for the artist, make them worthy of veneration.

These parts of their lives reveal qualities that we would do well to emulate.

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Tyrus Clutter. Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Joseph. Mixed media with oil on book pages, collage, bottles with found objects. Closed: 33 1/2 x 26 x 3 1/2 inches.

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Tyrus Clutter. Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Joseph. Mixed media with oil on book pages, collage, bottles with found objects. Open: 33 1/2 x 52 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches.

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Tyrus Clutter. Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Georges. Mixed media with oil on book pages, bottles with wine and bread, stained glass and tools. Closed: 36 x 22 1/2 inches.

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Tyrus Clutter. Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Georges. Mixed media with oil on book pages, bottles with wine and bread, stained glass and tools. Open: 36 x 45 inches.

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Eric Potter

Evensong The sails of evening wink discreet farewells and disappear beneath the peaceful sea.

The beach displays the haul of claws and shells and horseshoe crabs it daily offers free to sun-shy walkers, whose Morse-code toe prints are read by waves. Salt-tanged and damp, the onshore breeze ignores the sand and sprints past empty lifeguard stands, then up the ramp of dunes, across beach grass and through the pines, whose gill-like branches filter every sound, to find the salt box house where ivy twines the porch and blue hydrangeas drag the ground.

It stirs the upstairs curtains to a froth, fusses with flower vase and hanging ferns and smoothes the ample bed’s embroidered cloth.

She lights a yellow candle, smiles and turns.

Eric Potter is a professor of English at Grove City College where he teaches American literature, modern poetry, and creative writing. He lives in western Pennsylvania with his wife and three children. Besides going to the beach each summer, he enjoys hunting, coaching youth soccer, and, when he can, playing soccer.

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Tony Woodlief

The

Glass Child This is the blood, David tells himself. He twists open the bottle and pours its dark content into a blue plastic cup. The label declares that this is Balanced NutritionTM, but David whispers: “Sanguis Christi.” He feels a shiver of sacrilege. On the days when his strength has worn thin as thread, it’s the wisps of liturgical Latin, of all things, that give comfort. This is why he whispers Sanguis Christi as he fills his daughter’s cup.

They are sitting on the big bed in David and Kate’s room. Amy, who is three years old, is nestled between David’s thighs, her back to his stomach, her head against his chest. She whimpers on occasion, but mostly she is distracted by something near the ceiling. It may be a peculiarity of light and shadow, or an illusion inspired by the rot in her brain, or something else altogether. David doesn’t notice, because he is praying that the Balanced NutritionTM or Sanguis Christi will heal the tumor mashing his daughter’s brainstem to pulp.

The pediatric oncologist has explained that the tumor is a brainstem glioma. It has the shape of a snake’s egg. It’s diffuse, the oncologist told them. Non-operable.

It’s like someone threw sand into Jello. That is how he got them to understand.

Chemotherapy only made the dark egg bleed. Now Amy’s teeth are permanently clamped together, and her left arm is curled into her chest. On some days even air stings her skin. The oncologist has calmly explained that it is time to let her go. What he means is that David and Kate should stop feeding Amy. It was Kate who told him to go to hell.

David tears a paper towel from the roll on his nightstand. He holds it over Amy’s head as he folds it once, then again, then once more. He pushes the paper mass against her bottom lip and lifts the gouged rim of the blue plastic cup to her mouth. He wedges it between her upper and lower teeth and tilts. He quickly removes the cup and pushes up her bottom lip with the paper towel. The bottle claims a chocolate flavor, but to David it tastes of prunes and chalk. He chose it over strawberry because chocolate is Amy’s favorite. Look Daddy, my eyes are chocolate, she used to say, her face turned up to him, smiling as if she had created them herself. Most of the creamy chocolate-prune-chalk soaks into the wadded paper towel, but a trickle flows past Amy’s teeth and down her throat. “Sanguis Christi,” David whispers.

At first he struggled to get it right—tilt too high and Amy chokes, pour too slowly and it drenches her shirt. After five weeks he scarcely spills a drop. This is

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why some priests are so casual with the blood of Christ, he thinks, because they’ve poured it out so often. He carefully pours four sips into Amy’s mouth. He lets her rest between each. He reverses the paper towel so that the dry side is against her lip. Four more times, then he unfolds and refolds it in the opposite direction. David can give twenty-four sips with a good paper towel. Then he will drop the soggy remains in the small trash can beside his bed and tear off a fresh sheet. It will take him five hours to feed her this way, so long as the pain remains at bay. “Da propitius pacem in diebus nostris,” he whispers. Graciously grant peace in our days.

Amy doesn’t wail this morning, which David would once count as a blessing. They are halfway through the bottle when Kate shuffles into the room. Red lines from a couch pillow are imprinted on her cheek. She runs fingers through her tangled brown hair and catches it into a tail with a rubber band. “I can do it,” she offers.

David shakes his head and stares at the cup, because coaxing meager sips of life down Amy’s throat makes him seethe. His wife smoothes the thinning hair on her daughter’s head. “Hi sweetness.” Amy whimpers. Kate leans forward until her cheek is separated from Amy’s by the thinnest barrier, as if her daughter is encased in glass.

“You talk to Calloway again?” David asks.

“No.” “Why not?”

“Because he won’t change his mind.”

“Then I’ll call him.”

Kate stands and gives a humorless chuckle. “You certainly won’t change his mind.”

“Why not?”

She caresses the air above Amy’s skin, which is how the mothers of glass children must love them. “You didn’t know any Baptists growing up, did you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“They think baptizing children is an abomination.”

“You don’t.”

“Yeah, but I married a back-slid Catholic, too.”

“They can make an exception.”

“Not to do that.”

David rips away another paper towel. “She’s dying.”

Kate’s hand freezes over her daughter’s skin. She hates for David to say it when Amy can hear. “Reverend Calloway says she’s in a state of grace.” Her voice is thin and tired.

David clenches his jaw. “You tell him to come see her now. Tell him to come see this state of grace.”

Kate leans forward until her face rests almost on Amy’s head. She has grown skilled at touching without touching, just as David has learned to dispense Balanced NutritionTM without spilling a drop. She closes her eyes and draws in Amy’s scent. She opens them to confront him; they are pale blue and sparkling and wet. “I said call a priest if baptizing her’s that important.”

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David looks out the window, where a mulberry tree is spread wide and thick, heavy with berries. The darkest and softest have covered the driveway with purplish-black splatters. Is the tree bleeding, Daddy? Amy asked him this once, standing in the driveway amidst the berry massacre. It was such a strange question, on that sun-filled day, but by then he’d learned to wait for the sight she sometimes loaned him. And when this sight came a second later, it had indeed looked as if the tree wept blood.

Kate sighs. “I’m going to take a shower.”

David hates her for disappearing into the bathroom, hates her for the squeak of the faucet and the rush of water and the metallic, tearing-paper sound of the curtain being pulled back and then drawn forward again. He doesn’t know what he wants her to do instead. Sometimes he is angry at Kate simply because she exists, just as he hates strangers for walking by their house, or the dog next door for barking, or Amy for having a diffuse brainstem glioma.

He doesn’t know why he is angry at Kate any more than he knows why he wants Amy to be baptized. The need just metastasized, first a stray notion, then a recurring thought, and now this urgency. We should call a priest in Winston, he tells himself. Kate is right;

There is

violence

simply in keeping her alive. any of them would be glad to do it. Knowing this makes David’s heart sink for some reason he can’t fathom. Perhaps the ease with which it will be done is what makes it feel pointless. Casual rituals can’t heal a broken glass child. He wants her baptized through extraordinary effort. He wants her baptized in the church of the parent who still believes.

Amy groans, and David realizes that he is pouring too much liquid into her mouth. A brown stream spills over her chin and soaks into her white t-shirt. The shirt is intended for boys aged two to four, according to its package, but Amy’s body is swollen from the drugs. Her face has ballooned, rendering her little-girl features barely discernable, save for the delicate curve of her nose. David knows the reason so few people visit is because she has become repugnant.

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There is violence simply in keeping her alive. There is also his anger, spilled out on her flesh without warning, in a yank to keep her sitting upright, perhaps, or a cup shoved too forcefully between her lips. He remembers carrying Amy to the bathroom when they could still wash her in the tub. His exaggerated carefulness made him clumsy, and he scraped her spine against the corner of the doorjamb, causing her to howl. He breathed a curse at her for hurting. He stood deathly still in the doorway and held her as she cried, waiting for Kate to make it okay. As he stood there he ground his teeth so hard that the tip of one snapped, and he despised the door for its existence, and himself for his clumsiness, and Amy for hurting, and Kate for quietly soothing her daughter.

When her cries subsided he continued into the bathroom and bent low over the tubful of warm water, but Amy wouldn’t let go. Kate whispered to her that she liked baths, that baths were her favorite, but Amy only whimpered and dug her fingers into David’s neck. “There’s no point,” he told Kate, spitting his hopelessness at her. As he stood to carry Amy back to the bed Kate grabbed his arm, and with her other hand she peeled open her blouse, sending buttons tapping and skidding across the linoleum. “Hold on,” she commanded, and then she yanked down her jeans, stepped into the tub, and carefully eased Amy out of his arms.

Her face had the same expression, David realized in that moment, that it had taken during their wedding, when she stepped into the hem of her dress and sent a loud ripping noise through the sanctuary. Everyone had halted, even the organist, until Kate shook her head with that willful set to her jaw, snatched up the torn folds of her dress, and marched up the remaining steps. When David ponders whether Kate will leave him after their daughter is gone, he envisions her relentless, clenched jaw and her squinted blue eyes.

They washed Amy like that, stretched out on Kate’s body, Kate whispering and singing to her while David soaped and rinsed her skin. She’s inherited Kate’s stubbornness, he tells himself; that’s what keeps her drawing breath.

Kate is crying in the shower; David can hear it through the sizzle of water. Her weeping is soft and suppressed, like an old woman coughing in church. Amy can hear it, too, and she moans in reply. “It’s alright,” he whispers. He prays to an absent god that she won’t cry, because the wailing can hurt so much that it feeds itself. Sometimes Amy cries for hours, but today her eyes are drawn to the ceiling.

David considers calling Reverend Calloway. The thought of it drains him; he imagines Calloway is just as imposing over the phone as in person, with that large frame and thick jaw and his southern preacher’s way of looming over you, his eyes watching your mouth to gauge when you will be done talking, his wide lips set to deliver the next burst of words mixing themselves together in his bulbous head, undistracted by whatever you may be trying to say.

Calloway visited that first night at the hospital in Winston. He strode into the room, stood over them, prayed with hands stretched up to heaven, and then throatily declared, his face glowing with holiness, that Amy would be healed. He announced it like a fact, like a weighty gift that he had trucked in and deposited on the floor with a thud.

Kate had nodded and wept softly, like she is doing in the shower. Amy had been pretending to make up David’s face with her mother’s worn brushes and empty lipstick tubes,

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but she watched Calloway suspiciously while he squinted shut his eyes and bellowed out his righteous prayer. David wanted to believe, for the first time in years, in a god that was something closer than gone, but when he looked down at Amy he saw her countenance darken, like blood poured into water. This was how David knew, even as the last of Calloway’s prayer echoed off the sterile hospital walls, that she was going to die.

In the following weeks Amy was prominent in Reverend Calloway’s sermons. The prayer of a righteous man availeth much—this is what he would cry out to his congregation. How much more so the prayers of a righteous church? Kate’s eyes would take the look of splintered amethysts as she recounted his sermons to David. She believed that God was near.

She still does, even now. David wonders why she has never condemned him for not believing there would be a miracle. He begrudges her the sound of a shower curtain, and yet she doesn’t blame the absent miracle on his unbelief, though he suspects some in her church have whispered as much. Reverend Calloway, meanwhile, gradually eased Amy out of his sermon rotation. Her usefulness was diminished by her stubborn refusal to accede to his prayers.

Reverend Calloway doesn’t visit, but Michael Timmons does. Michael is a seminary student and a deacon in the Yadkin Baptist Church, assigned to assist Reverend Calloway with minor duties like mowing the church grounds and taking meals to widows and visiting dying girls whose very existence belies the state of grace. He is short and slender, with a permanently flushed face and thinning hair, though he is only twenty-three. He always looks terribly embarrassed to be on their doorstep, yet he appears at least once a week, red-faced and hopeful.

Sometimes Michael will sit with David or Kate at the kitchen table and quietly offer snatches of promise from places in the Bible that he has marked with pieces of torn paper.

Other times he will stand by the bed and make small, quiet talk while David feeds Amy. When he does this he gives David something new and tangible to hate, and so David wills all of his anger onto Michael, like anger is a physical thing that he can scoop up with his hands and hurl across the room. Michael stands awkwardly and explains what he read in the morning paper, or what he hears the weather might do, and David quietly hates him.

Occasionally, but always after Michael has gone, it occurs to David that nobody else has the courage to come into the bedroom, only this skinny, embarrassed kid who still thinks that what is believed must be acted on.

“You were in seminary yourself for a time, isn’t that right? Catholic seminary?” This is what Michael asked David one afternoon as they sat across from one another at the kitchen table. David nodded and sipped his coffee, slowly, in order to avoid saying more.

“Decided it wasn’t for you?” In conversation, as in all things, Michael persisted in hope.

“Seminary was fine. It was God I couldn’t get along with.”

Michael stirred his tea furiously.

“But,” David continued, finding malicious pleasure in Michael’s discomfort, “I suppose he gets the last laugh, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Michael said softly, as if trying to disagree without dissenting. “I don’t think he works that way.”

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“Then how does he work, Michael?” There was a rap of porcelain striking wood as David set down his cup on the bare tabletop. “Tell me how God works.”

Michael shook his head and made a whirlpool in his teacup and looked very much like a young seminarian ambushed by a pop quiz. Then a bashful smile spread across his face.

“Mysteriously,” he said.

David nodded, the fight draining from his chest as quickly as it had entered. The boy across his kitchen table just wanted to help, even David could see as much, and so he nodded, and muttered the platitude like a catechism: “He works in mysterious ways.”

Michael stood, relieved. “I’ll go up and see your little girl now, if that’s alright.”

David watched Michael disappear from the kitchen, listened to him climb the stairs to the bedroom, his mysterious god in tow. He took an apple from a bowl on the counter and sliced it into thin white slivers, but they had no flavor. Sometimes, after a day or two

an apple from a bowl on the counter and sliced it into thin white slivers, He took

but they had no flavor. without food, apples had the sweetest taste, a flavor so cool and sugary that David could almost believe there was a Garden before the Fall. But on other days they had no taste at all, as if they—or David—were apparitions.

The sound of the shower curtain being pulled back again makes David remember shopping, back when Amy could still sit in a stroller. They had been in the children’s section of a department store, searching for clothes to fit her swollen body. While he and Kate sifted through piles of shirts, David noticed Amy stretch out her hand to clutch the hem of a gauzy purple dress hanging nearby. She stroked it between her thumb and fingers, and gave it a slight tug, the way an old woman might test a piece of fabric. She held it that way for a moment, her slender arm shaking from the effort, then she let it slip away. As her mother held a bulky shirt to her torso, Amy’s eyes lingered on that dress, and they were an old woman’s eyes. And there were Kate’s eyes, too, like the eyes of the undertaker who came to the house to gauge Amy’s size—because a child’s coffin must be ordered in advance—weary, given the work of fitting a child for death, but also guarded, because to see all of it at once is to feel your mind shot through with sand, which is how David feels when he thinks about all these sets of eyes: Amy’s, longing for that dress of

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purple gauze, and Kate’s, loving her child unto death, and the undertaker’s, contemplating a job that he will need a whole bottle of bourbon to wash down.

David is still thinking on all those sets of eyes as he slouches in the den, a phone book balanced on his lap. Kate is upstairs with Amy, who is crying. David is trying not to listen to the crying. He is thinking about the way humans discern patterns where none exist, so that absent becomes mysterious. Now there is this question of the priest. He looks at the phone book, and he is suddenly filled with dread. The priest will surely come. He will come with the baptism of water, and he will sprinkle it on Amy’s wounded head in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. He will speak his mystical Latin, and she will have that face like blood poured into water, and then David will never be able to forgive the god of glass children.

Amy’s wailing started around noon today. Now the sun is hovering over the trees, and people throughout town are thinking about going home, about what’s for dinner, about junior-high basketball games and television shows, about reading a mystery or going to see a movie, about making love in their beds or in the back seats of their cars or on a blanket spread out in the park.

Amy is still crying. She sounds almost like a normal child from here, except that each mournful wail stretches farther than the last, until a long cry spreads thin into silence, which is the worst part, because it means she has passed out from the lack of oxygen, her

He should go up, but this phone book is a

massive

weight. head slumped onto her swollen chest. This is when they wait to see if she will breathe again, because when the crying has set in they increase the morphine. When she stops breathing they pray she will remain that way, and they pray she won’t, and they feel dirty for both prayers.

David runs stiff fingers through his hair and clamps them over his ears. He should go up, but this phone book is a massive weight.

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He remembers, behind his stanched ears, the three baptisms: of water, desire, and blood.

If the first isn’t available, then the others can suffice. Go to your grave crying out for the water of life, and it will be as if you had received it. Bleed and die in faith, and it will be as if your blood flows from a baptismal font. It occurs to David that his desire springs from some bitter aquifer of faith in the absent god, while Amy is slowly shedding blood into herself.

What need is there for mumbled-over tap water, in the face of these relentless baptisms?

He is computing with cryptic figures now, which is where he always excelled. If X, then Y; renounce the devil and receive faith; light the candle and be indwelt with love—but, despite knowledge of these spiritual equations, he never managed to etch them into his flesh.

He could explain the sacraments, he could conduct the rituals, but he couldn’t feel anything in their midst. Strange, that so much knowledge could be undone for lack of feeling.

And now, to be haunted by this terrible need, this irrational desire for Amy to be baptized in the name of a deaf god—it makes no sense. Upstairs she is dying, and David fears that if he calls the priest, he will scream. The priest will answer, Hello? and David will start screaming and he will never stop, because the only way to plumb the depth of this desperation is to scream forever and ever, and no matter how much Sanguis Christi they might pour down his throat, it will never be enough to stop the screaming.

Something in the house has changed, and David releases his ears to listen. It has been quiet for minutes. He stands. The phone book has become lighter than a child’s Bible, so light that he doesn’t even hear it fall to the floor. He climbs the stairs, seeing the grain in the wood, the way light from the receding sun spills through the front windows of the living room to warm the staircase. He had forgotten these things, or perhaps he has never seen them until now. Outside, a boy with golden curls pedals his bicycle along the cracked sidewalk. He is smiling, because he doesn’t yet know anything, or perhaps because he knows everything.

David stands now in the bedroom doorway. In the bed, Kate is slowly washing her child.

Kate is on her knees, on her side of the bed, because even though they are rarely in it at the same time any more, David and Kate have their separate sides. Amy is like a seam in the middle, or perhaps a fragile stitch, or a silent chasm, an absence though she is still here, just as soon she will be a presence though she is gone. “Saudade.” This is the word the brokendown ex-priest used to whisper, the one who slept in the alley behind the mission during David’s year in Portugal, his first exposure to grace withdrawn. Saudade—the presence of absence. How does one cross that space, that wound where the child was, but is no more?

How does one navigate the saudade?

Amy watches her mother, who crouches over her with a soft sponge and a dishpan of warm soapy water. Kate wipes down Amy’s leg, gently pads it with a soft towel, and closes her eyes. Her lips move silently, a prayer whispered into herself, as if God is hiding somewhere beneath her skin. She opens her eyes, picks up the sponge and squeezes, letting the water gently tumble back into the dishpan.

She washes Amy’s other leg, and the glass encasing her daughter is gone, because her hands and the sponge make small waves in Amy’s skin, yet it seems not to hurt at all. Amy

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has lifted her arm and, instead of watching her mother, who is praying again, she points at the shadowed ceiling. Even now, in the presence of this baptism that he has never noticed before, all David can discern is that he doesn’t see.

He carefully eases his cracked and brittle body onto the bed, and rests his face next to Amy’s. He wonders if Kate will wash him as well. He thinks that something in the softness of her washing, or in the water, or in the way she prays without words, could be sufficient. He whispers to Amy, “What do you see?” Amy turns her head slightly, whimpering with the effort, and gazes at him with her chocolate eyes.

There is a quiver along her lip. “Do you see something?” he asks. A giggle escapes her throat. She cannot say, so David lies on his back, and looks up to where she is pointing, and waits to see.

Tony Woodlief is a writer and management consultant whose writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, London Times, National Review, and WORLD Magazine, where he is a regular contributor. His short fiction has appeared in Image, and this is his second story for RUMINATE. His spiritual memoir, Somewhere More Holy, will be published by Zondervan in spring 2010.

His thoughts on faith, children, and the correct way to distribute pickles on a cheeseburger can be found at www.tonywoodlief.com. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four sons.

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Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

Jenny Gillespie

Proud Warrior My father’s son was an unemployed Proud Warrior most of his life.

When he came to stay with us, he showed us headstands and a small photo of his guru, her wound-like bindi and stern-sad eyes. Now he runs for his life from every shade of domestic battle, a child or two, one who wears Band-aids on his eyebrows. He wrote some phony pain pill prescriptions, and we think he might be in a cult on Fiji, or on the street, or hiding out with another woman who’s taken his name.

He left his belongings at my eighty-year-old father’s, who tries to give me his jacket, his suitcase, even his underwear.

I sit with him tonight, looking at a small diary my brother left, with a wild map of an Indiana graveyard where he believed the bones of Jesus lay.

There he must have had some difficult dream untranslatable in his scrawl, pointed and disheveled as a sick bird’s feet, words like blood, hands, devil, not signposts but mean tricks, leading him further away from us.

Jenny Gillespie lives in Chicago, Illinois, where she works as an editor at Cricket Magazine Group. Her poetry has been published in Borderlands, Meridian, the Missouri Review, and Front Porch. She considers herself a Christian-Buddhist and wants to learn more about Gnosticism, travel to Japan, and quilt, among other things. She is also a singer/songwriter who released her debut album Light Year in 2009. More about Jenny can be found at www.jenny-gillespie.com.

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Richard Sederstrom

Moss

Richard Sederstrom lives in the Sonoran

Desert of Arizona and Mexico and the North Woods of Minnesota. He has published poems regularly in Big Muddy, the Talking Stick, Red Owl, and Saint Anthony Messenger. He has also been published in Tar Wolf Review, the Tule Review, English Journal, Plainsongs, Mother Earth Journal, and RUMINATE, among other journals and magazines.

Richard is confident that long after Earth has had enough of human mischief, moss will be one of the simple creatures left to start over.

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Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

We drain the swamp, Unsightly, rot fragrant Kitchen of Nature, Bulldoze to improve With death the roof Of the land and release To the void the souls Of the food of our food, Garden of the air we breathe.

Then we run the muck Into the next low place, A sparkling Gehenna For shiny new roofs.

Sterile busyness fills With lifeless dreck The next lifeless ditch, The stream that ran With clarity to the source Of the soul. We should Rather celebrate The agelessness Of the soul of moss, The soundless liturgy of our Incarnations among Dying and joyful decay.

Rosanne Osborne

Complicity Spokes revolve, grind through the dusty track, gravel pushed aside by neighbors’ trucks on the farm-to-market road that leads to the field where my dad mows hay in scorching sun, my handlebar basket cradling a Mason jar of lemonade for him. On the road ahead a long black snake. I freeze on wheels spinning dust, watch it inch across the sun-baked clay, then slither into the ditch. My dad mops sweat and swats flies as he swills lemonade under the apple tree I climb at the field’s edge. I look down at the Ford tractor, the long arm of the mowing blade that slices timothy waiting to be baled, stored in the hayloft where I hid last month, leaving my mother’s favorite cookie jar in pieces on the freshly waxed floor. The glaze on sugar cookies lingering on my tongue, I climb higher in the old apple tree, shift to a limb that is certain to bear my weight. Looking down, I study the remains of a snake caught in the tines of the mower blade.

An apple ripens on the branch above my head.

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Rosanne Osborne

The Passion My eyes travel across the narrative of Hannah. The Old Testament story blurs with the images of women in long cotton dresses, pastels that blend into anonymity, leaning on compound porches, longing for children plucked by the state. Hebrew polygamy challenged by cult practices my mind resists. Yet longing binds past with present and the passion that subverts marginality is left in the crucible of my senses.

The angst of the barren womb merges with the emptiness of bunkhouse sheets, rows of boots left behind departing feet.

I think of waking from anesthesia, taunted to walk through surgical pain, past the window of newborns, re-enforcing irretrievable loss, the insensitivity of a system that assigned hysterectomy patients to the maternity wing. It’s that inherent need to nurture that ruled Hannah’s passion for a child, that sense of the incomplete reflected in the eyes of Peninnah, the tiny sandals at the door of her tent. Such passion sparks sacrifice, gives the longed-for child to the priest, defines the inner core, the soul’s womb.

A native of Missouri, Rosanne Osborne has lived most of her adult life in Pineville, Louisiana. Until her recent retirement, she was Hixson Professor of English at Louisiana College. Her poetry has appeared in the Christian Century, Thema, and Penwood Review.

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Issue 12 //

SUMMER 2009

Barbara Crooker

June The thick syrup of birdsong pours over our heads, and the afternoon drowses in the heat. Only the butterflies are industrious, skipping from the foxgloves to roses the color of old bricks. Even in her wheelchair, my mother is still surprised when she sees one pink waterlily rising out of the mud in the koi pond. When I push her past it on the way back, she gets surprised all over again. I pick her a dandelion; it smells of nothing but summer. Later, when it goes to seed, we will make a wish before our breath sends its parachutes spinning across the lawn. I think about her last mammogram, the clusters of nebulae, and the black hole where cancer’s random toss planted its seed. Out in the grass, the dandelions spread their thin spatulate leaves, dig their tough roots deeper, ready for any weather.

Barbara Crooker has published poems in magazines such as Christianity and

Literature, the Christian Science Monitor, the Christian Century, Tiferet, Sojourners, Windhover, Literature and Belief, America, Rock and Sling, Radix, Relief, the Anglican Theologic Review, and the Cresset. She has also published two collections, Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize, and Line Dance, published in 2008 by Word Press. In 2003, she received the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award (Stanley Kunitz, judge). She lives and writes in rural northeastern Pennsylvania with her husband and twenty-year-old son, who has autism. Two daughters are grown, and she has one adorable grandson.

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Ad Lib Annual Retreat, 2009 September 11-13 in Colorado Springs Franciscan Retreat Center Writers, visual artists, performers, pastors, please consider joining us for a time of fellowship, worship, and learning in the gentle environment of Colorado Springs’ Franciscan Retreat Center.

Presentations will be given by Dr. Dan Siedell, author of the recently published book God In The Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, and Tim Ternes, representing the remarkable St. John’s Bible Project, the first hand-printed and illuminated biblical manuscript in the last 500 years. Open time will be scheduled for sharing, prayer, critique, or enjoying aspects of Colorado Springs.

Cost: $165 per person For room (double occupancy), food (Ad Lib will provide), and meeting room.

Inquire for further information and registration materials: Richard Terrell, Associate Director Ad Lib 6905 Forest Lake Blvd.

Lincoln, NE 68516 (402) 486-4198 or (402) 440-8851 www.adlibchristianarts.org

ruminated

LAST NOTE

join the discussion. visit our editor’s blog. www.ruminatemagazine.org/blogs 44

Tyrus Clutter. Altarpiece of St. Thomas Eliot. Mixed media with oil on book pages, bottles with wine and bread. Open: 21 x 43 x 3 inches.

Detail

Natalie Salminen Rude. Grace for the Fallen. Digital Image on Canvas. 24 x 24 inches.