Issue 21: Grief

PO ET RY NONFICT I O N FICT I O N VISUAL A RT +

coming for to carry me home • Adrianne Smith my cloud of witnesses • Jessie van Eerden lying flat on the bottom of the pool • Nancy Priff one sometimes exquisite groan • Joel Sheesley

21 ISSUE

2011 MCCABE POETRY PRIZE • JUDGED BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE WINNER: IN BRIDGEWATER, MY ROOM • BY ADRIANNE SMITH

$

AUTUMN

9

FRONT COVER Joel Sheesley. Angle of a Dream. Oil on canvas. 45 x 72.25 inches.

THIS PAGE Deborah Sheldon. Dad’s Gone Home. Oil on panel. 28 x 28 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.

STAFF EXTRAORDINAIRE editor-in-chief B R I A N N A VA N DY K E

senior editor A MY LOW E

associate editors ST E P H A N I E LOV EG R OV E ST E FA N I R OSS I

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 J O H N PAT R I C K H A RTY 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 E R I KA L EW I S

intern C E L EST I N E T I D D

marketing and outreach K E I RA H AV E N S

design A N N E PAG EAU

annepageau.com

S U B M I SS I O N S We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round—you may submit online at our website. For information on Ruminate submission guidelines, Ruminate resources, and to submit your work, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.org.

S U B SC R I PT I O N RAT ES Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this nonprofit and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid. Please consider subscribing to Ruminate.

One Year, $28. Two Years, $52. If you receive a defective issue or have a problem with your subscription order, please email us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Send all subscription orders and changes of address to Ruminate, 140 North Roosevelt Avenue, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521 or send an email to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. Library subscription services are available through EBSCO and WT Cox Subscriptions.

D I ST R I B U T I O N Ruminate Magazine is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company and through direct distribution.

F R I E N DS O F R U M I N AT E This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Summer 2011 financial support has helped establish Ruminate at the intersection of faith, literature, and art. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors Steve & Kim Franchini, Kelly & Sara McCabe, Ralph & Lisa Wegner, 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, Devon Miller-Dugan, Corrine Fisher, John Fitzpatrick, Becky Haigler, David Harrity, Brad & Keira Havens, Elanie Jordan, Matthew Koh, Manfred Kory, Nathaniel Lawrence, Rob Lee, Paulette Lein, Patrick McGee, Gary Mason & Amy Womack, Ellen Olinger, 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.

21

CONTENTS

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

4 5 26 54 56

Tania Runyan 50 How Great a Struggle I Have For You

Dyana Herron 51 To Robert Ripley

POETRY Adrianne Smith In Bridgewater, my room 8 El Mission San Esteban del Ray 32 On Home 48 Kendra Langdon Juskus Suspension 9 Matthew Burns My Fifth-Grade Teacher, Mr. Dolan, 10 Tells Us About Menstruation

N O N F I CT I O N Jessie van Eerden 13 So Great a Cloud

Tyler McCabe 35 Something Carries Through

F I CT I O N Nancy Priff 22 Woman Underwater

Michelle Tooker One Month After Miscarriage 11 Christopher Martin Antidote to Narcissus 12

R EV I EW D.S. Martin 46 Torn Again: A Review of Every Riven Thing

by Christian Wiman

Beth Paulson And Now I Touch a Match to New-Laid Wood 20

V I S UA L A RT

David Feela In Praise of Insulation 25 Maureen Doyle McQuerry Good Friday 31 David Oestreich Crucifixion of Saint Peter 33 Mary Kathryn Wiley Mamie-Belle 34 Elizabeth Biller Chapman Wild Cilantro 44 Bethany Carlson Elegy for the Star Struck 45

FRONT COVER

27 28 29 30 43 BACK COVER

INSIDE FRONT COVER INSIDE BACK COVER

Joel Sheesley Angle of a Dream Portage Dream at a Crossroads Morning at Bethel Messenger Neither Height nor Depth Hold on to Your Dream Deborah Sheldon Dad’s Gone Home The Leaving Is the Hard Part Sarah McFalls

19 Down the Road

EDITOR’S NOTE

Grief.

Suffering. Let’s face it—they’re not very reader-friendly topics in today’s market. The staff and I actually wondered if hosting an issue on this theme might be too heavy, if the topic might discourage folks from reading the magazine.

I was thinking about this as I walked my son to his first day of kindergarten. He bawled and bawled, begging me to not leave him. My heart broke for him, and I realized, this too is a kind of grief. He, grieving his loss of the familiar and comfortable. “Let’s just go home and come back tomorrow,” he says to me. And me, grieving the passage of time—my baby with his big dinosaur backpack and the large crocodile tears falling down his cheek. And yet, when I picked him up from his first day, he came barreling out of the classroom telling me “It was great, Mom—we had three recesses!”

As my son reminds me, yes, we’re resilient. But that doesn’t excuse an oblivious eye or attempts to avoid the heavy, and it doesn’t mean that the three recesses cancel out the tears of the morning. We all experience moments, seasons, and even years of heart wrenching, but if we’re honest, we’d rarely choose to sit with grief, or even sadder, we’d rarely choose to sit with those grieving.

But in the hands of artists, a difficult topic can be given handles, places to hold on to. And while we’re holding, the artist can point our vision to something we might not have seen before or place our fingers on something we thought too difficult to touch. This is true of the talented contributors gathered here, who had a lot to say about grief. Grief that exists in divorce, death, goodbyes, lost babies, lost love, disease, or just feeling lost—reminding us all of the pain of this world but also of the beauty that can exist in the ashes.

So here it is. Issue 21. Heart-wrenching, lovely, and full of cries . . . even howls, I suppose. (I love what Dyana Herron points out in the adjacent “Notes From You”—that King Lear’s “Howl, howl, howl, howl” may be the most honest articulation of grief.) And the cries are not alone. These pages are moving examples of weeping with those who weep. To me, this solidarity and community is hopeful. Perhaps when we practice weeping with those who weep we are then even more equipped to rejoice with those who rejoice.

And we do rejoice with Adrianne Smith, winner of the 2011 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, and with all the finalists poets. Naomi Shihab Nye was the finalist judge this year, and it was an honor to have her reading and selecting the winners. She wrote this about Adrianne’s winning poem, “In Bridgewater, my room”: “A deft, moving, potent poem.

Understated, it carries its threads gracefully—room, song, train, someone departing—the grace of this poem’s music, and haunted beauty of its content, made this one really stand out.” We couldn’t agree more, and we were even further inspired to create this issue on grief because of Adrianne’s poem, a poem that reminds us that some day we will all be carried home.

Yes. We could stand to have our hearts moved, even wrenched a little more often. Not because we’re trying to find drama or seek tragedy, but because we want to be softened to the suffering (and the joys) of this world. And because we so desire what Matthew Burns describes as “a soft hand on [our] cheek / and soothing, bloodless words / we

[are] all straining to hear.”

We are grateful for the handles,

4

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

RUMINATE READERS & CONTRIBUTORS ON GRIEF

NOTES FROM YOU

Send us your notes for Issue 22 to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. We love hearing from you!

“As long as we are on earth,” wrote Thomas Merton, “the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones.” I feel this love-rooted suffering at times, often while watching my toddler son doing the kinds of things toddlers do— holding his blanket to his face and sucking his finger when he is tired, for instance, or getting excited over picking up little rocks in our yard. In such moments I know that he is, in the core of his being, no different from children who suffer from the violence of abuse, of war, of hunger. And so, when my son is tired, I pick him up, kiss him, and lay him in his bed; with him, I admire and study the rocks he gathers. In his sleep and in his rock bucket there is, somehow, grace enough to reset this broken Body in which there is no separation, if we could but ever see it.

Christopher Martin

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

Traveling with a group of U.S. church leaders in rural El Salvador several years ago, I was torn apart by deadly fear from military/guerrilla fighting going on all around us; and I was torn up by the unspeakable grief of the parents who had lost children to death squads, torture, and mutilation. And there I realized I never again could wear a cross as religious jewelry.

Nor have I done so. The cross means God is broken to be with us—“Emmanuel” comes at immeasurable cost to the Holy One. Steve Durham

READER

Grief and love are so closely related that at times I find it hard to differentiate between them. Like love, grief is about the other— the need for that which is not contained within our selves. Like love, grief is impossible to articulate perfectly, which is why artists are always trying to do it, and always will. Lear’s “Howl, howl, howl, howl,” may be the closest anyone ever comes: grief originates from somewhere primal in us, somewhere animal.

Like love, it whittles us to our barest state, then leaves us with only a question: What comes next? And that may be the most interesting part. The refrigerator and a one inch nugget of good cheese—becomes a feast.

Dyana Herron

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

Every night I climb into bed and curl up in the glow of my iPad. Using the right combination of screen taps, I can transport myself to the Dadaab refuge camp, where despairing mothers queue up to receive temporary rations. Many have been raped on the way or forced to leave dying children on the side of the road in order to save the others. The pictures are hard to see, but I manage. I say a prayer, nibble on chocolate, and fluff my pillow for sleep. Oh God, decrease their suffering. Oh God, increase my grief.

Tania Runyan

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

My father died in 1983, when I was twenty-nine. My love for him transferred to my mother’s care over the years. She died in 2004, when I was fifty. I grieved for my dad again, as well as my mom, in the years that followed. I work through things slowly.

And yet my friendship with my parents continues to grow. I find a note they wrote that says something I need to hear now. I remember something. Mom saved the poetry journals where my work was published in my early years as a poet. These are quiet moments of reassurance—holding the Bible, often read aloud to Mom, old roses bloom.

Ellen Olinger

READER

I was talking to a friend recently about the grief involved with saying goodbye. I told her that I find it hard during these periods of sadness not to go a little crazy, like, eat pizza every day or smoke a million cigarettes, cut my hair with my eyes closed or laugh for too long, to that point where people look at you and say, “I think he’s cracked.” But then, miraculously, I do none of these things. I clip my fingernails. I go to church and talk to an elderly woman named Ruth about her silver bracelet. I sit on the arm of my sofa and bite into a jazz apple. I said to my grieving friend, if you find a jazz apple in your grocery store, I recommend you try it. It is from Australia, according to the sticker. Details like these provide me rungs to keep climbing.

Tyler McCabe

NONFICTION CONTRIBUTOR

There are two paths out of grief and suffering: the path of surrender and the path of gratitude. When my beloved partner died of suicide, it was through surrender that I was able to mourn and move on. I had to surrender to the truth that it was his choice, not mine, to make. When my son died of suicide, it was devastating. The only light through the dark night of the soul that followed was gratitude, gratitude for those who prayed in my stead when I could not find the words, who insisted I contribute when I wanted to run and hide. I recognized that each day I survived was a miracle and a gift, for it did not seem possible, and yet I did. This became the compost from which later I extracted the jewel of forgiveness, healing, and understanding—the deepening of my spiritual practice when it felt shattered beyond repair, the knowing that I must use what I have with all of my soul and all of my strength.

Wendy Brown-Baez

READER

Read more notes from our contributors on page 56.

5

2011

F I R ST P LAC E

S ECO N D P LAC E

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N S

Adrianne Smith In Bridgewater, my room

Kendra Langdon Juskus Suspension

Matthew Burns My Fifth-Grade Teacher, Mr. Dolan, Tells Us About Menstruation Michelle Tooker One Month After Miscarriage Christopher Martin Antidote to Narcissusx

Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize G E N E R O US LY S P O N SO R E D by STEVE AND KIM with F I N A L I ST J U D G E NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

FRANCHINI

F I N A L I STS David Oestreich Crucifixion of Saint Peter Bethany Carlson Elegy for the Starstruck Maureen Doyle McQuerry Good Friday

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Dyana Herron To Robert Ripley Mary Kathryn Wiley Mamie-Belle Jennifer Dempsey Song of Husks Jacqueline Kolosov Snow in April Kait Burrier Buzzing Beth Paulson And Now I Touch a Match to New-Laid Wood Elizabeth Biller Chapman Wild Cilantro

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East, Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982).

Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Charity Randall Prize, the International Poetry Forum, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

Adrianne Smith

In Bridgewater, my room was set in the front of the house, overlooking the yard.

The hillside fell gently to the road below and to the Beaver River that slipped easily between the hills.

One night my father in a whisper, sang— swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.

And afterwards, I stood at the window and stared down the lights casting long glares into the river. I pushed the sash up, the night air breathing on my face, I squinted my eyes.

The beams stretched into stars— long tails of light cut through the darkness, joined together, and snaked in the sky.

And I listened for the train, lumbering down the tracks behind my house, the whistle first, both deep and shrill, and then the rattle of metal. I stood, lingered in its sound. With its passing, I hummed the last of the song— a band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home.

The train carried on and crossed the river, moved off to shake the bones of other homes.

The engine light blazed in the water and the whistle hung in the air, reached out to the city’s edge where my mother slept alone— the hospital floors heavy above her head and her sleep slow in coming.

8

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

Kendra Langdon Juskus

Suspension For A.B.

They come to me unbidden, old summers tucked like folded paper squares into the pockets of your tightest jeans, hidden until they tumble from the dryer in mottled cotton wads of memory: New York and reading Plath and you scared, always scared. Only the sculpture garden made you happy.

There we settled our books into the buckwheat grass and the spiders came out to braid their spindly legs through the black letters, looking for someplace to land.

We sat under a web of aluminum bars woven against the sky, splitting us with strands of shadow, veining your thin skin with ribbons of sun.

But below the splinters of steel, silver and bare, you drifted, weightless, your gravity coming undone.

9

Matthew Burns

My Fifth-Grade Teacher, Mr. Dolan, Tells Us About Menstruation Because he was known for his hands-on approach to education, Mr. Dolan gave us each a little plastic cup of pig’s blood to swirl around a bit and said, This is about how much will come out each month, give or take a tablespoon.

And after, in the clean middle school hall, our newly pubescing faces drained like so many little uteri, Danny, the new kid who’d just moved down from Maine, who was better than all of us in gym class hockey, and who, to the best of our knowledge, had yet to utter a single word from shyness, broke down and babbled through his tears, It just goes everywhere; It just goes everywhere, keened it over and over as if he had just watched his own mother bleed to death on the classroom floor.

Until the school nurse appeared like a plump white angel to walk him away with a soft hand on his cheek and soothing, bloodless words we were all straining to hear.

10

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

Michelle Tooker

One Month After Miscarriage Is it forkfuls of noon —the sun’s honey— floating through the window onto our sleeping bodies?

The sound of your bones shaking off night’s rust scaring away silence?

Or me sliding off the bed on sheets my mother gave us and thoughts I tell no one?

Is it learning there are no euphemisms for hollowness while staring at the ceiling?

Grief lingers longer in half sleep —hot August noon— ignores the children’s laughter rising like waters in a ready womb.

11

Christopher Martin

Antidote to Narcissus I’ve heard the great blue heron cannot see its own reflection cast from the water’s surface— a gift that it may never lose a fish in the image of a perfect eye or fail to see a frog amid such slate feathers shed from a rookery on high.

If only we could fade that way into the mist of rivers, into rhododendron shade; if only we could be so beautiful and not know a thing about it.

For Erik Reece

12

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

So Great a Cloud JESSIE VAN EERDEN

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this biterness, delight, since the imperfect is so hot in us, lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Wallace Stevens, “Poems of Our Climate”

1

A woman wearing a ratty black slip has entered my prayers. Thick eyeliner, pack of Pall Malls,

combat boots. She got in through a crack in the wall and now she’s looking out through the window slats—for what? She lies back on the bed and buoys her breasts with her forearm, smoking hands-free, lazy. I was saying something before—please or sorry, or maybe mouthing the word mercy—but the prayer is silence now. It has become a watching. She doesn’t behave like she’s uninvited; she wears no socks with her too-big boots, as if she just slipped them on to step out into the snow for a minute, to get the mail. I think about kicking her out, but we just stare and stare. She wins, and I’m stuck; my thoughts trail off then sharpen, like she’s nudging them in a certain direction. (Lazy, but pushy.) I think about the story of the girl who gave rice milk to Siddhartha so he could stay put under the tree and Become, how he took her rice milk for a sign, how she took care that it didn’t sour, kept it cool in the shade—did she lick her lips, thirsty? And then I think of the Prophet Isaiah: come buy wine and milk without money. Could be the girl licked her lips but still held out the thin bark bowl to him who drank it down. They that thirst, they that buy the milk, they that give it—whose is the holiness? Is that the question Black Nylon Slip is here to pose? Is that my question? Not quite, but it’s close. I’m not saying I’m even neighbor to the camp of the Enlightened; I’m just saying there are many who tend us and don’t they lean in close and don’t they breathe on our skin to remind us of something?

Black Nylon reminds me of something. With such clarity do the eyes lined in black look at me.

I don’t know how to end my prayer.

I’m just saying hello.

2 I sit down to pray then sit down to write. Two tasks sometimes without much boundary. The cheeky invader of my morning prayers stays with me at my desk, blows smoke in my face. She is a pesky vision.

Her smoke clouds around me and I think the phrase: cloud of witnesses. Well, okay. What about it?

From the Bible’s Epistle to the Hebrews: “Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.” Cloud of witnesses. It’s a Scripture I’ve known since childhood, like a scrap of fabric among other scraps that I’d quilt with if I knew how to quilt, that I keep in a soft sack of odds and ends, wrap a pebble in for a gift and tie the top.

Here’s my scrap: cloud of witnesses, the phrase cycling through my mind. And though I am frittering away my work time, I go ahead and wonder: what witnesses? Back to the Epistle to the Hebrews:

13

“They were stoned and tormented, sawn in two, wandered in deserts and mountains, obtained a good testimony through faith, but didn’t receive a promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.” So the witnesses were the bony martyrs at the dawn of the Church—metal-colored faces, worn, shriveled for the desert birds to pick their meat, flesh not able to shimmer back into word because we don’t go backwards. (For the Word became Flesh and there’s no going back.)

Okay. My curiosity satisfied, I’d say it’s time I get to that short story draft. But I’m pricked: I wonder why these witnesses are not made perfect without us. And what is the nature of that perfection?

And who are all the other witnesses? Who’s my cloud? Who’s my cloud? I know my current project must wait, for I have struck upon my question.

3 And it’s a writer’s question, but to sit with it I must also sit with the Scripture (the scrap of Hebrews) that provokes me—not to study it but to sense it. For the Word became Flesh and there’s no going back— it yielded itself to biopsy, ran fever, fell faint. What I mean is: There’s what the Bible says then there’s the flesh that the word becomes, indisputable, with a pulse and blood. I can’t account for it; I can’t exegete that heartbeat and song’s refrain—the Scriptures that cycle through—the way my fingers remember, in time, the thumb roll on the banjo, sounds souring—the way the Scriptures are true like your pee-puddle is true on the playground, hot, calling for a fresh pair of pants. Indisputable flesh, the thigh that bears the gush. No going back. Word is flesh and must be sensed: flesh tastes hears sees touches blesses and dresses. Catches the scent. Yields itself to biopsy.

Trying to sense this Scripture like a mole its next tunnel turn, I think: and whose hands do you reach for, Flesh, when at the mercy of The Biopsy Report? When it comes back abnormal? Maybe you reach for your cloud of witnesses—you reach for that one to bring you into the circle. She calls you “Baby.”

4 Josephine. I believe she’s the first member of my cloud of witnesses. “Baby” she called me. What else do I know of Josephine? I know it was her idea to have a taffy pull. Something exotic, saltwater taffy like the kind she had brought back to West Virginia from Ocean City, in bite sizes twisted into Easter papers: you hold them in your mouth for a long time, under your tongue, before chewing. Something for us kids in the Settlement to do instead of prowling the Ames parking lot in pickups. Stir the taffy to toughness then pull it taut until tiny white gems would snap loose; someone would bring the tissue paper to wrap it, ribbons to tie the tops. But I don’t think the taffy pull ever happened, for one reason or another. I don’t really know if that taffy Josephine gave me came all the way from the Ocean City Boardwalk, some bright beach shop, or from a gumball machine. But I know she was dreaming things up for me, and for all the kids in our tiny rural community; Josie was dreaming us up a safe and beautiful place that could live and shimmer inside our regular place, and it did feel safe. And those other women on the screened-in porch were dreaming too, making plans for this taffy pull under a fog of cigarette smoke too thick to leak out the screens, hoarse-talking about the kettle and the confectioner’s sugar and the way the Settlement boys were headed for Hades and another DUI. Josephine in a tight leopard bodysuit and jeans and icepink lipstick and “Baby” she called me—wasn’t I so little, too little to know what these women would mean to me?—“Baby, you can tie the ribbons on the tops,” she said, “once the taffy cools.”

14

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

5 Why her? Why’s Josie in my cloud—and she’s witness to what?

My memories of Jo are inaccurate and sharp at once. Sheets of siding that don’t match, that porch walled with screen, and a rutted road, hens in the ruts. I saw her in groups of women, a cloud, a cluster. Dramatic wave of her hand and a calling out in her smoker’s voice—not a call-and-response shout, for it needed no answer; it was final, Josephine’s call, it was brawny. Her earrings dangled strands dipped in dirty moonlight—“Baby” she’d call me, Kool-Aid she’d pour me at Bible School and engulf me in cigarette smoke and spandex leopard skin arms. Josephine. What a space she made for me when I was boyish and bone, all wire and worry and wonder—“Baby, come on up here”—hissing teeth at her sons rolling off to the Ames parking lot. “Them boys is my death”—but I knew she loved them terribly.

I’m there sipping my Kool-Aid with my Bible School craft she taught me—popsicle-stick cross. The glue is weak; my cross is coming apart. “Miss Josephine,” I say, holding up the sticks with gold glitter dusting down from them like hot ashes—she lights up, looks at the new moon, hums a dirty song. “It’s okay, Baby.”

Josie: member of the female cluster-cloud of my mountain childhood. When I got married, they sewed me a hen-print clothespin holder, embroidered me a pillow: a wedding shower as an initiation

These were women who wouldn't go to church if they had no nylons to wear, or if somebody one pew over had been uppity. Sentimental sayings, crisp judgement, sure, clannish, sure,

but wide wide arms. ceremony I neither wanted nor expected. These were women who wouldn’t go to church if they had no nylons to wear, or if somebody one pew over had been uppity. Sentimental sayings, crisp judgment, sure, clannish, sure, but wide wide arms.

That’s why. Why she’s in my cloud of witnesses—wide open leopard skin arms offering me their strength and mercy—and witness to the world as I live in it. She’s witness to the world as I try to write it, manifest it. Its details, but more than the details too—witness to some perfection within that world, within us. These women are not made perfect apart from me, nor I apart from them.

15

6 Miss Josephine: I have the idea that the composition of my cloud determines the tenor and timbre of my work. Cloud of witnesses: its population density, its demographic, whose names are on the membership roll.

Whom, in the dark at my desk, do I write for? That’s the core of my question.

And, when revealed and tested by the witnesses’ fire, will my art stand?

I am always in company when I write. I desire to be original, yes. I write for the deepest part of me, sure enough. But down deep, there’s a host, a motley crew. Most of these people are not there by invitation, I can’t help that. But, by my own volition, I can choose whom to invite close-up, an inner circle to surround me in the mist, neighbors strung tight by tin-can phones. These are folks to whom I can make myself accountable to say things true. Tell the story true. I suppose I’m writing for them.

And I suppose by true I mean, not factual, but honest, in keeping with the world as I live in it and not some nostalgic or cheap or overly grand version of it. True as in received out from what that world is willing to give and not imposed upon it. (True as in Miss Josephine could find herself at home in the story, unabstracted, unobscured, full flesh. For the Word became Flesh and there’s no going back— our art, too, must pulse and bleed.)

There are others in my host whose voices only dwarf and hollow me and convince me to write what’s false to myself. Some are abstractions: the Publisher, the Market. The Conference, the Academy. The Agent. The Editor. Not really specific people, but the idea of them—the Judge and

There are a few books in my cloud too.

Writers whose pen strokes I am following,

their narrow channel.

Executioner, the Critic and Reviewer. Okay, some in particular too: the rich uncle I always wanted to prove my metal against, the professor who wrote his corrections onto my thoughts even as I thought them, the pretty girl who believed me shabby in my best sweater. And also some clamoring voices of my own: the self in me that seeks a perfection that is enemy to the good, isolating and merciless; the self that says I’m a genius deserving my place in the sun, and the one that says I’m worm dung. In my host, these folks are only there for me to impress and prove wrong, to compete with and perform for and prove saleable to. They make demands on me I cannot fulfill and they turn my art to tinfoil and trash. And I suppose by tinfoil and trash I mean work that wraps itself around a successful trend and takes on that outer shape, the way foil does, without taking on the substance. I mean stories whose shapes I polish anxiously without attending to their secret interiors. I mean stories that are derivative and forced (stories in which Josie might find herself caricature, her voice all emptied of brawn, her body only an idea of itself).

But my cloud, my cloud of witnesses, they demand of me what I need most to offer. My best offerings and also the yoking of my offerings with those of the ready world. My cloud waits for words that take on flesh, not shadows, off-key and skittish.

16

ISSUE 22 autumn 2011

Do not waste time. That is the command I hear at my desk. You’re a mother bear; your cloud’s your cubs, your cubs your cloud. I must say to all the others in my vaster inner host: “Don’t you mess with my cloud. I won’t kick you out, for I do not wish to be inhospitable and, besides, there’s no getting rid of you. You may come in and sit quietly in the corner, but you can’t put the hot breath to my skin, no. It’s Josie who’s got that place, that right, our beautiful taffy still hot in the kettle, saltwater burning our eyes.”

It’s her that will help me say something that needs saying and will demand that I say it with my truest timbre and tone. (Could be that, once Josie and my cloud make me stronger, I’ll spend some time with those nasty folks on the outer edges of my inner host, like the pretty girl who snubbed me and my sweater, for perhaps even they are not made perfect without me, nor I without them—but that’s for when I’m farther along.)

To say that your cloud’s membership determines your work’s quality is to admit that the integrity of your art is bound up with those you choose to draw nearest to you, and to acknowledge that there are some that shore up your lie, some your truth. That is, some that dress you up in laughable illfitting suits and some that want you to breathe and flow in the housedress that fits you perfectly.

(This is a hard idea to put into words; I guess that’s why it keeps slipping back toward body.)

7 So who else? There are the constant witnesses, like Josephine and the women on the screen porches of my childhood—Cindy, Eliza, Liz, Jessie B., Aimee—and there are those that come into my cloud for only a short time. Like a few of my students. The girl with high hair and a story and a poem or two that she wrote through the night. The young guy fighting acne and drawing the map of his universe for me, on my desk—his warlocks and larwocks and their intergalactic battles—utterly lost between his stars. A few are so beautifully inky-wet, they get their writing all over my face, a streak of it across my soul, such that all I can say is, “Will you come be in my cloud? Leave your muddy clogs at the door, the fire and soup are hot. Let’s help each other do our best work as it brims from us.” And they do; they keep my work young and vulnerable.

Who else?

I visited a jail for the first time, fully in body, breathing. Those guys in orange jumpsuits, some came into my cloud. Like the one leading us in the breathing exercise: “Put your right hand over your heart, your left hand on your stomach—breathe in—breathe out—breathe in—breathe out— repeat after me: I am here—again, softer: I am here—again, softer: I am here.” He had hurt someone badly and was very sorry, eyes fixed on the sealed envelope of mercy. Cloud of witnesses: bear witness; remind me of mercy, that I might not simply mouth the word but sound it out with fullbodied sound.

And there are a few books in my cloud too. Writers whose pen strokes I am following, their narrow channel. I draw them near me, for it’s not just whom you write for—giving your offering—it’s also those you write because of, because of the path that’s been carved by their rivers of ink and the way they enable you to branch out into your own trickle then stream.

8 And that woman in the ratty black slip. I cannot forget her, for she started this whole thing.

“Hello,” she says back to me, back in my room of prayer, watching me skeptically but with absolute and severe love, that clarity. Combat boots indisputable. Looks out through my window slats again—

17

yes, I see what she’s looking for now—she sees the altar-called girl, the little scared one inside me, pee-hot, hellfired and feeling more pressure than a pressure cooker full of jars of beans, pressure for perfection and spotlessness. I see that this sorry young thing is the one who often courts the voices that ought not to be in my cloud—“O Judge, O Executioner,” she grovels. “O Critic of Critics.”

Black Nylon won’t stand for it.

She opens the window, says, “Come here, Hon, come on up here, Baby.” Wide-open arms like Josephine’s, easy and easing that poor girl. “You got to let go.” Rice milk maid, floozy saint. A significant, if imaginary, member of my cloud. She does not coddle; she keeps me clear and dry and steady.

9 And there’s Herald who made a set of butcher knives for every household in the Settlement, brought my family bits of soap and shoes from the Boys Home, went blind, gave a real damn what Jesus said about mercy, and there was a rumor you shouldn’t be a teen girl in a sheer nightdress with him around (he is not made perfect apart from me, nor I apart from him, and he steps into the skins of my characters to make sure they’re neither too sweet nor too wicked).

And my sisters.

And the man who accompanied our church choir on banjo without reading a single sheet of tablature.

And my friend who cried when he saw the birdseed set out for abandoned baby pigeons in Paris.

And my husband. And my rival in church choir who always got the solos. And Gaye, stiff, brittle and cool with judgment, self-righteous—but she left fifty dollars in our mailbox once when we kids were sick and in need of medicine.

And there are more, but I’ll stop there.

Somehow they each help me write the truer story.

Most in my cloud don’t even know they’re in my cloud. Probably never will. Most come from where I come from, the hollows and ridges, some from where I’ve been since, some from my bookshelves, some from where I live now. Some are dreamed up, in whole or in part. Some are dead. Every one of them makes me homesick for the home inside myself—a spacious place with biscuits aplenty and with cool, cool milk I could never buy. A few might well beg off, wishing to be elsewhere and not stuck with me. Still, I call on them, for they are not made perfect without me.

10 But what, finally, is this perfection that’s mentioned in the Scripture-scrap of Hebrews and that’s part of my sensing-out of the Scripture’s pulse and throb? When I call upon the cloud, “Please don’t dissipate.

Please help me tell it straight, or if crooked, help smooth the bends in the road like pulling out the taffy soft and warm”—when I stand with this cloud whose promise of the perfect is bound up with mine, whose word is flesh and flesh grass, the perfection we’re promised may be, simply, the fact of our binding. The fact that we are not alone—face unto face, hot breath. Terrifically flawed, we work hard side by side to make the things made, our gifts gifted, and we are enough.

18

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

Sarah McFalls. Down the Road. Gesso, marble dust, sand, graphite, and oil on wood. 48 x 48 inches.

19

Beth Paulson

And Now I Touch a Match to New-Laid Wood 1. The Path into the Light These are the dark days that begin with sky the color of old china heavy with unformed questions.

Sometimes the air is so still none of the bare branches move, even cattle trucked from summer range stand motionless in the valley.

How their brown backs shine in the pasture where they rest or graze on hay the rancher hauls and spreads, his eyes on clouds from the north alert to wind that can scavenge fields scatter in its path weed stalks and seeds, wind that can freeze a cow’s breath.

Meanwhile trucks whine on the highway, Red Mountain Pass open but their drivers chaining up on a shoulder outside town, bent under wheels with ungloved hands.

What we do to keep safe, what we do for pleasure— one man in a red shirt unpockets a smoke.

2. What the Spirit Said in November Study cottonwood trees touched with yellow candles where night’s cold rests.

Listen to wind shift in the tall grass as it lays low the last golden-eye daisies.

Touch the skin of the frozen pond and watch small birds glean a stubble field, then beat through gray sky on a gust of wind between roadside and trees.

20

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

Do not mourn how the sun turns away like a former friend that once touched your face with its orange fingers.

Watch deer at dusk pass over a hill browse grass among junipers lifting their solemn heads, gazey eyes.

They do not hurry or have expectations.

When you let go of these things you will be fulfilled.

21

WOMAN UNDERWATER NANCY PRIFF

Standing in a swimming pool drained for repairs, a woman finds that weighted boots have been fitted to her feet. From her spot in the deep end, she can’t see her sister Andrea, but can smell the coconut oil of her suntan lotion. She can hear her sister idly turning magazine pages and clicking the cubes in her iced tea with a straw.

On the patio table, the woman’s cell phone rings. She flinches at the ring tone, the once-bright chimes now tolling dully in her ears.

“Do you want me to get it?” Andrea asks.

The woman wonders if this is a trick question. Though she doesn’t want to talk to anyone or feel compelled to return calls, she definitely wants the phone to stop ringing. In fact, she would like all phones to stop ringing, all pretense and chatter to stop. She wants to press her ear to the dead silence between the tick of one second and the next, to push her finger against the belly of each hollow moment and stretch it out and out until it forms a hole so wide she can fall right through it.

But she can’t manage to say any of this, and now it’s too late. Her sister has already answered the phone. “She’s right here. Hold on.” As soon as Andrea moves the phone from her ear, the woman waves it away.

Andrea sighs and turns back to the phone. “Sorry, but she’s . . . fallen asleep,” she says to the caller.

“As well as can be expected, I guess, though Richard seems to be coping pretty well. Why don’t you give him a call?” The magazine slides off Andrea’s lap, and the breeze rifles its pages like the fingers of an invisible child. The woman tries to block out the conversation, to focus instead on the sound of unseen hands.

“OK, I’ll tell her,” Andrea says. “Thanks. Bye.” Her lawn chair creaks as she rises and approaches the pool. “That was Celia. She said to tell you she’s thinking about you.”

The woman hears each word tumble slowly over the edge of the pool, splattering on impact like overripe plums.

“Oh, and she said to remind you that you can always . . . ” The woman doesn’t think she can stand to hear any more well-meaning words. She notices that the boots are pinching her toes, and she tries to shift her weight and move her feet inside them.

“Listen, do you want to get out of here for a while?” Andrea asks. “Maybe go to the mall or come over to our house? Jack’s out of town until tomorrow, but Tim and Katie are just down the street playing with friends. I bet they’d bike home in a flash if they knew you were coming. They just love you.”

The woman stares at her weighted boots. Each one is buckled and combination-locked, and she doesn’t know the combinations. She shakes her head.

“Look, it’s been almost a week. You should at least make an effort.”

A vague shrug is all the response the woman can manage.

Andrea drains her iced tea and sets the blue plastic tumbler on the patio. “Well, I should probably get going then.”

The woman hears her sister’s bare feet pad away and the discarded magazine’s pages ripple once more in a stray breeze, which scampers off like a child trying to catch up with her. Then the backyard is quiet, and the sun bears down on the woman in the dry basin of aqua blue.

In the humid air, she bends down and tries random combinations on the locks: 25 right, 13 left, 8 right. The locks don’t give. 15 right, 22 left, 29 right. They still don’t budge. She spins the locks until her fingers ache and sweat rolls down her sides.

22

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

While she works, she feels as if the gravity has grown stronger, pulling down and making her arms and legs heavy. To conserve her strength, she sits on the bottom of the pool and leans against the wall.

Its cement surface scratches the back of her arms and legs and snags her black sundress, which she feels like she’s been wearing for days—or maybe months. After a time, the scratches and snags don’t bother her anymore. She feels too weighted down to care, and the gravity has increased so much she can hardly sit up straight.

“Hi, sweetie!” a singsong voice disturbs the silence.

The woman manages to lift her eyes to the apron of the pool, where she sees her mother’s summer sandals, dressy, white, and strappy. She struggles to speak. “Hi, Mom,” she says, inhaling the scent of her mother’s menthol cigarette.

“How would you like to see a movie at The Tempo? I thought we could catch a comedy at the early matinee. Little Miss Sunshine is playing. It’s supposed to be wickedly funny.”

“No thanks,” the woman says, barely keeping her head erect.

“Oh, come on, sweetie. It’ll be good for you.” Her mother’s words drift down with the cigarette smoke. “It’ll perk you up, stop you from moping around so much.”

She pushes herself to look up. “Maybe some other time.”

“You wouldn’t have to lift a finger. I’ll drive and get the tickets and popcorn, and everything.”

When the silence stretches to an uncomfortable length, the woman shakes her head. Her mother asks, “Are you sure you won’t come?”

The woman nods. She feels certain that a dark room full of people laughing together—their voices rising uncontrollably and bubbling over with hilarity at the jokes and pratfalls—would make her feel even older and heavier, like a wounded elephant who’d fallen behind, her heavy feet no longer able to keep up with the herd, her only hope to wait for the sun to bleach her bones flat white.

Her mother sighs. “Well, I won’t push you. But remember, you can’t hide away at home forever. Just let me know if you want to get out and do something.” She hesitates, and then the click-clack of her sandals fades across the patio.

The sky remains a relentless cheery blue. The woman takes a deep breath and stares at the aqua walls of the empty pool. Her gaze picks over the debris that has collected there: brown leaves blown into small nests in the corners, a dessicated apple core from Tim and Katie’s last visit, a jagged rock near the drain.

She stretches her arm toward the rock and grasps it. In her palm, it feels solid and heavy. The woman raises the rock and smashes it against a boot lock. The lock shakes, but doesn’t shatter. She aims and strikes again and again. The rock’s sharp edges bruise her hand, but she forces herself to continue. Then she lifts the rock as high as she can and slams it down. But the lock prevails, and the rock flies from her hand beyond her reach.

A low groan dies in the woman’s throat. She cradles her throbbing hand and waits for the pain to subside. Suddenly, she feels overwhelmed by gravity and slumps down to lie flat on the bottom of the pool. Her body feels as if it has turned into granite, cemented firmly to the earth, and she wishes she had Richard’s ability to stand tall and move forward.

Now she decides to give up thinking about freeing herself from the boots because even that takes too much energy. She closes her eyes to rest, hoping for the blank comfort of dreamless sleep. Just before drifting off, the woman feels a gust of hot wind and hears the iced-tea tumbler clatter and the straw skitter across the patio into the pool.

A growing circle of wetness around her hips makes the woman’s eyes spring open. Not again, she thinks. She looks down, struggling to separate bad dream from bad reality. No, this time it’s different.

This dampness is cold, and it’s spreading up her back and arms as well as down her legs.

23

She turns her head and sees that the pool is filling with water. Along the back of her body, the water builds a growing layer of icy pain that quickly turns into numbness. She can’t even imagine stretching to reach her boots, much less managing to unlock them. She lies as still as a mummy.

Little by little, the water level rises and lifts her body away from the bottom of the pool, yet her feet remain firmly weighted in the boots. With knees bent, her upper body is supported by the water and rises with it. Her hair floats around her head like seaweed on the tide, and she watches a few thin clouds form and dissolve overhead.

Eventually, the water reaches chest level, standing the woman up and lifting her arms away from her body. The sharp tang of chlorine burns the inside of her nose, and fragments of dead leaves float by. It occurs to her that this end of the pool is six feet deep, and she is only five and a half feet tall. This thought hangs so hopelessly heavy in her mind that she can’t even call out.

An early evening breeze blows a few more leaves into the pool, and the woman sees the lost straw floating toward her. With the water now up to her chin, she parts her lips slightly, inhales, and catches the straw between her teeth. Tipping her head back, she begins to breathe through the straw, though part of her wishes she were strong enough to let it go and let the water fill her lungs.

“That’s it. I’ve had it.” A voice grows louder as it approaches the pool. “I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I unplugged the phone.”

She recognizes Richard’s voice—her favorite voice—even though the water has distorted it. Normally thick and strong, his voice reaches her ears sounding rippled and distant. For him, she wishes she could rip off the boots and climb up the steps out of the pool.

Richard flicks on the underwater lights and then sits with his legs dangling over the edge of the pool.

“I know they mean well, but could they just listen to themselves for a minute? ‘Look on the bright side.’

‘You can always try again.’ ‘You can always have another.’ What are they thinking?” He stares at his feet.

“They’re not.”

For a moment, the woman sees her husband through the shimmering water. Though his shoulders are bowed and his black hair twisted into whorls and spikes by restlessness, he seems edgeless and radiant, like an angel. She longs to touch him, but the distance between them seems immeasurable.

Richard eases himself into the pool and moves slowly in the woman’s direction. “I mean, what would they say if something happened to me?” he continues. “‘Don’t worry. You can always get another husband.’

Seems kind of callous, don’t you think?”

Through straw-clenched teeth, she murmurs, “Mm-hmm.”

“Well, I don’t care what anyone says. You and I don’t have to try or do or get or have anything.” Richard rests his hands on her waist. “Not unless we want to, and not until we want to.”

The woman’s eyes sting with overdue tears. She fights a cry, but it forces her lips apart and the straw slips out. Then she clutches at Richard, fearing that she will drown.

“It’s all right,” he says. “You’re going to be OK.” He pulls her close and lifts her so that the toes of the boots point straight down. Through her sobs, she hears the tumblers click into place on the locks and feels the boots drift off beneath her. When Richard sets her down, her feet rest on his.

She crumples against him in pain. “I really wanted this one,” she whispers.

“I know,” Richard says. “Me, too.” He coughs to clear the sadness from his throat. “But I can’t afford to lose you as well.”

Still weeping, the woman lets her husband guide her to the edge of the pool and up the path to the house. She knows the boots will always be there, the water ready to fill her lungs, the hole big enough for her to fall through.

24

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

David Feela

In Praise of Insulation The roof, shed of its snowpack, gathers the sun’s heat again.

Upstairs under the shingles the attic warms while outside the temperature hasn’t climbed above freezing.

On such a day I could lift from the mausoleum of dusty boxes my dimmest memories and hold them under the glare of a bare bulb but it has all been so neatly packed away.

To open one box would only lead to another, and what is the past if not an accumulation of things we can not touch wrapped up in the feeling that we also can not let them go.

25

ARTIST’S NOTE

J O E L S H E E S L E Y, 2 0 1 1 I share the sentiment of Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” which speaks about “walking wary” of the chance discovery of content or meaning in everyday life.

With luck, Trekking stubborn through this season Of fatigue, I shall Patch together a content Of sorts . . .

To me, the patching together of content suggests an arrival at a turning point; a point at which our pervasive tendency toward oblivion is dispelled by an awareness that the status quo, oblivion’s usual way of manifesting itself, is illusory. At this turning point one senses that everything is important. It is important for what it reveals about everything else. We find ourselves in an indeterminate network of relationships that keeps opening up before us.

But here our energies and intellectual powers are taxed. How much of that indeterminacy can one absorb? How soon do we, in exhaustion, begin trading upon trivialities, banal coincidences? The world offers an endless supply of facts. We are pressured to understand how they are important to us.

Which facts relate in ways that bring us insight? Which coincidental meetings are actually important?

It is under the pressure to know these things that we feel the whole world groaning. Art is one such sometimes-exquisite groan. In whatever manner or voice, art calls out the relations between things, even subdividing the “thing itself” into its own sets of relationships.

Painting is one avenue in a network of roads that comprise what Art is. To be professional about painting is to know its history and technical detail, to be enmeshed in its limits; to “walk wary” with it in the world, alert to its capacities for patching together a content of sorts.

26

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

Joel Sheesley. Portage. Oil on canvas. 56 x 70 inches.

27

Joel Sheesley. Dream at a Crossroads. Oil on canvas. 30 x 81 inches.

28

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

Joel Sheesley. Morning at Bethel. Oil on canvas. 32 x 80 inches.

29

Joel Sheesley. Angel of a Dream. ?????????

Joel Sheesley. Messenger. Oil on canvas. 48 x 48 inches.

30

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

Maureen Doyle McQuerry

Good Friday It might have been an afternoon like this sun and horizon wide, birds tittering in tree tops drunk on pyracantha, in some far corner of sky a bank of clouds not in the forecast, black, heavy as a vault.

The first day good for planting, night frost vanished like a thief, the first stirrings of things to come: leaf bud, earth worm, red-cupped quince, the whole wiggling world awake and in this moment you do not fear the sagging bedsprings, the bottle at night, silence and the well its drawn from.

There is only sun sprouting your shoulder blades and bee song even when that thick black mass sails in to shade the tulip bed, perches like a crow in one lung clacking a diagnosis that is not yours and yours, knowing everything will change.

There is more truth in one seed risen through earth’s thick muck, than in the grave clothes of your past, now open like the throat of a lily, unwrapped like a long loved story, the ending revised from period to parenthesis.

31

Adrianne Smith

El Mission San Esteban del Rey Haak’oh Pueblo: the Sky City

The Virgin de Guadalupe is enshrined in walls that rise like leavened bread in the heat of day— heavy-hipped, they waste away in the ascent until pale adobe and sky are indistinguishable.

Within the church, dim light lingers in the niches, halos of dust settle overhead and bright bands of sunlight thrust through chinks in the vigas that lift the ceiling painted to rival the night sky.

Gold-leaf flakes, crumbles like ash onto heads bent in prayer. Before the reredos, tendrils of smoke lick the holy mother’s hair, braided with cornhusks, and her cloak, dusted in stars.

The earth is mounded with graves, bodies buried ten deep—generations entombed in strata—atop this mesa.

The clouds weigh heavy upon us, here, brushing up against the heavens. Veladores sputter and choke, the flames illumine the glass, dapple the stone-floor in color. The virgin gathers the whispered supplications cast at her feet.

Her carved eyes gaze out across the threshold, upon the turquoise sky and the faint, gilt edge of Cerra del Oro rising like a knife to slice the sky.

32

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

David Oestreich

Crucifixion of Saint Peter —Oil on canvas, 91 x 69 in.; 1601; Caravaggio

The soldiers make ironic penitents.

One, black-soled from the work, kneels, his face nearly in the dirt. Another swings a cord across his back, feigning flagellation.

The last throws his arms around the apostle’s feet, as if he would beg forgiveness.

All three hide their faces.

As they labor to set the timbers upright in the earth, they strain as at the weightiest stone in all of Rome.

The saint himself looks left, his face grown pale, his gaze solemn— but not at the rough handling, the metal joining flesh and wood, the impending jolt of inversion.

No, he now recalls the saying of Christ which troubled him above the rest, and grasps, at last, just what it is to him.

The soldiers own no share in his illumination.

33

Mary Kathryn Wiley

Mamie-Belle Before she died she was working on a yellow quilt, a pattern of hearts stitched by hand, the fabric stretched taut across a wide wooden frame.

Sometimes she’d rummage through her sewing closet— piles of plastic bags, scraps of color, yarn, hundreds of patterns spilling out.

Later, her ashes filled a simple urn which my brother carried after the service.

I held a tall flower arrangement.

She may have known her death was coming— the sudden impact of the truck, and after, in the ambulance, her mumbled, incoherent words.

She used to bake cookies, or drink a glass of coke while filling out crossword puzzles in her rocking chair.

She used to wear a clock on a chain around her neck.

Her wrists were fragile, papery skin stretched out over swollen blue veins that bruised easily.

Her laughing face. That smile.

She may have known her death was coming when her dead son began to visit her, showing up unexpectedly in the hallway.

34

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

SOMETHING CARRIES THROUGH TYLER McCABE

The words twitched behind my father’s tired smile as he studied our earnest fistfuls—words

wanting to stay in, needing to come out. For a moment he said nothing, hand to cheek, just rubbing stubble back and forth, making that scratchy sound I loved. He parted his lips gently. The words still cut.

“Those aren’t diamonds, guys.”

We were staying at his trailer for the weekend, my sister Holly and I, just a few minutes down the road from my mother’s house. We did about twice a month. His trailer was an old shabby thing, I guess, but I never noticed back then. I liked the wind chimes hanging from the gutter, the soft jangling they made during still mornings, and the way my steps sounded large and hollow on the wooden ramp up to the screen door. My father hung posters of droopy Georgia O’Keefe-style sunflowers inside the kitchen, which smiled at us even while they faded in their plastic frames. Behind the trailer there was a rusty metal swing set, and beyond it a field of canary grass that rose tall enough to prick my neck. The trailer was set up against a small paved road, inhabiting the mown edge of that enormous, empty lot.

My father took us to revisit that huge lot again a handful of years later, but apartments had replaced its sprawling air. The land had been carved flat and converted into a grid, all the grasses gone. The familiar landmarks—the knots of yellow scotch broom, the two lone pear trees—were replaced by rows and rows of giant chess pawns, an inanimate army of windows, doors, and lampposts reporting endlessly in either direction.

When I was young, though, the place was clear and vast. On early mornings, I’d stand with my nose pressed against the screen and gaze over the grounds, tracing the way the land rose to meet the muddled clouds. My boyhood instincts told me if I could stand upon that far hill, reach that skyline, that I could see the entirety of those golden grasses, miles upon miles, I knew, of pure savanna stretching toward the sun until they blinked out at the edge of the earth. I thought my father owned all of it.

That morning, Holly and I had been off exploring those grasses when we stumbled upon our diamonds.

We always adventured alone while the sun was young. My father slept in, exhausted from working his graveyard shift at the county jail downtown. His job was something I’d heard about for most of my childhood, but I actually only saw it a handful of times. I know my sister and I visited him there with my mother before the divorce—one Halloween we did. I don’t remember much about the visit except for the way our skin turned green under the fluorescent lights and the fact that he called me Tigger and my sister Pooh. I think he may have smiled and kissed my mother when he saw her, but I can’t say for sure. It might have been what I wanted to see.

“Where are we going, Ty?” Holly asked as I plunged forward through the grasses.

I ignored her question. I didn’t know, honestly, and it didn’t matter. These were the plains upon which the great Maasai warrior tracked his evening meal, the same earth that gave way beneath the hooves of his prey. Every stalk of grass was a spear in my hand; every new step launched me miles. We chewed purple clovers for their juices. The eyes of the lioness watched us from the hills.

With a turn past a particularly tall clump of scotch broom, we fell forward upon a foreign artifact: an abandoned motorcycle, wheels gone, rusting and surrounded by green bottles. And look! Tucked

35

inside creases of dried mud and grass were handfuls of jewels, little pockets of them everywhere! We approached them curiously.

“We’re rich! We’re rich!” Holly squealed.

“Hold out your shirt,” I said.

I scooped some of the shards into my hands and dropped them in our makeshift basket. The way I remember it, they were glittering furiously, but I know that can’t be true. The sun warmed my neck as I stooped to gather our findings. Satisfied, Holly and I ran back towards the trailer with our fists and hearts full, shaking out a trail into the grass behind us.

My mother married my father after she left Arizona State. The two had met while working at a movie theater during high school, started dating soon after, and stayed together while attending different colleges in Phoenix. She was a dancer who dreamed of being a doctor and a mother. He was handsome, a goofball who wanted to write screenplays but found himself following his father into police work.

Sharing the experience of turbulent families, they hoped to make together the stable one they’d always missed.

A police officer’s schedule is irregular, but my parents weren’t fazed by it, spending any spare time they had in each other’s company. On Sundays they walked through expensive model homes in wealthy districts for interior decorating ideas, and then perused aisles in Walmart to recreate their favorites.

My father’s uncle, a house painter by trade, taught them how to turn the walls of my baby bedroom royal blue without letting a single drip hit the carpet. They applied a nautical Mickey Mouse border at waist level around the room and set up a red Little Tykes slide. After decorating, they would walk to the park nearby and watch the desert sky smolder into sleep.

My earliest memory is from that first house they rented, just down the street from my father’s parents. In it, I am running to my grandpa and he lifts me up and spins me around. As the world turns about me, I reach my hands out to try and stop it. It slips through my fingers.

In some ways it was that house, its location, that twisted the first knots into my parents’ relationship. Just five doors down from the turbulence they both feared, the house was ready-made to shake, perhaps even poised to buckle. Every week, my grandfather showed up on their doorstep with a six-pack and invited himself in. He brought Pepsi, not beer, because he was too sensible to drink and didn’t need it, anyway. His voice was already loud, his temper already overbearing. He’d plant himself on a couch in the living room, just as my mother finished dinner. “Then came the lectures,” my mother says. “What to do with our money, our careers. And he wouldn’t leave until he’d drunk every bottle clean. It was a bad time. Your father wouldn’t tell him to leave, wouldn’t stand up for us. Didn’t have the courage.”

To escape, to save the family, they moved north. They packed everything they owned into a tired yellow moving truck and put the desert behind. My mother had never seen Vancouver, Washington, before. It introduced a whole new palette of colors unknown to her in Phoenix: grays, brilliant greens, ultramarine blues. After two days of travel, only the new rental house observed our arrival. It welcomed silently as we pulled in, just the four of us crowded into the front seat, the sun-beaten Ford Tempo trailing behind.

For a while, it was a better time. One night, my father should have been away for police training, but he snuck home instead. He let himself through the front door quietly while my mother slept. Slipping into their bedroom, he gently woke her.

“I’ve got to show you something! Come on, quick!” he whispered.

“You’re home early! What—or why—” He smiled and motioned for her to be silent. Holding her hand, he led her outside.

“Look!” he said, raising his hand. Then, unable to contain himself: “Snow!”

My mother gasped. Tiny white flurries fell out of what seemed to be total emptiness, as if suddenly

36

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

appearing from nothing. They graced the air like whispers, vanishing as they settled upon the shoulders of her pajamas. My father wrapped his arms around her and they laughed like children, then spoke softly to one another, then stood silent, astonished by the winter performance. This awe belonged solely to them, or between them, as two who have together withstood and fled the desert valley. It was deep-breath wonder. The frozen dust melted against their faces in the dark.

I’ve never seen photos from my parents’ wedding, but my mother says it was “traditional.” I’ve never asked where they honeymooned, but she has assured me that they were truly, truly in love. I believe her because she says it like an apology. Her eyes smile in a sorrowful way. “I really did love him.”

My father had a dog at his trailer, a big Akita with an ivory face. Her name was Cheyenne, but I only found that out later. “Come here, Shy Anne!” I would yell as I chased her. I’d wrap an arm around her and shove my face in her chest. Shy Anne followed Holly and me on our morning expeditions through the savanna and guarded us with motherly ferocity, ears in a constant shiver. Her posture was noble.

Under her watch, no wild creature could bring us harm. I could tell back then that my dad really loved

ON SUNDAYS THEY DROVE THROUGH EXPENSIVE MODEL HOMES IN THE WEALTHY DISTRICTS TO GET INTERIOR DECORATING IDEAS, AND THEN PERUSED AISLES IN WALMART TO RECREATE THEIR FAVORITES. her because he spent his extra money to build her a dog run and was always careful in fastening her collar to the line so she wouldn’t accidentally wander. He took her for evening walks on the property and taught her to play fetch. She sat in the kitchen while he dipped bread for French toast.

Shy Anne set off with me one afternoon into the savanna, the time of day when our shadows lay straight beneath us in the sun. My aim was the top of that distant hill, to stand at that height and survey the vast plains, the Ngorongoro Crater. Within would be swarms of gazelles, wildebeests, and zebras, grazing, snorting, stomping the dust. Shy Anne and I would not fear the spotted cheetah. The hunter’s gaze would not deter us.

For whatever reason, the Vancouver public school system back then required a unit on Africa, which for my grade school teacher meant lessons on exotic animals. “Cheetahs are fast sprinters,” I scrawled onto a project poster. I underlined the important words in orange marker. “Their large nostrils let them take in extra oxygen for running. When they run, their tails work like rudders, helping to steer and balance during tight high-speed turns. When they are hungry they scan the plains with powerful eyes.”

The project became a small obsession at home. I even watched an Animal Planet special called “Big Cats.” There in my living room, I saw a young wildebeest, maybe a year old, try to escape a cheetah. Even as I watched, I knew it was doomed to fail—and towards the end of the chase, the little wildebeest seemed to know it, too. Its eyes, once wide with fear, glazed over slightly, suddenly calm, accepting. Its tongue no

37

longer dangled out of its mouth; I thought it wanted to die with dignity.

“Cheetahs can reach speeds of seventy-one miles per hour,” I reported. “They can travel around twenty-five feet in a single stride. At top speed, they can take four strides per second.”

Before I watched that television special, I thought being a cheetah would mean being able to escape time, as if speed equals time travel. Surely something that fast could outrun it. That was before the baby wildebeest died in my living room, though, with the creature at its throat. After that a cheetah seemed like time’s hireling, or maybe its mercenary. Time had caught the baby beast.

“A cheetah’s spine is like a spring, so it can shoot forward at its prey. It’s mouth and teeth are small, so it kills its prey by suffocation.”

At some point I started seeing time, it’s most capricious parts, like a cheetah—the way it can catch you up in a moment and change everything. The way it seems to allow for life just long enough to feel

I CLOSED MY EYES WHILE MY MOTHER’S VOICE TOOK LIGHT STEPS THROUGH MY TIRED, FLEDGLING MIND. the sting when it’s gone. I hadn’t felt that sting yet in grade school, but I did feel those golden eyes on me. They seemed to be hidden everywhere, always moving behind a screen of grass, always watching.

“Tyler! Tyler! Ty! Ler!” my dad’s yell cut through the air. I turned around and saw him at the screen door. “Lunch!”

I looked at Shy Anne and the skyline, leaning my elbow on her shoulder. We were nearly halfway to the peak. She huffed her dog breath in my face and my frown faded a little.

“Okay! Coming!”

We turned and began our descent.

My mother remarried when I was five. She met my stepdad at an insurance company where they both worked. Holly and I called him Papa because we couldn’t replace “Dad,” but he was still a father to us.

Papa came from a previous marriage and divorce like my mother, so we had two new sisters after the wedding. Kate was my age and Kristin was Holly’s age. We quickly became close in the innocent way only children can: through a visit to the zoo, giggling at chimpanzees, licking popsicles.

“Stepsister” seemed too formal a word to describe Kate or Kristin. We woke up early together and planned circus shows for our parents (always involving our magic wands, always our crowns of construction paper and glitter glue). I made faces at Kate from across the table while we waited for our Sunday breakfast at Elmer’s. Kate ordered her eggs sunny-side-up, which sounded sophisticated to me. I ordered mine that way, too.

38

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

The four of us children used to have sleepovers together. We’d tie up blankets into a makeshift tent with my mother’s hair clips. The light inside that tent was beautiful, diffused as it was through all the blue and white blankets. The way I remember it, although I know it’s probably a trick of time, the light around our faces was almost foamy, holding us together to that shore for just an extra second before the tide went out again. That’s the picture of Kate I remember best: her smiling at me underneath our makeshift tent, six-year-old eyes bluer by the blue waves, and small golden threads in her hair shimmering, nearly translucent. I saw her again almost a decade after that moment and I missed that younger face.

Before we went to bed inside our tent, my mother would come into our room and sing to us. With the lights out, I couldn’t see her there, couldn’t see my sisters around me—only I could sense them, feel their soft elbows at my sides. I pulled my blanket over my head; it trapped the warm breath there in a pocket around my cheeks before filtering into the space above. I closed my eyes while my mother’s voice took light steps through my tired, fledgling mind:

Tell me a tale of kings and queens, Tell me of Peter Pan, Tell me of when you were a boy, Of when I shall be a man, I like to sit here in the dark, Listening to all you say, I feel so lonesome in my bed, I wish you would let me stay.

After their wedding, my mother and my new Papa helped Kate, Kristin, Holly and me decorate new bedrooms with our handprints. Dipping our palms in red, blue, pink and mint, making smeary prints on the clean white, sealed our friendship. When we finished, we stood back and assessed our work. The result was like our new family: beautiful and messy.

One of our weekends at my father’s trailer never came. I remember it because my clothes were still folded when I unpacked them.

“Daddy’s having a bad weekend, guys,” my mother explained. She sat down with us on my bed.

“Something very sad has happened. Daddy’s dog, Cheyenne—she died last night. You know how much your Daddy loved Cheyenne.”

My father had called my mother crying.

“Your Daddy loves you of course,” she reassured us. “He’s just very, very sad right now and needs some alone time. He’s going to bury her out in that big field, where she loved to run.”

It struck me then, I think, that my father lived alone—that our weekends with him were actually not very long. Most of the time, nobody was there to wake him midmorning shouting, “We’re rich, Dad! We’re rich!” And he probably didn’t make French toast for himself. He probably just ate cereal. I imagined him now, sitting without Shy Anne in the kitchen, just swirling the flakes, watching them fall apart in the milk.

“Was Shy Anne his best friend?” I asked my mother. She paused an extra second before responding: “I don’t know, Ty. I know she meant a lot.”

I wonder if my father called anyone else besides my mother. I wonder if there was more than one reason he dialed her number.

39

The early days of my mother’s new marriage to Papa stick together like wet pages in my memory. Ink from one transfers to another; scenes clump together, cling to my fingers; and so soon I’ve reached the end of the chapter, that time with all six of us. There were bits of stray paper everywhere at the time: chore lists and stacks of chapter books, colorful tissue squares from a birthday piñata, scraps unvacuumed in corners. I remember love notes taped to my mother’s bathroom mirror and tucked into Papa’s car visor.

During that first summer together, they put us four kids through swimming lessons. We’d enter the public indoor pool in a parade line: Kate and me running up to the door in excitement, Holly and Kristin holding hands nervously behind, Papa toting a bag of towels and holding open the door with his foot for my mother, in the rear, who was walking slower than usual because of the new baby in her tummy.

It was going to be a boy, my mom said over dinner one night.

“What do you guys think we should name him?” Papa asked.

All four of us paused. Our eyes searched the room for answers.

“Clock!” “Ketchup!” “Hotdog!” “Furniture!”

“What about Austin?” Papa said.

We shrugged. “Kind of boring,” I said.

A home video shows my mother shying away from the camera later, nearly eight months pregnant.

“Don’t you bring that thing near me!” she says to the screen. Papa’s arm comes around into the frame, reaching for her stomach. “Come on, let’s see it,” he says. She is smiling, saying, “No, no, no, you get that away from me,” as he pulls up the bottom of her shirt to show the great soft bulge of her stomach.

Some nights, I liked to climb on her bed and rest my head on that bulge, breathe in her mother smell, something close to apples and fresh paper from her books. With everything quiet, I could hear my own heart beating, or perhaps it was hers or my brother’s, and the perfect, unwavering rhythm of that sound made me forget that things could ever change, that I wouldn’t just lie there with my head on my mother forever, that the people we loved might at any moment die or go away, leave us alone in the world, that in just a few seconds diamonds might be transfigured into glass. That beat, beat, beat told me the world was stable, I was safe as it swallowed me up, my mother ran her fingers through my hair. Beat, beat, beat and no room for volatile things.

My Papa lifted me gently and carried me to bed.

One evening, I found myself nearly at the peak of my dad’s great hill, just a couple minutes from the crown. I remember that the sun over the edge was turning an unusually deep color like an overripe orange falling from its tree, returning to become part of the earth. The golden savanna had quieted to an evening tan. The jackals would be out soon. Over the peak, the wildlife would be settling down in herds for rest, and Mt. Kilimanjaro, silhouetted in the distance, would be watching over her land, her warrior tribes, her slumberers and their waking foes. I zipped my sweatshirt against the wind. Behind me, the windows of the trailer shown like golden eyes in the distance.

I finally climbed the summit of the hill. I pulled my gaze over the edge, let my eyes fall on the land that sloped downward before me: some yards down a few brambles, dormant blackberries, stripped and brown. Below, a chain-link fence, a brick building, a basketball court. There was a street. And it was just a school. A school that just sat on a field that just rose up to the hill I stood on.

Visions of wildlife were instantly torn from me. I looked around, looked back behind me. I couldn’t see the savanna in the grasses.

Of course.

That place was far away, too far for me to reach. It could only happen in pictures and stories, behind television screens—that place that had been mine, now gone.

All except for the cheetah, purring behind me, satisfied, licking its paws clean.

40

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

I don’t know how long I stood there with my teeth chattering as the sun fell and the wind became cold—chattering the way I had at my last swimming lesson. Kate and I had both chattered. The chilly shower beforehand caused it, and the excitement, the nervous energy that came with throwing ourselves into an unstable place, a ground that moved away from our feet if we kicked. I was treading water with my right hand anchored to the pool’s lip, and Kate, with her left hand and facing me, was doing the same.

“Hey, Ty, I have something to tell you,” Kate said before the instructor began. She looked at me with those cords of blonde hair plastered to her head, eyes guilty. “Kristin and I aren’t going to visit anymore.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Mom and Dad say it’ll be better.” She meant her own mother and my Papa, of course— but how could Papa say that? How could she be leaving? My sister. Kate, my sister.

It wasn’t until I was older that I learned about the angry questioning Kate and Kristin’s mother subjected them to each time they returned from our house. She’d ask them about every little detail of their visit, question them endlessly about Papa and my mother, our house, the new baby boy. It was

I REMEMBER THAT THE SUN OVER THE EDGE WAS TURNING AN UNUSUALLY DEEP COLOR LIKE AN OVERRIPE ORANGE FALLING FROM ITS TREE, RETURNING TO BECOME PART OF THE EARTH. a spiteful and cruel questioning, and had at its root nothing to do with those girls. The stress of it, though, the strain between parental loyalties, ate at them during every weekend transfer. Looking back, I can see it. Kate sometimes burst into tears. I didn’t understand then. Papa made the decision to end their suffering by cutting himself from their lives. It probably kept them from years of ulcers, headaches, anxiety medications. I wonder now if they even guess at the life he bought them by selling his active fatherhood. But as I clung to the edge of the pool that day, that was the last thing I could have wondered. All I could know was that the world had changed again, violently, painfully, and with so little notice.

I shivered to myself. The swimming instructor led us to push away from the wall. There in the water, we let all the solid things fall away, let ourselves sink to the bottom until all that surrounded us was unfixed—until, alone, suspended, we could feel only our small permanent selves within the

41

shifting liquid. Whether for sorrow or for the sting of chlorine, I let out tears. They dissolved into my surroundings. I sank until my feet felt the bottom. Then, bracing myself, I surfaced.

From the top of my father’s hill, I began the slow descent to his trailer. There was no spear in my hand. There was nothing to defend myself against. I chewed on a clover and listened to my steps. I noted the rhythm of the crunch, crunch, crunch, through the quiet field.

My father later moved from the trailer into a small house. It had a regular backyard, with neighbors on both sides and across the street. He raised an Akita puppy, a small brown one from the litter Shy Anne gave us just a few weeks before she died. The puppy’s name was Wake, as in that trail of disturbed water left behind boats, the aftermath. My father still slept in on our weekends together. When Holly and I woke, we crept into the TV room and watched cartoons.

On some afternoons, we would walk to the park down the street. There Holly and I would race across the field, touch a knot in an old evergreen tree, run back, and collapse in the grass. We’d lie there for a time with our eyes closed, saying nothing. I would hear my heart beat in my ears, behind my eyes, in my palms. That beat, beat, beat—that something carrying through.

42

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

Joel Sheesley. Neither Height Nor Depth. Oil on canvas. 80 x 36 inches.

Reproduced here in black and white.

43

Elizabeth Biller Chapman

Wild Cilantro Fragrance of chadon beni and prognostication scent the Trini morning already broken by the Abbey bells’ deep booming and the parrots are flying up from Tunapuna, noisy but faithful to the holy hill.

A yellow oriole, like a small sun, is pecking at the halved ripe bananas the monks place carefully along the railing.

Signs drench the world.

An early shower wets the missal she left open on the nightstand.

And above the verandah where she brought her coffee and book and grief, an emerald green iguana will float a long thin tail and kohl-rimmed eyes.

Soon there’s a buzzing of white thighs. Two copper-rumped hummingbirds are fighting at the feeder: a longing wind begins to shake the avocado tree.

44

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

Bethany Carlson

Elegy for the Star Struck I brought my umbrella to reckon this scarred face of weather & I’ve lost touch with the earnest blooming of marigolds, their understated navigation of simplest lengths: vine, trim, & root—my own uncut belief in glass frontiers, the progression of the calla lily, the cosmic void, neighborhoods of star-eating stars. I’ve lost touch with the broken blood vessels in longsuffering. Tell me your secrets in hemlines of rain & I’ll say a sky without tear ducts is no sky at all.

When the horses have long forgotten their wild, will you trace them with your fingertips, taste the salt of them on the grain of your tongue? Will you wager their darkened shapes could fill an evening sky?

45

REVIEWS

TO R N AGA I N Review of Every Riven Thing, by Christian Wiman (Farrar, 2010) REVIEWED BY D.S. MARTIN

In the Spring of 2010, I attended one of my favorite events—The Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin

College. When I learned Christian Wiman—editor of Poetry Magazine—would be speaking, I marked that session in my program. For me, it turned out to be one of the highlights of the conference. That morning he spoke of his journey, and his perspectives on art and faith. Even though I soon sought out Wiman titles in one of the bookstores, it was his upcoming poetry collection Every Riven Thing that I was particularly looking forward to.

In this, Christian Wiman’s third poetry collection, we see a poet who balances his playful love of language with his desire to have that language communicate something worth saying. He plays with rhyme and partial rhyme in the opening poem, “Dust Devil”—“Mystical hysterical amalgam of earth and wind / and mind”—letting the sound propel us down the page.

He plays with the pairing of similar words, and with the associations of homonyms in our minds.

In “Hermitage” he says of one character, he “wrought it all into a tenuous, tenacious form.” The word “wrought” here draws us back to a reference in the poem to working with iron; similarly, just after using a bell as a simile, he says, “He wrung / from time a time to vanish / back.”

Wiman seeks to work out theological questions throughout the book—and in the title poem, in particular, he examines the relationship between the Creator and his creation: God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made sing his being simply by being the thing it is: stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why.

And this is a world where we are torn, and where much of creation is torn, and as the Apostale Paul tells us, is “groaning as in the pains of childbirth” (Rom. 8:22).

Christian Wiman strives with words to make them say what, in such a concise space, they might not be able to say. Sometimes he brings us with him with fascinating results, and sometimes he leaves us behind, scratching our heads. In the case of a series of seven poems entitled “Not Altogether Gone,” it would have helped to have known up front that he is writing about the illness and death of his father; this only fully came to me from external sources. This is no sentimental portrait, but then again, even knowing the context, I don’t feel invited in enough to experience much of the man.

There are many poems, however, that sing in differing ways. In some, he’s a fine storyteller; in some, he’s skilled in making and breaking poetic structures; in some, he speaks with profound simplicity.

Sometimes the significance he seeks comes in the form of memories of his childhood in West Texas.

Consider the stories in poems such as “Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone” and “Five Houses Down.” The first is about a long-since-torn-down diner, in a long-abandoned town that only exists in the poet’s memory. The

46

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

latter is about a neighbor whose yard was a scrapheap containing the “eyesore opulence / of his five partial cars” and a “wonder-cluttered porch.”

Christian Wiman’s first collection appeared in 1998. The Long Home was a strong debut, with many of the techniques he employs in Every Riven Thing already present. Much has happened in Wiman’s life since then. In 2003 he was appointed the editor of the influential, Chicago-based magazine Poetry. After this coup, however, he hit a discouraging snag; his poetic stream ran dry. For more than a year he seemed unable to write any poetry at all.

According to Kevin Nance of Poets & Writers, four significant things then happened in quick succession in Wiman’s life: 1) He fell in love with and married fellow-poet Danielle Chapman; 2) he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable blood cancer; 3) after years in the spiritual wilderness, he returned to God and the church; and 4) after three years of struggling, his ability to write poetry returned. All of these experiences contribute to Every Riven Thing.

Enduring cancer treatments and facing his own mortality come to mind when reading of a wind-blasted apple sapling in “After the Diagnosis” or when reading the prayer “This Mind of Dying”: “God let me give you now this mind of dying / fevering me back / into consciousness of all I lack.” The poet’s cancer unpredictably vacillates between active and dormant, and his prognosis is equally unknown.

It is obvious from his poems that Wiman does not like God-talk—having been raised in a family awash with it—although he constantly speaks of God throughout the collection. I think he fears to speak pat phrases that haven’t earned their place, or to be identified with those who speak this way. In the first part of “One Time” he says, “To believe is to believe you have been torn / from the abyss, yet stand wavering on its rim.” This is where Wiman finds his uncomfortable home.

His uneasiness with an oversimplified faith is evident by the self-debate that resurfaces from poem to poem: “Sometimes one has the sense / that to say the name / God is a great betrayal,” he tells us in “Gone for the Day, She is the Day.” And elsewhere he says, “I say God and mean more / than the bright abyss that opens in that word” (“One Time”)—and still elsewhere he proposes that his “tongue / be scrubbed . . . if I should utter / the dirty word / eternity” (“Lord of Having”). Similarly, like the kid in Sunday school who doesn’t want to be lumped in with the conformers, he frequently proves to us he hasn’t forgotten how to cuss: “. . . given all hell / to a god who given time / knew goddamn well / what to do with it.”

Even so, it’s often on the dark edge of doubt where faith’s beauty shines—often in the soil of real questions where answers bloom. I value Every Riven Thing when Wiman celebrates the good things of God, but I equally value the book when he has the guts to acknowledge the struggle. As John Donne once prayed, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” so Wiman prays, “. . . shatter me God into my thousand sounds” (“Small Prayer in a Hard Wind”).

He does not conclude with conclusions, but with room for each reader to continue to freely move through these poems again and again, for themselves.

To love is to feel your death given to you like a sentence, to meet the judge’s eyes as if there were a judge, as if he had eyes, and love.

—“Gone for the Day, She is the Day”

47

Adrianne Smith

On Home

The creosote have sent their tap root down into the rust-hued sand, tainted the soil with acid, as if to say: “Only I will flourish here, will breathe this waterless air sucked dry by the noonday sun.”

I fly above the parched salt flats, creased like the Earth’s palm, carved by the corrosive wind’s biting sand. My finger trace their shapes on the window’s double pane as I glide wordlessly above.

The wind must want to be seen.

Her skirt stirs the too-still air and calls the sand with a whistlesong, kicking up dust as she gyrates her hips to the shrill melody.

The air screams over the wings as I descend toward the black tarmac scar, a gash, cut through wastelands of mesquite, yucca, Spanish swords, and Apache plumes.

Men have bushwhacked through barbed thorns and piercing needles, but they have not shamed the wind, that whirling-dervish.

She is Chiindii to the Navajo, a spirit twisting into life, seeking home here, in this wind-tossed desert; but she has no roots to mine for water, to burrow beneath

48

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

sun-baked soil. The wheels graze the earth and I can’t help wondering if she chose to roam, or if she was ripped away, left to waltz the stinging dance of the dispossessed.

Creosote limbs bend beneath the weight of the plane’s descent.

The wind whirls dust into eddies and carves shallow dimples in the earth, like footprints left by my wandering feet, trying to go home one last time.

49

Tania Runyan

How Great a Struggle I Have For You —Coptic Church Bombing, Alexandria, Egypt, 1/1/2011

All day they pray before the blood-splashed banner of Christ.

He spreads his robed arms into the browning clouds.

A young man leans into Jesus, tucking his head beneath his chin. A woman presses her fingertips to his hair.

What is real are the rabbits’ feet of winter buds on the magnolia out front, the boards and plastic buckets accumulating in the neighbor’s yard. How great the struggle, to unfold my arms and work my hands through these frosted windows, to lay my fingers over that woman’s and feel the pulse of her grief. But I hold on. I want to slouch back in my chair, but I hold until my hands sweat, until she sweats into the bloody hair of Christ. How great the struggle to stay here while the phone rings, to shove through God’s great shadow of why. We lean into the stain.

We feel the blood still pounding as it did through the man who just hours ago lay himself open to prayer.

50

ISSUE 21 autumn 2011

Dyana Herron

To Robert Ripley What hunger was in you for the earth’s great anomalies— a woman wedded to a corpse, the man who sired three children in three different centuries?

What beauty for you could match that of rare twins rising from their mother’s dark water, braided spines fused together forever, like ironwork? And why, among all stories, did you most love the one about a girl who swallowed a pin, but years later pulled it from her infant daughter’s thigh?

Did you believe it, or not, when you sailed your ship to the country where a man sculpted an exact replica of his pale, wasted body as a gift for his lover, after learning he would soon die? Tell me, did you see it standing there, frozen, teeth and nails extracted from live flesh, and recognize this as wonder of wonders, the dazzling horror of love’s perfect posture?

51

featuring: Leila Aboulela • Scott Cairns • Lan Samantha Chang Shane Claiborne • Bruce Cockburn • Jonathan Safran Foer Li-Young Lee • Maurice Manning • Marilynne Robinson Gary D. Schmidt • Luci Shaw • Judith Shulevitz Craig Thompson • Walter Wangerin, Jr. and more

april 19-21, 2012 Registration opens in October.

For more information, visit calvin.edu/festival.

CONTRIBUTORS

Matthew Burns holds a PhD in creative writing from Binghamton University where he was a managing editor of Harpur Palate. His poem “Rhubarb” won the 2010 James Hearst Poetry Prize and his other poems and essays have appeared in Folk Art, Ragazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Memoir (and), and others. He is an assistant professor of English at Heritage University. As he writes this, he is two days into a 2700-mile drive between New York and Washington State.

Bethany Carlson is an MFA candidate at Indiana University and an associate poetry editor for the Indiana Review. She has poems forthcoming in The Cream City Review and The Bellingham Review. Access more of her brain’s meandering rabbit trails on Twitter @bcarlson518.

Born in Boston in 1943, Elizabeth Biller Chapman lives and works in Palo Alto, California. Her work has appeared in Sand Hill Review, Water-Stone Review, and Poetry, among others. Her chapbook, Creekwalker, was published by (M)other Tongue Press (1995).

Robert Creeley selected her poem, “On the Screened Porch,” originally presented in Poetry, for inclusion in Best American Poetry, 2002. She has seen two full-length collections into print: Candlefish (University of Arkansas Press, 2004) and Light Thickens (Ashland Poetry Press, 2009). Now retired, she previously worked as a college teacher of Shakespeare and a psychotherapist in private practice.

David Feela has been writing in the attic since retiring from his high school teaching gig. His newest book of essays, How Delicate These Arches: Footnotes from the Four Corners, will be available this fall from Raven’s Eye Press, or by leaving a self-addressed stamped envelope outside his attic door.

Dyana Herron is a Tennessee native who now lives in Philadelphia, after stopovers in Atlanta, Boston, and Seattle. She is a graduate of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in creative writing and for the past two years has been a regular contributor to Image Journal’s Good Letters omniblog.

Kendra Langdon Juskus is a writer and editor and a student in the Spalding University MFA program. She was a finalist for the 2010 Janet McCabe Poetry Prize, and in addition to Ruminate, her writing has appeared in Flourish, Catapult, PRISM, and Books & Culture. Originally from New York’s Hudson River Valley, she is enjoying the wide skies and fertile gardening ground of Illinois, where she lives with her husband, Ryan.

Christopher Martin lives in Acworth, Georgia, with his wife Deana and son Cannon in an old house between Red Top Mountain to the north and Kennesaw Mountain to the southeast. Chris is a graduate student at Kennesaw State University, and his writing

54

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

has appeared in Still: The Journal, Loose Change Magazine, New Southerner, and American Public Media’s On Being blog, among other publications. He edits the online literary magazine Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination and is at work on a collection of essays titled Native Moments: An Ecology of Fatherhood. Aside from writing, Chris enjoys spending time with his family, especially outdoors, and he coaches his little brother’s basketball team, the Owls, every season. (Cannon is not only the team’s biggest fan, but also their official mascot, “Lil Hoot.”) Chris and Deana are expecting a daughter, Opal Mary, in September. In fact, she should be here as this issue goes to print!

D.S. Martin is a poet and teacher. He and his wife have two virtually grown sons, and live just north of Toronto. He’s the award-winning author of two poetry collections—Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). Visit his website: www.dsmartin.ca and his weekly blog about Christian poetry—www. kingdompoets.blogspot.com.

Tyler McCabe is the Program Coordinator of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing program and managing editor of Image Journal’s bi-weekly newsletter ImageUpdate. His writing has appeared in SPU’s Lingua art journal and Etc. magazine. Originally from Vancouver, Washington, he has recently settled in Seattle’s lovely Queen Anne neighborhood, where he plans on crafting his first book-length work of nonfiction.

Sarah McFalls is a native Tennesseean and lives in Knoxville. When she is not painting, she works as the collections manager for The Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee.

Her work has been featured in juried shows in Tennessee, Illinois, and Georgia. She writes: “I began to paint the landscape of ‘Down the Road’ from some photographs I had lying around and quickly discovered that I didn’t need the picture to paint the place. I knew what it looked like. I knew what it felt like, and I knew how it made me feel. I just had to paint until the image was done. The importance I gave to the specificity of place vanished, and the landscape soon became a skeleton to support an unconventional handling of media.”

Maureen Doyle McQuerry is a novelist, poet, and teacher. She has three young adult books coming out in the next two years—The Peculiars, a steam-punk adventure, Beyond the Door, and Time Out of Time (Abrams/Amulet). Her poetry is in many literary journals and in the award-winning chapbook Relentless Light. She teaches writing at Columbia Basin College and is a teaching artist with the Washington State Arts Commission. She is also a founding member of Washington State’s newest website devoted to young adult literature, YA-WA (www. ya-wa.com). You can find out more at www.maureenmcquerry.com David Oestreich lives in Northwest Ohio with his wife and three children. In addition to writing, he enjoys fly-tying and

photography. He is also an amateur herpetologist and probably drives all the real herpetologists crazy. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Minnetonka Review, Hobble Creek Review, Eclectica, and Tar River Poetry.

Beth Paulson’s poems have appeared widely in small magazines and anthologies. She has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, including one in 2010. Her poetry collection, Wild Raspberries, was published by Plain View Press in 2009. Beth lives on Colorado’s Western Slope where she teaches writing and creativity workshops.

She climbs in the mountains there as well as in Italy and Switzerland.

You can read more of Beth’s poetry at her website, www.wordcatcher.org Nancy Priff’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, The Literary Review, The Dan River Anthology, The Bucks County Writer, and other publications. She has an MFA in fiction writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University and received a 2003 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Also, she has written or edited more than 100 books, videos, DVDs, and online courses on nursing and medical topics. Nancy lives in Ambler, Pennsylvania, with her husband John in a mill worker’s house, circa 1830, which they have renovated over the years.

Tania Runyan’s poems have appeared in dozens of publications, including Poetry, The Christian Century, and the anthology A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare. Tania has been awarded an NEA grant for 2011 and the 2007 Book of the Year Citation by the Conference on Christianity and Literature for her chapbook, Delicious Air. Her first full-length collection, Simple Weight, came out from FutureCycle Press in 2010. WordFarm will release her second collection, A Thousand Vessels, in 2011. Tania spends her days writing, tutoring high school students, playing Celtic fiddle and mandolin, gardening, and managing three boisterous children.

Adrianne Smith, originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico, moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to study art and creative writing at Belhaven University. She graduated this spring, and now manages a Chinese restaurant to pay the bills. She was awarded honorable mention in the 2009 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and second place for poetry in the 2010 Southern Literary Festival.

Joel Sheesley is a painter who lives in the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated with a BFA in painting and drawing from Syracuse University School of Art and from the University of Denver School of Art, with an MFA in painting and printmaking. He teaches art at Wheaton College. His work has been exhibited regularly in Chicago, including at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2010, and in other cities across the country. Mr. Sheesley received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. In 2008 Mr. Sheesley’s painting was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University.

Deborah Sheldon has painted all her life and majored in fine arts in college, but she just started exhibiting in the past seven years.

Recently, her work was featured in two solo shows in Spokane, Washington. Deborah also won first place in a 2010 juried show for the Chase Gallery in Spokane. Deborah writes: “As far as memory goes, it has always been art for me. But my real pivotal moment as an artist was August 26th, 2009 at 11:00. My dad died. The mix of grief, loss, and unanswered questions filled me.

I purposed to work through that in my artwork. It was painful and wonderful. Another mystery to me is how the paintings seem to draw viewers in who are in the grip of grief. I have had many opportunities to cry, share, and finally accept with people-— the images being the catalyst. We are bonded by our shared experience. It has been an unexpected gift and a season of Hope.”

Michelle Tooker grew up in an area known as Poets Corner in Middletown, New York. Now, she shares a house in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and rambunctious cat. By day she works in marketing and by night she writes poetry. She’s been to thirty-four countries and plans to visit at least one hundred. It’s difficult to pick a favorite place, but she has a special affinity for Burma. She actively raises awareness about the human rights atrocities occurring within the country, and, in August, she hosted “Artists Against Censorship,” a literary fundraising event that benefited the U.S. Campaign for Burma. Michelle’s work has appeared in the Asia Literary Review, the Schuylkill Valley Journal, Ampersand, Foundling Review, Poetry Quarterly and other journals.

You can follow her at michelletooker.wordpress.com.

A West Virginia native, Jessie van Eerden holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, The Oxford American, River Teeth, and other publications. Van Eerden was selected as the 2007-2008 Milton Fellow with Image and Seattle Pacific University for work on her forthcoming first novel, Glorybound (WordFarm, 2012). She lives with her husband Mike in Ashland, Oregon, where she teaches at The Oregon Extension of Eastern University and the low-residency MFA program of West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Mary Kathryn Wiley graduated with a degree in English from Mercer University, where she won the Sophie Oxley Clark Williams Outstanding Essay Award for a paper on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—“Suffering and Solitude as the Companions of Art.” After a few brief but formative years in Kinshasa, Zaïre, Mary Kathryn grew up in rural Georgia as the fourth of six children. She currently lives in Macon, Georgia, with her cat Owen. She attends an Episcopal church and works for a local nonprofit serving inner-city youth. She enjoys the films of Federico Fellini, the literary works of modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, and Virginia Woolf, and the TV shows of Joss Whedon. Her poetry and short stories have previously been published in The Dulcimer.

55

LAST NOTE

These days,

grief feels like a daily exercise. Good healthy grieving. Not that any major loss is marking my life right now; it just seems to me that simple changes deserve their grief time.

A kind of witnessing. The summer ending, an office cleaned out for the next person, a book with no more pages left in it to read.

Writing is, in part, grieving—didn’t Joan Didion speak about writers being born with a presentiment of loss (in “On Keeping a Notebook”)? And so we write it down, not to grasp it out of fear, but to know it fully in the present before we let it go. I often wonder if the bigger losses will feel more manageable if I give the small losses their due—no, not more manageable, but maybe more shot through with the kind of light you notice when you’re more awake.

I hope that is the case.

RUMINATE CONTRIBUTORS ON GRIEF however, they were no longer avoiding the crushed snails; they were devouring them. Antennae squirmed over the carcasses, until all that was left were the shells and a glistening trail of mucus—a gleaming corridor between ravaged graves.

Adrianne Smith

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

Sorrow is a cat crouching in the undergrowth often undetected Her habits have worn a path uniquely into each life . . .

D.S. Martin

BOOK REVIEW CONTRIBUTOR

Many of our griefs are long and arduous, a continuous slog.

cancer, prompted me to think of this passage: As you can see, I am occupied with Death, so there’s no time left to answer you with a novel. When I first arrived in the world I thought there would be more time; I was mistaken; so are we all.

They are particular to us and yet they are universal. And that is the truth about the world. Grief that feels too big to be born. It seems to me as a writer that the easiest way to capture grief is by writing small, focusing on the particular. We must also tell the other truth about the world, that the end of our grief has already been written. Annie Dillard writes, “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” And that is the flip side of our story: wonder and astonishment as individual and universal as grief. And somehow we must learn to live in between them both. There is a time to give voice to each.

David Feela

Maureen Doyle McQuerry

Jessie van Eerden

NONFICTION CONTRIBUTOR

A writer friend of mine, whose life was suddenly revised by

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

Nothing can measure those long empty stretches, the selfelected isolation, the spasms of rage or sadness that leave me changed. My father’s death caught me on the cusp of adolescence.

After the car accident, he lingered for days, finally leaving behind the sterile smell of hospital corridors. Depression, anxiety, nightmares. These are the tokens of grief and, in my case, PostTraumatic Stress Disorder. The past haunts, while the future remains unclear. It is only in the present that I find hints of life’s meaning, as well as its fragility.

Mary Kathryn Wiley

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

In Paris, the dead alone dwell in the 20th Arrondissement divided between the Pere-Lachaise and Belleville cemeteries. The stone paths, mottled by the dim light filtering between the intertwined branches of ash and oak, climb Mont Louis. One afternoon, while climbing the steps to an upper terrace, something crunched beneath my feet—the path was paved in snails. They crawled in lines, one behind the other, and glided on their muscular feet, weighed down by the dark curl of their shells. I had interrupted several processions, but the snails kept on, inching around the shards of shell and flesh. I stepped off the path and watched. Soon,

56

ISSUE

21 autumn

2011

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

When I had to drive the length of the country—nearly 3000 miles westward, away from family and friends—I learned endurance. Physical endurance, sure, but a strange mental endurance that I’ve never known: one part focus, one part meditation on what was going away. And in that second part I learned a lesson in loss; or, if not loss, then disappearance, which is a friendly sister of loss. On the night we arrived, finally stopping and laying down and knowing that it was all done, I thought: It is already tomorrow on the east coast, just after midnight, and I know the people we left are doing whatever it is they’re doing. I know the people we love who are so far away will wake up tomorrow, as will we, in a new place, missing someone and going on in spite of it.

Matthew Burns

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

When I

first experienced crippling grief—over a sudden death—I finally understood that biblical gesture of tearing one’s hair and garments in sorrow. I wanted out of my clothes, my hair, my skin; any membrane that would dare touch a world where such pain and loss were possible, that would dare let in so much suffering.

Kendra Langdon Juskus

POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

Deborah Sheldon. The Leaving Is the Hard Part. Oil on panel. 28 x 28 inches.

57

Joel Sheesley. Hold on to Your Dream. Oil on canvas. 35 x 81 inches.