Issue 17: Pilgrimage

PO ET RY

We do not see things as they are

FICT I O N

Getting to know her

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NONFICT I O N VISUAL A RT

A journey through the city

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Hannah VanderHart

Bill Cass

Traveling to taizé

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April Schmidt •

Gene Schmidt

THE 2010 JANET B. MCCABE POETRY PRIZE WINNERS

17 ISSUE

9 P I LG R I M AG E

autumn

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RUMINATE?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse; to meditate; to think again; to ponder 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 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 Christiane Buuck. “Alliance Catholique, Lourdes.” Digital photograph. 5 x 7 inches.

INSIDE FRONT COVER Marianne Lettieri. The Forwarding Address. Vintage cart wheels, house numbers, postcards, maps. 38 x 20 x 28 inches

INSIDE BACK COVER Marianne Lettieri. You Can’t Go Home Again. Balcony balustrade, Radio Flyer woody wagon, Boy Scout compass, red glitter

platform shoes, paint-by-number house. 47 x 16 x 11 inches.

Ruminate (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly by Ruminate Magazine, Inc., 140 North Roosevelt Avenue, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521. Postage paid at Fort Collins, Colorado, and is printed on certified paper from the Forest Stewardship Council. Postage paid at Fort Collins, CO. SUBMISSIONS We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round—you may submit online at our website.

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FRIENDS OF RUMINATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous summer and fall 2010 financial support has helped establish Ruminate at the intersection of faith, literature, and art. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors

Steve & Kim Franchini, Kelly & Sara McCabe, Ralph & Lisa Wegner, Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra & John Zeilstra

Patrons

Grace Church Presbyterian, Brad & Keira Havens, Imagined Design, Bruce & Cindy Jenkins, Katie & Ryan Jenkins, Katie & Tim Koblenz, Chris & Barb Melby, Paul Miller, Jerry Mossberg & Jan Sherrod-Mossberg, Brian & Anne Pageau, Richard & Rachel Rieves, Josh & Nicole Roloff, Troy & Kelly Suto, Paul & Sharon Willis

Sponsors

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STAFF

EXTRAORDINAIRE

editor-in-chief BRIANNA VA N DY K E

senior editor AMY LOWE

associate editors STEFANI R OSS I

ST E P H A N I E WA L K E R

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associate readers ALEXA BE H M E R LIBBY KUE N E K E

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W H I T N EY H A L E • P H I L L I P H E N RY • M A R C I J O H N SO N • ST E P H A N I E M I K K E LSO N • N I C H O LAS P R I C E • J O N AT H A N VA N DY K E

interns EDIE ADAM S • H A N N A H B LA I R MATTHEW KO H • E R I KA L EW I S • ST E P H A N I E V I SC H E R

design ANNE PAG EAU

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annepageau.com

outreach & marketing KEIRA HAV E N S

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CONTENTS

N OT ES editor’s from you artist’s contributor’s last

4 5 28 56 60

P O ET RY Hannah VanderHart

Owls 7

F I CT I O N Bill Cass

20 Home

Heather A. Goodman

48 Ash Wednesday

Ryan Harper

ESSAY

God Shed His Grace 8

Ellaraine Lockie

Waiting for Midnight 9

April Schmidt

11 Taizé

Rachel Dacus

Orchids and the Way 17

Ellen O’Connell

38 Fair Bodvar

Heather Matesich Cousins

Returning to Bear Lake 18

V I S UA L A RT

Richard Osler

Remnants 19

Emily Hayes

Christiane Buuck FRONT COVER

Another Winter 33

Chelsea Henderson

Five Stones 34 A Last Sunday in Charlottesville 35

Thom Caraway

The Leper Attends the Idaho State Roadkill Fur Auction 36 You’ll Never Be Here Again 37

Kelly Beahm

If I could 45

Sara Maria Harenchar

The Remaking 47

Sally Molini

Hibernaculum 55

Maryann Corbett

Late Season Day Trip 60

Alliance Catholique, Lourdes

Marianne Lettieri INSIDE FRONT COVER INSIDE BACK COVER

The Forwarding Address You Can’t Go Home Again

Ken Gibson

10 Holy Water (Vatican)

Gene Schmidt

29-31 Lovetown, PA Series

Mandy Thrasher

32 Untitled 1 BACK COVER Untitled 9

Stephen Mead

46 Threshold

EDITOR’S NOTE

to

Ruminate’s Issue 17: Pilgrimage. You may notice some changes around here, that we’ve taken our own pilgrimage, of sorts. And well, we have. Over the past four and a half years Ruminate has grown into a robust publication with talented contributors and faithful readers. And we’ve learned some things about ourselves along the way.

We love making Ruminate, making it open and playful and rich. We also like the quietness of the creamy white space on the page and the carefully placed letters and images. We like the contemplative gift that Ruminate extends to our readers, the prayers it shares, and grappling that it encourages. So we’ve reworked our logo and layout to reflect this, we have plans to add interviews and reviews, and we even changed our tagline from “faith in literature and art” to the more earthy and playful “chewing on life, faith, and art.” Thank you all for taking this journey with us—we hope you like the changes.

This issue also holds the winning poems from our 2010 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. Thank you to all of our entrants for sharing your work and to our gracious judge Vito Aiuto. Congratulations to the winning poet, Hannah VanderHart, and to Ryan Harper and Ellaraine Lockie for the runner-up prizes, and to all of our finalists. Mr. Aiuto writes: “I am thankful I was asked to read the poems that comprised the finalists for Ruminate’s poetry prize. It was a privilege and a pleasure to spend some time in the company of people who were willing to sing like that.”

You’ll also find in this issue our gatherings on the theme of pilgrimage, on journeys of all kinds— from losing one’s house to fire, traveling to a Taizé monastery in France, floating past the English countryside on a canal boat, and journeying through Philadelphia, to an evening in the Boreal forest, a lost chance for love, the Idaho State Roadkill Fur Auction, and making a shelter. It bears proof that we are all pilgrims traveling great distances and depths to see the sacred place.

I hope you enjoy the travels,

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FROM YOU

Ruminate’s pilgrims and their journeys . . .

At nineteen, on my own, I rode a bus twenty-three hours from London to Hungary seeking sacrifice, drama, a certain call. To God I would say: Igen! Yes! Stephanie in Budapest lived my ideal: single woman serving Eastern Europe. Her calm gray eyes saw everything. But she was going home to get married. She’d had her legs waxed. Lynnette and Beth, new missionaries, introduced me to the blue Duna, Maria Teresa yellow, the markets, May Day celebration, dark Hungarian literature. The Colemans, too, seemed normal.

They had good credit. Their kids played soccer, worried over homework, wished to paint their fingernails. We baked a cake.

Finally, from Jerry, in the kitchen: you don’t have to decide your whole life now. Experiment. Enjoy. Get good at what you like. There’s time. Later, you’ll know what to do.

I came home to study art.

ANNA MARIA JOHNSON .

Broadway, Virginia

We load the church van with donuts, egg-salad sandwiches and apprehension. Someone slams the ill-fitting doors and we rattle away, past car dealerships, malls, well-heeled neighborhoods and wary inner city storefronts, everything waiting for Monday’s dawn. We unload, redistribute our bounty and wait.

Father, forgive us, for we are afraid.

They’re waiting, jagged ranks of weathered faces, layered clothes, and backpacks, smiling, smoking, staring. Onward Christian soldiers we march, past these patrons, our friends, displaying Jesus-love in stacked donut boxes and smiles. We regroup in the kitchen. Elbow to elbow we pour coffee, spread the counter with food. We pray, amens sounding as booted feet tromp the stairs. We are bravest behind the counter.

Later, we leave the kitchen’s shelter, searching out friendly faces. We sit at tables cluttered with elbows, cups and ashtrays, barely room enough to unfold the map that marks a path to common ground.

BOB VANDER LUGT .

Caledonia, Michigan

To be honest, I had to look up the word pilgrimage. It’s not a common word in our culture. But, my journey—my place to revelation—is one I’ve been finding for over thirty years.

Despite being taught that we “ought to love one another” at church, despite my parents love for me and each other, despite the example of love that my husband gives me daily, and the love I have for my children, I now finally understand this: That God is love. I mean, full of love. So much so that if we were standing at his feet, it’s all we would hear, taste, smell, or see. It’s a daily journey to accept and be in His love.

HEATHER SPIVA .

Sacramento, California

I am a woman in my seventies, married forever, with children and grandchildren. In my fifties, I graduated from the University of Puget Sound and began writing poetry. My poems reflect the quiet, domestic life I have led. I grew up and spent much of my life in Western Washington. My husband and I have now retired in Montana, in the tiny town of St. Regis, tucked away in the mountains, near the Idaho Panhandle.

GLENNA COOK .

St. Regis, Montana

I was born and raised in Chicago in a Mexican-American household. My mother was German, but due to my father’s overwhelming dominance, the family culture was surely Mexican.

We attended a Lutheran church on Chicago’s South Side until I was fifteen, when we moved to Powder River, Wyoming.

The culture shock was significant, but I loved every minute of living in the West. We moved thirty-eight miles to Casper, Wyoming, seven months later, where I met my future wife.

My wife and I then moved to Eastern Washington and became teachers. And after a thirty-year teaching career, I retired from the public schools. Still married to the girl I met in Wyoming, I spend my days writing, reading, running, and gardening.

MICHAEL ALEMAN .

Spokane, Washington

Send us your notes for Issue 18 on sounds and silence to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. We love hearing from you!

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2010

JANET B. MCCABE POETRY PRIZE J U D G E D BY VITO AIUTO who is a husband, father, poet, pastor and, with his wife Monique, half of the gospel folk duo The Welcome Wagon.

S P O N SO R E D BY STEVE AND KIM FRANCHINI in loving memory of Janet McCabe, who was a faithful collector of good words.

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First Place

Owls

HANNAH VANDERHART . Page 7

Runner-up

God Shed His Grace

RYAN HARPER . Page 8

Honorable Mention Waiting for Midnight Janet McCabe, 1951.

ELLARAINE LOCKIE . Page 9

Hannah VanderHart

Owls

for my brother Ansil

Our intellect is related to what is most evident as the eye of an owl to the sun.

—Aquinas, De Trinitate

i.

Aquinas runs his finger down the untried Difficult, ponders at the algae in The pool, effect of the sun all day; we do Not see things as they are, or if we do We call them visions, separate them out Like cards with insufficient postage. ii.

Pack your bag and thermos, brother, we Will hunt tonight in slippers, carry nets, Leave the luna moths on the front door’s screen, Leave the great green wings in order to see New things: the moon. We will leave the sun to owls That fly by day, diurnal, golden eyes That flinch at nothing externally bright. The northern Hawk is such an owl: lululu it sings in the Boreal forest. We will look for twentyThree specimens of delight, knowing that twentyThree times twenty-three times seventy Are the numbers of the beautiful at night. iii.

Day shines—and we heft our bags like there was no Night of seeing or a starry past You are loading boxes for a man, Testing his guns, each gun, every gun that is Rat-a-tat-a-tat—and at my desk Some songs are playing, mimicry of owls.

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Ryan Harper

God Shed His Grace On this, the volcanologists agree: beneath Wyoming boils a magma sea not meaningfully cooler than the sun (by the standard of human tolerance); six hundred forty thousand years, it has been cooking, pressurized; but any day now (by the standard of solar systems and collapsing stars) it is going to blow some ten miles high, some thousands wide—fire chunks of yellowstone and trees, of grizzly bear and campground showers; most of the country, buried teton-high in sulfuric ash, will disappear, as will the sun, from earth for good (by the standard of Independence Day transcendence).

About such matters, no one knows: how much Columbia’s black acidic belch will change the oceans, poles, this time; where Jackson Hole’s exiles will turn; what papers will be demanded of them; what purple-mountain poet will rewrite “America, the Beautiful”; how great will grow St. Petersburg, Miami, and—dear god—New York! What of New York? And by what standard will we judge the world ended?

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Ellaraine Lockie

Waiting for Midnight My grandson says Ouma, you're just like Cinderella as I feed carrots and lettuces to five rabbits in the backyard Seeds to the squirrels and twenty-some species of birds Walnuts and dry cat food for the crows I believe he expects me to entice them all into my art studio to design a gown for the evening We don't talk anymore about the mouse my cat caught when he learned life isn't always a fairy tale He knows by now I don't believe in cages and that there should be only one zoo in every country What he doesn't know is how insignificant that glass slipper is How searching for it can rust years from their hinges Open doors into rooms that breathe Marlboro smoke, whiskey and musk oil Ghost of the male deer donor hanging from a rafter Men with oiled skin that lusters like a yellow canary diamond Who smell the scent of longing and hunt it down Catch and release until they're bored with the wounds and slam the door in your face Yet you open another before scabs form Until finally you're bled dry and forced to heal You learn the power of prayer How to meditate in your backyard To watch a banana blossom unfold I tell none of this to my grandson He'll have to discover for himself the difference between authentic and synthetic How the latter is only snake oil That a fence around a place isn't always a cage but protection from the other side And that even a castle has a wall or moat

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Ken Gibson. “Holy Water (Vatican).” Digital photograph. 5 x 6.5 inches.

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Taizé

APRIL SCHMIDT

I am here by none of my own doing. I have done nothing to get to this place.

An overnight bus ride, trying to sleep with my head ducked in a carpeted cabinet to have dark and quiet, waking with my heart flabby. Then sitting up to the front window, heart sloshing, hanging over the driver on the top of a double-decker bus. Out the window: tender, growing, pink-topped hills, the sunrise like a settling pashmina. Rose, lavender, sage, buttercup. Each color every color. And tender grapevines reaching across the fields, leaves like children’s hands, tendrils like a child’s finger, reaching, reaching for a small warm touch of assurance.

There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: a flowered meadow, silence, Easter, and loneliness. In the midst of four months studying literature abroad, I have ended up at a monastery in Burgundy, spending a week in silence in the days before Easter. It’s been raining for three months: England. And now I wake up in pink sun over hazy lavender and yellow flax fields and visit a chapel full of flame. I eat crusty bread with sweet butter and skim the skin from bowls of dusky hot chocolate. I drink lemony tea in the afternoon, my reflection quivering in the amber scooped from a hot silver tub. I sleep alone in a barrack room, on a top bunk, with other women, in their twenties and in silence, in rooms around me. I pray, in common, in chant, three times a day. It’s the only sound I make. I walk in the afternoons past white cows with stout horns and wet noses in green fields. I eat with women from Holland, Germany, Canada, and Spain without speaking, passing and seasoning simple meals without words. I paint, with a child’s box of watercolors, spongy swamps of pigment and a plastic brush, whatever flowers I find. I don’t ask why I do any of it. It’s here, and I am, and that seems enough.

This morning I woke in my rocking metal bed to the monastery bells and went to shower in a common bathroom. There are eleven of us women here in silence and other young people all around the monastery, meeting each other and talking about faith. Our home while we are silent is a square of barracks around open grass with a common room on one side and a bathroom on the other. They all have steel corrugated roofs and concrete floors.

Clutching my toothbrush, toothpaste, towel and soap, I walk across the open grass, the hem of my pants getting licked by the dew. As I brush in front of the chipped and murky mirror, two other women come in and prepare to bathe, balancing towels on hooks and shower rods and checking the curtains for spiders and webs. I step in a shower after them and undress, hanging my clothes carefully in backward order on the hook out the door, my puny hand towel balanced on top like a mop wig.

In succession, each of us flip on the water with the fill and burst spray of uncovered pipes. Three loud consecutive commands for quiet: Shh. Shh. Shh. I suck my naked body back against the wall, 11

pressing my lungs up and pulling my hips back. The cold water spatters on the skin of my stomach.

I flip my hand in and out of the stream waiting for the heat. The backs of my legs hover near the cold concrete. Flip: Wait. Flip: Wait. I think we simultaneously give up.

One by one, the sound of the water splashing on the floor deadens as our bodies jump in the flow.

Icy water smears down my shoulders, breasts, and hips, and slathers my stomach and thighs. Novocain cold streams down my scalp. Cells chill. Air thrusts from my lungs.

Lined up in a monastery bathroom, we gasp and pant: a line of dignified, seeking women slotted in shower stalls. Together we suck air and utter little cries of shock, no one covering the experience with words. With only the whimpering presence of body, we pant and chuckle, together in our freezing flesh.

This place is all mornings. Even on the way to evening prayer, the bells clang and peel, tumbling up and out like a sunrise even as the sky is beginning to settle and smolder. I walk alone from our square of barracks onto the noisy gravel path. By now the others here know by sight who’s in silence, and I can move in a bubble of

solitude even in the crowd. The permission in silence is astounding. I am allowed to watch and absorb without responding or entertaining. I’m basking in the relief of this release.

I walk to the left entrance of the chapel, a low, plain building without stone or a steeple, and drag my fingers across the bushes by the door. The leaves pass their aroma and make my hands smell of dust and rosemary. The smell itself is like a ritual, accessible but rooted in something ancient and mysterious. Rosemary, for remembrance, and dust.

The inside of the chapel is dark and open. Thin green carpet covers the ground and skinny steel pillars hold up the ceiling. Down the center, two rows of boxes form an aisle. The boxes are planted with the rosemary-smelling bushes. Bach is playing. Across the room four stained-glass windows punch color into the dim. They are square and monochromatic like four lit jewels set in the wall: blue, red, green, orange. The front of the chapel blazes. Triangles of orange fabric leap to the ceiling, open squares of clay stack and scatter across the floor like burning coals. The candles in them flicker.

Together they ripple and pulse.

I find my spot on the floor next to the bushes, close enough to the front that all I can see is the flame.

I sit large to preserve my space as others walk in and settle. I cannot open when surrounded. I hate that the practical things make such a difference. And am disappointed.

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I slide off my shoes, pulling the back strap over my calloused heel, and sit hugging my knees staring at the cratered soles and cracked leather, waiting for them to transfigure into a spiritual lesson. The only one that comes to mind I’ve heard before. The brothers walk in and I hear the rustle of their white robes as they kneel in the aisle. Bach stops and there’s a pause while the hidden musicians prepare to begin the service. I keep staring at my shoes. I know there’s a digital sign in the left corner; its red numbers showing the location of the first song. It’s so practical. I hate it, when I don’t need it.

The songs begin: simple repeated chants in all the languages of the world. The sound seems to come from everywhere, blooming out of the air above my head and glowing there. A haunted line breathes low through the flute and something in my guts stretches down and pools. It’s time to begin my prayer.

I turn my legs and kneel on the thin carpet, dirt poking into the skin on my knees and forearms, my forehead resting in my palms. I try to pray in silence, directing words at God from the back of my bowed skull. I feel my knees and palms and elbows. I can smell my own breath. I see an hourglass of dark between my knees and hanging breasts. My hair is spilled on the gritty floor around my head.

The chants continue to float above me, a cantor breaking through like a message bearer, his tenor voice open like a bell.

I fold my knuckles and lay my forehead on the ground to try and mouth my prayer. “God,—.

Lord—.” Neither of these are right. “El Roi.” It feels strange to shape the Hebrew words, artificial, appropriated. The God who sees me. I feel my legs and toes begin to tingle. They’ll be numb soon and standing will be clenching and difficult. Songs continue to open in the air. A man reads in French from one of the gospels. The chapel is silent. The silence rings in its emptiness. Full of bodies and candles and dirt. Rings in its openness. Full of body and sandals and hurt. “El Roi.” El Roi. This uses all my faith, is my entire prayer.

I spend my afternoons in the meadow enclosed by our barracks. It’s full of perfect weeds: white puff dandelions, yellow buttercups, tall tiny daisies. I sit with my back against an adolescent poplar, slender and strong as a young girl, or lying in the grasses looking through their green hollow and fibery stems floating with white and yellow orbs. I feel like a small bird from here, hidden, with my big, glassy eyes. I think I could be content to eat seeds.

All afternoon I read and write. I’ve made a new journal of cheap paper, stitched together with a sewing kit and covered with one of my simple watercolor flowers. I write long rambling entries, dreaming about marriage and motherhood, open to femininity and hope uncut by intellectualism and practicality. I blow dandelion seeds and make wishes. For the first time in my life I write without embarrassment about the softness of the air on my skin and the feeling of my hips when I walk. For the first time I think it might be worth it to be a woman. For the first time “bride” sloughs its puny, girlish pettiness and becomes regal, self-possessed, and crowned. For the first time, I think lovingly about the word “daughter” and the music of “Our Father who art in heaven.”

Each morning Sister Anne stands with us in the common room and gives us scripture for the day. She wears simple wool skirts, flat brown sandals, and blouses with pockets. She speaks to us in English, reading from the gospels or of Jonah or Deborah with her head uncovered, speaking like these men and women were her family, saying “Jesus” with her soft French accent, “jsah-see,” easily, like he is among her friends. I picture over and over again the women at the tomb and keep thinking her name is Mary. She is so much like one, in wisdom and peace, who’s finished crying.

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We don’t speak among ourselves, except to translate. Esther takes in the English and in quiet intercessions speaks to one of the other women in Spanish. Esther reminds me of the other Mary, somehow both young and wise.

Sometimes Sister Anne reads the scripture in French as she knows it, letting each of us find our way to the text in our own language. “Jean, chapitre vingt et un, verset vingt-cinq: Jésus a accompli encore bien d'autres choses. Si on voulait les raconter une à une, je pense que le monde entier ne suffirait pas pour contenir tous les livres qu'il faudrait écrire.”

Esther whispers, “Jesús hizo muchas otras cosas también. Si cada de una fueran escritas, me imagino que aún el mundo entero no tendría espacio para los libros que serían escritos.”

Later today I stand among tables of the pottery the brothers make to support their community. Each piece has a small stamp on the bottom, taizé, because none of them take personal credit for the work they do. I stand before the cash register with a wide-bowled oil lamp in my hands; its purchase both a recognition that I will have to leave this place and a weak, material effort to carry away a piece of its flame. I am trying to buy a symbol.

As I wait, I think of the scripture Sister Anne has given us: a library in heaven. I stand with the clay lamp in my hands, elbows akimbo, passport pouch across my shoulders, and a scene drops into my head: A young man with dark skin and wavy hair stands in front of a shelf full of books. This man, the Son of God is sliding one book back onto the shelf, smiling. I have books in God’s library. If God has a library, my name is in the pages. I stand in line for the cash register, my arms full of clay, lashes laced in blinking tears.

Today is Maundy Thursday, a day named for washing feet. I have never been able to feel guilty or joyful enough for Easter; have always felt less like a believer this time of the year than ever. So I try to ignore it, even here. Especially here. Where expectation for miracle, for magic, for transcendence is so easy.

Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Week. The labels bring back my skepticism, my intellectualizing, my nuancing. My oh-so-sophisticated realism. The core becomes a hard gunmetal marble, a flint, a scrutinizing mirror.

During afternoon prayer I analyze the parts of the service, categorize the ecumenical into traceable influences from denominations, countries, orders, hemispheres. The icon on the cross from the Russians, robes from the Benedictines, urgent social intercessories from the liberation theologists, thin green carpet from the Americans. I pray as I should: dignified, orderly, focused on the articulatable needs of others. “Be with Megan and Mindy as they are deciding what to do with their lives.” “Be with Mom and Dad as they prepare to have an empty house.” “Be with Betsy and Brian as they grow in their relationship.”

After climbing the stairs of personal petition, I reach a higher plateau blooming with words and diction.

“Be with all those suffering: the mothers trying to care for their children, the children without food or protection, all of those living in wars.” I begin to walk around the plateau, harvesting the waving, preassembled bouquets. “Burden the powerful with mercy and the powerless with strength. Grant sustaining beauty to refugees and exiles. Free prisoners from unjust jailers and use just jailers to free prisoners from themselves. Heal the sick and wounded, both in body and in spirit. Provide balm for the abandoned and the lonely. Shine wisdom on the leaders and infuse grace in their actions.” I have no trouble filling the hour.

After prayer, I sling on my shoes and duck out of the chapel. The sun stamps my retina, slams into the back of my eyes. My pupils wince and squeeze. Insects buzz in the brightness, humming over the rosemary-smelling bushes. The feet of those in front of me munch on the gravel as they walk toward their tents in knots of three or four, walking like philosophers leaving the Akademeia. I walk along the road thinking of how much I accomplished during prayer. The insects keep buzzing.

I leave the main road, crossing through the low, snapping gate that marks the area for those in silence,

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and look especially into the bush of orange pompoms in front of the sisters’ quarters. The bugs are so loud today I guess they’ve gathered between the branches. I walk around the sisters’ house toward the entrance to the meadow and turn the corner toward the line with our shower towels rocking in the breeze.

There are no bugs. A man is mowing down my meadow.

A riding lawn mower is lapping the square, rolling over the dandelions, slicing the buttercups.

Clouds of dandelion seeds rock in the air around the mower.

They are mowing my meadow. They are mowing my meadow.

The rasping of the motors files the inside of my ears. The buttercups bend forward as the mower rolls over them, clump limp behind the blade. The exhaust spits more rocking seeds into the air.

No. I feel like I’m shivering. The man gets off his mower and rakes up the stripe behind it. He scoops up the flowers and dumps them in a black trash bag.

No. There’s an open spot in the top of my head, a space left where something small and hard evaporated.

Jesus, stop them. Jesus, please stop them.

The man gets back on the mower and continues cutting. Another man rides into the meadow from the back corner by the shower. They shout to each other in French, one pointing to a pocket in the corner of the square, the other nodding and gesturing that he’ll cut around the poplar.

Someone has kicked me in the chest, their foot punching my sternum inches into my lungs.

They are cutting my buttercups. They are throwing away my wishes.

The second man finishes clearing the far corner. The first man is still circling, putting edges on the meadow and shrinking the wild, growing space. He’s turning the meadow into an English lawn. I feel like my blood is draining out the bottoms of my feet.

Jesus, stop them. Jesus, please stop them.

The second man rides up next to the first. They talk, the first nods at something the other has said then jumps off the mower and rakes up the stripe behind him while the other man leaves. What’s left will be no trouble for one mower.

Clutching the slouching black bag, the man gets back on the mower. He swings the wheel wide to slice through the middle of the square, but instead of looping, he keeps going.

Without looking back, he rides off to the corner, leaving the job unfinished.

I stand staring at the square of flowers in front of me. A banner of dandelion seeds trails, rocking, to the ground.

Thank you. Thank you.

15

* * * A young woman moves among the flowers stooping and gathering in plain khaki shorts and a white t-shirt.

She’s not old enough for her movements to be poised or precise, but she’s past the teenage awkwardness of arms and legs moving in visible intention. She’s young and a woman; her body is as noticeable to others, slim and taut, and as transparent to herself, unpained and unmanaged, as it will ever be.

She walks carefully through the patch, picking buttercups with her right hand and placing their thin stems in her left, holding them openly in a ring of her thumb and finger, their bowing heads brushing the tan skin at the base of her thumb and the curl of her knuckle. The very tip of her tongue has snuck out the right corner of her lips. It’s difficult to tell if this is a genuine slip into unselfconsciousness or a plotted action to move her mind toward a certain childlikeness.

Her long brown hair is wound at the back of her head absorbing the sun as she picks only the best blooms, still careful not to leave any single spot bare. Finally, she steps high over the grass and walks into a common room to wrap the bottoms of the stems in cool, wet paper, a brown speckled swaddling to rest in her palm. She leaves the common room and the square and walks down the road toward the chapel, her sandals scuffing the gravel, the flowers carefully unremarkable at her left side. They are a private gift.

Inside the chapel she finds her place and kneels on the gritty floor, her forehead in her palms, the flowers on the thin carpet in front of her shoulder. She drops into prayer like a contraction, single-minded, her spirit laboring and unspooling like a ribbon pulling from her chest out her throat. She prays water, sunlight, comfort, and armor, pushing them from her chest, laboring to birth them, against gravity, from the muscles of her heart.

She prays until her spirit is so tired that she weeps.

When she’s finished, her eyes are wet and her breathing is settled. She wipes the clinging water from her eyelashes and sits. In the aisle, between the bushes, others are gathered around a cross lying in the center. She sees them from a distance as people kneeling around a piece of painted wood, medieval and superstitious. She feels foolish, but determines to give her gift anyway, tired of letting self-consciousness and practicality close every window.

Stepping quietly, she walks to the cross and kneels behind the people around it. Candles flicker at the head and feet and at the tip of each nailed hand, casting a sheen on the lacquer. Having grown up in a church without images, she doesn’t know how to look at this cross with a face, but she understands symbol. She holds the buttercups in her hands and bends her body forward, her mind full of space after the emptying of her prayer.

She’s not used to giving things like this, so she only opens her hand and lets the flowers to the floor while she marks the gift in herself with a wordless sort of space, an open sphere of acknowledgement. The flowers lay by his right open hand.

She sits up again, looking down at her shadow from the candlelight, sand pressing in her knees and tired, and an unthought phrase opens in her. I’ll take them with me. She smiles in the candlelight, in disbelief or wonder.

Maybe both.

That night while she’s trying to express her experience, she writes, feeling foolish and humble and honest, “I just wanted to give him something for his kitchen table.”

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ISSUE

17 autumn

2010

Rachel Dacus

Orchids and the Way Dangling white parasailers, the orchids arch over a photograph I took on a journey to Shirdi in a rocking, rattling bus going from Aurangabad on a monsoonal August day. My pilgrim’s memento.

The white wings lift me again into that rainy afternoon, jolting me back into the gray landscape where anything white stood out stark as a signpost and the drip of the air conditioning in the bus maddened my forearm as it rested on the window’s grime.

We could make out nothing through spatters but the whitewashed banyan tree boles, their octopus limbs reaching down to root and make miles more banyans.

Standing in Sai Baba’s shrine, the line that seemed to stretch into banyan roots and the chant through the loudspeakers crazed my head until women reached out because I seemed to be going to faint.

A pilgrim flies heart-open into the dark. I know this. I look back now and through the photograph while the tabletop orchid runes and puns to the tune of Asia. I wonder what I was doing there, unworshipful at a tired shrine. Why does anyone wayfare through a wilderness, grasp at the far end of their knowing, if not to unfurl in a flash the stark wall of unreason. There in a humid, echoing hall, nameless and as unrooted as I have ever been, I could step forward, each pace a slow year, and emerge from fear’s tangle into a space that opened where I had been long and least able to budge.

17

Heather Matesich Cousins

Returning to Bear Lake My neighbor takes up a position on his deck at twilight and cups his hands over his mouth and bleats like a foghorn to remind the fishermen that the sky is purple.

The fishermen leave home-going trails of shirred light on the surface of the silver water.

I cross the creaking white boards of the dock and stand on the very edge and don’t look down.

I am standing on the water.

The fishermen reach the far shores.

The lake is still.

Just a few pinpricks of movement where the mosquitoes dip.

The lake is a road no one is traveling, a broad field no one runs through.

It stretches out around me.

I dare myself—once again—to walk across it.

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ISSUE

17 autumn

2010

Richard Osler

Remnants Waves gather up and fall.

Sun pours in from the east.

Tethered boats zig-zag out on the bay. The wind brailles my face. The brown dog belongs to its stick, my throwing, the water that holds them both up and her insistence when I stop.

I have faith in this breathing and writing and the crow’s black caw.

The geese left with three goslings from April’s twelve. The smaller stick chewed and now in pieces by my feet.

The small black rocks lost in the volcano’s last breath.

The driftwood logs left on the beach.

My own life, coming apart into the smallest things.

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BILL CASS

Now, as I near the end of my days, I wonder how we come to call a place: home. Born there,

perhaps. A job. Climate. Family roots, getting away from something, love. None of those have dictated my decisions in this regard. I was a tradesman, a laborer really, all my life, and could do a number of simple things passably well. Worked in several factories and on a number of construction projects.

Spent a fair amount of time in the merchant marines. Helped on a few ranches, drove trucks, welded. A lifetime of doing this and that in this or that place.

One time, about twenty-five years ago, I was heading from one place to the next, driving from Seattle across the Great Plains to Omaha to work with a cousin who had recently started a painting business there. It was late fall. All the corn had been turned under; the fields were either barren or had been rotated with dry grass that was brown and patchy. Endless stretches of brown or brown-yellow, an occasional wet ditch, and dipping telephone lines along the roadside. The sky was a sheet of gray, and it felt like it might snow.

I stopped the second night near dusk where two roads intersected at a low, flat, pink motel made of cinder blocks. Six rooms in a row with a white farmhouse at one end, some outbuildings next to it, a gravel parking lot, and an empty swimming pool with juniper bushes between the house and the rooms.

There was a big tree on one side of the house whose empty branches hung over a corner of the pool.

The foyer of the farmhouse served as the motel office. I rang the bell on the little desk next to the staircase. A middle-aged man came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a dishtowel. Through the doorway, I could see the back of a woman standing at the kitchen sink, water running. They both had short, salt-and-pepper hair.

He didn’t ask if I wanted a room, but took out a small card and a pen from the desk and set them down in front of me. I filled out the card and put the amount of money noted on top of it while he sorted through a cigar box of keys. He handed me one.

I said, “I can’t remember my license plate number. Want me to go and look?”

“Nope,” he said. “I gave you the end room, the one farthest away from the highway. Have you eaten?”

I shook my head.

“Well, if you’re looking for something to do, you can go into Carson. There’s a diner there might still be open and a pizza place. Else we can fix you up a sandwich or something.”

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2010

“Sandwich suits me fine,” I said.

“Won’t be fancy.” He looked out the window past me at the gray sky that had grown pink on the horizon. “I like to sit outside a while this time of night, watch the light change. If it’s not too cold for you, go get settled and come out by the pool. I’ll bring your food out there.”

I said thanks and drove over to the room. It was clean and spare. I washed up, put on a coat, and went back outside. He was sitting in one of the two rusty, tulip-backed chairs next to the pool holding a plate and a brown mug from which steam curled. He watched me come across the cinder parking lot and sit down next to him. Then he handed me the food and set the mug next to me on the concrete.

“My wife made that chicken salad and the pie,” he said. “It’s pretty good.”

“Thanks,” I said. I took a bite of the sandwich and looked at it. “That’s great.”

He nodded and looked out across the highway where the horizon had a purple line drawn between the gray and pink. A barn stood silhouetted in the front of the field across from us, and a flock of widely dispersed blackbirds flew through the hue over the stand of trees at the back of it.

“Is there a river back there?” I gestured with the sandwich where he was gazing.

“Creek,” he said, pronouncing it, “crick”. “Brook. Stream. Whatever you want to call it. Isn’t big enough to be called a river. Sometimes brings enough water to irrigate, that’s about all.”

I looked at the side of him and took a sip of tea. His face needed shaving. The outsides of his eyelids drooped, and his lips were pressed together in a short, thin mark. There were large calluses on both his palms where they met his fingers. He held his hands in his lap, sat back and rubbed his thumbs together slowly. I thought that he was perhaps ten years older than me, somewhere in his mid-fifties.

I asked, “You farm any of this?”

“Used to,” he said. He swept his hand in an arc. “Just about all of it at one time. Sold it off little by little. We had no kids to help, to pass it on to. Built this fly-by operation a few years back and sold everything but a couple acres next to the house where we keep a garden and a horse. That’s it.”

“Place doing all right?”

“You’re the only paying customer right now,” he chuckled. “Summer, we get a little better business. It’s at this crossroads, you see. Truth is, most folks use the interstate nowadays. Thought about putting in a filling pump, maybe a lunch counter-type deal to help drum up business, but I don’t know . . . it hasn’t worked out to be quite as lucrative as we’d hoped. Time goes on and it doesn’t make as much sense as it used to.” He shrugged. “We get by.”

I nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me. I stared out where he was: fencing and barren land in every direction. An eighteen-wheeler rumbled by from the north. It was the first vehicle that had passed since I’d sat down. Then a tiny, thin cloud of dust rose from the back of the field behind the barn, and in front of it an old truck snaked slowly toward us.

He said quietly, “Kate.”

I asked, “That truck?”

We watched the ribbon of smoke drift after the truck for a moment. Then he pointed and said, “That barn burned down last spring. Struck by lightning. Course, we all got together, raised them a new one. Then worse yet, her husband dies at the equinox. Some kind of aneurysm.” He shook his head. “She’s had an awful time of it. Trying to keep up the farm and the kids on her own.”

The truck kept along. I ate the warm pie and we watched. The sky was muffled now, gray-purple toward the truck and the rest of it going dark. A few stars had crept out. The truck came up the last rise and alongside the barn. A woman with brown hair, jeans, and a jean jacket climbed out followed by a little tow-headed boy and girl in too-big sweatshirts. She waved once to the man next to me, then dragged open the big barn doors, and the children followed her inside. A cream-colored light filled

21

the barn’s windows, as well as the patch of dirt in front of the open doors.

“Feeding time,” the man said softly.

We watched the coal-like figures of cows lumbering slowly in from the field in the gathering darkness. Now our breath hung in short cloud blasts. I sipped tea and held the mug in both hands to warm them.

After a few moments, Kate came back out of the barn and walked up to the fence across the shallow gully next to the roadside. She put her arms on top of one of the posts.

“Say, Rudy,” she called. “I could use a hand with something, if you got a minute.”

He stood up.

I said, “Can I help?”

“Come along, if you want. Maybe she needs something lifted.”

We walked across the highway, between the barbed wire strands, and stood in front of her in the soft, crumbling earth. Kate’s skin was either wind or sun-darkened, but it didn’t hurt the way she looked. She nodded to me and I nodded back.

She said, “Heifer’s got her head stuck.”

“Let’s go see,” Rudy said.

The big clumps of dirt broke softly and easily under our feet. The collective low moans of the approaching cows mingled with the quiet voices inside the barn. When we stepped into the light, I could see her children up in the hayloft holding toy cars.

There were perhaps twenty open slats low on the far side of the barn. The trough on the inside of the slats was full of the new hay she’d spread. The muzzles of most of the cows chewed hay from outside in the barnyard on the other side of the slats. But in the slat closest to the barn door, a heifer’s small head had come all the way through the boards and was tossing awkwardly in the hay. The sound from it reminded me of a bleat from a sheep being shorn. We walked up to it.

“There she is,” Kate said. “That gap’s been fine for all the rest. No problems.”

Rudy nodded and smiled. “Well, she isn’t happy with things right now, is she? Let’s get her out.”

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2010

He brushed a strand of hay from the heifer’s eye, which looked up at him big and terrified. “Go out in the yard and hold her rear end. When I say so, sit her down.”

Although he hadn’t asked me specifically, I followed Kate through the gate and into the black mud of the barnyard. We stood behind the heifer. The cold night sky had filled with stars. Steam rose off the backs of the cows. Tails swished around us, and the smell of dung was sweet in the back of my nose. We glanced at each other.

Rudy asked, “Ready?”

“Yes,” Kate answered, and set her hands on the heifer’s hind flank. I did the same on my side.

Through the slats, we watched Rudy slowly lower one hand under the heifer’s muzzle and close the other over it. He held his hands firmly together and told her, “Shh.” Then he gently turned the heifer’s face so that she looked straight ahead, and lifted it. Her hooves pawed the muck. One of the other cows began to urinate, a steady, steam-filled, forceful stream.

“All right,” Rudy said slowly. “Easy now. Stand away from her legs. Set her rump down towards the end of the yard. Easy.”

We did, and he helped the heifer’s head back through the slats. Her ears folded over on themselves, then she was out, running on her spindly legs clumsily to the end of the yard. Kate looked at me and smiled.

“Thanks,” she said.

I nodded. She wiped her palms on the front of her jeans, and then I followed her around to the open doorway of the barn. Rudy was tossing new hay into the depression where the heifer’s head had been. Kate walked up to him and patted his shoulder twice.

“Appreciate that,” she told him.

He said, “Gwen’s made pie. You and the kids want some, come over.”

“Wish we could,” she said. “Getting late though. School night.”

A toy car fell out of the loft into the sawdust near my feet. I handed it back up to the boy, who had his mother’s big, gentle eyes. I looked at her and those eyes smiled again.

“All right, then,” I heard Rudy say.

I held her gaze as long as I dared, then followed him back through the field, under the fencing, and across the highway to the motel.

He picked up the plate and mug, and we stood next to the tulip-backed chairs. It was quiet. The soft white light from the kitchen came across the lower part of the big tree and threw shadows on that corner of the empty pool. A broken branch sat still among the wet leaves on the blue cement bottom. The light also crossed the side of Rudy’s face, darkening it. He extended his hand and I shook it. He went back inside, and I walked around the pool to my room listening to their storm door swing slowly shut behind him.

Later in the night, I heard a train go by quite a ways off through the fields to the north. Perhaps, I can remember thinking, I could get to know her and maybe other things would develop from there.

But I didn’t see how. I’d been alone a long time.

Every now and then, a truck or a car went by in one of the four directions. Otherwise, it was still, except for a few birds that started tittering towards daybreak.

I stopped at the diner in Carson that next morning for breakfast. It was just a little narrow place on a corner with a short counter and a couple of booths. Two men in work caps and plaid, long-sleeved shirts sat across from one another at the back booth, and a waitress was pouring coffee at the end of the counter for an old man with a toothpick between his lips. They were the only people that I could see in the place. They all stopped and watched me as I settled onto a stool near the cash register.

23

The waitress came over, set a cup in front of me, and filled it with coffee. She was a solid woman with a friendly face and glasses. I ordered eggs and toast, and she called that through a little window behind her. It was warm. I unbuckled my coat. The two men went back to talking quietly. The old man and I nodded at each other and then turned back to our coffee. Smells from the spitting grill came from the kitchen.

The waitress set a napkin and silverware in front of me. I asked her, “How many people live here?”

She paused and then said, “I don’t rightly know. Frank, how many people live in Carson?

The old man regarded her, chewing on his toothpick. “In the county or within the city limits?”

I shrugged. He switched the toothpick to the other side of his mouth and considered some more.

Finally, he said, “About fifteen hundred here in town . . . suppose about two thousand across the county. It’s a big county, bigger than you realize.”

“Seems like a nice place,” I told them.

“Just right,” she said.

The old man nodded and turned back to his coffee. I did the same. A few minutes later, the waitress put my breakfast in front of me. I ate slowly. I had no particular timetable to meet except to be at my cousin’s house in Omaha before he went to bed that night. It was a long drive, most of it, I knew, mile after mile through empty fields.

After a while, the two men at the booth stood up, pulled coats on, and shuffled out the door. Bells on it tinkled when they opened and closed it. As I was pushing my empty plate away, the bells tinkled again, and Kate came in with her two kids. I swallowed.

“Hey,” the waitress said to them and smiled.

“Morning, Mabel,” Kate told her. She glanced at me and smiled. I did the same, then fiddled with the handle on my coffee cup. She said, “Hey, Frank.”

The old man nodded and said, “Kate.”

Mabel took the lid off a little pedestal on the back counter, put two sugar donuts in a small white bag, and brought it to them at the cash register. She gave the bag to the boy. He and his sister each hung to opposite corners of their mother’s jean jacket. “There you go, darlings,” Mabel told them and grinned. Kate handed her some money.

“Fixing to snow?” Mabel asked.

“Feels like it,” Kate said.

They nodded at each other slowly until Mabel asked, “Kids okay?”

“Oh, little one has the sniffles. They’re fine.”

Kate ruffled her daughter’s hair. Mabel nodded some more. The radio came on low in the kitchen: a country western song. Someone switched the stations until settling on a news program giving a report on grain prices.

“Well,” Kate said. “School’s going to start.”

Mabel wiped her hands on her apron and said, “You all have a good day now.” I watched her push through the swinging door into the kitchen.

When I turned, Kate was smiling quietly at me again. She stood for a moment like that. She said, “Thanks again for your help last night.”

“Sure.”

We looked at each other some more until she raised her eyebrows, sighed, and said, “Well.”

Then she turned and went back out through the tinkling diner door. I watched her go down the sidewalk with a hand on the shoulder of each of her kids. The boy swung the donut bag as he went. I swallowed again, shook my head. I took another sip of coffee and felt my heart thudding away. I kicked the base of the counter, and Frank glanced over at me. I put some money on the counter and left quickly myself.

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2010

But the street was empty, no sign of their truck. I walked up to the corner, and the side street was vacant, too, in both directions. A calico cat sauntered out behind the gas station across the street, crossed the blacktop, and stopped in front of me, its tail standing straight up. The tail swayed back and forth. After a moment, it purred once, then went off up the sidewalk and into the alley behind the diner. I don’t know if it had stopped to be petted or not. Either way, I’d chosen not to, and so off it had gone, on its way. Not much of a chance that I’d ever see it again.

I worked for that cousin for about a year. Winter was pretty long and hard in Omaha, not much to do. I started collecting pennies, and that passed some of the hours outside of work. There was a pretty good periodical section in the library there where I spent time. I took long walks along the river, had lots of opportunity to think about things.

After my cousin’s business went under, I stayed a while longer and took a job sheet rocking for an outfit that was building a new strip mall. But that ended, too, so I eventually decided to head back to Seattle to see if I could find a ship to put out on again. I was in no rush, so drove by way of Carson.

I stopped at the crossroads motel. It stood closed-up, empty, patches of weeds littering the cinder lot, plywood up in some of the farmhouse windows. The tulip-backed chairs were gone, so I sat on the front step of the farmhouse. It was a warm late-spring afternoon, several hours before dusk. The wood on the barn across the road had weathered and darkened. The field behind it was planted now in ankle-high new corn. I watched a tractor motor back and forth toward the road among the rows that were planted horizontal to it. From that distance, I couldn’t tell who was driving. Its approach was gradual. In order to do something, I tossed gravel at the mailbox that stood on a crooked post where the parking lot met the road. I made myself breathe slowly.

Gradually, I could make out the driver with his tangle of red hair: a gangly high school-aged boy. At one point, as he was working the nearest row of corn, he raised his hand in greeting from the cab of the tractor. I did the same. I waited until he’d pulled it up in front of the barn before I walked across the road and climbed through the barbed wire. He’d opened the barn doors. There were no cows in the yard, and the feed trough was empty of hay. I saw some thrashing blades and other equipment in the sawdust under the loft.

The tractor stood idling. The boy came back around the side of it and stopped in front of me, “Hi,” he said. “Say, that motel is closed.”

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I nodded and asked, “Same lady own this place? Kate?”

He shook his head. “Nah, she sold to my uncle, moved away.”

I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. He squinted at me. I noticed that one of his two front teeth overlapped the other, but I wasn’t thinking about that.

I asked, “Any idea where she went?”

“Nah. I don’t think she said exactly. Somewhere with warmer winters, I know that.”

I nodded some more. I looked out over the field where he’d been working, and he followed my gaze. There were several groups of blackbirds over the low growth. He waved his hand passively toward them and said, “Shoo.”

A dog barked somewhere. I could smell the diesel from the idling tractor. The boy put one foot up on the running board, and said, “Well.”

“Thanks, kindly,” I said. I turned and headed back towards the fence. I listened to the tractor chug into the barn, then the engine switch off as I crossed the road. I got back in my car, but didn’t start it right away. I’d never been with anyone for more than a few weeks at a time and that had only been on a

couple of occasions years before. I’m not sure what I would have said if she’d still been there. I guess I would have thought of something. After that last time, I hoped so, anyway. I’d thought about it enough, I knew that.

Perhaps ten minutes passed before the boy came back out of the barn and closed its doors. He started walking up the long drive that Kate’s truck had come down. I watched the back of him until he disappeared into the trees behind the field. Then I started the car and headed to wherever the next place was that I would hang my hat.

I spent the twenty-plus years that followed mostly shipping out here and there. Went to some interesting foreign ports, saw a good portion of the world, I guess you could say. I suppose I had my share of adventures. My back eventually got the best of me, and I settled in this mid-sized city near the Great Lakes where an old crewmate’s family owned a hardware store. I went to work for them a decade or so ago and have been there since. It’s not hard on my back, and it’s work I like well enough.

With only Social Security, I have to augment a bit, so that fits the bill. Truth is, I need to work just to pass the time. I still have my coins. Plenty of places to walk. Friendly enough folks around. There’s a library; I’ve begun reading histories and biographies. Brought home a cookbook once and tried a few

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recipes, but it was hard to get excited much making meals for one. A while back, I started to pray, too, in my own awkward way. At first, at bedtime, but then after a few months, in the mornings, too, before I got out of bed.

Besides that crossroads, there are plenty of other places I could have called home. Usually, I realize now, something small just felt right about them. I remember a little town along the boundary waters where Canada meets the Great Lakes, south of Route 2, distinguished in my mind by still black ponds, red dirt roads, and people moving at a sensible pace. There was a small city in the mountains of Mexico; the buildings there were as white as those in Greek villages, but the night air retained a sweet fragrance from the surrounding pines, and people greeted you quietly when you passed by.

Another is a place I paused to get gas one summer afternoon somewhere in Oregon. A park sat across the street that had green grass and tall willow trees that threw long, liquid shadows. In the back of the park, I could see the shimmer of a municipal pool in the clean light and hear the splash of water and the shouts of children from it. A big woman sat in a folding chair at the front of the park near the entrance. She was crocheting and selling huckleberry jam. The jars sat on a card table that had an umbrella fixed on it against the sun.

There are lots of other places, too many to mention. I could have called any of them: home.

Yet, I never did. Those prior opportunities are gone. This will now be my final resting place, circumstances pretty much dictate it, and that’s all right. It’s as good as any other. Nothing makes it stand apart, no clutch of the heart, but it’s fine. It’s home. Home, sweet, home.

I don’t know. You settle places, you fill your life with events and memories and things.

Sometimes, though, I think it’s those you omit that mean the most. At least in certain instances.

At least in those instances that may always remain irretrievable. I’m not sure about much, but about that, I’m fairly certain.

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ARTIST’S NOTE

Gene Schmidt lives in New York with his wife and son. Before LOVETOWN PA, he spent a year measuring the width and length of Manhattan with yardsticks in a project called MANHATTAN MEASURE. A documentary film about the project, directed by Johnny Gerhart and Philip Armand, was screened at film festivals around the country, including the Big Apple Film Festival, Nashville Film Festival, Los Angeles United Film Festival, and Docufest Atlanta.

LOVETOWN PA: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE CITY A group of artists from the Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery in Philadelphia invited me to propose a project that could be realized in Philadelphia and exhibited in their gallery. Since it is the City of Brotherly Love, I decided to take St. Paul’s text on love from I Corinthians out onto the streets to see what would happen.

I assembled the entire text using panels of reclaimed scrap wood collected in the months leading up to the project. The letters were cut out of the panels like stencils, allowing the text to be the city itself showing through. I mapped out a journey through the city and began making my way by spelling out the text wherever I could find a wall or fence to lean the panels. The project became a very physical way for me to meditate on the text and learn some lessons on love from a city that still knows something about it.

For projects such as these to have a life beyond the initial performance they need to be well documented. Photographer Alicia Hansen collaborated with me to present LOVETOWN PA to those who were not able to see the work in progress and in person.

To see additional excerpts from the project, please visit www.lovetownpa.com

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Gene Schmidt. LOVETOWN PA. Performative installation.

Photo by Alicia Hansen.

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Gene Schmidt. LOVETOWN PA. Performative installation.

Photos by Alicia Hansen.

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Gene Schmidt. LOVETOWN PA. Performative installation.

Photo by Alicia Hansen.

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Mandy Thrasher. “Untitled 1.” Digital photograph. 24 x 30 inches.

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Emily Hayes

Another Winter

For my mother

At 4 am, she sees her grandson’s hands play this is the church, this is the steeple. Later, she opens the doors of Liberty Baptist Church and slides in a pew between her aging parents. The piano plays In the Garden, How Great Thou Art, and an old man reads from the book of Luke. She wonders if her father needs a cane, if her mother should be taking more Namenda. She notices that a second cousin has her sister’s jaw line. Today, there are more people in the cemetery than the village, the bell in the belfry is broken and rusting. They are only burying her aunt, but still, she cannot help but peer over the precipice, deep into old age, arthritis, Alzheimer’s.

On the ride home, she closes her eyes to grey clouds, the uncertainty of coming days, lost on a road that curves through evergreens and Illinois prairie, away from another winter.

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Chelsea Henderson

Five Stones

1 Samuel 17:40

In the full swell of mid-morning, when the cheese had softened and soured in the tents, the men nearly fainting in a heat that blistered like rope burn, I stole off to the pebbled streambed for a makeshift armor that could fit into a shepherd’s bag, fishing up five stones: one for the dark and glossy tint of a defiant girl’s eyes, for its edges as sharp, as cutting, one for fitting in the crook of my sling, one for the plum-print of a bruise it would make on my brother’s arm later, one for remembering how my father equated stone and bone—both return to dust—and one for the force of a name in a mouth, for the visceral palm-weight of a word, its pelting power.

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ISSUE

17 autumn

2010

Chelsea Henderson

A Last Sunday in Charlottesville

after a line by James Harms

On an evening walk with a friend, we stop in the nearest bar and order milkshakes. You’re not bar type of girls, the bartender comments, pinpointing us as tulip-garden girls, coffee shop girls. He might also suspect that we are the type who daub perfume between our breasts because that is where the heart beats, where something is always pulsing out.

The day wanes to shadow, little to no breeze, only what could have been the stillness inside a woman who has just given herself for the first time, that resounding quiet of being only her own again.

Love is the price of love, one of us says, having read it somewhere, struck at the fact of something being its own currency, wondering if we’ve learned to pay in full. But an hour, too, is the price of an hour— a stroll down a street we’ll one day merely be visiting, that will soon be a cairn of breath spoken as an afterthought in an evening that will never repeat itself.

For a while I try to say nothing.

To listen to the arch of her foot as it cups the sidewalk, to the dark arranging itself like a bouquet in the branches, to the streetlight kindled in her eyes, briefly furious, like a match tip that believes it will never burn out.

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Thom Caraway

The Leper Attends the Idaho State Roadkill Fur Auction Like mine, their removal is detachment from the body, ruined but not too ruined.

I see another leper, one who has dismissed the living.

I think about the men who hustle the long roadwork of Idaho, who have learned the language of blood, smeared down fifty yards of highway—the parallel skid tracks of the locked-up vehicle, a body inside, a body outside— those men whose job it is to quantify the dead.

Love is not the coexistence of two alonenesses.

Like the roadkilled raccoons, porcupines, deer, skunk, the occasional bear, the coyote, house cat, lost dog, like all the other beloveds lost on the back roads of this terrible wilderness, and like the men who collect, strip, and scrape the pelts, I would also remove my skin if it meant my permutation into the world.

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2010

Thom Caraway

You’ll Never Be Here Again or even be able to find it on a map.

And who would want to?

Something so fine could only be transient. This you know. Of this you must be certain.

Orange scrim of clouds bantering the low harvest moon.

You say, Yes, love.

I know already, you can’t mean me, even if once, you had.

Lonely, we speak past each other about baseball, the proper way to hold the bat to lay down a sacrifice bunt, suicide squeeze, runner breaking from third at the pitcher’s first move.

Faith pure, and love enough to fling himself down the line.

This is what we allow ourselves. This isn’t St. Augustine, with white sand or lovers strolling toward their own deep decay.

Instead, pencil-etched ash against fading asphalt sky and a blanket of dead leaves.

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ELLEN O’CONNELL

With bare ankles, we walk alongside the narrow boat, racing it from lock to lock, keeping

well ahead of it as it clumsily knocks its way along the canal. From the shore it has none of a sailboat’s grace; it does not tip and toss moodily. A light wind blows gnats and mosquitoes from the air and brings with it the scent of yesterday’s rain. In the new sun, my neck burns around the geometrical curves of my cotton shirt. After seeing so many farms and fields front and back, I notice how slowly canal life passes. The boats we see have names like Moonshadow and Ethel Fidgett and Tit Willow.

They are painted like gypsy caravans. Our boat is Bodvar because it is a Viking boat, but we call her the Fair Bodvar as though she is beautiful.

Brendan’s new growth of beard is red and unruly, paving his face in fiery sunlit patches. He knows how to tie slipknots and half hitches and figure eights in no time at all. He learned them all at Boy Scout camp in the summers when he was younger, or from our father, who is full of practical knowledge about basic survival.

“You could start a fire in the woods, right?” Brendan asks me one humid night on the canal.

“Sure I could,” I say. “If I had some matches.”

“What if you don’t have any matches?” he asks.

“Do I have a lighter?”

“No. You have nothing but everything you ever learned.”

“Then no,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t know what to rub together to make sparks.” I can see he likes my answer, partly because he predicted it, and mostly because it is something he can do that I cannot. If we were stranded together, he would be the one to keep us alive.

Brendan rolls up the bottoms of his jeans and walks flat-footed in the mud of the canal’s edge. I wear canvas shoes and sweep the brambles out of our way, slicing my hand in several small cuts that don’t stop bleeding for hours. Around us, the English countryside is wet and dense and timeworn.

Squinting your eyes makes it hard to tell what century you are in, or what isolated summer from our youth Brendan and I are visiting. It could be any of the summers we left home with our parents, bound for leafy foreign cities, strange and lonely to us as children. The more aware I am of how many summers we’ve spent here, the more I worry that this is the last, and that we will slip out of it as quietly as we slipped in.

I stand at a lock with my brother, pushing my thin body against it after he has unwound the gates with the winch handle to let the water in. His hair is thick and dark and he is eighteen years old. In the fall he will leave home for college, where he wants to study American history, and will possibly spend the next four years missing our home’s back deck, where the sun rises in the morning, and front porch, where it sets at night.

Brendan is like me in lots of ways. If he could go anywhere in the world, he would go to Cuba. He can predict exactly when in the afternoon our father will fall asleep with his beard against his chest and

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2010

that he will wake himself up by snoring. He believes that consideration for others cannot exist without morality, whereas morality can exist without consideration.

In many important ways, though, we are old friends now meeting for the first time in a long while. I have been away from home for a few years, and come home only for summers or Christmas or a week in spring. We don’t talk while I am away, my brother and I. We don’t much talk when I’m home. I spend the time fighting with my father or cooking with my mother. I sit in parks with friends and laugh until I cry, and then I wonder how I could have misremembered so much how it felt to be home.

My father came to London this summer to research the parable of the prodigal son at the British Library. For the first summer of my life, I go with him some mornings and sit next to him while he pours through old plays. I never cared for the ending of that parable, though; I was always too much like the other son. I use my time in the reading room with all the books I can think of that have elegant prose and magical realism. In the afternoons our father takes me to lunch with his colleagues, who mostly ignore me and make academic jokes based on Shakespearean puns. I write pretty letters to my best friend back in New York and try to make art out of the things I’ve been doing recently. I write things down to tell Brendan later, like about the girl who fell asleep with her French braid on my book, or the man outside with the falcon. One day as I go to leave there is a chorus in the lobby, singing songs that seem to lift me right out of myself and I float to the ceiling to listen. Up there, my heart soars. I forget to count my steps as I walk away a few moments later, counting eight of them before I start all over again in the same rhythm that never changes in my head.

This is the weekend we travel on a canal boat near Rugby, skin soaked in the hot nighttime thunderstorms, working the locks each day. When the water starts to slowly pour into the lock, Brendan runs over to help me close in on the other side. We push our bodies against the wooden arms of the gate, digging our feet into the ground until it slowly moves, grunting and heaving. The narrow boat moves through; my father steers it while my mother stands on the bow, bracing herself to hit the side.

She assumes a crash position, nearly dropping to one knee and leaning forward like a runner at the beginning of a race. She cheers us on and my father says nothing, but nods to us silently from the back of the boat as it rises in the lock and we wait for the water to level before opening the next gate to let the water back out.

I suddenly want nothing more than to stay here forever with my brother, neither of us returning to our real lives and deadlines and correspondences. Our parents could visit when they wanted to speak and listen to us, or when my mother just wanted to sit between us. If I stand here forever like a statue, my feet will grow into the ground and the birds will peck at me and think I am something to eat or a place of shady retreat. I don’t think Brendan would stay here with me indefinitely. I wonder if he had to grow into the ground with one person, and let his skin burn and sweat and freeze over, who would it be? Who would make him laugh enough so that he wouldn’t mind?

He hops back in the front of the boat, his long feet slapping the sun-warmed metal of late afternoon.

He turns to watch me get in, but I don’t want my younger brother’s help.

He looks for a place to sit down.

“Sit anywhere you like,” I tell him, “but save some room for me.”

He has already crawled to the canal boat’s roof, which he will have to jump down from at the next bridge we come to.

At home when he looks for a place to sit down, he sits on the piano bench and plays ragtime in passing with an easy rapture. He plays big band jazz from Cuba with gentle ornaments, and then continues going where he was going before. For Brendan, the piano is just a stop on the way out the door.

We see a dozen cows or so by the puckered bank and perk up to moo at them loudly.

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“Moooooooooo,” we shout at them, and they lift their heads lazily and look at us. Beside them a field of wildflowers throw their heads back in the wind, like people laughing.

“I feel feral,” I say.

“I smell feral,” says my brother.

Like most places you find yourself, it all looks real enough when I’m here, staring the willows in the face, walking along the rail which stretches the length of the boat’s outside, eating in pubs, drinking, sleeping. At the same time I already know I will get home and write my friends in California and New York and tell them it looks like a fairy tale. What I mean is, life stands still on the canal, and Brendan makes me laugh, and there is something reassuring about the boredom. Options are limited. I can read. I can walk along the side of the canal for long hours, or between locks. I nap often and lightly. I talk to my brother and tell him about my life in New York, which I haven’t done since I moved there.

He tells me about his life back home in California with our parents. He could say anything in the world to me right now. He could tell me he’s angry I left him all alone to get in trouble, and I should have called him more. He could tell me how he can’t stop thinking I was the one who got it right because I never got caught doing things I shouldn’t.

Instead, he says, “I can’t wait to leave home and be away.” It isn’t eloquent. There’s something tired in his tone. I do not care for it.

“I don’t think I ever felt like that,” I told him. “I wasn’t ready to leave home yet when I was eighteen. But I never thought staying was an option.”

“I just want to leave and only ever come back when I have no more money and nothing left to do.”

I say nothing. In the loud silence I hear everything around us that I wasn’t listening to before. I hear the way the trees skim their leaves along the top of the canal’s water. I hear the cornflowers and the mustard fields growing. I hear the boat’s constant humming motor. All the sounds seem to collide.

Now Brendan is leaving home too, only this time for good. I wonder if my parents think this means an end to searching his backpack and giving him unexpected drug tests. I think that to them leaving for college is the beginning of an adult life of serious scholarly study, because it was for them, and for my older sisters, and it was for me.

We are on the canal for the longest days of the year, and when we go to bed the dark is not complete. There is no light but starlight on the canal. Forever ahead winds and black water, and forever behind, black water.

“Want to have a feet fight?” I whisper to Brendan, in the bunk next to mine. He’s big enough now that he will win.

“Why?” he asks.

“To celebrate summer solstice,” I tell him.

He puts his feet in the air between our beds, and I put mine up to match his. With all our might, we push.

“I’m not even trying,” he says.

“Yeah right.”

“Come on, you’re so weak.” I don’t see his face or arms. Just his bare legs and feet stick up in the dark, meeting mine, forming an arch. We have both pushed aside our bedclothes to fight this match.

From the front of the boat’s insides comes the sound of my father’s hush.

“You two,” says my mother.

“We’re having a feet fight,” Brendan says. “I’m about to win.” But we just stay frozen, feet suspended in the air, for a minute longer before I call a tie. Together in our side-by-side beds, we are completely still. We lie like wrestling statues, and a memory of a few days before, before we

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left London, appears to me in the dark of our floating island. Strange the things you remember, the connections you can make when you have the time to.

A few days before, at the exact same moment, we fell in love with a piece of art that hung, suspended, from the ceiling of the Tate Modern. It was called “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” and it was in a room all of its own.

“I love hanging sculptures,” I said to Brendan.

“It’s not really a sculpture,” he said.

“Of course it is,” I said. “It’s not a painting or a performance.” I know, because he was raised by the same parents I was, that he thought sculptures were only made of marble and stone, and that they were of things like saints and Romans. The two of us stared at the back of the David for an hour and a half one summer when I was fifteen and he was eleven. That was the summer our grandmother was dying and our mother would go into every church we passed to light a candle and weep silently in the pews.

“Thirty Pieces of Silver” had thirty round disks that hung from the ceiling by thin silver wires that caught the light in a way that moved me substantially. The disks were all made of flattened silver, things like trombones and silverware and old picture frames that had been steamrolled. The point, said the artist’s statement, was that so much silver has more sentimental value than monetary. Wedding gifts, for example, or a grandmother’s old coffee pot, are not worth much, but they mean so much to people.

The disks were laid out in a rectangle and each of them was exactly the same height off the floor, and the same space apart. Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, a temptation greater than anything he could learn or love. The sculpture was perfection, in silver and sunlight. Perfection is the only thing I’m sure I love these days. I find no beauty in tangles, only profound unease.

“Wow” my mother had said to us. She said it because she was inviting us to say something. If I knew the right thing to say, I would have said it.

“I don’t care who you are. This is just good art,” Brendan said, and I think it was the first time he realized it could be something entirely new. We loved the Tate Modern that day, with our eyes and our muscles, which were exhausted at the end. We read what Joseph Beuys thought about his old van and sleds, and we saw Miró and Dali and Diego Rivera.

“I like looking at it, but I love reading what it’s about,” Brendan said to me. “This is so much better than Golden Marys.” That’s what he called the Medieval and Renaissance art we spent summers with as children, my father telling us how important this piece was, and how famous, and how beautiful.

“But they’re all of the Virgin Mary,” Brendan had said to him when he was just a child. “They all have golden backgrounds.” We didn’t yet know there was any other opinion to have.

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“This is amazing,” he whispered over and over in the Tate Modern. I loved each time he said it.

I was glad to be there the afternoon that my brother fell in love with art. It was an adult love, this modern art love.

On the canal, I see the green land as the fertile bed of my ancestors, each new season piling another layer over antiquity. By complete chance and a series of mishaps that sent my ancestors to the new world, it turns out I am not an illiterate potato farmer, as perhaps I should have been. Americans love nothing more than to tell each other of their bloodline. We all know it, and adopt it as a second identity. In some ways, it affects everything. But on my family’s trips back to Ireland when I was a child, Brendan and I saw our names over and over again on encrusted gravestones, so ancient that the grass swallowed them lazily, year by year, until the names were made smooth by silver lichen.

It did not seem familiar to me, as other places have. People say I look French, but really it is just an affectation that was born when I lived there a few years ago. It was the first place I fell in love, and the first place I fell in love with. No one told me it was exceptional or important. I felt it all on my own.

Maybe that’s why in the still night on the side of the canal, I am thinking of my brother and new art.

By day, we pass under bridges so old that no one knows how old they are. Brendan jumps down from the roof or lies flat when we pass through, elongating himself so that he sees their undersides, damp, unrefined. Roads led there ages ago that no longer exist, even in memory. On the other side, the sky lowers itself and the banks probe the dirty water curiously. Dark will catch up with us soon, or rain, or both. I wonder if Brendan remembers that there are some cities we have visited where you cannot see the stars. When I go home to California after months in New York, when I came home from Paris a few years ago, the stars were a beautiful surprise.

“Look how dumb they look,” Brendan says to a dusky bank of sheep. He bleats at them loudly and they stop chewing briefly, caught up in what he’s saying.

Together we bleat. The sheep respond.

“They’re answering us,” I say, laughing. “The sheep bleat back at you when you bleat at them!” I call to my parents in the back of the boat.

“Sheep bleat at you even when you don’t bleat at them” Brendan tells me. He makes me laugh easily, but he never seems to grow weary of it.

“Did you hear what Brendan said?” I shout to my parents.

“What?” My mother calls back. My father’s eyes hardly leave the canal as he steers us through.

“You always tell them what I say,” Brendan tells me, still looking at the field of sheep. “You say the exact same thing I just said, but they listen when you say it.”

“At least I give you credit,” I tell him.

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2010

“The only way they know I’m funny is because you tell them.”

Around our floating island this last summer of Brendan’s childhood, we watch the water lapping, and parting, and rising up to meet the boat’s sides. * * * The last time I saw my therapist in New York she told me not to brace myself against the summer.

“If you’re always preparing your body for disaster, there are a lot of great things you could miss,” she told me. She told me this because I grind my teeth when I sleep, and get headaches from tension, and an old whiplash injury from France flares up sometimes in my neck, although it is only after my return to New York at the summer’s end that she gives me a formal diagnosis and I begin treatment. I am on the canal only for a few days, but now I am ready to listen and learn. Now I unbrace myself, and try as hard as I can to hear something meaningful.

The more I listen to the ancient silence of the midlands, the less they say. Without distractions, without the modern age, with only a boat and my brother and my parents, I am ready now, to stop and look at the cows and the muddy water and the steeples on the low flat horizon. I lie on the bow and wait to be told the thing I have braced myself against, while Brendan is silent beside me. I hear nothing but his breathing, and his hums and throat clearings and the way he bleats at sheep to try to get them to answer him.

During my nap I think of something that really happened rather than having a completely new dream. I am young, perhaps no more than ten, and I am in the church at my elementary school. My lap is plaid and my feet are on the kneeler. A priest named Fr. Ford is telling us how to listen when we pray. I don’t like Fr. Ford because he wears ruby rings and talks about himself in the third person.

Plus he has lavender hair. He refers to himself as “Father,” and I always ask him, “Who’s father?” just to be insolent. My best guess now is that he had just read from the book of Kings, when God speaks to Elijah, my second favorite prophet, in a still small voice. Elijah expected God to speak in fire, or in oceans, or in plagues. Those are the only voices of God anyone had ever recognized.

The voice of the water and trees is too quiet to hear, and Brendan yells loudly at the farm animals.

From my back, I look up at the low crowding clouds, and the way they delve into the line between grass and sky. It’s been three days. I’ve heard nothing, and I’ve listened to everything.

“Here are some more locks,” Brendan tells me. “Ready?”

I sit up too quickly. “I’m spinning,” I tell him. “Just a minute.”

We have a well-choreographed routine, which we perform now. We have the habit of doing things rapidly, as though time is of the essence. It never is on the Fair Bodvar.

Before the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution, the canals of England were the way to transport things from one small city to another. They built them through farms, and as a concession to property, built small bridges connecting one half of a farm to another. The bridges go nowhere really, and serve nothing.

We walk over one after the locks, to test this piece of history. Brendan and I are always testing history. He walks ahead of me, slowly with nowhere to get to but the other side. Softly, he sings.

“When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken. So I hung my head and I cried.”

On the other side of the bridge we see flocks of animals. There are sheep with spray painted red letters on their freshly shorn fleece.

“Baaaa,” Brendan yells to them.

“Baaaa,” I say from behind him. I try to memorize the image of my young brother with his thick

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dark hair, walking tall in a field, the summer that he is eighteen. I do this urgently, as I do everything.

The sheep stand up and jog away from us, sitting down somewhere not far, looking at us and conferring. Their faces look human in their creased concern.

“I think we’re trespassing,” I tell him. “This is a real farm.” Close by is a stone house.

“There’s a church up there,” he tells me. “There has to be a path nearby.”

“I don’t like this,” I say. “We are definitely not supposed to be here.”

Behind us my parents are still on the boat. They might be tying up, coming to join us. They might be deciding where to get a meal. They might be watching us walk ahead of them, their children, thinking, would you just look at that, just look!

Brendan stands perfectly still, although there is a small movement in the air, which winks past us. It feels as though we are standing in a beehive, but I don’t see the bees. Brendan does; his eyes are fixed or something, moving on the horizon. For a second, the way his eyes look is more important than what he sees. With his eyes he points.

I look over to see a large herd of bulls rushing toward us. They do not look alike, but they run with the same determination. I admire the light brown of their coats for a second, the black and white, their stout bodies on small column legs. They are running so fast I forget to be scared for a few seconds.

“Are we supposed to stand still or run?” I ask Brendan. I give him one second to answer before I think he is taking too long, and then I begin to run over the field, back toward the bridge we came from. I don’t look back to him to see what he is doing. My feet aren’t moving fast enough, yet if I moved any faster I would take flight.

I run half way across the bridge before I look back to Brendan, standing still, with a herd of bulls stationary in front of him. They stop charging right as they get to him, and he looks at them carefully, waiting for them. It is comical the way they go from full force to rest. What can be going on in those bulls’ heads? There is a fence between them and Brendan, but he reaches out to them as though he is reaching out to touch a bird’s egg. He stands like that with his hand out in front of him, and there is nothing left to do but laugh. As I laugh the bulls look away from my brother and towards me, and begin walking to me. I laugh so hard I have to sit down on the bridge, and my parents look up at me from the boat below. Around me, the air smells like sunshine.

“I’ve never seen you move so quickly,” Brendan shouts from across the field.

I roll over to look at the water, which moves languidly, because it is not in a hurry. It has nowhere to go but to the other side of the bridge. It takes its time.

I am not the only person to have lain on a bridge and watched the water move without me. I am not the only one to feel the sort of sadness that is beautiful, that you want to last because it makes you see all the blades of grass, and not just the field. Brendan comes up the bridge.

“What’s taking them so long?” He looks down to my parents, who are standing under us talking, tying the boat up to the side, perhaps wondering if they should eat first and nap later. The two of us sit on the bridge, our feet dangling from the side like a woman’s earrings, waiting. Our father throws a line to our mother; the way the sun hits her hair makes her look gilded. Brendan scratches the paint on the bridge, just to let someone know we were once here.

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17 autumn

2010

Kelly Beahm

If I could If I could—I would let you pull back the cover leaf through my pages and let your fingers kiss each line.

And I would pull words apart like petals—one by one— letting the final filmy metaphor slip to the floor to leave me trembling bare before you.

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Stephen Mead. “Threshold.” 35mm photograph. 8 x 8 inches.

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2010

Sara Maria Harenchar

The Remaking You waited in dirt-crusted, mangled jeans, sunned skin from the yard’s labor,

inviting grin—the smell of you— salty sweat and paint thinner, your presence like a long drive, the freshly cut grass sneaking into the car.

Your hands—enormous on the rough wood, the wood you earned, the wood you loved to shape and animate.

Alone, you went many mornings to that abandoned shack, animals breeding or dying inside, leaves and mud waiting for you, you wishing away the heat with each task you complete, the remaking

coming slow,

steady.

When I first saw what you built, asking what I could do, I felt like a trespasser— wanted but not belonging, coming too late.

You did not mind it.

You knew I could not have been there that summer with you, you discovering him, the man in you—building, me being made ready for the shelter we two would create.

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HEATHER A. GOODMAN

Sarah watched her house sink into the flames, the blaze burning her cheeks, the wind

tickling the back of her legs.

Inside lay photos of their wedding, of babies’ first steps, of last year’s Disney World vacation. Inside lay Steve’s great-grandmother’s silverware and her grandmother’s china with the pink and silver roses.

Inside lay Molly’s cello and Tommy’s baseball bat signed by Jimmy Rollins. Inside lay her Franklin planner that told her who to take where on what day, like Molly’s recital next Tuesday and the church volunteer nursery duty every first and third Sunday and the presentation she had at work tomorrow morning—or was it this morning now?

Inside lay the family Bible with six generations of church weddings and funerals recorded, including her sister’s death at age five. Sarah imagined the pages curling and dissipating, erasing identities and legacies.

This made her throat hurt.

Steve had rushed into action when the fire alarm sounded. As he bounced his fingertips against the knob of Tommy’s bedroom, he called out commands. “Stay low! Crawl if you need to. Go to our meeting place.” Molly, Darren, and Sarah gathered by the tree across the street, and a moment later, Steve emerged with Tommy, safe and pleading for his fish. Sarah’s intestines had unraveled inside of her.

Now, watching the firemen, channels formed in Steve’s forehead. His arms crossed and his legs wide like a sentinel, Steve guarded the remnant of their house. He looked down and smiled at Tommy.

“We’re okay, buddy.” Tommy bound his arms around one of Steve’s legs and wiped his eyes and nose on Steve’s pajama pants. Steve bent down and kissed the top of Tommy’s head.

Their youngest, Darren, tugged on Sarah’s side and held up his arms. She lifted him, and he chained his legs around her waist. He jammed his thumb into his mouth and curled her hair around his finger—a habit he’d forsaken eighteen months ago until tonight. Her purse fell to her elbow, and she shifted it back to her shoulder, its weight like a tether, holding her to this land. “‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,’” Sarah said.

“What?” Steve said.

“It’s a poem, but that’s all I remember.” Sarah rested her cheek on Darren’s head. The scent of smoke lingered on his hair.

“Have you called your dad?” Steve straightened and took Tommy’s hand. “We need to get the kids somewhere safe.”

“It’s by William Blake. ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright.’ What comes after that?”

“Why would a tiger burn? We need to make sure the schools know why the kids will be gone the next few days. Maybe they’ll let us pick up their homework.”

“Right. I’ll call them right now at” —she fished her phone from her purse and looked at the time— “three thirty-seven in the morning.”

“Sarah.” He pulled her close to him, squishing Darren’s leg between them. Darren whined. “I’m just going through things we have to remember so that between the two of us, maybe one of us will think of it in the morning.”

“Something about the night, like first star I see tonight, but not that, of course. What is the next line?”

Steve kissed Sarah’s cheek. His lips brushed her ear, sending a shiver down her arm. “I know what

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you’re thinking,” he whispered. He kissed her again. “But we never learned how to sail.” He rested his hand on the back of her neck. She thought he was going to say something else, but the fireman approached. Steve winked at her, but the corners of his mouth pulled in a grimace.

In the forests of the night. That was the next line of the poem.

“Everyone out, ma’am?” The fireman had a strange accent. She couldn’t quite place it, but then, this could have been a dream.

“Except the fish,” she said. “But, hey, breakfast, right?”

The fireman looked at her for a second then returned to his fellow heroes.

Six fish boiled in their tank. Tommy had begged his father to rescue them, but it was too late, and what would they do with them? The fish lived in an elaborate salt-water tank Steve had set up with the kids. With the kids was stretching it. “Come on,” he had said. “It’s a science experiment. Think of what they’ll learn.” He watched too much Discovery channel. The only thing the kids learned was the language their father used when frustrated. For a salt-water tank, they had to create a system with pipes pumping water through not just the front display tank but two tanks—one consisting of an oversized plastic trash can—hidden behind it. Steve converted a closet, cutting out a square in the wall for the display tank. It brought one frustration after another: clogged pipes, dead clams, and one suicidal fish who succeeded on his third attempt. She considered dumping Prozac into the water after seeing what the suicide did to Tommy.

“Maybe they’re safe in the water,” Tommy said to her.

“Maybe.” She squatted down to Tommy’s level, balancing Darren on her knee. He whimpered and leaned into her, almost knocking her over. She hugged Darren, letting him know she wouldn’t put him down. “You know what I think happened?”

Clutching a plastic dinosaur he slept with every night, he shook his head.

“The water fairy scooped them up and carried them to the bathroom. She sent them down the toilet, and right now they’re swimming to safety. They’re making their way through all these pipes, and in an hour or so they’ll make it to the ocean.” He probably wouldn’t believe this. Last year he discovered the truth about the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny. “Like we do every vacation.”

He cocked his head, sucked in his lips, then smiled. “Do you think they’ll find their friends in the ocean?”

She swiped his hair out of his eyes. “And they’ll make new friends.” When they searched the house tomorrow, she’d have to discard any remnants of fish before Tommy noticed.

Steve called to Molly, but she ignored him. Molly dealt with things her own way. Sarah and Molly were alike in that. It’s why Sarah petitioned the principal of Molly’s school to get rid of the rule that banned “abnormal colors of hair dye.” “How is bleach blonde normal for most of these girls?” Sarah demanded. The principal argued that blue wasn’t natural or normal to anyone’s hair, and that was the difference, but Sarah persisted. By the time Sarah won her case, Molly had decided to shave her head in solidarity with a friend who had cancer. Sarah’s thirteen-year-old amazed her. At times, Sarah was jealous of her.

Molly had iPod buds shoved in her ears. It’s funny the things they grabbed as they dashed out of the house. Sarah seized her purse. Molly snatched her iPod. Tommy, his plastic dinosaur. Molly probably was listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings, her grief theme for her life soundtrack, as she called it.

Their neighbors’ homes dripped with water, a protection from the possibility of spreading flames.

The firemen made sure the neighbors were immune. Flames reached from the side windows of her house, though their stretch diminished after they’d been fighting the cascading water. She almost pitied the failed escape attempt of the flames.

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Not long ago, she had let the wicks get too long in one of her candles. Steve pointed to the burnt glass around the edge.

“See?” he said. “You need to trim them.”

But she didn’t. The height of the flame on a long wick thrilled her. What harm could it do? The next day, after her candle had been burning a few minutes, the glass fractured. A loud crack like a shot resounded through the room. She jumped at the noise. Wax spilled onto the desk and the floor. On impulse, she grabbed at the glass and burnt her fingers. Remnants of green wax stained her desk. She imagined this fire swallowing first the wax then the desk itself.

Steve’s fists and jaw clenched. “I hope that fire-proof box does its job.”

“The box that repels flames, laughs in the face of floods, and arm-wrestles tornadoes.” She said this like a commercial voice-over. “Also slices tomatoes.”

The corners of Steve’s mouth lifted, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. He put his arm around her waist.

Steve prepared for things like this. He had taken pictures of their larger items for insurance purposes. Protected in that fire-proof box lay photos of their pool table and dining room table, their new HDTV and entertainment system with surround-sound speakers, and the armoire she’d found at some antique store.

She closed her eyes and inhaled smoke. Before her drifted the ashes of her life, composting, fertilizing new earth, tender and pregnant with possibilities.

A year ago, Sarah had asked Steve what he thought about selling the house, buying a catamaran, and living on the sea. They bought books, and Sarah contacted a woman who blogged about life on a boat.

She learned about things like meal planning, homeschooling, budgets. She and Steve whispered in bed: “Imagine teaching the kids about Mayans by taking them to Mexico! Or waking up every morning somewhere new. Or making love to the rhythm of the water slapping the side of the boat.”

But then there were Molly’s cello lessons, and how would Tommy play baseball? And Steve got that promotion at work.

The insurance money would cover the cost of a boat, like the one still waiting in a harbor in Florida.

She had checked last week.

Sarah walked over to Molly. Molly sat on the cold, wet grass, her arms wrapped around her shins, rocking.

“On the bright side, you’ll get a whole new wardrobe,” Sarah told her. She hoped for a good eye roll, but Molly remained stone-faced.

“Do you think this means something?” Molly asked.

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2010

Sarah waited for Molly to clarify. When she didn’t, Sarah said, “Like what?”

“Like purification from everything that makes up our lives, everything we consume when most of the world is in shambles around us, in shambles because of us. Maybe it’s symbolic. We spend our lives building what burns up in minutes.” Molly wiped her cheek with the heel of her palm. Sarah let Molly read too much poetry in cemeteries. Walt Whitman was her latest obsession. She liked to read him leaning against his mausoleum in Harleigh Cemetery.

“Honey, I think it means we join in with the world in suffering, that we taste it now, and that we have the chance to start all over again, to create from scratch, to be who we want to be.” This surprised Sarah, how philosophical she sounded.

“What about those who can’t start all over again?”

So maybe Sarah had warned the kids about the poor, starving children in Africa one too many times when they didn’t finish dinner. She dug in her purse until she located a dull pencil and a scratch of paper—the back of her last grocery list. She handed them to Molly. “Here.”

Molly took the pencil and paper, examined the list. “Coconut milk and curry?”

“For your poetry.” Molly’s fifth-grade teacher had introduced her to the poet’s life, and since then, Molly had been through four Mead notebooks. All now gone.

Molly squinted at their house like she was contemplating the incinerating life before her then filled the paper with words. Sarah didn’t dare read them. Not yet, at least.

Most neighbors watched from the front of their houses; some peered behind the safety of their windows. Their pity skittered across her lawn like trash blown by the wind. She wanted to rake it up, stuff it into big black bags, and shove it into the dumpster. Or better yet, shake the bags onto their lawns. Over the next few weeks, they’d call her cell and ask, is everything okay? Can we do something?

Yolanda from next door circled her arms around Darren and her like a lasso. “Why don’t I take the kids to our house, get them something to eat, let them spend the night?”

She nodded and tried to peel Darren from her, but he linked his ankles together and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe.

Yolanda smiled. “I’ll get Molly and Tommy.” Yolanda collected them and took them by their hands. Sarah watched her kids disappear into Yolanda’s house. Yolanda made the Virgin Mary look neglectful. Before Sarah had kids, she thought this nurturing ability came naturally to all mothers. She ground her teeth to hold back the tears. The kids were better off with Yolanda, who cut the crusts off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, volunteered at the school, and bought Band-Aids with characters on them.

Sarah confessed to her best friend once that she envied the prodigal son. His courage to leave! To live his life! She hated the older brother who left without ever leaving. Her best friend sipped her latte and didn’t say anything.

Sometimes, Sarah skipped her book club and took the speedline to Philly, far away from her suburban life—a whole different world, even—and walked into a trendy bar. On those occasions, she sat in the front area as if she waited for someone and watched the people on their stools with their vodka tonics or beers or daiquiris. Then, after maybe a half hour or forty-five minutes, she went home.

But that life was no different from her own. The prodigal son ended up right where he started.

The prodigal or the older brother—they seemed paltry choices. One had no future but a lifetime of experience. The other would inherit the mantle of wealth and empty memories.

Darren went limp in her arms. His breath was warm and damp on her neck. She laid him on the cushioned bench on Yolanda’s porch. For a moment, she squatted beside him, moving her fingers lightly up and down his arm, looking through the bars of the fence around the porch, until his

51

breathing evened again. She removed her robe and tucked it around him. Then she left the porch and stepped as closely to her house as she dared.

In a few minutes, she’d call her dad and ask if they could stay at his house, the house where she grew up. She and Steve would stay in her girlhood room, where maps of Italy, Belize, and Morocco still hung next to her ballet awards. The kids could sleep on the sofa-bed in the living room.

There were no more flames now. Ash slid down the sky like stars on a midnight stroll. It streaked her arms and pajamas. She turned up her face to it, licked the flakes like raindrops, rubbed them into the skin of her face like moisturizer.

Except for some burnt roofing, on one side, the house looked untouched. They could have been coming home after a late-night pinochle game. But on the other side, the missing walls revealed the guts of the house. Some rooms had been destroyed. Others, except for blackened walls, looked normal.

Molly’s room, for example: The rumpled sheet looked as if Molly had gotten up to use the bathroom. It reminded her of the dollhouse her father had assembled for her when she was a kid.

She should’ve put the family Bible in that fireproof box. Steve had asked her once if she wanted to, but she told him that was ridiculous. She displayed its ancient binding, elaborate artwork, and gold leaf cover on a wooden bookstand on the mantle. She had it open to a painting of Lazarus, wrapped in burial cloth, stumbling from a tomb, his sisters running toward him with their arms flung open (not at all like the elder brother who rejected his brother’s homecoming). Jesus, head cocked, stood before him. After Sarah’s sister died, she flipped daily to the page between the testaments that marked the six generations of church weddings and funerals and brushed her fingers across the date of her sister’s death like reading Braille. Gradually, this happened less often until she only touched that spot twice a year—on the day her sister entered this world and the day she ran away from it.

Not everything had been destroyed. Perhaps the Bible had survived. She couldn’t see the living room to know what remained, and they wouldn’t be able to go inside to salvage what they could until later.

Steve put his arms around her. She held him for a moment before pulling away. He shrugged off his robe and held it out to her, but she shook her head. Steve draped his robe over his arms and crossed them again. They faced the house, but there was no more action, nothing to watch. If she stared at the sky hard enough through the bends of the radiating heat, it became the depths of the ocean, the moon only a reflection of itself, the stars wandering jellyfish. She thought about their fish swimming through the pipes. Then she imagined herself joining them and giggled.

“Are you okay?” Steve’s brows pressed together. He massaged the back of her neck.

She tempered her expression. “I was thinking about the family Bible.”

“Mike said most of the living room is okay. Smoke and water damage, but not a lot of fire damage.

Maybe the Bible’s okay.”

“Mike?”

“One of the firemen. Turns out he’s working on his MBA. I gave him my card. We’re having lunch next week.”

Only Steve would make a new friend while their house incinerated.

“Mike said it was probably an electrical fire, though he couldn’t be sure. He said it looked like it started inside the walls.”

Between the outside shutters and her carefully hung art, sparking and throbbing until it exploded, she thought.

“We’d wanted to update the house. We could get those granite counter tops and a shower with five jets.” Steve’s optimism and plans twisted around her like a straight jacket. “Molly redoes her room every few months anyway.”

“Mm,” she said. “What if we build some model home, one we could sell fast and move?”

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2010

“Move where?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. Vancouver. Hawaii. Wisconsin.”

“Wisconsin? What’s in Wisconsin?”

“Cheese?”

He laughed. “You and your cheese.” He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “I’ve heard about this new insulation material. Apparently, it’s all the rage these days—green and economical. And we could put in a sun room. Remember when we talked about having a sun room? You could disappear with a book.”

She pressed her breasts against him and whispered in his ear. “We could disappear to a new place entirely.”

He pulled her into him. “That would be nice. Bartend from a hut in Jamaica.”

“You make the best mojitos.”

“Those are Cuban.” He kissed her like he was about to fling her to the ground and take her right there.

An idea she wouldn’t mind. Then he said, “This is what I love about you. All this stuff doesn’t matter to you. You take it in stride. Most women couldn’t, you know.”

The air around her thinned when he said that. She wanted to tell him that the only time she didn’t want to take a mallet to the walls was when they made love. That the only way she could breathe again was to dive into the ocean until it closed in around her. That she didn’t want the kids to turn out like her. But she knew what he’d say. I can’t leave my job, he’d tell her. How can we take the kids out of school midyear? Or her father wasn’t doing well all alone these days. All the reasons he gave her until the discussion of the sailboat drifted into nothingness. She leaned against him, suddenly lonely and missing him.

She shifted her purse from one shoulder to the other and calculated how far she could get on credit cards, her ID, and some cash. She’d miss Molly’s recital, Tommy’s baseball game, and Darren’s first lost tooth—just that morning, or yesterday morning, rather, he had wiggled his top front tooth for her. And she’d miss Steve’s Irish Spring smell.

She didn’t know when she’d come back, how many phone calls Steve would make before she would answer her cell to tell him when to pick her up at the airport. At least he wouldn’t cut her off from the credit cards. His love ran deeper than that.

She ran away once before. She was nine years old. Lugging her favorite pajamas, an extra shirt, and a book in her purple-flowered suitcase, she pranced out the front door, down the block, and around the corner. There she paused. She didn’t remember how to get to her grandparents’ house, and her best friend down the next street had left two days before on vacation. She turned down the alleyway and snuck into her backyard through a hole in the fence. Between two bushes twice her size, she spied on her family.

She watched through the oversized kitchen window as her mom dished out dinner for her younger sister (this was two months before her younger sister died—she could never run away after that). Her little sister pleaded to finish her TV show first, please, please, please. Sarah could see straight through to the front 53

door, so when her father kissed her mother on the cheek and shut the door behind him, Sarah skirted around the bushes and watched through the rotting slats in the fence. A moment later, on his bike, he zig-zagged along the street, slowly, looking between the houses. Once, she thought he saw her, but he didn’t say anything or come toward her, so she must have ducked away in time. He went around the corner. A minute later, he reappeared and went the other way down the street.

Her stomach growled and tensed. Not only was she missing one of her favorite meals—meatloaf slathered with ketchup—but The Cosby Show would be coming on soon. She yanked her extra shirt out of her suitcase and donned it to ward off the slight chill in the air. Then she huddled between the bushes. She tried reading, but the dimming light hurt her eyes. Plus, she wasn’t interested in Mary Poppins right then. The neighborhood boy started talking to her over the fence, but she shooed him.

“Shh! I don’t want them to find me!”

He gave her a strange look and ran inside. Thinking about it now, she laughed. Knowing that boy, he envisioned aliens abducting her.

In the end, she had nowhere to go, nothing to eat—why hadn’t she grabbed at least a granola bar to extend her perseverance?—and nothing to do. Having nothing to do bothered her more than the rest.

She hated being bored. Boredom reminded her she didn’t belong.

In her own backyard, she waited until her father returned. Was that worry on his face? She smirked.

Then she waited what seemed like ages. Surely she had missed her TV shows and bath time. She imagined her mom tucking her sister into bed, and her parents, after one last concerned look out the window, turning in. Didn’t her parents’ bedroom window light up? And, yes, she was sure a figure appeared, staring out into the night. Longingly staring, even.

Sarah intended to sneak in and go straight to her room. They’d think she’d been gone all night. The next morning, she’d wake them, surprise! And they’d be filled with regret over how they’d treated her and gratitude that she’d returned. But the door creaked when she opened it. Her father had said a dozen times he needed to fix that and her mother responded each time, no, she wanted to know when a robber or worse intruded.

Also, from the TV came the voice of Bill Cosby. But that didn’t make sense. It had to be hours past The Cosby Show.

“Did you have a nice walk?” was all her mother said. Years later, when Sarah was in college, she brought it up: Remember the time I ran away?

“You never ran away.” Her mother turned to her father. “Do you remember Sarah running away?”

He shook his head, and she never mentioned it again.

“Sarah, yoo-hoo.” Steve waved his hand in front of her face. He looked at her expectantly—he must have asked a question. His eyebrows pushed together. “Where are you?”

She watched the horizon turn the color of fire. Phaethon had run away with his father’s chariot and crashed it into the ground.

“You ready to head to your dad’s? Yolanda said Tommy and Molly could stay the night there.” Steve kissed her forehead. “I’ll get Darren.” He strode to their neighbor’s porch and lifted Darren in his arms. Her throat hurt again. When Steve came back with Darren, he put his free arm around her. She leaned her head back against him, intertwined her fingers with his. Together, the three of them waited on the curb to go to her father’s house.

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2010

Sally Molini

Hibernaculum The desert feels lit from the inside, air more presence than atmosphere.

I’ve been here a week listening to cactus wrens, rafter creaks and the sound of my own mind.

A turtle crawls nearby, his long season of sleep over, both of us a few miles from the cabin where a substation glows in red Mojave haze like a Martian park.

Three-fingered risers and switch guards send their jouled buzz over the yellow throats and chicory— walking this landscape is like adding a depth to distance in which I feel too slow, as if I can never know the reach of this world, earth transmitting its bottom-line realizations.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Kelly Beahm is an MFA candidate at Chatham University. As part of

that program, she has started her own publishing house, Twisted Tree Press. Her own work will be published in the fall issue of the Coal Hill Review. She lives and works in Pittsburgh.

Christiane Buuck lives, teaches, and writes in Columbus, Ohio. Her

fiction has appeared in Cutthroat Magazine, her nonfiction in the Seneca Review, and her artwork in the Connecticut Review Elvis issue. She was first drawn to pilgrimage through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and later walked the Camino de Compostela across Spain and parts of France. She is currently working on a novel inspired by these experiences. Christiane writes: “The Alliance Catholique gift store, in all its gaudy splendor, epitomizes Lourdes to me: a town where devotion and consumerism walk in lock step. This picture was taken in the gloom of February, when the town was nearly deserted, and yet the neon glows on, and the Virgin is ever for sale under the watchful eye of the security camera.”

Thom Caraway lives in Spokane, Washington, with his wife, two

children, dog, and a cat who recently adopted the family. The cat is a proficient hunter of birds. When not shooing the cat away from birds or the birds away from the garden, Thom teaches at Whitworth University. His work has previously appeared in Yalobusha Review, Smartish Pace, and Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. His book A Visitor’s Guide to North Dakota was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007.

Bill Cass is an educator who lives in San Diego. He has had eleven

short stories accepted for publication in mostly smaller literary magazines such as Bellowing Ark, Red Wheelbarrow, ESC-Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, and A Year in Ink, Vol. III.

Maryann Corbett is still figuring out what poetry should do, though

she’s the author of two chapbooks, Dissonance (Scienter Press, 2009) and Gardening in a Time of War (Pudding House, 2007). Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in over sixty journals in print and online, from the very serious and reverent First Things and Christianity and Literature to the extremely irreverent Shit Creek Review. She lives in St. Paul with her husband, relies on Facebook to get her twenty-something kids to talk to her, and works for the Minnesota legislature.

Heather Matesich Cousins grew up in Bear Lake, a small town in

northern Michigan. She holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Georgia. Her first book, Something in the Potato Room, was selected by Patricia Smith as the winner of the Kore Press First Book Award and was published in January 2010. She currently lives in Monroe, Georgia, with her husband and two dogs and teaches at the University of Georgia.

Rachel Dacus is the author of Another Circle of Delight, Femme au

chapeau, and Earth Lessons. Her work appears in the anthologies

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17 autumn

2010

Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po LISTSERV, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose About Alzheimer’s Disease, as well as in numerous print and online magazines. Read more at www.dacushome.com. She also interviews poets for Fringe magazine. The daughter of a rocket scientist, her name is on a piece of floating space junk.

Heather A. Goodman secretly wishes to be a Broadway star. On

any given day, you can find her randomly breaking out into song and dance in grocery store aisles, park trails, and back alleyways. She writes to keep the voices in her head and her imaginary friends happy.

Her fiction has been published in Relief Journal, Infuze Magazine, Generate Magazine, and others, and her short films have been produced for film festivals and church productions.

Ken Gibson’s photographs were recently selected for solo exhibi-

tion at University of Cincinnati Clermont College and are part of the permanent collections of the University of Louisville Photographic Archives, Central Washington University, and Northern Kentucky University. You can see more work at www.kengibsonimagery.com.

When not visiting grandchildren, he and his wife can usually be found in southern Indiana. Ken writes: “‘Holy Water (Vatican),’ taken in Saint Peter’s Square, is tightly framed with individuality subservient to the gesture. The perpetual challenge I face with photography is providing clarity to each moment I frame. Framing by necessity excludes and I exclude a lot, seeking only what is essential.”

Sara Maria Harenchar lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is

a native of Greensburg, Pennsylvania. After spending four years as an undergraduate in English literature in beautiful Gettysburg, she decided to pursue an MA in professional writing at Carnegie Mellon University. Sara enjoys working with nonprofits and is pursuing a career in grant writing. In addition to coffee, good books, and writing, Sara also enjoys acapella, playing guitar and piano, the Golden Girls, Glee, and being Catholic. She believes in writing that shakes you awake and moves you to action. “The Remaking” is Sara’s first published poem.

Ryan Harper is a doctoral student in religion at Princeton Univer-

sity, where he is finishing an ethnography of contemporary southern gospel music. Some of his recent poems have appeared in Big Muddy, the Litchfield Review, and Red Clay Review. He and his spouse, writer and chaplain Lynn Casteel Harper, are both proud natives of southeast Missouri, and proud residents of New Jersey. A long-time jazz drummer, Ryan currently plays in an all-graduate-student quartet, which is adorably interdisciplinary.

Emily Hayes received her MA in English literature from Southern

Illinois University Carbondale. She teaches at Carbondale Community High School and is co-editor of the Village Pariah. Her poetry and

creative nonfiction have previously appeared in various journals, including Review Americana, Paterson Literary Review, Broad River Review, and Diverse Voices Quarterly. Above all, she is known as “Mama” to her four-year-old son Benjamin, a little boy who already understands the power of poems.

based in the US and France (www.cerisepress.com). Her work is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, and Barrow Street. She lives in Nebraska.

the University of Virginia where she is pursuing a degree in poetry. She has had poems accepted or published in North American Review, Tar River, Sow's Ear, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. Besides her studies, she is actively involved in a campus fellowship where she leads worship on a weekly basis. After graduating, she plans to pursue an MFA in poetry.

Ellen O’Connell, originally from California, just completed an MFA in nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her previous articles and essays have appeared in Redivider, Spectrum, the Independent, and santa clara review. She was the senior fiction editor for Lumina and will begin teaching writing at University of California Santa Barbara in 2011. When she is not writing, Ellen watches Masterpiece Mystery shows and makes strawberry shortcake. She is happy to be back in California where there is such good horchata and plans someday to subscribe to the New Yorker.

Marianne Lettieri grew up within sight of missile gantries at Cape

Richard Osler is a poet, specialty money manager, poetry work-

Chelsea Henderson is an undergraduate entering her fourth year at

Canaveral, Florida, during the space race. Visual juxtapositions, such as egrets flying at the rumble of a rocket launch, gave her a lasting appreciation of images that are at once familiar and strange. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally, and she is the founder of Arts of the Covenant, a group for visual artists of the Christian faith in the San Francisco area. More of her work can be viewed at www.mariannelettieri.com.

She writes: “As a species, we tend to wander and journey. The Forwarding Address explores how, with every move, we take our notions of home with us in boxes and in our hearts. And You Can’t Go Home Again speaks to everyone who has tried to return to their place of childhood long after wearing ruby shoes in the Emerald City.”

Ellaraine Lockie is a well-published and awarded poet, nonfiction

book author, and essayist. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area but leaves her husband, cat, and twelve rabbits every summer for as long as she can get away to Montana. There she stays in a cabin on a horse ranch that used to be her family's homestead and spends time with her two horses. Ellaraine teaches both poetry/writing and papermaking workshops and serves as poetry editor for the lifestyles magazine Lilipoh.

Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer, and maker of short col-

lage-films, living in New York. His latest book, Our Book of Common Faith, contains poetry and art that explores world religions and cultures to find that which might bond humanity rather than divide it. He writes: “With ‘Threshold,’ I had the good fortune of being in the Musée d’Orsay just wandering around the halls with my camera when I looked up and saw this gigantic clock. Reverie is what I experienced, a moment that seemed to stand still, and when a gentleman stepped in front of the clock, I saw it as a perfect image of life’s journey.”

Sally Molini was born in New York City and has had a variety of job

experiences, including working with Southeast Asian refugees, Chamber of Commerce executives, the elderly, and New Zealand printers. Currently she is a co-editor for Cerise Press, an online international journal

shop facilitator, father of four grown children, and partner of Somae Claire. He lives in Duncan, an hour north of Victoria on Vancouver Island. His poem “Remnants” was written when he lived on Bowen Island, a short ferry ride from Vancouver. His brown lab Cape spent countless days on the beach including the evening before she died in her sleep. Her memory, another remnant in my life.

April Schmidt teaches writing at Bethel University in St. Paul,

Minnesota. She received an MFA from Hamline University, and her creative work has recently appeared in Geez Magazine. This is her second piece in Ruminate. She lives with her husband and son in leafy, literary Minneapolis.

Mandy Thrasher is a photographer living in northern Colorado.

She recently had her first solo exhibit at Everyday Joe’s, a music and arthouse in Fort Collins, Colorado. She writes: “When looking at the rural areas along the Front Range of northern Colorado changing from farm lands of corn rows and grazing cattle into cookie-cutter subdivisions and places where you can spend an afternoon of golf, I felt the need to show what is. For the people who live in these areas it is an old way of life budding into a new world. Whether that new world is full of prosperity or one of loss, it is a landscape full of change.”

Hannah VanderHart lives by the Severn River in Annapolis,

Maryland, with her husband Luke and their two cats. Hannah is one of seven children, a Virginia native, and in addition to an agrarian background, she has many family members serving in the United States military. Books and British cooking are two of her greater joys.

A recent graduate of George Mason University's MFA program, Hannah has poetry published and forthcoming in the Basilica Review, Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, and So to Speak. As of fall 2010, she will be studying contemporary British poetry at Georgetown University.

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stOrIes anD pOems tO ILLumInate Our LIves

October 29–31, 2010 Luther College, Decorah, Iowa • Presentations, readings, and panel discussions featuring 18 new and 12 returning authors • Beautiful campus, friendly atmosphere • All writers and readers welcome KeynOte speaKers Award-winning poet Robert Cording National Book Award finalist Rene Steinke

“Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe.”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Information and registration

lutheranfestivalofwriting.org

bearing witness,

waking hearts,

making

cardus.ca/comment

magazine

good.

LAST NOTE : PILGRIMAGE

Maryann Corbett

Late Season Day Trip Because it could only happen in summer, because an early start was vital, because we’d run outside in the grass by the driveway, our sneakers wet, the air still cool, so early the light went sideways, because it changed things, because we would be saved by water from our humid suburban sins, because we’d begin by driving into the sun, in oriente, compass point of the pilgrim, past New Life Church and Transformation Salon and PMZ Plasma Services, where debt is washed away in blood, because of hope, because each year we forgot the hard returning until it came, the late-night driving back on the black, unbending highways, the cranky children, forgot the trash on the seats, forgot the way we steeled ourselves for the dark and the year’s forgetting, all this is why I can bear to stand on a corner a thousand miles from the shore, in a second-hand suit, and wait alone for a bus that will take me to work, watching others leave at the end of summer, the early sunlight barreling like a truck down east-west streets, and the gulls of parking lots wheeling in carnival arcs, screaming the sea.

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2010

Mandy Thrasher. “Untitled 9.” Digital photograph. 24 x 30 inches.