Issue 25: Unraveling The Dark by Ruminate Magazine

POET RY N ONFICTIO N F ICTIO N VIS UAL ART +

wanting Whitman to be read over my grave • Temple Cone finding my way back to books • Tarn Wilson how a man without a shadow isn’t really there • Tony Woodlief chasing the human figure • Ivan de Monbrison 2012 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize Judged by Li-Young Lee WINNER: NICOLE ROLLENDER’S “NECESSARY WORK”

25 ISSUE

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ruâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse; to meditate; to think again; to ponder Ruminate is a quarterly magazine of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith. Ruminate was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstrokeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;longing for the significance they point us toward. Please join us.

FRONT COVER Aubrey Allison. Introspective. Digital photograph. OPPOSITE PAGE Francis DiClemente. Sunday Afternoon Street. Gelatin silver print.

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

senior editor

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CONTENTS

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

4 5 28 58 60

FI CT I ON

POET RY

Tony Woodlief The Dead Boy

Nicole Rollender Necessary Work Prelude

Robert McKean Landscape Painting

Temple Cone What I Meant by Joy James Crews For Those Weary of Prayer Calling

8 23

NONFI CT I ON

10 11

Matthew Roth My Father Goes Out with a Chain in His Hand

Mitchell Untch Autumn

Shann Ray Invocation

Jane Hertenstein Seeking the Elusive

Tarn Wilson A Narrative Break: On Reading after Crisis

R EV I EWS 54

Kelly Michels Static In The Dark

Harry Bauld When You Grow Up Catholic

Becca J.R. Lachman Wait

Cover

Laurie Lamon I stopped writing the poem

Gary J. Whitehead Warren Carolyn Moore What Euclid’s Third Axiom Neglects to Mention about Circles Wesley Rothman Long After My Grandfather’s Death

V I S UAL ART

42 52

Rita Jones The Dawn That Comes Walking: A Review of American Masculine: Stories by Shann Ray

29-32 Back Cover

Inside Front Cover Inside Back Cover

Aubrey Allison Introspective Matthew Ballou Lamentations 3 Verse 2 Lamentations 3 Verses 17 & 18 Ivan de Monbrison Selected Works Selected Works Francis DiClemente Sunday Afternoon Street Dad: Side Angle

EDITOR’S NOTE

“Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.” —Madeleine L’Engle A Ring of Endless Light

In preparing for this issue, we came across Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2010 lecture “Smile or Die” in which she explores the more insidious side of our society’s obsession with remaining positive. Many of us have experienced the admonition she identifies to keep our dispositions “cheerful.” We might have even heard this in spiritualized terms—as though God offers more love, comfort, and direction to people who exist in a state of perma-cheer, even to the point that we might refuse to look with sober reflection at the real circumstances in our character, spirit, and relationships near and far. But in this issue of Ruminate, through word and image, we invite you to consider shadows; to look squarely, without fear, with honesty and compassion at the things we might rather avoid. And so we present the work of Ivan de Monbrison. In an interview with Benjamin van Loon earlier this year, Monbrison stated: . . . the artist is hunting whatever is hidden in him, waiting for it to come out. It is very strange. Sometimes you work for days and days, and nothing comes out. Then, for some reason, when you’re angry and depressed—inside of you, you can feel that this energy is coming to the surface, and then this energy comes alive on the paper or the canvas.” (Anobiom Lit, Jan. 4, 2012). We hope that the inclusion of these images will function as visual psalms, poems of lament, confusion, and of deep ambivalence in its truest sense. May you find in them meditations on how we are, each of us, a marriage of glory and grime, saints and sinners—one. We are also pleased to share a powerful example of contemporary gothic literature in Tony Woodlief’s short story “The Dead Boy.” This genre of literature (from Bram Stoker and Emily Brontë to Flannery O’Connor and Toni Morrison) is known for its ability to address the eerie or uncanny moments we can’t quite name and the things we repress or deny. Woodlief works skillfully within the gothic genre, giving us ghost-like images of the toll that horrific guilt can take on those we love. This issue also features the winning and finalist poems from the 2012 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. We were honored to have renowned poet Li-Young Lee serve as our finalist judge for the Prize, and we congratulate Nicole Rollender for winning first place with her poem “Necessary Work.” Rollender’s poem gives us truthfully poignant and contrasting images of life and death, like “the beautiful plum falling / from its long branch, then sweetly decomposing.” She carefully shows us the importance of contrast, how a light in the middle of the day can go unnoticed but shines vividly in the dark of night. Like Rollender, other contributors in this issue also use truth to unravel the dark. In his poem “Calling” (where we happily discovered the title phrase for this issue), James Crews plays with the truth behind our words saying, “If I say I see a heron lifting off / hours before dawn, I mean I see / a long, blue piece of me unraveling / from the dark . . .” Speaking the truth about our shadows isn’t easy. It’s why we must confide in those we love, telling them If I say this, please know that I really mean this. Much like the recognition of our saint/sinner state and the power of truth-telling, the arts have a way of piercing through the heavy shadows and the light perma-cheer that can plague us; they unravel the dark in order that we may better gather the light. And gather the light we will: like Laurie Lamon watching a video of ocean darkness erupt with an octopus giving birth, like Shann Ray witnessing his wife tucking their daughters into bed and the way she touched her lips to the inside of their wrists. Like Harry Bauld’s words “morning is still a cello / No one has even taken out of the case . . .” and Becca JR Lachman, who says, “I have seen things shine. Most days, this is enough . . .” It’s true. There are octopuses giving birth, and mothers kissing their children, and new mornings that have never been taken out of the case. And we have all seen things shine. With hope, Stefani Rossi & Brianna Van Dyke

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RUMINATE READERS & CONTRIBUTORS ON UNRAVELING THE DARK Send us your notes for Issue 26 to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. We love hearing from you!

FROM YOU I often go gray on overcast days, my mind an extension of the clouded sky. I lie in bed, open-eyed in false darkness, and wait for the weather to break. In time I get up, put on the kettle (a ceramic mug in my microwave). I drink tea and listen to sad, sad songs. I conjure tears and consider my face in the mirror. My eyes dark with shadows, my cheeks hot and pink. I look haunted yet lovely. Poor me, poor me. I curl on the couch like an oversized shrimp, and my hound dog nudges my arm. “What’s wrong?” her eyes ask. “It’s not even raining.” I begin to get bored. Bored with myself, bored with my sadness. I open something that takes me elsewhere: a book, a door, a terrible movie. The storm begins when I disappear. Elizabeth Derby CHARLOTT ESV IL L E, V IRG INIA Somewhere, in the yard I grew up in, there waits a cylinder of darkness, a coffee can full of the absence of light and memory. I know I filled it with something and that I planned to open it again, years later, to know what I knew then. I dig and I dig. There are roots, soil, stones beneath the woven turf. There are things in that capsule waiting to see the light. Gary Whitehead POETRY The darkness. It can appear daunting, but I know now that even in the deep darkness a light can be found. I’d like to think that Light in the darkness is G-d, the G-d turned man, turned Jesus, the One who walked among us bearing our illnesses, sharing our doubts and heartaches . . . yet overcame in truth and love. The beauty lies in closing one’s eyes and silently seeing, knowing that behind our closed lids, what we see is not the deepest darkness. There’s light. Still. Rachel Hester DURHAM , NO RT H CARO L INA Recently, while researching James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I managed to locate the last of the sharecropper farmhouses he wrote about. Overgrown with pines, it had been abandoned at least forty years, its windows gone, its collapsed front porch nothing but a few boards that hung like eyelashes. As I approached on a fire trail of red dirt, I felt a profound sadness. These farmers had struggled greatly in life, and I worried that my presence somehow violated the place. But when I looked through the doorless back entrance toward the half-open door at the front, I found in the shadows a coolness that welcomed me, but cautiously, as if the house itself, though wary of strangers, couldn’t help but offer respite. Temple Cone POETRY I’d been awake for two weeks, maybe three. Friends were letting me stay in their son’s room because my marriage was ending. The only light in the room was the laptop beside me in bed. I kept it open to hear email arrive, in case she wrote to say the night was over and, in the morning, I should come home. I pulled the computer to my lap when the room’s last shadows dissipated to complete darkness. I tried to Google my way to wholeness. I searched for ways to keep my children well. I wanted this fractured marriage of eighteen years to mend. Nothing holy appeared on that screen, certainly not my reflected face. Once I closed the lid, I lay there firing prayers up into the night: “Heal me, Jesus. I am broken. Heal them, Jesus, those I’ve broken.” The dark grew so deep it turned blue. David Wright CHAMPAIG N, IL L INOIS

Anesthesia-induced sleep should be a dark place, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s merely a blank, a white mist of lost time. When I awoke hours after my daughter’s difficult birth, the recovery nurses wavered before me, vague and gray. They were not who I wanted to see. My husband rocked our baby beneath a sunny window in a hospital room, many hallways away. The weight of what I’d missed—that first morning together as a family— crashed down. But what I had gained—a daughter, healthy and whole— has outlasted the lonely lost hours. Now I cling to my husband’s memories of that morning with her, shadowy though they are, as my own. The three of us move forward together. Light advances against the darkness of trauma and pain. The darkness of what might have happened, but didn’t, makes the treasure of my little family shine all the brighter. Rebecca Martin LYNC HBUR G, V IR GINIA After living twenty years on the foggy Northern California coast in a shadowless state, I now appreciate shadows because they accompany bright sunlight. Carolyn Moore PO ETRY In Caravaggio’s paintings, you see the violence of light, the volatile vulnerability of being discovered. It’s not too shocking when you take into account the fact he was on the run for years, a wanted man, unveiling the human body in all its frailty, exposing the imminent dangers of being seen and known in a blind, sacrificial world. Darkness with all its shadows is simply safer. The unknown, a haven. It’s the light you need to be worried about. Each of us is wanted in one sense or another. The reason I love art is its ability to fearlessly push toward that light despite the risks, using every shadow, every inch of darkness, not as a subject, but as a canvas. Kelly Michels POETRY We rise to leave again, but again my aunt grasps my hand tightly, desperately willing us to stay. She is on oxygen and cannot speak. She was expected to die two nights ago, then last night, but here she is, still surviving. We are late, but we sit back down once more. A few more soothing words and patient glances, and finally we pull away. The nurse anxiously asks if other family will be along soon. Arriving late to our engagement, we discover it has been canceled, as our dear aunt has passed away. We could have stayed with her, yet we felt we had to go. Were we wrong? Memories will haunt. “The light shines in the darkness . . .” (John 1:5). What is it that really matters? Humbling questions are shadows that envelope and shape. Relationships matter. Opportunities are limited. Charlie Allison R IC HAR DSO N, TEXAS The harsh and denuded church to which I was dragged as a child taught me spiritual ritual inadvertently; all that talk of hell gave me nightmares of demons, and so at night I would curl into a tight ball, my head buried in my arms, in belief that the demons couldn’t find their way in when I protected myself that way. It became my nightly ritual for falling asleep, and I still do it on the rare but inevitable nights when the demons return. I curl into a demonrepulsing ball and whisper the Jesus Prayer and eventually comes the dawn. Tony Woodlief F ICTIO N 5

2012

F I N A L I STS Harry Bauld When You Grow Up Catholic

James Crews For Those Weary of Prayer Calling

Shann Ray My Dad, In America

Rachael Katz Animal Valentine

Matthew Roth My Father Goes Out with a Chain in His Hand

Anna Maria Craighead-Kintis The Bosque Burns on the Feast of John the Baptist Becca J.R. Lachman Wait Laurie Lamon I stopped writing the poem Kelly Michels Static In The Dark

Carolyn Moore What Euclid’s Third Axiom Neglects to Mention about Circles

ISSUE 25 Autumn 201 2

Wesley Rothman Long After My Grandfather’s Death Mitchell Untch Autumn Gary Whitehead Warren

Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize S P O N SO R E D by STEVE AND KIM FRANCHINI J U D G E D by LI-YOUNG LEE

WINNER Nicole Rollender Necessary Work

S ECO N D P LAC E Temple Cone What I Meant by Joy

LI-YOUNG LEE finalist judge Li-Young Lee writes: “‘Necessary Work’” is a memorable poem, powerfully realized and emotionally true. Among the many virtues that recommend it are the vivid images, as well as a complicated music arising out of a deep unconscious wordcounting and word-weighing. One can sense the poet sorting the music of thinking and feeling from the chaos of an outsized undifferentiated passion. But above all, it is the passion that I love about this poem, and how that passion is canalized by discipline to create a work of profound beauty.”

Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2008). His earlier collections are Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001); Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Lee’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna, and their two sons.

Nicole Rollender

Necessary Work Roman poets put skulls in their love poems—the mortal with the immortal, the dark in the brilliant death-light; the beautiful plum falling from its long branch, then sweetly decomposing. The excruciating parting of our two bodies, that was necessary. Your tiny body—you can’t even drink my milk—sleeps in my palm. Holding you, my thin hand is just a cradle of bone: If I could pour light into a cup, raise it to wet your parched mouth . . . Hold on, hold on, I say. Your life starts with one word, sing, a prayer candle set floating in my womb, yes, one word, then another. Hear this: Jug. Rice. Tears on stone. Broken-necked lily. Hold on. Winged baby. Sing. While you’re in the hospital, my kitchen is cursed: My hands are afraid to break apart this bloody meat, to mingle my fingers with warm sinew and tendon, to pat spice and salt into flesh. My grandmother set a place for the dead, if her soft-footed brother might drop from heaven into the night kitchen, looking for bread or sweet milk, the way the living look for love. What’s missing here: the smell of bread rising, of rummy yeast, of fennel and pale cabbage wings, leek and kale, cardamom and thyme. My grief doesn’t let me eat with the living or dead. I whisper to you: Rain on the lake. Mist. Swallows calling. Hold on. I won’t lure you home with bread. I call you with words, words. Someday, we’ll return to dust, but the bones, our bones, will always shine in the dark earth. That ancient shine through your silvery skin: Come on, baby, sing. Sing. Sing.

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Temple Cone

What I Meant by Joy God’s beloved has startling breasts, heavy as storm clouds. Her voice is burred with mist. Doves startle from her fingertips. When she calls to Him, wind rises to blow the chaff away. The tree of a thousand years of peace is no bigger than a child But bears many figs. The tree of dreams has leaves but no branches. The tree of joy has never been seen. Only stones whisper its name. A vale of soul-making, not tears, wrote Keats of this world, Grief for his own wasted breath bleeding through the words. We’re all embers waiting for someone to break us open and blow. In the body of my wife lay hidden the body of my daughter As I lay in my mother’s body. Seeds within seeds, all unfolding Into an iridescent blossom that never sees the end of spring. I wanted Whitman to be read over my grave, when it came to that, The last part of the Song, where a hawk complains of his loitering, Where he promises, if we’re looking, to wait on the road ahead. But then Whitman explained that what I meant by death was life, What I meant by life was joy, and what I meant by joy was yet to come. He was gentle about it, though, touching his gray hat, and laughing.

James Crews

For Those Weary of Prayer Surely you know that time of night when fireflies, tired of their own pulse, float right into the mouth of a net, when cicadas begin to sense they are nothing more than husks for the chorus that fills them. Surely you have seen a child slough his trunks and run naked through a sprinkler, crying out with joy as you call him to bed. Arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you always calling the name of what you love most back to you, over and over, holding the door open, pleading, Please donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make me ask again, and asking again until he comes?

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James Crews

Calling If I say I see a heron lifting off hours before dawn, I mean I see a long, blue piece of me unraveling from the dark, landing in the creek to hunt a glint of fish, then taking it writhing into the mouth silvered by light some call the moon, but which is merely a buffed steel cap barely holding back the spill of summer sun. The heron can already sense the water warming up the way we know a word spoken to a glass of liquid over time will change its molecules: Call it holy holy is what you will taste.

JANE HERTENSTEIN “I did not find you outside, Oh Lord, because I made the mistake of seeking outside you who were within.”

—St. Augustine

Last night instead of going to bed I stayed up walking through cyber doors,

clicking my way into a hall of mirrors. It started with checking to see if anyone had signed the condolence book at the funeral home website that houses Mom’s obituary. Not too many, but of the five or six names, I recognized a couple of old neighbors. So I googled them—just for the heck of it. One thing led to another. One hour led to another. It was dark and quiet. I was reminiscing/wishing before a glowing screen. Could it be a door? Can I walk through the monitor and suddenly return to North Village Drive? Finny and Greta, our old neighbors, are out in their front yard moving the sprinkler, while up and down the street kids are coming out to play after dinner. Far away I hear Joe or Billy Pohl counting to fifty. Ready or not here I come! I can smell the grass, its heavy perfume as a shroud of dew falls. Soon it will be dark. The brightness of the screen hurts my eyes. I’ve been sitting too long. When I switch everything off the room jolts into black. I stretch and stumble into bed—where I am chased by phantoms, seeking me, but I am not found.

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Matthew Ballou. Lamentations 3 Verse 2. Mezzotint. 9 inches in diameter.

THE DEAD BOY TONY WOODLIEF

The day we killed the boy we rode to town in my father’s jeep. An old army duffel was slouched

between my legs, its musk mingled with the smell of gas and oil. In my imagination it still held killing tools: cool, greasy bullets, knurled grenades, a long, sleek knife. In reality there was just a Delco battery and some dulled rotary rock bits inside. Only years later did I realize that when he was a soldier, Daddy’s duffel held mostly food, clean socks, and letters from my mother. The killing had never been in this stiff canvas bag, but beneath my father’s skin. Maybe it was necessarily written into my flesh as well. Daddy was a water witcher. He stabled a few horses, but mostly he made money on the farms and fields across our North Carolina county and the ones that hemmed it in, by divining where good water lay waiting beneath the earth. But on this day, instead of some tobacco farmer’s property, it was the back of our land that he aimed to pierce. “I can feel it down there,” he’d told me, “sweet and cold.” The sun made his jeep a greenhouse, the sweat all over me and in my lungs, so that when I talked it felt like gurgling brine. We didn’t say much. Wind tore through open windows, and we felt the engine’s vibration in our teeth. I’d already aggravated Daddy before we got to the end of the pitted dirt trail connecting our property to the county road. It was clear, even to a nine-year-old boy, that forcing conversation was not going to help my cause. My cause, before everything changed, was an icy bottle of RC Cola from the corner case at the Stopn-Sav in town. The store sat next to the machine shop where Daddy was going to get those drill bits ground and scraped until he could see his image in their sharpened inner curls. My mother had said No, her voice sharp and flat, her answer out before I’d even finished my question. Mama didn’t like the talk of the old men idling perpetually inside the store’s cool dark interior, eyes sparkling with sin when they trained them on the light of the inward-opening door. “Have they ever said anything while you were in there?” Daddy had asked this while Mama stood at the sink washing breakfast dishes. He winked at me. Mama whipped her head around with violence and mischief in equal measure, soft brown hair spinning about her head like a carnival ride, green eyes narrowed. “Ray Waterson, don’t take on like some city lawyer with me. I can hear ‘em laughing when I come to the door.” “Nothing wrong with laughing, sugar.” “I could see the filthy talk in their faces.” She surveyed my father from crown to toe, her eyes saying she knew full well what men do in dark places. “Daniel’s not goin’ anywhere near that place.” I nearly let out that I’d never heard a single dirty word in there, but then my mother might have

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taken to interrogating me on how often I’d been in there, and just how many dirty words I knew. I kept silent. Daddy always had a way with Mama. “Now sugar, do you really think the machine shop is any better?” That nearly sunk it for both of us, and had it come from anyone else I’d have never seen the inside of that machine shop—or any other place worth going in town—until I was twenty. But Daddy backtracked and began his sweet-talk, which always made Mama fuss and smile all at once. She was facing him now, her hands dripping thin suds onto the kitchen floor as she fussed, and Daddy was chiding and soothing and slowly closing the space between them, his hands held out like he was approaching an ornery horse. “Don’t you sugar me,” Mama warned him, but already I could see the smile at the corners of her narrowed emerald eyes. My mother had the greenest eyes; she said they came from her people in Scotland. Daddy used to say they’re what made him notice her in high school. He said they reminded him of shamrocks, and pastures, and other things. He never explained other things because I was a boy, but whenever he said this my mother would slap him in the chest. Now Daddy had his hands on her waist, and he was kissing her neck and tickling her with his gripping fingers. In reply she pushed his shoulders, hard, like she really did want him to stop, though even a boy could see it was the last thing she wanted. “When are you going to trim that scraggly old beard? It feels like I’m kissing Moses. Ray!” Daddy had lifted her up onto the counter. She squealed and slapped his shoulders, and tugged the hem of her dress back over her knees. “Ray Waterson, set me down this instant!” She took hold of his thick black hair and pulled, so that he laughed and howled all in the same breath, and the sight of her eyes wide, her nostrils flared, bent on having her way even though we could both see she was happy, made Daddy bellow, a deep laugh from inside his belly that forced its way past his large white teeth. Then he was leaning close and whispering things that made her alternate between outrage and deep-voiced, murmured remonstrations. For a moment all the work of the days past and days to come melted off them both like ice in summer sun; and it felt as if they both held me, which is an odd notion because I remember sitting at the kitchen table with the toes of my boots just scraping the linoleum, but it felt that way nonetheless, like they held me in their arms even though I was already big for my age. Finally Mama glanced over at me, as if remembering that she was a mother with a Saturday’s work ahead of her, and ordered Daddy in her stern voice to put her down. He didn’t obey, even though her tone had changed, and so she grabbed hold of his ear and yanked it hard. Daddy yelped and set her down. He rubbed his ear as if he was really injured, and Mama kissed him. Then she slapped his chest and turned back to her dishes. A few minutes later, as Daddy was finishing the last of his coffee, Mama sighed and said I could go. The matter of the RC Cola, however, was not settled clearly. Did her acquiescence include my visit to the dime store, or was it limited to being at Daddy’s side in the machine shop? She’d only agreed to let me go after Daddy solemnly attested to the good Christian character of Marty Giles, the machineshop owner (the disposition of whose soul, belonging as it did to a known drinker and Episcopalian, was an open question to Mama, a lifelong Baptist). I was intensely aware, when I clambered out the front door on the trail of Daddy’s boots, that Mama’s ruling was open to interpretation. I also knew that my father would make a more sympathetic court of appeal, and so I held my tongue until he fired up the recalcitrant jeep. As Daddy aimed the jeep at our long stretch of gravel drive, I waved at Mama, who peered out at us through the kitchen window. She waved back. I sat back in my seat and stretched my arms over my head, attempting a casual air. “I sure am looking forward to that RC Cola,” I said. Daddy grunted and fiddled with his rear-view mirror, which was turned down from the last time I’d pretended to drive his jeep. “Yep,” I said, “A cold drink’s good on a hot day like this.” No answer. “If you don’t have the money for it,” I said, “I have a quarter.” “We’ll see.” “I can get it myself since you’ll be busy.”

“Just wait and see.” “Mama doesn’t mind.” This was not entirely true, but the tone of his “we’ll see” wasn’t encouraging. “Maybe.” “You sure talked her into it. Her kiss meant Yes.” The truth was I wasn’t sure what Mama’s decidedly un-Baptist kiss meant, but it sure didn’t look like No. “Daniel.” Daddy said it with a sigh and with the hint of an edge. I didn’t understand Daddy’s Daniel any more than I understood Mama’s yes, but I did know that one more ounce of pestering was going to get a No out of him for sure, and so I sat on that sweaty seat and breathed the murky oil smell and studied Daddy’s arms. They were roped and brown, and they stretched the short sleeves of his tee shirt tight. Curly dark hair covered his forearms, and there was a thin scar, white like a fish’s underbelly, running from elbow to wristbone. It seemed unnaturally straight to have been born in a world of jagged edges. “Daddy, where’d you get that scar?” I ran the tip of my finger along it. I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Whenever I would ask him where he got that scar, Daddy would say, Aw, now; or, I’ll tell you someday, or sometimes he would say nothing at all, he would just stare out at the fields like he was trying to remember himself. Today he put his broad gentle hand on my hair and smoothed back my curls, like he was wiping something away. We were off the dirt road we’d been bumping over, gathering speed on the steaming asphalt of the road to town. Sometimes when he was sitting with his newspaper or his coffee I would lean against Daddy’s chair, rest my head on his shoulder, and take his arm in my fingers. I would turn his palm out, his arm like a great machine that I could work as a man in the cab of a crane, and I would run my fingers along that pale wound and shiver at its insistent straightness. I wondered if this was what it was like to be a man, to sit up in the cab behind your own eyes and work the big arms and legs that your body had surprised you with, and if every man got a scar somewhere like my father had received from a jungle he wouldn’t name. Our tires hummed along the asphalt like they were their own engine, distinct from the wide-open roar of Daddy’s rebuilt motor. I studied the thick, blood-red skin of his neck. The red ran from the lip of his stained tee shirt up under his fuzzy beard and tangled dark hair, which he kept longer than any of the other men in church, but which nobody seemed to hold against him, even as they whispered about the Gilley boy, the one home for the summer from Chapel Hill who wore jeans to church but whose stringy yellow hair was a tad shorter than Daddy’s. It was six years after the Summer of Love, but folks in Hickory Shore, North Carolina, had never taken to that idea in the first place. I knew Daddy’s special dispensation in a town of short-cropped hair was because he was a War Hero. I knew it from how the other men looked at him sometimes, a mixture of envy and admiration and resentment coloring their faces, and how sometimes I would hear them whisper the name of that country Daddy wouldn’t allow to be spoken in our house. I knew it from how Mama kept my own hair shaved short. I knew it, too, from the medals he kept shut tight in their black boxes at the bottom of a dresser drawer. Lined up in a row like coffins is how the medals seemed the first time I found them underneath tee shirts and socks, my pulse racing with the mystery and sin of rifling through my father’s possessions, racing as well at the sight of those heavy ornaments tied to the ends of colorful ribbons and laid to rest on velvet. There were stars of silver and bronze, and three thick hearts of dull gold and bright purple, with the mournful visage of George Washington on the front, and the mysterious descriptor, “For Military Merit,” set in plain raised type on the back. You had to earn the right to wear long hair; it was for Military Merit—this is what I thought back then, and also that long hair was what gave a War Hero his power, just like Samson. I used to wonder how I would ever become a War Hero myself, the way my mother kept my hair clipped short. That was why boys grew up and moved away from home, I decided, so they could grow long hair and gather the scars into their flesh and somehow become men. I was ignorant of most things, and probably still am, but about this one thing I think I was right.

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As we rumbled into town, past the first squat brick shops, then a gas station, and then my own shuttered school, I wished we were in a parade. I imagined the whole town lined up on the cracked sidewalks and narrow brown yards to watch my father with his thick black hair lying in curls over his blood-red neck, his arms like cables gripping the rebellious wheel of the jeep, and me with him in my own white tee shirt, my arms skinny and hairless and unscarred. I dreamed of a parade and every part of my body ached to collect my own straight, silent scar. When that flash of green and blue shot out from the row of cars and pick-ups lining the street, my brain tried for an instant to work it into the fantasy, as a wayward balloon, perhaps. Daddy knew better. He braked so hard I thought his boot had gone through the floor of the jeep. He threw out his arm, his fingers splayed wide, to keep me from slamming into the flat black dashboard. My face slapped against the back of his forearm; I felt the raised smoothness of his scar, and beneath it tensile bone. Past the squeal of tires I heard a clump-thump. It sounded like a potato bag tumbling from a cellar shelf. I remember the sight of Daddy in that instant before I flew forward, every muscle tensed as he forced the brake into the floor, the tendons in his neck like ropes binding him to his seat, his teeth snapped together like a trap.

CURLY DARK HAIR COVERED HIS FOREARMS, AND THERE WAS A THIN SCAR, WHITE LIKE A FISH’S UNDERBELLY, RUNNING FROM ELBOW TO WRISTBONE. Later, I would think of the dead boy as a bullet, fired after my Daddy had stopped expecting it. I suppose to that boy’s mother, who was standing in the Red and White when it happened, comparing prices on soup cans, perhaps, or picking out a roast for dinner, or maybe looking for a melon with no soft spot, and wondering if a car had hit another car outside, but then realizing that the sound had been a fleshy thump and not the bright crunch of metal against metal, and then wondering if it had been a dog, and only then—just then—remembering that she had told her seven-year-old son Bobby, Yes, you can go across the street and see about getting some construction paper—to that poor mother, it was we who were the bullet, Daddy and me and that lumbering jeep now huffing slantwise in the street. Daddy jumped out and ran to the front of the jeep. Before he dropped out of view he had the look a man must take on when he is shot—eyes wide, already bargaining with God, afraid to look at the wound. I pushed a shoulder into my door and scrambled out as well. Daddy was on his knees, holding

a brown-headed boy whose head seeped dark blood. Half the boy’s face looked to be sleeping, but the other half was swollen, open-eyed. He leered at me one-eyed, from my father’s arms. “Daniel,” Daddy moaned at me, “go back.” People were gathering on both sides of the street, coming out of the buildings as if there really was a parade. Daddy shouted for somebody to call an ambulance. His shout seemed to draw more people. “Daniel,” he said, “please.” The boy’s mother squeezed through the crowd, which was edging closer by inches. She let out a cry that disappeared into itself. She got down on her knees in front of Daddy and together they cradled that dead boy, she mumbling and praying, and him shouting for somebody to Call an ambulance, for Christ’s sake. Daddy pleaded with me again to get back in the jeep, but his eyes searched me like he expected something else, something he could not name. I stood there, unsure what to do with my hands. I stood and watched my father and that boy’s whimpering mother cradle death between them, as if together they had made him all he was and would ever be, she giving him life and my father taking it and this dead boy staring into the bracketed space between them, peering one-eyed because to see the short span of it all in a single glimpse would be too much for any man or boy to bear. I watched my father cradling that dead boy and I wondered if the boy could feel through his whitening skin, if death takes everything instantly or by degrees.

THE SHARP STRIKE OF MY MOTHER’S HEELS CAUSED A SHADOW OF SOMETHING TO PASS OVER MY FATHER’S FACE. I felt hands on my shoulders. I turned to see Milo Tompkins, the assistant pastor at our church, crouching so that his eyes were level with my own. He had thick, curly golden hair, and his face was smooth and younglooking, even to a boy. He looked past my shoulder with mourning eyes. “Come along child,” he said, standing and walking me to the sidewalk, away from the gathering and murmuring and quietly weeping crowd. “Is he all right?” Milo thought I was asking about the boy. “No,” he said. “He isn’t.” Someone had already called Mama, because when we puttered and bumped up the gravel drive in Milo Tompkin’s powder blue VW Bug, she was standing on the bottom step of the porch, her arms wrapped around herself even though the heat of the late morning sun poured down on her. Her eyes were red but she held a placid expression on her face. We walked toward her slowly, like she hadn’t yet heard the news, like half the town hadn’t by now called the other half to tell them what they’d seen or heard or suspected. Mama stood rigid until we were close, then she pulled me to her chest. “Did he see it?” she asked Milo over my head. “I’m afraid so.” Milo apologized. “It wasn’t as bad to look at as you might think.” “Still,” Mama said. I felt her body quake once, then she was steely and still. “Yes ma’am,” Milo said. “Lemme pray.” He said this with mild surprise, like he was just remembering that he was a preacher. He put a hand on my mother’s shoulder, and his other hand on the back of my head, and

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prayed for healing for the family of the dead boy, and for my father, and for me, that I would not be tormented by bad memories. In the years to come, I would wonder if Milo had prayed it wrong, if his prayers, which didn’t heal anything, instead stirred up something in God or the devil that afflicted the dead boy’s earth-creeping spirit, and my unraveling father, and me. We didn’t go to the dead boy’s funeral. We dressed for it. Mama scrubbed my neck and ears, and while she fussed she peered into my face like she had lost something behind my eyes. My father stood beside her in front of the bathroom mirror, tucking and pulling at his worn black tie, his chin raised, his beard trimmed. The lines spreading out from the corner of his eye seemed gouged into his skin. He had on long shirtsleeves, but I imagined I could see that ghostly white scar running up his forearm toward his face, like the trail of burnt air in a bullet’s wake. Daddy caught me watching him. He turned his eyes to the floorboards and left us alone in the bathroom. Mama tied my tie, even though I knew how. Her fingers worked faster than Daddy’s on his own tie. “There’s eggs waiting for you in the kitchen,” she said as she turned to her make-up. My church shoes clacked and clattered as I went down the hall to the kitchen, where a chipped plate of eggs waited on the table across from Daddy with his coffee. He hadn’t really looked at me since we killed the boy. I figured he was mad at me for not climbing back in the jeep after the accident, but now it seemed like the sight of me left him ashamed. I thought about his gaze as he had cradled the dead boy, how he had looked to me like I could help him. The day that boy died was the beginning, I think, of not knowing what to do with myself, of being an alien in my body, of stomach aches, of the anger that seemed to force its way out through fissures and cracks. I slid into my chair inside that body that didn’t feel like mine. My thick black shoes thumped the table legs, making my father’s coffee quiver. He stared at the table. I ate cold eggs. I was thirsty, but I didn’t want to ask him for milk, because of that frozen mournful gaze. He seemed to be balanced at the top of something immense and unknowable, so that any disturbance might cause him to topple out of view. There was a darkness beneath the brown-red skin of his face, his face crossed with lines like ancient riverbeds. His eyes were dull and lazy beneath thick eyebrows slightly arched, the visage of a man trying to remember something. His hands clung to the stained white coffee mug, like someone in the midst of a long sickness might hold it. The sharp strike of my mother’s heels caused a shadow of something to pass over my father’s face. As she fetched a teacup and tried to brighten the kitchen with words about the weather, I wanted to warn her, to shout that something had changed, that something was inside our home that had not been here before, or that perhaps had been sleeping in the dark recesses of our cellar. I split the cold egg clumps into smaller and smaller pieces to make them last, as if everything not yet broken might be preserved that way, if only we could sit at breakfast forever, and my father could remain in that trance, and they would never put that boy’s broken corpse into the ground. “Ray,” my mother said, her voice unusually cheerful, “we should get going.” Daddy didn’t reply, he just gripped his coffee cup like a sick man and stared at the tabletop. Mama’s voice grew cautious. Lower. “Ray.” “We’re not going.” I jerked when he said it, even though his voice was thin and soft. Maybe that’s why I started, because I had never heard such sadness in my father’s voice before. He said we weren’t going like he was telling us the weather, informing us about something that happens to people, the way that boy had happened to us. “Ray,” my mother said, her voice soothing. “No,” my father said, his voice like fresh pebbled earth, his single word negating everything, denying everything, brooking no response. “We’re not going,” he said again, this time in a whisper. The boy’s name was Bobby Doyle. I had known him by sight, though now all I could remember of him was the image of a brown-headed boy half-sleeping in my father’s arms, one swollen eye staring lazily up at me. I hadn’t really known him, except that he was a boy who used to play kickball in the schoolyard, who carried a metal

Snoopy lunch box, and whose mother wrapped his schoolbooks in brown grocery bag paper to keep them unscuffed. There were a thousand other things that made him the particular boy named Bobby Doyle, but he had run in front of our jeep, and now all the color had been leached from those things, so that Bobby Doyle was just the pale corpse of a boy. The most important thing about Bobby Doyle, now, was that he was a boy whose mother and father and brother would never see him again, buried as he was beneath the clotted dirt of a graveyard west of town. School started two weeks later, and everyone had heard about the dead boy. I knew this from how they looked at me on the school bus, how they said his name, first one child and then another. Their talking and whispering was about many other things as well, but even then I thought I heard them saying it, on the bus and in the hallways, the grievous words lurking just behind the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum and the flat thunder of locker doors: Bobby Doyle. They didn’t look at me as if I had killed him, but they didn’t look at me as if I was innocent, either. I had been more than a bystander, and deeper than that, I shared the blood of his killer. “Was there blood all over the street?” This is what my friend Calvin Pruitt asked as we slouched into our desks. He was the smallest boy in the class, with strawberry blond hair and a round face sprinkled with freckles. His hazel eyes were wide as he asked. In most things Calvin was shrewd and even skeptical, but anything involving blood or death evoked in him a reverent, dread-filled curiosity. We were going to be Marines, me and Calvin. We were going to fight in wars and win medals. “No,” I told him. I could feel the other children listening, their squirming and giggling subdued. I wanted Mrs. Stuart to stop lingering in the hallway. I could see her through the open door, talking to another teacher and shaking her head, her lips pressed tight, and then looking into the classroom, directly at me. I stared at my scratched desktop and ran my finger along the smooth straight groove of the pencil holder. I lifted my fingertip to my nose and took in the metallic graphite smell. “My mama said it was blood everywhere,” announced Mary Taylor, her voice loud and definitive. The other children murmured a collective Oooo. I set my jaw and looked into Mary’s accusatory face, my own face suddenly hot. I was going to tell her that he hadn’t bled that much, as if that would make Bobby Doyle less dead, or not as deep in the ground. I was going to say that my father had nearly put his boot through the jeep’s floorboard, so badly had he wanted to miss that bullet of a boy. Mrs. Stuart came in, wearing a false smile and contrived cheerfulness that filled the classroom like thick perfume. The rest of the morning was times tables and division. When the teacher wasn’t looking, Calvin slipped me a note: MARY TAYLORS MAMA HAS A BIG FAT BUTT. At recess Calvin asked if I wanted to play marbles and I said Sure, and so we went over to the gnarled oak tree at the edge of the playground and dug our marbles out of our pockets. It felt different than at home, where the dead boy was a guest at our table. He wasn’t anywhere around that oak; it was just me and Calvin and the soft click of a marble tapping its prey, or the dull thump when it missed and hit one of the tree’s long protruding roots. There was just us and that tree and the warm breeze blowing across our backs, making the thick branches sway and hiss high above. We didn’t notice the older boys until they were standing over us. “Broadus Doyle is my best friend.” The boy speaking was Daryl Ledbetter. He had thick arms and a wide, freckled face scrunched around a pug nose. He was a thirteen-year-old. A small gang of his friends stood behind him. Broadus Doyle was Bobby’s older brother. He had become their best friend, too. Calvin and I stayed crouched over our marbles. “Your daddy’s going to jail,” Daryl Ledbetter snarled. “No he ain’t.” said Calvin. “And your daddy’s crooked as a dog’s hind leg.” Calvin always paid close attention when his father talked business at the dinner table. Daryl Ledbetter’s father was a contractor, a member of the town council, and an elder in our church. Daryl ignored Calvin, squinting his wide-set eyes at me. “Broadus and me’s best friends,” he said. The other boys shifted from foot to foot, eager. Calvin told Daryl to shove it up his butt, and one of the boys told Calvin to shut up or else he would get some too. “Your daddy’s a murderer,” Daryl said to me. I began stuffing marbles in my pockets. In the years to come this same calmness always melted over me

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before a fight. “I’m gonna beat your ass,” Daryl said, “and then my daddy’s gonna beat your daddy’s ass.” I lit into Daryl Ledbetter like he was the dead boy himself. I was big for my age, but clumsy and slow-handed. It didn’t last long enough for teachers to notice, assembled as they were in a conspiratorial huddle in the shade of the school building. When it was done I lay curled up against a root, crying. Calvin kneeled by me and tried to say something to make it better, but I yelled at him until he went to the other side of the tree. He waited there until I was done crying and on my feet, walking towards the building in response to the bell. He caught up to walk beside me, and we didn’t talk about the dead boy or Daryl Ledbetter. My mother and father didn’t notice the angry red streak beside my eye, or the swelling at the corner of my mouth. We sat at the table and ate dinner, Mama watching Daddy and Daddy watching the empty chair across from him. We all knew that chair wasn’t really empty, because the ghost boy who’d come to live with us needed a place to sit too. Ghost boys don’t eat. They just sit close and watch you and never say a word. Their silence is the worst thing about them. When you are a boy and you have a father who loves you, there is something in the air where he has been that draws you to it. You become his shadow, and because he loves you he lets you into his space and against his skin even though you are clumsy and you talk too much. Sometimes he waits for you when you are trying to catch him, and sometimes he seizes you up in his strong hands and places you on his shoulders so that you can have a turn at being in the sun, and he your shadow. All this is a way for him to tell you that a man without a shadow isn’t really there, and that this is what you mean to him, that you make him fully there. My father stopped waiting for me in the months and years after we killed that boy. I had to search for him, and often when I found him it seemed that there was no longer room in his presence, as if killing that boy had made him not a father. A few weeks after the funeral he drove into town again for the first time, the grill of his

WE ALL KNEW THAT CHAIR WASN’T REALLY EMPTY, BECAUSE THE GHOST BOY WHO’D COME TO LIVE WITH US NEEDED A PLACE TO SIT TOO. jeep scrubbed and brushed clean, to do what he’d intended that last time, to get his drill bits machined so that he could dig the well on the back acres of our land. It was only later, when Mama told me he would be late for dinner because he was drilling the well-hole, that I knew he’d been to town at all. I rushed out of the kitchen as if to do chores, but instead of milking the goats or gathering what remained of the beans and tomatoes, I skirted the garden and the hen house, slipped between the slouching blackberry bushes now picked thin, and dashed across the sloping field that led to the back of our land.

I didn’t know I was sneaking until I spied Daddy through a stand of trees and chokeberry, and realized that I was stepping lightly. He was sitting on the open gate of his rusted pickup, a piece of pipe in one hand and a deadly shining drill bit in the other, and he was fitting them together to make the weapon with which he intended to pierce the ground until it bled. Daddy always knew where to strike the earth. Men from three counties away would seek him out, and for the right price he’d go away with them. When he came home he’d be smiling, his pocket full of bills. There was a beer can beside him. I saw another waiting in the battered gray toolbox that guarded a dozen lengths of drill-pipe on the ground. I had never seen my father take a drink before. Mama didn’t allow drinking in the house, not by anyone, not even when on New Year’s Eve one of her cousins visiting from Pennsylvania had pulled out a bottle of sparkling wine. I didn’t know where my father had gotten his beer from, but I knew his having it was a bad thing. I wondered what he would think of my spying, and I thought about how I would step out from behind the bushes at any moment, pretending to just arrive. I was soon thankful that I hadn’t moved, because he began to talk to Bobby Doyle. He cursed that dead boy for getting in his way. “Should have stayed with your mama, you little sonofabitch,” he said. His words came out slow and kind of sideways. He called Bobby’s mama a bitch and a whore and other things, and shouted at her for not looking after her son. He went through another beer and then another. He cursed people I didn’t know. He told some of them he was glad they were dead. He told them he was glad they were dead and he was here witching a well and drinking his beer. He shouted that he wasn’t sorry for it, and that they should all be in hell. He talked to someone he called gook boy, and told him he wasn’t sorry one damn bit. He told gook boy that he shouldn’t have tried to fight in a man’s war. “I’ll kill you again, time I get to hell,” he mumbled. All this time he was drinking and cursing the dead, Daddy assembled pipe sections and wrestled the rig into position over the well-site. His muscles jerked with his efforts. When he was satisfied with the rig, he connected wires to the generator resting in the bed of his pick-up, clambered up into the bed, and yanked on the generator’s starter cord. It coughed and shivered to life, filling the cooling air with a growl. He dropped back down to the ground with a grunt and a curse, lifted the first piece of drill-pipe, fitted now with the machined bit that might as well be the cause of that boy’s death as anything, and locked it into its joint so that it rested just a hair’s breadth over the earth. He hit the switch and retrieved another beer. The bit began its slow, ruthless rotation, and Daddy settled himself on his toolbox to watch. For a while there was nothing but the sound of birds and cicadas and that drill-pipe squeaking in its frame, its bit gouging the earth, and the generator’s huffing, and behind that an air hose forcing the loosened dirt up through the pipe to deposit at the foot of the rig. Daddy lit a cigarette and watched cold dark dirt pile up beside the narrow hole. At intervals he stood and added a piece of pipe to this earth spear. He named more ghosts, and cursed them just like the others. He glared at the well as the bit did its work. Perhaps my father was digging into Bobby Doyle’s grave, from the way he grew silent as he stared at the deepening hole. I have often recalled the whine and growl of that drill turning, and sometimes I envision the world doing this, judging and sentencing and grinding us into cold broken earth. Then my father wept. He hurled his half-empty can at the chokeberry where I hid. It arched through the air end over end, slinging ropes of beer. He put his hands over his face, and his shoulders lurched up and down. “You shouldn’t have been there,” he whispered through tears and snot. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Bobby Doyle, or the gook boy, or someone else. I still don’t know to this day. I only know that a boy never forgets the sound of his father crying, not even after he is a man with children of his own. The bit dug deeper and deeper, past the wet black soil, through clay and fragile shale. I stayed hidden and watched my father dig to what must be the heart of the world. Maybe something in my flesh knew that in a few years, on this very soil where I lay, my father’s knife would pierce my skin. Maybe my heart knew there was no saving him, even though he would witch me from the grip of death not once but twice. Maybe I was just a boy and afraid. I lay in that cool dirt and watched my father watch the nothing beyond the bit-pierced soil, until I remembered Mama. She would come looking for me. She would see my father. I crept backwards on my belly, and went home to my mother and dinner.

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Nicole Rollender

Prelude I see my skull’s fine bones, a mess of blue hydrangeas wild above it—this reliquary for a life’s flames, rooted in what I wanted: love. These things I missed make me sad: painting at Montmartre, or this old mountain—goldenrod and sheep—where I could have lived, a trail of candles down to the sea. These china birds, a whale’s bone, this stem . . . In Paris, do you remember we stopped on a side street to eat warm baguettes packed with goat cheese? Sweet bread, almost like honey, such joy—then we climbed down into the chilly catacombs, caves piled high with bones, this dark wall of skulls. So much silence, little air, yet I was happy then and didn’t know it. Why do you stand looking up toward heaven? You answer: a hummingbird’s skeleton, so delicate in my open hands, its sharp bill—you placed it like a flower, its ruby feathers long shed. We trace the bones with our fingers, the same careful way I gazed into one skull, her heart-shaped nostrils the locus of desire for a body alive—I breathed in her memories, wild grass, sea air blown for miles, tart herring in beetroot soup, sweet peaches. What she loved keeps her rooted here. I’m starting my own long good-bye to all these precious things—honeysuckle, the scarred hollow behind your knee, beeswax, my grandfather’s cedar chest. Whatever my last act of being—it will be a bursting open into brilliance . . . I can taste your sweet name in my mouth. Listen: I owe you my life.

Matthew Roth

My Father Goes Out with a Chain in His Hand From the window this morning I watch my father, snowy-headed and stooped a little now, go out, dragging a length of logging chain behind him, to his orchard. With the chain, he will beat the young trunks of the four recalcitrant ones, who refuse— though old enough, he says— to flower as they should. It’s a trick his father knew, who once scarred an apple tree by accident, only to see white blossoms burst in mid-July. “Some of them will only produce if they reckon they’re going to die.” My son, not seven, joins me in the window, seeing what I’ve seen, and asks me to explain. Before the first dark line of trees my father slows, as if forgetting why he came, then disappears into the mottled shade. The silence fills my son to overflow. I stoop and kiss his head and tell him I don’t know.

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Mitchell Untch

Autumn I worry about your penchant for slippers, for your terry cloth robe that falls open, for your neck that no longer turns independent of your shoulders. That slip in your breath worries me. Last week, there was that surprise bruise on your arm, the inevitable bloom. Yet still you insist on doing everything, lift things you should no longer, the edge of the sofa a quarter inch, laundry baskets filled with wet clothes. The chair you moved to another corner of the room shaved a year off your life. But mostly, I worry about myself, about things that haven’t happened but are likely to. Denial takes a random shape. I bought flowers for our anniversary. We watched them open. All week they took in light by the window. At night, fed themselves in the dark. We thought they might live forever inside the cool walls of our apartment when one morning we found their petals curled like fingers, let go. Your feet bother you. Your ankles swell. Yes, it’s hell growing old in the sunlight, in the waves of stars and evenings. Each morning has that much more to give. Yesterday the building next door whitened with each evaporated cloud as we watched it from our bed, white as last evening’s stars, and did not notice the balconies slipping in the bright light, the paint beginning to peel and crack, the windows, like eyelids, wince. I feel the temperature of your skin next to mine, the slow calculation of your hips, the moistness of your legs sink into the shallow grooves of the sheets and I am the ground that feels rain, the leaves of all the autumns falling, the wind harvested. The sun was lovely that morning, the blindness.

Shann Ray

Invocation 1. The truest form we take is when we are children and our bodies swerve like cliff swallows, the boy bird with thistle hair who jumps to touch the sun, the girl with sound from her lips like water from the mountain. Each of our tears is stored in Your bright blue bottle. 2. My wife moves from the bed and walks the hall with me, her hair dark and bright, her body held by her intent and when we return she looks wild as winter, the whole house vivid in her eyes, and something higher. Have you ever seen a forest fire at night, the world in light so transgressive the trees breathe like embers? Now, she whispers, They are asleep! our three daughters, and she holds my big manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand and kisses my mouth. I kissed them too, she says, and I know because I watched her touch her lips to the inside of each wrist.

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3. The height of summer, her imprint on the slant of my face sets me on an open plain with nothing between us and the end of the world but grass like tinder, windblown, pale, and the sun. I want to burn, she says, and we burn.

ARTISTS’ NOTES

IVAN D E M O NB R ISO N : CHAS ING THE HUM AN F I G U R E Ivan de Monbrison was born in Paris in 1969 to a French Protestant father and an Egyptian Muslim mother, both of whom had Jewish origins. Monbrison experienced a liberal artistic education, during which African and Oceanic arts became central to his interests. Encountering non-Western imagery left Monbrison with a desire to examine historical perspectives on constructing meaning in art, and how raw honesty can be expressed within our contemporary and absurd world of thriving technology. Monbrison is also curious about the extent to which art still serves a religious function in the midst of pervasively secular culture. He finds this question especially urgent for contemporary society in which he perceives that art is increasingly utilized for marketing rather than for precipitating reflective thought. Monbrison has found that distorting and fragmenting the human figure— finding camaraderie with artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon—has been the most effective way for him to pursue this non-religious “spiritual” quest. Monbrison’s works have been exhibited in the recent years in various countries. You may view more of his work at artmajeur.com/blackowl.

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Ivan de Monbrison. Ink and acrylic on paper. 16 x 12 inches.

Ivan de Monbrison. Ink and acrylic on paper (x-ray of the original drawing). 16 x 12 inches.

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Ivan de Monbrison. Ink and acrylic on paper. 12 x 12 inches.

Ivan de Monbrison. Ink and acrylic on paper. 12 x 8 inches.

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ROBERT MCKEAN

It was a dog’s snout that unearthed the bone. The wrist, the radius, a tiny thing. He and Lloyd Ross

had been at the lake only the week before. Lloyd was in wholehearted agreement that Harvey take up a hobby, and what better hobby than one he sold supplies for? Painting, acrylics, or what passed as painting. Blobs, Harvey told his wife, I paint variously sized blobs in various colors, and Lloyd peddles me another tube for ten bucks. Jenny had trouble getting around by now. She used a walker, a woman of forty-six, a varsity tennis player in college, it tore at your heart. Twelve years together, his second marriage to this younger woman and then the diagnosis and swift advance of the disease. Even her speech had begun to be affected, the slight dysarthria thickening her diction, an early warning of the ultimate wreck the malady named after a beloved baseball player would make of her body. He had closed his office, throttled back his practice, grown preoccupied. For the first time in forty-five years of lawyering, he had forgotten a court date and had been publicly scolded by a judge. Which is why he yielded to Jenny’s entreaties. Do something, she said. She was fastidious about her appearance, kept her hair-dresser appointments, had her clothes altered as her weight fell. She brushed her tow hair from her face and teased him. Go back to work, take up chair-caning, just don’t sit around watching me die, Harvey. At least, the developing story as it played out over the winter in the Citizen Chronicle had served as a distraction, albeit a grisly one. The bone’s discovery led to the sequestration of the lake and tumbledown picnic grounds, more dogs (Bigger noses? Lloyd speculated), earthmovers, workstations where the dirt was screened, colorful tents and daily news briefings, a clairvoyant in San Diego who visualized a child of five impaneled behind a bookcase in the condemned lodge, and the denouement, the common pit, from which not only the body of the long-missing little girl was exhumed, but also the body of the young Guatemalan nanny, who had fallen under suspicion herself for the child’s abduction. Evidence implicated the father, Harvey’s client in the ugly divorce that had led up to the child and nanny’s disappearance, and the husband’s conviction. “It’s good,” Jenny argued. “In a way it is. It’ll bring closure for the family.” “For them.” “Harvey,” she did love teasing him, although this was more in the way of a lecture, “you’re going soft in the cranium. You’re an attorney—you did what you were supposed to do. You didn’t do anything wrong.” “You’ll be okay?”

“Go paint your blobs, please.” He waited in his car before Lloyd’s store on Roosevelt Avenue. In the backseat were his Guerilla Painter Pochade Box with its adjustable field tripod—the box was birch, he liked the fragrance of the delicate wood, its tang—his squiggly tubes of paints, his brushes, his color wheel, his folding stool. He had asked Lloyd, before handing over a check for four hundred dollars, do I need a beret? Back there were also his lunch and a warm sweater. It was overcast, silvery and cool, the first time since last fall they had been back to Lake Biddleford. After a year, he still felt exceedingly foolish. Like one of those balmy ladies you see sitting in the middle of cow pastures, or, worse, the caricaturist who drove around Ganaego in a twenty-five-year-old Peugeot with anti-abortion stickers obscuring every square inch of the chassis, perhaps holding it together? “Could be muddy,” Lloyd warned him, climbing in. “I brought a thermos of scotch.” The little artificial lake was hourglass-shaped. The men worked their way over to the far side: one, a short, balding attorney, square black-frame glasses, baggy wool trousers, leather shoes, ill-at-ease with his portable art studio; the other, a running-to-stout black entrepreneur fifteen years the older man’s

junior, Boss Green track jacket and pants, red and black Nikes, perfectly at ease with his vast library of paints and brushes. The water lay mirror-still, a shade darker tarnish than the sky. They established their easels in the greening saw grass, steps away from where, later in the summer, invasive stands of loosestrife and cattail would flourish. They liked to stage their setups far enough apart for a degree of privacy but not so far as to inhibit conversation. Lloyd was a talker, but, at talking, nobody could hold a candle to Harvey Silverstein. A man with a mouth, Jenny had introduced him to her slightly traumatized Methodist family. On past painting days, the conversation had thrived on news of an exploding whale in Taiwan. Many whale jokes. But today Harvey was moody. “The puissance of the state.” He gestured across the lake at the mounds of clayey earth, at their epicenter the moldering lodge with ferns beginning to fringe its roof. Here and there tatters of yellow police tape glimmered. “They would’ve dug up the whole valley— and should have, don’t get me wrong—if they’d had to.”

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“I’m surprised they didn’t find a hundred bodies.” “You do hear stories of the lake,” Harvey allowed. Both men favored truncheon-sized cigars, although Bunny Wiesenfeld had limited Harvey’s intake to two or three a day. Scarves of pungent smoke clung to the willow catkins draped above them, the thermos contributing its own oaky scent. On summer afternoons when he wasn’t tending his art supplies store or filling in at one of his dry cleaning outlets, Lloyd would set up his easel on the roof deck of his building. His wife, who was fair-skinned, avoided the sun, but Lloyd, dressed in skimpy fuchsia trunks and large-billed white visor, loved to bake in the noonday heat. Arranging his supplies about himself, he’d take a satisfying slug from his frosted margarita, and, sweat trickling down the big brown bowl of his belly, abandon himself to his art. He tugged at his scraggly salt-and-pepper beard. “Creep was mixed up with the mob, Harv. Those folks play by a different set of rules.” “I didn’t like the guy, but never for a moment did I . . .” Lloyd labored on a silver birch not generally found in heavily forested areas and certainly not in the scene before him. “No way to grok what he did. Don’t let it eat you up, man.” At some point, dissatisfied with his floral blobs, especially the ones spotting his pants, Harvey wiped his hands and set off on an excursion, a circumnavigation of the park. Before lake and lodge, the valley had been farmed. He stepped over the remnants of several stonewalls and skirted two mossy depressions that may have been the foundations of house and barn. The trees were frizzed in pale green; occasionally, his shoes sank in the boggy ground, making slurping sounds. Thanks to smalltown journalism’s insatiable thirst for gruesome detail, he had a good notion where the burial pit had been located, and, indeed, stumbled upon it fifty yards behind the lodge. There was little to see. More fluttering police tape, a patch of much trampled ground, stumps of trees that had been felled to admit large pieces of equipment, a mound of freshly overturned earth—yellowish, reddish, slick. Three winters child and nanny had slept here in each other’s arms. He was a good lawyer, unafraid, incisive, quick to pounce. He sank his teeth in cases, got to the heart of things. He knew what he was doing. How then could he so have misjudged the man? For someone who had spent his life in an arena in which the estimation of character was the single most essential task—the sole task, one might argue— how could he have not credited the wife, the mother? Feeling the intense need to pee, not wanting to do it here, Harvey blundered back toward the lake, its nipped-in waist. He relieved himself in a stand of evergreens and sat on a rotting log. The good counselor, the straight-A pupil, he had gone the extra mile, tracked down the gossip on the mother, had in the court of domestic relations neutered her arguments, had delivered a child into the hands of a psychopath. *** “You guys up for joining us for dinner at one of our local spas?” Lloyd Ross’s friendly mug nearly filled the car window as he leaned back in. A drizzle of dioxazine plum purple—if Harvey couldn’t paint the paints, at least he was super at recognizing them—lay alongside Lloyd’s nose. “Probably not, but thanks. She doesn’t like to go out much anymore.” “Poor kid. Give her my best, Harv.” As he drove past the ex-union hall, he looked the other way, so as not to have to see his old windows on the third floor. They were in shadow, without light, he knew, and no one inside heard the pigeons burbling on the ledge. Who would rent an office in a dying building in a dying town? He headed toward the T&V. He shopped, he cooked, he did the dishes. And that was peculiar, knowing him. His first marriage he put on his tie early in the morning, untied it late at night. His life’s center of gravity lay at the office, the courthouse, the Briggs Hotel bar doing deals. When Caroline died, he realized too late that it had been she who shopped and replaced the fuses in the fuse box, she who carried in her compliant soul the memories of their three children growing up. Now, he zoomed the Hoover over the carpets like

a demon possessed. He baked pies, he figured out the byzantine cable listings, he crumpled newspapers in his fists and scrubbed the windows with vinegar. He heard the clump of Jenny’s walker through their rooms and persuaded himself that taking over the domestic chores was somehow keeping her alive. No fool, Harvey Silverstein thought, like an old fool. As he was about to turn into the T&V, he changed his mind. In the throes of the couple’s divorce, he and the wife’s attorney—Joe Henderson, a Briggs bar regular, too—spent an afternoon itemizing the child’s toys. Whether the husband’s money came from the syndicate, which, Harvey noted, had never been substantiated, or from his pizzerias, he had made it in abundance. Joe Henderson, who had been raised in one of Ganaego’s bleakest plans, put his arms entirely around a Steiffe giraffe as big as him and said, “Good grief, Harv, we’ve got twenty thousand dollars’ worth of shit here.” Designing an impromptu inventory system, they started tagging the multitudinous nursery playthings with Post-it notes, hurrying to finish before the girl and nanny came home. They didn’t finish in time. And Harvey, because Joe needed a drink, was left to explain to a four-year-old girl why there were yellow tags on her dolls’ butts. It was something you couldn’t explain. He drove to Oak Grove. Doing this would run counter to the advice of his wife; were he serving as his own counsel, he would strongly oppose it. And all in all, he supposed, the best outcome would be for her not to be home. But in answer to the wayward chimes resounding deep in the belly of the sprawling ranch house, she swung open the door. A small, finely featured woman, dark hair rounded and glossy over her ears, tailored pantsuit, proud, icy. She didn’t recognize him, then in mid-introduction suddenly cut him off. “I don’t believe you’d have the nerve to show up here.” She backed away from the wide door, made ready to slam it in his face. “I think,” he said hastily, “I need to say I’m sorry, I—” “What makes you think I care?” His shoes were mud-caked, his pants speckled with paint. It had been, he realized, a mistake to intrude on her sorrow. In this far, however, he went the rest of the way, getting it off his chest. “I didn’t like him, I didn’t really trust him, but I never thought he was capable of that—it never crossed my mind. I did the professional thing, not the right thing: I didn’t listen to my own better judgment. It was the worst decision I ever made.” “You didn’t have to listen to your better judgment!” She shook her head at him, more in bewilderment than anger. “I told you! I told all of you!” He recalled Sandra Monzi sitting in one of the courthouse’s hard chairs, a young woman clad in mink she refused to remove in the room’s heat, her hands concealed in the coat’s voluminous cuffs, as she stonily listened to the judge deny her petition for sole custody. Passing her in the street now, he might not have recognized her. Pain, worry, grief: All had exacted their price. “So, you’re sorry,” she said, simply. “Fine. It doesn’t matter. You won—isn’t that what it’s all about?” “I wish I hadn’t. I wanted to tell you that.” She was right: It didn’t matter. As he turned to leave, she said, “You don’t look like much of a lawyer? Is this the way you normally conduct your business?” Anger, scorn? He wasn’t sure. He looked down at his clothes, embarrassed. “I’ve been hounded into taking up a hobby,” he said. “Painting—pictures.” “Pictures of what?” It seemed incongruous, to be talking of his hobbies. She was leaning on the edge of the door. He decided it wasn’t scorn she was expressing, and it occurred to him: Maybe few people visited her? After Caroline died so unexpectedly, people had trouble knowing what to say to him. Whatever her motivation, he decided this grieving woman he owed this much. “Landscapes, you know, trees and birds? Un-

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fortunately, my pictures aren’t very good. You’d be hard pressed to distinguish between a bird and a tree.” “Why do you do it if you’re that bad at it?” Most people took his artistic demurrals as sham modesty. He appreciated her taking his words for what they were. “I don’t know, something to do. I have a buddy I paint with. He actually has some talent.” “And so you were painting, landscapes, with your friend, in the mud”—she gestured at his shoes—“and you suddenly decided you had to drop everything and run out here and apologize to me for something you did five years ago?” Harvey Silverstein had, he knew, a broad ready smile. A reckless smile, Jenny once told him. He smiled at Sandra Monzi, despite himself. “Maybe I’m not a very good apologizer, either, but, yeah, that’s sort of what happened.”

“Where were you—painting, I mean?” His profession dealt in truth; it also dealt in dissimulation. Trusting his intuition, he chose not to lie to her. “We were out at the lake. It was my idea. We haven’t been back there since last fall.” It rocked her. He was afraid of wounding this stranger again. And she did pull sharply away from the door. But she didn’t close it. “They wouldn’t let me go,” she said. She clenched her arms about herself, looking down, lost to her grief. “They said it was too awful, that I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I wanted to go, but they wouldn’t let me.” He had made lots of mistakes in life. Some serious ones, one colossal one. He couldn’t put the worse mistake he had ever made right, but he could do what he could do. “Would you like to go there, Mrs. Monzi?” he asked gently. “If you want, I’ll take you.” Before getting in the car, she gazed in at his easel and canvasses and other paraphernalia, pausing as if to validate his story. On the short ride out Wieck Road, she sat beside him silent, self-absorbed. Even when he pulled into Biddleford’s lot and pointed at the path behind the old lodge past the fluttering lengths of yellow tape, her only acknowledgement was to briefly meet his eyes. He tried to steer them away from the worst of the marshy areas, but it was April. Along the soles of her black pumps mud soon appeared. He had

warned her there would not be much to see. One mound of dirt looked pretty much like any other, and nothing could ever help you to understand a psychosis that could so possess a man as to cause him to murder the nanny he was having an affair with and then his own child. But over the final mound Harvey brought them to and nodded down at, he held her while she quietly sobbed. *** As he passed down through Ganaego again on his way home, he looked up at his blank office windows and decided he was a lawyer. He researched, he analyzed, he tracked down leads, he wrote up evidentiary briefs and defended them. He knew how to persuade people to talk and not litigate; he knew how to persuade people to litigate and not talk. He knew the cops, some of the bad guys, who you saw in the courthouse. What he was not was a painter. Actually, he had started in on this train of thought a bit

earlier, in the T&V. He found himself pondering a bag of dried split peas. How did these become soup? “They don’t,” he answered himself. “You open a can.” Harvey discovered his wife in the bathroom, in the tub, awash in blood. “I’m sorry,” Jenny said, as if it were all her fault. From the gash above her left eye blood had crimsoned her freckled face, her breasts and belly. The sides of the tub looked like something from an abattoir. “Harvey, I’m so sorry. I slipped—I think I broke my leg.” She was in shock, shivering, yet she was calmer than he. In a great flurry of hysteria, he dragged the blankets off the bed and, against her protests he was going to stain them, tucked them around her. He clattered down the stairs to the phone, misdialed 911, dialed it correctly, turned the thermostat up to ninety even though it would take longer to raise the heat in the house than they would be there, fetched a pillow for her head, bringing her more pain than comfort. She winced. “I’m sorry,” she said again. He wet a hand towel and bathed her face, then folded the towel and pressed it against the deep gash that continued to seep. She winced again. In South Ganaego’s glory days it had boasted its own fire

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and ambulance company, but long past were those days. Having run out of useless things to do, Harvey swore at the slowness of the responders and fell prey to his fears. He gathered she had fallen an hour or more ago. It was probably due more to the declining strength in her legs than the slipperiness of the porcelain, but still he held himself responsible—for the tub, for the nonskid pads he never got around to gluing down, but mostly for his being out all day. Beneath her, her leg was crooked the wrong way. He reached down and held her, lightly. They heard the sirens approaching. The medical technicians invited him to clamber up into the ambulance and kneel beside his wife. As the truck streaked down the boulevard along the darkening river, Harvey recalled an old memory, his middle child, a boy of twelve, pitching off his bike and tumbling over a retaining wall and his riding in the Cadillac ambulance with the boy to the hospital. Noah was frightened, he had gotten it into his head that he was going to die. For a minute, the boy’s irrational fear spread like a contagion to Harvey, then he had mastered his panic and calmed the boy. All this preparation and rehearsal for death, he thought, and how miserable we are at it when at last death comes. Today, truly frightened, he closed his hand around his wife’s hand. “How did the painting go?” she asked. “You’re trying to take my mind off my worries?” Her eyes closed in pain, then opened. They clung to him. “Talk to me, Harvey, talk to me. I love it when you talk to me.” In addition to the paint on his trousers, now there was blood. Harvey idly scratched at a smudge of red, not utterly sure of its origin. Ganaego’s streetlights, dim with age, glimmered in the dusk. As they passed beneath his office windows, this for him the fifth time today, he said, “I’m thinking it’s not the painting I’m having trouble with; it’s the paint. I might ask Lloyd about watercolors.” “You miss your work, you old liar.” Alongside her nose lay a wisp of blood. People with colors on their faces, he thought. He touched the dried blood, rubbed it gently, then lifted her hair free of her forehead. “Yeah, I miss my work. I had a helluva practice, a helluva lot of fun.” Harvey smiled, consciously opening his wide mouth even wider, showing all his big yellow teeth. “But that’s all over, Jenn. It’s time for Act II, you and me.”

Kelly Michels

Static in the Dark There is a shred of veil in Venice, waiting for new pilgrims to file in from the dark like a skull with a full head of hair in a church rushed with incense and shadow. I think of Mia Zapata, the hounds tracing the air, how she was found like a Christ in the fog, they said the stillness of her pale body looked like a light in the dark. I was young in the throes of San Giamani, its grotto littered with Pepsi cans as the echo of a boat’s motor kept me stable, balancing above the shadow of water. Sometimes I wonder if everyone is recovering from something. There was a woman on a talk show, held in a box for seven years, persuaded to be a slave, locked in the dark. When I got in the car this morning, there was a preacher on the radio advertising eternity—God, he said, has no shadow. I read today that ninety percent of all crack and cocaine addicts recover by becoming alcoholics, as if trying to light a wet match in the dark. My uncle is a paranoid schizophrenic in Las Vegas. He drives with a live caged panther on the top of his van. He believes what he says to you is in confidence. It is difficult at times to know what is what—whether or not what I see is a sign of God or simply a light making everything else falling behind it dark. Sometimes in sleep’s sacred space, I pretend I am at sea, searching for your remains, unsure of what I’m looking for, trying to recover a shadow.

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Harry Bauld

When You Grow Up Catholic It’s always a little girl in Santiago or Sacramento, Her name a flower, who spots the Virgin Mary In the spilled toothpaste or the filthy fast food grill. In bed I know you’re asleep when something flickers Through your legs, a broadcast I can’t hear—sunspots, Moon cycles, tides, I don’t know. I’m male: somewhere Something is being batted, shaved, Sharpened to a point. Still you and I remain A few outlets where the world’s current Plugs in, like the legends of New Yorkers Who used to pick up jazz radio From Kansas City in their fillings. Some nights after the petit mal of your crossover Into sleep, the universe winking out in you Like an old TV, I go into the bathroom And sit on the closed toilet in the dark And look east through starved city trees Toward Queens, where morning is still a cello No one has even taken out of the case, and try To quell the news wired along my own marrow. Last night I leaned an arm on the cool porcelain of the sink And listened to the word tomorrow bounce like a ball In my head. Back under the sheets I clasped you Till I slept, stretched along the line where one arm reached Over your head as if to interrupt With one last question the droning lecture of night, And I dreamed to the drum of your heart in my ear, On earth as it is in heaven.

Matthew Ballou. Lamentations 3 Verses 17 & 18. Mezzotint. 9 inches in diameter.

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Becca J.R. Lachman

Wait

—after Psalm 27

I have seen things shine. Most days, this is enough: my escape route more grace than gravel. Every stop-motion memory of failure stocked in my body like grain. I am the harvest’s vessel, full and waiting for a match to find fire where I stand, the whole mess blitzing down. Mama said Don’t as many times as she could. But my shield, in the end, is gravity, the faith root not yet weeded out. Since childhood, it’s been the same landlord leaving me notes on the kitchen table he built into the hardwood floor. This will someday be yours, he signs at the bottom. “This” is all I’ve ever wanted—to stop being homesick, to cry at the beautiful God looking out of a stranger, make my life from something sung out of joy, not out of training. There are deer in the gardens again. And someone’s name I don’t recognize all over the mail and magazines. The landlord was once out of town for weeks. I asked for different light bulbs, but he brought me lamps instead. I think it’s him who throws the fuse, switches off the newscast when I’ve been listening for hours. Who needs that rabble, anyway? I do. I just want the headlines to be different. Me too, he nods. Me too.

On Reading after Crisis TARN WILSON

In three years time, my life as I knew it cracked. My father, still in his early sixties, passed on. A year

later, my mother died suddenly at age fifty-nine. The following year, a surprise to both my husband and me, our long marriage disintegrated. Grief piled upon grief. I lost all desire to read. I had been a voracious reader all my life and, in the months afterward, its absence unhinged me, even more than the loss of my house, possessions, and familiar routines. Slowly, slowly, over the last two years, I have found my way back to my books, but through the most unlikely of avenues. And in some ways my reading habits have been—perhaps permanently—altered. But why did crisis so radically alter my reading patterns? To understand how deeply the loss of reading disoriented me, you have to know my reading history: I’d had a tumultuous childhood. My hippie parents divorced when I was young. My mother was moody, alternately loving and raging, dancing wildly in our living room or lying immobile in her dark bedroom for days on end. She was restless, driven always to new places, new jobs—shambled relationships in her wake. Almost every year, my younger sister and I transferred schools. Our education was fragmented, and the tentative friendships we’d begin to build continually dissolved. But I had books. Each time we moved, I unpacked my books first, organized them by category, and arranged them in size order on my bookshelf. I adored the books of E.B. White: Charlotte’s Web. The Trumpet of the Swan. I read and reread the complete Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series and the many Wizard of Oz books. I disappeared into the worlds of Roald Dahl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and James and the Giant Peach. Two shelves were filled with yellow Nancy Drew books. Books filled in the gaps of my interrupted education—and were friends who could move with me. I was shy, but books provided intimacy, companions who understood me, a window into the hearts of those different from me. And stories were an escape: almost always, we lived in cramped apartments and my sister and mother liked the company of noise—both the TV and radio blaring—so books were my place of quiet, private worlds that belonged only to me. Stories gave me a way to manage my feelings. My mother’s emotions were enormous and unpredictable. She’d yell at her boss, quit her job, and again we’d move and suffer weeks without an income, sometimes days without food. For me, emotions had life-threatening consequences, so I vowed to keep mine as even as possible. But within the safe confines of book covers, guided by a wise author-consciousness I trusted to keep me safe, through characters who were not me, I could feel the full range of anger, fear, and grief. I could risk hope. My parents, as part of the sixties rebellion against the staid formality of the fifties, were exploring new moral codes, so their value systems were murky and changing. The books I read were not didactic, but the authors had hard-earned philosophies for living well, which imbued their stories. Unbeknownst

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to me, and under my atheist father’s radar, I was absorbing books by Christian authors: C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and his Chronicles of Narnia, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. They gifted me with a moral center. Most importantly, books gave me models to live by: story after story in which unlikely children became heroes, masters of their own destiny, of service to their community. They were flawed, but brave and unselfish. They endured. They thrived. They served. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was building a story frame on which I could model my life: a map through my childhood to a meaningful adulthood. Books were full of drama—but not senseless drama. Suffering was necessary for the characters’ growth, to test their mettle, refine their characters, and arrive at a happy end. I, too, was on a hero’s journey, and I would prevail. Although we had little money when I was growing up, my mother indulged my book habit. In early elementary school, she hand rolled her cigarettes, and, every time we visited the tobacco/book shop, she let me buy a new novel. In seventh grade, I was enraptured by Watership Down. I was reading it during history class, and the boy in front of me, teasing me, hid it and wouldn’t give it back. My mother understood how dreadful it was to be interrupted in the middle of a story and drove me out that night, on icy Colorado roads, to buy another one. The next day I was again reading Watership Down at my desk, and the boy, bewildered and a little embarrassed, pulled out the book hidden behind the magazines lining the tray of the blackboard. “I was going to give it to you today. . . . You must really like reading.” By the time I was an adult, my reading had probably evolved from a healthy habit into something closer to a compulsion. Years ago, I read The Artist’s Way, a twelve week creativity program, which asks participants to sacrifice reading for a week. I exhibited all the behaviors of an addict. Excuses. Justifications. As an English teacher, I had to prepare the reading for class and grade my papers, right? And I’m such a quick reader, I involuntarily read the sides of buses and backs of cereal boxes. And, really, who can resist at least opening a People magazine at the hairdresser? Okay, maybe when I found myself in the bathtub reading the ingredient list on the shampoo bottles, I recognized I had a problem. Addicts have reasons for their behavior—for me reading was a way to settle my busy mind. Busy Mind Syndrome, I like to call it. My mind is always tracking multiple layers. The dominant ones: obsessing about my to do list, monitoring my fussy emotions, fearing I am in dire danger of disappointing someone, mulling over my relationships, envisioning my future and evaluating my progress toward it, worrying over the news, grieving about environmental issues, managing memories of the past, second-guessing myself, and mostly berating myself for not living up to impossibly high standards. So reading anything was a form of rest. Reading narrowed my thoughts to what was on the page and its narrow band of related associations. It gave my thought some structure, an escape from the crazier parts of myself. So how could I lose such a deeply engrained and fundamental habit? Yes, the stresses of those few years were unusual: in addition to the deaths of both parents, divorce, and my challenging job as a high school teacher, I was enrolled in a rigorous master’s degree program. My father-in-law, who had been an artistic mentor to me, unexpectedly died the same weekend as my mother. Just after my husband and I separated, I fell in love—joyful, but overwhelming and disorienting. But none of these were more than the ordinary changes of an ordinary human life. Less shocking than some of the insanity of my childhood. I spent hours researching how stress affects reading, and found nothing more revealing than this common sense statement on a website on grief: loss affects focus and concentration and “You may read a paragraph several times and still not absorb its meaning.” Grief disrupts concentration and the ability to track a story. But why? What was happening in my brain? I don’t know, but I have a partial theory: loss is traumatic to the degree to which it disrupts a sense of identity. In my childhood, my story of myself had not yet solidified, and I was partially aware, even then, that my crises were largely of my parents’ making. I didn’t take the disruptions personally. But as an adult, without realizing it, I had grown into a story of myself, particularly in my marriage. I had promised myself I would not repeat the multiple divorces

of my parents. I believed my “I do” was a commitment for life. I was held in partnership by my religious beliefs, the hopes of friends and family, the intermingling of finances and possessions, and, finally, after years, the acceptance of the loneliness at the center of our relationship. So the sudden dissolution of my marriage, complicated soon after by the new man in my life, was a shock and a wound and a confusion— an unraveling of my story of myself. I was not the character I thought I was. The plot was not moving towards its expected end. There was nothing left to resolve but to love my parents and my spouse and let them go, but who was I in this new and open space? So that’s my theory: change is traumatic to the degree it explodes our story. Recovery depends on our ability to let the story wash away and our willingness to examine the life left behind. For the first time, we must see it as it is, without judgment or interpretation. That explanation, in itself, is a story, so I can’t be sure of it. I’m certain of so little these days. But here’s what I do know: in the months after the deaths and the separation, my thoughts stalled. My busy mind

had been shocked into silence. I had to keep going: teach my classes, grade my papers, do my homework, answer my work emails. But it took almost more energy than I had. Several days after my mother’s death, a friend invited me to a small gathering at her house. “Come, it will be good for you to see people,” she said. She couldn’t know how stunned I was, how a loss can be like an injury, how I needed to keep still, how I couldn’t make small talk—or even worse, meaningful talk. At that point reading felt like that: small talk and meaningful talk in the living room of my brain. Too exhausting. I could no longer argue politics with news magazines or fret over the unfolding of the facts with newspapers. I couldn’t have emotional conversations with novels about desire and suffering. Short stories demanded focus I didn’t have. Self-help books were full of lectures and advice I couldn’t follow. In the past, fine literature—the best thinking by the best minds—restored me, but even the author’s words were too much of someone else rattling around in my head. I needed to be alone. Here is the moment I knew my mother was going to die: My sister and I had moved her to a care facility. She loved birds and was fond of the sweet stuffed animals my sister and I sent her over the years. So to make her room cozy, I brought her some items from her house: A little teddy bear. Some small papermache birds with real feathers she’d bought to decorate packages. While she was sleeping, I set them around the room. When she awoke, she almost panicked: “Take them away! I need you to take them away.”

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I gathered them and had to leave the room. As soon as I was gone, my mother told my sister she feared she had hurt my feelings. But that wasn’t it. Even though she had yet to be diagnosed, for some reason I can’t explain, I knew her need to have her environment stripped bare meant she was soon going to die. In retrospect, I believe that all of her attention was focused on her struggle; she was both fighting for her life and preparing to set down the ultimate book, the story that was her own human existence. She couldn’t bear any clutter or distraction. Now my mind craved the same extreme simplicity as I adjusted to life without her. And reading felt like clutter. In the months after my losses, my relationship to time altered: I could see only the present moment or the cosmic scale. I had lost my capacity for long-term planning and could think no farther ahead than the next day’s lesson plans. On the positive side, I was emotionally present with my students in a way I had never been. In the past I had been most emotionally alive while reading; now I was inhabiting my own life, strange and disorienting though it was. On the other hand, I suddenly saw human life on the largest scale, the great wide arc of human history. My attention shifted from my goals for the week, my five-year plan, even my own lifespan, to eons passing: thousands of generations, born and dying, born and dying. What is meaningful in this vast measure? Suddenly, I could care less about the small dramas of Hollywood stars that had secretly attracted me: who was dating whom and who had adopted a baby and who had lost too much weight. They will get old and die. They had their own griefs, just like mine, and I wanted to give them some privacy. Likewise, on public radio, I’d hear pundits, with great intensity and earnestness, micro-analyzing the possible outcomes of an election over which they had no influence or control. “You’ll know soon enough,” I thought to myself, wearied by the urgency in their voices. “And what does it matter anyway? We all die.” The enormous boulder of time, with its births and deaths and revolutions, would continue to roll with or without their words. This was also new for me: I was grieving real time. In the past, I had dealt with crisis with elaborate mechanisms of denial: immediate numbness, followed much later by confusing emotions that leaked out at unexpected and sometimes inappropriate moments. This time was different: I cried often. Small pleasures—the taste of an orange, the warm water of a bath, the beauty of a bouquet sent by a friend—were magnified. All emotions were heightened—as if I had no exterior skin to dull suffering or joy. The longing in a song on the radio, the tender loneliness in a painting, the vulnerable expression on a student’s face: I felt them all with overwhelming intensity. In the months after the initial shock of the losses had lessened, instead of reading, I wanted to see people. I said yes to more invitations. I didn’t want to talk about myself, but I wanted to hear others tell their stories. Over and over, I guided every conversation to the same essential question: “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you and how did you get through it?” And people talked, strangers and acquaintances and friends who had never told their secrets. Stories, but ones that floated in the air instead of ones I could read. I didn’t know if I would ever return to reading—or who I would be without it. I fretted over it, but had to let the desire go as no amount of effort could restore me to my former habits. And then, slowly my books did return to me—but not in the way I had imagined. My sister, also going through a divorce, mailed me the Tao Te Ching, the sixth century Chinese Taoist text, translated into English and arranged in poetic lines by Stephen Mitchell. It was the first, and for a while, only book I could read. This was in stark contrast to my elaborate pre-crisis reading habits. During the summer, I’d gobble whatever I could get my hands on, often in some inexplicable theme: novels and memoirs about the Holocaust, memoirs by outdoorswomen of the 1940s, everything by and about Anne Morrow Lindberg. But once the school year began, the books on my bedside table were predicable: 1. A half-finished literary novel, which, as soon as my job got too demanding, I abandoned. (But if anyone asked me what I was reading, I’d mention it.) 2. A memoir, which I was reading steadily or couldn’t put

down. 3. A self-help book I’d read a little of every day, but which I might tuck in a drawer when my literary friends came over. 4. A book about writing or spirituality that I usually read in the morning 5. A book of non-fiction essays. I’d read a few pages before bed every night. 6. A layman’s book of sociology or psychology I’d read in fragments. 7. A book of poetry I’d intended to read but never opened. I predicted that when I started reading again, I’d begin with gentle, amusing books, which had soothed me when I was most overwhelmed by work—say, the travel writing of Bill Bryson. Or maybe a spiritual memoir on death or divorce, which simultaneously named my feelings and gave me a comforting spiritual context for them. But, no. Instead I found my way back through the reading I’d long avoided—poetry. And not just any poetry, but the most abstract and impersonal of poetry. As a child, I’d loved poetry, the singsong voices and rhythms, the nonsense and surprise. In college, when I began taking traditional literature classes, I became enamored with poetry again. I remember buying T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets and reading it alone in my dorm room on a Friday night, sitting on my navy blue comforter. The rhythms and language (“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”) felt so intense and beautiful and true and transcendent, my whole body filled with tingles. I didn’t know what to do with those tingles, couldn’t contain them, so I did what any serious student of poetry might do in the same situation, I jumped on the bed and yelled, a quiet girl yell. It felt inadequate, but what else could I do? After college, I called myself a poetry-lover, but I did not become a poetry reader. There were three obstacles: One. The sensation was pleasurable, but so intense, that I feared being overwhelmed. Some people say God doesn’t show Himself to us because we will be blinded by the light: I was afraid of being melted by poetry. Two. After college, I slipped into the ordinary life of trying to find a job and learning how to be an adult, navigating new and old relationships, and, for the first time away from home, processing my tumultuous childhood. Poetry reminded me that I was no longer living with a child sense of awe and wonder, and because I couldn’t manage to stay poetically awake, being reminded of my dullness only made me feel inadequate. Three. My busy mind was worried and racing. Poetry reading required a shift of consciousness, a stillness I could rarely muster. So year after year, I bought new poetry books. I kept them near me, but didn’t open them. Why, then, did my reading recovery begin with the Tao Te Ching, especially poetry so spare and abstract?: “Free from desire, you realize only the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.” Perhaps it was the unexpected hibernation of my buzzing brain. I had lost my ability for long-term planning, but in its place was a quietness in which I could receive poetry. And the Tao was so pared to its essence, as to have almost no sense of a human author. My mind did not feel invaded by a guest whose personality I had to accommodate; the words felt as if the universe itself was speaking. “Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course?” “Can you love people and love them without imposing your will?” It encouraged release even from my goals and striving: “When her work is done, she forgets it. That is why it lasts forever.” Most of all, it promised that even though my story had dissolved and I had no framework with which to understand myself, I still existed. I copied this line many times in my journal: “Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.” I read the slim volume over and over, and then moved on to the complete poems of the 13th Century Persian mystic, Rumi. As a writer, Rumi has a more distinct personality, an identity with which I could agree or argue, but, similarly, his words promised that right in the midst of my jumble-thoughts was wisdom: “Where did I come from and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea.” Rumi helped me accept my blasted state—“This year I am a burnt kabob”—and embrace a larger definition of myself: “Drink all your passion and be a disgrace.” And he comforted me: “Be empty of worrying. Think who created thought.” “Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.” “Look at the chefs preparing special plates for

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everyone, according to what they need.” He promised me a future beyond my suffering: “Why do you stay in the prison when the door is so wide open?” “Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now.” Only poetry could reach through my fog of grief and fear. Not long after my father died, I took an afternoon workshop with the cross-genre writer Greg Glazner on the difference between narrative and lyric writing. Narrative, or traditional storytelling, he explained, unfolds in time. It takes place in a specific location and moves from here to there (through change in plot, place, or thought) along a time line. In experimental work, the line may be fragmented, the location surreal or subjective, but the work is still grounded by time. Lyrical writing, on the other hand, transcends time. It stretches above the flow of story to touch some timeless illumination. It glimpses a dimension where contradictions are reconciled, stretches toward insight for which mere words are inadequate. The Tao and Rumi. I had experienced both birth and death as lyric moments, existing outside the familiar flow of time. Visiting friends just after the birth of a baby, I always feel as if I am entering another dimension. An atmosphere profoundly still, yet alive. Hushed, reverent, alert. In those first few weeks, the room where the family rests feels filled with a warm, protective layer, where time moves slowly, if at all. I have felt the same timeless, reverent hush just after a death. For a moment, everyone’s stories, fears,

hungers are stilled. Worrying stalls. I know suddenly (and can’t imagine I will ever forget again) that life is for living and loving and nothing else matters. The ache of loss has not yet permeated: I still feel in the presence of mystery. None of us knows, really, from whence we come and where we go when we slip to and from this world of human time—this elaborate story we have told ourselves about ourselves. At moments of birth or death, we are jarred from our story, touch the lyric, transcendent level. So maybe that is what happened to me: the narrative of my life had been broken. My parents had disappeared through a crack into another dimension. My marriage, which had given shape to my life and grounded me in space and time and relationship, evaporated. In the months afterward, I was forced to return to my story, my life unfolding in time, but I did so on autopilot. And my mind still dwelled in the timeless, placeless, formless lyrical. Only poetry made sense.

It’s been two and a half years since my last major loss, and I have settled again into the shape of an ordinary life. I plan for my classes and for my future and I worry again about my to do list. I can’t resist the headlines of the celebrity magazines in the grocery store. My familiar stack and range of reading material are again heaped beside my bed. But all is not as it was. Although I am no longer the world-weary person who sighs over the great arc of human history, I feel more distance from political debates. My energy level is slower, but more intense. Now, I can slow myself down enough to regularly read poetry. I couldn’t find my way back to novels—my first love—on my own, so I joined a book group to help get me there. And my reading process has changed. I read more slowly. And I re-read. Sentences. Passages. Whole books—I revisit old loves, or begin a book again as soon as I have finished. I feel anguish sometimes about all the reading I’ll miss in my lifetime, but can’t make myself read any faster. I use my intuition to choose my books and I abandon those that don’t speak to me. All this is new. I don’t know if the changes in my reading habits are permanent, but I suspect I will never be the same reader I was. One ritual has stayed blessedly the same. I am decades from my childhood, but three months ago, when I moved with my new beau into my new house, I was most eager to open my book boxes. I held my old and soon-to-be-discovered friends in my hand. I felt their weight. I sorted them into categories, I arranged them by size, I set them on my shelves. They surround me now. They are my history, and they are the lives I have yet to live.

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Laurie Lamon

I stopped writing the poem to read about the temperature of sugar dust that can catch fire, and the genesis and the shape of skin grafts, and the leg the nineteen-year-old fiancĂŠe holds down, pressing her lips to his lips because his leg still feels fire. I stopped writing to watch the YouTube video my student Danny sent with instructions to wait through the first three minutes of darkness to the moment the octopus gives birth to thousands, its body the braid a dance looks like when I think of dance, and the depth where the photographer waited in the vast space like the space beside the road where I pulled over the first time to find my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mile marker, or the gravestone where I felt in my pocket for pen and paper and found sugar packets and tore them open and poured the sugar across his name.

Gary J. Whitehead

Warren Autumn, with its globes, the gold and silver saved, hanging here and there like something to reach for, has become this time to walk through and through which to watch from a distance seven vultures, like days of the week, turn and turn. They, too, must be watching. They must see with keener vision the least leaf swing upon a stem, a bee visit the sleeping dog. This is not why they have come. What the breeze lifts and offers, what the sky accepts has nothing to do with the orchard, with the dog in its dream, with you, who canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t yet sense what, between the rows, in a nest of summer grass, lie strewn like stolen purses. This is why the vultures, the days of the week come: to assign a given time a task, to walk, however awkwardly, toward what the dog knows and what, when the branches are finally bare, will waft on cooler air up and down these rows.

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Carolyn Moore

What Euclid’s Third Axiom Neglects to Mention about Circles Winter. You forgot to tip the birdbath meant for mild months. Circled tight, its water froze. Cement cracked, its purpose drained. Circles + constraint = breakage. Plane geometry allows concentric circles, if only you will seek them. Bereft of diameter, radius, secant, and chord— have you a compass to draw solace’s circumference? That circle familia? You left it for what now lies as shattered arcs beside you, as you are beside yourself. Spring grass erases circles the deer, all autumn, pressed flat as they lounged, swapped fleas and ticks, gnawed on bruised windfall apples. A tangent is a straight line touching a circle—never cutting it. This is no time to be tangential. Cut back. Seek the old, faint pencil tracks your careless sleeve smudged and dimmed. This, a circle’s elegance: a line returns to itself. Or could seem to.

REVIEW

T H E DAWN THAT COM ES WA LKI N G A review of American Masculine: Stories by Shann Ray •

Graywolf Press, 2011

REVIEWED BY RITA JONES

When I was four years old, my mother bundled up the youngest three of her five children and

took us to the King Street Train Station in downtown Seattle. My parents were in the midst of an absolutely brutal divorce. For the next three and a half days, a portion of my family was enclosed in the confines of a train car, bound for Kentucky. Paducah, Kentucky, where my aunt lived. It was midwinter, and the land was blanketed in snow, with long arms of flat ice that stretched between horizons. At the time, I had just begun to read, and The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, was my favorite book. My mother, several weeks before our trip, had purchased a small stuffed animal for me, identical to the rabbit in Williams’ story. Its ears fell long and slender, and its stomach was lined with soft suede, with a bodily sheen of cotton-trying-to-be-silk. In a time of travel and unknowing, through the entire divorce, I never let it go. Shann Ray’s American Masculine is a book worthy of being such an anchor. It is a book you cling to in times of chaos, when the whole world is falling apart around you—when you are falling apart too. Its dark beauty, its soft and terrible stories, somehow makes the world you see real, and better. The author grew up as a non-Indian on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeast Montana. American Masculine, his debut collection of short stories, is primarily set under that hard blue of Montana sky. The characters below walk between rebellion and heritage, addiction and purity, rage and forgiveness, every so often looking upward and outward, considering their hearts, their dreams, and the ones who have been lost. The American West of previous generations has been a setting of legend and myth. Men are silent, strong, tall, unmoving, and alluring in their stoic presence. Landscapes are long and still, their expanses freeing. That West is now a West of lost things. In its place Shann Ray creates stories of different men: fathers who beat their sons and wives, basketball players who can never leave their small towns, rodeo boys lost in city banks, marriages fraught with adultery, and businessmen drowning in sex and alcohol. The women of his stories, every so often caught up in their own tales of selfdestruction, are figures that do their best to quell the tidal forces of violence in the men they love. American Masculine reminds us that the term “masculine” is inherently a social construct, one to be re-created, re-imagined, and re-formed with each telling, with each male, and with each family. Each story tracks the thoughts of a man caught in the pain of his own ruin, one approaching the psychological turn that demands his hardness should end. For some, it is death; for others, the birth of their first child; and for others, the sweet graceful touch of someone who still loves them. For example, in “The Miracles of Vincent Van Gogh,”(which first was published in Ruminate’s Issue

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15), Ray writes, “Tangibly they ranged the border between self-sabotage and a new country of grace, and it worried him, the threshold over which a man must pass, the crucible.” What is most striking about Ray’s style is the melody and rhythm of each sentence. “Lyrical” is a drastic understatement for what he accomplishes, using rich nuance, well-planned diction, striking beauty, and the sharp bite of detail. Both exquisitely crafted and appropriately colloquial, his prose is some of the best stream-of-consciousness writing I’ve read in contemporary fiction. Although the majority of his stories follow traditional structure and form, Ray exhibits great discernment in the inclusion and exclusion of punctuation, internal and external dialogue, and the shifting of time and space. There is a weightiness to his writing, one in which you recognize the great human potential of his characters, and in weighting his words he slows the reader down. Thus, with greater attention, the reader can recognize the magic of the new, the magic of grace and forgiveness. Thematically, the breadth of Shann Ray’s collection allows him to delve into an array of topics. American Masculine explores many of our deepest insecurities: our fear of deep and true love; our inability to break family cycles of terror; and the overwhelming bonds that keep us in violent stagnancy, addicted stasis, or blinding heartache. He explores familial trends of anger and hate, forgiveness and acceptance, all against a backdrop of what it means to be brave, what it means to have courage, what it means to look squarely in the mirror and do something with what you see. He reminds the reader that a primary part of what it means to be human is the ability to look inside, and challenges men and women to take that look, no matter how scary it may be, even if our shadows seem larger than our sunlit selves. “I’ve been wondering about how to be different than I’ve been,” a father says to his son—a son he once abused and whose mother he has cheated on, a father who has marbled bruises on his family (“In the Half Light”). Through his characters Shann Ray navigates the ties between violence and love, violence and childhood, violence and its seeds. Yet, violence isn’t enough of a word to describe the scenes that Ray creates; it is more of a deep confusion with the body, with what we can do or undo with it, what we can destroy and overpower. And in its wake, Ray shows us how tired we become, how utterly exhausting it is to carry the world alone. For example, in “The Dark Between Them,” Zeb and his wife, Sara, are trying to have a child together. They are both ex-junkies, and the doctor has just told Zeb that his wife has experienced her third miscarriage. Ray writes of Zeb: He’d say nothing. Stand as a stuffed man with no mouth or ears, his arms and body so elongated that the shoulders narrowed straight to his neck. He’d pack cotton bunting into the back of his own head to fill the space inside his face. No mouth or ears, but eyes. Black buttons from his father’s first suit. . . . In the silence he thought of men who abuse women, men with sisters, wives, children. He thought of himself as one of these men, empty and consumed by greed, given over. When one takes steps into such darkness, one is also given room to breathe, space to consider the divine through Ray’s simple echoes of Native American spirituality, biblical scripture, and the deific

majesty of creation. Within a loose theological framework, Ray’s stories include dark litanies of the broken-spirited, drastic pleas for tangible love, and prayers for all numbness to cease. Carefully, Ray reminds the reader that many hold a deep desire for suffering to simply reach its end, a cry for quick death, so that in the void beyond they may find freedom and release (as in “Rodin’s The Hand of God” and “The Great Divide”). In “How We Fall,” the first story of the collection, my personal favorite, a woman weighed down by alcoholism, panhandling, and prostitution thinks back to the love she left behind: In the early morning she touched a thin sheen of water in the bottom of the kitchen sink. She moved her index finger in a cursive pattern and wrote Benjamin’s full name, then erased it, then wrote her own name. The nature of the lines and their slow evaporation worked at her like a thing that gnawed bone. Life is no solace, she told herself, and went back to bed. Her story, like the others in this collection, does not end without hope. Yet hope, love and faith are not crutches for Ray, they are not easy outs. Each story does not end in kind resolution. Instead, many end with descriptions of an incredibly fragile image of love: a soaring eagle, the sunset behind a driving car, a lone man in a field of crystalline snow, an unmade bed in the first light of dawn. Within this collection, there is somewhat of a strange similarity in the names of his characters and in their sizes, features, and habits. Each story boasts different cities and families, yet they are wonderfully related echoes of each other that make you feel there is a larger framework for humanity in which we all suffer and love together. Ray defines his Montana setting as “the world without edge and like a dream,” in which we grope towards a love strong enough to heal us. Several stories in this collection were almost unbearable to read in their weight of sadness. One portion of “Rodin’s The Hand of God,” for example, pulls from the ache and nausea we feel when we learn of great tragedy, perversion, and the desecration of the innocent. The only comforting metaphor seems to be found in the constancy of the rocking between day and night, dawn as “a desire, a hunger in the land and sky” for the world to be reborn. This collection has become my new Velveteen Rabbit. I read it twice over to even begin to start this review, and as I carried it with me, it grew shabbier and shabbier, its spine crushed by the turning of pages, of coffee stains and grubby fingers. As the Skin Horse says to the Velveteen Rabbit, “By the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to the people who don’t understand.” And maybe, I loved American Masculine with that tenacity. In doing so, Ray reminded me that no matter how ugly we may be, no matter how diseased or broken, when someone truly cares for us we become transformed.

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Wesley Rothman

Long After My Grandfather’s Death Huddled on an island of bone in Jonah’s great whale we have never fished or camped or talked over a meal until now. We rig a net of tattered shirt and driftwood— debris from our wreck—wait for fish to idle in its mouth, spring our trap. With his abalone knife, our only possession, we pick small filets from slender ribs that fold and snap back, scrape all the way down a throat if not removed. Jonah spent three days inside, ill with repentance, practiced his drowned-man posture, his booming whisper, prayers falling from his mouth like fish guts from the belly cut. When we have devoured every morsel, my grandfather and I rest side by side, telling stories of our lives, as we never have, peering into the dome, starless and breathing. The water calms: food gone, humid dark, mumbling we mistake for God’s voices.

CONTRIBUTORS

Aubrey Allison is a BFA writing student at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Her favorite things include strong coffee, cold pine forests, and wearing shoes that are silent when she walks. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s taking pictures or embroidering something. Her visual art has been sold in the United States and France, and you can see it at aubreyallison.com. Aubrey created “Introspective” by merging two of her photographs—combining images is one of her favorite things to do—to make an expressive self-portrait. It is a picture of inward reflection: a quiet yet active mind. Matthew Ballou is an artist and writer living in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife Alison and daughter Miranda. He is an assistant teaching professor of painting and drawing in the art department of The University of Missouri, where he has taught since 2007. His artwork is an attempt to address—through archetypal themes and symbols—the fundamental questions, ideas, hopes, and concerns he has about being in the world. This general approach has manifested in an exploration of the morphology of the body—its shapes, angles and internal relationships of parts—as a cipher for or vision of human knowledge. Recently his work has been seen in solo shows in Boston and Seattle, as well as in a two-person show with Tim Lowly in Louisville, KY. His extensive article on the work of Odd Nerdrum was the cover feature in Image Journal’s 2006 Summer edition. Ballou has been a contributor to Neoteric Art in Chicago, Illinois, since 2009, and Neoteric released a collection of his essays, titled Nine Texts, in October 2011. Harry Bauld writes: “My first connection to poetry was my theft at fifteen of a large leather-and-gilt 18th-century edition of Thomas Gray from the Medford (Massachusetts) High School Library. I did not know Thomas Gray and had never actually read a poem intended for adults, but I reasoned even such a beautiful book wouldn’t be missed since its card pocket revealed it had last been checked out in 1953. Years later I gave away the book as a gift and have continued to atone through the years with a Himalaya of rejection notices from the finest literary journals, although several—including The Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, New Millenium Writings, and The Baltimore Review among others— have considered the penance done. With humility and gratitude I have been allowed to teach poetry and literature as well as coach baseball, basketball, and boxing at independent high schools in New York and New England.” James Crews was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. His collection of poems, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and he is the recent recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. In his free time, James writes reviews and essays for basalt magazine and regularly contributes to the (London) Times Literary Supplement. He has worked as a wallpaper salesman, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, and an English teacher in rural Oregon. He has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently at work on a PhD in Lincoln, Nebraska. Temple Cone is the author of three books of poetry, most recently That Singing from March Street Press, and of six chapbooks, most recently

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The Waters Beyond the Ark from Finishing Line Press. An associate professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he is also an avid marathoner, which may have something to do with his having been a medieval flagellant in a past life. Francis DiClemente lives in Syracuse, New York, where he works as a video producer. In his spare time he writes and takes photographs. He is the author of Outskirts of Intimacy, a poetry chapbook published by Flutter Press. His photographs have been exhibited in small galleries in upstate New York and have also appeared in some literary magazines. He received a BA in communications/journalism from St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, and an MA in film/video from American University in Washington, DC. More of his photographs can be seen at www. flickr.com/photos/francisdiclemente. He writes: “I am fascinated by the simple juxtaposition of light and shadow in whatever form it takes, and I strive to discover interesting images amid ordinary surroundings.” Jane Hertenstein’s current focus is flash. A decade ago the average short story was sixteen to twenty pages double-spaced; today flash is all the rage, for the digital age, formatted for the hand-held device. Jane is the author of over twenty-two published short pieces, a combination of fiction and creative nonfiction and blurred genre. In addition she has published a novel, Beyond Paradise, and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady, which garnered national reviews. Jane is the recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Flashquake, Fiction Fix, Tonopah Review, and several themed anthologies. Rita Jones graduated from Westmont College in 2010 with a degree in history and an English minor. This fall she will embark on her next journey in academia as a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her studies will include american intellectual history, women and gender, and american spirituality. Rita was raised on a small farm in the Puget Sound, Washington, and still holds a deep fondness for front porches, lilac blossoms, and cradling chicken eggs in the palm of her hand. Becca J.R. Lachman teaches and tutors at Ohio University. Her first poetry collection, The Apple Speaks (Cascadia Publishing House, 2012), is dedicated “to humanitarian workers around the globe, but more for the families who love them.” This past year, she’s been on a book-and-arts tour encouraging the public role of the artist within community and teaching storytelling/poetry workshops for intergenerational groups of women. A grateful and recent grad of the Bennington Writing Seminars, her written work has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Swink, Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Octave Magazine, On Being’s blog for American Public Media, and elsewhere. Becca muses about everyday Anabaptism, music, the writing life, and living in a college town at tattooedmennonite. blogspot.com. Laurie Lamon’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Ploughshares, and other magazines and journals, including the anthology 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days,

edited by Billy Collins, and the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. In 2007 she received a Witter Bynner award, selected by Poet Laureate Donald Hall. Her two collections of poetry are The Fork Without Hunger and Without Wings, CavanKerry Press (NJ), 2005 and 2009. She is a professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. She lives with her husband and their two Scottish Terriers, Maude and Oscar.

University, is editor of Stitches magazine, which has been nominated for two Jesse H. Neal Awards and won the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) Magazine of the Year Award in 2011. She lives with her husband, daughter, and two cats in Southern New Jersey, on the edge of the Pine Barrens. Nicole loves exploring Civil War battlefields and re-reading her very-tattered Agatha Christie mysteries.

Kelly Michels received her MFA from North Carolina State University where she also received the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been featured in Best New Poets 2012, Nimrod, Mad Poet’s Review, and Blue Fifth Review, among others. She loves spending time with her (polar opposite) blue-eyed, blond-haired little sister and is addicted to decaf coffee, Irish and Greek independent film, art deco design, and the smell of the ocean. She lives in Raleigh where she dreams of impossibly simple things like owning an old house to fix up or adopting a duckling. More information about her work can be found at www.kellymichels.com.

Matthew Roth teaches English and creative writing at Messiah College, in Grantham, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife, two children, two cats, three ducks, and five hens. His book of poems, Bird Silence, was published in 2009 by the Woodley Press.

Robert McKean writes: “I have had stories published in The Kenyon Review, The Chicago Review, The Dublin Quarterly, and elsewhere. My inprogress collection of stories was a finalist in the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and the Sewanee Writers’ Series, and I have been awarded a Massachusetts Artist’s grant. Nearly all of my fiction is set in Western Pennsylvania. The characters and their extended families in my work, who appear and reappear in various stories, form a diverse ethnic, racial, and generational stew of lives and passions played out over the decades from the 1930s through contemporary times. I believe that we write when we are young in the belief that we have something to say; I believe now, after writing for four decades, that we write in the hope that we have something to hear.” Carolyn Moore’s three previous chapbooks won their respective competitions as has her latest collection, The Seven Deadlies, pending publication from Interrobang?!. She taught at Humboldt State University until she was able to eke out a living as a freelance writer and researcher, working from the last vestige of the family farm in Tigard, Oregon. Poet and prose writer Shann Ray’s collection of stories, American Masculine (Graywolf, 2011) won the Bakeless Prize. He is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and the author of the creative nonfiction book of political theory Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). Born and raised in Montana, he spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation and played college basketball at Montana State University and Pepperdine University and professional basketball in Germany. He now lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University and enjoys family dance night at home pretty much every night with his wife and daughters. Nicole Rollender’s poetry and nonfiction have been published in various literary magazines, including Alaska Quarterly Review, the strange fruit, Literary Mama, Salt Hill Journal and Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry chapbook Arrangement of Desire was published by Pudding House Publications in 2007. Nicole, who has an MFA in creative writing from Penn State

Wesley Rothman serves as assistant poetry editor for Narrative magazine and senior poetry reader for Ploughshares. Recipient of a Lindsay J. Cropper Poetry Award, his poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bellingham Review, Salamander, Newcity, The Critical Flame, and elsewhere. Rothman holds degrees from the University of San Diego and Emerson College and teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Mitchell Untch was a finalist in the 2012 International Cavafy Poetry Competition and has or will soon appear in Nimrod, Quiddity, Jabberwock Review, James Dickey Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Confrontation, among others. A native Californian, Mr. Untch is a twin and began writing five years ago. He is currently working on a project with poet Spencer Reece, a member of the Archdiocese of Spain, who, in 2013, will be teaching young women in Honduras that have been abused and neglected, the art of writing poetry. Mr. Untch may be reached at Jaenote@roadrunner. com. He gives thanks to the staff of Ruminate for their hard work and to Li-Young Lee for his years of writing from that luminous “inner voice” of his that speaks to us all with such keen intelligence and beauty. Gary J. Whitehead’s third book of poetry, A Glossary of Chickens, will be published by Princeton University Press in early 2013. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals, most notably in The New Yorker. Gary works as a high school English teacher at Tenafly High School in New Jersey, and he lives in the Hudson valley of New York, where he enjoys gardening and oil painting. Gary is also a professional cruciverbalist, or crossword constructor, and has published a dozen crosswords in The New York Times. Tarn Wilson has recently been published in Brevity, Gulf Stream, Inertia, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and The Sun. She earned her masters in education from Stanford and her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and now teaches high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of her most recent obsessions include: iBird, daily journaling, sparkly shoes, outdoor adventures, the radio show This American Life—and trying to be the best possible listener, teacher, and friend she can be. Tony Woodlief lives in North Carolina and Washington, DC. His essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The London Times, and his short stories, two of which have been nominated for Pushcart prizes, have been published in Image, Ruminate, and Saint Katherine Review. His website is www.tonywoodlief.com.

THOUGHTS ON UNRAVELING THE DARK FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE LAST NOTE

Losing my mother to cancer was the source of an eclipsing external darkness, yet the last several years of my life have been spent wading through a new and different shadow—that of an internal lack of self-love, and self-acceptance. It is that precipice that has struck me as the most debilitating force of adulthood. Walking out from that shadow, into a land of new vision, is the next endeavor. Rita Jones BOOK REVIEW Carl Jung said be careful of the shadow, but don’t fight it. Draw it close, as you would a good brother or a good sister, and listen to what it whispers in your ear. I love his closeness and intimacy with the fact that we are all made up of shadow and light, and the discernment we gain with regard to this is what forms the basis of our moral responsibility in the world. And referring to God, Joel said, He knows what dwells in the darkness and light dwells with Him. For me, I want to be able to ask loved ones to help show me my shadow. In response I hope to ask forgiveness and change. Then we can walk into the valley of the shadow of death together, and emerge into life. Shann Ray POETRY It is not a rare thing, I know, to be heartbroken in high school. Or to be heartbroken at all: to kneel on the floor, staring at the shattered pieces of your heart. I hope it is not a rare thing to also have your gaze lifted, slowly, gently, by art, by music — instrumental music first, and not love songs. Gradually you can handle words, poetry. Your gaze lifts, and you find you are kneeling at Christ’s feet. With grace He is forming a new heart in you, better than the old, clunky high school heart. I want to be part of that gaze-lifting force for others. Being pushed to your knees is not a rare thing, and maybe that’s the way it needs to be. You have to get kneeling somehow. Aubrey Allison VISUAL A RT In 1995, I worked as a fire lookout on the summit of Up Up Mountain, in the Bitterroots of Montana. The tower where I lived was a glassedin 14x14 room with a narrow catwalk around the outside, forty-four feet off the ground. One very dark night, when the tower was completely swaddled in clouds, I walked out onto the catwalk and found myself face to face with another man, whose shadowy figure stood, I swear, in the air beyond the railing. It took me a few startled breaths to realize that I was seeing my own shadow against the cloud, lit up by the white light of the lookout’s lone lantern. I can still feel the buzz in my nerves. Matthew Roth POETRY When researching American poet William Stafford and his time as a WWII conscientious objector, I came across an anthology of oral histories collected from some of the 12,000 men who, like Stafford, served in Civilian Public Service in the 1940s. Imagine my awe when, skimming the table of contents I not only saw Stafford’s name listed, but also my grandfather’s. “The darkness around us is deep,” Stafford wrote. Though my grandpa was a quiet man, I wish he’d told more stories about living out his Anabaptist faith in the great shadow of war. Becca J.R. Lachman POETRY

Your parents knit darkness right onto your body so you cannot pull it off—their depression and addictions and restlessness and sorrows woven in black yarn. Even now, years later, you carry that scratchy, suffocating weight against your skin. But notice, the sweater is wearing thin. If you look—you must look—you can find loose ends. Find them by writing. Pay attention to those who point them out to you, those places your old story no longer fits. Pull. You will be nervous: each dark memory you tug loose will link to another memory, and you will fear your own unraveling. Hold that yarn in your hand. Examine it. It’s not solid at all, but made of emotions and old beliefs: it vibrates for a moment, then disintegrates. Tug. Pull. Look. Underneath, your own bright garment shimmers. Tarn Wilson NO NF ICTIO N If Vermeer is a painter of light, Caravaggio is a painter of the dark— his carefully wrought, emotionally precise subjects the center of his paintings, sharp against the charcoal-into-black background. In one of my favorite paintings, Caravaggio has painted a woman seated, draped in red and white robes, her collarbone gesturing in emotion (its hollow dark) and her head thrust upward, so you never see her face— just the emotion working her neck muscles, up into her jaw. I see her contemplation in the dark; she’s in solitude; she’s in an agitated state. For me, the dark is where you’re alone with your soul and body, where you work out the things you fear most. It’s where you come face to face with yourself, but you don’t turn on the light. Nicole Rollender POETRY I, like most people I imagine, long for a blueprint—for the blueprint. Better yet, maybe one of those architect’s sketches of the building-tobe, the handsome skyscraper, the impressionistic daubs of green for trees and shrubs, the cars in various jellybean colors silently motoring by, the tiny wisps of pedestrians lingering in the optimistic light of an indefinite sun. Alas, I don’t believe there is a blueprint, nor are there operator instructions or notes on what to do in case of malfunction. I malfunction, often; most people I know do. Our architect sketches would have the building leaning sideways, the shrubs sprouting in the middle of the sidewalk, the pedestrians holding their arms over their heads until they hear the all-clear. The good news is, if you listen closely, some nights, in the dark, you can hear that all-clear. Robert McKean F ICTIO N Being in the dark is like becoming invisible. Away from the laughter of broad daylight, lines are blurred and all shapes fade away. Maybe it is a retreat, when one can not face the obviousness of life any more. Ivan de Monbrison V ISUAL ART

An interesting truth my drawing students eventually grasp is that the strongest, densest dark in their pictures is—usually—right next to the brightest light. As cliché as it might seem, this fact translates to the vagaries of belief and hope as well. My darkest, most doubt-filled hours have also been times of distinct spiritual clarity where misty, undifferentiated fog flees away and I can sense the edge between right and wrong, between what ought to be and what is. And so I often wander the shadow lands, if only to glimpse the strong light that can only be seen there. Matthew Ballou VISUAL ART

Francis DiClemente. Dad: Side Angle. Gelatin silver print.

Ivan de Monbrison. Ink on paper. 8 x 6 inches.

Issue 25: Unraveling The Dark

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