Issue 24: Heirlooms

POET RY N ONFICTIO N VIS UAL ART +

picking tomatoes & surnames • Meggie Monahan & David Spiering an agnostic searching for a saint • Lili Wright i’ve been here before, i remember that tree • Katie Taylor Frisch 2012 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize Judged by Leslie Leyland Fields WINNER: JESSICA WILBANKS’ “FATHER OF DISORDER”

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STAFF EXTRAORDINAIRE editor-in-chief BR I ANNA VAN DY K E

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CONTENTS

NOT ES Editor’s From You Artists’ Contributor’s Last

4 5 28 58 60

POET RY Jill Reid Questions to the old farmer

8

David Spiering poem caused by watching a girl hold her face in her hands

9

Meggie Monahan My Brother Gets Us in Trouble & We Are Sent Outside

19

Christina McDaniel Mortar

20

M. Brett Gaffney Promised Land

22

Jennifer Atkinson Meditation on the Nature of Prayer

23

Jonathan M. Devin Honeymoon in Maine

27

Maryanne Hannan Overheard at a Big Box Hardware Store

44

Lauren Shadd Bluegrass

45

Lindsey S. Frantz Gas Line Fire, Estill County

46

Robb Jackson Third Day of a Gale

47

Ashley Caveda Sons of Thunder

56

NONFI CT I ON 10

Jessica Wilbanks Father of Disorder

33

Lili Wright Shopping for Virgins

24

Colleen Clayton Mud Fork Holler

50

Bryan Parys Shape of a Ghost

R EV I EW 48

Kristin George Bagdanov Review of Entering the House of Awe

by Susanna Childress

V I S UAL ART Cover Inside Front Cover Inside Back Cover Back Cover

29 30 31 32

Paul Flippen Exposure Projection In Bloom Close Reading Katie Taylor Frisch Stacked Experience Twenty-seven Years in the Cambium Day Logs Branching 1

EDITOR’S NOTE

My husband Jon and I recently finalized the details of our wills. Don’t worry; nobody is sick, nobody is dying. But we were taking a trip a few months ago, and as we parked at the airport, I had a moment of terrible panic. What if our plane crashed?

What if we both died? I scribbled a note on a coffee-stained napkin saying something like, “If we should die, please tell soand-so that we want them to have our children. . . . ” Jon teased me, but I made him sign the napkin, too. And then we both agreed to get our wills done and that we really needed to talk to so-and-so.

The important things are now on paper, settled. But the process had me thinking about all the things that weren’t listed in the will, all that I’ve inherited or held close, my small treasures on this large earth.

Like my great-grandmother’s upright piano. And books, lots of books. My husband’s painting, a self-portrait from high school. My son’s handprint inked on a piece of cream cardstock. The Come, Lord Jesus prayer that my parents taught me, and how to be brave, and how to love. The acorns I saved from a walk, thinking they might have a poem in them. The photograph of my husband’s late father, holding his little boy in his arms. The little red sweater a dear friend knitted my daughter. My grandmother’s Reliable Cook Book from the Trinity Lutheran Ladies. (I love the “Household Hints” with scrawled tips like “The juice of a raw onion will remove the poison of an insect bite.” And I wonder, did this happen? Did the onion help?)

These are my placeholders, my stack of stones, reminding me of what’s most important. Like the title of visual artist Katie Taylor Frisch’s series, I’ve been here before, I remember that tree, our treasures show us our memories. Heirlooms, like Ms. Frisch’s trees, mark the places we’ve been, the places our people have been. They point us toward where we’re going.

In 2009 the inventor and designer Saul Griffith gave a speech at a large design convention. He implored the designers there to support more of an “heirloom culture,” creating products that last so long that they can be handed down from generation to generation. I love this phrase and the idea of an heirloom culture (and think it has implications well beyond the design world)—where the art we make, the homes we build, the grace we rest in, our friends, our families are all worth treasuring.

This is the opposite of a culture where things are disposable, made shabbily, or created half-heartedly. It means that simply throwing something away is no longer a solution, and that we may need to get on our knees every so often to fix something, to sew a button on, to say we’re sorry.

In the pages that follow, our talented contributors give us their own examples of heirlooms. There’s the farmer’s dirt that “creams like black butter” between fingers, the girl holding her face in her hands, dead ladybugs that point us toward the Promised Land, the fossiled imprint of a leaf. There’s string music and laughter, the places we come from, the sources we always circle back to, and the act of teaching your daughter the word “pray.”

There are hard things, too, that we inherit—dysfunction, poor genes, cancer. Jessica Wilbanks, winner of the VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, speaks about the anger she’s inherited from her father as if it were a plot of land divided up between heirs: “I am not the only one who struggles; my brothers also have a share in the family anger.” But our contributors don’t simply leave us in dysfuntion. Wilbanks says that although the family of her childhood cannot be restored, there may be a chance for a new creation, a new family. In “Shape of a Ghost,” Bryan Parys imagines that a heritage can be “reset, swallowed.” And in Lili Wright’s “Shopping for Virgins,” we are told that “Every man is entitled to turn his underwear into a kite.” All of these authors invite us to make or see something beautiful from our treasures and our tragedies.

So, yes, on our collective lists of heirlooms I’m sure there’ll be fine china and Grandma’s wedding ring, and there will also be dirt like creamed butter, trees marking our place, kites made out of underwear. And we’ll be grateful for the reminders: Treasuring the beauty in this world. Taking care. Mending and fixing things that are worth saving. Loving. Saying we’re sorry. Remembering our true inheritance.

What’s your list of heirlooms? Email me (editor@ruminatemagazine.org). I want to know.

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RUMINATE READERS ON HEIRLOOMS Send us your notes for Issue 25 to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. We love hearing from you!

FROM YOU

Europe’s winter of 1709 remains the worst on record; they say livestock froze standing up and birds fell in mid-flight. Johann Jost Baumann lost his animals and grain, and, on Queen Anne’s mercy, sailed the Rhine to Rotterdam on to London then across the Atlantic to the colonies. He reached New York and the Hudson in the spring of 1710, not before dumping hundreds of typhus-stricken Bavarian bodies to the ocean floor while his wife gave birth below deck.

We split sides in the Revolution, my long-lost Tory cousins still someplace on the Canadian prairie. We tweaked our name and stayed 300 years, hearty but unexceptional Palatine farmers, having nothing, then or now, worth trading to the Dutch. The doublewide trailer in which I grew up no longer exists. I bequeath to my Indiana children only dreams of playing on the mossy floor of the woods, fishing the Mohawk River for smallmouth bass, digging up Iroquois arrowheads, and round memories of hills.

Daniel Bowman Jr. HART FORD CITY, IND IANA I rock back and forth, my hands on smooth, curved arms; a soothing creak sounds of generations past. My grandfather gave me this rocking chair. He told me his own father made it and was sitting in it, smoking his pipe when he, himself was born. After my grandma died, grandpa moved into a retirement home down the street from us. We painted with watercolors, and he showed me old photos of their sailboat, the Mari Mari. He told stories of their adventures in Europe. In this same chair I sat as I waited for my grandfather to take his last breaths. I found a strange comfort in each reliable motion; I still do. My children too, find solace here. I’ve rocked babies to sleep and children with scraped knees. And on days when that pang of loss reappears, I sit and I rock myself and I remember.

Anna Tesch W HIDBEY IS LAND, WAS H INGTO N Somewhere in a box in storage is a pile of old love letters we didn’t know we were writing. Somewhere in a cup in the closet is a single strand of door beads we hung in our dorm before we knew it was ironic. Meanwhile, from mom: A sharp mind and a stubborn heart.

From dad: The value of people, puns. The rest—fetishes of the past: pottery from Shigaraki, a Burger King toy from the day we saw Alanis Morissette (yes, isn’t it . . . ?). My family keeps more things than memories. Strange. It makes all language foreign to me, some other fish’s water. I build up stories, emotions, and memories like Lego houses and ask for others’ approval. Did I do it right? Who can tell me?

I look at my sons and think, if someone doesn’t do something, this will be their legacy, too.

with his birthmother’s arched brows sleeping in a pile of his mama’s favorite books. I messaged Hannah: “Remember that pretzel?” Yes, she replied—forever, of course—in a bag with a dandelion Becca had picked. Pieces of my children tucked away in her house. Her child enfolded in mine.

Tania Runyan LINDENHUR ST, ILLINO IS After the Funeral: In the cardboard box from the nursing home, between the radio alarm clock, and last week’s bingo prize, rests a Bible we never knew. Inscribed inside with birth origins from the emerald isle, it whispers family. I lift it out, rescue it from the Salvation Army, sit cross-legged on the floor beside the last place she slept, open the brittle black cover and smell the pages.

Stacy Barton MAITLAND, F LO R IDA In my family, we plant trees, shrubs, and flowers to hold our memories in their root balls and shoot them out their limbs in puffs of new leaves and flowers each spring. We carry offshoots of older trees, seedlings, clumps of split tubers and bulbs from one property to another, leaving some behind in the space we disturbed. The Japanese maple near the northeast corner of Mom and Dad’s property was planted for my grandpa. There’s an ancient rhododendron bush beside the gravestones of my ancestors in the cemetery off East Washington Street. This pixie rosebush was given to me when my daughter was born. This lilac comes from my mom’s backyard. These hostas were split off of plants from my in-laws’ house, which in turn were split from hostas at her sister’s. Split, divide, and grow. Split, divide, and grow. On and on, carrying species from one landscape to another, planting, watering, and fertilizing in hopes that they will take root in this new soil.

Sarah M. Wells ASHLAND, O HIO I have a few belongings that I would call heirloom: A tattered leather jacket from my father (who died when I was one) and a guitar from my uncle (who died when I was sixteen). I generally try to maintain a healthy relationship with possessions, not clinging too tightly, yet these two items I hold most dear—to me they are magic. When I wear my father’s jacket I remember to be a man like he was. And when I play that guitar, I hope to sing songs my uncle would have sung. In these things, spirits of loved ones still shape the world. It is like the resurrection, how Christ lives on in his Church actively shaping reality.

Brad Fruhauff EVANSTO N, IL L INO IS

Brett Taylor MINNEAPO LIS, MINNESOTA

Four years ago, our family drove to a downstate McDonalds to meet Hannah, the teenager pregnant with our future son. While our two daughters stomped around Playland, we decoded ultrasound pictures and compulsively refilled our Cokes. As we left, Lydia handed Hannah a pretzel she had carefully nibbled into a heart. A week later, Hannah wrote that she’d hung the pretzel on her bulletin board. And the next month, as she fed her two-day-old son before handing him to us, grief pressing behind her eyes, she assured Lydia she still had the heart. Last night, unable to sleep, I peered in on Samuel, whose legs, now without a dimple of babyfat, dangled over his bed. A boy

This .22, the stock broken. Single-shot, bolt-action. The rifle I learned to shoot with. Open sights. This baseball glove, Red Dot Series, I got for my twelfth birthday. Oil worked daily into the leather, belted under my pillow with a softball to form a deep pocket. Years of ground balls and put outs. This copy of Letters to a Young Poet, which I read as if written to me. This collection of comic books, this poor eyesight. This garden spade, this axe handle. This turn of the nose, this cowlick. This right arm, good for throwing out runners. This trigger finger.

Thom Caraway SPO KANE, WASHINGTO N

5

2012

F I R ST P LAC E Jessica Wilbanks Father of Disorder

S ECO N D P LAC E Lili Wright Shopping for Virgins

VanderMey Nonfiction Prize S P O N SO R E D by DR. RANDALL J. VANDERMEY J U D G E D by LESLIE LEYLAND FIELDS

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N S Colleen Clayton Mud Fork Holler

Bryan Parys

LESLIE LEYLAND FIELDS

Shape of a Ghost

F I N A L I STS Emily Brown Seeing What Happens if I Do the Same Thing Over and Over Again

Tristan Mercado Virtually Qualified

Kaethe Schwehn Tailings

Natalie Vestin Purple Light in the House of God

Lori Vos A Cloud of Mothers

Ms. Fields writes: “‘The Father of Disorder’ presents the inevitable and yet mysterious unraveling of a particular family system. The burden of her witness is a haunting and beautiful lament in language I almost want to call “perfect.”

Don’t stop writing, Ms. Wilbanks. We need your clear, unafraid voice.”

Leslie Leyland Fields is a writer, speaker, and professional editor who lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska, in the winter and Harvester Island in the summer, where she works in commercial salmon fishing with her family. She has written/ edited seven nonfiction books of memoir and essays on a variety of subjects, including her most recent book, The Spirit of Food: Feasting and Fasting Toward God. Leslie’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Orion, Image, Christianity Today, Christian Science Monitor, Books and Culture, and many others. Leslie and her husband Duncan have six children, a daughter and five sons.

Jill Reid

Questions to the old farmer When you wear dirt better than anyone else in the parish and it creams like black butter between your damp, daybreak fingers and your whole life is a mason jar you have emptied into the russet mouth of the family legacy, your heel a gentle kiss upon the forehead of the land, when dawn splits open the sky’s jet chest, and the light calls you into the field you have sown like a firstborn and for the first time you cannot answer her need, could you turn away from her tender green eyes from the clean, good work and the red vesseled skylines of dawn?

Will you turn to the old woman and the warm fire, and with the china cup quivering in your thick, knotted fingers sit in the soft chair and call the day good?

In the evening, shall you listen with pleasure to the song, fierce as finale, of the winter winds strumming the hard arms of the hickory trees like strings?

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

David Spiering

poem caused by watching a girl hold her face in her hands I saw you at a backyard party while I snapped the top off a plastic beer bottle you looked like you were jonesing for a new planet to occupy lately I’ve been searching for a new surname that’s as good as money and rhymes with count if I don’t find it soon you’ll see me skipping stars in deep space

9

Father of

disorder JESSICA WILBANKS

My anger, when it comes, grows from my chest outward. It’s as if my heart turns into a witch’s

cauldron, simmering my blood until it rages its way through my veins, blushing my neck, quivering my hands, and pulsing itself into my formerly peaceful thoughts.

This used to happen to me quite often when I was cooking dinner for a man I loved very much.

I’d be washing carrots idly, chopping garlic, and then that heat would get to pumping. I’d clench my lips closed and concentrate on the chopping, until this man—a very good man whose own blood ran lukewarm—would ask me for a spatula or something, and then all holds were off.

I can still see this man’s face, surprised at first, like a toddling child walking blithely through the park, thinking he’s holding his father’s hand before looking up to see a stranger. Of course this man took my anger into himself, thinking maybe his desire for a spatula was wrong, that he was wrong, him instead of me, simply because I was fiercer and more furious. But this man was not a dormouse, so then his own blood finally charged him up with adrenaline and fury, and we would fight over the food we were cooking.

It seemed to me when one prepares a meal in a swirl of rage, some of that rage must disperse into the food, so that when we ate hours later, after our blood was running at a more reasonable temperature, our previous heat dissipated into the meal. This is very likely a misinterpretation of the law of entropy, which states that energy tends to flow from being highly concentrated into places where it has the freedom to move.

Later, when we lay beside each other in bed, our bodies were still hot to the touch. We edged away from one another, cocooning ourselves far into the separate corners of our king-sized bed until it seemed like we were sleeping alone.

I am not the only one who struggles; my brothers also have a share in the family anger. One of them batters the ocean with it in his morning surf sessions. When he visits our parents there’s no ocean available, so he’s always slipping out to meet a friend or pick up groceries. If there isn’t a car around to take him away, he straps on his sneakers and hits the trails, running until his heart is too tired to beat anger into him.

Another of my brothers is too gentle to ever let his anger out. He gave himself over to addiction instead, and only methadone brought him back. On his visits home for Christmas he drinks the vial of pink liquid in the morning and then nods off on the couch for much of the day, eyelids fluttering, holding my mother’s dark-colored cat in his lap. When he wakes up in the late afternoon he bakes chocolate chip cookies and smiles at us, but while he’s sleeping, I sometimes see a certain expression in his face, and I know then that in his sleep his anger goes to meet him.

Meanwhile my father nibbles on something in the kitchen, hums softly, asks me if I want a cup of coffee. I sit on the porch with him for a while as he tells long stories about the dogs and asks me questions about my life. His eyes are clear and steady, his mind is quiet, but the caffeine revs me

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

into impatience. I start thinking about all the things I have to do when I fly back home, and when my father tries to tell me a joke I’ve heard a thousand times before, I thrum my fingers against the side of the porch and interrupt him with the punch line. He turns quiet, and I don’t look up to meet his eyes.

II When my brothers and I were growing up, a whole series of rented farmhouses rocked on the axes of my father’s moods. It didn’t take very much to get him thundering like some Old Testament prophet— maybe my brother had refused to wear socks to church, the dog had gotten into a neighbor’s chicken coop, or we had slammed the door hard enough to wake the baby. Or sometimes his moods had nothing at all to do with us. The heat had just started rattling around in his head, and my father had to do something to get it out.

Whenever we saw his storms forming, my brothers and I sought small spaces, tucking ourselves into the fold of the long closet under the attic stairs, breathing in that mothball smell, and running our fingers along the mottled plaster. Or we’d slip out the front door and make for the weedy strip of gravel under the tall boxwoods that lined the front of the house. If his thundering reached a particular level, we’d run for the empty silo in the barn next door and curl up at the bottom, watching the swallows cut into the blue circle of sky above us.

But sometimes he’d spy an ankle as we ran by him, glimpse a curl of my hair from under the boxwoods, and then he’d rush after us, all the while yelling—we were bad, we would always do the wrong thing if presented with a choice, there was no way to right us, not even the rod would right us, though he would certainly try to right us, and we would sink lower and lower with every shout, as if his voice was a post-hole digger driving us down into the ground.

After a while my father would retire, spent, to occupy himself with something else that needed fixing. He’d get to banging wrenches around under the car, trimming his roses, building a pen for the ducks, and after a while he’d call us over to show us a praying mantis or teach us how to change the oil on my mother’s car. We’d approach gingerly until we were satisfied that his anger was finally sleeping at the bottom of his mind. We were too young to be anything but grateful his rage was gone— we were especially too young to wonder where it went.

During these episodes my mother would look on from the four-paned window in the parlor. She was slower to forget my father’s fits, and so she’d simmer there for a long while as my brothers and I gathered around my father again, tipsy with joy, passing him tools and laughing uproariously when he attempted a joke. My mother was no longer young, and she had stopped trusting my father a long time ago. She had also made it through high school chemistry; she knew that when a hot pan cools, its heat doesn’t just disappear. The law of entropy prevails. That heat had to go somewhere, and even then my mother suspected the air hadn’t just taken it up and blown it away from us.

III The word entropy was coined by Rudolf Clausius, the sixth child of eighteen, born in the German town of Köslin to a Lutheran pastor and his wife. In all known photographs, Clausius is sharp-faced and unsmiling, a wintery beard masking his thin lips; but students and friends frequently referenced his kind and sympathetic nature. As a young man Clausius dabbled in history before moving on to focus on mathematics and physics. His doctoral dissertation was an unsuccessful but ambitious attempt to explain the blue of the sky by day and the red of sunrise and sunset.

Prior to the publication of Clausius’ ninth scientific paper, “On Several Convenient Forms of the Fundamental Equations of the Mechanical Theory of Heat,” there was no such thing as energy. Heat was thought to be a discrete substance called caloric, a weightless, colorless gas that made things hotter when it seeped through them. Caloric was not thought to operate whimsically, though, heating

11

substances according to some inner drive, but was rather governed by a series of laws. One popular scientific book, A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of All Things Familiar, written in 1840 by Rev. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, explained the substance this way: Q. What is heat?

A. The sensation of warmth.

Q. How is this sensation produced?

A. When we touch a substance of higher temperature than ourselves, the warmer substance keeps parting with its heat, till both are of equal temperature.

Q. What is that “stream of heat” called, which flows thus, from one body, to another?

A. CALO’RIC. Caloric, therefore, is the matter of heat, which passes from body to body; but HEAT is the sensation, of warmth, produced by the influx of Calo’ric.

Caloric theory was serviceable for a time. It explained why the ground froze when an icy wind blew by it, as well as the slow melt of snow when warmed by the sun. The notion reigned unchallenged until Nicolas Carnot, a young upstart from France, published a paper pointing out that when one bores holes in cannons immersed in water, the water boils without cooling the cannon. Carnot’s findings baffled the scientific community until Clausius published a paper positing that the reigning notion of heat was incorrect, and should be replaced by a concept he called energy.

The twin axioms of caloric theory, updated by substituting heat with energy, mutated into what is now known as the second law of thermodynamics, unchallenged now since 1865. Energy can be transformed from one state into another, but can never be destroyed, and energy tends to flow where it is crowded to places where it has the freedom to move.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Clausius reached the pinnacle of his career prior to the death of his wife, who passed away during the birth of his sixth child. After her death, Clausius devoted himself almost entirely to fatherhood, collapsing into bed after long days of fathering his brood without a helpmeet. Years later, he published various papers and eventually returned to teaching—holding examinations from his sickbed right up until his death—but some historians are baffled that the promising scientist played only a minor role in the blizzard of scientific advances following his discovery of entropy. One historian called Clausius’ lack of further achievement “strange, even tragic.” His brother’s memoirs are mum as to whether or not Clausius regretted his choice to devote himself to fatherhood, whether the scientist lay awake at night with cannons and equations on the brain, closing his eyes to thoughts of how all of the energy that might have gone into his scientific projects had instead been dispersed into the care and feeding of six lively youngsters.

His brother simply wrote that the great scientist “was the best and most affectionate of fathers, fully entering into the joys of his children.”

IV Time proved my mother was right to worry about us, at least based on the diagnoses my brothers and I fielded as we maneuvered adolescence: Alcohol Abuse (2), Anorexia Nervosa (1), Attention Deficit Disorder (3), Bipolar Disorder (1), Depression (2), and Substance Abuse (2). The sheer quantity of clinical language that has attached itself to my brothers and me is somewhat troubling, but I’d like to think we’re decent people. It’s true none of us have owned homes, produced masterpieces, birthed

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

children, or found love—instead we live paycheck-to-paycheck in second-rate cities, waiting tables, teaching other people’s children, mowing lawns, and installing concrete countertops in other people’s kitchens.

My mother sees our father as the Great Undoer, the progenitor of all our trouble, a volcanic force that turned us from sweet, tow-headed children into sarcastic adults. Tears spring to her eyes when we tell stories about the time that the police hauled my father away after he punched my brother, the time my father broke a wooden spoon on my brother’s thigh, the time my father slept in a tent for two weeks before letting his anger drop and speaking to us again. It troubles her even more that my brothers and I frequently recount these stories while sitting around the kitchen table laughing ourselves into near-seizures, beers in one hand and cigarettes in the other, hooting with glee as we mimic the way my father’s eyes get to darting when he’s about to blow.

From our limited positions, it’s hard to trace these far-away stories to our various disorders, but my mother peers far above our heads and finds gossamer threads there. She traces them through a maze

my mother sees our father as the great undoer, the progenitor of all our trouble, a volcanic force that turned us from sweet, tow-headed children into sarcastic adults. of twenty years, all the way back to my father, who’s still holding those four threads in his hands. In my mother’s eyes, my brothers and I are overgrown marionettes dangling at the end of those lines, all of our reactions linked to the jerks and shakes he gave them long ago. Our plaster heads are pivoted toward our father; our felted ears perked for whatever words might be coming out of his lips.

V Maybe it’s because I don’t want to be a marionette, but I’ve always felt that when I lift my arms, I do so out of my own volition. Each of my parents would disagree, but while my mother believes my father’s anger sent his offspring skidding down the path toward destruction, my father submits to a different theory of predestination. He sees the world not as a blank canvas, but rather a Calvinist chessboard in which the moves are already prescribed by God. Whenever he feels it’s necessary, he trots out all sorts of evidence from the onionskin pages of his well-thumbed Bible—evidence supporting his claim that the various loves and hurts and sins which will move our lives are already written invisibly in the air. My father believes we have little choice in the matter of our own fate, and that conviction seems to be a great relief to him.

At fifteen, I resisted this doctrine. My God was clean-shaven and delighted to let me roam through my life on my own two feet. Unfortunately for all of us, my fifteenth summer fell around the time when my father’s rages pivoted away from material triggers—leaving toys in the grass to catch on the blade of the lawnmower—and toward more ideological triggers—whether or not a young person may tell another young person to shut up, or, even more dangerously, whether or not one has free will.

My brothers and I usually avoided being corralled into vehicles with our father, but that summer, close proximity was unavoidable. I had a job baby-sitting for a pair of rambunctious boys in the same

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Virginia town where my father commuted daily, and so every weekday morning I joined my father in the cab of his ancient pick-up truck. The ride would start out well enough—the truck hiccupped down the long dirtpacked driveway while my father sipped his tea, commenting quietly on the weather—but around the time we hit the shiny asphalt of Route 4, he’d toss his teabag on the floor of the cab and begin to survey everyone in our family, charting his approval or disapproval of their choices. Somewhere around the long swoop down to North Beach, the road cut through a series of steep hills and the conversation turned into a bull ride.

One day his mind started whirring at an even higher speed, lurching and thumping like the laundry in our second-hand dryer, and my father began arguing that his temper was not his fault, he had no choice in acting the way he did, and couldn’t do better if he tried. I thought this was ridiculous and said so; I said we were all responsible for ourselves. My father began hollering, but instead of trying to follow his trail as I usually did, through faulty logic resting on stray bits of Scripture, I turned my head to the truck’s filmy window, and began

the pieces of our world desperately want to move, to flow, to exchange. eyeing a nearby barn that had crumpled into a field. My father’s voice became distant and the red left on the barn took on a special sheen. I studied the scene with a vague, journalistic excitement until it was out of my eyeshot; it was surprising to me how easily my father’s voice faded.

I think it bothered him most of all that I had turned away from him, crossing my scrawny arms, preparing to wait out this tempest. My usual reaction when faced with the force of his temper was to take on his energy, either matching the cycling of his mind and arguing with him, or, more frequently, busting into tears. Either way there was a dispersal. This time, though, I refused it, which meant the heat was left in him, and so of course he had to do something to release the pressure.

My father abruptly changed lanes, the better to reach the right-hand side of the road, where he stomped on the brakes and stretched across the bench seat until he reached the door handle. He pushed the door open, despite its creaks of protest, and then with the commuters roaring past us, he ordered me out of the truck.

The sound of the truck peeling away broke me out of my reverie, and I started crying, cars whizzing by me as if I was invisible. Nowadays concerned suburbanites would have snatched me up in minutes, offering sliced oranges and a cell phone, but back then it was not an unusual thing to see a teary teenager loping alongside Route 4. I cried for a while as I walked, but soon became bored and started imagining I was really alone and wouldn’t be able to call my mother when I reached the gas station another half mile south.

An hour or so later I was tucked back into the family bosom, but that night I imagined the ease of departure—how I might hitchhike the hour-and-a-half to D.C., buy a Greyhound bus ticket with my babysitting money, and make it to the Carolinas before morning. The possibility of distance had slipped into my blood like a unshakeable virus, even though I would be eighteen before I left, and when I did leave it was my father who drove me toward New England and my college years in that same pick-up truck.

VI I tell a revised version of that story every Christmas, to the endless amusement of my brothers. The licentious nature of memory leads me to erase the sneakers I had on and substitute high heels, sending my former self trooping through trailer parks and across algae-filled drainage ditches, looking for a phone so I could call my

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mother. Some Christmases a trucker offers that humiliated girl a ride to Philadelphia, a man hocking peaches by the roadside sells her a Ball jar of warmish water for fifty cents, and a mangy dog follows her for miles despite her comic attempts to shoo it away.

Even my sober mother chuckles at these retellings, while my father, nestled in the middle of his offspring, smiles and shakes his head as if reminded of the behavior of a long-forgotten uncle prone to half-baked stunts.

Time’s arrow has done its work on him, frosted his beard and thinned his hairline. A stroke last spring cut him down a little more, thickening his tongue and gimping his right leg. His rage hasn’t completely disappeared, but his body no longer supports it—the words that stung when they came from a black-bearded, sun-stained man fall flat when they slur out of this old man’s mouth. In the play of our lives he has become King Lear—still the titular character, but limited to serving as a catalyst for the activities of the next generation.

My father’s not the only stranger at the table. I hardly recognize my raucous, hairy brothers, whose speech is littered with words that would have blanched the children they once were. Even stranger than their adult bodies and habits is the knowledge that at any moment, we are all free to walk away, to fly back to our individual sets of rooms in faraway cities, jingle our keys in the lock, nudge the door open, and enter a quiet space marked with only our own smell, delightfully free of other Wilbankses.

It wasn’t always like that. Our family used to be an entirely closed system. For much of our childhood, we were home-schooled by our mother. Aside from our trip to church on Sunday mornings, my father was the only one who had any sort of communion with the outside world, and even then it was a tentative sort of communion, since he worked for himself as a bricklayer, doing small jobs for individual homeowners. My father liked to say that we had everything we needed under our own roof, but this meant that when his rage left him and ricocheted around the house, there was nowhere for it to go. If a door could have opened into our family, my father’s anger might have exploded outward, but as it was the house was shut up tightly for our own protection.

The pieces of our world desperately want to move, to flow, to exchange. Hot pots cool down immediately—the atoms in that hot pan are vibrating rapidly and want nothing more than to mix their energy with the cooler, slower atoms, dispersing the heat and creating less of an extreme. It is simply the way of the world. There’s no way to stop this process—the more something is pressurized, the more likely it is there will be a violent explosion when it finally manages to make an escape.

VII An endless stream of philosophers, poets, and psychologists have mistakenly equated entropy with disorder rather than dispersal, but fortunately for science, there is a certain physicist, now in his nineties, who is on a one-man crusade to set the matter straight. Dr. Frank Lambert has devoted his twilight years to a letterwriting campaign urging textbook publishers to move away from “the cracked crutch of disorder” when teaching entropy. He has been largely successful, pointing out that just as the dispersal of sugar into coffee is not a chaotic process, entropy is energy’s way of evening itself out. No one would argue that a suitcase, once unpacked and put away, makes a house less orderly than before. While some might find a degree of apocalyptic excitement in the idea that our universe is rapidly becoming more and more chaotic, Dr. Lambert points out that entropy in its truest form is a little less exciting. In the end, all hots and colds will fizzle out, sweet and bitter will combine, and everything will become somewhat lukewarm.

I appreciate Dr. Lambert’s efforts, but it’s hard to shake my original conception of entropy, which is closer to the Marvel Comics version. In that universe, Entropy was the son of Eternity and one of the Seven Friendless, a motley crew of near-deities who have been around since the beginning of creation, each of whom contain a force absolutely necessary for the world to move forward. Entropy was light blue with a tiny head, painted half black and half-white like a hybrid sort of mime, his head sitting atop the bulging upper-body of a typical superhero. Entropy’s purpose was merely to undo, and he did it all too well. There came a time in which he had destroyed everything around him, and then all was nothingness and there was nothing left to destroy. This must have been a strange moment for Entropy—the whirring in his head was finally over and all was quiet and

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peaceful. But instead of being content with the void and the destruction he caused, Entropy decided to try his hand at creation. Urged on by Captain Marvel and Rick Jones, Entropy took a cue from his father’s example and came up with the big bang, thus restarting the engine of time and turning into his father, Eternity. The destroyer of worlds became the creator of worlds.

There are some Marvel fans who question this story, typing in all capitals during their late nights on the Marvel message boards, pointing out that if Entropy becomes Eternity and the world begins again, then Entropy doesn’t exist anymore, so how can the world exist without disorder? How can time start back on itself, again and again, forever, if Entropy is missing?

I see their point, though I like to think even Entropy itself can change his mind, that the future is not yet written and can still surprise us. And yet a world without entropy is impossible. Even Dr. Lambert would agree. Without entropy, he’d say, ice would never melt, sugar cubes would never fall apart in coffee, and spices would never soak into the rich broth of a pot of chicken soup.

VIII The Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, the author of A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of All Things Familiar, was known to be a chatterbox. One scribe put it more delicately, writing that the man “was never adverse to opening his stores of knowledge to anyone with whom he might converse.” Throughout his life Brewer developed the habit of writing down various questions he had about science, and when he eventually attempted to find the answers to his questions and published those pages, he found a vast audience throughout Europe.

Brewer’s popularity might have come from his enthusiastic (though often misguided) treatments of scientific principles, as well as his willingness to tackle the theological implications of those discoveries.1 The enormous technological and scientific advances of the 1800s had shaken the Church’s hold on society and led to a great deal of anxiety for a deeply religious public. But for Brewer, an ordained minister, scientific laws did not necessarily contradict theological precepts.

Brewer’s guide is thus littered with references to God, who in his wisdom gave fur to the beasts of the field and “robes of feathers” to the birds of the air (section XIII), made animals and vegetables dependent on one another (section XVIII) and ensured that grass and other vegetables are excellent radiators of heat (section XVI). Throughout the Guide, Brewer is candid about the limits of scientific theory—when asking himself what one should do to keep safe from lightning, he solemnly advises his imagined reader to “ . . . draw his bedstead into the middle of his room, commit himself to the care of God, and go to bed; remembering that our Lord has said, ‘The very hairs of your head are all numbered.’” While his contemporary Charles Darwin made no attempt to fuse evolutionary theory with theological precepts, Brewer’s reasoned and rational catechism frequently crescendoed into a burst of religious fervor.

Q. Shew the WISDOM of GOD in making polished METAL and woolen CLOTH BAD RADIATORS of heat.

A. If polished metal collected dew as easily as grass, it could never be kept dry, and free from rust.

Again, if woolen garments collected dew as readily as the leaves of trees, we should be often soaking wet, and subject to constant colds.

Q. Shew how this affords a beautiful illustration of GIDEON’S MIRACLE, recorded in the book of Judges, vi. 37, 38.

1

Brewer cannot be blamed for including mistaken information about caloric theory in his volume, as the Guide was published prior to Clausius’ paper on entropy, but his other mistakes were legion. Legend has it that when Brewer asked a scientist to proofread the Guide prior to its publication, the scientist advised him to burn the book rather than publish it.

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A. The fleece of wool (which is a very bad radiator of heat) was soaking wet with dew: when the grass (which is a most excellent radiator) was quite dry.

Q. Was not this CONTRARY to the laws of NATURE? A. Yes; and was, therefore, a plain demonstration of the power of God, who could change the very nature of things at his will.

I have left much of my childhood devotion behind me, but I still find myself appreciating Brewer’s breezy subversion of newly ironclad scientific laws. There are indeed laws governing the natural world, and I have seen evidence of them. And yet it seems beneficial to think that every once in a while, there is the possibility of interruption, the opportunity for things to shift.

IX Every evening, when my father’s pick-up wound through the hills and around to whatever farmhouse we rented at the time, he’d use the last bit of daylight to try and eke out some more green from his garden. He liked nothing more than to walk around the yard inspecting his plants, turning up leaves to detect the presence or absence of fruit. Only when my family moved the last time did he stop planting a garden. Maybe he was tired of leaving his hard-earned fruits to the next tenants. Instead, he poured himself into the hundred or so potted plants dotting the rim of the wide southern porch. He planted jasmine and gardenias for their lingering, musky scent, brilliant

and yet it seems beneficial to think that every once in a while, there is the possibility of interruption, the opportunity for things to shift. blue puff-ball hydrangeas, gawky, overeager black-eyed Susans, savory herbs, and the delicate peonies my mother loved. His trees were all in five-gallon buckets with holes drilled in the bottom; they lived out their lives root-bound and doomed to a stunted height with delays in flowering.

During my time in college, two of my brothers were motoring through adolescence and squealing their tires up against my father’s rage. Often I dug through the falsely cheery tone of my mother’s weekly phone call to try to find out the real story of how everyone was doing. At some point during my sophomore year of college she didn’t try to hide the anxiety in her voice. Apparently my middle brother had developed the habit of throwing his cigarette butts lazily off the porch, and one morning, my father had found one in a prized gardenia pot. Smoke poured out of his ears, I would imagine, like a real-life Yosemite Sam, and he went on a rampage, knocking his beloved plants off the wide porch and onto the ground. My father didn’t stop until all of the plants were up-ended, and then he took off in the truck. While my mother shut herself up in her bedroom and prayed for deliverance, my youngest brother, Joshua, went out on the porch and stood there for a long time. He must have been eleven then, and I suppose he started with what was closest to him, righting the pots that were still whole, consolidating the plants whose pots had shattered, sweeping and raking spilled soil into manageable piles.

“I lost some,” Joshua told me the next day on the phone, as I squatted on the stairs of my apartment in Western Massachusetts, sucking on a cigarette. “The jasmine is just not gonna make it.”

Who knows where my father slept that night—his truck, maybe—but when he came home sometime in the late morning, he sat in the cab for a while. The view from the driveway is such that he must have seen the porch just

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before he lumbered up the hill to the house, stopping to feel the leaves of a hearty tomato bush that had made it through the previous day’s drama without being much worse for wear. When he finally opened the screen door, he looked at my mother, who shook her head, and then at my two oldest brothers, who refused to meet his eyes.

I wasn’t there to see the look on Joshua’s face when my father came in, but my mother told me he was sitting on the couch, reading Architectural Digest. I guess my father reached for him, to hug him, maybe, or thank him for putting things in order. But Joshua looked up from his magazine and shrugged. “I didn’t do it for you,” he said. “I just like plants.”

My father nodded and headed into the kitchen, and Joshua went back to reading Architectural Digest.

X The principle of emergence is better known as the-whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts. It dictates that in some living systems, astonishingly complex patterns develop out of simple interactions between its members.

Emergence, one physicist admits, works “uncomfortably like magic.” An individual termite never intends to build a mound, and yet, year-by-year, the mindless motions of many individual termites accumulate into a thirty-foot tower of termite saliva and excrement, a tower that gives the termites the humidity their fragile bodies need to survive.

In the same vein, family systems theorists believe families are more than a collection of individual hands and laps and minds. Instead they are a mysterious assemblage capable of producing their own weather, just as wind, warm ocean waters, humidity, and the Coriolis effect work upon each other in order to form a hurricane.

Those therapists who subscribe to family systems theory believe a damaged part of a family—a parent or child— can only be healed in the context of the family itself. The individual cannot be parsed out and treated alone, but rather must be viewed as a mere strand in a web of emotional dependencies. As a result, their practice focuses on identifying the near-chemical reaction occurring when all of these discrete personalities combine in the home, a reaction similar, perhaps, to the slow simmer of individual vegetables, meat, and spices in a pot of boiling water.

The difference between the family and the individual is the difference between that murky, flavorful pot with its slow, rolling broth, and the still life on the countertop, where garlic and onion share space with celery, carrots, tomatoes, and chicken. There on the countertop, in the late afternoon light, the carrots are in a state of utter carrotness, unpolluted by the onion’s musk or the celery’s surprising richness—all the ingredients are still whole.

Beside the kitchen table where my brothers and I tell old stories on our rare visits home, a splotched photograph dangles from the refrigerator from some greasy old magnet. It’s a black-and-white family portrait, taken by my father on the self-timer. In it he is looming to the rear of the family, glaring into the camera.

Meanwhile my mother looks doubtful. She holds us tightly, and now I know why—the heat was being turned up on the stove.

Central to the second law of thermodynamics is the concept that time’s arrow always moves in one direction.

Entropy always increases; energy will always disperse into a place where it isn’t so crowded. There is no restorability, and neither is there a rabbit-trail back to the time when my father’s rage was still stuffed inside his own head, when my mother believed holding us tightly could help, and my brothers and I were still smiling with that pure, buck-toothed joy unique to children.

That old snapshot dangles above our heads as my brothers and I each take a side of that square kitchen table. We are entirely different people now, long-limbed adults prone to stray fits of temper or laughter. We’ll never be that particular family again, but it’s no tragedy that soup subsumes its ingredients and simmers them into a new creation. At least that’s what I tell myself.

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

Meggie Monahan

My Brother Gets Us in Trouble & We Are Sent Outside Our father instructs us to pick only the heirlooms that are heavy, split, or rotting. The earth between our toes braces itself for mutiny.

My brother and I hate gardening, not knowing how to keep things alive, having always preferred to leave this delicate work to our older sister who carries the sunlight around with her so effortlessly, even when no one is looking. Not us.

Even that year when she was in the hospital and we accidentally forgot about her Christmas cactus, and it kept needing to be in our lives—held on for months, insisting on its own well-being from the bright, neglected windowsill in our sister’s bedroom— even then, we killed it. Though it would shrivel in April, it stayed so calm and able through the winter months, no hint of fear or decline in the tiny purple flowers.

I buried the cactus in the woods behind our house while my brother spewed an almost-penitent eulogy about trapeze artists or something. I still can’t tell whether it was brilliant or heartless. She forgave us for our carelessness as she always has, but since then I’ve watched her pacing the woods, waiting to spot a Christmas cactus blooming under a pine tree, convinced that just because we killed it doesn’t mean it’s really dead. Now my brother and I stand at opposite ends of our father’s garden, banned from the house until our chore is complete, debating how many tomatoes we will pick and how many we will launch at one another. It is another morning of laughing and stalling. A stone’s throw away, something green is growing where we buried our sister’s optimism. We don’t go back there anymore because we can’t know if it’s poison ivy or one of its harmless relatives. Instead, we stomp around this plot, waiting to see who will be the one to make the first move, who will be the one to turn their back.

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Christina McDaniel

Mortar Her breasts are gone where the one-eyed surgeons cut into the chest wall like a child cuts out a snowflake, some kind of last resort. She is the last thing anyone notices in a chapel built by convicts.

Her own eyes, sharpened by the revelations of the MRIs, go to the mural of Moses parting the Red Sea. There are the slaves outstretching their arms, a golden orb encircling their new air.

Moses’ cape unfolds with the conviction of fire.

He lifts the sea to the highest peaks.

She sees there is an ineptitude, a crack in the middle of his face where the mortar just so happened to run out.

If the convict had scraped his empty bowl with an angel’s repose and shrugged his shoulders thinking, all things fall apart, then she might be glad.

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Forty years ago, this December, if God had handed a baby to her mother and said, I’m sorry, We didn’t have enough, But for now, part your legs and watch the snowfall.

It is a beautiful day to entrust her to the shortages.

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M. Brett Gaffney

Promised Land A dozen dead ladybugs litter the back pews of St. Ambrose Catholic Church.

I like to think they traveled here to bathe in the many voices, to die in the multicolor glow of stained glass and sun.

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Jennifer Atkinson

Meditation on the Nature of Prayer What if now I broke the seal— rebroke it— and wedged in underneath: September’s cornsilk light, the river, windfall ghastly with yellowjackets, a fist of thistle seed, whatever fit—not so much to wake you as to believe for a moment you dream the things of my dreams. Along the river I love to overturn stones to find a stone on which the fossiled imprint of a leaf makes real the imagined: the image is its image.

Relics, bones, and splinters, hard evidence, as if evidence were proof, is everywhere.

You are the delible flute note, footfall, the dull clang of falling stone against bare cliff, outcrop, then silence legible as distance.

What is love compared to rock?

In the story a child’s hoard of pebbles is better proof against hunger than bread or love. And yet it’s what doesn’t turn up from the rain-softened ground, what doesn’t like seed from seed, return, as the meadow, repurpled with thistles, regilded with finches, returns, what it’s no use sifting the midden for, I want— not even so much a you who loves or responds as one who hears.

Or could seem to.

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COLLEEN CLAYTON The Mullen roots spread deep down into the holler, honeysuckle thick, they wind and split in every direction, so long as that direction is north. They reach and pinion to places all over, colder places, but always circle back to the source—Mud Fork, a place that itself is buried. No map can find it and everything, us, all of it, is rooted deep down, bound to the mountains of West Virginia. Mud Fork Holler. Small wilderness of sugar maple, fire pink, and ginseng, carved through with coal-dusted footprints and the snaking rut of four-wheel drive.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

“Spelling. Minus two points. Hollow, not holler.”

My teacher wrote this in the margin of my “What I Did For Summer Vacation” paper in grade school. I was back in Ohio, being taught by a straight-laced first year who needed to impart all she had learned in college and whose deepest fulfillment lay in her ability to wield a red ink pen. I forgave her. She was new and had never been to a holler. She did not know that you stand in the bottom and holler upward, letting your voice crack like thunder against the mountainside. She did not know that misspelled words have meaning too.

The longest river in the U.S. is the Mississippi.

The largest ocean in the world is the Pacific.

2 + 2 = 4.

Yeah? Well, who cares.

Running barefoot down a winding dirt road with only six houses on it, any of which I could walk right in without knocking and sit down to eat, that’s where I wanted to be. Watching copperheads get decapitated with a shovel, building a fort out of branches and an old tarp, swimming in a muddy waterhole where positively anything could be lurking, that’s where I wanted to be. Climbing the mountain, all the way to the mossy Rat Rocks, to smoke stolen cigarettes and gape at stolen Playboys with my cousins (we didn’t care that it was girls on the pages, so long as they were naked) and tucking it all away in a plastic bag for next time. Sliding nervous, green-faced and woozy back down to the houses, bee-lining it to the nearest bottle of Listerine, THAT is where I wanted to be.

What did I do for my summer vacation?

Lady, you have no idea.

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So, I grew up. One foot in, one foot out of the holler. But when I graduated high school and went away to college, I didn’t go back for ten years. Until Mamaw died. Oh, how things look different when you are twenty-eight and have been gone too long. When you have earned the glorious, all-knowing paper from the glorious, all-knowing Gods of Higher Learning, things do not look the same. I had become my teacher. And how ugly it all looked when viewed through the eyes of one who sits on her ergonomic throne, behind her particle board desk, signing papers with her fancy, overpriced pen. Pity she who visits a place of treasured youth—minus the youth—and minus the wisdom to look beyond the lack.

Why don’t they get rid of all these junky cars? Well water? Yuk. You mean people still USE that outhouse? Boy, they got the fanatic market cornered. Assembly of God. Southern Baptist. Pentecostal First Free Gospel Tabernacle of the Evangelical. I tried humming that song we used to sing to bring it all back . . . Driving down the road, I get a feeling that I should have been home . . . What?! The only state in the union to still allow snake-handling churches!? How come I don’t remember this part? Is that a church or a pole barn hosed down in whitewash?

So, I was back. After ten years, I was back for Mamaw’s funeral, questioning it all and trying to find that elusive pearl. The funeral aside, objectively, I could not see where it went, the joy of being in the holler, the joy of being Down Home that I so easily felt as a child. Where did it all go? My joy was now locked inside the tight jaws of addiction, fanaticism, and white-trash poverty.

Oh yes. They got the Bible thumpin’, banjo pickin’, praise Jesus! hollerin’ hard stuff alright. In fact, they got a lot of hard stuff now that I look closer. The Budweiser drinkin’, marijuana growin’, moonshine stillin’, “got a vicodin handy?” hard stuff. Who in their right mind would want to live here?

Mamaw.

She was born, raised, and raised nine kids in Mud Fork. Then Papaw died and because of her wandering mind, she was forced to come live with us in Cleveland, spent most of her time watching nature shows. Loved those chimpanzees. She’d watch the same tape over and over, surprised again and again at the way the head chimp would charge his foe, amazed at how the mothers would groom their young, cuddle them like baby dolls.

Look at ‘em. Carin’ for they youngins, she’d say.

Those chimps were the only thing that kept her mind from wandering back to Mud Fork, the only thing that kept her from asking about the one thing she was still sure of: Am I going home today?

Then she fell and broke her hip and got worse. And because Old Age likes to torture slow, she got slightly better right before she had a stroke. Over and over she stroked, recovering a little, and then stroking again. Mini-strokes, the doctor called them. Pitiless cruelties that slowly seize and rob, give and take, then take some more. They don’t have the decency to gather themselves up into one big blow.

She lingered for years in the nursing home, the last two in a fetal position, aware only of sensation.

Hot, cold, loud, bright, hungry, thirsty. And then the holiness of sleep. Was she lucid in her dreams?

Did she remember the life once lived? Did she remember her pretty white well that she kept painted with flowers all around it? Her old porch cat, Precious? Did she remember the apple orchard where her kids, then grandkids, would lay on a fat limb, looking up at Eden, foundering on the spoils before the green apple two-step had them kicking it to the outhouse. We were too afraid to go inside to use the bathroom. Fearful of YEAH BUDDY! I TOLD YOU YOUNGINS THEY AIN’T RIPE YET! Did she remember letting us grandchildren brush her hair? Did she remember our amazed faces trying not to look at her braless figure under those thin night dresses she wore in the summertime? The wonder when that tight pile of hair would unravel, cascading in palomino waves over her sagging breasts.

She’s a real woman under there.

She’s got the hair and knockers to prove it.

At the funeral home, she lay there nested inside her favorite color, a delicate pink suit dress, her hair tied up neatly in that signature bun, sleeping on a bed of pink satin, pink roses all around her.

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And they came from all over. Every seat filled, every inch of wall space taken. . . . she was a fine woman, that Brizie, and generous . . .

. . . Lord honey, they never was a better Christian than Brizie Mullen . . . . . . Hard as she saw it, ‘specially when she was young with all them kids? Still, she

always lent the helpin’ hand . . .

Oh my. There it was. I could feel it coming back.

Then came the service. That pearlescent spark was extinguished quick by a holy-rolling Comb Over in burgundy seersucker. One hand held the gospel, one hand pointed a finger. Directly at all the beer drinkin’, fornicating, pill poppin’, moonshinin’ shit stains who dared show up.

This is a funeral asshole!

I wanted to run up and kick him in the balls and yell it in his face.

How dare you! This isn’t about you! Can’t you just shut your fat face and make Mamaw’s funeral nice?

Nooooo. He had souls to save.

For half an hour the preacher bawled out no one in particular, just the whole stinking lot of us.

Waving that Bible, pointing that finger. Then . . . the dramatic pause.

Who here’s ready to know the Lord God? he asked.

Every single spine stiffened in unison. And not a peep was offered.

We followed the processional back to Mud Fork. She was buried next to Papaw in the bottom-turnedcemetery where she used to grow corn in front of the main house. The creek runs alongside.

An old-timey singing group came over from another church. A cappella they sang, with eyes closed, heads thrown back in the thick summer heat. Wailing altos and tenors sang in memory of Brizie Mullen. “I’ll Fly Away.” “Wayfaring Stranger.” “The Church in the Wildwood.” All her favorites. They sang and we cried. . . . Mother’s not dead . . .

. . . She’s only sleeping . . .

. . . Just patiently waiting for Jesus to come . . .

We let the wailing roll through the holler. Let it crack like thunder and shake the mountainside.

Then silent prayer. Only the holler sang as we listened to the music of Mud Fork. The trill of birds, the hum of bees, the trickle of creek water.

Who here’s ready to know the Lord God? it asked.

And the joy . . . it was right there.

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Jonathan M. Devin

Honeymoon in Maine The air hangs too heavy over frigid water, cold in summer and heavy blue like blueberry patches in northeastern night, beneath salt-whipped cottages overlooking Cobscook Bay. Here, before the sunrise, patchwork boats dredge, rip green veins from ocean floor.

Somewhere, a man is heard cursing in tobacco breath the morning’s catch. Elsewhere, a dog can be heard barking, the sonorous tide retreating, and a truck’s ignition choking.

Maine wasn’t made for love; Maine was made for cursing. Cursing listless 4 a.m. shifts, cursing the day, and your own face calloused, raw, tempered in sharpened air on one of the vessels dotting the bay.

Tiny ships, dark water like freckles sprinkled on the skin of the ripest blueberry, prepared at any moment to be swallowed up into turbid oblivion.

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ARTISTS’ NOTES

PAUL FL IP P E N: A N TIQUAT ED OPT ICS My paintings communicate through several visual languages simultaneously, by incorporating a variety of applications or techniques. The majority of the surfaces exhibit crisp-edged patterns or representations that overlay, and comment on, a central image. I strive to enter a dialog with the viewer, wherein issues such as craft, decoration, beauty, and labor are used for an expression that has a density of personal narratives and implications. The fragile and confessional nature of these relationships (of both a personal and artistic nature) is addressed through an idiosyncratic imagery of signs and metaphors.

The drawings included in this issue are part of my Antiquated Optics series, exploring the subjectivity of images, the act of observation, and the creation of meaning.

KAT I E TAYLO R FR ISC H :

I’ V E BEEN HER E BEFO R E, I R EM EM BER T HAT T R EE Much of my work revolves around identity and the creative process itself—the role of bad ideas, trust of vision, insecurity, discipline, response to materials, obligation to creativity, etc. This is one reason journaling is so prominent in my work—the writing serves as a record of understanding the places I’ve been and the progression of my own personhood. I like to think of my pieces as “visual journals,” illustrated documentation of my journey.

Similarly, trees have become a common theme in my work because of their monumental nature. Their orientation and verticality relate them to humanity. Their annual rings record the environmental events of each year the way my journal entries record my own.

I work with material that relates to my inspiration. I love that paper and felt act as co-creators with me—I can make decisions about much of what I want to occur, but ultimately the materials themselves will do what is in their nature to do. I appreciate the independence of paper and felt, and how these nonwoven textiles become fabric simply by their own properties. It is for this reason that I work with other natural objects, things already created to remind me to cooperate with a world that is much larger than myself.

The images here are part of a larger installation series I’ve been here before, I remember that tree.

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Katie Taylor Frisch. Stacked Experience. Individually made gampi papers with embedded leaves, waxed linen thread bound around wire. 10 x 12 x 27 inches.

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Katie Taylor Frisch. Twenty-seven Years in the Cambium. Handmade gampi paper with embedded leaves, tea, coffee, and walnut staining, cover made of cast kozo and gampi fibers. Closed: 9 x 10 x 5 inches. Unrolled: 400 inches long.

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Katie Taylor Frisch. Day Logs. Handmade gampi paper with embedded pine needles, cast gampi and kozo fibers, found twigs, binders board, burning, tea and coffee staining. Closed: 15 x 25 x 3 inches. Installed: Approximately 108 x 60 x 30 inches.

Katie Taylor Frisch. Day Logs. Detail.

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Katie Taylor Frisch. Branching I. Handmade abaca paper with embedded wire and string, India ink journal entries bound within accordion-style book. 12 x 7 x 94 inches.

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

Shopping for Virgins LILI WRIGHT

My mother stands in the Maine ocean, wet up to her waist. Her hands play with the cold water,

carving half circles that look like fans. There’s no one on the beach but she and my dad, and the quiet is humbling, as if we’re all very small and don’t count for much. Camden’s blue hills stretch along the horizon in a graceful undulating line. The beach looks huge at low tide. So many rocks. Clumps of brown seaweed lie strewn like tousled hair. With mincing steps, my father makes his way to the water and stops at the edge, careful not to get his feet wet. He’s wearing cut-offs, khakis so shredded the pocket hangs loose below his ragged hem. His white terrycloth hat sits on his head like a sign of surrender. He carries a long piece of driftwood with a water thermometer tied at one end. With a smooth toss, he casts the thermometer out to sea.

“How’s it feel?” he asks.

“Cold,” my mother calls back.

My parents have been together forty-five years and have been coming to this beach for as long. When my dad stopped working, when the world closed in on him—too loud, too much—my mother, then a lawyer, supported us. They don’t have many friends. They have each other. They bicker, yet somehow it works.

“Nan, do you want to guess?”

“Sixty-three.”

“Sixty-two.”

My mother sighs, steps deeper into the calm water, stumbling to find safe footing. Her spongy bathing cap covers her curls. Her suit is scalloped, purple. It has a skirt. She still has a nice figure. Not fat.

Not trim. But well-proportioned. Surprisingly healthy for someone who is not.

Without warning, my mother stretches into the cold. She breaststrokes, panting, then floats on her back. Her swimming sneakers bob to the surface and she studies them. A seagull calls overhead. Off in the distance, sailboats move so slowly they seem glued to the water. The air smells like beach roses, the essence of pink. This is the closest thing my mother has to church. Baptism and blessing. Prayer and confession. But mostly swimming just feels good. The tingle of salt. The weightlessness of a body in water. The cool. The transcendence.

Cold but happy, my mother walks out of the water and rubs herself with a towel, stiff from being dried on the line. She looks at the view, the vastness of the water, the rocks underfoot, each different, each made, then bends to pick up a lucky stone, gray with a white band around it. Cap in one hand, rock in the other, she walks towards the stairs, as we, her family, the people who are watching her from wherever we are—Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Indiana—we all think the same thing, an idea that makes no sense, but we believe it anyway. If she keeps swimming in cold water, she will not die.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at age forty-seven. She was treated with chemotherapy and a mastectomy. Twelve years later, when cancer appeared on her spine, when it became clear she would spend the rest of her life living with this uninvited guest, the squatter, Mom didn’t shoot coffee enemas or move to Honolulu or as Grampy, her father-in-law, suggested, sleep on a mattress of magnets.

Mom does her law work, sees family, walks the road. She goes to Maine in the summer. No matter how difficult her treatments become, this routine never falters. These pleasures are always enough.

There are no wild stories to tell about my mother. No love affairs with a Salvadorian rebel. No fortune

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lost in Vegas. In a society that values flash, extremes, largesse, a shy attorney living on a dirt road in Connecticut does not matter much, yet my mother has a strength anyone could admire. She was a lawyer, back when lady lawyers wore silk bows around their necks, like wrapped presents waiting to be opened. My mother has dark curly hair, a thin nose, high cheek bones. She has never done much with her beauty. Her only facial scrub dates back to 1958. She had her first make-up lesson at age sixty, when I bought her a facial at Georgette Klinger and a plucked creature named Masha demonstrated in a giant mirror where to apply blush.

My mother is painfully literal. She values precision and clarity, architecture, stone walls, paisley, Scrabble, dictionaries. Back when Mom and her sister Penny, the wildly creative one, the dancer, the poet, shared a room as girls, they’d watch the car lights move across their bedroom walls at night. Penny would ask Mom if she liked the movies and Mom would say: “What movies? All I see are the lights.”

My mother does not believe in God. Her mother refused to go to church, but as a girl, Mom sometimes went with her father because she liked singing hymns. When my parents first moved to Connecticut in 1962, the year before I was born, they went to a Sunday service at the local Episcopal Church.

The service didn’t wow them, and neither did the minister. So imagine her surprise when he showed up at the front door later that week, offering to bless the house. Mom was home alone with my brother.

The minister had them both get down on their knees and pray. (I cannot for all the tea in China picture this scene.) Mom felt so uncomfortable that when Dad came home from work, she said, “That’s it.” She never went to church again. And she never took her children to church—not once.

When it came time for sabbatical, my husband, Peter, and I moved to Spain because we are writers and writers write better in Europe and drink better in Europe and have better sex in Europe and often become famous once they have moved to Europe. We decided to go to Spain to escape small town Indiana, where the grocery check-out girl asks me what a grapefruit is and how I plan to eat it, where bumper stickers read, “Got Jesus?” and “Break the Habit: Eat Domestic Rabbit.” We’d go to Spain to prove to ourselves, to the world, that it was possible to have adventures while carting along a three-year-old and a swatch of purple fleece known as “Blankie.” We’d go to Spain because my infertility treatments were not working and I had this romantic notion that all I needed to conceive our second child was to lounge in the Mediterranean sun with a glass of Rioja and a giant bowl of olives.

Our first child, Madeline, was a happy accident, but multiple rounds of hormone injections, timed intercourse, Reiki, and conscientious rubbing of a black clay fertility turtle could not summon the second. My mother’s medical history made our crusade even more urgent. I worried my mother would die before our second child was born. My photography teacher in grad school used to warn that “art is not something you bring home to mother,” but Madeline was our finest piece of art and I wanted to share our second artwork—if there was going to be one—with my mother. Look Ma. Look what we made. I wanted this for me, for my mother, for my children. My mother always regretted that Grandmother died before Madeline was born. “She never knew you were a mother,” Mom said sadly on more than one occasion. “She would have been so pleased.” Mom had Chip and me by age twenty-five. Grandmother lived to ninety-one. So my mother was a mother with a mother for forty years. But so much had changed in a single generation. Women like me waited so long to have children that we had to scramble to complete our families before they were ripped apart. Forget procreation. This was a race. When I asked my friend Charlotte if I should start taking my temperature to track peak fertility days, she’d snorted. “Forget the whole basal temperature nightmare. At your age, you don’t have time to screw around.”

A month before we left for Spain, my mother called to say she was having mysterious stomach pains.

“It’s my bowels. I can’t ever be too far away from the toilet.”

“Is it cancer?”

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“We don’t know. They’re going to open me up and take a look.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t go to Spain.”

“Of course, you should go. It may be nothing very exciting.”

“Oh, Mom.” I sighed.

“I know. I was doing so well.”

“How’s Dad?” “Discouraged. He takes these things so hard.”

We all take these things hard. These things are hard to take.

I changed the subject, hoping to make Mom laugh.

“How do you like our president?”

My mother groaned. She loathed George Bush. “The arrogance. The bluster. It must be nice to have God whispering in your ear.”

And then God did whisper. Or chemistry took hold. Luck played its joker. The narrative turned a page.

I got pregnant. Peter smiled at the news, just the way he had with Madeline. Disbelieving and believing. Relieved. Terrified. Adoring.

Mom’s voice warmed the phone: “That’s wonderful news.”

Flushed with my hard-earned happiness, I smiled at the frat boys in Greek letter shirts. I smiled at the green-haired checkout girl with the stud in her tongue. They’re such good people. They are who they are. Each one is somebody’s child. From the depths of cardboard boxes, I pulled out maternity

Women like me waited so long to have children that we had to scramble to complete our families before they were ripped apart. clothes: Giant tights. Breast pads. Shirts the size of spinnakers. Everything felt important. Every night of sleep. Every bite of food. Angela, the obgyn nurse, rattled through a list of warnings. Pesticides in apple skin. Mercury in tuna. No sushi. No swordfish. No Brie. No booze. This last one proved particularly taxing.

At dinner, I poured milk into a fluted glass. “Look, white wine!”

Three days before we left for Spain, I started to bleed. “You’d better lie down,” Peter said. It was January. Snowy winds shook the windows. It occurred to me that it was naïve to feel safe in your house. Things could always slip under the door: Bugs. Bats. Cold. Reggae music. A coupon from Pizza King. There was no master of the house. Just a house, and, some believed, a master.

After midnight, the cramps sharpened. A ghost in a nightgown, I staggered to the bathroom. Blood dripped into the bowl as I peed. I held toilet paper underneath me. A bloody mass oozed onto the paper and I howled and I knew.

Peter called out, first annoyed, then scared, “What? What?!”

I looked at the shape, trying to make out a face, not a child’s face, nothing so literal, but the face of a slug or a jellyfish, some slimy creature you’d find on the terrace after it rains. I imagined Madeline, snug in her yellow room, her body heavy with sleep, and wondered if my crying would wake her.

Were you not supposed to cry in front of your kid? What did What to Expect say about dead babies? I remembered the first time I learned the word “ululation.” They made up that word for moments like

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this, when women lose their babies, when women wail and their cries shake the ground. Kneading my eye sockets, I clutched the mass, not wanting to give it up—it’s not right, it’s not fair—while Peter hovered and paced, asking if I was sure, stroking my head, echoing “I’m sorry” and “We’ll try again.” Staring at the amorphous gray tissue, I thought: Other women make babies and you make this.

Every day hundreds of tourists peer over the old bridge in Ronda and marvel at the Tajo, the tremendous limestone gorge that cuts the Spanish city in two. This is the view they’ve come to see, the dizzying 330foot drop they’ve admired in photographs, in postcards, the one Hemingway wrote about in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the one hash-smoking teenagers throw stray cats over, smirking at their terrified screams. The Tajo is a straight shot down, a twenty-five story free fall, with nothing protecting you from gravity’s long pull except a wrought-iron fence and your own common sense, neither of which seems like sufficient protection when you are staring into the abyss.

Immediately, tourists whip out their cameras, as if the view might run off without them. They bend and focus, leaning precariously. (The year before we arrived, a British man fell to his death while taking a picture.) Day-trippers pan past the white-washed houses, the sloping rock bluffs that bulge like

You wouldn’t think you’d need a mother once you became one, but things didn’t work that way. fingers of a giant’s fist, past the prickly pear that grows defiantly between rocks, to the base where the Guadalevin River flows, rushing and brown in spring, green and putrid in summer. Everyone who looks over the edge is struck by the Tajo’s beauty, and everyone who looks imagines falling and, at least for a moment, contemplates death. There is something particularly Spanish about this vivid confluence of beauty and death, like the sequins and blood of the bullring, like the shivering cries of flamenco.

To keep busy, I enrolled in Spanish classes, losing myself in a sea of irregular verbs. After week one, our teacher Ana, a theatrical woman with an orange shawl, announced we were moving onto subjunctive.

My fellow inmates, undergrads from Kentucky, and I nodded grimly. Oh, yes, we’ve been here before. The Spanish language has two sets of parallel tenses. The indicative expresses certainty, facts, everything that is known and real. Madeline likes Barney underwear. Spanish grammar is a bitch. The subjunctive is used to express doubt or uncertainty, wishes or regret, anything unknown or unknowable. While English has dropped most of its subjunctive, Spanish remains a bird’s nest of hypothetical maybes.

“Vaya con Dios”—my Mexican host mother used to say every morning as I ran out the door. I had no idea what she meant, vaya being subjunctive of the verb “to go,” a lesson far beyond chapter three where I was floundering. Go with God. A hope, not a fact. Are you really going with God? Will God go to Spanish class and help me conjugate the subjunctive? God only knows. What you want may not happen. What happens, you may not want.

The night after my mother’s surgery, I sat at the kitchen table in our apartment, staring at jars of dried beans, tins of tea, a rope of garlic that twisted like a snake. I made my wish and dialed Hartford Hospital.

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The phone spluttered, ringing three times before Dad answered. He spoke slowly, as if each word was a stone he had to roll uphill in a wheelbarrow, letting go of the handles periodically to rest.

“It was cancer,” he said. “Her colon was full of it.”

That afternoon, I took Madeline out for hot chocolate. Then we went to church. I didn’t know we were going to church until we were there with our coco breath, hustling into a pew up front, as if we were seeing a play and wanted good seats. It was nice how churches were left open in Spain, as if God were a twenty-four hour cash machine, available for desperate withdrawals. We’ll just step inside for a minute and get out of the wind. Pretend we are religious.

Inside, the church was hushed and dark, with vaulted ceilings and marble everywhere. Above the altar loomed a figure of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus. The air smelled musty as memories, dank as souvenirs from places you’d long ago forgotten. A few people hunched over in prayer. Madeline sat in my lap, facing me, legs wrapped around my waist. Though she had never been to church, she sensed she should be quiet. I thought about Mom and the things she liked best: warm bread, detective stories, needlepoint, the law. How long could she keep this up? Cancer had taken a breast, now part of her colon. It was like building a model in reverse. Soon there would be nothing but a chassis and a pile of parts. We need glue. We need some goddamn directions.

What would I do without my mom? I had no idea. You wouldn’t think you’d need a mother once you became one, but things didn’t work that way.

“What’s wrong?” Madeline whispered.

“Mama’s crying a little.”

“Why you crying?”

“Because Gran’s sick. My mommy is sick.”

“Why she sick?”

“She has cancer. It’s a disease.”

“She throws up?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Menember when I threw up in the bath tub and you had to change your shirt?”

I always felt a rush of pride whenever Madeline got her words wrong. Glasses were geegees. Magazines were mazagines. Vasaline was gasoline. Madeline pointed to a priest crossing the pulpit, Bible tucked under his arm.

“What’s the man doing?”

“He’s the priest. He’s going to talk to the people.”

“Why is the cancer in a box?”

“A box?”

Madeline nodded.

“I don’t know what box you’re talking about, sweetie. I am sad because Gran is sick. She has cancer, a disease. So we’re going to sit a minute and pray —” I paused. Madeline had no idea what the word pray meant. She didn’t know because we hadn’t taught her. It seemed absurd parents had to teach their children everything. Couldn’t a three-year-old pick up a few pointers on the street? Closing my eyes, I tried to pray. A prayer for my mom. A prayer for a baby. A prayer from a woman who didn’t know a damn about prayer.

Madeline tugged my arm.

“Hold tight,” I said, rubbing her back. “We’re just going to sit here and think nice thoughts about Gran.”

Madeline cocked her head, curious. “You love Gran?”

I imagined Mom sitting on the lawn in Maine, blue jeans rolled, pale calves catching the sun. My mother was part of the landscape of Maine. With the rose bushes. The ants that nibbled the rose bushes. The orchard that overlooked the ants that nibbled the rose bushes. The clear blue sky above the orchard that overlooked the ants that nibbled the rose bushes.

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“Yes, sweetie. I love her.”

“Where is Gran? In Maine?”

“Remember the house with the grandfather clock? She’s near there, in the hospital.”

“I want to see her.”

“Me, too, but we’re very far away. We’re in Spain now.”

Madeline studied the pews, the chilly tiles. “This is Spain?”

I pulled her close, smelling her sweaty scalp. “Yes, sweetie. This is Spain.”

“Mama?”

“What?”

Madeline tilted her head until her forehead touched mine, drilling her eyes until I saw double.

“Mama!”

“Yes!” Madeline gave me her most seductive smile.

“I want dessert.”

Mom and I sit at the piano, four hands poised over the ivory keys. I am eleven years old. “I can’t do it,” I huff. “I need help.”

Mom skiddles me down: “Let me try it once.”

Her fingers round the first chord, then glide down the keyboard. Pretty soon her head sways like this is her favorite song in the world, even though it’s a dreary Beethoven piece with so many sharps the clef looks like dried-up alphabet soup. Clunk. A mistake.

Mom frowns. “Whoopsy daisy, Nancy. That’s not it. F sharp.”

I smirk with satisfaction. “All right,” I interrupt. “Now help me.” My tone is rude and whiney, but I can’t help myself.

Mom releases the piano. I sigh the sigh of the forlorn, the martyred. The first chords come out okay, but I can’t keep track of the sharps.

“You’re not helping me,” I pout.

Mom frowns. “I don’t know why you want me here.” She pulls a Kleenex from her sweater cuff and wipes her nose. She has a cold, but I don’t care. “You just have to practice. Try one hand at a time.”

But I don’t want to play one hand at a time. I want to play the whole piece. I want to play the whole piece now. I picture Beethoven with his wrinkly German clothes, his wig of stringy hair. He is deaf or blind? He smells of onions. He has no friends.

“Here, let me see,” Mom says.

An octave higher, she starts up again. Arms crossed, I seethe. As she plays, my mother hums a prissy soprano, like she’s back in high school glee club, a pretty girl in a kilt. Downstairs, Dad is deveining shrimp, cold water running. Chip is off at boarding school, two hours away. There is no way to escape the baby grand piano or the brass wedding-present lamp that lights my mother’s hands as they press the slender black keys, the chunky white ones.

I hate my mother and I need my mother.

I hate how much I need my mother.

Now she’s on a roll and won’t stop now until she reaches the last chord, the final ornery, purplish dadum, so I scratch my mosquito bite, scowl, pretend I’m stone deaf like Beethoven, so blind I can’t see my mother’s tired face soften with joy.

It was Jaime, my Spanish tutor, who suggested I go shopping for virgins. Single, in his late thirties, Jaime reminded me of a chesty game bird who doesn’t fly much. His greased curls furled like a coxcomb.

His nose formed a dignified beak. A charming mixture of machismo and vulnerability, Jaime roared at

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soccer games, yet suffered every pollen spore in the wind. Instead of reviewing impersonal pronouns, we gossiped about miracles, superstitions, and strange happenings no one could explain. Jaime collected odd stories: like the premonition he’d had the night his grandfather died, how parked cars in Gaucin moved backwards on their own, or the blind woman who had seen Jaime’s aura and swore he was an angel.

“My whole life I’ve had these feelings, a sixth sense. You see this?”

He held up his thumb. There was a faint white scar.

“I was cutting bread with a serrated knife, and the whole time I was thinking, Jaime, you’re going to cut yourself and then, of course, I did. But here’s the really strange part, I have a scar the same size and shape on the other thumb.” He showed me. “I also have a scar on my foot. My friend Jorge says, ‘Hombre, if you get a scar on the other foot, then we’ll know who you really are.’”

Jaime grinned. He liked the implication.

Many of our conversations circled back to the Virgin Mary. Back home, I’d never given the Virgin Mary much thought—chastity wasn’t a virtue that held much appeal—but Mary was a rock star in Spain. Many Spaniards were so devoted they skipped over God and prayed directly to his mother. Most

More studious pagans would have read the Bible or joined a church group, but I wanted to find God on my own, without intermediary or coercion. churches had a Virgin, a statue depicting Mary in a different stage of her life. Each virgin had a distinct name and following. Jaime kept an image of Maria Auxiliadora dangling from his review mirror.

At traffic lights, he touched her for luck.

“Spain has always been a Marian country,” Jaime explained. “Personally, I can’t talk to God. He’s so distant and powerful, the great father.” Jaime shook his hands like lightning bolts. “But the Virgin is different. She’s human. A mother.”

“But every church has a virgin,” I said. “The Virgin of Sorrow. The Virgin of the Ascension. How do people decide who to follow?”

“When I look at Maria Auxiliadora, I feel comfortable and at ease. I can talk to her. I go to other virgins and it’s fine,” Jaime bobbed his head ho-hum, “but not the same. It’s like soccer: I am with this team. You’re with another. Since you’re interested in virgins, you should do a little research. Go visit churches and see which virgin speaks to you.”

It was an unlikely crusade—an agnostic goes searching for a saint—yet the idea felt right, even inspired. Maybe face-to-face with the Virgin Mary, faith would bubble up inside me. What did it feel like to believe in God? Light and airy, I imagined, like wearing new clothes. With God, your prayers traveled, zoomed, like those bank drive-through tubes that whisk back to the teller on a current of air.

God’s love soothed like the sea, washed you like driftwood, softened your knots.

People without God got by with less metaphor. More pharmaceuticals. Less abdication. More vaccination, caffeination, masturbation. Less master plan. More winging it. More dumb luck, momentum, and gravity. For the first half of my life, when bad things happened, I’d run, write, weep, drink, smoke,

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buy a pink shirt, the palest, baby pink, the color before color, the sky blushing at dawn. But each year, it was harder to bounce back from setbacks. Each year, I had more to lose.

More studious pagans would have read the Bible or joined a church group, but I wanted to find God on my own, without intermediary or coercion. Perhaps it was a holdover from my days as a reporter, but I approached religion as I would a fresh news story: Show up. Pay attention. Wait for something to happen. I did not tell Mom about my quest, though she would have appreciated its irony: her cancer had brought me to church when she never had.

Jaime’s virgin presided over a white church behind a shady courtyard. It was late morning, and the only person inside was a woman mopping the floor. I slipped into a pew and gazed up at the Virgin. It was like the first moments of a blind date, where you wait to see if there’s chemistry.

Maria Auxiliadora was young, twenty-five, tops. With her sky blue gown, flowing hair, and dangling earrings, she looked like a Wiccan goddess from a New Age poster. Jesus was a toddler. Cute and plump with wavy hair, he held his chubby arms open to embrace the world. Together, they looked too sweet to be credible, but I tried, closing my eyes, opening them, waiting. Bleach fumes wafted from the cleaning woman’s bucket. Nothing was hitting me.

Just then, two women and a boy scurried down the aisle, rustling with shopping bags. They paused before the Virgin, crossed themselves, barreled up the back stairs to the Virgin’s platform with the

Here were the bodies, but where were the spirits? Why had no one designed a spirit museum? Maybe they had.

And people called it church. sort of determination most people reserve for shopping at Bergdorf’s. On the plateau, they kissed the Virgin’s feet, scampered downstairs and out the door. It reminded me of a Chinese fire drill.

I tried to pray: Please God, Mary, we are trying to have a child. Maria, my mother has cancer. Make her strong. She’s doing better but is still weak. But I couldn’t take myself seriously. What was the difference between kissing a statue and rubbing a fertility turtle? At that moment, they both seemed like bunk. Hell, you’d be better off mopping the floor.

This wasn’t my virgin. I liked Jaime so much, it was disappointing not to care for his virgin, like when your best friend marries a drip.

I kept shopping. The Virgin de la Paz, Ronda’s patron saint, lived in an ornate chapel in the old part of town. Outside, a plate-glass window offered a view of the altar. Its sign seemed suited for a Las Vegas peep show: Insert coin to light virgin. When I rang the bell, a nun ushered me inside the tiny chapel.

This Mary was older, solemn, as if she’d seen some things, not all of them good. In her heavy robe, she looked queenly, bell-shaped, overdressed for the party. Baby Jesus seemed frail, weighed down by a gold embroidered coat and crown. His face was that of a fifty-year-old smoker.

I sat down and waited for a sign, a feeling. This whole process was beginning to remind me of the children’s book: Are You My Mother? One morning, a baby bird cracks open its egg while his mother is

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out looking for worms. The rest of the day, the bird wanders around asking dump trucks and cows if they are his mother.

Are you my virgin? No, you are not my virgin. Where could my virgin be?

Doctors gave my mother five years to live.

My father called with the news. I heard the number and felt it bounce away from me. Immediately, I vowed not to count. To count was unseemly. To count was to accept a death that was unfair and unnecessary. We would fight back. We’d take those five years and double them, then, like lucky gamblers, double them again.

After the call, I sat on our terrace and tried to imagine being dead. By now, you’d think I’d have refined my thoughts on death, come up with something solid, a plank to walk across, a beam to hold my weight.

Instead, I dipped back to childhood, when I used to lie in bed at night and picture myself buried in a coffin, topped with a heavy stone, a lawn in need of mowing. Prone, I’d listen for familiar voices. Chatter or singing. Then I’d remember: You can’t hear when you’re dead, silly. You can’t talk or dream or see. You’re nothing. Nothing at all. But I couldn’t imagine a world without me anymore than I could stop thinking, any more than I could imagine what lay beyond outer space, or fathom a world without language. All these years later, I had nothing original to say about death, just the same old hash. I wanted to believe in the afterlife, reincarnation, the spirit world—who didn’t?—but as Dad said, If there really is a heaven, it must be a pretty crowded place.

In Mexico, where I lived for a year, I loved all the skeleton art from Day of the Dead. Dolls and crèches, T-shirts and woodcarvings. The Calaveras drank tequila, played trumpet, didn’t give a damn.

Great stocking stuffers, I used to think. Magnets for the fridge.

But maybe death wasn’t a happy skeleton. Maybe death was more like the mummies in Guanajuato, that terrible museum, where petrified bodies sagged and toothy faces howled and the museum’s masterpiece—the dead pregnant woman—had skin so loose it looked like a cluster of plastic shopping bags.

Here were the bodies, but where were the spirits? Why had no one designed a spirit museum? Or maybe they had. And people called it church.

When traveling with your parents to a big European city like Sevilla, bring at least three pink purses.

Wear cotton socks on your hands like opera gloves. Convince your parents you are the most trustworthy person to carry several hundred dollars worth of cash and travelers checks. Fuss until this happens.

If you travel by car, refuse to use a car seat. (None of the Spanish kids do.) Doodle on the city map with indelible pen. When your mother points out bulls lumbering in the fields, ask which is Ferdinand.

When you arrive at the hotel, jump on the bed for exercise. Hide under the blankets and pretend a lion is coming. Go to the bathroom and debate the finer points of the toilet. Discuss who will pee here and who will poop here and get a clear timetable for when all this might happen. When your mother suggests it might be more interesting to talk about something else, ask why.

Forget seeing La Giralda, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Head to the park for popcorn.

As you roll down the city streets, past the grandiose Moorish bell tower, past the vivid tile mosaics at the Plaza de Espana, point out the dog mess on the sidewalk. When an older woman in a gray robe and sturdy shoes passes by, announce in a loud voice: “Look, Mama. There’s a nun.”

At lunch, while the waiters rush between tables, practice your flamenco in the aisles by snaking your cupped hands through the air and smiling knowingly. When your mother shops for ceramics in Triana, the old gypsy quarter, wave your umbrella like a flag.

Ask your mother if the Spanish word for horse is “horse-o.” Ask her what the Spanish word for agua is. When she says agua is Spanish, ask her why.

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Back at the hotel, refuse to nap. Flicker the lights. Take photographs with your parents’ camera even though you don’t know how to focus. When you get dressed for dinner, wear three pairs of underwear. Insist the Barney pair go on top. Refuse to wash your face. Put deodorant on your toes.

Wear a necklace made of ziti.

At dinner, forget the tapas. They are all gross. Order cheese pizza. Hide under the table with the cigarette butts and the puddles from other people’s shoes. Point out the gum wad someone left behind. If you can reach the olive oil, make soup. When the pizza arrives, pick off the black specks and tomato chunks. Explain you like pizza but not tomato sauce. When the waiter says you are muy guapa, hide your face and pretend you’re shy so he will give you a stuffed animal or a key chain or, better yet, candy. If you pass gas, grin and say: “Buenos fart-es.” Laugh and repeat this joke. Don’t worry that this is the only Spanish you know.

At dinner, get giddy. Why not? You’re on vacation. Chant “I want to go now,” and bang the flower vase with your flan spoon and watch your father lunge for the check and your mother chug her Rioja. As you weave home through the Jewish quarter, past the tapas bars overflowing with young lovers dressed in black, all of whom look a lot happier than your parents, point to the full moon and ask: “Where are we?”

When your father replies, “We’re in Spain,” ask why.

When your mother rolls her eyes and says: “I’ve been wondering the same thing,” ask why.

Though it is hours past your bedtime (Spanish style), suggest a group elevator ride, even though your room is on the ground floor. When your father loses his temper, hide between your mother’s legs. Guilt your father into three bedtime stories. Ask for a drink, a Kleenex, a back scratch, a head scratch, a goodnight kiss, a Spanish kiss, a butterfly kiss, an Eskimo kiss. Call out “I love you” into the dark. If no one answers, yell, “Mama!” and if she doesn’t appear within ten seconds, yell again and again and again until your mother’s face appears before you, until her face lights up the night.

One morning, after dropping Madeline at daycare, I went back to the church where we’d gone to escape the wind. Alone in my pew, I listened to birds chat their news, letting time roll on without me.

This Mary had pale skin, flushed cheeks, thick brown hair that peeked out from under her golden shawl. Her dress was wavy, hippy even. She held Baby Jesus snug. Her expression was reassuring, not corny, not severe. Just seeing, knowing, resolved to see life through.

As no one knew where I was, the church felt like a hiding place, a sanctuary. I was free to talk to the Virgin, so I did. I reminded her I’d been here before. I reminded her it was hard to be a mother, though surely she already knew. Closing my eyes, I’d bear down on my wishes, like an iron pressing pleats. My mom. A baby. What we need here is a miracle. Actually two. Yes. Please, God. Mary. Break all the rules.

No sooner had I finished my prayer than I began to doubt myself. What was I thinking? Religion wasn’t pick-up basketball. You couldn’t drop in and play. Besides, the whole symbol of the Virgin Mary was fraught. Passive, chaste, the Virgin Mary had been used to keep women subservient and sexually shamed, yet with Madeline tucked in school and Peter home at his desk, it felt good to sift through my life, pretend someone with clout was listening. As I had no religion, I saw Mary in her simplest terms, a symbol of motherhood, a good mother, or any mother on a good day. I liked this Virgin, though she didn’t appear to have much of a following.

As spring came, as the wind slowed and the almond trees blossomed, I stopped into my church most mornings—always bearing my same two wishes. Sometimes I lit a candle. Sometimes I took notes. I told Jaime I’d found my virgin, but didn’t know her name. Neither did he. One morning, I went searching. It took a while, but when I found it printed in a church bulletin, I knew I’d met the perfect Virgin for a mother like me: La Virgen del Perpetuo Socorro.

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The Virgin of Perpetual Help.

In time, I gave up trying to imagine life without my mother. You couldn’t prepare to lose your mother any more than you could prepare to become one.

That spring, I signed up for driving lessons so I could finally learn to drive a stick-shift car. Like conquering the subjunctive or finding God, mastering a stick shift was another self-improvement project better done abroad.

My teacher, Carlos, spoke no English, and I didn’t know the Spanish words for gear, accelerator, stick, signal, lane, yield, pedal, merge, blinker, horn, shift, clutch, or break. I couldn’t read the street signs or convert kilometers, but none of that mattered to Carlos. We shook hands and headed straight for the highway.

With his crew cut and mirror shades, Carlos looked like George Clooney, only smaller. If he had a sense of humor, he kept it on ice. The car had two sets of pedals. When Carlos grabbed the wheel, I felt like we were two children sharing a pizza.

Carlos told me I needed to drive faster.

Carlos told me I needed to relax.

Jostling through the city, I tried not to think or see, as if somehow I’d drive better the less hard I tried. We passed boxy ladies carting sacks of tomatoes. We passed old men selling lottery tickets hung like laundry. Out of town, the highway resembled a cheap video game. Oil trucks. Farm animals.

Curves and construction. The sun was so bright it made my head ache.

Carlos looked up from his newspaper and muttered Mas rapido.

I rolled my eyes and pressed the accelerator. The speedometer read 100 kilometers an hour. Isn’t 100 of anything too fast? Looking down the highway, I conjugated verbs. I crash. You crash. He, she, or it crashes. It worried me the steering wheel was called the volante, from the verb volar, which means to fly or blow up.

Carlos said tenemos que quitar el miedo. We have to get rid of the fear.

I thought: Good luck, buster. You’re not the first one to try.

On the way home, I made a bet with myself I was pretty sure I could win: If you make it back today without crashing, you’ll get the baby. If you make it home, you are lucky, graced. If you make it home, your mother will meet your baby before cancer sweeps her away.

Ronda lay before us, perched on the hill. Down the highway, I drove, fast, then faster, until the moment ballooned and speed felt good, the way you can let everything go sometimes and be fearless, because if life ended that second you wouldn’t give a damn. I was glorious, airborne, brilliant, a woman in a car, driving in a foreign language. It seemed possible the Virgin was watching. It seemed possible she’d come along for the ride.

Fifteen minutes later, I landed safely back at the school. Checking my watch, I wondered how long I’d have to wait to collect my winning bet. Carlos helped me park, pulling hard on the wheel, yanking the emergency break.

There is a Spanish saying for such moments of glory, one that requires no subjunctive: Every man is entitled to turn his underwear into a kite.

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Maryanne Hannan

Overheard at a Big Box Hardware Store Electrocuted since I last saw you.

Fell off a three-story ladder. Be dead now, except for an angel, no kidding, dressed in blue.

I was frying, sizzled like bead lightning.

A runaway buzz saw. Until I noticed her, hanging midair, pointing to a pin-size patch of glittery ground—where I landed on a wave pure enough to drink. So peaceful, people say I went crazy up there. I don’t talk about it any more.

The angels know. Did I ever tell you about my husband, how twenty years after his death, I found Ahab’s words underlined in his college text: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.” Back then, if I’d seen an angel beckoning his inevitable end, would I have agreed to ride with him, on inexorable rails glittering like knives?

The worst part, for me, wasn’t the falling, or even the months in the hospital, but to slip back now, believe the old problems are real again.

The worst part for me was never flying.

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

Lauren Shadd

Bluegrass Among the tents and the portable showers, power cords and campers with awnings and string lights, the dually diesels and fifth-wheels, the avocado sixties van and the Airstream with pink painted flowers, there is a smattering of string music and laughter. It drifts on the smoke of cook fires in the half light, where the occasional slam of doors on the port-o-lets punctuates the white noise of feet on gravel, and even the latest show in the distant grandstand is winding down. When faces fade in the night I wander here, by the camps and the pockets of friends carved out among the pecan trees and the ruts of tires in the earth, when the soft chords of a hundred songs suspend in the air with the dew, and I am anonymous, knowing if this is not the center of things, I am at least close.

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Lindsey S. Frantz

Gas Line Fire, Estill County Before fire lit the sky, before the moon rose and the stars came out, it snowed—the first of the year. White gusted around cars and people, on pavement. Later, when the snowflakes rested, when the roads began to freeze, I saw fire touch the sky.

Not flames, an orange glow lit the bottoms of thick clouds in the distance. Light flickered, a giant candle—bright, eerily close.

Too far away to feel the heat.

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

Robb Jackson

Third Day of a Gale Every living thing must bend to this gale as it shrieks in from the northeast, howling as it fills an abyss somewhere nearby.

I struggle against its insistence, knowing that I’ll soon find shelter.

Pelicans, gulls & terns soar & dive in the wind— something like kids speeding downhill on bikes nearly out of control— smiling, but hanging on for dear life while rollers smash against the rocks, filling the air with spray, torn clouds, veils of mist strewn hither & yon.

I’ve always loved nor’easters—as a child I’d have miles of coast, all of Lake Erie to myself—no peopled intrusions.

I stand here by the salt sea now, remembering my childhood vows.

Spread-eagle, leaning straight into it, inviting wind & spray to cleanse every nook & cranny of my spirit—everything parasitic, all detritus, each hungry accusation, every care—anything that clings to me that isn’t me—blasts clear—I’m cleansed, free.

Round & round deliberately I spin—first one way, then the other— my outstretched arms like the needle on a compass pointing true, finding the way that makes me complete.

With no human witness, I am unshackled— I am polished smooth & hard like a living stone with a new name written on it, known only by me.

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REVIEW

ENTERING THE H OUS E OF AW E

by Susanna Childress • Western Michigan UP, 2011 REVIEWED BY KRISTIN GEORGE BAGDANOV

Picking up Susanna Childress’s second book of poems, Entering the House of Awe, is like

uncovering an heirloom in the attic. The book’s unique dimensions alone (7 x 10 inches) cause it to stand out on a shelf, while the winding and varied lines within signal to the reader that these poems will not be left alone, nor will they stay contained within the cover once they are unfurled.

Childress requires our trust to enter this book, yanking us around blind corners, pulling up short and changing scenery until she finally unveils the gripping and guttural truth that leaves us in jaw-wide wonder.

Perhaps one of Childress’s most notable feats as a poet is her capacity to hold the tension of a sentence or line perfectly until she makes the reader trip the wire. In “Just like Solomon,” a poem about the end of a relationship, “four years unwinding / like the tire swing twisted up tight and all of a sudden / let go,” we experience this sweeping destruction first in the form of the poem, which winds back and forth across the page, then again in the nauseating speed of the relationship’s demise. In fact, two-thirds of the poem is comprised of a single sentence that does not even stop for a breath before dialogue:

You

hold onto the sounds of this inside your mouth, the way you don’t let much of anything shrink away these days

though it goes and goes whether you like it or not: shock,

the blotched red couch, his mother that first Thanksgiving taking your picture over and over . . .

We cannot rest and cannot help but yearn for a resolution, especially as the speaker digs down, finally, to the root of their conflict, the “dark almond lodged in [her] throat,” and realizes her own culpability, preferring to “saw the place in half” over compromising.

Other poems, such as “The Lanterns,” unfold rather than unwind. This two-page poem comprised entirely of couplets enlarges as it progresses, with each metaphor blooming into a bouquet of intricate details before we alight upon the next. The speaker describes how she hears

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the awe of my voice at itself, spilling from the tender napkin of my throat, ticks and shirks of consonants, hums that tripped through each of the known vowels and words that were not, will never be, words. It doesn’t matter how things grew too bright, how fear etched its haggard lines under the sac of breath in my chest . . .

Each line leaves the reader rushing to the next to see what each new image will reveal as it resonates with and strengthens what precedes and follows. The story and detail contained in one metaphor alone is enough to keep me churning the image in my mind for the rest of the day, imagining, for instance, “what wide vats, / what lavalieres of words came, faster and blacker, banana leaves // shriveling over flame, canaries set loose in the kitchen . . . ” Childress’s book of poems overwhelms us with the heavy burden of witness but, unlike sensationalized reports and headlines, does not abandon us in our grief. “The Wry World Shakes Its Head,” a meditation on Isaiah 40, is a teeth-gritting narrative that grapples with how the Lord’s glory is revealed in our lives, how we can be comforted by the seemingly distant promise of Isaiah. For the speaker, The first time you see the rugged place become a plain is the moppy red hair of your mother’s retarded cousin Roy Dale, cropped, stern as a recruit, something of a joke atop his docile body: slack, spittled, set in the corner . . .

She wonders, “Where, then, to go from here? . . . // . . . not What should I cry out but What shouldn’t I?” In “Chloé Phones after Three Weeks Working at the Home,” we witness terrible acts of violence and injustice as relayed by Chloé to the speaker who, like us, searches for a response to these atrocities. But what can one say to the child raped by her stepfather? “There needs to be no right word There needs to be a wide hole a / whole mouth where the right word isn’t.” Then, in “What’s Done,” we watch “the women who pummel their children / in public. . . [the] Lady // at the airport flinging her spatula of a girl again and again . . . ” and want to shout out in protest or, rather, cry out to the Lord: “Split open the hazelnut under / our ribs Let there be enough to go around and around.” Childress leads us down these corridors of outrage, disgust, and stomach-churning guilt so that we might know our limits and recognize what we are capable of, that we might somehow learn the answer from He who “bends but a portion of our hearts / toward hell.”

It is not easy to enter this house of awe; once you take Childress’s hand and pass the threshold, you will not leave it unchanged. In these poems, we discover how broken stories can be reassembled, how sometimes the crying out is the answer, how poetry is both an act of discovery and of witness, how “telling, fashioned like a nest, is not the sound of a thing, but its hearth” (“Fetching”).

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BRYAN PARYS Our house has become a series of wordless mouths, digesting our voices, sometimes burping up the acid reminder of what we once sounded like. Those sounds are most often the heartburned prayers of my family and my church, asking for a miracle for my father. Often the request turns into a bold present tense, sometimes even going as far as thanking God for the miracle He’s about to do—Thank you for taking away this burden, thank you for hearing us. It is the spring of 1987, I am four, and that miracle has gotten steeper and steeper, until one day it is a cliff face, rain-slicked rocks slipping down, nothing even trying to go up. The closest thing to a miracle is that the hospital has honored my father’s request to be at home when it happens.

When my mother pulls our rumbling white Bronco up to the garage, my sister gets out without being asked and wrenches the door upward, its jaws squeaking and cracking as it prepares to swallow the chalky pill. For the last time, my father gets out of a car and climbs the set of stairs leading up to our lemon yellow house, my mother guiding him on one side, a rolling intravenous stand on the other.

She peels the screen door open, pinning it with her hip as she unlocks the front door, letting it lap all of us in. He waits as my mother strips the cushions off the woolen, brown couch in the living room and rips out the tongue of spring and mattress that is coiled inside. When the sheets are taut and pillows propped, she guides him over and lays him down, checking the connections and levels on the IV stand, its tubes like veins escaping the rot that is growing in the middle of his body. With tape and a square of gauze she secures a feeding tube three times the size of a drinking straw that is cinched to the side of his neck. It is not that he can’t open his mouth and receive food, but that three-quarters of his stomach is gone. She is a registered nurse, and so she is quick, thorough, letting habit hide the fact that she’s placing her husband on his deathbed.

The couch is ancient and noisy, though the body on top of it barely rustles its snapping springs and rusting mesh supports. He’s always on the left edge of the bed, the leash of his feeding tube not giving him much leeway, but it makes him easier to reach. His head is propped up so that he is facing the door, watching us enter and leave at whim, effortlessly performing what he now must think of as a miraculous action.

Because he can barely move, he becomes an object, human furniture. Or, maybe furniture becomes him, creating the idea that nothing is inanimate if we notice that everything has the power to ingest a soul, swallow its ghost. That couch, then, becomes the blurred lips between life and death. Each passing day he is more a part of the house as his body moves closer to the inanimate, his skin dying before him, invisibly flaking off and sinking into sheet and mattress. My father is a couch; the couch, an urn.

I am trying to figure out the quickest way to get to his side of the couch as I walk in from the dining room. I take stuttered paces in both directions, behind, in front, over, nothing feeling quite right. My mother is sitting with him, holding a mug of hot broth in one hand. They’re talking, but the words disappear before I can register their tones, let alone the shape of the words themselves, and the room

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feels suffused in a glow of silence. With her free hand, my mother pushes her brown hair over her ear, but most of it falls back into her face. She picks up what looks like a long lollipop stick with a small green sponge stuck to the end and dips it into the broth. She lifts it out, moves her hand up and down as if she is trying to guess the weight of the object, letting a few drops fall back into the steaming murk. My father opens his mouth slowly, as I get a little bit closer, still not sure if the route I’ve chosen is the way to get the nearest to him. It is during these feeding times that I can see his mouth the clearest, can see how the act of opening and closing, letting things in and out is tiring for him, his front-heavy glasses tipping slightly over the slope of his nose. But he is not speaking here—words and broth will not fit together. My mother rests the foam square on his tongue and presses lightly to make sure the salty liquor comes out and moisturizes his cracking tongue. His head cranes upward, guiding the broth down into a dark, wordless throat.

Even though I’m trying to stop it, I can feel this day—like every day since he came home—turning into a static slide, a silent projection of where my father is and what he is doing. Or, rather, what he is not doing because that’s all he can do. The lens of my eye is trying to capture him, record his every last move, but I blink and he stays put; I blink again and I’ve looked away from the couch, staring at a glazed clay penny bank in the shape of a duck. Its beak is closed, but is chipping off the top, carving a new, awkward mouth. I pick it up, lifting its head back, feeling how heavy the pounds of pennies in its stomach make it sink like a footprint into the thick, green carpet. Even though it is broken, we keep it here in a corner by the doorway into the dining room. Through the crack in the brittle beak a thin metal rod is exposed, an iron bone that keeps its mouth shut while we feed it our extra, unnecessary change, expecting it all back when it amounts to something again, and we drain its worth.

If my eyes are a camera, then I feel overexposed; the images that populate my house being all the things that surround the object of my father. I continue to circle and haunt the couch, until I’m standing by him as my mother continues dipping and feeding. Somehow I’ve already forgotten how I got here. I look back at where I started, hoping there will be a row of indentations tracking what I did so that I can remember it later when I want to return.

I want to pick up his thinning wrist, to see if the blanket below carries the impression of his arm, or if it is so light that there is no crease at all, the blanket already numb to the memory of a body part resting on it. I run a finger over the lattice-ridged strip of medical tape that holds the feeding tube in his neck in place, its crisp plasticity a reminder that it is not skin, that I am not touching my father.

It looks as if we are sticking him back together, or keeping him from cracking further until our patchup job is an empty spool of tape, a pinched bag of saline with a tube no longer connected to a body.

As for houses, my family has had three all together, although that togetherness splits with each move.

First, we live in half a house on Jefferson Street, where my little brother Caleb will be brought after he is born. Here, Caleb and I are bathed in a kitchen sink, warmed by a pot-bellied stove, and sleep in the same room as my older sister Allyson. One night I have a dream that I am flying down the stairs, moving so slowly it is as if I am haunting, not flying, my body parallel to the decline of the stairs.

My shadow slinks below me, its form staggers like an accordion as it slips over the lip of each step.

I am aware that my father is walking around, though even in the dream I can’t find evidence of his movements, the timbre of words blown beneath his moustache. The dream becomes a tripped looping where I keep getting halfway down the stairs, just to the point where maybe my parents are talking in the kitchen, but as I approach I am suddenly starting over at the top of the stairs again, rounding the corner from my bedroom. I do not know if there is an end to the dream, or if the loop is meant to go nowhere forever.

We move down the block to Elm Street, and it is meant to be temporary; just a next step towards the house my parents envision for their family’s future. After my father gets sick, we think he’ll beat it, that God will provide like He always seems to. So, when they put a down payment on this house,

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having the master bedroom up a flight of stairs doesn’t seem like a bad idea to my dad, that reaching that high might only be possible for a fraction of the short time he lives here. And though they are making payments to own this house, it is not ours in the way my parents want. They want to build, to shape something of their own that begins with them and, maybe, never ends—it’ll be a space where every couch, chair, crumpled receipt, tracked-in dirt speck will have a story, a heritage, and it will be ours it carries. When one of us sits on that future chair, it’ll be an extension of our bodies, our eyelashes and lint fusing into a symbiosis of sparkling biology and inanimation, with nothing but our buried shadows to separate us.

Not long after we move into the Elm Street house my parents take a leap of faith and buy land up on Meredith Center Road—literally just down the street from a Christian school that is barely older than my sister, and where they are hoping to save enough money for all three of us to attend.

It was as if from puberty to thirty, Jesus slept, and all that time in between is some endless dream.

There is no record of Him growing armpit hair, of him wondering what life would’ve been like if he hadn’t grown up with a stepfather, of his roaring twenties when he learned to live without ‘a place to lay his head.’ His childhood is a spectral etching of imagination where he could’ve asked about his origins, his heritage, his identity. The writers of the gospels seem to wonder the same thing.

Matthew opens his version with a genealogy that traces Jesus back to Abraham and the creation of Israel. Luke places his genealogy—this one going all the way back to Adam—in between the only canonical story of Jesus’ youth and when he is baptized at age thirty.

In this one account, Jesus is twelve, and has traveled with a large group of family and friends to Jerusalem for Passover. When they leave, Jesus stays behind, and the parents of the Messiah don’t notice for a whole day. They turn back and find him in the Temple courts, theologizing with priests. When they tell him that they’ve been anxiously looking for him for days, he asks, “Why were you searching for me?” Here, a father is looking for a son, who at this point is just that, a son, not Son, and so Jesus sounds ignorant of the fact that parents would rather not lose sight of their children. But then, all searching has to stem from a loss, from walking away from the thing we valued most, assuming it would follow us wherever, whenever, and then we kill ourselves trying to figure out why we can’t hear that voice anymore, can’t even see a shifting shadow or a fading impression. So we scour frantically, even if all we find are the shiny spots on the floor where the furniture of the past once stood. Before it was moved, before it was sold, before it was left on the curb for a week, and someone drives by, thinks about picking it up, but then, it rained yesterday, so she keeps driving.

Before his father can answer his first question, he follows up with another, and then, duh, it’s so obvious: “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”

The night my father dies, I am not in his house. My grandmother, who we all call Nanny, is babysitting me, and in a rare case, Caleb is not with me. Though he is two years younger than me, we’re often grouped together like twins, or one person even, in light of the fact that my sister is so much older. For six years, it was just Mom, Dad, and Allyson. As my father’s time runs out, my mother needs more and more time—with him, with making preparations. The kids then, are being watched by a number of sitters, but seldom are the three of us under the same roof. Caleb and I are at the Tucker’s or Nanny’s, and Allyson is at the Chisholm’s. We are listed as Bryan, Caleb, and Allyson, the boys and Allyson or, more often, Allyson and the boys; that and always separating us, a divided house, houses dividing us.

In the late afternoon of May 14, Nanny is unpacking a bag I have with me, and I realize that I will not be sleeping at home tonight. I do not know where my siblings are, nor do I know the reason why my mother won’t be picking me up in a few hours, or if there is something that is keeping her from doing it.

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

The inside of Nanny’s house is always dark, the sun surprising me when a breeze briefly parts a curtain and cuts a slice of light onto the cherry-stained wood paneling, day breathing in, night breathing out, the exhalation always lasting longer than the pulling in. I can’t sit still, and for some reason I keep running between her one bedroom and the living room around the corner. I bend myself endlessly on that division between bed and living, stopping abruptly in the middle of each room and turning about-face as if I had hit a wall that wasn’t there, or I was tied to a giant elastic, and there is only so far I can go before I’m snapped back. When I first arrived, Nanny let me open an amber glass candy dish in the living room and pick out a butterscotch or a peppermint. I wait until she isn’t looking, answering yet another phone call that causes her to turn and hunch away from me, folding her neck down into the receiver and speak in a zipped whisper, and then I try lifting the half-shell cover without tinging the glass edge too loudly, or crinkling the dead skin wrapper that shrouds the candy.

When we turn in for the night, I lay on one side of the bed, the sugar still buzzing my thoughts into a speeding, itching blur. I squirm under the prickly quilt, pushing my body up and down, trying in vain to use my weight to dig into a mattress that feels like a plank of wood with an old sheet wrapped tightly around it. Nanny is either asleep, or understands the discomfort and doesn’t tell me

to stop my fussing. When sleep comes, it is as surprising as that thin burst of sun, and so when the phone rings the next morning and my eyes shoot open, I can’t really believe that I’ve ever actually been asleep. Her tone is hushed, but she can only lean her body so far away from me in this full size bed, so the mutterings are louder, more frantic. But then there is a gasp that breaks her tone completely and she is covering her mouth, shaking, and I get up, start running around the edge of the bed, then out around the corner into her, not my, not my father’s, living room, and I stop completely when I hit the uninterrupted blackness.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, “ . . . the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” I am the son of man, not capitalized, of a man with no place to lay a headstone. I do have a place to lay my head.

But, big deal, right? What is sleep but the amount of time we put aside to forget? It is a drug that none of us ever recovers from—our eyelids get heavier until one day they are not like morning-drawn

curtains but doors to a bank vault, and then it’s that thing people call eternal sleep.

But, then we dream, and Hamlet, the ghost-talker, said that was the rub. Before we wake, rubbing crust from our eyes, dreams try to remind us of the things we were sleeping to forget. The waifish images haunt our rest; lies that walk around and have mouths that tell us we can fly and gather ashes, taking back what should’ve been ours.

My father has no headstone, no plot where a rock sticks up jagged as if the grassy gums of the earth are cutting crooked, marbled teeth. He wanted his ashes spread over the property he and my mother had purchased and planned to pour a concrete foundation on, and from there, encourage growth. He bought the land before he ever knew why he had to pop Rolaids so often—over twenty-five acres for $17,000. With a chainsaw my mother had given him for Christmas, he set about clearing the land himself, having a gravel driveway laid down over the eighth of a mile stretch snaking up to the plot. When he’d carved a chunk out of the darkened forest’s stomach, my mother started packing picnics and bringing us all up to play house on our land. After finishing her sandwich one afternoon, she walks over the land and climbs up a tree on the periphery, and with one hand hooked around the trunk like a banister, she waves, yelling to her children, her husband, “This is the view from the second floor! From our master bedroom!”

When he dies, she sells the property, knowing this jilted square of earth is just a myth. But not quite a myth, as that suggests a past, memories built on top of each other like post-and-beams, clapboarding their way to myth, legacy. No, this is a stunted myth, peppered with the burnt fragments of a future.

Her one condition to the owners is that every year on May 15th, she be allowed to drive up the soon-tobe-paved driveway and walk the edge of the land, praying, crying, and singing out-of-tune, her shoes sinking into the soft earth as if she was trying to plant him, keep him from blowing away farther.

Since it was sold, I visit this would’ve-been spot once, but it is only by chance. I am in fourth grade at Laconia Christian School. When my father was alive, they had racked their brains with ideas on how to pay my tuition. It never occurred to them that, because of the life insurance policies in my father’s name, it would never be a financial burden. Three years ago, my mother remarried a man named

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

James. I am playing basketball for a city league team named St. James. Eric Frazier is on the same team, his cowlicked black hair framing the enormous Rec-Specs he wears during games. My position is the center, since, for the first time, I am the tallest kid in the room. “Hey Parish! Parish! Pass the ball!” my teammates yell during practice, modifying my last name to fit with Robert Parish, the 7’1” center for the Boston Celtics. In the middle of the season, Eric announces that he’ll be hosting a team sleepover at his house. They are all public school kids, and so they are all strangers to me. My mother convinces me that it would be good if I went, and, she says, did you know he lives on the property that was almost ours?

When our van pulls up the driveway, I am only vaguely aware that, amongst the crab grass and rotting piles of leaves, my father’s ashes are surrounding me. This knowledge mixed with the anxiety I feel about having to talk to these other kids keeps me silent. There is pizza, cake, a plastic indoor basketball hoop. The talking around me doesn’t stop, but is never directed at me. Alex Bailey won’t shut up. I want to yell, Everyone out of my house, but instead I pick a corner of the living room and wait for someone to remember to pass the ball to me. Brian Bolduc finally sees me, yells, Heads up, Parish!

Here, on the land of my father, no one has any idea who I am, and they won’t call me by my real name.

That night we fill the living room floor with our sleeping bags, and I have trouble finding a space for mine, carrying it around like a snapped chrysalis. I step over Alex, who hasn’t stopped talking, and my heel rolls over his blanketed foot. “What the hell, Parish?” he says, before going back to rambling.

There is a small space around the corner of the couch, so I lay it down, wrapping it around splayed torsos. I crawl in, shivering and press my head against the fabric of the couch leg, and though it feels unnatural, like it doesn’t fit, I don’t move. I am freezing and wide awake, listening as a few snores begin, Alex still talking to no one, shut up Alex, me not sleeping, me conjuring cartoon shapes of ghosts outside the window.

For thirty years, Jesus didn’t ask anyone to follow him, or ask them to leave their houses behind and wander the known world, trying to find someone, anyone, that would know who he was. He didn’t tell anyone about his bigger parentage, about the fact that even though he was raised in a good home, it never felt truly his own, something he could inhabit for very long. “Who does he think he is?” his disciple Simon might’ve thought, “The Messiah?” Instead he waited, kept wandering, doing, never speaking, and then in Matthew 16, he asks Simon, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon says, “You are the Messiah.” And, instead of breathing a huge sigh of relief and thinking Phew! I was beginning to think I was alone on this one, he changes Simon’s name to Peter, which means “the Rock”, saying that the church, his house, will be built on this rock. But then he tells Peter to keep his declaration a secret. What Simon says, Simon believed, and then his heritage was reset, swallowed.

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Ashley Caveda

Sons of Thunder

“ . . . to [James and John] he gave the name Boanerges, which means Sons of Thunder . . . ” —Mark 3:17

I. James.

Your voice was stuck at birth like ambered flies, Wharton’s Jelly wrapped tight around your throat.

The doctor clamped and cut the fibrous cord that tried to choke the life it gave. Your chest contracted, drew in breath for tiny sobs.

Dear timid brother, take my hand and squeeze.

You’re not alone. Together let’s scale stairs again and hide ourselves in books and games, in cardboard houses, throwing stuffed rabbits and plastic-eyed bears in animal wars.

But screeching brakes roughed up our spinal cords; legs refused their work. James, before you bite them hard enough to index every print with matching molars, place my equal scars within their tracks, remember that they fit.

Brother of the nucha-collar, of cords that tie you down, forgive the flesh that’s numb when it should feel—forget what might have been.

Don’t cling to knots; expand your lungs and breathe.

Be still, so I can cut the cords away.

II. John.

She rocked her half-moon belly, cradling folds of your unborn flesh, nine months of days tucked safely as Bibles within their pews.

The Lord Himself named you John before you were born: the child whom our mother loved.

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

Dear reckless brother, wandering by night— our parents ignorant and unafraid— roads aren’t for games, nor knives for child’s play.

Your bedroom locks will keep you safe inside, from shards of glass you shattered with your fist.

But screeching brakes compounded who you are: a coma trapped you in your head—nine days with no release, no glass to break, no key to steal. You spent your time recording wrongs, forgetting, John, your name means you are loved.

You perform all your miracles in red, unsettled dust. John the Magnificent remembers every slight, can turn water into bile. Watch him as he spites the world— just watch him as he saws it all in half.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Jennifer Atkinson is the author of three collections of poetry. Her fourth book, Canticle of the Night Path, recently won Free Verse’s New Measure Prize and is due out in Fall of 2012. Individual poems have appeared in various journals including Field, Image, Witness, New American Writing, and Cincinnati Review. She teaches in the English Department and the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia.

Kristin George Bagdanov earned her BA in literature at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and is heading to Colorado State University this fall to pursue her MFA in Poetry. Her chapbook, We Are Mostly Water was published this spring by Finishing Line Press. She is excited to move to Fort Collins, the home base of Ruminate Magazine, and to experience life outside of California.

She is a 2012-2015 Lilly Graduate Fellow, has a cat named Gothmog, and a new husband named Levi.

Ashley Caveda has wanted to be a writer ever since she discovered The Chronicles of Narnia as a little girl. In June of 2012, she will receive her MFA from The Ohio State University. Currently, she is working on a novel-length memoir that explores how the 1990 car accident that left her paralyzed affected her life, as well as the lives of the rest of her family. She owns two pairs of Hunger Games inspired earrings and is pretty certain that Conan O’Brien is her soulmate. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Superstition Review, and her fiction has appeared in the online edition of Monkeybicycle.

Colleen Clayton: Self-described cheese-monger, tire-flattener, and middle-aged problem child. (Also, she likes to write stuff!) She holds an MFA from the NEOMFA and teaches writing at Youngstown State University. Colleen writes primarily for teens but occasionally writes for “grownups.” Her young adult contemporary debut novel What Happens Next will be out October 2012 through Poppy, a teen imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. www. colleenclayton.com Jonathan M. Devin is a writer, musician, and student, currently studying English at Liberty University. His poetry has earned him publication in LAMP magazine and The Shangri-La Shack Literary Arts Journal. In his poetry, he attempts to articulate the small or marginalized occurrences of life and convey them in a way that captures their beauty and significance. He enjoys independent films, contemporary poetry, dark coffee, and New England Patriots football. While he currently lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, his heart will always reside in the foothills of western Massachusetts. After graduation, he plans on writing and teaching literature.

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ISSUE 24 Summer 201 2

Paul Flippen was born in Berlin, Germany, and as an Army Brat, bounced around between Germany, Texas, and California at the whim of the Pentagon. He earned a BFA and a BA, both from the University of Texas.

He then acquired a substantial amount of student loan debt, earning an MFA and an MS, all from Pratt Institute, New York. Paul is happily married to a very patient wife, Jennifer, and tries to spend as much time as possible with his daughter, Claire, and son, Isaac, with whom he rides bicycles when there isn’t too much snow outside in Fort Collins, Colorado. To see more of his work, please visit www.paulflippen.com.

Lindsey S. Frantz is a freelance editor living in Eastern Kentucky with her husband, Vince, and their red doberman, Juno. She loves to crochet and knit. She has been previously published in Aurora Literary Arts Journal, Paradigm, and Main Street Rag’s Villain’s Anthology. You can peek into her brain by visiting www.lindseysfrantz.blogspot.com.

Katie Taylor Frisch holds an MA in textiles, clothing, and design and a BA in psychology of religious belief and women’s studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the current Fiber Artist in Residence at the Lux Center for the Arts and is the owner/designer of FeedingTheLake.com where she sells one-of-a-kind handbound books.

She is currently in the middle of The Calendar Project, a one-year task of documenting each day by making a nuno felted fabric, which you can observe on her blog ftlake.blogspot.com. Katie is also a part of The 815 Arts, a community venue of 2 Pillars Church aimed at serving the local artists and musicians of Lincoln, Nebraska.

M. Brett Gaffney graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University with a BA in English where she interned with national journal REAL and is now pursuing an MFA in poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She would like to dedicate this publication to her Grammy who always kept the Holy Spirit alive in her heart.

Maryanne Hannan thinks a life of poetry is never wanting to say you’re retired. She lives with her husband in upstate New York; they have two married daughters and one grandson. Her poems have been published in Christianity and Literature, The Christian Century, Anglican Theological Review, Poet Lore, and Gargoyle. She is a contributing editor at Cerise Press: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture.

Robb Jackson is currently Regents Professor and Haas Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Robb’s poetry originates from his journal writing practice and is informed by close observation of the place he now calls home, Corpus Christi, Texas.

He also works extensively with addicts and alcoholics in a courtordered rehabilitation program where he teaches residents poetry and

journaling techniques as part of their recovery. Robb’s first book of poetry, Living on the Hurricane Coast, contains poems that stem from his transition from his northern roots to a new life along the Gulf Coast of south Texas. Child Support was written over a twenty year period during and after his separation and divorce from his four children’s mother. Crane Creek, Two Voices, which contains poems by Robb and Vanessa Furse Jackson, was published by Fithian Press in summer 2011.

Christina McDaniel writes: “I’m currently working on my studies in English and creative writing at Oakland University. When I’m not buried under a pile of assigned books or research papers, I spend much of my spare time writing literature that addresses the emotional and social challenges of living with long-term illness. I have an affinity for Russian authors and Romantic painters. I live in the Metro-Detroit area with my parents and seven cats; one of the cats enjoys Sunday stroller rides around the block. My work has been previously published in Polaris Literary Journal.”

Meggie Monahan studied poetry at the University of Houston where she served as Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, Sonora Review, NANO Fiction, and elsewhere. Meggie was named after a 1980’s miniseries character and has a lot of nicknames, her current favorite being “Lunchbox.” The poem in this issue is for her sister and brother, the music-maker and the dreamer of dreams.

Bryan Parys is inspired constantly, though most people refer to this as ‘being distracted.’ Here are some obsessions he can’t do without: plants, Assam tea, background music. His wife and year-old son are pretty great, too. A New Hampshire native, he proudly sports flannel and permanent stubble. He writes, edits, and currently teaches creative writing at Gordon College. His freelance has appeared in The Good Men Project, The Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, and The Silent Ballet, but this is his first publication in a literary journal. He lives in Amesbury, MA, but he’s moved eleven times in eight years, so it’s safe to assume he’s already somewhere else.

Fourth River, Big Muddy, and The Penwood Review, she has been writing as long as she can remember—a fact that can be affirmed by the volume of childhood stories and poems her parents are patiently waiting for her to reclaim from their attic.

Lauren Shadd is a 2001 graduate of Queens University of Charlotte, who works in the insurance industry and writes in her spare time.

Every September she and her husband travel to Winfield, Kansas, for a music festival, which they enjoy so much they chose to be married there in 2010. She enjoys the poems of Cathy Smith Bowers and Ted Kooser, and enjoyed her first poetry publication in 2011 at Charlotteviewpoint.org.

David Spiering writes: “I have published three chapbooks and one full length collectiion with Sol Books of Minneapolis called My Father’s Gloves. I have published work in Poetry East, The Chiron Review, and many other places. I’ve worked as co-op baker, natural foods clerk, produce clerk, cook, and university English teacher.”

Jessica Wilbanks lives in a housing co-op in downtown Houston with her cat Sam, her boyfriend Jake, and eight other people. She received her MFA degree in creative nonfiction at the University of Houston, where she served as nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, The Puritan, Sojourners, and Relevant Magazine. She recently traveled to Nigeria to conduct research for a narrative nonfiction book about Pentecostal Christianity.

Lili Wright is author of the memoir Learning to Float and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, and many literary journals. Most recently, her work was noted for distinction in Best American Essays 2010 and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010.

A graduate of Columbia’s MFA program, she teaches writing at DePauw University in Indiana, where she lives in a yellow Victorian house with her husband and their two children. Her essay brings together several of her passions: travel, studying Spanish, and an island in Maine.

Jill Reid lives among the pines and bayous of Pineville, Louisiana, with her four-year-old daughter, Ellie, and too many books to count. Though she lived in Texas while completing her MA at Baylor and spent a semester abroad in England, her roots are in rural Louisiana, a place that flavors many of her poems. A professor of English at Louisiana College, Jill is also a poetry candidate in Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program where she just completed her first poetry residency at Whidbey Island and fell in love with the local coffee and the view. Though her poetry has only recently begun to appear in journals like Relief, The

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LAST NOTE

THOUGHTS ON HEIRLOOMS FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

I want to pass on to my children the memory of spending summers in my great-grandfather’s cottage in Pembroke, Maine. I want them to treasure, as much as I do, the nights with no electricity or indoor plumbing, with only a fireplace and conversation for entertainment.

I want to instill an appreciation for small things—the crisp frost on the blueberries above the coast, the smell of cold saltwater crushed against blue shale rocks, the crackling of seaweed between small fingers. If I could pass on anything, it would be these moments.

Jonathan M. Devin POETRY Two days after my grandmother passed away, my mother handed me her gold crucifix. I was always told the necklace would go to me, but I didn’t know how important it would be in revitalizing my faith. When I held it close, I could smell her and the perfume she wore. It was then that I knew everything was forgiven, that she was finally free. I prayed to God for the first time in a long while that night, fingering the heirloom like a rosary.

M. Brett Gaffney POETRY I’ve been working on my will these past few years—a living will, to be precise. Yes, I am twenty-five, and no, I don’t own anything of value, but I have learned a few small things since I have been alive—thoughts and questions I’d like to pass on to my loved ones.

Being a poet, I have confidence in the endurance of words over time and hope that the pages of this slowly growing book will provide some questions, and maybe some answers, to those I leave behind, whenever that may be.

Kristin George Bagdanov BOOK REVIEW Without words embedding an item in a personal history, there is no legacy, just an item, be it a dish, a ring or whatever. As time passes, the stories get lost, so the job of the living is to keep the stories and artifacts connected. My grandson was recently confirmed. He took Francis, a beloved great aunt’s name for his Confirmation.

I planned to use the bowl she bought for me on her first trip to Ireland for the fruit salad at the party afterward. My daughter suggested that we use my mother’s china plate for the cheese. Then we put the lettuce and tomatoes on my mother-in-law’s rose platter, thereby managing to honor these three women, two of whom never lived to meet the young man of the hour. And now these items will not be heirlooms whose memories are too soon lost, but part of a vibrant collective memory.

Maryanne Hannan POETRY My grandmother’s home in Connecticut was filled with antiques, but the silver fish is what I wanted most. It’s actually half a fish, concave, a two-foot-long pewter mold for serving tomato aspic, the kind of weird food Betsy DuBois preferred (food like melba toast, chutney, and stuffed eggs.) Like the best heirlooms, this fish is the

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perfect marriage of person and thing. Grandmother lived on the water, and on summer afternoons, she used to swim so far out into Long Island Sound that we could barely see her bobbing head. With her tight gray curls and sporty figure, she was a silver fish. Now this keepsake hangs in my kitchen, as it did in hers, reminding me how every woman needs to swim away sometimes—if only to remember why she wants to swim back.

Lili Wright NONFICTION I cooked eggs again, on cast iron. With butter. With bacon fat. My parents did not own the pan, but it has been passed down, through the arms of yard sales. With each egg comes another thin, viscous layer that says no, that says we will not stick. Most of my pans are Wagner Ware--iron ore originating from Lake Erie, and a product so pure, the aisles of modern kitchen stores don’t know what it’s like to wait so long for meaning that its surface cleans itself slick.

Bryan Parys NONFICTION Somewhere in my mother’s house there is a set of china meant for me, perhaps a piece of jewelry handed down from her mother’s mother, but the real heirlooms in my family are less tangible. The things that have been passed down are stories by C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle, which my mother read to my brothers and me when we were children, the caramel icing she makes for our birthday cakes every year, the prayers I whisper before I fall asleep at night.

Ashely Caveda POETRY Funny, my (now deceased) English father-in-law gave me an ancient leather-bound, folio-sized Baskerville Bible with its wood 18th century Bible box as a gift during one of my visits to England after I was married (marriage #2 I might add). He gave it to me because he knew how much it would mean to me. I’ve always seen it as a token of his approval of my marriage to his eldest daughter. It sits in its box at the foot of our bed. I take it out and read it once in awhile and realize that I am, at best, its steward for a time.

Robb Jackson POETRY When I think of heirlooms, I think of music. My dad was a huge ABBA and Blondie fan. And whenever I hear the Johnny Nash song “I Can See Clearly Now,” I think of my mother. She played that .45 record all the time. When I hear that song, I think of a warm afternoon nap, the sun shining through the window onto a Snoopy pillowcase, the low hum of a distant vacuum, and the comfort of knowing that my mother was just in the other room. Nowadays, I play a lot of music in the car; running my kids to and from their various activities. I hope when my kids are grown that when they hear Fiona Apple, Damien Rice, Regina Spektor, or The Beatles, they think of me.

Colleen Clayton NONFICTION

Paul Flippen. In Bloom. Ink, watercolor, gouache, tempera, acrylic & transfer on paper. 15 x 15 inches.

Paul Flippen. Close Reading. Ink, watercolor, tempera, acrylic & transfer on paper. 15 x 15 inches.