Issue 20: Feasting

PO ET RY NONFICT I O N VISUA L A RT +

sipping your mom’s stew • Jeffrey G. Dodd the swallow of a magic pill • A.J. Kandathil habitual consumption • Stefani Rossi 2011 Ruminate nonfiction Prize “Flexing, Texting, Flying” by Josh Macivor-Andersen

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FRONT COVER Laura Breukelman. imagining things again. Oil, wax, and fiber on panel. 24 x 30 inches.

THIS PAGE Laura Breukelman. is it a small ‘t’ tradition? Oil on panel. 36 x 48 inches.

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.

Ruminate Magazine (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly on FSCcertified paper by: Ruminate Magazine, Inc., 140 North Roosevelt Avenue, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521.

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senior editor A MY LOW E

associate editors ST E FA N I R OSS I ST E P H A N I E WA L K E R

review editor PAU L W I L L I S

associate readers A L EXA B E H M E R W H I T N EY H A L E P H I L L I P H E N RY ST E P H A N I E M I K K E LSO N WHIT REFVEM J O N AT H A N VA N DY K E

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

Patrons Dan & Kate Bolt, Imagined Design, Judith Dupree, Bruce & Cindy Jenkins, Ryan & Katie Jenkins, Tim & Katie Koblenz, Chris & Barb Melby, Jerry Mossberg & Jan Sherrod-Mossberg, Brian & Anne Pageau, Chris & Becky Pittoti, Josh & Nicole Roloff, Neal & Becky Stephens, Troy & Kelly Suto, Ben & Morgan Van Dyke, Matt & Lisa Willis

Sponsors Syndey Avey, Alan Bauer, Michael & Alexa Behmer, Melissa Bingham, Suzanne Brock, William Cass, Judith Cepa, Devon Miller-Dugan, Corrine Fisher, John Fitzpatrick, Becky Haigler, David Harrity, Brad & Keira Havens, Christine Jeske, Elanie Jordan, Matthew Koh, Manfred Kory, Nathaniel Lawrence, Rob Lee, Paulette Lein, Gary Mason & Amy Womack, Patrick McGee, Peter & Amanda Melby, Ellen Olinger, Geoff Pope, Janet Penhall, Rachel Roberts, Cheryl Russell, Dave & Kathy Schuurman, Luci Shaw, Janos & Margaret Shoemyen, Lucy Selzer, Margaret Selzer, Gwen Solien, Mary Van Denend, Kelly & Brandon Van Dyke, Robert Van Lugt, David Weldon, Steve West Copyright Š 2011 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

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contents

notes Editor’s From You Artist’s Contributor’s Last

4 5 26 54 56

poetry

review Rita Jones 50 The Spirit of Food, Ed. Leslie Leyland Fields

Jenn Blair The Truth 8 Fast Food Forms 9

nonF I CT I O N

Don Thompson Dead Grass 10 C.R. Resetarits Breakfast Midway to Bierstadt Lake 22 Bites 23 Lauren Schmidt The Magic Trick of the Table 24

Josh MacIvor-Andersen 11 Flexing, Texting, Flying

Patty Kirk 32 Saving Waters

A.J. Kandathil 38 Van Gogh’s Parable

Barbara Crooker Pistachios 25

V I S UA L A RT

Joseph Heithaus House Red 31 Jeffrey G. Dodd Letter to James from the Wavering Highway 35 Sometimes, in the Evening, I See Him 36 Turning a Scrap of Metal in His Hand Laurie Lamon Pieta 37 Sharon Fish Mooney “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance . . .” 47 Libby Falk Jones The Angel of Shoestring Potatoes 48 Natalie Minor Picking Olives 49

FRONT COVER INSIDE FRONT COVER

Laura Breukelman imagining things again is it a small ‘t’ tradition?

27 28 29 30

Stefani Rossi Clean Plate Club Recipe for Love Afterglow Much

INSIDE BACK COVER

Candace Keller Rich Man’s Table

BACK COVER

Nicora Gangi One Is Not The Other

editor’s note

Welcome

to Ruminate’s 20th issue! We are celebrating five years of Ruminate and are thrilled to mark this occasion with an issue on feasting. Thank you, dear readers, for joining us on this journey of chewing on life, faith, and art. Thank you for believing in Ruminate. I lift my glass to you all (preferably filled with my husband’s yummy homebrewed India Pale Ale). And I hope you can sit down now and enjoy the feast of this issue, which we have carefully prepared for you.

I love what the work in these pages and the concept of feasting teaches us, how it’s a synonym for delight—that when we feast upon something, we are intentionally choosing to delight in the goodness that has been given to us. Some of our contributors do just this, delighting in pistachios, red wine, tomatoes, potatoes, rosemary, olives, and water—certainly a grocery list worth savoring.

Jenn Blair writes about being “happy enough with what is enough / which is right in front of us which is what we requested / in earnest hunger and haste and annoyance and hope.”

Other contributors teach us that when we pursue feasting, we’re seeking a richness and excellence that is greater than the empty shallowness we’re often satisfied by. They feast on the beauty of dead grass and Van Gogh, and even look at life absent of feasting, considering what it would be like to follow a life-promising diet that’s free of high-fructose corn syrup, cell phones, and boys. Each of our contributors teaches us what it means to live with a heart ready to be delighted and with an eye trained to spot moments worthy of a feast.

We are also pleased to introduce our first annual Ruminate Nonfiction Prize, judged by Al Haley.

The staff and I give our hearty congratulations to the winner Josh MacIvor-Andersen for his essay “Flexing, Texting, Flying” and the second-place winner A.J. Kandathil for her essay “Van Gogh’s Parable.” Both pieces contain writing you can savor, and with Al Haley’s note about the state of nonfiction, this issue is, in part, a kind of nonfiction feast.

Our featured art for this issue comes from Ruminate’s very own art editor, Stefani Rossi, whose most recent body of work is concerned with food and drink and the habit of consumption. If feasting represents a joyful state of mind and a heightened appreciation for the good meal set before us (or the art, words, or dear friends set before us), then Stefani’s work points us toward the realization that when we simply consume, rather than feast, that appreciation and joy are tragically missing.

And so, I think we’ve set a nice table for you and hope you enjoy the rich offerings of our contributors.

May you feast upon the beauty in this issue and find yourself full, but also left with a desire for more, and perhaps, a desire for the true banquet, the feast of all feasts.

Bon appetit,

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Notes from you

Below are Ruminate readers’ thoughts on feasting.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Family gather around the table. Hot bowls of food steam on the plates before us. Everything feels warm, even despite the gray skies outside. We drink wine and laugh, sometimes hysterically, late into the night. Stories are told of those who went before us, and we chuckle at the little new ones with us now as they play. And we are indeed grateful.

Brandon Dennison

Ona, west virginia

How can silence be so heavy and solid, this absence of words, this listening in on the sighing of everything outside, inside, underneath and overhead? I am so ready to throw this sweet silence under the bus when the ice cream truck comes down the street. I don’t want to wait and taste the silence on my tongue, know the coolness it brings, let it stick to my hands and my mouth as it delivers some relief to my poor, starved soul.

I choose instead to fill up on empty words—high calorie, low maintenance. And yet, at this moment, words cannot offer relief, only silence can carry that in its pocket.

Angela Doll Carlson

Nashville, tennessee

Today’s lecture: One Commodity — Multiple Values. Standing at the lectern, mind racing, desperate for memorable examples, when out of nowhere—Scrapple. Unsalable pig parts, the offal (don’t ask) left over after butchering. Boiled, minced, spiced, and cooked with cornmeal mush, it has protein, fat, carbohydrates— nutritional values all. When we were poor, mom made it, fried crispy at the edges, for breakfast, with eggs.

Ergo, nostalgic family values. It keeps me humble. Scrapple came with my Pennsylvania Dutch forbears; centuries-old identity values emerge from the mists. A student blurts out her valuation, “I wouldn’t eat that crap if you paid me.”

Jerry Eckert

Vail, Arizona

I miss Mom’s Sunday dinners. Delicious food was merely condiments for our conversations. My older siblings would come home, and we’d set aside our petty rivalries to cram around the dark walnut table, which Dad extended to its full length. Nearly twenty years have passed since we last enjoyed a Sunday dinner like that. God knows I’ve tried replicating that favorite meal of the week, but it’s never quite the same. I can’t wait for the day when we all—parents, siblings, children—will again sit together around our Father’s table to share bread and wine, the entrees of grace.

Amy Nemecek

Tustin, Michigan

A box of Belgian chocolates. Leonidas—handmade 99% pure cocoa, air lifted from Brussels to Rotterdam and Chicago, now gracing my Ohio kitchen table. Praline, Truffle, Manon Café, Ganache with creamery butter; I savor one a day with steamed Java, hiding the last morsals from my spouse. The last chocolate honors Napoleon the Great, his portrait and name delicately engraved on top. A decadent surprise heats tongue melting chocolate into the whipped filling. Eagerly, I await my daughter Lara’s next trip across the Atlantic. Leonidas, you have outdone yourself!

Clarissa Jakobsons

Aurora, ohio

Send us your notes for Issue 21 to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. We love hearing from you!

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judge ’ s N ote Al Haley

F irst P lace Josh MacIvor-Andersen Flexing, Texting, Flying

S econd P lace A.J. Kandathil Van Gogh’s Parable

As I read through this batch of deeply felt, well-crafted personal narratives I couldn’t help noticing that the old adage is true: We live in a broken world. It’s not just bombs exploding and the earth cracking apart and swallowing us up. More often than not, what’s broken lies deep inside us.

Of course, there’s a potential problem with so many people recognizing this brokenness, indeed living with it every day in their own lives or seeing it in the lives of family, friends, or neighbors. What’s left to say about divorce, dysfunction, drug addiction, cancer, and other contemporary ills? A familiar chant of “woe is me”? Or the slightly more interesting, if not always credible, formulation that difficult struggles can lead to some kind of victory?

I’m not the only one to notice that the nonfiction bestseller list has for some time been dominated with the narrative of the ordinary person’s struggle to overcome “whatever” and find happiness.

This past January Neil Genzlinger wrote a review in the New York Times, “The Problem with Memoirs,” in which he rather impertinently asked such writers to “shut up.” He stated that worthwhile memoirs by writers who have actually accomplished “something noteworthy” or have had “an extremely unusual experience” are at a disadvantage as they are: . . . lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how

Ruminate Nonfiction Prize Finalists: Left For Dead at the Crossroads of Faith by Libby Cudmore • Everything that Rises by Alissa Goudswaar • Something Carries Through by Tyler McCabe • Camden Angel by Curtis Miller • Bread by Stephanie Smith • The Blue Recliner by Philip Weitl

Nonfiction Prize many other people have already written about it. Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight.

By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an underprivileged child or been an underprivileged child. By anyone who was raised in the ’60s, ’70s, or ’80s, not to mention the ’50s, ’40s, or ’30s. Owned a dog. Ran a marathon. Found religion. Held a job.”

You know what? There was a time when I might have agreed with Mr. Genzlinger. Now, after judging this contest, I think he very well could be missing something.

What he calls a “sea” seems to me more like hundreds of interesting tide pools left behind on the beach. Or it’s the individual “drips” falling relentlessly in “Van Gogh’s Parable” by A.J. Kandathil. Or I think of a teen by the name of Pip in “Flexing, Texting, Flying” by Josh MacIvor-Andersen whose tears are more complex than “commonplace.”

There’s a particularity to suffering and life’s struggles, whether they involve the physical, mental, or the existential.

No two people experience troubles in exactly the same way.

It’s this particularity that makes such stories compelling and, yes, exceptional. It’s why I find the good stuff right here in stories that arguably could happen to most any of us.

Still, I believe there are two necessary ingredients required to make this kind of writing work.

First, there should be a special species of narrative intelligence in charge of the tale, one that is able to use words at such an accomplished level that they render experiences in a way that makes us feel as if we’re present while simultaneously we’re receiving an understanding

that is deep, as if time and actions have been given the luminosity of great poetry. Second, the experience being reflected upon should ideally be one that stands fairly close to (if not right at) life’s edge. And this is key: The writer needs both these things.

Standing at the edge without the requisite tools to write about it will either leave us mostly unmoved, like another Hollywood fireball hurtling toward the action hero, or it will come across as an attempt at sensationalistic entertainment (“I picked up the knife and thought of stabbing my mother . . . ”). On the other hand, writing fluently about some safe realm (here I think of a sort of clubby, inner circle type of writing about how my dog or cat helps me see into the mind of the universe or those accounts of what one did during exotic foreign travels) risks leaving us with the realization that nothing of substance has been endured or come to pass. When that happens we start to forget the piece almost as soon as we finish reading it.

Happily, forgetfulness was not something I struggled with as I sifted through these submissions. Instead, I came across memorable stories that in the most general sense are much like yours and mine. All of us make certain profound choices while at the same time other choices are out of our hands, decided by other people, history, time and chance, and perhaps God. When it’s all done and the cards are turned face up how will our life be? Better or worse or the same? We must read on, live on to find out.

Al Haley is Writer-in-Residence and associate professor of English at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. He is author of Home Ground: Stories of Two Families and the Land and Exotic: A Novel, winner of the John Irving First Novel Award. His work has been featured in publications including The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.

Jenn Blair

The Truth When the radio sang about love, other gazes grew soft, but I was never convinced.

I peeled potatoes and if a bit of rough skin stuck on mine, I did not flick it off ‘til I was done, and to me, that was tenderness.

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Jenn Blair

Fast Food Forms Looking up at the art above our booth we wonder, does anybody dine after the camera closes?

On the bread torn neatly in half on the board, flour scattered all around. It’d be so tempting.

Then again we’ve heard of trickery, slick advertisers, with their painted marble peas and glue for milk. Who even knows what forms the beads of water poised at different parts of the lettuce leafs? Next, we meditate on forgiveness, prompted by the surprising cheese resting so amicably near the grater that’s just torn its hindquarters to perfect shreds.

Then a child across the way yells in delight directing her chubby finger towards the tomato its green star stem with perfectly equidistant points, as we munch on its paler weaker cousin and devour slightly singed crusts, happy enough with what is enough which is right in front of us which is what we requested in earnest hunger and haste and annoyance and hope.

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Don Thompson

Dead Grass I still can’t convince myself there’s no life here— not the insect philosophers sequestered under rocks, nor the lizards that must be somewhere, fakirs who hold their breath all day, levitating in the heat shimmer, but the rocks themselves, Gnostics who won’t let us in on their secrets.

Even the dead grass is alive —impossibly alive like holy scripture— so that if you knelt down, read a few blades, and memorized their scribbled monosyllables, you could say them to yourself for as long as you live whenever you’re not sure what life is.

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josh macivor-andersen

The

best tree climber in the world is a small, dreadlocked German named Bernd “Beddes” Strasser.

He is the best because he trounced all of his competitors at eight of the last nine international treeclimbing championships. Of course few people were actually watching (tertiary ESPN coverage doesn’t come cheap), but those who were craned their necks in disbelief, awestruck at the fluidity, balance and speed of a little wiry man climbing through tree canopies as if he were a squirrel.

I was watching, too, taking notes, doing my best to mimic his moves in my own less-than-world-class climbing career. Yes, I took the Tennessee championship one year, went on to land third at regionals— which won me a chainsaw—but I will simply never have Strasser’s prowess, his sixth climbing sense, which might just be pure lunacy. He climbs as if he had a tail.

Strasser never knew it, but I viewed him as something of a golden ticket on multiple levels. There was his climbing, which could transform any competitor into a champion if emulated properly. But there was also his story, his compelling, obscure, hitherto-unknown life story: the seed picking company he started to help scientific researchers gather specimens from the tippy-tops of impossible-to-reach trees, his innovations in tree climbing equipment and safety (he invented a widely used friction knot called the Swabisch, named after a forest close to his home in Germany), his environmental advocacy and the fact that his weathered face and dreadlocks and charming smile were destined to grace the cover of Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, maybe even GQ. The dude is just photogenic.

I was sure I would be the one to break him into the media’s limelight, and at the same time catapult my fledgling writing career into the literary stratosphere. How many writers could follow him through the trees, after all? Who else could shove a microphone in Strasser’s face two hundred feet up a tulip poplar and translate all of the climbing jargon into palatable prose?

I was sure it was me. The right guy at the right time. So I emailed him. I explained my plan, called myself a freelance writer, told him I’d like to do a feature profile that would almost definitely be shopped over to a top-tier glossy magazine with success. It took a while, maybe three months, but he eventually emailed back:

In the beginning of July I will be in Sequoia National Park climbing mammut trees. It is within a project of the Berkley University of San Francisco.

By the way, I was there last year already . . . these trees are incredible and sure enough they would be an amazing scenery for pictures . . .

Happy days, climb safe,

beddes

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By the time I reached the last sentence, I had thrice imagined my byline on the cover of ESPN Magazine.

I made plans, consulted the atlas, called friends and family along the route and booked floor space and guest rooms. I told my tree-climbing friends all about my summer project and started strength training so I could climb to three hundred feet without wheezing like a deflating tire. I told all my writing friends about the profile and heard a resounding chorus of: yes, you are the one to write this article—please remember us when you win the Pulitzer.

And then I was off, all the way from the East Coast to the West, with a trunk full of journalism and climbing gear. Fresh batteries for the recorder. A brand new length of rope with which to tie a Swabisch in front of the inventor himself.

But Strasser had been vague about the exact location and dates of his tree foraging in California. Early July, yes; Sequoia National Park, yes—but nothing more. I had emailed him a few times before I left, but still hadn’t heard back with specifics. And yet I was committed, inching along my mapped-out trajectory and waiting anxiously, daily, for Strasser’s reply.

It never came. I sat roadside in Arizona wondering whether or not I could simply drive to the 202,430-acre park and find him in the trees.

“It would be like finding a monkey in a jungle,” said my wife.

“Like finding a Hyla arborea tree frog in a rainforest,” I said, always one to strain a metaphor.

Such is life. We secure something, lock it down, tether it to a tree only to see it drift away. Our plans and dreams and visions for the future, as sincerely as we make them, have a way of dismantling around us quickly, sometimes even as they are being constructed.

So we flex. We hit a dead end, hinge, seek a new direction.

It was simple enough. My tattered map came back out and I made new plans. Up the coast I would go, all the way to Seattle. From there, I even thought I might head all the way over to Rhode Island, where this year’s International Tree Climbing Championship would be held, to track down Strasser and get my career-defining article after all.

And then it struck me: my baby sister, the one who lives with Mom back East, who has never seen big mountains except on television; my nineteen-year-old adopted sister, Pip, who has been in something of a downward spiral ever since Mom and Dad split up years ago. She’ll fly into Seattle and together we’ll meander all over the West until we’ve seen everything there is to see. It will be pivotal for her. A new beginning! A hinge moment! A trip across the country with me at the helm will be just the jump-start she’s been needing to get her life in motion again.

It was an easy sell: “Hey, Pip, why don’t you fly out West so we can drive back East together.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it will be, um, pivotal.”

“Sure!” she said, without asking what I meant.

Indeed, we flex. Bernd Strasser, the best tree climber in the world, steps back into the shadows of his sequoias and coils his ropes in peace. My baby sister, Pip, whose suicide attempts over the last few years have been frequent, who has been institutionalized for the omnipresent depression and anxiety, who, at nineteen, has yet to see a real mountain, steps unknowingly into the light. * Pip is the youngest of six girls. Her mother left the maternity ward with her after a few days, spent a week in an old crumbling house in North Nashville, and Pip was then snatched from her mother’s arms by a state caseworker on the front steps. The official narrative was that each of her sisters had been molested or abused in some way, and her mother, who, along with a variety of fathers, had been in and out of jail, was essentially blacklisted from ever having another baby.

We were a fresh new foster family. It was Mom who pushed for the role, convincing Dad that my brother, sister, and I were getting older, self-sufficient, and that it was time to foster or adopt some kids in need.

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It was the Christian thing to do. Dad was painting houses sixty, seventy hours a week and was more reluctant than Mom to start over. My siblings and I had been a handful, filling our parents’ lives with all kinds of adolescent angst, drugs, and lots of rock and roll. But Mom was insistent, and the paperwork went through, and suddenly we got a call one night to ask if we’d foster a week-old baby girl who had just been whisked away from a fiendish family.

This is what I remember: the humidity and the honeysuckle. Our condominium complex and all the blacktop and me tearing over the blacktop on my skateboard, soaring over drainage ditches and patches of grass and bright yellow speed bumps. I remember shooting up the steps of our deck and sliding open the heavy glass door and then there was a baby in Mom’s arms, a quiet little human being all wrapped in pink, and I remember my dad calling for my brother and sister upstairs, calling them

So we flex.

We hit a dead end, hinge, seek a new direction.

down to the dining room where the baby slept in Mom’s arms. He told us to lay our hands on her and pray for her, told us that God had spared her all kinds of abuse and torture and brought her to us, which was a kind of salvation. I had stopped believing in God but I closed my eyes as tightly as I could, laid my hand on the baby, and asked God to forgive my unbelief long enough to hear my prayer, which was that the baby would be safe and healthy and that she would never have to go back to her birth family again. I opened my eyes, shoved my hands back in my pockets, and silently said amen. * Pip and I made a pact. Well, actually I created a pact for our trip that she essentially agreed to. I told her she was free to add her own ideas, but mine seemed to take up a lot of space. Not much room for additions.

This is what I said:

• • • • • • •

You: No high fructose corn syrup drinks (Dr. Pepper).

Me: No alcohol.

Us: Daily exercise, journal entries, healthy eating.

You: No going home.

Me: I will share control of the music.

Us: We will be honest if annoyed, communicate openly and freely.

You: NO BOYS!

Pip hung the pact on her wall, right next to all the pictures of ex-boyfriends who had been less than loving towards her. She agreed to our pre-trip training program, which included exercise and lots of drinking water. She started to search for tickets and tried to fight back the growing anxiety attached to getting on a plane for the first time by herself.

And I gave up on my strength training for the Strasser interview and simply worked my way up the

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coast, wondering the whole time if Pip would actually get on the plane. The last time she had tried to fly was on a visit to my college in Philadelphia, with the understanding that she might even stay with me for a while. She had made it all the way to the ticket counter, bought the one-way ticket, and then went fetal on the airport floor, sobbing uncontrollably. Mom phoned from the terminal and called the whole thing off.

Pip says over the phone that it won’t happen again, that she will definitely come, but later Mom says that my sister has been having “swings” and “melt downs.” The day before she is scheduled to fly, Pip tries to kill herself again, this time with sleeping pills. She is back from the hospital and okay, but Mom thinks she did it because she failed to exercise enough, isn’t “skinny enough,” feels like she’s broken the pact already.

I think of my baby sister with a tube down her throat, her stomach pumped. I think of her getting to the airport only to slip into the bathroom with a razor blade.

But flight day comes and I get a text, my brother telling me that Pip is on the plane after only a few tears. I get another text, this time from Pip, says she is on her way. My texting thumbs come to life and

The closet thing worked.

We stayed in there until she calmed down and started talking.

We agreed that she couldn’t say hateful things to me or anyone else anymore . . .

I remind her that this plane ride, which is really just a mouse of an issue, has become a monster for her.

I tell her to slay the monster. “Kick the monster’s ass,” I say. “You are a soldier, a champion. You’re Joan of Arc.” Another botched metaphor. Her phone clicks to sleep and I imagine the plane doors suctioning shut and pressurized air filling the cabin. I see her gripping the inoperable ashtrays, closing her sore eyes and cringing as the jet engines roar to life like lions. * When Pip was eight years old, she told me she hated me, so I locked her in a closet. I don’t remember why she told me she hated me, but after the outburst I can remember feeling that I was the one to finally set her straight, get her on the right track. The idea of the closet came quickly. I grabbed her by the arm and marched her into her own room, into her own closet, pulled the light on and slammed the door shut.

I, too, was on the inside. I figured if I locked her in there alone she might just sit and fume and devise all kinds of terrible revenges against me. So I stayed with her. I sat there and she cried like crazy,

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started clawing for the door handle, but I kept her at bay with one arm and picked up Veggie Tales tapes with the other, started reading all of the backs of the VHS boxes out loud. Very loud:

Have you ever felt too small to do a really big job? That’s

what a little shepherd boy named Dave feels when his big

brothers head off to defend their country, leaving him behind

with the sheep. They’re in for a surprise when they find out

their foe is a 9-foot pickle!

The closet thing worked. We stayed in there until she calmed down and started talking. We agreed that she couldn’t say hateful things to me or anyone else anymore, and I finally set her free. I made a mental note of my success and filed it away to be wielded when my as-yet-unborn kids get born and start acting unruly.

The truth is I’ve always tried to fix people. Siblings, parents, politicians. I scream at the nightly news sometimes fully believing that if the people on the screen would actually listen to me, the world would finally find its equilibrium. I’ve got this severe middle-kid psychosis-plus-hubris that makes me believe I can make everyone feel happy and healthy all the time, if only I work hard enough.

Pip has been on my fix-it list for a long time. I noted the changes in her, the growing mood swings and depression as my parents’ marriage began to crumble. She was only fourteen when it started, still planted firmly in the middle of their infidelities, screaming matches, and manipulations. I tried at times to stretch myself from my relatively stable adult life into her darkening adolescent one and pluck her out. I reached and reached but eventually saw her slip beneath all the tumult—the little girl Pip seemed to drift away, and the girl who floated back to the surface was someone different indeed.

This new Pip went into her room, slammed the door shut, and began taking sharp objects to her skin, channeling every bit of fear and anger and lack of control into the press of a pen tip against her flesh. * The Seattle airport in summer is bright and huge and clean. It feels fresh and hopeful. I watch the arrivals with interest, see all the explosions of happiness and gratitude—people together again, finally.

But even the departures have this sweetness and sadness all mixed together. A group of ten teenagers stands to my right, saying goodbye to a girl, Yuki, who is heading back to her home in Japan. Ten teenagers weep and laugh as they circle her, touching her shoulders and wrapping their arms around her, hungry for touch before she flies away.

My baby sister walks through the security gate staring at her feet. She is straight-faced, walking slowly, nothing but a book bag and a sweatshirt and the rainbow-laced hiking shoes I asked her to bring so we could walk in the woods.

“You can’t fix her,” my wife said. “All you can do is love her.”

“Sure,” I said, even as I concocted plans to both love and fix.

I scream Pip’s name and her head jerks up as if she had been sleepwalking. Now she is in my arms, breathless from the walking, and I begin demanding all the details of her flight and her thoughts, all the things she felt as the plane took off, leveled out, landed.

She is good. Sedated with anxiety medicine, tired and hungry. But good. Now it’s me and Pip and an entire country lying to our right—the East. We walk slowly to the car, pay our parking ticket at a little kiosk, and throw her bag on top of the pile of books and clothes and camping gear scattered around the Civic. Evidence of a proper road trip.

“You ready?” I ask.

“I’m ready,” she says.

“Do you like fish and chips?”

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She makes a face like she just swallowed a cut lemon.

“Hate them.”

“Well, then I’m going to take you to get the best macaroni and cheese you’ve ever had,” I say, throwing the car in gear, heading straight for Pikes Place Market, feeling grateful for the heat and light of the Northwestern sun, grateful that all the rumors of rain, at least for today, were untrue. * Pip has been writing for a long time, ever since she was a little girl. She never read much, at least not until the Lord of the Rings trilogy sucked her in, but she was always creative and found it easy to put good stories together.

I’ve been giving writing assignments out for a long time, to just about anyone who will politely accept them. Pip is always a prime candidate because she never turns them down and always delivers startling, fresh stories written with a genuine and steady prose.

So as we drive away from Seattle and pull the car onto a ferry at Whidbey Island, I’m lost in narratives, thinking about the storylines that captivate us and all the ways we try to live out those storylines in our real lives. For me, the narratives that have dominated my life are the ones in which heroes (usually having started out as pig keepers or mild-mannered something-or-others) discover their true calling and go on to save the universe. Yes, that’s my story, I think and feel and believe every time I see it in a film or read it in a book. I then go on to inflict my narrative on all those around me, like a comic book hero who swoops down to rescue pedestrians on their way to work, spilling coffee and stepping on toes as he “saves” the day.

By the time we pull off the ferry at Whidbey Island, I decide I’ve got Pip’s narrative figured out, too. It always involves a broken, helpless girl who meets a mysterious boy and is then swept up, saved, made whole by his love. It helps if there is flying involved—and vampire teeth.

This is the story she projects onto every goober of a guy she shares a passing smile with, the story she believes and desires above all stories, the one that frequently wiggles its way into her own writing, and the one she dreams about when her dreams are strong enough to break through the medication.

“I’ve met a boy online,” she says as we begin driving again. “He’s nice.”

“Oh,” I say. “Tell me about him.”

There’s not much to say. Lives in Arizona. Works at a grocery store.

I’m desperate to have the narrative conversation with her as we wind our way up Whidbey, but instead I spend the time pointing out all the things she would never have seen back home. The sea and boats, the conifer forests and mountainous backdrop and all the shades of prickly green.

I remind myself of my wife’s words even as my messiah narrative bubbles up in me like a geyser.

You’re just here to listen, support, encourage, I tell myself as we set up the tent and go for a walk around Deception Pass. You can’t save her, I tell myself as she wheezes next to me, exhausted from the hundred-yard walk to the waterside. My narrative interrupts, hrumphs, and says that if I don’t save her she’ll surely die. * I should never have become a tree climber. My fear of heights is suffocating and strikes with a vengeance every time I pass over a tall bridge, get close to any edge with a corresponding drop off.

The fear starts in my belly and then overtakes my brain, turns all my thoughts into flashing red DANGER. Bernd Strasser doesn’t feel the same fear. Nor does my big brother Aaron, who taught me how to climb, who told me to get over it, let go of the trunk and get out on the limbs and go to work. “Get out

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there or I’ll have to go up and do it myself,” he said as I froze fifty feet up a sycamore tree, hugging the trunk desperately.

Pip, of course, has a list of fears as long as a complex curry recipe. All kinds of social anxieties, fear of dogs, fear of being alone.

And yet a few months ago she dove from a plane at fourteen thousand feet strapped to a stranger named Junior. My brother was there because that’s where he is most weekends, jumping out of planes to get his adrenals pumping again (after a lifetime of dragging powerful chainsaws through dangerous trees, few things still excite him).

Pip was just supposed to go down to the drop zone and hang out, read a book or two and take some pictures. But my brother has this funny up-and-at-em influence, this way of talking people into doing things they wouldn’t normally do: one more shot of tequila or a pedal-to-the-metal race or a free fall from a plane. He worked on Pip for a few hours and then, suddenly, before she knew what was really happening, she was suited up, given instructions and hoisted into the air by an old prop plane piloted by a chain-smoking hippie with a ponytail.

She jumped, face first, falling directly into Aaron who had grabbed her by the shoulder straps and pulled her into himself. Aaron plummeted at a hundred miles an hour on his back, laughing

My narrative interupts,

squeezes my esophagus in a vice grip,

and says that if I don’t save her she’ll surely die.

like crazy as Pip and Junior chased him through the sky. He had a video camera attached to his helmet and I’ve seen the footage, her face all contorted by the wind, the fear turning into something like maniacal joy as she realized, mid-flight, that she was really flying.

When she got safely to the ground, she called to tell me what she had done.

“Guess what?”

“What?”

“I jumped!”

“Out of a plane? Seriously?”

“Seriously! I’ll send you pictures!”

And then a grainy shot of Pip in a jumpsuit materialized on my cell phone, she and Aaron giving the lens some kind of hell yeah gesture, tongues out, arms draped over shoulders.

I was amazed and jealous that my brother was the one to unlock such an adventure in Pip. I usually feel like I’m the only one capable of such things.

But mostly I was just amazed. And along with a list of other things, I’ve been meaning to make my baby sister a little laminated card that she could keep in her purse, a card that she could pull out every time a panic attack comes in a throng of people, or when anxiety over an upcoming driver’s test or GED exam builds to a breaking point.

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I, Pip, jumped from an airplane at fourteen thousand feet, flew through the air, and landed upright on my feet. I, Pip, can do anything, survive anything, conquer any fear.

I would include a little thumbnail picture of her in her purple jumpsuit—a proof, a stake in the ground, a talisman that she could hold up like a lamp against any darkness. * We go north through the Cascade mountain range, endless curves, perfect view after perfect view. We drop down through an Indian reservation and stop at Coulee Dam. I can’t help myself and start getting all didactic, lecturing my sister about the rounding up and sequestering of Native Americans. I give her a lesson on electricity, as in what happens when we flip on a light switch in our house, all about the destructive nature of coal plants and dams.

She wants air conditioning. It’s hot in the wheat fields of eastern Washington. I turn it on reluctantly, mumbling about decreased gas mileage, and watch her watching her hand trace the curvature of the fields. She realizes that if she squints with one eye and pumps her fingers along the

I dream

of a bottomless gas tank

and the ability to show Pip everything.

landscape as it whizzes by, it looks like her fingers are running up and down the passing green hills.

She pulls out her camera, switches it to video, and records her fingers tippy-toeing along at seventy miles an hour.

There is laughter now, hers and mine. She shows me the video and indeed it looks like her hand is running a break-neck marathon over the hills. Looks like her hand is flying.

“It’s beautiful out here,” she says.

Soon we are out of gas. Pip has never filled up a tank. Pumping gas has always been Mom’s job, and Mom never asked her to help. I show her how it’s done, how to slide the card in and remove it quickly, how not to fill an unleaded tank with diesel. She’s open to these lessons and doesn’t grumble.

I scrub away the insect carcasses from the windshield and she replaces the pump and it all feels like something of a victory to me.

And although the goal was to drink only water and juice on this trip, she wanders through the gas station and sees a sport drink with the triumvirate lure of being “cheap, big, and cold.” She buys it under the auspices of hydration and brings it to the car, reading through the ingredients as she settles into her seat.

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There is water in that bottle, high fructose corn syrup, a smattering of electrolytes and vitamins.

“I broke the pact,” she sighs. “I didn’t know.”

She hands me the bottle and I turn it over in my hands, study the label and swirling the bright blue liquid into a funnel.

“It seemed like the kind of thing that wouldn’t have syrup in it,” she says apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

The pact isn’t about corn syrup—it’s about creating a pivot point in Pip’s life, a fulcrum that will allow her to teeter away from all these destructive habits and patterns. More water, less lethargy, daily doses of hope.

“No worries, Pip. Stupid labels. Small print. Now you know.”

We move on, blasting East, her sipping at the sports drink and me pounding out parradiddles onto the steering wheel: right-left-left, left-right-right. We hit the interstate and cruise at eighty. We’ve never really spent this much time together and somewhere in the middle of Montana she says, “Ok, lets get to know each other,” and she tells me all about the boys she’s loved and how they’ve hurt her. She describes what it was like to be stuck at home as Mom and Dad’s marriage imploded. We collectively remember the closet and the Veggie Tales tapes.

“I’m glad you still don’t hate me,” I say. “I guess the closet worked.”

“Yeah right,” she says with a smirk. “I just wanted to get out of there.” * I dream of a bottomless gas tank and the ability to show Pip everything. But everything doesn’t exist on a single road headed East. Everything is everywhere—Glacier to our north, the Dakota Badlands straight east. I’m putting out feelers to see if the impossibly large faces of former presidents carved into a mountain is something she’d like to see. Or maybe Canada, a first visit for her to a foreign country. What does she want? What does she need? I study the map as if it were a sacred text, tracing my finger along highways that connect to interstates that connect to little swathes of green (national parks) and brown (Indian reservations) and realize I’m looking everywhere for answers.

“How about Yellowstone?” I ask.

“What’s there?”

“All kinds of stuff. Bears, moose, geysers. Old Faithful!”

“Old Faithful!”

“Only the most famous geyser in the world. We have to see it!”

And this is how decisions are made. We head south to Yellowstone to see water erupting faithfully from the earth. I bring my map as we sit in the shade of a tree, waiting for the aquatic fireworks, and I calculate distances and mouth the names of towns.

“Kit Carson, Colorado,” I mumble. “I wonder what it’s like down there.”

Steam is hissing from a hole in a ground and a few hundred people lounge in a giant circle, playing with the buttons on their electronic equipment. Old Faithful seams to be teasing us, sending up plumes of steam and then subsiding. We hear people say this is it and it’s coming now, but still we wait.

I take our bottles into the cafeteria to pilfer fresh water from the soda fountain and when I come back the geyser is more active.

“Are you ready for it?” I ask, noticing too late that her eyes are red and wet with tears.

“Sure,” she says, wiping at her face with the back of her hand.

“You ok?”

“Sure,” she says, pointing her camera at the geyser as it erupts, spraying us and hundreds of others with a mineral-rich mist. Her crying disappears in the wetness.

“Ok, let’s boogie so we beat traffic,” I say, and we shuffle back to the car to find a campsite before dark.

Her heart breaks a hundred times a day. Sometimes it heals for a while—she smiles and laughs—and then it breaks all over again.

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As Yellowstone vanishes quickly in our rearview mirror, I begin writing her a letter in my mind. It starts like this:

Dear Pip, I don’t want you to die.

And it goes on to describe all of the things I wish she would do to get healthy, to avoid onset diabetes by the time she’s thirty, regain control of her emotions and relationships.

We ride mostly in silence, eventually finding a little camp spot on a ridge where we can see the entire Teton mountain range. It’s getting dark, dark enough that the stars are beginning to materialize in the sky above us. Our friend told us that we’ll see more stars out here than anywhere else in the country.

After the tent I set up our little camp chairs and position them facing the mountains and sit down to wait for the light show. Pip asks if she can go to sleep.

“But the stars,” I say.

“I’m just really tired,” she says, and she zips up the tent and begins to make love over text to the boy in Arizona.

I take my chair farther into the darkness and watch the sky. Satellites patrol space, tiny pinpricks of light soaring slowly above. And there are shooting stars. Every thirty seconds or so I see another.

Before long I hear the whining of wolves, and then the howls. Pip has given up texting and is talking now, sending kisses into the receiver and telling the boy, “I love you.”

Finally the phone clicks shut and there is silence. I wait for a long time out in the darkness and when I hear her gentle snoring I sigh and realize I’ve carried the anxiety of the day in my shoulders since morning. I let them sag, slouch deep into the chair and pray for the first time in a long time, asking God to listen past my unbelief, to save my sister. * I first talked to God when I was five years old, when I first understood that some people, good people go to heaven and live happily ever after and other people, the bad ones, go to hell and burn forever.

Mom was good and Dad was good and my brother, Aaron, wasn’t good but maybe he’d turn around someday. All I could think about was being away from my family, so I begged Mom to help me invite Jesus into my heart. She was very serious about it, sitting on the edge of my bed with my hands clasped in hers. She made sure I understood the theological implications, and what would be expected of me—go and sin no more—and I slobbered and poured tears all over her and recited the sinner’s prayer because I was electrified with the theological/psychological/physical sentiment of take me with you.

Things got complicated shortly after that. I began testing the invisible, trying to see if God would reach his heavenly hand into my concrete world and help me out. I lay in bed one night, staring at the box fan propped up in my window, and used all of my spiritual energy to get God to turn on the machine. Hours and hours. I focused on the fan and believed as deeply as I knew how that God could, if he chose, do anything he wanted in this world, and that I, if only I had the faith, could move mountains. “Literally move mountains,” said my parents and my Sunday school teacher. That fan was nothing. A tiny little plastic knob. A simple click to power level three, then two, then one.

How easy and simple it would be for God to bring a little breeze into our rooms, to galvanize our faith once and for all. Beyond all doubt. How purely and voraciously I believed he would.

But the room was still that night, and every subsequent night that I failed to turn on the fan with my own in-the-flesh hand. It took awhile but I eventually drifted far, far away from that simple, childlike spark of faith, only to return to it much later. But now my expectations are much lower and my

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requests have become questions. Instead of staring at fans, I stare at the news feed on my computer and ask God to explain where he was when the Janjaweed tore into those villages in Sudan, raping and killing and gouging out the eyes of children. I go silent and listen, hear traffic on the street, a plane growling overhead, the hum of the computer’s fan and then, yes, there it is, I hear the same Godwhisper that has swept past my ears for twenty years: Joshua, where were you? * Bernd Strasser never competed in this year’s tree climbing championship. I’m not sure if the Sequoias wore him out, or if he just felt like it was time to move on. The new champion is a climber named Jared Abrojena from the Western chapter. He is clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair and a smiling, all-American face. I could see him on the cover of GQ or Outside, but I’m banking on Strasser. Eight out of ten championships is still pretty good. I’ve got another email waiting in his inbox, assuring him there are no hard feelings, that if he’d like I could meet him anywhere in the world with my ropes and recorder.

But summer is waning. I’m wrapping up all the post-trip loose ends. I finally went ahead and made that little card for Pip, too, the one with the picture of her soaring through the sky. I chose a strong font, put it in bold, laminated it.

Sometimes I feel like my time is short. There is an increasingly morbid math on my little sister.

She has made twelve attempts on her life in the past five years. Two days after we arrived home from our three-thousand-mile trip, she took twenty-eight pills and was whisked away to the hospital by three police cars, two ambulances, and one fire truck. Mom said the lights around the house filled the neighborhood as if it were the Fourth of July.

She is stabilized now, taking a class, a kind of after-care from being in the hospital. We talk on the phone, and sometimes I’ll send her a text, reminding her to go outside and get some vitamin D, or to drink more water so she’ll keep hydrated.

“Thanks,” she says. “Thanks for the reminder.”

It’s a small screen where all these words transfer back and forth, where all these words live and are stored. I always tell her I love her and, even with a smattering of exclamation points, the phrase fits on a single line.

There are times I’d like to write it big, times I wish my texting thumbs connected to a skywriter, one of those biplanes trailing smoke. That way she could see it, and maybe God, too, see what I’ve been trying to say, simply, all summer long: I’m here, Pip. I’m right here.

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C.R. Resetarits

Breakfast Midway to Bierstadt Lake What pretty little leaves the aspen have limes or lemons or at a distance for a moment clementine.

They pour down mountains down burnt toast crevasses the zigzag of ill-cut loafs like molten marmalades shimmering in waking eyes dancing on hungry tongues.

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C. R. Resetarits

Bites As if Adam and Eve were not in spring at the time and place supposed but premonitions of summer apple groves—fruit bitten, jammed, or pied— not past knowing—pre-fruition—but just picked and eaten clean. The whole affair some dream unproved while prime movers, shakers—apple grove, serpent, all the rest— hint promises, quiet talking ups, garden plots time share scams by dread cartels twixt Ur and Id and Oz. Nothing so spring/summer within this grove of trees.

Fall fruits too often are a trail of tears, crammed cattle cars, millennia of concubines, noncoms, soldiers, either side, stewed apple skins frame narrow homes and kimonos spun of silk and stone and wormy apple cores.

No not spring but winter grove cleared save the vapor trail of ravens and ghosts paring ribbons of apple peels flung against a spending sky.

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Lauren Schmidt

The Magic Trick of the Table The Dining Room has just opened and in rolls Stanley, spokes flickering, the steady gears of his entrance every day. His pant legs deflate at the knees, pinned to themselves like two ghosts twisting in a grimace. Underneath, pain drags a string of razorblades through the airy sleeve. Stanley thrashes to clasp his absent, burning calf. Was it war or did it happen in the mysterious purple universe where he grew from fluid into human, or a high shed and a dare before bones blasted through skin, then shattered into a thousand cries for mother? At this table, Stanley is like any other man. Its glossy top slashes him in half, makes a phantom of his missing limbs. At this table, Stanley pounds his heavy fists, sends the plates leaping with glee at another man’s jokes. Here, Stanley rises from the magic trick of the table, marked like a jester by the wrinkles that bracket his eyes. Here, he waits for Brandy to bring him the plate of chicken he divides with fork and knife while she sits across from him and smiles.

Beneath the table, Stanley feels muscle braid slowly over bone, and the coldness of her toe sliding up his pant leg.

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Barbara Crooker

Pistachios

after Leonard Cohen

They’re already half-cracked, aren’t they, the smooth shells swinging open, the tongue of the nut peeping out. I stare at the one in my hand, and I’m back at the museum in Vancouver, where First Man is curled in a clam shell, Raven perched on top, waiting for it to crack open, for Humans to be born. If I had known then how much sorrow lay ahead, was yet to be borne, could I have let my heart open like that? This shell unfolds like some strange green flower to the sun.

It’s no accident that things newly minted are green, that the grass springs up green when April comes round again. Though some think being green means unformed, unripe, even envy is jealous of green, its freshness, its hope. The sun, at day’s end, loves slipping down behind the horizon, sometimes flashing green. The way this small nut slips perfectly back into its shell, although you can never quite click the lid, tuck in the world’s sorrows, make it stick tight, once the hinge is broken, and the crack that’s in everything has let the light back in.

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artist’s note

(Re)P resenting Habit Stefani Rossi In my work, I cultivate intimate encounters that invite people to contemplate the larger narratives in which we participate. I (re)present objects in order to create microcosms of these narratives. Over the last three years, my interest in stories revealed by artifacts of daily living, particularly those used in significant routines, led to my investigation of the lingering evidence of habitual consumption: receipts, wrappers, and disposable containers.

When recontextualized, these ephemera remain potently descriptive of the activities for which they were originally purposed. The things we live among, what we strive to possess, the detritus we try to eliminate—these all shape our notions regarding beauty, position, status, and belonging.

The following four pieces are part of the larger body of works, (Re)Presenting Habit. Through staged scenarios that incorporate carefully rendered illusions of trash, sometimes incorporating the material presence of these leftovers themselves, (Re)Presenting Habit construes habitual consumption to be an act of petition, a process of recollection, and an expression of devotion.

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Stefani Rossi. Clean Plate Club. Oil on panel. 9 x 12 inches.

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Stefani Rossi. Recipe for Love, Part 2. Oil on panel. 10 x 10 inches.

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Stefani Rossi. Afterglow. Oil on panel. 24 x 36 inches.

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Stefani Rossi. Much. Oil on velum, used industrial coffee fliters, gold leaf. 52 x 78 x 18 inches.

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Joseph Heithaus

House Red How does the wind lift the goblet of the wine dark sea? How do we take the light into a glass, let each musky scent, every ruddy

flavor flood a wide and empty shore? What can we make of the red gleam staining the wall—irony of white? We drink for the long dead

and drowned. We drink a scarlet sea with all its winds and tides, good blood of a fallen god, the crazy, stomping, crushing muck of a load

of grapes, a hurricane of bliss come to the mouth, a cherry kiss.

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patty kirk

Saving

When as children my siblings and I ate oranges, our mother made us scrape off

the thick, white underside of the peel with our teeth and eat it, too.

“That’s where all the vitamins are,” she told us, scraping her own peel with her short, yellowish teeth to demonstrate.

It was pleasantly spongy and a little bit sweet—not bitter as just about every recipe I’ve ever read for candied orange peel or orange marmalade claims. You’re supposed to slice the white part off and throw it away. It wouldn’t have mattered if it were bitter, though. We would still have had to eat it. Not to eat it would have been a waste.

It is in the spirit of that scraping of peels—or perhaps in emulation of my father’s equally frugal habits of eating lettuce cores and cooking beet leaves and turning leftover mashed potatoes into potato pancakes—that I have become a saver of waters.

I save the pastel waters in which green beans or squash or greens or even smelly broccoli or cabbage has cooked—saving not only their vitamins but the delicate memory of their peak flavor—and use them to make garden minestrones. I turn every scrap of fat or skin or bone I trim from meat into broth, refrigerate it, skim off the fat, then freeze it and use it in everything. Asparagus I break off as low on the stem as they will break, broil the tender parts, then boil the tough ends to later process in their water and sieve into a silky, green cream of asparagus soup. When I boil corn on the cob or potatoes to mash or make into salad, I save their waters for bread. I painstakingly trim and boil the hard, little worm-eaten apples and pears that fall off my mother-in-law’s trees, press the flesh through a potato ricer to make a tart filling for the half-moon pastries my girls love, made from frozen pie dough scraps, and then turn the thick, pectin-rich water into jalapeño jelly—each little jar sporting three or four suspended peppers, like fish in a bowl—to eat with cream cheese and crackers as summer wanes and we’re starting to tire of the garden’s abundance and want more exotic stuff.

By winter, my freezer is packed full with frozen waters: old yogurt tubs and juice cartons sawed off with a bread knife and the nicer clear plastic takeaway containers from our favorite Thai restaurant, each labeled with its contents. Corn water. Potato water. Apple water. Pear water. Broths of chicken and lamb and fish. Pink, shrimp shell water. Pale green zucchini water and the darker green of combined vegetable waters, which I sometimes boil several times with each meal’s scraps over the course of a week.

Opening the freezer door, I feel like a rich woman must feel, surveying her jewels. Yes, I feel rich.

A few years ago, we suffered a terrible ice storm. It came all at once, coating the roads and trees and barbed-wire fences and every raggedy blade of grass in our pastures with

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Waters over an inch of the clearest, prettiest ice. It turned our homely farm into a fairyland, a set of the Nutcracker Suite, everywhere glitter and trees bowed into sparkling arches.

At first my daughters and I just wanted to be out in it. Sliding on the sidewalk around our house. Bigstepping through fields of daggers. Breaking especially nice ones off to admire—the thin, yellow blade of grass or black briar magnified into magnificence—and then add to their collection, alongside all my frozen waters, in the freezer. (The girls have stored our Oklahoma weather there since babyhood: hailstones, mucusy-looking icicles from the eaves of our porch, snow they plan to make into snowcream after the snow is gone.)

We planned a longer tromp through the magical woods, under the glass trees. All at once, though, the woods became a warzone. The ice had gotten so heavy that, one after the other, the trees exploded downward, broken off at the crown, Kristallnacht everywhere.

Then, the electricity died. And the phones. Every highline in the county was on the ground, and we entered a flurry of disaster considerations. What to do about staying warm? What to do about dinner? What to do about light? What to do about Mamaw, my husband’s widowed mother, alone in her cold, dark house down the road? We had just figured out she had Alzheimer’s disease.

We collected water so we could flush the toilets, then spent the next few days snailing down the road to town, standing in line to buy candles and hurricane lamps and matches and generators that were sold out, talking to neighbors in worse circumstances than we were. We had propane for the stove and, by some miracle of rural planning, water, and the power came back on at our house in less than a week, as compared to the three weeks some of our neighbors shivered and stumbled around in the dark. For some reason, my husband’s CPA office in town never lost power, and the girls spent a few thrilling nights camped out there, watching old KISS concerts on Youtube. Another miracle: Kris was eventually able to find a generator, the last one in the last store we went to, for Mamaw’s house—big enough to power lights and the pump but not much more.

We were several days into the ice storm and, although we didn’t know it then, almost back to a functioning household before I remembered the freezer and all the chicken thighs and wild-caught whole salmon I had gotten on special, the ground lamb I had splurged on for Lulu’s beloved shepherd’s pie, and all my lovely waters, quietly thawing into waste. It was like the parable of the barns, it occurred to me—“So is he that layeth up treasure for himself”—but I ignored that thought and concentrated my attention on the creation of a massive salvific soup of everything good: chicken, lamb, frozen

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peas and corn, the last of the summer tomatoes tossed whole in bags, and the waters, their beautiful colors homogenizing into a generic broth brown.

My family ate that soup for days. In our dark house. At Mamaw’s. Transported in jars to Kris’s office and heated up in the microwave for the girls. First our power and then Mamaw’s came back on before I had a chance to unload the rest of the freezer and feed what was in it to our dogs, but we were still eating that soup.

We lost the girls’ hail and icicles and snow, though. It turned back into what it was to begin with, just water, refrozen to the shape of the tub that contained it. Some of it was not in any sort of container, and, by the time the electricity came back on, had melted onto the freezer shelves into a big, greyish lump of frozen water. A child’s lifetime of weather, lost.

When I told them about it, they were blithe. What does a child know of past wonders that could never be recovered? To them, there was only now, a tossing of snowballs. Or perhaps, in glimpses, some happy eternity of fairy weather: hail the size of oranges, icicles wreathing our plain house for an infinity of Christmases, snow on snow on snow.

The rest of us know better.

And so I will continue to save our waters, anticipating a future of thirsts and droughts and scheming in this small way to quench them—and, along the way, perhaps enjoy a draught or two of rapturous remembrance.

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ISSUE

20 summer

2011

Jeffrey G. Dodd

Letter to James from the Wavering Highway Remember the kettle, the smoke flooding the already dark porch. Remember your mother, in her grave two years already that night. What would she say about the kettle, full of lamb, carrots, the potatoes we’d cut?

What would she say about the chain of clouds thick in the sky as we collected garlic tops, scurrying to finish before the sharp sky spilled its own soup and turned the garden mud, made us blind? Remember, James, the bruise you got when you opened the door into your own face, the animal yelp you let out, the smoke that still clung to the air and eyes. Remember us sipping your mom’s stew—two blind, hungry fools trying to raise the dead.

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Jeffrey G. Dodd

Sometimes, in the Evening, I See Him Turning a Scrap of Metal in His Hand Explaining these fireworks, this tradition of blood orange against the southern night over new-year snow, reminds me of trying to explain to him that the berries in my garden, still orange in June, would soon turn the blue-black of the veins that reach out from my mother’s walnut hands, of the shirt he bought at the yard sale on Cedar. The things of which I know nothing becomes clear in the starburst afterglow: the Kirundi he used as a child, the pidgin he picked up in the camps, the voices of my mother’s first husbands, the father he hasn’t mentioned, the source of the glinty scar on his wrist. He struggles to speak across our cigarettes’ orange glow, of the bullets like a driven blizzard, the mad clamber into the bush, his first paid job hacking limbs from their trees. He’d braid them and use the spans to repair the camp’s walls, strong enough to keep out thieves but not this breeze sweeping our smoke toward some other time.

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2011

Laurie Lamon

Pieta When I saw the snake crawl from the dirt which moored the swing, I flung myself from the swing— my brother sat on the rim of the tub pouring warm water over my knees to break the helmets of dried blood, then lift the bandages. * I don’t know how much sugar, how much vinegar, I told my husband who was washing more blackberries.

The ball of pulp grew smaller and heavy, black juice dropping through cheesecloth.

On the stove, reduction of blackberries, sugar, the unquiet vinegar. * In the museum when we stood before the Pieta it wasn’t the crown lost for centuries we wanted to touch but the pedestal that bore their single weight.

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van gogh’s parable a.j. kandathil

We meet at night sometimes, Vincent Van Gogh and I. Nights when everyone else in the house

is asleep but I’m awake, waiting for the hours to pass. It’s been about one month since I moved to the city, and I still can’t get the hang of falling asleep like my husband, a native New Yorker. Every night my attempts to sleep are accompanied by the thrum of the subway at the end of the street, the blare of car alarms, and the midnight whines of alley cats poking through the trash. Sometimes I nudge Rajan’s shoulder with my own and whisper, “Did you hear that?” He usually burrows deeper into the sheets and says, “Hear what?”

We moved here from the Philadelphia suburbs in search of a place where we would belong, a place where being a mixed-race couple wouldn’t feel so anomalous. But living in the city sometimes feels like walking on a life-sized sheet of graph paper, and I’m not the right shape to move through the blocks. I’ve never been good at math. I miss the imperfections of roads curved around large maple trees and dead-end streets with quirky names like “Tripplewood” and “South Turkey Street.” Names that let you know they have a story to go with them. Now I live on 86th Avenue between 77th and 76th in the basement of a house in Queens. I can’t get used to an address that pins me between coordinates on a plotted line, the kind that’s easy to forget and hard to escape.

I’ve grown accustomed to spending these late hours alone, but lately the image of Vincent has been keeping me company. I close my eyes and imagine that Van Gogh has left the city limits of Paris and is staking out on the lawn of an asylum in the French countryside, painting the summer sky. It’s my way of counting sheep, I guess. I like to watch him work. I count every stroke, every bead of sweat, every submersion of a spent brush in water. Not one is missed; I envision them all.

An asylum in St. Rémy, France, June 1889, Midnight After so many sleepless nights with paintbrush in hand, Vincent now knows his insomnia as an intimate brother. Whether sick or well, sane or not, night has always beckoned him. The call begins at twilight, and it swells as the evening becomes full grown, then it sighs, disappearing at morning’s first light. While the other in-patients at St. Rémy’s sleep fast in their beds, he roosts alone on the lawn with his oils, easel and palette, the raw ingredients for his work. Crowds of candles frame his feet; a halo of light surrounds him and opens up into the dense expanse of night.

It is humid, the temperature caught somewhere between warm and hot, and his breath and sweat mix with the heavy air. Vincent thrusts his brush against the canvas, and so he begins. A blunt stroke at first, one that ends in a swoop of gathered paint, like the frosting on a cupcake. He creates dimension, a world within a world. Motion, emotion in angles and ocean waves of gold and midnight blue rock against each other. Stroke, stroke. Up, down goes his brush into the oil. Submerge, emerge.

Every so often, his toes get burned by the dripping wax.

Van Gogh sees movement in the midst of stillness, ripeness in the infant hours of day, and color where there was none, only night. He paints it; he is night’s hunter, her memoirist. And somewhere in the tipping topsy-turvy of what some may call sane and crazy, brilliance strikes.

One hundred twenty years later across the Atlantic Ocean, a young woman stumbles upon the 53rd Street entrance to the Museum of Modern Art. She is a newcomer at odds with Manhattan, a sophisticated lady-city who won’t make room for her in the concrete folds of her skirt. The young woman pushes through the revolving door, presses the “five” button on the elevator wall, and when

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2011

she enters the fifth floor, she, Vincent Van Gogh, and his Starry Night meet for the first time.

In the topography of his night-portrait, she finds the broken landscape of her own body, the rumbled edges of her calloused toes and bitten nails, her abandoned attics and basements in billows of paint.

She imagines running her fingers across the painting and feeling the crests and swallows of night’s silent movement. Evening’s silhouette meets the terrain of her flesh, the contours of her depression.

For a moment, she lets herself believe that she’s a dash of paint wound around a goldenrod star, close enough to reach out of the darkness and touch it.

She is slipping; she feels it. The inner-shifting waves of serotonin, hormones, dopamine. Her dark side of the moon; her silent tide. The dark bits of herself that she loves and coddles. Sometimes black silence can be liquid-like water, and she washes herself in it.

Shhhhh, now, she whispers. Shhhhh. Don’t fight it.

It began slowly this time, as it always does. For some reason, regular, benign items seem sadder here in the city. Things like airport parking lots stuffed with cars or the cadence of a stranger pronouncing her name. Paying cash instead of credit card. Extra-whitening toothpaste.

This time it looks like a fat white man, her depression. He sits on her chest while she lies in bed with his balding head and his wooly chest, smoking, sweating, heaving. His cigarette dust sprinkles her forehead like it’s Ash Wednesday. He likes to recite his own version of Jesus’s parable of the ten virgins to her, eager to point out that she is probably one of the unlucky five without enough oil in her lamp to last the night.

It’s your own fault, he likes to say with a raspy laugh. How many times I gotta tell ya that you ain’t never gonna have enough oil to get ridda me? .....

Number of psychiatrists’ offices recommended: Three.

Number of recommended doctors covered by insurance: None.

Number of in-network psychiatrists researched, located, and called: Five.

Number of doctors who actually returned my call: None.

Number of times someone actually picked up the phone: One. Time lapse before next available appointment: Two Months. .....

An Outpatient Psychiatry Wing. January 2009, Two p.m.

Outside the hospital, the colors of the street are cold, gray, muted. The city’s been suffering from postpartum depression ever since Christmas and New Year’s passed. Of the five months I’ve been living here, January has been the hardest. The sky is dull and beards of dirty snow frame the faces of every building on this street. This is the month that winter bears down.

I am waiting in the lobby, perched on a burnt orange chair, tending to the requisite medical paperwork. These sheets of paper house my mini-memoir in lists of illness and disease, family history and surgical descriptions, inoculation dates.

When was it again that you had that nasty lump removed?

How about that uncle with liver disease or the grandmother with colon cancer?

Date of death?

Duration of disease?

High blood pressure, heart disease, bad eye sight, cholesterol, chicken pox.

Each one of them gets a check. That’s the crown of illness: the while-you-are-waiting, insurance-

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providing, privacy-promising, liability-covering check mark. These are the pages on which a worthy doctor will scribble a diagnosis, or at least you hope she will. You kind of hope she can peg you, though you hate being pegged. This will define you, this disease and its “cure.” You do not define yourself. What would be the point?

The form begins the same as all the others: name, age, address, social security number. Easy, easy, easy.

Occupation.

I pause. Not so easy.

Answer #1: She who can’t get out of bed in the morning.

Answer #2: Aspiring novelist.

Answer #3: Crier, tripper, nail biter, grudge-holder, run-on sentence writer.

Why is the answer portion so small?

I write: None.

Reason for visit.

Answer #1: Life, ages 0 through 27.

Answer #2: I have given up on fixing myself through no-starch diets, sweaty exercise, and daily direct sun exposure.

I write: Depression.

she attempts to grin but it ends up being more of a squint/sneer.

Two-fifteen p.m.

The staff here shuffles about, buffing the floor with their boxy orthopedic sneakers. Each shoe glides across the tile like it’s made from a giant bar of ivory soap. This place breeds crops of mousy, stringyhaired women in sagging pants, all black and plum-toned. A man mops up the gray winter drool all of our shoes left by the entrance. He plunges his mop into his bucket, a full-immersion baptism. In, out. Up, down. Submerge, emerge. Perhaps he’s painting a masterpiece with his mop-brush on the cold tile, one destined to disappear when it dries. I watch him swish the water around.

I found this hospital, along with the four other doctors who didn’t return my calls, through an internet search on my insurance company’s website. Emblem Health keeps sending me purple and gold glossed pamphlets in the mail about how to be my own health advocate: Conquer depression! Don’t let it conquer you! Rajan and I use them to soak up the overflow from our pet rabbit’s litter box. During my research, I read somewhere that there are two types of psychiatrists: good ones and those that accept insurance. I can’t afford the former so I have to settle for the latter.

Two-thirty p.m.

A white-haired woman with tree-trunk legs and quite large, thick black glasses toddles in through the revolving door. The sleeves of her fur coat are about two inches too short. She pauses to lean against the registration desk, staring open-mouthed at the white wall in front of her.

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2011

“Can. I. Help. You?” The receptionist with a rhinestone-studded eyeglass chain and perfectly squared maroon fake nails speaks slowly and loudly while keeping her eyes on her computer screen.

The woman acts as if she hasn’t heard and continues to waddle down the hall. Her shoes squeak as she treads across the tile.

An incredibly skinny man has been leaning against the reception desk ever since I came in, his swarthy forehead pressed against the bit of the desktop that juts out. He has very saggy earlobes that almost rest on the collar of his turtleneck. Every once in a while, he moans.

The waiting room is filled with people like this—people like me I should say—those who are hunched over, backs arched in question marks, heads in their hands. Those who are spacing, using the hospital wall as a pillow. And me. I sit rigidly with my hands between my knees. I’m sweating but I’m afraid to take off my winter coat.

The side door opens with a blast of cold air and a portly middle-aged man in a jogging suit strolls in along with a miniature Scottish Terrier in a vested leash. He wears a plastic name badge wrapped around his neck with a shoelace and his pant legs swish back and forth when he walks.

He spots me sitting in the lone chair by the hall and smiles. “Scooter!” he commands, and his little dog’s ears perk up. “Attack!”

Scooter skips his way over to me and sits on his hind legs, placing his dainty, little front paws on my lap. His tiny tongue peeks out from beyond his lips.

“That’s quite a trick,” I say, scratching Scooter’s mini-head. He licks my palm.

The man crouches down beside me and gives Scooter’s behind a pat.

“Scooter’s an old friend of mine,” he says. “He’s the best pet therapy dog around this place. The kids up in the cancer wing just love him.”

“I bet,” I say.

Scooter pants and rests his chin on my knee. He looks up at me in the way only a canine can. I bend over and press my nose to his. Who cares if he smells like sweat and snow?

Two-forty-five p.m.

A blank-faced young woman emerges from the mouth of a hallway. She is holding a clipboard as she surveys the galley of patients.

She calls my name. I stand and Scooter trots to my left, moving on to the next needy lap.

It’s my turn on the merry-go-round.

The social worker assigned to me has a bad, out-grown dye job. Her hair lays listless on her shoulders like the fronds of a fennel bulb. As she blinks at me and waits for me to follow, I picture her in the cosmetic aisle of Duane Reade, picking out a do-it-yourself shade of Golden Glimmery Shimmery Sunshine or some other stupid name. I make a mental note to add at-home hair dying kits to my list of items that are sadder in the city.

I try to make small talk with her as we walk down the hall to her office. I mention Scooter, the prom king of the hospital invalids. She attempts to grin but it ends up being more of a squint/sneer. I decide to be obedient and follow her quietly down the hall. Unsurprisingly, she is also quite slouchy-pantsed and underfed. She kind of just slumps down the hall, and I just slump after her.

The door to her office closes behind us with a thud. It’s a concrete cell inside. A handful of black jackets hang from the back of the door. How many black jackets can one have? There are no windows; it feels like I’m trapped in a basement.

I don’t know what time it is.

I sit in an old chair, which makes a soft farting noise as I lean into it. The stuffing is leaking out of the sides. I take off my jacket; my armpits are sweating but my hands are cold. I regret wearing my pastel-pink turtleneck with the puffed sleeves, and I feel stupid in it. Earlier that morning I thought it

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would make me look soft and approachable, but instead I feel like a baby.

The social worker plops down in front of her computer, stretches her arms overhead, and crosses her legs.

The black computer screen and blue-green blare of the letters on it remind me of my elementary school computer class in the late 1980s. I guess this is where all those eighty-pound computers ended up.

We make typical first date small talk, though I’m the one answering all the questions, the very same ones I answered on the fill-in-the-blank form. She types up all the information as I slowly spell my last name and my address.

Name. Age. City. Zip code. Education. Employment.

She continues with her questions, even though they sound more like statements, a recital of a cold, psychiatric liturgy. A pre-ordained call and response. It ceases to be a conversation, or perhaps I realize it was never meant to be one. She begins her stolid recitation.

Do you have friends. How many. How often do you see them. Do they call you. Are you married. How often do you have sex. What form of birth control do you use. Do you have children. Have you ever been pregnant.

If so, what happened to the baby. Miscarriage. Stillbirth. Abortion. Death. Do you have sex with other men.

Do you have sex with women. Have you ever been raped. Molested. Photographed naked. If so, who did it. Are you a victim of incest.

She cracks her knuckles. Then she continues.

Is anyone trying to kill you. Do you receive any instructions from people talking to you through the television. The radio. The sky. If so, what do they tell you. When was your last psychological breakdown. How long did it last. When is the last time you restricted yourself from eating. Purged. Diet pills. Cut. When was your last period.

Check box, check box, return return. Backspace.

Abruptly she stops her ski slope of questions. She swivels her chair to face me, and her eyes bulge from the landscape of her face.

I am going to speak three—she holds up three fingers in front of my face—words in a row. These words are unrelated. Please repeat them.

Shoe. Red. Popcorn.

Shoe. Red. Popcorn.

Now say them backwards.

Popcorn. Red. Shoe.

Spell redecorate. Spell it backwards. Who is the mayor of New York City. The president. When will the world end. Do you know how it will it happen. Who told you.

She asks about addiction. What to say? I collect cans of diet coke in my closet like a bulimic collects jars of vomit. Does that count? I don’t even have the balls to have a real addiction, just an elementary school one.

But she doesn’t want an explanation, just a check box. We’ve found our rhythm now.

Addiction?

No. Drugs?

No. Alcohol?

No. Cough Syrup?

No. Cleaning Products?

No. Glue?

No. Question, question. Ratty tat tat.

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2011

Yes no no yes yes no no yes yes no yes no yes no yes.

My answers become percussion, the low rumblings of a subway train approaching underfoot.

Miles beneath me, plates collide, grind, split apart. From somewhere inside me, I hear the sound of tearing.

Click click click. The keys stutter.

Return, return.

Backspace.

The doctor will call you when she’s ready, she says.

Class is dismissed. .....

It is now three-fifteen in the afternoon, and you are back in the waiting room again. You fight to stay molded to your chair and not run for the exit. This is all strangely familiar to you, this firing squad, this asking but not hearing, seeking but not finding. The conditions may change, but the voices do

she asks about addiction. what to say? i collect cans of diet coke in my closet like a bulimic collects jars of vomit.

not. Your throat cries and you open your mouth, but no sound comes out. Your silence, a familiar desert. The feeling of being gagged so someone can dictate to you, define you, dismiss you, deny you. Yes, you are used to filling a slot in someone else’s filing cabinet, making yourself small enough to slip right in.

Pastor, you remember saying from somewhere in the basement of your brain. I’m really having a problem.

What is it, my child?

I’ve got some sadness, Pastor. I got it down deep.

Are you right with God, child?

I—you stuttered. I think so.

You can’t think, girl! You have to know! God has no tolerance for the weak.

And all of a sudden you were down on your knees. He pressed his palm into your forehead and squeezed your temples between his fingers. He prayed the sin out of you and the Holy Spirit into you. Indoctrination. You learned to say things like Amen and Blessed be to match the crescendo of his voice because your knee caps were starting to itch.

You are absolved, my child. Go and sin no more.

I wasn’t looking for absolution, you said. I was looking for . . .

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But it didn’t matter. He had already shut the door behind you.

A converted soul—nay, a healed soul. Another one diagnosed, another one saved. Check.

Yes, this all has happened before. The pastor, the parent, the parable, the pill. Each one keeps trying to straighten you out.

It will take you a lifetime of telling yourself, this is NOT God, this is NOT God, THIS. IS. NOT. GOD for you to actually believe it.

Check box, check box. Return, return.

Backspace. .....

“So what’s wrong? Tell me what brings you here.”

This is the voice of my psychiatry resident. She is fawn-faced and has very unruly brown hair. Blue and wet, her eyes sink into the valleys between her brow and cheeks. She needs a cup of coffee. This office is incredibly small, but this one has a window.

I’m here because I catch sadness like it’s the common cold. I think that much is clear. Emotional Immune Deficiency. Can that be an official diagnosis? I give her some runny diarrhea answer.

“I’ve been getting really sad lately from things like toothpaste and empty sugar bowls and I can’t get out of bed in the morning and if only I wasn’t so sensitive then I wouldn’t feel so lost and I wouldn’t be so crazymanicangrysad . . . ”

millions of little regulation-sized scooters, placed in uniform crates, shipped all over the united states.

I start to cry. In between sobs, I try to excuse myself as a crier (see Form #1, Answer #3).

She blinks a few times. “I know this can be hard,” she says and pats her pockets and opens a few desk drawers. “I wish I had a tissue to give you.”

I wipe my nose on my stupidly pastel sleeve.

“Sorry.” Fawn Face sighs and drums her pen cap on her lips. “Well. Let’s see what we can do to help you get through this . . . ” she pauses. “This rough patch.”

“Thanks.”

She gives me the cancer-patient sympathy grin and head bob before poising her pencil over her prescription pad. A weird satisfaction to have a case so cut and dry, like pinning the tail on the parthereditary, part-circumstantial degenerative disease.

“What kind of pill are you looking for?”

The question catches me off guard. What am I looking for? I think about Jesus and the hem of his robe, the power it had to heal years of illness in one instant.

“Something that gives me energy,” I say instead.

“Hmm.” Her nose crinkles. “Do you smoke?” she asks. “Are you an anxious person?”

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I say no and no, though the second is a lie.

“Wellbutrin. A low dose to start.” She scribbles on her pad. “Are you seeing a therapist?”

I wince. “Sort of.”

My blind dates with therapy in NYC have been, shall we say, less than helpful. My first meeting with my soon-to-be-ex-psychologist took place in an office the size of a bathroom stall with massive amounts of paper and books piled in every open space. The middle of the floor was sinking under the weight of it. The hugely fat office cat, Lover Boy, had wiry, cement-colored fur that he kept grinding against my leg, both before and after this therapist diagnosed me with depression, nodding her head slowly as if she was revealing some great mystery.

“You’re weighing on your husband,” she said. “Once you take your pills, your husband will be able to focus on himself for once. Isn’t that what you want?” she asked, scratching Lover Boy underneath his collar. “He’s such a friendly cat, isn’t he?”

The wet-eyed psychiatrist tilts her head and gives me a patronizing, yet concerned furrowed brow as my mind drifts, like she wants to pat my hand but knows that direct contact is not advised. “You really should see someone. Once a week.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll try.”

“Call if you have questions.” She hands me the slip of paper and opens her office door. “My number’s on the back. We’ll see you in a month.”

Oh, true apothecary. I hope thy drugs are quick.

Scooter the pet therapy dog is waiting for me in the lobby when I emerge, standing on the evanescent water mural the janitor left behind. People are still being shuttled in and out of offices and up and down the hallway like grocery store items on a conveyor belt. The waiting room population has bloomed to twice its size since I last left it. My cheeks are burning, but I put my jacket back on anyway.

Scooter plops his little butt on the tile and tilts his head up toward me. He looks me in the eye.

Scooter just gets me, man. Why can’t he be my therapist? Maybe hospitals should try rationing out little dogs to their chronically depressed patients. An hour or two for the mild cases, and overnight doggie visits for the severe ones. It wouldn’t take long for pharmaceutical companies to jump on that bandwagon. Millions of little regulation-sized Scooters, placed in uniform crates, shipped all over the United States. Doggie pens in drug stores; overcrowding behind the check-out counter. A free return policy after 30 days; pet repossession when an insurance company cancels coverage. A new wave of cutting-edge medicine for pet-human separation anxiety—one strain for humans, another for dogs. The dollars roll in for another created disease.

I think not.

Saggy Earlobes is still waiting in a chair, back hunched. He’s been joined by Orange Shoes, Rose Tattoo, and Furry Vest. They all sit on the edges of their seats and clutch their jackets to their chests, just like I did almost two hours ago.

I will be the Cesár Chavez of the St. Vincent’s Psychiatry Wing, mark my words. One day books will be written about me and Tree-trunk Legs and Saggy Earlobes will hoist me on their shoulders, chanting my one to-be-famous quotable quote: “We aren’t crazy! We’re just sensitive!”

As I exit, the late afternoon sun shines directly upon the awning above the hospital entrance. The leftover snow’s spit dribbles from the overhang. It hits my shoulder with a splat. .....

One woman in my arsenal of therapists once told me that I have holes in my love bucket and they need to be plugged up. There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a HOLE!

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Love Buckets. When I was growing up, there was a Presbyterian pastor at my parents’ church who had a rugged, red beard and always repeated the same phrase when he prayed during the introit while the organ offered a somber minor-chord soundtrack.

“We are but a drop in the bucket of time,” he used to say, always giving extra emphasis on the “p.”

Eyes closed, I imagined the sound of a rote pinging against dull metal, over and over. Isn’t that sound enough to drive even God crazy? I pictured Him as a farmer in overalls, hauling a bucket around His yard, catching each human water droplet as it fell. Plink. Plunk. I saw showers of people falling from dark rain clouds, cracks in the roof, leaky faucets, and outdoor water spigots.

Drip goes the extra paint falling from the brush. Drip goes the melting snow drooling from the gutter. Drip goes the bead of water slipping off the mop. Drip, drip, drip. That is the sound of grieving.

The end of the parable of the ten virgins has always bothered me. All ten of these women were waiting for the bridegroom; five of them had enough oil in their lamps to last the night, and five of them did not. The haves and the have-nots. Those with the oil are welcomed into the banquet, and those without are left outside the gates in darkness. What if their oil was stolen? What if they just weren’t given enough?

Have I ever had enough? In one of the nooks of my memory, I find myself about ten years ago under a dry summer moon in my hometown in rural Pennsylvania, which was small enough to give visitors a thorough tour in about fifteen minutes. There were only three worth-while landmarks to show off: the bearded face someone carved into a tree by the post office, the domed clock tower of the courthouse, and the butt tree, which—as one might imagine—boasted two strategically placed growths on the bark that resembled a pair of rotund cheeks. That one was always the tour-favorite until it was chopped down a few years ago, whittling the tour down to ten minutes flat.

In the memory, I am in the neighborhood park—Brandy Springs, it was called—lying in the middle of the little league outfield, blades of summer grass against my skin. In the field to my left lay a patch of parched earth where they planted the automatic pitching machine for the minor league teams. To my right, the far side of the rusting fence was flanked with local business sponsors: Forestry Hardwood, The Rotary Club, Livenspire Masonry. You couldn’t hear anything there but the occasional cricket and my own teeth chomping through a twenty-five-cent bag of sour watermelon gummies that made the insides of my cheeks sweat.

It was the Fourth of July and fireworks exploded overhead. Things on earth stood still, but the sky was in motion. Colors of gold, red, blue, green, purple shimmered and dissolved. Night came alive; the hues bumped and collided and danced with each other. For a moment, things were achingly beautiful, right before it all faded to nothing. I hung on for a while longer while my sister and brother headed for the car, wondering if it was really over and if I’d be the lucky one to witness an encore finale. The sky remained silent. But this can’t be the end, I thought. It just can’t.

But it was. For that year, at least. The 4th of July would come around again after another school year, another Lake Erie winter, and another soggy spring, as it always does. On the way home, I closed my eyes and could still see the imprints that the red and gold bursts had left behind. My body just knew how to hold onto it tight enough so that once the imprint faded, the memory of it would remain and that would be enough. I would make it be enough.

Often I am seduced by the thought of having my problems disappear at the touch of an anointed hand, or perhaps the swallow of a magic pill. It can appear like the kind of immediate salvation I need, the only kind I assume God will give. It’s my greatest fear that when I meet God face to face, He’ll say, “At last, my beloved, let me fix you.” And it will also be my greatest relief.

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20 summer

2011

Sharon Fish Mooney

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance . . .”

Ophelia, from Hamlet In ages past, your silver needles graced Greek garlands, stimulated minds, helped students pass exams. Someday, researchers say, you’ll be a proper remedy for mixed-up memory, protect our brains from ravages of radicals.

My mother grew you, planted you in spring beside our old stone wall in loamy soil when she was young. She cultivated, cared for you before confusion claimed her fertile mind and avocations loved turned troublesome.

Tonight I’ll wander through my garden, pluck you off your bush, roast you with garlic, lamb, serve you with bread and wine, reflect on my own silver threads and aging mind, while savoring thoughts of better years to come.

47

Libby Falk Jones

The Angel of Shoestring Potatoes Sunday mornings, my mama made music on a thin silver harp with six fine wires, her fingers sliding again and again a glistening spud down toward the slicer.

In my pink-striped nightshirt, I’d slip down the hall to the sizzle and scent of sweet grease. Mama stood at the stove, clouds of cigarette smoke and steam from the cast iron skillet circling her head, with beaming face she’d hand me a crunchy gold halo on a paper towel-lined white plate. My fingers teased slivers from the moist heart, the goddesses chanted their hail mamas, I rose to paradise.

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ISSUE

20 summer

2011

Natalie Minor

Picking Olives “They grow on trees, like apples, only of course smaller,” I say later in English over the phone.

Everything in Greece is smaller: fish markets, apartments, the distance people are willing to drive.

And prayers. Today a nun grabbed my wrist and pulled it to an olive. “Lord Jesus Christ,” she said, and closed my fingers.

“Son of God,” she tugged. “Have mercy on me.” Dropped it in my bag.

“Now you will say it every time.”

When she left I could hear the other sisters huddled in their trees, speaking together far too fast for me, and louder, I thought, than they should in a monastery.

It was October and I wished all of a sudden to be in an apple orchard, braced by fall-colored hills.

Which means at home.

Lord Jesus Christ, I’m picking olives.

Son of God, it sounds like a curse.

Have mercy on the olives in my foreign hands and on me, because even I am getting smaller and whining about it when we’ve only just begun the work.

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Reviews

The Spirit of Food: Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God Ed. Leslie Leyland Fields (Wipf and Stock, 2010) reviewed by rita jones

My

current employment as a recent college graduate includes a small black apron, a white notepad, and many leafy greens—all part of waitressing at a local organic “body and soul” vegetarian restaurant. I am around food all day, carrying plates of hummus and tabbouleh stacked five eggplantsteaks high, of tofu wonton pillows in ginger-orange sauce, and of Mediterranean veggie nut-burgers with goat cheese and balsamic onions. I love my job, and I love the food, but at the end of the day I chow down on a tempeh taco salad (tempeh is partially fermented tofu) and rush home.

Thinking about food, cooking food—much less reading about food—are not what I’m keen to do at home.

My housemates cook and bake, jam and curry, while off the clock I stick to tea and meals that take about five minutes of prep time. The Spirit of Food, however, proved to be a grand exception to my disinterest in traditional culinary literature, and has brought me to a greater level of sensory awareness and placement as a partaker in the divine feast.

Leslie Leyland Fields’ anthology is comprised of short narratives (about 3 to 10 pages each) by contemporary essayists regarding an array of topics from large-scale farms to box-truck diners, from church potlucks to the communion table. As a little after-dinner morsel, each essay includes an original (or slightly modified) recipe from the author.

Fields is an Alaskan author of several books and teaches nonfiction in the Master of Fine Arts creative writing program at Seattle Pacific University. Within intentionally faith-based circles, she is well-connected and exhibits ingenious taste in authors. Excerpts from Robert Farrar Capon, Lauren Winner, and Wendell Berry are to be expected, and placing some lesser-known authors in their midst was a calculated risk. Some essays do fall short, and tend toward the sentimental. But many authors, such as novelist Thomas Maltman, former NPR commentator Caroline Langston, medical writer Brian Volck, Southern author Vinita Hampton Wright, and the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemmann, exhibit remarkable pieces.

Fields compiled The Spirit of Food to document the ways in which “many writers, growers, nutritionists, and theologians are calling us back from a kind of forgetfulness and inattention to our physicality, our appetites and our food, a neglect that quite literally threatens our health” (xxii). Most specifically, her volume highlights our individual and communal choices before God, with strong attention to the sacramentalizing of food, time, space and family. In an era filled with controversy, food wars, and food ethics, she asks, “How do we eat? How do we respond as people of faith? And if we make all the right choices, will good food rightly procured and produced then save us?” (xxiii).

Within the essays from these thirty-four authors, a wide range of writing styles and tonal expressions are displayed, yet all, as the pieces deal with the intimacy of food, are highly personalized. Many discuss family heritage, church bodies, religious traditions, love, and loss, before food, all to bring the reader’s attention to our constant position before God’s table. Essays of exposition, narration, description and persuasive argument are all well placed in a concise chronology from garden, kitchen, ritual, fasting, and communion to, finally, feasting.

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In intimate, daily gratitude for His provision, delight and diversity, The Spirit of Food unfolds the role of God in creation and His manifestations in root, stew pot, potluck, and the absence of all those things. As we learn how to eat in the world, it is supremely helpful to be directed to these writers. The reader is exposed to a microcosm where, as Jeanne Murray Walker describes, one can find church in the meandering aisles of a produce market and celebrate in the mystery of being fed. In turn, the choices we make among those communal blessings reveal our inner selves: sometimes we can be grateful and receptive, and other times, truly awful. Essays also include interfaith dialogue with Judeo traditions as we learn the lessons of being kosher: God cares about our dietary choices, God is concerned about food, and a right relationship with food obediently points us toward Him. The most commanding and dynamic segment of the anthology is found in essays of fasting and absence.

Here we see the individual wrestle with a world of pressures, anxiety, confusion and well-intentioned failures. In contemporary society, food is a commodity of luxury and comfort, yet also the potential source of the kitsch we seek to hide: weakness, dependency, flabby bodies, less-than-perfect existence, emotional chaos, and fat thighs. Sometimes absence from food helps us cope, helps us refocus, helps us concentrate on our higher needs—and sometimes we cannot seem to connect with food as truly good. We starve, we binge, we suffer. Fields wisely includes efficacious works on the general topic of fasting, including a stunning essay by Gina Ochsner on recovering from an overwhelming eating disorder, and her epiphanies that led her to wholeness.

Weakness, however, can be found in the sentimentality of several essays, which appear stunted by both nostalgia and idealism. Diversity in location and lifestyle are seen throughout the collection, but appropriate consideration of those with broken nuclear families, drastic fiscal limitations, or painful church experiences is not clearly made. For many, the reality of a family meal, in church or at home, has never been apparent. Healthy daily meals may be far above a single mother’s budget. Church can be an intimidating space, and communion rife with misunderstanding, exclusivity, and guilt. On the whole, many essays in the collection assume a level of openness and connection to healthy forms of intimacy, a proclivity one should not take for granted. However, several essays usher in a pastoral tone of empathy, instruction and inclusivity that does not make this general shortcoming pervasive for the book as a whole.

The Spirit of Food celebrates the many ways in which our world is symbolized, embodied, and meant to be taken and eaten, piece by piece, with Eucharistic intent. With Capon, we marvel upon the universe in the interchanging folds of a yellow onion, a spectrum of life and death, hollow and sweet. In such an “aqueous house of cards,” the reader is given a homily of staggering beauty (51). Berry, with a more universal consciousness, claims our freedom should beget a situation in which our food and farms are free; if not, we are all chained. Therein lies the beauty of this collection: philosophy in a vegetable, and transcendence in bread. Food has the capacity to bring us to the cerebral caverns of delight, and Fields’ work helps to shape the direction of our path.

As we approach each plate, each field, each drink, each Lord’s Supper, we are taught that food must be the embodiment of our love and the intention of our choice as physical and spiritual bodies. Fields’ compilation is helpful in that it points to a larger body of work that we can turn to in these choices—the writing of Berry, Winner, and Capon to start with. We are invited into a conversation in which we take part three times a day, and into the sacrament of our existence. As Fields’ reminds us in her closing essay on the perfect loaf of bread, we are simply waiting for it all to rise. To do so takes patience and grace, and comes from within.

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contributor’s Notes

Jenn Blair is from Yakima, Washington. She has degrees from King College, Hollins, and St. Andrews University. She has published in New South, Copper Nickel, Kestrel, and the Tulane Review, among others. Her chapbook All Things are Ordered is out from Finishing Line Press. She teaches at the University of Georgia, and lives in Winterville, Georgia, with her husband Dave, daughter Katie, and two goldfish who still remain nameless.

artist’s guilds on such varied topics as, “Spiritual Symbolism in Art” and “Personal Expression Through The Pastel Medium.”

Recently, she taught for Gordon College in Orvieto, Italy, and she now resides in New York City. Nicora writes: “My aim as an artist as is to render the aesthetic experience of being overwhelmed, filled with awe at something so majestic it evokes a sense of the One who created everything seen and unseen.”

Laura Breukelman is currently completing a Master of Christian Studies degree at Regent College. Her area of research and interest lies in the intersection of theology, theory, and visual art practice. She is also passionate about art education, especially as a part of social justice initiatives, having taught art classes to a diverse spectrum of students from a Belize elementary school to street youth drop-in centers in Calgary and Halifax. She currently teaches sessionally at Trinity Western University. She writes: “The two pieces featured here are from ‘Accumulations and Erasures,’ a project that examines various rites and rituals that form the contours of memory. It attempts to draw out the relationship between truth and subjectivity in memory, its slippages and distortions, holes and erasures, anchors and reference points.

Barbara Crooker’s books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, published in 2008 by Word Press and winner of the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C&R Press, 2010). New work is out or forthcoming in Spirituality & Practice, Windhover, and others. She lives with her husband and son, who has autism, in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, and she loves Leonard Cohen and pistachios in equal measure.

Joseph Heithaus is a professor at DePauw University. His book Poison Sonnets was recently accepted for publication by David Roberts Books and will come out in February of 2012. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry. He also has the luck of having a poem etched in stained glass at the Indianapolis International Airport and a poem painted onto the side of a barn in Greencastle, Indiana, where he lives with his wife and four children.

Rylie Dodd buys cowboy shirts for her husband Jeffrey G. Dodd. The couple lives in Spokane, Washington, but he’s from Southeast Texas and sometimes needs his homesickness eased. Plus, the little pearlescent snaps are so crisp and tactile. Someday, she thinks, he’ll write a poem about them— the snaps, not the shirts. She’ll be featured prominently. Like his other poems, it’ll be published in journals such as Rock & Sling, Harpur Palate, Meridian, and Santa Clara Review.

She doesn’t tell him this; he doesn’t need the ego boost.

Nicora Gangi was born in Indiana in 1952 and was a professor of art at Syracuse University for 29 years. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 2006. Her work has appeared in journals and magazines such as CMYK and American Artist. Nicora has lectured regionally and nationally as a visiting artist at universities and

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2011

Libby Falk Jones grew up in south Louisiana with parents who loved words, music, and food. A professor of English at Berea College in Kentucky, she teaches courses in creative writing (poetry, prose, and drama), literature, and vocation. Her contemplative writing course invites writers to probe silence, solitude, and nature as wellsprings of creative work; her chapbook of poems celebrating abundance, Above the Eastern Treetops, Blue, was published by Finishing Line in 2010. Her poems have won awards from Women Who Write, Heartland Review, and the Labyrinth Society and have appeared in 13th Moon: a Feminist Literary Magazine and New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writing, among others.

Rita Jones graduated from Westmont College in 2010 with a degree in history. She was raised on a small farm in the Puget Sound, Washington, with four siblings and a menagerie of animals from cows to peacocks. To that end, she harbors a deep appreciation for orchards, chicken runs, and front porches. Her writing has appeared in Westmont’s poetry annuals, while her illustrative work can be found in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jesus (Baker Publishing, 2011).

A.J. Kandathil lives and writes in the New York City metro area.

Some of her favorite NYC spots are Bryant Park, Alice’s Teacup, and the MoMA. She’s currently writing a memoir about hideand-seek at nightfall, low-budget high school plays, and church camp pyromania. Her work can be seen in Burner Magazine, Precipitate Journal, and The Quotable.

Candace Keller is a professor of art and curator of art for the Museum of the Llano Estacado and Abraham Art Gallery at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas. Her work has

been awarded the Citation of Distinguished Service by the Texas Historical Commission, and she served on the Texas Commission on the Arts. She was selected for fellowship studies in painting with artist Audrey Flack in 1986 and artist Ed Paschke in 1995.

She is also the recipient of the Virginia Steele Scott Fellowship Award for art history research to the Huntington Library and Collections. Candace has an extensive exhibition record and is represented in private and corporate collections. Her work is concerned with the human condition, the natural world, and the spiritual aspects that underlie visual apprehension.

Patty Kirk is associate professor of English and Writer-inResidence at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas.

She is the author of a food memoir entitled Starting from Scratch: Memoirs of a Wandering Cook (Thomas Nelson, 2008) and two spiritual memoirs, Confessions of an Amateur Believer (Thomas Nelson, 2007) and A Field Guide to God: A Seeker’s Manual (Guideposts, 2010), and her collection of essays entitled The Gospel of Christmas: Reflections for Advent is forthcoming in October 2011. She and her husband live on a farm just across the stateline in Oklahoma, where she spends her time watching birds, cooking, worrying about her two college-aged daughters, running on the back roads, writing, grading papers, and ruminating about life—all of which eventually end up in her writing.

Laurie Lamon’s poems have appeared in journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins. She was selected by Donald Hall, Poet Laureate 2007, as a Witter Bynner Fellow for 2007. Her collections of poems are The Fork Without Hunger, 2005, and Without Wings, 2009 (CavanKerry Press). She is a professor of English at Whitworth University and poetry editor for the literary journal Rock & Sling.

Josh MacIvor-Andersen lives in an old house in Wilmington, North Carolina with his wife, a cat named Baby Kitty, and a brand new baby human. He is an award winning writer, teacher and tree climber.

Natalie Minor graduated from Cornell University in 2010 with a BA in classics. In the summer of 2011, she plans to move to Greece. She has won several awards for poetry, and her work is forthcoming in Talkin’ Blues Journal and St. Katherine’s Review.

poetry on Alzheimers has been featured on the Ohio Poetry Association website and in an anthology (Silver Boomer Books).

She has lectured in the US and the Netherlands on poetry and dementia and teaches research and gerontology online. She is the author of Alzheimer’s: Caring for Your Loved One, Caring for Yourself and was a 2011 semi-finalist for the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award for a book of sonnets and 2011 winner of the Frost Farm Prize.

C.R. Resetarits’ most recent poetry appears in Women’s Quarterly Review, Able Muse, Front Range, and the Dogs Singing anthology from Salmon Poetry. She lives, writes, and roams the High Plains of West Texas.

Stefani Rossi studied painting and printmaking at the University of Puget Sound. In 2010 she received her MFA in painting from Colorado State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions, and her upcoming exhibit “Bitter/ Sweet” may be viewed at the Clearstory Gallery in Spokane, Washington, from June 3rd to September 15th, 2011. Stefani will be joining the art department faculty at Wabash College in Indiana beginning July of this year. She has worked with Ruminate Magazine as visual art editor since 2008. More of Stefani’s work can be viewed at www.stefanirossi.com.

Lauren Schmidt’s work may be found or is forthcoming in The Progressive, Alaska Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Rattle, Nimrod and others. Her first full-length collection, Psalms of The Dining Room (Wipf & Stock) is forthcoming. “The Magic Trick of the Table” is part of a chapbook based on her experiences in The Dining Room in Eugene, Oregon, where she was a volunteer server.

In November 2009, Lauren was forced to resign from her high school teaching position for the publication of her poetry. She returned to her native New Jersey where she teaches at Brookdale Community College.

Don Thompson writes: “I’ve been publishing poetry here and there for almost fifty years. My recent chapbooks include Turning Sixty (March Street Press), Sittin’ on Grace Slick’s Stoop (Pudding House Press), Where We Live (Parallel Press at University of Wisconsin), and Back Roads, which won the 2009 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize.

My wife Chris and I live on her family’s cotton farm in the southern San Joaquin Valley not far from the prison where I teach.”

Sharon Fish Mooney lives in Coshocton, Ohio. Every third Thursday you’ll find Sharon and her husband Scott at their local Tim Hortons where they host a poetry and music night. Sharon’s

55

last note

After

being with people at work all day, I feast on the evening bird calls in my neighborhood. I love to time the evening walk with Maude, our Scottish Terrier, for those distinct calls and returning calls across the pines and birches. There is something so poignant and simply ordinary about that close to the day that has paralleled the human day. Waking, working, eating, resting . . . I love being reminded that our seasons of the day overlap.

Laurie Lamon

Poetry

To sustain others with food is an everyday act of love; an expectation, a necessity, but an effort worth the doing. A feast however, is a special celebration of love and occasion, a coming together with a recognition and focus on the love behind the gift.

Candace Keller

VISUAL ART

So much of any feast is about anticipation. Food is in the head, well before it is in the mouth. Recently, I got my family lost while taking them all on their first experience cross-country skiing. I had our lunch in my backpack, but we were trying to find a picnic table up among the trails on the mountain. Soon hunger and fatique set in. My nine-yearold daughter started crying. My twelve-year-old daughter was hungry. My wife was angry. My teenage son was ready to give up. But I kept thinking we were getting near. Finally, a woman passed and told us we were only a few hundred yards from the tiny lodge where we had started. We’d somehow circled back to the sunny spot where we’d put on our skis that morning. Peanut butter and jelly never tasted so good.

Joseph Heithus

Poetry

My favorite Scripture passage has taken on an additional shade of meaning since I’ve been writing poetry. Jeremiah 15:16 is all about feasting on God’s words that bring joy and rejoicing to the heart . . . like all good poetry . . . like Mary Oliver’s The Swan, that calls me to feast on beauty—calls me to change my life.

Sharon Fish Mooney

Poetry

Ruminate Contributors on Feasting

As a small girl, my favorite morning meal was Kellogg’s Raisin Bran. I adored it, and fancied dairy even more, so much so that I would take an early morning trek to the large refrigerator we kept in the barn, where we stored fresh milk from the days before. I would sojourn (barefooted) over fifty yards of gravel and stand on cold concrete to take a ladle to the glass milk jars, delicately scooping a full portion of straight cream on my Raisin Bran. I seem to have escaped diabetes and high cholesterol (thus far), but not my voracity for breakfast.

Rita Jones

And sometimes

you find yourself out on the Fiery Gizzard trail in Tennessee, wandering with a backpack and some beef jerky and a friend who agreed it would be a good idea to disappear for a while in the wilderness. You are days deep in the adventure before it feels like your body starts to devour its own fat supplies in order to survive. Instant oatmeal won’t cut it. You are starving. But then there’s this: that sumptuous return, the first sight of a Waffle House, the hard plastic booths and the laminated menus. Scattered covered diced chunked capped and topped hashbrowns and make it a double, please. Make it quick, please. Triple it and pump the coffee directly into the vein. God bless this feast.

God bless this emptiness filled.

Josh MacIvor-Andersen

ISSUE

20 summer

2011

NONfiction

You know the saying “feast or famine”? Well, it seems to be more famine than feast around my house, as I’m “Our Lady of the Perpetual Diet.” As I get older, keeping things in check seems to get harder. So I write about food rather than consuming it, a calorie-free pursuit .

Barbara Crooker

POETRY

After a period of excess, what a relief it is to diet! To measure out and record my daily portions, to feel myself deflate as the days pass, to rediscover hunger—a rare gift in our overfed culture. Without hunger, bounty and provision just words. When I diet, the least luxury—an apple cold from the refrigerator and a one inch nugget of good cheese—becomes a feast.

Patty Kirk

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Book review

NONfiction

Candace Keller. Rich Man’s Table. Acrylic on canvas. 40 x 50 inches.

Nicora Gangi. One Is Not The Other. Pastel on paper. 14 x 18 inches.