Issue 22: Up In The Air

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

the certain but impossible • Sally Rosen Kindred praying on airplanes • James Silas Rogers between luck and chance • Peter Mitchell Lawniczak the moment before disaster • Micah Bloom 2011 Visual Art Prize Judged by Sandra Bowden winner: micah bloom’s “Interventions”

22 ISSUE

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w inter

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FRONT COVER Micah Bloom. i1. Oil on panel. 7 x 9 inches.

THIS PAGE David Bogus. The Fisherman. Earthenware, slip cast, low fire under glazes and glaze, fishing line, hardware. Variable dimensions.

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contents

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

4 5 26 54 56

poetry

nonfiction James Silas Rogers 32 Outside Metaphor

Deja Earley 45 Virgin

Amanda Leigh Rogers Carp in Winter 8 April Snow 9 Sarah Hulyk Maxwell Father Daniel Says 10

fiction Peter Mitchell Lawniczak 11 Raffle

Jason Myers America Mix-Tape, Track 34 21

review

Sally Rosen Kindred Scandinavian Christmas 22 Bryce Emley no Lazarus 23

Paul Delaney 40 Review of Mending a Tattered Faith

by Susan VanZanten

Claudia M. Stanek Smoke and Cloud 24

V I S UA L A RT

Tracy Youngblom Hands 25 FRONT COVER

Karina Borowicz Down Here 31 One Chance

27 28 29 30

Rob Cook 38 Apple Pastoral 39 INSIDE FRONT COVER

James Dickson Lost in Translation 43 Dave Harrity To Mark the Place 44

INSIDE BACK COVER

BACK COVER

Micah Bloom i1 i4 i3 i2 i5 David Bogus The Fisherman The Optimist Luggage Nancy Teague Have a Chair

editor’s note

Welcome

to Ruminate’s Issue 22: Up in the Air! This playful title was inspired by the work in these pages and their varied renderings of the in-between, limbo, and up-in-the-air moments in life. You know, those seconds or seasons spent on the threshold, when you’ve moved toward a door but have yet to pass through.

I like this idiom, "up in the air." I picture things floating around, throwing my hands up—letting go. This sounds nice. But "up in the air" also means a kind of metaphorical pause, which can be uncomfortable or worrisome, even terrifying to those of us who like to have our feet on the ground, like to keep moving, like to have control . . . myself certainly included. And as many of our contributors point out, this pause or uncertainty can happen because of large life changes—pregnancy, an unexpected illness, a lost love, marriage, a new vocation, death—but it can also happen because of small things—the glimpse of a blue heron flying low at dusk, the weather, an airplane trip, or reading an Emily Dickinson poem. In “April Snow” Amanda Leigh Rogers describes the effect of simply watching snow fall, the “wet flakes rush[ing] to earth,” and she says “I lost my feel for gravity / and almost drifted up.”

And, of course, we were inspired by Micah Bloom’s winning art from our first ever Ruminate Visual Art Prize.

Bloom’s work explores the charged moment before tragedy, when a life’s existence is up in the air, and it asks questions about when and how the divine intercedes. We were thrilled to have award-winning artist Sandra Bowden serve as the finalist judge for the Visual Art Prize, and she writes: “First Prize goes to Micah Bloom for the delightful and interesting paintings on interventions. There is something so contemporary and youthful about these works that makes them very intriguing."

Like Bloom’s work, periods of ambiguity are intriguing (even if they're uncomfortable) because they are ripe with possibility. They offer us the chance to grapple with the unknown, to encounter our finiteness. And when this happens, when it’s clear that things are no longer in our control, we come to the end of ourselves. And if we’re lucky, we are hushed—we must wait and see. Deja Earley’s short memoir “Virgin” shares her story of being a twentyfive-year-old Mormon and virgin who struggles with feeling like she has yet to start her real life. Her experience is ultimately one of waiting, of living in the in-between, of holding onto a covenant while she pilgrims an interim season of life.

Waiting, it would seem, also lends itself to new insights, new lessons. James Silas Rogers describes the untethered feeling of flying on an airplane and the realization he experiences: “. . . on this flight headed back from New York I grasp, in a way that I never did before, that . . . the past remains utterly irretrievable.” And in "April Snow" Amanda Leigh Rogers goes on to tell us that after she lost her feel for gravity, she then looked “downward to relearn myself.”

I find myself wondering about this, wondering if we have to first lose our balance, become unsure, in order to receive these chances to relearn.

Let me be clear—I love control, and I hate losing it. But I am drawn to the beauty and relief of being hushed and made to wait, of being taught something anew. That’s the gift that the in-between offers. And, it is my hope that it’s what this issue offers to you, dear readers. Whether the blue heron flying low at dusk presents itself, or you discover it, when it happens, may we all remember the gift that accompanies the terror of being up in the air. And may we sometimes have the courage to let go.

Trying to loosen my grip,

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Ruminate readers on things up in the air Send us your notes for Issue 23 to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. We love hearing from you!

When I arrived, I felt as if I had arrived months before.

Months later, I feel as if I arrived here yesterday. Oklahoma and half a world away. One hundred and eighty days. Deployed. The interstice between normalcy and more normalcy seems to be more normalcy, but a different kind. It isn’t ordinary. It isn’t a rut.

It’s work. It’s reading books when you aren’t working. It’s walking to the chow hall for a coffee. It’s getting a beer with the crew after a flight. Fly again a few days later. I think a lot here. I have much more time to read and think. The Army guys salute and say, “All the way, sir!” My buddies down range are dodging the bullets and rounding up the bad guys, finding the road-side bombs. I miss my family and my gal pal. My sister’s deploying too soon.

John Samuel Tannehill norman,oklahoma

It’s the rhythms of grace that are the hardest for me. The finished work of grace, this I understand. The unfinished work of grace, the kind we have to wait for until heaven, this I understand.

It’s the rhythms. The ebb an__d the flow. The here, so strongly and tangible one day, and gone, so hard and difficult the next. It’s not the grace that changes, it’s the in-betweens. This year has been one of learning grace, letting the fullness of what it implies wash over me. Bathe me in comfort, love, joy, fullness. But I read Matthew 11 about rest and it is full of the active verbs. Get away with me. Take a real rest. Walk with me. Work with me. Learn the rhythms. Keep company with me. This seems like an awful lot of work to do rest. But there’s a strange comfort in that. The comfort is this: rest is intentional too.

Lore Ferguson Fort worth, texas

from you

We’ve been here before. Eleven years ago we were here, waiting for a biopsy report. At first, we thought nothing of the shave biopsy—my husband, the redhead, the fair-skinned Swede. He was always getting something checked, burned, cut away. But then the doctor himself called us at home at 8pm on a Tuesday night. I watched as Dave scribbled down foreign terms: Clark and Breslow, Wide Excision, Sentinel Nodes, Malignant Melanoma, Margin. “We have no margin,” I thought. “We don’t have room for this.” Toddler at home, self-employed, increasing debt, baby on the way . . . we had no margin. So we’re here again in this waiting place, waiting for the biopsy report. And we’ve still no margin to spare. There is never enough room for cancer.

Angela Doll Carlson chicago, ILlinois

That moment before we press “end” but after we’ve said “goodbye” and “I love you.” How his face flickers on the other side of 2,600 miles, smile all tangled up in pixels and the muted yellows and fleshy reds of my webcam. How neither of us wants to be the one to do it. Press end and cut a sharp, static line across the moving lips and eyes creased at the close of another day or week apart. In my first year of college, my anthropology professor gave a lecture on liminal space: the handsbreath of time between is not and is, the quotidian bookended by the significant. I think, This is it. This space where neither of us are here or there, yet.

Allison Glasscock Monmouth, oregon

My heart twists in anticipation of a life filled with freedom to create. And yet, I’m overwhelmed with the current demands of life. “Trust Me. In everything there is a season.” Like a dagger to the gut, the holy word cuts me. “Trust.” I want to. Yet here I am treading water in the priorities of the day. My head sometimes disappears beneath the surface. “Do you see me drowning, Lord?”

The desires to paint and write churn inside me and well up like a fountain ready to burst. They occasionally trickle out; in sweet rushes of inspiration. But then everything else falls to pieces, and I feel selfish. My little one’s eyes wide and blue looking up at me in expectation is only temporary. “One more story please, mama.”

I breathe in deep the smell of her young skin and I choose to rest in this sacred fleeting gift.

As Tom Petty sings, “waiting is the hardest part.” We all know that. We want more, better—and soon. We wonder what it takes. We pray and hope for an answer. We take a tentative step or two, only to retreat. We hate the delay, but we hate the thought of making a mistake even more. I’ve realized, after much hand-wringing and wishful thinking, that waiting is an active process. It’s preparation, if I use it appropriately. I can improve my skills. I can grow in faith. I can rely on what I believe instead of what I can do. Most of the time, I think what I am waiting for is waiting on me—to be courageous, to be relentless, to be ready for what will come after it.

Jason Eichacker San jose, california

Anna Tesch whidbey island, washington

5

2011

first place Micah Bloom, interventions series

second P lace David Bogus, “Optimist Luggage”

honorable m ention Nancy Teague, “Have a Chair”

Visual Art Prize F inalist judge , sandra bowden supported by the friends of ruminate program

F I N A L I STS Matthew Ballou Matt Drissell Dorothy Gager Jodi Hays Erika Huddleston Aynslee Moon Hal Moran Michelle Arnold Paine Julie Quinn John M. Robertson Kate Shannon Kate Stipp Angela Young

sandra bowden Sandra Bowden is a painter and printmaker living in Chatham, Massachusetts. Sandra’s art is a meditation on time, incorporating biblical archaeological references and ancient text. Her work is shown extensively across the country and is included in many collections, including the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, the Museum of Biblical Art, and the Haifa Museum. She has had over one hundred solo shows in the U.S. and internationally. For fourteen years Sandra was president of Christians in the Visual Arts, a national organization dedicated to exploring and nurturing the relationship of the visual arts and the Christian faith.

Amanda Leigh Rogers

Carp in Winter Slowly, beneath the pond’s ice skin, you move, gelid flame.

Aimless and strange, you slip through thick liquid, lurk, invisible in mud-dark water, barely there, though there, fishy heart beating, chilled blood oozing, eyes open, blinkless, blank.

Do you know, golden and low, that turning earth will tilt the pond’s face sunward once again?

Warm will return and you’ll hear the trickling music of the feeder spring, the percussive crack of breaking ice, the tomb unsealed at last.

Have you seen the king-fisher’s blue-gold feathers, dreamt of that brief and cutting pain as talons drag you from your breath and you are lifted, aloft flying, then feasted on, your substance becoming heat and shining wing.

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

Amanda Leigh Rogers

April Snow I wanted apple blossoms but today these wet flakes rush to earth.

Looking up into the sifting I lost my feel for gravity and almost drifted up.

When I looked downward to relearn myself I saw how the whiteness clung to the crocuses. It filled their purple flutes with winter.

If you were here, your heart might hurt— not because spring is baffled for a day, or for the way the icy pieces burn the skin, but that the flowers and the snow bloom toward a silence no one thought to pray for.

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Sarah Hulyk Maxwell

Father Daniel Says Stations of the Cross aren’t Russian.

So, we took them down.

Now there are nails sticking jutting from the walls, doubting fingers filling up the plaster holes and the outline of a black square the women will clean when they come.

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

Raffle peter mitchell lawniczak

Lady Luck is always indulgent of Her worship. The old register’s printer chits and chuggers. A

TV monitor mounted in the corner behind the motel manager shows a whirling swarm of little numbered globes. One chutes out of the tumbler to the pedestal where a second camera is focusing.

Chosen: The white ball says seventy-six upside down. The next ball leaves the swarm with as much theatrics. Two. I didn’t buy a ticket, so I’m only researching. Lottery odds are taxing and we’re not lucky yet.

The motel manager hands over a postage stamp receipt, smiling with mustard spots in the corners of his mouth.

“Thanks,” I say. These managers don’t like people paying for one night at a time. It makes me look like a fugitive, but plans change and for the first time in fourteen years I come to my hometown with more to do than just pass through.

The wall clock is dead, so I check the time stamp on the receipt: 19:51. No wonder I’m starving. The lottery drawing on the TV ends about how I expect.

I could knock, but I use the key and see the kid in bed. He’s still awake. Must be rough living without a dad. It was rough enough living with one. I need a shave.

The room’s dark but I know the path to the bathroom. With the light on, the little blue tiles on the vanity seem artificial. The shower’s glass door is scummed opaque up to the chest. You could still peek a tall girl’s goods. I wonder how much he knows about me. Me and her. The boy’s pretty tight-mouthed. Me, too. Since he showed up, I just stare. Me looking at me. I thought I was younger.

“That’s her,” he says from under the sheets. I didn’t hear the phone ring.

“Your mom? How do you know?”

“Cuz I called and told her I was alright. I didn’t have to charge. It’s local.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“She could’ve used a tracing service. Star sixty-nine,” he suggests.

“Are you gonna answer? Should I?” I ask. What hadn’t occurred to him appeals or at least buys him some time. The phone has given up.

He begins to think. He calls it session, but it looks a lot like thinking out loud. All kids learn things differently. I remember learning three ways to do long division, but only one of them stuck. The first time I saw him do it I asked, “Why’re you talkin’ like that?” He was startled, changed his voice, and then said coyly, “Like what?”

He gives a grave, consigning nod, representing the consensus, and I stay by the phone. Then, he’s alone in session on a red lattice-patterned armchair by the door. He throws the bolt before he sits. I feel the ring coming, but it still tears the room like a thunderclap. This time I pick up first ring.

The breath on the line sounds sick, reminds me to hold the receiver a bit away from my face, because not every cleaning lady remembers to wipe the phone. I begin, “H’lo—” “Shut up. Where’s Goober?! Where’s my son!? I’ll find you, don’t think I won’t, I will. You’re at a motel and you’re not far and I will stop at nothing, hear-me?—nothing!”

11

“He’s fine, listen—” “You shouldn’t have come! You shouldn’t have come near him you sick, sick—. He doesn’t just run away from home! He’s just a boy, don’t you dare . . . ” She’s breaking and I check to see if the phone’s still in one piece.

“Goober’s fine.”

The boy is sitting gently fixed in his trance of nods, whispers, and little gestures of objection and approval all mixed up at the speed of thought. What a nickname. It even stuck with his mother.

There’s worse nicknames, I suppose, and at least it’s better than his given name. “Scott” sounds like shit. Wish I would have stayed for that part.

“Goober” started as a joke, I suppose, with the other kids singling him out because he has to think out loud. It seems like he’s moderating an entire auditorium. His eyes wander and examine and regard things that are lost to me. His voice and face change as though he’s testing the fit and function of each different perspective that occurs to him.

“You can come see him if you want,” I add to settle her down like I’m on her side, but the boy snaps out of it. His head shakes and he pleads silently. The line’s silent. I think she knows he must be hearing this. And, I think she knows what he’s doing now: imperceptibly inching towards the door, he’s ready to leave his coat and his wallet on the bed table to get four more steps head start.

“No,” she breaks in. The starting gun snuffed, he’s drawn back into the chair. “Just shut up and let me talk to him.”

I hold out the receiver at the stretch of its cord. He takes it and just holds it in a dead hand on his lap. He looks exhausted suddenly. I feel like I should hold the receiver to his ear for him, but that’ll look ridiculous. He knows how to use a phone if he wants. What the hell’s he doing? What do fathers say to sons?

From the bathroom I can hear him talking softly, but I can’t tell if it’s into the phone. He crosses behind me in the mirror tending the cord over the bed. More soft talking. I don’t know if he’s hung up yet. The razor catches on my lip. God, that smarts. I snap off a square of TP to cut the loss.

He’s sitting off the side of the bed with his hand on top of the phone pressing it onto the hook.

“Well?”

“She’s not going to call the cops,” he says.

“What did you say when you called before that got her all riled up?”

“Not much. Just that I may not come back ever.” He glances up to study me.

“Did you say why?”

“No, but this time I told her I’ll come back. Which is maybe a lie. I don’t know yet.”

“How much does that depend on me?” I'm feeling my face looking closely for stubble and he gives a look—I see a glimpse of it in the mirror—like I said something obscene. And that swell of pride I found had been inflating since I'd recognized her skin like wet sand coating Scott's awkward adolescence when he was suddenly sitting shotgun in my unlocked car saying, “Hi Dad,” finally burst. I shrink from the mirror so he won’t catch sight of my face. “So, what now?” I pipe into the room between bringing handfuls of water to my face.

“I’m with you.”

I replace my shirt and sit next to him on the bed. We stare dumbly forward like we’re looking out a windshield and I’m the driver. “We’re just beginning my favorite time of the year, Scotty. I call it the Midwest Summer Circuit.”

“We’re booked solid at church picnics, swap meets, craft fairs, annual fund-raisers. You’ll see what it’s like, great traditional events run by the same folks every year. There’s chances sold at fairs, at concerts, or with turkey dinner, and we play every one by ear. Feel out the crowd, meet some people and hear their little stories that always come out. This part of the year is pretty dialed in. Routine, I mean. It’s safe. I mean relatively safe because I could be broke come August if I don’t win a thing, but what are the chances, really?” I shrug for punctuation, and I’m fixed on keeping the road looking like

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

it’s passing solidly under our feet.

“I always play small lotteries in Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, when I get a good sign. They say the lottery is a tax on people that don’t understand the laws of probability. But there are no laws, Goober.

Every drawing ends one of two ways. Win or Lose. Fifty-fifty.”

“But try your luck too often, and it’ll wear out.” The preacher comes out in me, and I think all the hundreds of pastors I meet every year have never told me anything so true.

“I have an attachment to Midwestern summers. I just gotta be here May to Thanksgiving, even when there’s no luck. We’ll be in Janesville, Wisconsin, after Milwaukee, first weekend Labor Day for a fest they have every year with a car raffle. Ten dollars a chance, eleven for a bill. Last year, I drove off in a Hyundai Tucson,” with one stunning Midwest beauty queen, I omit, “sold it for a good chunk then after I won this one,” I poke a thumb at the bolted door to indicate the car parked in the space outside. Seventy-six Camaro Bumblebee. My birth year. The highlight of a hot streak I had in Salinas this February.

“We’ll take a tour of The House on the Rock when we’re in that area of Wisconsin. It’s an eclectic museum in a mansion made up of strange collections and artificial magic. When you get into the tip of the Infinity Room and look down at the biscuit bluffs and swimming endless treetops, you get eagle

There’s chances

sold at fairs,at concerts,

or with turkey dinner, and we

play every one by ear. vision and you’re witness to the verge of everything born and breaking.” Finally, a smile spells his depression for a moment, “and they have the World’s Largest Carousel.”

I know that the carousel and the place are really not impressive, especially to a fourteen-year-old, but there was an aspect of the place as a whole that held an ominous grace drawing out of its patrons an organic desire to bear witness. Revelers and rubberneckers, all. That grace and its power are the living proof he’ll have to see. They hold the secret: the difference between Luck and Chance, and he’ll see if one can gain Her faith and favor, one should never want. Two more eyes trained on the prize may mean I can actually afford to feed the kid and not sleep in my car this summer. “But you can’t ride it, no one rides it.”

He must be starving, so I say, “Get washed. I’ll take you to Red Lobster.”

Waiting for him to finish his meal, I open the top of the hanging file labeled ‘OHIO’ I carry stuffed with all the handbills, posters, articles, and other announcements for raffles. The top one says, ‘St. Dominic’s 31st Annual Pig Roast—Music—Food—Games—Raffle—Prizes (duh)—Silent Auction.’ This week I do a ring

13

around Toledo, then switchback a trail up to Sandusky. Two raffles drawing this weekend, sixteen more we won’t need to be present to win. That’s not quite fair if we’re supposed to be partners, then, the prizes sent back to my permanent address should be split, too. We’re not exactly partners. He’s my blood. Besides, he’s in training. Or, a contemplative.

“When did your mom tell you about me?”

He’s devouring popcorn shrimp in handfuls, “Last week.”

“Last week just?”

“She didn’t want me going to church. She wasn’t going to go even though she’s always there and I still wanted to. She wasn’t going to drive me, so I asked a friend to pick me up on their way, and then she told me all about you while I was waiting for my ride. She pleaded with me. Real tears. I went anyway because I was sick of her. Then, when I saw you I knew it was you she meant. You come every year, but you never even said anything.”

“I said something once.”

“I remember that. But that wasn’t to me. Not to your son. I could have been anyone.”

“Well, your mother. She told you. I wasn’t allowed. Why did you never ask about your father before?”

“I have. She said you travel, live on luck, and that you don’t have insurance or a plan.”

“She said I’m a loser.”

shown had me grace, luck

I knew

so I my and did

part.

“Yeah, but I found out I can’t always trust her judgments.” He cleans out the basket of shrimp, licking the breading off the wax paper. A young couple is coming up the sidewalk to dine, and the boy seeing me watching his girl makes an eclipse. As they come by our window he lets go of the girl’s hand and starts to walk exactly on the line between my eyes and her curves. I don’t care that I can’t see the girl, but what gets me is that she can’t see me seeing her. I want to give her the gaze—ankles to angel eyes—and see her see my appreciation.

Driving back to the motel I want to tell Scott how glad I was he was with me when I—we won today. I want to tell him he’s lucky, but Lady Luck shuns blasphemy. Instead I say, “Do you do drugs, Goober?”

“No.” Good. Probably won’t steal from me. “Well, if you did you might have an idea how I was affected today.”

“You got high?”

“In a way. You go to school?”

“Most of the time.”

“What grade?”

“Ninth.”

Freshman. “And you spend like seven hours a day at school when you’d rather be doing something

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else because you have to. At the end of your day, what do you look forward to more than anything?”

“Playing 360.”

“Games. Great. That’s a great reward for a long day of crap you don’t want to be doing. All day when you think about video games you get a feeling that’s joyful for something that hasn’t happened yet. All day when I thought about spending time with you after work, I got that. It was a stronger feeling than the joy of winning that cash.” I feel I’m flattering myself and add, “You’re a good kid.”

It doesn’t take long for the light feeling to fade into awful silence.

“But tomorrow, I’ll be a burden. I don’t have clothes, or anything to do while you drive, and I’m another mouth to feed. A date is nice once in awhile, but there’s not enough room in a Camaro for two bums.”

I can’t react, but I want to slap him out of pity, it seems an instant cure. “We can stay in motels.”

“But you make better if you don’t, and you wouldn’t unless you found a girl.”

My own history was never so damnable. Caught red-handed, and he’s living proof. I want to tell him I don’t go around like that anymore. “How long were you planning on bumming along with me?”

Watching him think like that makes him look crazy. I almost tell him not to answer.

“I don’t have a plan yet," he says.

“Is saying there’s no plan a cover up for a plan?” He doesn’t flinch.

“Is saying everyone’s crazy a cover up for being crazy?”

“Look at the pot call the kettle black.” I laugh, but it hurt him deep. He’s suffering and he knows how to run. I’m afraid to slow down at the red light, but he doesn’t go for the door.

“Goober. I’m sorry. Just—‘case in point’.” He actually smiles. The boy who thinks he’s a parliamentary democracy graciously allows dissent from aliens like me. I never want to hurt him again.

Then he brings it up: “Why do you believe in Luck?”

I never thought about it as being something I believe in, just something I’m into, but I do believe in it, or else I couldn’t get into it. “I have to believe in Luck else how do I explain the success of other people?”

Goober smiles wantonly, full of satisfaction.

“But it’s bad luck to be superstitious. If you go inventing fear just to fear it, that can only bring bad luck. There’s a method to cultivating goodness. Like meditating monks or The Force in Star Wars, you just become part of whatever draws you. You win if you’ve followed your instinct and lose if you try to tempt fate. When I first started, that would be around the time you were born, I had beginner’s luck everywhere. Then about ten years back when I was way down, couldn’t even afford to leave New Mexico, I got a chance for free that got me right back on the trail. I found a string of raffle tickets blowing around on the fairgrounds, heard a loudspeaker murmuring numbers in the coliseum across a mile of empty blacktop lots and ran straight to it. I knew Luck had shown me grace, and so I did my part. I busted my starving body all the way there just in time to hear the grand prize winner, five thousand dollars cash, and my sweaty hand producing the winning ticket to the clerk. Fool’s luck.

Bought a motorcycle and took it easy in Texas for a while.”

I shut off the car in front of our room’s blue door. He thanks me for dinner and we watch TV snacking on mini bags of pretzels from the vending machine.

Next morning I wake up and his bed’s empty, the tiny bathroom unoccupied, his jacket and wallet gone. “Damn,” but my wallet’s untouched. Then I see a shadow pass the curtains and the door handle wiggles. Goober comes in with coffee and donuts. “Well, look at you. Breakfast is served,” I say even though I don’t drink coffee.

“It’s continental breakfast from the office, they have more if we need it.”

“Great,” and we sit on the bed and finish everything. He drinks coffee black with some tortured distortions of the face for each swallow. What experience.

Mondays I like to take it easy, find a nice drive to wind through or bum around parks or pubs if it’s raining. Usually, I’ll set a stop or two in a certain direction and do all my shopping thereabouts. “We have to stop a few places on the way to Cayahuga, fill in some blanks at a couple raffles and then we’ll

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window up to the falls for dinner.”

“Is there a bridge over the falls?” he asks, and I wonder why he cares.

“What kind?” I say, but I already know there’s no bridges.

“Over the falls. I thought there was a bridge.”

“Well, maybe there should be one.” He smiles dreamily.

I finish the briefing and our day goes off without a hitch. I don’t let the boy call any shots, but I make sure he watches me make my picks.

I snatch a number out of oblivion. “Eight,” then explain: “And before I said eight, I hadn’t even thought of eight. That number couldn’t have come from me, but it must have come from somewhere.”

So we bought eight tickets for a house raffle, twenty-two for a Harley-Davidson at a pancake luncheon and I fill out the entries by hand even though I have my stamp and ink pad in the car. “All business expenses are charitable donations,” I profess. “Tax deductions are nice, but don’t think She doesn’t also notice how generous I can be.”

At dinner he uses the pay phone to check on his mom. It’s taking awhile. I picture her now as I have ever since I left Ohio. My parents were complaining about the phone bills; hers were complaining about not being able to send a fax. They got a second line for her room the same day I lost my phone privileges and began visiting instead. I see her as I did: framed in the driver’s window of her father’s Buick, coasting along with her foot on the brake to keep up with me walking, not trying to console, not pleading, just talking across the empty street. She compared our privileges and called it Luck. I was so furious.

I had nothing to offer but love. And what was that worth? Every Midwestern child is smarter than his parents, we knew.

She doesn’t want to talk to me.

As I settle the check, Goober stands by a window and looks up the falls. I follow his gaze and notice far away a short bridge suspended over the rapids. “I guess there is a bridge,” I say. “I never noticed it before.”

“Bridges should be something that get noticed,” he says in a stern tone, not his own voice, and I can’t tell if he’s judging the bridge builder or me.

On the ride back to the motel some jackass flashes me for not having my lights on, and it’s not even dark. The flash breaks his session.

“Almost home,” he jokes.

“Scotty, I want to apologize for calling you crazy yesterday. It’s not true. You’re a good kid.”

“It’s okay. Only a friend can be that honest,” but friend sounds nothing like father.

I say, “You still haven’t told me what you think.” “‘Bout what?”

“About why you’re running away, and about why it seems like you’re not staying long with me. If you just wanna get out of Dodge, I’m not a Greyhound.”

“I’m not leaving with you.”

I pull the car in, park it. We both get out, shut the car doors, walk into the room, and I shut and bolt the door before I respond, “You’re not?”

“No. Unless.”

“Unless?”

“Listen, I think—” “You think what?”

“I think I don’t want to get you involved anymore.”

“Involved in what? Are you in trouble, Scott?”

“No. It’s—” “Scott. If there’s any problem you can just tell me and—” “I stole the jackpot.”

“What? What jackpot?”

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“Not just the jackpot. All the small pots, too. They were all together. I found out where they keep it.” He’s not lying. He really took it. I can tell even before he draws the lock box from behind my bed skirt where the cleaning lady hopefully forgot to vacuum today. It’s heavy, black, clearly marked 'ST. THOMAS AM in yellow paint pen. I drop it like it’s bitten me when I remember I have unique fingerprints. He rolls it over on the bed, studying it.

“You can’t open it.” Final.

“There’s got to be a way to open it,” he shakes his head and watches the box.

“Open it? We’ve got to return it.”

“No,” and he’s not taking his jacket off, he’s just touching the box. The little silver face of the keyhole scowls, “This isn’t a confession. This is a proposal. There’s more than double the jackpot, more than ten-grand cash in here. I’m not giving it back after all I went through to get it. Someone should have hid it better if they didn’t want it stolen.” A shadow crosses his face, and he urges me, “You’ve been all around and down a long road, Dad; I know you’ve cracked a safe somewhere along the way.”

“No, I’m not a crook. I don’t know what the hell you got me into.”

“I made my own luck. All these helpless churches with their picnics. No one asks questions, no one locks doors. Their whole lives are hypocrite smiles. This is easy money. Maybe we have to skip town to let the heat off, but then we just pick up the trail and—”

Someone

should have hid

it better if they didn’t want it stolen.

“This isn’t a game, damnit!”

“You can’t turn me in. How would that look? You’d be arrested.”

“We have to return it, then.”

“Ten large? No way!”

“It comes and goes, Scotty. Money comes and goes. You’ve got to help me find a way to return this.

You’re so clever to get it, now put it back.” I’m a crazy inventor locked away in my cellar for months, and my latest prodigious creation has just blown up in my face.

“Mister Moral. You’re not my dad. I’m leaving. Go ahead call the cops,” but he doesn’t make a move.

“How could you steal from your own church?”

“There’s no fund-raiser funds in here, just the prizes.”

“And that makes it all better?”

“Don’t judge me. Just help me.”

The smoke and dust clear. The remnants are strewn across the floor and as I stand stunned,

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studying the catastrophe in the auburn blaze of his expectant gaze, I have an epiphany. I was using the wrong set of tools. “OK,” and the concession already feels like a lie, “but we’ve got to play this smart.”

Goober swallows. “I’ve tried to crack this kind of box before and I got to say, the easiest way to do it is with the key.”

“You’re joking.”

“Where’s the key?”

“I don’t know, probably with Peggy Knepprath’s husband, Ted. He’s in charge of the raffle.”

“I don’t know him.” More lies, I met Ted before I even met his mom. Twenty years ago Ted saw me at the CVS next to the bus station, digging in my backpack which held everything I owned, and he must have known it. He invited me to dinner. Peggy was perfectly natural when Ted brought me in. She showed me where I could wash, sat me down at the table with his family and fed me. Every year Ted is surprised to see me alive, as if it were impossible to survive to thirty-five without a wife, a house, two dogs, and an heir.

“I don’t want to break into his house.” says Goober, “He’s got dogs and probably some security systems. Plus, it’s only two blocks from the sheriff’s station.”

“That’s too risky. But the drawing is tomorrow. We can let him bring the key to us.”

“You want to go to the drawing? There’s nothing to win.”

“No, but I bought thirty-one tickets, and it might be suspicious if I’m not even curious to see if any are winners.”

“Yeah, you’re right. So how can we get the key?”

“We can’t know until we’re there to see.”

All night and the next morning Goober sits chattering his teeth, mumbling in disjointed whimpers. I can hardly get to sleep he’s so anxious. When I finally get up he pretends to wake up, and then we head to St. Thomas right away.

We stand out front watching the crafters and bakers hauling in their merchandise and displays.

Scott points out Ted’s car as soon as he sees it, we go inside, and I leave the boy behind in the hall. He sits on a bench to watch the doors and to warn me if Ted exits or if his mom shows up. I stroll by Ted’s

He’s losing faith

in the plan.

car and check the doors. All locked. I peak inside. The key isn’t in sight. I report back to Goober that the key is likely to be on Mr. Knepprath’s person. He’s losing faith in the plan. He’s assigned to watch Ted constantly, and if he ever sees a key, he should not take his eye off it in case an opportunity arises.

I leave on another secret errand, speeding back to the motel to retrieve the box we’d locked in the room’s safe and return to the church. Goober finds me; he hasn’t noticed I’ve left. No sight of the key, yet. He begins to suggest that some force may be needed to manhandle the key from Mr. Knepprath and points to some things that could be used as weapons. I say we don’t act until we know where the key is kept.

I start heading in toward the assembly hall when I see Ted coming. He’s carrying several Rubbermaid bins and I nudge the boy so he jumps up to help him. I get out of sight. Reentering the assembly hall from a different entrance to flank Mr. Knepprath with Scott standing behind him, I pray the boy can’t read lips.

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Ted doesn’t recognize me at first, which only adds to the effect and the scene appears casual, but to Mr. Knepprath—my old acquaintance once a father to teenagers himself—I can quickly reveal my plot and guarantee his participation in just a minute. He’s savvy and even a little amazed. “I might have guessed he was your boy, after that summer with Miranda,” he says, not enjoying this revelation with Scott sitting just behind on the Rubbermaid intently ignoring us.

“Ted, I just don’t want this to get political.”

“Well, It certainly won’t end Andy Griffith, not with the way Miranda can get. OK. Let’s play father, Jerry.”

“Father Jerry? Is that the new pastor?” I joke, but he just waits for me to say I really understand. I say, “No. That’s me.” Confident that the plan can work if I can play the part, I nod and whisper, “OK. Do it.”

Ted lifts the suit coat hanging over his back pocket to adjust his waistband nonchalantly after I wander away. His keys are hanging on a belt loop, and the boy notices.

Goober doesn’t tell me he’s seen. We regroup, and he tells me we need a new plan proposing some nonsense that gets rid of me, but I’m insisting we work together. He maybe sniffs paranoia, or suspects my counter plot. My insistence escalates, and just when I think he’s going to make a scene or act on his own, I concede, “OK. I’ve got it. We’ve maybe only got a few more minutes before he’s going to head for that box and not find it. We need to buy time, find the key, or just play it cool until we can find a welder we can trust to crack that safe.”

“Won’t that burn the money?”

“Some.”

“Listen. Then, we’ve got to get that key. Now.” Double doors swing wide open gushing wind through the front of the hall. His mother, Miranda Keller St. Elmo, suddenly appearing in the doorway, strides majestically across the threshold, straight to our position on the little wooden grandstand. Her narrowed eyes are fixed on me. The boy is struck.

“Goober, are you still running away?”

“Hi Miranda,” I say, and stand up to greet her.

“That’s enough,” her body repels my approach. I see wrinkles now that she’s close up, they cut harsh lines in her smooth dust-flecked skin. Goober is still frozen.

“Goober? Will you answer me!?” She’s beginning to make a scene, and I can’t decide to stay or go.

I don’t have time to decide. Goober snatches my car keys off the grandstand bench, rushes through the minglers in the hall, and rips the set of keys from under Ted’s coat. A few confused onlookers turn when they hear the tear of the belt loop and Ted’s surprised shout, but they don’t know what they’re watching. I’m a few steps behind the boy, Ted behind me and Miranda in wake, howling.

Goober is fast. His legs may be his only mature features, but they sure work and he’s out in the lot and in the car already ignited and moving. I leap over two car hoods to reach the next aisle and roll to a stop in front of my Camaro pulling out. He speeds up, and I can only dodge. He screeches it around the end of the lane and heads for the street.

Stopping solidly at the intersection with a sudden courtesy, I know what he’s seen. He lifts it from the backseat to the passenger seat. Pops up to check our progress. Again. Fumbling the keys. I’m still running at him.

Through the window I see a small set of keys dangling from his hands holding the box. It’s open and it’s empty and he looks up at me and says, though it’s muted by the glass, “It’s . . . empty.”

“I know.” The box is not actually empty. It holds the reserves for the sacristy. Body and blood in Tupperware containers. The Camaro stands at the intersection, rumbling, idling.

“How could you? I thought you were my friend.”

“I had to. I’m your father.”

Ted and Miranda halt beside me. Miranda pulls the passenger door handle, but it’s still locked. Scott is completely shrunk, he looks comically small in the driver’s seat.

His mom moves around to his side and demands he unlock the door. “What are you doing, Scott?

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Are you crazy!? You almost killed someone.”

Ted reclaims the box and his keys from the car and I get into the driver’s seat. “Wait!” I hear as the door slams. I can’t tell if it was Miranda or Scott. They’re both standing on the street corner looking dumbly through my window. Then Miranda looks at Ted because he’s turned to look, too. Ted’s bottom teeth show as he strains to carry the box.

I jump out, “Ted! Put that thing on my trunk. I’ll drive it up.”

Miranda nods and leads Scott along the drive back through the lot, walking beside the Camaro’s passenger door. We process awkwardly four abreast at a walking pace until I pull up to the entry. Ted and lachrymose, red-faced Goober, prodded by his mother, team lift the lock box into the hall. I stand leaning on my car door. Across the roof of the car Miranda Keller St. Elmo is watching me. Her eyes are low, and tired. Her hands hold all of her nut brown hair behind her head. Her two elbows are raised in a pre-ponytail posture. Her best thinking posture. I kill the engine.

“Why’d you tell him that case was full of money?”

“I never told him what was in the case.”

“Did you know?”

“Ha. I thought it was empty, until I lifted it. Then, I don’t know. I knew he stole something.”

“Would you—?”

I just wait.

“Would you ever forgive me? I know you’re not as green-eyed—as I thought. It’s just my dad had money and you were a—stud, and I had such ugly braces—” “I forgave you, Miranda. I wouldn’t show my face here if I hadn’t.”

“He’ll forgive you, too.”

I say, “Who?” and dart my eyes to the ceiling of clouds scrolling overhead. She takes a second, then smiles. “Yeah, it must be rough for him living without a father. It was rough enough living—” “With one. I know. The mother of a bastard will have heard that one by now. Thanks.”

“Oh.” “Look, Jerry.” Father Jerry. I look. “What if we started over? Would that be worth a shot? Would you want to stay awhile? For dinner? Would you forgive me for admitting I want someone, that I think Scott wants you, needs you, too?”

“Miranda. You were my first love. There’s no return.” I get in and leave the car double-parked deep in the lot. Her plea sounds like watery paid programming preaching. Stop, Jerry. Look, Jerry. Listen, Jerry.

An unending advertisement playing across a river with no bridge.

She’s gone inside by the time I walk back. The crowd in the hall of St. Thomas is bustling again.

Perfume pot luck. I sit on the bleachers with my stubs, thumbing the stamped, serial numbers and waiting for the drawing. I win tenth prize. I break even but I don’t feel lucky.

I check out at the motel and start heading north soon as I get back. It’s unseasonably warm, so I sleep out on the hood of the Camaro, under the stars.

Alone under the reeling night sky I feel I’m a fly trapped in a jar swarming around other flies in a furious tantrum, occasionally hitting a solid wall and being turned back into the flock. And when looking through the discriminate lens of the great container I can never breach, I see a woman’s hand, slender and gracious, beckoning.

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

Jason Myers

America Mix-Tape, Track 34 Marionettist, what a rush to be strung along the nimble ship of your hand. In the digital age, everybody’s fingered someone else’s downfall.

How often a breeze breaks my heart, the sun a hideous lamp, filament always going, going, going.

Here’s a haircut, here’s a piece of pecan pie.

Change of scene, change of clothes, but always the salt in your hair, the hibiscus of Hagerstown. And that I see a darkness, and that tilapia lay like gloves on the counter, and we knew the reasons of towns, and we streaked the commons, indifferent to decency once and for all, and mastered the dances of the Dakotas, smiling as goldfish who’ve forgotten the bowl, the bowl, what a wonderful bowl!

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Sally Rosen Kindred

Scandinavian Christmas For Jenny

Then suddenly, for a month, we were all Swedish— even Miss Brown who’d never set foot on a boat, even the pretty Jewish girls who hated me for having an alien name like theirs, rubbing their shiny braids in row four.

Dark mornings we cross-stitched St. Lucia for the classroom tree, drank Cokes called glögg and gave each other names knitted from sounds of swallowed frost: Billy Fields who’d called me skinny pig when we’d been Americans straightened under the crown of Carl Gustaf.

I stopped kicking boys to fill the robes of Sigrid the Proud, bride of salty myth, refusing the Christian prince for one holy week. Outside it was still Greensboro in clouds of concrete mud, our parents’ bodies wrapped in coats, numb and dull with cold— General Greene’s statue cracked leaf-black and wet, the plaster Winn-Dixie Santa lurching his drunk mechanical wave— but inside we were awash in changed heat, the vents blowing fierce Viking breath into our lungs. Drifting north in the slide projector’s hum, we watched dusty saints dance like lint in the shadow of strange and stronger snow. When we sang Thou Ancient, Thou Free in words we did not know, all the deer that lined our Belk sweaters turned their stitched heads toward the Baltic.

All the flakes sang down the fine knit that put our parents into seasonal debt for a world no one had promised which had by knorr and dragon ship arrived. In three years you’d get here: off the plane from Gothenburg, your warm arm next to mine at the same chrome desks. In five you’d teach me laughter glinting like fish, new words cold and fresh in your hands

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and Lucia’s song from your own tongue.

But then, I could not even dream your body.

In my dreams that month Mary stood at the door to the barn, clad in blue and gold calling Sigrid, voice silver as the candles in her hair, arms cradling an oar or a child, a map, a cold way out of here, the certain but impossible hum of a midnight sun.

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Bryce Emley

no Lazarus For Patti Fusco

four days after his melody of short breaths crescendos into flat line after her lungs have become punching bags and she remembers to pray as everyone who has lost has prayed when it is too late for prayer she will roll back the stone herself weeping as Jesus wept over two thousand years ago and find the strips of linen stench of death and still no Lazarus

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

Claudia M. Stanek

Smoke and Cloud “Does smoke talk with the clouds?”

—Pablo Neruda

From fireplaces and foundries, Forests bereft of foliage, Crack houses abandoned but full, Trains aflame off their tracks, Roofs stabbed by lightning, Smoke’s ashy arms stretch Beyond pillows of vapor Then shrug back into the soft Embrace of cloud.

Smoke speaks nothing of this Sacrifice for the sake of ethereal Communion in submission to the force That would douse its origins but Which chooses instead escape.

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artist’s note

Micah B loo m : Interventions The interventions series reflects on moments of injury and near death experience. These moments of near disaster or saving come from my own experience and are framed in a spiritual, historical context to imply the involvement of unseen forces.

I understand these works as a visual inquiry into divine interventions. Influenced by the Gothic painting of pre-Renaissance Italy, interventions showcases the sensational, fleshing out the interaction between the corporeal and spiritual, the natural and the supernatural.

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

Micah Bloom. i4. Oil on panel. 9 x 12 inches.

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Micah Bloom. i3. Oil on panel. 9 x 12 inches.

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

Micah Bloom. i2. Oil on panel. 7 x 9 inches.

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Micah Bloom. i5. Oil on panel. 9 x 12 inches.

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

Tracy Youngblom

Hands She sometimes cups her face in her own hands when she prays, imagining the skin of a God who would gather the fallen petals of her prayers and hold them to his face, or make of them a garment to press in place. She believes her whispered pleas stall in the air like winter breath, hope’s frozen voice.

Where, on earth, does it exist, love without its measure of distance?

She remembers her father’s hands gathering her mother off the floor, their faces spun to gold in the fluorescent light, their laughter high above her, howling with the wind outside and the cries of the hungry barn owls.

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Outside Metaphor james silas rogers

I often find myself praying on airplanes, and think that it might have something to do with

how little there is to see when I look out the window.

In high school, we memorized “High Flight”—"Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth. . . ."—but I can think of nowhere less ecstatic than sitting on a commercial flight. For all the times I have looked down at the tops of clouds, any simile that might describe them is already a cliché: ice cream, cotton fluff, frosting, sea spray. Right now we appear to be flying over cake frosting. Dingy gray cake frosting.

My work as a publisher often finds me coming home from exciting, stimulating places. Today, as I gaze at these drab cloud strata, I am thinking back to the professional conference I have just left, where I gave a well-received paper on how contemporary Irish writers have employed genealogy. Many of the scholars who attend this conference have become my good friends, and I am always sorry to leave them, even as I am looking forward to seeing my family and the routines of home again.

But in between, there is this flight. Several miles above the earth, I know not a living person on the airplane by his or her first name. There is no conversation beyond the superficial. Not a soul who knows my name can point at the sky or a map and say, "That’s where he is, right now." A friend who had major bypass surgery told me that when he was in the hospital recovering, he kept wondering where he had been during the time he was hooked up to the heart-lung machine. In a small way, I wonder that every time I ride an airplane. We are lost to geography, and by extension, lost to the weave and embeddedness of our lives, up here.

The inevitable metaphors for such a state of isolation are common: a prison, a desert, and occasionally, when we look down at cities and countrysides arrayed below us like little kingdoms, a mountaintop. That may be why I can pray on airplanes: because the metaphors by which I think of flight are metaphors that lead to the historic locales of prayer. * Today I am praying for my mother. When I get back to Minnesota, my wife will collect me at the airport, and at home I’ll do all the boring necessities of reentry. I will unpack my suitcase and throw a great knot of dirty socks and shirts into the washing machine. The dog will be exuberant in his welcome; the kids will be uninformative about what happened in my absence. I will sift through the mail and be astonished that I can be gone so long and get nothing but junk. And I will pick up the phone and call my mother. Her conversation will run like this: No news. Not a thing. I’m fine. Mine, while tinged with a little more youth and a few more activities, will hardly differ.

At eighty-five, my mother is in the closing years of her life. A simple actuarial table, or common sense, could tell me as much; yet it’s only lately that I’ve realized she is, at last, very old. She has not been a typical octogenarian; until this winter, she drove and cooked and was steady on her feet.

If—or, occasionally, when—we stopped to think about it, everyone in my family would have known that her exceptional vigor was going to end, that it was like an Indian summer that has hung on far longer than predicted. In the past three months my mother has aged more than she did in the previous decade; a blood vessel burst in one eye, leaving her half blind. She is less steady on her feet,

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and—most frightening—she loses the thread of a conversation, and has occasional passing periods of forgetfulness. She needs to start using a cane, too. My mother stumbled going into her condominium complex on Easter Sunday afternoon, and gashed her scalp—not badly, but enough to require a trip to the emergency room. One of those four-pronged aluminum devices, which plenty of women her age have been using for a long time, would give her stability and we would not have to worry so much about her falling; but my mother is not without her stubbornness. The reason she doesn’t use such a cane is that she doesn’t want to, and that explanation, for her, suffices.

It was when I came to sit with her in the ER this April that I first fully understood that what my mother wants to do and thinks she can do, and what her body and senses will allow her to do, are no longer on parallel tracks; I realized belatedly how tired she is, and how, with each successive loss of this or that capacity to age, her sense of joy erodes like a crumbling riverbank.

Here, three miles in the air, I start to make a list of the moments of my mother’s life. I ask myself, where—and by where, I mean, in what room, in what place—was she most my mother? In memory, I am trying to find irreducible moments of her love as a mother and my love for her as a son. Looking into the dark, dark glass of memory, and holding the memory of those we love, are acts that honor the lavish gift of their createdness. Recollection is, in this way, a sort of prayer.

I think of my mother at Lake L’Homme Dieu, where my family vacationed every summer for twentythree years, think of her sitting on the edge of the white plank dock in her black swimsuit, dangling her feet in the water. Her glasses are off and I am more surprised by the furrow they’ve left on the bridge of her nose than by the sight of her eyes. I swim over and look at her toes, misshapen and callused from long years in shoes that never fit and flattened against one another. She wants me to chase away the minnows, then maybe she’ll wade.

I think of her on the night of January 5, 1974, the day my father died of a heart attack, crawling into the twin bed in which my father had always slept.

I think of my mother ironing, watching daytime TV in the next room on a day when I am home sick from school, in bed. A high-pressure infomercial, which I had seen before, is on: I hear it through the thin door, and as it blares I know my mother will be enthralled by the advertised product. A minute later she bursts into my room, running in place with a child’s excitement: “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!” she cries, “I want a Veg-O-Matic!!!” And she and I both laugh at her silliness.

I think of her only ten years ago, when she was seventy-five, going to the funeral home for the wake of her best friend Bernadine; and I know, as we walk in, that this death has left a hole in her life greater than that of anyone except my father. My mother, always good at funerals, wears her sadness openly this night; tears show in her eyes the moment she walks into the room, and I love her for it.

I think of her serving green scrambled eggs on St. Patrick’s Day, while my father mixed pre-parade Bloody Marys for their friends.

I think of her at a reunion in 1976, in her hometown of Green Isle, Minnesota, population 450, with her cousin Dolly. Two women in their sixties, they hopped on a tractor-pulled hay wagon for a ride around the town. Dolly and my mother strike poses as beauty queens, waving and blowing kisses and laughing like the little girls they had been, growing up in the 1920’s.

When I try to locate her in a place—to find the exact spot that is my mother’s life, the address and the room in which her love was most real, the locales in which I knew I loved her—the scene that fixes in my mind comes from the kitchen in our old house in South Saint Paul. I see my mother pulling a box of Quaker Oats down from the cupboard. I see her walking to the foot of the stairs and calling up, Kids! Come eat! (She never really raised her voice when she wanted to be heard, but rather had the annoying habit of merely making her voice sound as if she were speaking from far away, like a clumsy ventriloquist). I see my mother tossing a dish towel down the clothes chute, recall that she once walked by and absentmindedly tossed a loaf of bread down the chute in the same way. I see her spreading peanut butter, cutting the sandwiches lengthwise instead of diagonally as we insisted.

In 1965 we sold the house, and the new owners did nothing to repair or improve it for the next thirty-

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five years. Finally the housing inspectors condemned the building, but before it was torn down my sister found the bureaucrat who held the key. He kindly let us walk through the empty rooms, a week before the bulldozer came. It’s so small, my mother kept marveling. How did six of us ever eat at a table in here? We were smaller, too, of course; progressively rising pencil marks that recorded our heights could still be seen, near the basement door. But my mother’s amazement was understandable: It was a tiny kitchen. Bathrooms in most suburban homes today are larger than this kitchen.

For all the knowledge that my childhood lay under the grime and dust of this house, it was not an especially haunted trip back. I revere E.B. White’s essay “Once More to the Lake,” in which he talks about having the odd feeling that he is his father and his son is him, and that the roads, the weeds, the jokes the swimmers tell, have all happened before and will keep happening again in a Mobius strip

My friends and I invented explanations for our parents’ imperfections as shepherds lying on their backs and watching the night sky might make up legends about the constellations. of generations. I’ve often felt that when revisiting places that were once charged with intimacy; at a grade-school reunion someone showed me a picture of my fourth grade classroom, and looking into the faces of John Schintz and Gloria Viere and a dozen other children’s faces, I fell into that snapshot like Alice down the rabbit hole.

But as I walked from room to room in the old house, I knew it lay totally in the past and no fillip of recognition could collapse the years between. Except for one moment, when I stood at the back door— the door that I’d enter when I got home from school, or when I put my bicycle away for the night.

Standing there, it was 1960 again, and I was seven years old, and my mother was at the sink. “Hello, Jimmy,” she’d say. “What happened at school today?” That’s all; nothing more forceful or probing than my mother waiting for me when I got home from school, a moment of presence that can be reduced no further. Putting my hand around the doorknob, my whole childhood was compressed into that instant.

Eavan Boland writes in Object Lessons that, “We yield to our present but we choose our past.” I quoted Boland’s line in the conference paper I presented a few days ago; riding home now, sifting through images from childhood under the specter of my mother’s decline, I realize again how autobiography and literary criticism penetrate one another; how, at bottom, the works that resonate are those that resonate in the critic’s own life. And, if we want to go a step further, it seems as if books themselves can hove into our lives in ways that come steeped with both mystery and purpose; among those of us who choose to live in the land of words, who have not had the experience of being drawn to a title about which we know nothing, and finding it to be one of the great reading experiences of our lives? When I was fourteen, I saw Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again in a bookstore and knew that I had to buy it, instead of the Simon & Garfunkel album I had intended to purchase that day. I read the entire book that weekend. “You can’t go back to the cottage in Bermuda,” he wrote, and though Bermuda had never entered my life or the story of George within this book, I still remember that sentence, close to forty years later. Boland’s aphorism may well be the line I’ll remember when I’ve

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forgotten the rest of her book: We choose our pasts.

I spent a lot of my young life trying to choose a suitable past. I had the bad luck, in late adolescence, to have fallen in with a crowd of friends and a small group of young teachers who collected angst, for whom a knowledge of their parents’ shortcomings was an indispensable credential of self-awareness.

They didn’t know they were clueless, of course. They were good kids; many of them were geniuses.

There are worse things to aspire to than a bruised psyche you can wear like a shiner, and however earnest our late adolescent pain may have been, almost none of them ended up unhappy. My friends and I invented explanations for our parents’ imperfections as shepherds lying on their backs and watching the night sky might make up legends about the constellations.

The starting point and the end point of all these stories was our own escape. We were not going to become them. Our greater sensitivity and maturity beyond our years assured us that we were going to be—already were!—open and secure, free from artifice. The past is the freest possible place, the only opportunity we have to live unencumbered by the tyranny of expedience and fact. Like the Q-bomb in Dr. Strangelove, the past cannot be disabled and no power on earth can do anything about it. We can only revise it through our imagination, and when we are young and have the blithe ability to set loose tidal waves of hubris, the imagination can run unchecked.

When I was twenty, I went away to a yearlong vocational program in practical nursing. It was a stupid decision: I had never worked in health care before, and it took me a dozen years to realize I that had never wanted to. My mother didn’t think it was a good idea for me to go to nursing school, but then, my mother was opposed to almost everything, and I discounted her opinion. My father didn’t have much to say about it, so I took off for the vocational school in Faribault, Minnesota, where I also happened to know the parents of my boyhood best friend. They rented a room to me for the absurd sum of five dollars a week. I was aware that this was largesse on their part, and for the whole year I realized that I was a guest and not a renter, and thus did little to personalize my old friend’s room in which I was encamped, besides putting up a couple of Sierra Club posters.

A ragged hole gaped on the outside of my bedroom door, which I later learned was the result of my friend’s brother having punched it in rage. Over that hole, I taped two pictures cut from National Wildlife magazine. One was of a koala bear, clinging to the green sprout of a eucalyptus, its toy-like face the essence of naiveté and vulnerability, the face that makes you want to hug it as a child clutches a stuffed animal. The other picture was of a giant iguana with its head raised haughtily against the Galapagos sky. They covered the hole in the door, and when my friends and landlords asked me why I had chosen those two pictures I joked that they were “family portraits—that’s my mom and dad.”

The funny thing is, my joke was an accurate statement of what I believed, of how I had rewritten my past.

At that point, I thought my mother was the iguana: unapproachable, without deep feelings, skittishly fleeing whenever the outside world intruded. And I thought of my father as the koala bear, the most lovable man in the world; which in a lot of ways, he was. What I overlooked in that account was that my father had also fallen into a habit of absence from my life, and that when—as any child will do—I had thrown up one or another of those baffling roadblocks to his affection that only children can perfect, he had simply given up.

Twenty years later I would find myself weeping as I wrote a memoir of him, tears streaming down my cheeks as my writing led me to admit my own father-hunger at last; there was an image of my father on that door, but I didn’t know it was the crater in the veneer behind the picture.

And my mother?

Maybe she wasn’t as warm a person as I might have liked. Maybe she was a little too quick to disapprove any change from the familiar, and a lot too quick to discourage any risk-taking or competition by her children. As a small-town Irish Catholic girl who’d never been offered educational horizons beyond learning to type and take shorthand, she may have been a little overmatched by her cerebral sons, and it’s clear she really didn’t have the first clue about how to approach college and

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career choices. What I didn’t realize then was that, however inadequate and off-target she may have been about some things, my mother was always doing her best.

Nobody needs to tell me, now, how hard it is to be a good and available parent. It took me a long time to realize that I couldn’t say that about my father; it’s taken me even longer to realize I absolutely can say it of my mother. She did the best she could.

Roethke concludes one of his poems with a little couplet that runs, “dissection is a virtue when / It operates on other men.” As I near fifty, I am coming to realize that he was right. At the very least, “the examined life”—if it really is a virtue—ought to come later. When I recall the presumption of youth, in which a supposed self-awareness became its own raison d’être, I do wish I’d directed the energy I put into self-examination more toward the big world out there: That I’d chased more girls, learned how to dive, played a lot of volleyball. I wish I had embraced times and places as well as I embraced pop psychology, faux philosophy. No one told me, or my precious, psychologically-minded friends—or if they did tell us, we would have been too superior to hear them—that we were too young to sum up anything. At one point in my life, I thought my mother was the iguana, harsh, aloof, lacking emotion. I pray for her now; and I pray, too, that I might be forgiven, for having been so wrong. * We are lost to geography up here, but not to time: a stewardess announces that we’re about twenty minutes from touchdown .

Eavan Boland keeps reappearing in my thoughts. Her great project, as a poet and an essayist, is to write the silence of women back into literature, and she titled an important collection Outside History. She insists that we make a distinction between history and the past, and that history—the stories that get told—is something different from what really happened. I want to make a comparable distinction in my own life. I want to cling to those moments not freighted with category and naming and interpretation. I want to hold my mother outside metaphor.

Can we know we are loved when we are not fully embodied, fully in a place? I’m not sure. What I do know is, that whatever else love is, it’s not an abstraction: love is my mother making sandwiches, my mother lying on a hospital gurney, getting her head stitched up on an Easter Sunday afternoon.

These layers of clouds below me: if, as I’ve been thinking, there is nowhere quite so removed from place and particularity as an airplane, then cloudy days make it doubly so. I am pretty sure that by now we have crossed one or another of the Great Lakes stretched out in a blue mantle over the curve

We are lost to geography up here, but not to time: a stewardess announces that we’re about twenty minutes from touch-down. of the earth, but I never saw it. I’m guessing, based on the time elapsed, that below these clouds lie the rich farmlands of the Midwest, that here and there along the rivers and the railroad lines there are towns, and houses with backyards and kitchens; and that in many of those houses right now, there are children and mothers who love each other so much that description fails. Here, on this

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plane headed west from New York, I pray that joy will continue to be a part of my mother’s life, enough to bring her in the end to what we can call a happy death—though I know that her body is failing, that delight has been leeching away from my mother, the thousand small losses of age wearing her away, pinprick by pinhole by slap in the face.

We live in bodies that inevitably fail; we live with bodies that inevitably fail. I said that air travel suggests the historic locales of prayer, and it does. But it also hints at a kind of hell or purgatory, in the sense that those are places defined in part by the excruciating awareness that they stand apart from another world. This is a flight headed home and, as such, I suppose the governing metaphor of this journey should be that of reentry, of stepping back into the life that waits at home. And of course that’s true. But it’s also true that on this flight headed back from New York I grasp, in a way that I never did before, that although every thread of the past, every scene that I recall, could be traced instant after instant back from this moment, the past remains utterly irretrievable. Someday soon, my mother will no longer be in the world.

The ways in which I remember her, the places that I link with her so vividly in memory will eventually—like all human memories—become a sort of unconsulted archive.

How odd that this is best realized in a moment among strangers, in a muffled no-place, miles above the earth.

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Karina Borowicz

Down Here Blue heron flying low at dusk.

A creature that has never once doubted its feathers. Or the sky, or the blurring tops of trees.

Above crossed power lines, past the abandoned train depot.

It cannot see me.

Its business is not down here, with us, our lamps burning dull yellow, like pollen-filled honey, from behind living room windows.

A secret whirs over us, startling as a second moon.

I keep driving, but feel suddenly blind, as after gazing at a bright and naked light.

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Karina Borowicz

One Chance The child’s skin is transparent at the inner corner of the eyes back of the neck up along the small soft arm the veins are being written in a language we weren’t meant to comprehend she will grow neither beautiful nor plain it is written there will be work at the cotton mill these tiny fingers will spin barrelsful of the resinous mass into miles of fine thread around a towering bobbin the love of a poor cabinet-maker eight children the verses of happiness written into her body along with psalms of loss the black rosary wound around her daughter’s small cold hands creature of milk and black sky the words being written now upon your body have been coiled inside their own silence for so long waiting for your arrival their one chance to be spoken

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Review

Mending a Tattered Faith: Devotions with D ickinson

by Susan VanZanten (Cascade Books, 2011) reviewed by paul delaney

Writing

to family and friends, Emily Dickinson would often copy out by hand one of her poems, sometimes adapted just for that occasion. The poem enclosed with a letter (sometimes accompanied by a flower or a loaf of bread) was offered as a word of solace or delight. The poet who shunned publication as “the Auction / Of the Mind” nevertheless remained active in correspondence, circulating her poems as “a vital part of the commerce of friendship” as one biographer puts it. Over the past century Dickinson has been hailed one of the greatest poetic voices of all time, and her work is now the subject of countless critical studies and scholarly tomes. In Mending a Tattered Faith: Devotions with Dickinson, Susan VanZanten returns the poems to the realm of the personal. VanZanten is a formidable scholar in her three volumes—and many critical articles—on South African literature. But this slender volume seems more like a gift. I could imagine including it with a flower or a loaf of bread for a frayed friend who might be mended as much by words or meditation as by other forms of nourishment.

Out of Dickinson’s astounding output of some 1,800 poems, VanZanten chooses just twenty-nine that she invites her reader to ponder. Some are well-known, frequently anthologized choices and some, at least to me, are wholly new. In a twenty-page introduction to Dickinson’s cultural and religious context, VanZanten invites you to first read the Dickinson poem aloud, then read it silently, sit with the poem and think about it, and perhaps even write about the questions it raises and the way it speaks to you. In effect VanZanten encourages readers to take a lectio divina approach, allowing the poem to bud and blossom not just in the imagination but in the spirit, letting deep speak to deep. VanZanten certainly does not treat Dickinson’s poetry as holy writ, or even seek to minimize Dickinson’s vacillation between belief and doubt. But Dickinson pondered the biggest questions of faith, and VanZanten repeatedly shows how the poems offer occasions for readers to meditate on matters that touch eternity. After giving the full text of the poem, she includes an italicized question for mental or written reflection “if you wish to use it,” and then offers a page or two of her own illuminating commentary or meditation on the poem.

VanZanten’s approach is disarmingly casual, bracingly direct, yet shot through with discerning wisdom. Even her one-sentence prompts are incisive. When I first read “An altered look about the hills—,” I didn’t see that the poem was about spring or understand

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how Dickinson’s capitalized reference to “Nicodemus’ Mystery” pertained to the rest of the poem. VanZanten’s prompt gets right to the heart of the matter: “What is the relationship of the coming of spring and Nicodemus’ question in John 3, ‘How can a person be born again?’”

The poem points to a number of signs of spring and says we would recognize many more.

VanZanten regards the poet as courteously implying “that I know this as well as she does, but if I am honest, I must admit that I need her assistance.” Well, if I am honest, I must acknowledge my gratitude not just for VanZanten’s explanation of obscure references to “Tyrian purple” but for showing how the mystery of natural regeneration points the way toward the mystery of spiritual regeneration.

After reading VanZanten, I’ll never encounter a Dickinson line about an “altered look” without considering how an echo of “altar” resonates in Dickinson’s use of “alter.” VanZanten is so insightful that I’m inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt when occasionally an analogy seems a bit tenuous. According to VanZanten, the “axe shrill singing in the woods” must be a woodpecker because the roads are “untravelled.” That’s what she says—no human can be in a forest that has “untravelled roads.” Of course, that same line of reasoning would mean that Dickinson herself could not be present (except perhaps telepathically) to smell the “Fern odors on untravelled roads—.”

As a literary scholar, VanZanten has examined Dickinson’s handwritten versions of poems on microfilm and microfiche and can vouch that Dickinson wrote an “e” rather than an “a” in a word that might be “spacious” or “specious.” She explains what it means to “con” a subject or to be “unshriven,” words that might have been familiar to a Shakespearean audience but are less so today. And she has a keen ear for biblical allusion. When Dickinson puts single words such as “consider” or “sparrow” in quotation marks, VanZanten unerringly points us to the scriptural passage the poet invokes. She shows how frequently Dickinson goes back to David in the Psalms, or to the Lord’s Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount, and other words of Jesus. But VanZanten also cites Dickinson’s allusions to Paul and Silas in Philippi and other scriptural passages from Genesis to The Revelation of St. John the Divine. More surprising to me is her ability to quote the precise Isaac Watts hymn that Dickinson appropriates in “Where bells no more affright the morn—.” She even has a wealth of biographical details which she deploys concisely and precisely. If Dickinson conceives of heaven as a place where “Not Father’s bells—nor Factories— / Could scare us any more!” VanZanten can tell us when steam whistles at straw-hat factories in Amherst would roust workers—and other sleepers— out of bed each morning.

But VanZanten wears her learning lightly. Her meditations are replete with details that are far more personal than scholarly. We learn that she’s a night owl who likes to get up after ten, that she’s self-conscious about freckles, that as a child in the early 60’s she was fascinated by Queen for a Day on daytime television, that she grew up on an azalea nursery where she had first-hand experience of the destructive power of frost.

But what comes through even more forcefully is VanZanten’s acknowledgment that she identifies with the questions Dickinson asks, even when they spring from anguish, from

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anger, from affliction. She journeys with Dickinson, asking the hard questions where the answers are not assured. She even—and this, to my mind, reveals the most telling humility— writes about poems she confesses she does not understand. After bringing Matthew and Psalms to bear on “I think just how my shape will rise—,” after explaining the theological point that in Jesus’ account of the sparrow “God does not stop the bird from falling on the ground; rather God is with the bird as it falls,” after wistfully telling us she doesn’t just want assurance of God’s knowledge but wants God to intervene to prevent her from falling, VanZanten confesses: “I can’t ultimately figure out this poem and read it in such a way as to make consistent sense.”

When did you last hear a scholar offer such a frank admission of not being able to figure something out? “But,” VanZanten continues, “I do know that some of its painful questions echo questions I have felt. I understand the anguish and the anger.” VanZanten’s brutal honesty about the limits of her insight inspires my confidence in all that she reports that she can see. If she says the “axe shrill singing in the woods” “has to be a bird!” well, maybe it is.

But Mending a Tattered Faith is not ultimately about figuring out poems. The poems just provide an occasion for figuring out our lives, our anguish, our anger, our response to the questions that will endure as long as “This World is not conclusion.” VanZanten’s unvarnished acknowledgment of anguish and anger makes her book a safe place to go beyond platitudes and examine painful places in ourselves. She has the wisdom to acknowledge that such mystery “puzzles scholars.” But when she finds “testimony of faith” in some poems, I believe her.

VanZanten is even willing to dispute with a poem, to take Dickinson to task on occasion.

She finds the voice in “To lose One’s faith” to be “too rigid, too simplistic” and she’s not afraid to say so. The point, over and over again, is not just to figure out poems but to ponder the hard questions.

So who is this book for? Well, it’s for anyone who finds in words a means of approaching the Word. It’s for anyone who cares about Dickinson’s poetry—or who has been intimidated or baffled by Dickinson—and wants to journey with her. It’s a book for anyone wrestling with doubts or enduring tough times. It’s a book for people of faith and a book for people of doubt. Reading this book I thought multiple times about a former student who reluctantly confessed to her community of faith her sense of isolation, her fear of death, her doubts regarding the divine. Mending a Tattered Faith offers a voice I think that former student might be able to hear. So I commend the book not just as one you will want to have for yourself, but as one you might wish to give to someone you know. Send it with a flower or a loaf of bread.

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Rob Cook

Apple Pastoral The falling orchard hired me to count how many cups of sunlight an apple can endure. I bury future mornings in the rooms of the deepest apple and record them with small hard footprints from which new trees can grow.

No apples on the plate while I sleep. I will not corrupt the plate and its bruises that feel the pauses of each apple, the blushing of worms and all the horizons blushing in those early, burrowing kisses.

I scored higher than the sugar gnats on the inventory of an apple’s betrayals. I did not guard the apples with a dictionary’s lethargy. I crept through the window of the weakest apple as it dropped to the ground when the ground was no longer there. I did not allow the apples to acknowledge their nothingness.

There were no apple sightings among the farm clouds.

There were no apples using and then throwing away the trees that lusted after each other.

There was not one apple killed.

“Many men fought inside the apples and did not return,” one farmer said.

I stopped women pushing carriages filled with cries of apple mist. I stopped men gazing from seedlings that believed in apple cotillions on the surface of every stormy apple. We did not forget each other among the orchard closet’s ripening dresses wandering with no sky to shelter them. We did not make it beyond the shivering city of shadows. We did not stop the early autumn soldiers turning to cider as they fell. We did not talk about the stems that climbed sleeping from our crushed apple hooves.

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James Dickson

Lost in Translation I. I never forgot the word for “foreigner”: auslander They can’t be escaped. Even in my Munich hotel room, I found the Bible from Die Gideons.

Perusing pages, the occasional flash of recognition, and suddenly I wound my way through the cold city and toward Gothic steeples across the square.

Gray stone, stained glass, mumbled prayers from some locals. I knelt: Mein Vater, du bist in Himmel, sehr gut ist deine Name and stopped. I had outprayed my vocabulary.

II. From Chartres, France, to Oxford, Mississippi Medieval monks walked paths just like this one, winding around themselves during daily prayer.

It’s been reproduced in paving stones near the university’s quad, its only pilgrims now are squirrels dodging students who hustle to nine o’clock classes. A windblown beer can skitters across.

III. And the spirit moved across the water My buddy, the only atheist in his AA meetings, says he prays to the ocean. Sometimes he’ll drive the three-hour trip to the coast just to watch the waves. I asked if he sees anything other than water crashing on the shore. He said No just as the wind whipped around us. Maple leaves danced like fire. Then, silence.

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deja earley

I’m

twenty-five years old, and a virgin. I’ll remain one until I get married, and if I never marry, I’ll die one. It goes with the Mormon territory. We’re taught from the time we’re small that that’s the way it’s going to be, but we’re also encouraged to think it through. To decide for ourselves. We just know how we’re supposed to decide. I realize that it’s not exactly a popular approach to sexuality.

Sometimes our lessons on chastity are thoughtful and convincing, and sometimes they’re juvenile, absurd.

What follows is an absurd one, one that Mormons tell amongst themselves about how silly it can get: the bishop comes to the front of a classroom of squeaky-clean, well-groomed young people with a grave expression on his face. Picture rows and rows of striped ties and polka-dot skirts that come to the knee. With considerable ceremony, he takes out a small white bag and from the small white bag he removes a brownie. The bishop hands the brownie to someone on the front row and encourages her to pass it around. While he talks about the joys of matrimonial union and why it’s dangerous to be alone in houses with a member of the opposite sex, or watch movies horizontally, or let our significant others enter our bedrooms, the brownie snakes around to the back of the room. Each person handles it so that by the time it gets to the back, it’s sort of mangled. You can see shiny fingerprints in the top of the frosting. The bishop, when he has it back in hand, safe in its tissue wrap, leans in close and asks, weightily, “You see. Who will want it now?” * When a Mormon friend got married recently, she wanted me to be a bridesmaid. As is tradition in Mormon culture, I felt it part of my duty to buy her lingerie.

Victoria’s Secret is an uncomfortable place for me, as it is for most single Mormons. The mechanics and costumes of sex are baffling. Especially when I was younger, I couldn’t pass the big mall windows without blushing. This time, my friend and I strode in with as much confidence as we could muster. We steered clear of anything too lacy or skimpy, anything with too many straps and too little fabric, leopard print, leather, fur, body frosting, etc. We stuck with the soft pastel nighties that hit mid-calf, trimmed in feminine lace. Those we could handle. We pulled a couple off the rack and went back to the dressing room. I stood outside, leaning on a cabinet full of bras while she tried on the nighties and asked me about my life. That spiraled quickly into asking me if I was dating. I was prepared for it. But I still wasn’t sure what to say.

“Well sort of. I can’t tell, actually.”

“What do you mean you can’t tell?”

“Well, you remember Ben. He’s been taking me out lately. I think. I mean, he asks me. It’s clear it’s just me who’s invited. He opens doors and pays for dinner and we have long, meaningful conversations where he tells me stuff he doesn’t tell anyone.”

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“That sounds like a date to me.”

“Like last weekend, we drove up to Cascade Springs, that place in Heber? We walked around while the sun set.

And then he pulled out flashlights and poetry anthologies and we read poetry in the dark, trading off between my favorites and his, stopping every once in awhile to look at the stars. He showed me the edge of the Milky Way. I’d never seen that before. And then, nothing. He dropped me off.”

I could see my friend’s feet stepping out of a soft pink nightgown.

She sighed, “Oh, Deja. You sure know how to pick men.” * I guess she was right. That Ben relationship is sort of the way things go for me. I’m not married in part because I gravitate towards men that are only up for ambiguous situations. It wasn’t that Ben didn’t like me; it was that he didn’t like me enough to make a move, which, for Mormons, would mean a kiss good night, holding my hand, a gesture towards a relationship.

A year and a half after the conversation at Victoria Secret, I’m in an emotionally intimate, pseudo-romantic relationship with Oscar, a man who’s not a member of the Mormon church, which is why it’s pseudo this time.

We want different things. I’d like to scrub my babies in the kitchen sink and raise them to be good upstanding

Mormons; he’d like a writing career in New York City and maybe at some point he’d like to cohabitate with a nice lady and have a few kids—his words. We’re PhD students in Southern Mississippi, nothing interesting for miles around but each other, and we’re in love, but complicatedly so.

One night he tells me, “Look, Deja. I know what I’m sacrificing. I know you. I know if I were with you, I’d always have clean clothes, and you’d always pack my lunch. Before I could even think something could be done around the house, you’d have done it. Because you’d want to.”

“Are you complimenting me? Or is this some comment on how I’m too traditional for you, too housewifey?”

My feet are tucked up under me on Oscar’s red couch, and I’m trying really hard (for the hundredth time) to wrap my brain around why he doesn’t want me. I mean, why he loves me, but why he doesn’t fight to keep me.

Why in May he’s going to New York and I’m expected to find some sort of situation elsewhere. And he’s so damn calm about it all.

“It’s a compliment. What I’m saying is, if I decided to be with you, I know you’d take care of me my whole life, and that my life would probably be substantially longer, too. You’re going to take care of your kids and husband, and have a career at the same time because that’s the kind of person you are. And if I decided to be the husband, my life would be full of children and good meals and interesting conversation and all of that. But see, I can’t have it. Because to get it, I’d either have to lie and pretend to be Mormon and therefore ruin my life, or I’d have to ruin yours. And I couldn’t do either one of those things just so I could get my lunch packed, you see?”

I can’t look at him. I’m staring at the treadmill, the blinds, the cat, anything but him. And the worst is that

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I know he’s staring right at me, and he knows I’m not looking at him. Some part of me is ashamed that I can’t understand it. Or maybe it’s not that I don’t understand it, but I don’t accept it. I know he’s not going to beg me to run away to New York with him; I know that if he did, I couldn’t do it. And still I find myself fantasizing about being there with him, telling him about my day, going to museums on Saturdays, even having his stupid dinner on the table when he gets home. It’s pathetic.

Part of the problem is that we’ve got different theories of love. He’s told me on several occasions that for him, love means letting someone go. This makes no sense. For me, love means making a decision to be with someone and adjusting your life to make it work, even if that means clamping down on the jugular. But he’s probably right. My way has already led me through a world of hurt, and I assume I’ll have a world more before I’m done.

Although, I don’t think he’s been spared any pain, either. Maybe there’s no right way to see it. Sometimes people can be together and sometimes they can’t. And whatever way you can manage to wrap your brain around that, good for you.

I’m thinking all this while he’s in the bathroom. There’s a DVD that he’s already put in, and I can tell he wants to watch it, wants to stop talking about this because we’ve already been through it all.

“I could have gotten you to sleep with me?” He asks as he crosses the room to his place on the couch.

I laugh, embarrassed. I had told him that earlier in the conversation and he was still ruminating. “I think so.

There was a while there where I was pretty weak-willed. I didn’t know what I wanted. And sometimes I felt ready to chuck it all, take off my shirt, and climb on your lap. If, during those times, you would have applied some pressure, I think I would have caved.”

“Wow. I’m such a prince.”

“I know.” I turn and look at him. “It’s remarkable, really.”

“Thank you. It is remarkable,” he says.

“But see, it’s weird. Because I also hate you for it. I hate that you never tried. I sometimes wonder if I were prettier, if you would have.”

He thinks about it. He thinks about it for a while. Then he says, “No. No, come on, it isn’t like that. I mean, I’ve wondered before if it could happen and if maybe it would change the way you see the world. And you’d have experiences and maybe someday you’d go back to being Mormon and maybe you wouldn’t, but you’d be glad about what happened. But on the chance that it wouldn’t change the way you see the world, I knew it would ruin you. And I couldn’t ruin you.”

We watch the movie. It’s The Razor’s Edge, and I’ve never seen it before, but as we watch I realize Oscar’s been quoting lines from it for as long as I’ve known him. He hates the swelling violins and smatterings of poor acting, but between all that, there are some excellent moments. There’s one part when Isabelle, a female lead, comes to find Larry and he’s swimming, and there are five martini glasses on the side of the pool, and she stands above him with her hands on her hips, tells him they need to talk, and he says, “Okay, seal talk.” And he teeters on the edge of the pool in his swimsuit that looks like Charlie Brown’s T-shirt, arfing like a seal. And poor Isabelle is impatient, but we both laugh hard at that part. Oscar says, “I always want to say that to you when I can tell we’re on the verge of a big talk.” Okay, seal talk. We have a lot of big talks.

While we’re watching, it seems like Oscar likes this movie because he is this movie. He is Larry. He talks like him and thinks like him and says profound and perfectly funny things to defuse situations at exactly the right moment. He wants people to be happy and he tries to be a good person and protect people and help them in nonjudgmental ways. Okay, maybe he’s not that great. Larry’s not even that great. But Larry reminds me of Oscar.

And there’s that part later, when he’s with Sophie, the seal-talk woman’s friend/rival. They buy a canoe at a shop and Larry comes home from his fish packing job to their white apartment, and Sophie has painted the canoe this bright, shining, cherry red. It glows. It’s so beautiful. Right before Larry climbs into it, Oscar says to me, quietly, “I always want to say this to you, too.” He’s not really trying to be tender by saying it so quietly. He’s worried about interrupting the movie. But it is tender.

On screen, Larry climbs in the canoe, hands Sophie a baguette, picks up the paddle and says, perfectly cool, with perfect affection, “Squaw—fix dinner. Nice job on canoe.” I don’t mean to, but I’m crying. I want to be Squaw.

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* The thing that bothers me is that I’m infantilized from both sides. I’m an anomaly in the culture at large. It feels like the only people that don’t have sex are the ones who can’t get any sex. We few that are waiting for marriage are getting fewer and looking more foolish. And the thing is, I can’t help but begin to agree. I mean, it would have been one thing had I married my boyfriend freshman year. But it’s getting a little silly for me to be my age and to actually have no clue what sex is all about, to still be getting squeamish when we talk about it in my lit classes or in classes I’m teaching.

For the most part I get what stuff means. But sometimes one of my university students will be making a comment and I’ll think, “My goodness. This kid has had sex. And I haven’t. In fact, most of these students probably have. There’s this whole body of experience that I don’t know about. My understanding is pure theory. No one has ever even laid a hand on my breasts.” And yet, my authority in the classroom, to some extent, depends upon my pretending. If I admitted virginity, I’m convinced I’d look instantly younger, that they’d lose some respect for me.

And it’s no better within the Mormon Church. Mormons put the family unit at the center of the church. You go to church as a family, you sit with your family; while you’re there they talk about improving your family. It’s not that I disagree with the approach. The problem is, I do agree. But I’ve outgrown my family, or maybe they’ve outgrown me. And my new one hasn’t shown up yet. When sermons are given, it’s assumed everyone is in a family unit. When they try to talk to those without traditional families, it comes off condescending, like a great big pat on the head. So I go to church by myself, and when they talk about families, I cringe inside. Or sometimes I get angry. Or hurt. I want to leave and never come back. * Last Christmas, my younger brother got married. I wasn’t happy about this. He was my last unmarried sibling. I prayed a lot that week, begging God to help me feel okay about it. And then, a few days before the wedding, I realized I had it all wrong. I needed to pray that I’d be helpful to my mother, who was stressed to pieces. And I needed to pray to be happy about my brother, because it really had nothing to do with me, his getting married.

The only thing I wanted was not to pout or weep at the wedding reception. And I managed it. As soon as I started praying about other people, I became a paradigm of helpfulness and cheer. I spent hours arranging spray painted tree branches in silver buckets full of rock salt, tying tulle and little blue flowers around chairs, and cooking Spanish rice for the rehearsal dinner.

The night before the wedding, my mom came in my room to see if I wanted to listen while my dad gave my brother a blessing. For Mormons, any man who has his spiritual ducks in a row can bless someone, somewhat like a Catholic priest would. I get blessings from my dad when I’m sick, when I’m worried about something, at the beginning of every school year. And my brother had asked for one the night before he married. I knew I should tell my mom no, that I didn’t want to listen. But I felt like I could handle it, that I was obliged to handle it for my brother’s sake, so I followed her back to my parent’s bedroom.

My dad stood behind my brother with his hands on his head. My brother sat up very straight in a chair from the kitchen table. And I burst into tears. I was doing fine until my dad said something like, “God wants you to understand that this is the beginning of your real life, the beginning of your grown up life. Everything prior to this has been preparation.” And what was I supposed to do with that? It felt like that meant I was a child, that I would be a child indefinitely, that my life wasn’t actually real.

But it seems so clear to me now that for my brother, that was true. Frankly, his life wasn’t all that “real” until he met his wife and got married. He was sort of awkward and directionless, and once married he took on this clear, responsible, happy approach to his life. God wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to my brother through my dad, and I was only eavesdropping. Shame on me for taking it personally, for crying myself to sleep, for not being able to wish my brother well the next morning when he left for the temple, no matter how I tried to force myself.

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* So why in the world am I still a virgin? How come I hold onto my virginity when there’s a man who would have me? It’s a good question, but I don’t know that the answer will satisfy. I mean, this is how I grew up, with God and sexuality and family and sin and goodness all tied up together. I don’t think I’m even capable of pulling those things apart into individual strands, at least not for myself. And so, whether I like it or not, my sexuality has to do with my relationship with God, and I like having a relationship with Him. He’s always taken good care

of me: comforted me, explained things when they didn’t make sense, shifted my perspective and told me to stop whining and generally sent people and experiences that I needed when I needed them. I believe that. I know He’s aware of my existence. And at least for Mormons, He’s quite clear on sex. Aside from all of the frustrations, there’s no sidestepping the actual admonition to only sleep with one’s spouse.

Once I was at church when I had probably been thinking too much about it possibly being okay to sleep with Oscar. I had been hoping for a way to weasel out of it, imagining that God, in perfect sympathy and knowledge of my unique situation, would lean down and whisper that it was all right, just for me, at least for a while. But there’s this part at church where I’m supposed to think about what I’ve promised to do and what I’ve promised not to do. And while I was thinking, it was like God was nodding, saying, “See, no getting around it. Sorry, but there’s just no getting around it.”

When I lived in Utah, this all seemed normal enough. I got my BA and MA from Brigham Young University—a school that’s 98% Mormon, and the student body is something like 37,000. The marriage rate there is around 50%, and seems even higher than that. But it didn’t happen for me. I came close a few times. And I stubbornly held on to those relationships because I wanted the husband and the babies, but in the end, it didn’t work.

Almost against my will, I graduated. I remember driving home from my thesis defense, crying, telling God I never meant to get the degree; I wanted a baby, not letters after my name. By that time, I was slated to leave Utah, land of Mormons, and come to Mississippi, land of very few Mormons, and meet Oscar, and have everything get more complicated and seem to make less sense than it had back home. * Coming to Mississippi has opened my eyes to the way the rest of the world sees religion. I’m learning how much it’s damaged people, or, on the other hand, how absolutely ridiculous and naïve it can seem. But I don’t know where else in the world I could access the feeling I get in the temple: a connection to everyone and everything in the universe, that God is quite close, and my whole life is quite clear, and the world seems like a lovely, or at

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least a manageable place.

It’s that feeling that keeps me from taking off my shirt. I can’t betray it. Because I promised I wouldn’t. Once, months ago, when my faith was low and I wanted so badly to be with Oscar, I considered leaving the church more seriously than I had ever done. That morning Oscar came over for breakfast, and afterwards I hopped in the shower while he waited in the kitchen.

I was standing in front of the mirror, doing my hair, when he shouted to me, “Deja, does it seem weird to you that we haven’t seen each other naked?”

I took off my towel to get dressed and paused to look at my nude body in the mirror. “No. Not for me. Why?” “Well, I mean, because we spend so much time together and we know so much about each other. Usually when I’m this close to someone, we know what the other person looks like naked, that’s all. It seems very strange to me that we don’t.”

“But you have to understand. The only naked bodies I’ve seen and the only people who have seen my naked body—well, every time has been by accident.”

This had never occurred to me before, but it was true. No one had seen me. Except for once when my sister barged in the bathroom after I took a shower and before I had my clothes on; or when my friend Emily and I had

skinny-dipped without checking the depth of the water first; or once, when I wandered back to my Grandmother’s master bathroom because my brother was in the front one, and I saw her spotty, nude backside. And I’ve never seen a real live penis, except for when I’ve changed diapers. I haven’t even seen one in a picture, unless art counts.

When I came back in the kitchen, there was all this sexual tension in the room. We both knew it. There was often tension like that between Oscar and me. But because our physical relationship was so limited, the policy was to stay away from it as much as possible. We stood on opposite sides of the table, smiling sort of awkwardly, looking at each other.

He left quickly. I stood in the doorway. He turned around halfway down the walk and told me I looked good standing there. “Come back, then,” I said, too quietly for him to hear. And when he asked what I said, I said nothing. And he left. I closed my door and stood behind it, feeling infantile.

Right after that encounter, I went to a literature class in which a classmate gave a presentation on her seminar paper. It was about a Victorian novel written to caution young girls about promiscuity. I sat in that class, with everyone chuckling at the inadvertent innuendos and the way the main character was such an immature child until she runs away with her lover, and then, of course, she’s a fallen, worthless human, good for nothing more than martyrdom, which she receives at the end of the book. And it seemed like it was her religion’s fault.

Everyone in the room agreed that if she hadn’t been forced into the idea of chastity to begin with, she could have saved so much heartache. It seemed true to me, too, sitting there. Which didn’t help me out. I was miser-

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able for the rest of the day, trying to make sense of it all.

There was no one for me to talk it out with. I didn’t have any close Mormon friends in Mississippi and my mother can’t even handle talking to me about holding someone’s hand, let alone being seriously tempted to bed. I mean, I couldn’t remember why it mattered, anymore. I was trying to remind myself of meaningful church talks and statistics that say that cohabitation correlates with a higher incidence of divorce. I was trying to tell myself stories of people I knew who had decided to have sex before they got married and how miserable they were. But were they miserable? Or were they fine, happy even? I couldn’t remember.

And then, early the next morning, emotionally exhausted, I thought of a scene in a book I had just read for the same literature class. The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings. A boy, Jodie, has raised a deer from a fawn; it’s his best (and only) friend in his rural, isolated life, until Flag gets old enough to start eating the family’s crops. At which point his father insists the boy take the deer out into the woods and shoot it. Jodie agrees he’ll do it. But once he’s out in the woods, the deer nibbling leaves and prancing about, Jodie loses his nerve and treks to the nearest neighbor, ten miles away, hoping they can help him find a way to keep the deer. For the preceding 400 pages, these neighbors have been set up as an uncivilized, violent, but ultimately kind bunch. Jodie bursts in and asks them (I’m paraphrasing here.): “What would you do if you had a pet that you really loved, but your dad told you to take it out and shoot it because it was eating your crops?”

The mother answers: “Well, I reckon if I agreed to shoot it, I’d shoot it.”

Jodie pleads, “But no. I mean, you really, really love this animal. He’s your best friend in the whole world.

What would you do?”

The father answers: “Can’t starve. If I had to shoot, I’d shoot.”

Thinking about that scene, I realized: the only thing that mattered—the thing that mattered more than what had happened to my friends who slept around, and more than the statistics, and more than the meaningful lessons, and even more than the fact that I really really loved Oscar—is that I promised I wouldn’t have sex before I got married. And I can’t break that promise. Can’t wriggle out of it. I mean, I could. People do. And eventually it’s okay and their relationship with God gets back to normal. But I don’t want to do that. I can’t do that.

I know that my situation seems different from Jodie’s because no one’s going to starve if I decide to have sex before I get married. In a way, I’m starving precisely by keeping my promise. But it’s nothing compared to the way I’d starve without that relationship, the way I’d feel if I broke my promise. Promise is the wrong word. It’s deeper than that. We call it a covenant, a two-way promise, which for me makes it a natural mandate, like the need to eat.

Which is not to say I don’t wish I had never promised. Sometimes, I’ll be getting into my car to go home to my house for the night, and Oscar and I have just watched a movie or had a long conversation or something else pleasant, and I’ll wish that I never told God that I wouldn’t. I want to go back in time to when I said I wouldn’t, and change my answer, or maybe just get a break from it, some sort of exception for a few months. But there aren’t any breaks. This is my life. I have to shoot, so I shoot. * Last summer, a stray cat adopted me, then turned out to be pregnant—the sides of her skinny frame swelling out into a hard globe. I fed her until she had her babies, wondering if I would keep them all when they were born. One day she wasn’t anywhere around when I got home, but she was crying, and I found her underneath the neighbor’s porch. It had been raining all day, so she and her kittens were in a damp heap.

I couldn’t leave them. I found an apple box and Oscar lifted them into it, one at a time, while I held a green umbrella over the operation, and the mama cat tried to reclaim them by the scruff of their necks and put them back in her nest. Once they were settled, I was moved by the sight of this little family in my space.

It was hard for me to sleep with her clan in the corner of my bedroom. Whenever she bathed them or inadvertently sat on their small heads, they squealed like piglets. But it was more than the noise. Once, I propped myself up on an elbow to watch, and all four babies were attached to her side in a row. She stretched her paws

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out above the subtle nodding of their heads, spread out her claws, and purred like a go-cart.

This bothered me. Not having suckled anything, I couldn’t tell if those claws meant that she was dying, suffering. Or reveling in it. Either way, I had this odd impulse to tear all of their sucking mouths away from her nipples, to scatter the family. I couldn’t figure out why I was having violent thoughts about kittens until I got up to get some warm milk and Tylenol PM. Walking back my bed, she followed me with her green eyes and I realized I was jealous of the damn cat. Even with the Tylenol, I lay awake in bed, feeling ripe. * Eventually I kept the mother cat and one of her babies, and although I’m loath to admit it, those cats have become a sort of family for me. I discuss important subjects with them, ask them how they’re doing, all the typical cat lady stuff. And last Christmas, I paid for them to come home with me to Utah. I worried about bringing them, but they did a shockingly fine job of staving off the isolated feeling I usually get when I’m at home. While all of my siblings’ children ran around at Christmas, the object of their attention and affection was my cats.

It was almost like I finally had kids, and the cool kids, at that. The ones that everyone else’s kids wanted to sit next to.

On the way back to Mississippi, I was waiting by my gate in the Atlanta airport. I had both cats in a single carry on, so I was trying to wait as long as possible before I brought us all on board. Standing at the gate, holding out my boarding pass, I watched a family behind me say goodbye. A man kissed his wife, then bent down to kiss his two kids—a boy and a girl, who were visibly upset. They clung to him. His wife was stoic, as was he.

I was wondering what situation could possibly merit a departure like that. I figured perhaps he was leaving the family—she was kicking him out or he had decided to leave, and so he and his wife were more angry than emotional, and the kids just knew their dad was leaving and would miss him. I thought this made decent sense until the tableau increased in intensity. When he carefully pulled his kids off his arm, they started screaming, “DADDY!! DADDDY!!!! No, NO, DADDY!” They were hysterical, crying as he got in line behind me. I could tell he saw me watching, and I felt like I had to say something. I’m no good at talking to strangers, and I’m always sort of proud of myself when I think of something to say, so I turned around and said, “Looks like you have a pretty impressive fan club, there.” It was a stupid thing to say. I don’t know why I said it. If anything has ever been none of my business, it was clearly that moment.

He answered, “The army is shipping me off to Iraq. I’ll be gone for a year and a half.” I could see tears in his eyes then. His voice had cracked a little. He was trying hard not to lose it.

My right arm was holding the carry on with cats in it. It was suddenly very heavy. I knew I was supposed to say something, but I didn’t have any idea what I was supposed to say. I turned around and said, as sincerely as I could, “I’m very sorry.” And then it seemed like the smart thing to do was to leave the man alone. We made our way down the jetway, me with my bag of cats, and this man walking behind me, emotional, quiet. I had been thinking of my pets as children the entire month I had been in town. Now that seemed absurd.

We boarded the plane. Several times throughout the flight I leaned down, opened the carryon just enough to pet one cat or the other, tugging their ears between two fingers, telling them, calmly, we were almost there.

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ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

Dave Harrity

To Mark the Place Remember that I said this: maybe the day is just beginning where belief would end.

Looking back, how would you define it now?

A life revealed in clarity of morning prayer: scape of dawn, stars receding to thin cloud, the body bent—request or resignation?

Even if you don’t, the stars understand.

Lights arriving because their bodies are already gone—graves always give way to glory.

As if the dark stones over their violet tombs have rolled back and it’s now enough to make you see what small faith you had before.

Brother, isn’t this your devotion?

Place your hand in your pocket when asked to give.

Give whatever it is you find there.

And if you should pull a dusty seed place it in the earth.

Forget that it came from you.

Never let your left-hand know.

So that years from now, following home those tiny lights some long road back to this place, you might be surprised to see your accidental gift revising the horizon— small green proof that we were here, that we once crossed this road together.

No record of denials set down; no crowing uncertainties about it.

And what you once thought anathema was the kindness of an incantation.

Maybe what I said before was wrong: the day is actually ending where this world will not believe.

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contributors

Karina Borowicz’s forthcoming book, The Bees Are Waiting, was selected by Franz Wright for the 2011 Marick Press Poetry Prize.

Her work has also appeared in AGNI, Poetry Northwest, and The Southern Review.

Micah Bloom lives in Minot, North Dakota, and has shown work nationally and internationally. More of his work can be viewed at www.micahbloom.com. This morning he read Galatians 6, drank Lotus tea, and dodged ice patches on his bicycle commute.

David Bogus was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a BFA from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He is currently assistant professor at Texas A&M International University. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibit at Casper County Community College and group shows include “The Chromatic Edge” at NCECA Seattle and “Materials: Hard & Soft” at the Greater Denton Arts Council in Denton, Texas. He writes: “My ceramic process has recently shifted to a focus on slip cast objects—creating identical multiples of objects often taken from real life found objects to create a trompe l’oeil effect. The contents of my work are derived from memories that continue to reveal themselves by offering revelations about life through seemingly coincidental events.”

Rob Cook is a social dropout trapped in New York City’s East Village. He edits and publishes Skidrow Penthouse and works hard to fight back the dirt and cockroaches secreted by his tenement apartment. His latest book is Last Window in the Punk Hotel and recent work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Fence, Mudfish, Versal, Pear Noir! and Bomb (online).

At Westmont College, Paul Delaney teaches American literature, contemporary drama, Irish literature and Shakespeare. He takes Westmont students to plays throughout southern California and (every other year or so) the British Isles. He is the author of Tom Stoppard: The Moral Vision of the Major Plays (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press). Tom Stoppard in Conversation, which he edited, was the first of several volumes of interviews with playwrights published by the University of Michigan Press, a series to which he has also contributed Brian Friel in Conversation.

When not writing poetry, James Dickson keeps himself busy by teaching English and creative writing at Germantown High School, just outside of Jackson, Mississippi. He lives with his wife, Greer,

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and their son, James. In June, he completed his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. The South is a wonderful place to write—things move a touch slower here (he’ll refrain from making the obvious joke about his students being slow, too), and it gives writers a chance to take note. Some of his poems appear in Stirrings, English Journal, Burnt Bridge, and Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly. However, it should be noted that his list of rejections is much more impressive.

Deja Earley’s poems and essays have previously appeared in journals like Measure, Arts and Letters, Borderlands, and Diagram, and several of her poems were recently included in Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets. She married the man she writes about in “Virgin” after all, and they moved to the Boston area, where they live with three bickering cats. They are slightly less complicatedly in love. She works as a development editor at Bedford/St Martin’s Press.

Bryce Emley graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2011 with a BA in creative writing. He’s an editorial assistant of The Florida Review, Managing Editor of 12:51, and a substitute teacher/ marketing executive by day. More of his work can be found in Pleiades, Slipstream, on EmpriseReview.com, and elsewhere.

Dave Harrity is a traveling teacher who conducts workshops for churches, seminaries, and other religious institutions about using poetry as a devotional practice for spiritual formation and growth.

His poem “To Mark the Place” is a tribute to a close friend who recently retired as the chaplain of Asbury Seminary in Kentucky.

Living in Louisville with his wife and kids, he enjoys working with his hands—gardening, doing home improvement projects, and, when time permits, making artwork from scraps of metal, wood, and other ‘junk’ found in his garage.

Sally Rosen Kindred’s first poetry book is No Eden (Mayapple Press, 2011), and her poems have appeared recently in diode. She is currently obsessively reading the poems of Jack Gilbert, Paula Bohince, and Lisa Russ Spaar. After reading Peter Pan to her sons this spring, she’s writing poems about Wendy Darling.

Peter Mitchell Lawniczak writes: “The hardest thing for me to do is talk about myself. So many other subjects are so much more enriching that I hate to waste words discussing what I consider to be a constant. I live blessed by abundant family and friends. I have

body, mind, and possess an unlimited energy for the process of creating art. I have to finish school. The roots of my intrigue are transparent in anything I write, whatever the subject, one will see that everything is motivated by love and the expression of this is limitless. This is my first publication.”

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell currently resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and is learning all about Cajun cooking and warm winters.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Sarah is studying in the Deep South for her MFA in poetry at Louisiana State University. She and her husband are enjoying married life, despite the occasional spat over who does the dishes. As of now, no babies are on the way, despite Sarah’s mother assuming that all good news will turn out to be baby news. Her work may be found in Muse & Stone and connotationpress.com: An Online Artifact.

Jason Myers grew up in the Cumberland Valley of Maryland. His proximity to Washington, D.C., cultivated an early appreciation for both culture and politics. He once stood in line for four hours in thirty-degree weather to see a special exhibit of Vermeer at the National Gallery. He also endured similar conditions to witness James Brown lying in state at the Apollo. He studied with Mary Oliver at Bennington College, Philip Levine at New York University, and is currently a Master of Divinity student at Emory. He lives in Atlanta, where he walks to worship at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Amanda Leigh Rogers lives in Abington, Pennsylvania, with her husband and three sons and teaches writing and theater at Bryn Athyn College. She loves poetry not only as an art form, but also as a spiritual practice, one that invites writer and reader to move between states of quiet presence and energetic expression. Her creative goal is always to serve the poem and love the reader.

Her work has appeared in various literary and general interest magazines.

James Silas Rogers is a lifelong resident of Minnesota—for fiftynine cold years now—where he is director of the University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies. He edits the multidisciplinary journal New Hibernia Review, an academic quarterly that also publishes essays, memoirs, and new poems. He’s published his creative nonfiction in various periodicals, including South Dakota Review, New Letters, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and is wrapping up a mixed-genre book on cemeteries and sacred space; the working title is Notes

from Places Near the Dead. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, among them Nimrod and Poetry East­, and in the chapbook Sundogs (Parallel Press, 2006).

Claudia M. Stanek grew up in Depew, New York, a town once centered in the manufacture of railroad parts. She received an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, Euphony, Red Wheelbarrow, and The Briar Cliff Review, among others. Her poem “Housewife” was selected by composer Judith Lang Zaimont as the inspiration for a commissioned libretto for the Eastman School of Music’s 2009 Women in Music Festival. She was awarded a 2010 writer’s residency in Bialystok, Poland, which allowed her to explore a new sense of place in the context of how Poland has evolved since her ancestors emigrated to the United States. She lives and writes in East Rochester, New York, where she and her rescued pets enjoy viewing newly planted birches.

Nancy Teague lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband of forty-two years. She has two sons and four grandchildren. Nancy has been shown her work in juried art fairs across the country and recently won ‘Best of Show’ in the October 2010 Bold Brush online competition and ‘Award of Merit’ in the National Oil and Acrylic Painter’s Society “Best of America 2010.” Her paintings hang in private and corporate collections across the United States. Nancy writes: “It is amazing how the power of light on objects can cause the everyday, flawed, or time-worn to reflect new life or significance.

Someone once said, ‘Stand still and look until you really see.’ I hope the viewers will do just that with my work, discovering and enjoying—and then carry this ‘looking’ into their days. Often we are in a hurry or even denial, not realizing the difference light can make in the details of everyday or flawed life.”

Tracy Youngblom has been writing poetry for longer than she has been gardening, but both those things drive and define her. Her first chapbook of poems, Driving to Heaven, was published in 2010

by Parallel Press, and recent poems have appeared in Aethlon, Turtle Quarterly, The Cortland Review, and Emprise Review. Work is forthcoming in New York Quarterly and Weave Magazine.

Besides teaching English at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, she runs, blogs, cooks, and enjoys her husband and three sons (when they come home to visit).

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last note

Ruminate contributors on things up in the air

Learning is in the times between before and after. Once we realize what we have learned, we find ourselves looking for the next oasis just over new dunes that lie in front of us.

Claudia M. Stanek POETRY

Every day since I started paying attention to my life—started intentionally contemplating, writing—I have been offered a small scrap of silence each day. Often it comes when I’m intentionally seeking it, but sometimes it sneaks up on me. I’ll be going about my business in all the usual noisy places—work, home (especially after my kids have gotten out of bed!), driving, wherever—and a noiselessness emerges out of the barrage or monotonous background: a few seconds of complete stillness. These polished quiets are a haven for me—a tiny seclusion from all the flickering busyness. The trick is allowing myself to experience them—I’ve been so focused on my tasks for the day that I’ve worked through the moment or I’ve been so startled by them that I push them away. For me, these flashes of peace are a foil to what’s always happening, a reassurance against what’s constantly moving around or in me—they are a reminder that there is always a retreat just before me and just after me. When I slow down long enough to feel the reality of quiet--that it is everywhere—a wonderful peace comes and I realize that I am not living in noise but between the happenings of silence.

at the airport, and she hadn’t yet told us how it happened, and we hadn’t yet looked at urns in the basement of a funeral home. It was just the two of us, and I knew what to do then, knew how to listen, knew not to open a book or put on my headphones, knew that we hadn’t yet landed, it wasn’t yet real, he wasn’t yet gone.

Deja Earley Nonfiction

In between is where all the action is: muscle is built after, not during, the workout. Compare the joy of a meal with the afterdinner afterglow. Doesn’t conception—the real hard work, after all—happen after sex? Lulls in action aren’t really lulls at all: the volume’s just lower. Eliot says that the shadow falls between the motion and the act, but there’s a lot of light in that tiny space, as well.

James Dickson POETRY

Up in the air, limbo, in between times? What powerful and

Limbo: caught between. Trapped, if momentarily. Raising children was one long experience of limbo for me—will you-won’tyou, please come here-please don’t go there, speak to me-don’t speak to me like that. The joyful sight of emergence and the painful closing up. My children are grown—mostly—and I still find myself caught between agonizing and celebrating their unfolding lives. Will there be a time they have “made it,” when I can enter one place or the other, worry or assurance? I doubt it. After all, I said it myself once, in a poem: Joy is half dream, longing half grief.

necessary places of transition. Of course I’ve learned that truth the hard way—responding with tearful or crying-out questions: Are You sure this is where I am to be? Does it have to take so long?

This is such a lonely place—are You sure this has purpose? I was sure this was the direction You said to go, but now it seems so hard—did I miss Your will, did I hear right? Are You here? But now those kinds of questions are not so quick to surface or rule my heart. I think it’s because I can now identify with the Psalmists who said, “I once was young but now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread.”

He means it when He says—“I am the God of all flesh, is anything too difficult for Me?” (Jer. 32:27), “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways” (Is. 55:8). May I add, they are so much better and wiser! No matter how long those in between times are, He is there and He is working to show us His goodness and faithfulness. Learning to rest and being teachable in transitions means nothing but good. What powerful places they can be.

Tracy Youngblom POETRY

Nancy Teague visual art

We sat next to each other on the plane, sipping plastic cups of

A threshold can look like a wall, because we don’t yet know how to see the new life we are about to enter. Winter is a time of waiting, and the trees must let go of green and wait naked for a long time before the blossoms appear. In a way, we are always in between. Each breath, each step is a little leap into mystery.

Dave Harrity Poetry

water, talking softly. Occasionally he would say, “My dad died,” very quietly, as if I hadn’t heard the news, as if he hadn’t really heard it, and I would say, “I’m so sorry.” But mostly we talked about anything but that, and we hadn’t yet met his mother alone

Amanda Leigh Rogers Poetry 56

ISSUE 22 winter 2011-12

David Bogus. The Optimist Luggage. Ceramic, glass. Variable dimensions.

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Nancy Teague. Have a Chair. Acrylic on canvas. 40 x 30 inches.