Issue 26: In the Margins by Ruminate Magazine

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

ledgers recording hope against subtraction • Richard Cole sharing a wall • Heather M. Surls carrying shame and gratitude • Shannon Skelton re-imagining books • Laura Hennessy 2012 Kalos Foundation Visual Art Prize Judged by Bruce Herman WINNER: LAURA HENNESSY

26 ISSUE ISSUE

W WIINNTTEERR

RUMINATE?

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

FRONT COVER Laura Hennessy. Dictionary. Aluminum print. 26 x 23.2 inches OPPOSITE PAGE James Hapke. Standing on Stars. Woodcut and collograph with watercolor and polyester resin additions. 51 x 19 inches.

James Hapke writes: “Space expands outwardly compounding on itself, invisibly breathing. The Pacific Ocean reaches out over the curvature of the earth beyond sight, filling all gaps, weighing down on the earth. In the midst of such abstracted displays of time and form I have been driven to express the validity and necessity in practicing openness to the terrifying though consoling unknowns in the expanse and intricacies of creation. In practice, printmaking provides a breath between gesture and completion that acknowledges a lack of control, which I find, aligns with a necessary approach to interacting with these questions of existence, place, and purpose. I am influenced by questions of universality and flexibility in our evolving narrative. I am interested in hope outside of quantifiable facts. I believe in glimpses. The green flash. Patience. The white whale.”

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

senior editor

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AMY LOW E

poetry editor ST EP HANI E LOV EGR OV E

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CONTENTS

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

4 5 28 56 58

Joey Locicero Sewer Grates Are Barren

Jean Tucker Cooking Alone

POET RY Richard Cole The Beauty of a Strip Mall Michelle Regalado Deatrick To Thoreau, on Visiting Walden

Joshua Robbins Hymn for a Marriage

Kathleen Henderson Staudt Volunteer

Kait Burrier Buzzing

Julie Hensley Winter Without

David Oestreich A Brief Note on Sovereignty

Renee Emerson Flaws

Don Thompson Those Hummingbirds

Luci Shaw So It Is with the Spirit Diane Scholl Graven Image, 1933

26 27

Shannon Skelton Guilty

Paul Stapleton Wagering

R EV I EWS Linda McCullough Moore 52

Photographs of Memories

V I S UAL ART Cover 11 29 30 31 32

Heather M. Surls I Share a Wall with a Dying Woman

FI CT I ON

Mary Jo Balistreri Solace in December

Scott Cameron Remembering to Take Off My Shoes To Jessica for Bringing Winter Early to Missoula, Montana

NONFI CT I ON

Laura Hennessy Dictionary Curl Red 1 White 4 Black Book Bend

Inside Front Cover 39

James Hapke Standing on Stars Galileo Surprised

Inside Back Cover Back Cover

Zacheriah Kramer Self Portrait Sower

EDITOR’S NOTE

I was flipping through the proof for this issue when I re-read Shannon Skelton’s story about a blind woman who, when her fingers bled from reading so much Braille, used her lips to read the Braille markings. And I found myself grabbing my pen, needing to mark this moment, to mark this beauty. I gave a nice, earnest checkmark to the margins, but it wasn’t enough. It was hardly my lips. So I underlined a dark, thick line of affirmation and planted two large !!s in the margin—my small gift back to this author whose words have made my journey a little less lonely. I long for words and images and stories like these that I must underline, star, and amen. I think it’s why we read and why we write or make art—to remember the truths we can so quickly forget, to mark our spot, to take note of the beauty.

It makes me think of the former Poet Laureate Billy Collins’ poem “Marginalia” where he recounts all the different types of margin markings he’s seen—from ferocious rants against Kierkegaard to an Irish monk writing along the margins of the Gospels about a singing bird outside his window. Collins says we all desire to make marks in the white border “. . . if only to show / we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; / we pressed a thought into the wayside, / planted an impression along the verge.” Unlike a book’s margins, life’s margins remind us of the things or experiences that are not mainstream, are not often heard or acknowledged. Laura Hennessy, the winning artist from our 2012 Kalos Art Prize, stunned us with her reinvention of disused books. She transformed these marginal objects—books that had lost their place—into what Kalos Art Prize juror Bruce Herman deemed “mysterious presences.” Living in the margins is almost always more dangerous and costly, but it offers wild opportunity. Like Hennessy’s reimagined books suggest, things or people existing on the edges have the opportunity to be transformed or to witness transformation. Some people choose to live on the fringe and others are forced there. But either way, it is a place of courageous and attentive living— you can’t live on the margins and also simply “laze in an armchair turning pages;” your life is not a life of status quo. And for those of us engaged in our spiritual journeys, we’re reminded that we are also pilgrims traveling the margins—in this world but not of it—grabbing our yellow highlighters and marking the truth and loveliness with wild streams of color, and being transformed in the process. This winter, we hope you get to witness and mark many of these moments. With peace and hope,

ISSUE 26 Winter 201 2-1 3

RUMINATE READERS ON MARGINS Send your notes for Issue 27 to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. We love hearing from you!

In 2007, I was growing food on an abandoned city lot in Canada’s poorest postal code. A man who called himself Pops lived in a hotel across the alley. He used foil to hold his glasses together and said he protected our pumpkins at night. His hand was busted from beating up a drug dealer. One day he gave me a can of malt liquor that I used to make some very fine beer bread. The winter of that year he disappeared. When I met Crystal in our alley, she looked thin but healthy. She was new to the neighborhood, addicted to crack, and selling sex. We talked occasionally over four or five months. She grew thinner, and more sick until she disappeared. Margins are edges. Cliffs. You fall off of one, that’s it. The story’s over before the conclusion. Edward Hopkins

W ELLI NGTON, COLORAD O

My fiction pokes at the margins, the thin place between life and death, past and present. What if . . . linear time ceased to exist for a period, allowing my characters to experience the past alongside their current present—a foot in each reality? What will they learn? What will they experience? What occurs in the community around them when confronted with this difference? What happens when what we think we know collides with the reality that was and our interpretation is wrong? How deeply does the past influence our current reality and our future? These are all questions I have as I explore the margins between what is and what was. For me, the margins are a complex place ready for exploration as long as what I “know” is held in an open hand, and not a clenched fist. Cheryl Russell

NEW PHI LAD ELP HI A, OHI O

I’ve lived in the margins for almost three years. We adopted a little girl with trauma in her past and that brought trauma into our family’s present. Very few understand how to help, what to say, or what we’re feeling—so we’re shuffled off the page. We didn’t expect, want, or ask to move to the margins. I fight our relegation to the side in my heart and with my words. I didn’t know what to expect out here, but I know what I’ve found: strength, faith, beauty, love, and determination from the people who fight every day for the children they love who were hurt and are hurting still. In the margins, I have found my community. Jamey Cicconetti Hatter

FROM YOU

Emotionally speaking, margins are the difference between the cost and the retail value. They’re the leftovers in your grandmother’s fridge. They can be paper thin or nonexistent, calculated risks. They disappear if not championed. It’s just business. Margins are unattainable on an e-reader. They’re sometimes variable, even gross. And then there’s a margin call, and you hope you’ve been smart about cost management. You hope that you’ve colored enough outside the lines, creating value where there was only white space. You hope that some accountant type can come in and fiddle with the numbers, doing everything within their power and the law. After all, when you calculate hope like you would any other commodity, then the margins represent the hope that remains. Chris DeVore

M O U N TA IN H O M E , IDA H O

Having recently retired from my teaching career, my life now is lived “in the margins.” Balancing volunteer work, increased family support activities, catching up on projects on my list, and being the friend I want to be, can be a challenge. Sometimes I miss the structure of going to school and having a daily plan. I am learning to take what each day brings. Keeping focused on the big picture, all the little things bless my life. Hellen Allison

RI CH A RDSO N , TEXAS

Tiny bit of tissue—that little black mole on the white skin of her ribcage—a quick shot of Novocain to prep her for his incision—narrow circle with his scalpel, a few drops of blood, a stitch or two, and she was gone—back to work, to life. It wasn’t for another year and a half that we found out he never sent the tissue to a lab, just threw it away. The oncologist told us that had the other doctor tested the mole and discovered the melanoma, all they would have to do is widen the margins of the incision—maybe a centimeter. Even now, eight years after her death, I’m still struck by how tragic a tiny margin of error can be. Donovan McAbee

N AS H VI L L E , TE N N ESS E E

BOW I E, M ARY LAND

2012

1 ST P LAC E Laura Hennessy

2 N D P LAC E Zacheriah Kramer F I N A L I STS

ISSUE 26 Winter 201 2-1 3

Jason Ackman

Stephen Mead

Susan Hart

Austin Parkhill

Sueme Jeon

Julie Quinn

Frank Krifka

Sue Gyeong Syn

Olga Lah

Crystal Wagner

Evan Mann

Derek Wagner

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N James Hapke

Kalos Foundation Visual Art Prize S P O N SO R E D by THE KALOS FOUNDATION F I N A L J U R O R BRUCE HERMAN

A NOTE FROM THE JUROR

I’ve studied the finalists for the art prize many times in the past week or two—and I’ve read through statements by the artists with great interest. This has not been an easy decision—to rank pieces within an extraordinarily complex array of styles, intentions, concepts, techniques. The criteria for judging art are complex and multivalent—and always have personal, subjective values that are cultivated over a lifetime and draw upon diverse theories and historical precedents utilized by the judge. I was impressed by the consistently high quality of all the entries I evaluated. In the end, I had to go with a gut-level set of choices—a visceral response based upon forty years as a practitioner and professor of art. I attempted to choose the three winning artists from the different stylistic and theoretical contexts represented in the fifteen finalists. A brief word on my top choice “Dictionary” by Laura Hennessy: one in a series of photographs of disused books from a thrift store that were transfigured by the artist into

Bruce Herman

mysterious presences, looking more like life-forms than old books. This piece, in particular, continued to hold up over many viewings, carrying with it all sorts of aesthetic, emotional, and even theological implications for me. We live in what many have called a “post-literate” culture whose texts are no longer mainly located in bound paper, read from cover to cover. Our primary texts these days are often images—even what might be called disembodied images or fragments of former images and texts—vestiges of traditional cultural artifacts in mainly digital format, varying intensely in meaning, context, and cultural value. Laura Hennessy’s “Dictionary” communicates all of this without a trace of sentimentality or preachiness or propaganda. It exists like a flower or anemone to be encountered aesthetically as well as with curiosity and extended rumination. (Something this magazine prizes!)

Bruce Herman completed both undergraduate and graduate fine arts degrees at Boston University School for the Arts. He studied under Philip Guston, James Weeks, David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Arthur Polonsky. Herman lectures widely and has had work published in many books, journals, and popular magazines. His artwork has been exhibited in more than 20 solo and 100 group exhibitions in eleven major cities including Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. His work has been shown internationally, including in England, Italy, Canada, and Israel. His art is featured in many public and private collections including the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art in Rome; The Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts; DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; and the Hammer Museum, Grunwald Print Collection, Los Angeles.

Richard Cole

The Beauty of a Strip Mall is the beauty of a minor dream turned quietly aside at the end of the day, the beauty of the small, impossible ledgers recording hope against subtraction and finally closed with a sigh. Every unremarkable donut shop is somebodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s act of faith, and somewhere between almost and never quite, in the last miles of aging neon and plastic backlit signage, here too is poetry, where the books will someday be balanced and the future is always a bargain, everything ninety-nine cents.

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Michelle Regalado Deatrick

To Thoreau, on Visiting Walden . . . I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU Clockwise along the wide path, fallen leaves of birch dull or burnished, flat beneath my feet, circling the pond still as a dial beyond the rain-blackened trees—. See how from those dark limbs comes all feather and flight, the kingfisher headlong plunges through the pond’s tense surface disappears into the chill depths—. Sudden, the explosion upward of water and of bird, of fish, flailing, beak-gripped, flashing impotent flakes of silver at the tarnished sun, and then the astonishing air floods the gills until the fish is gulped entire, descended into that abyss—. And you say—against all this— It is another entrance

Joshua Robbins

Hymn for a Marriage Today when the beach grasses’ pale gold bowed toward the sea, the wind Blew through and, picking up their one note again, played a song I recognized as devotion. Everything loves this way. It is the shore’s adoration of the moon’s round-faced pull. The kestrel’s hunger And free-fall, the sky’s exultant approval. It is the late afternoon’s long shadows Finding rest not in manzanita or scrub oak, but in the madrone’s open arms. And you, Too, will find it here, as you are meant to, having listened to the lives which have Become your own, as even now the wind carries down the shoreline. Like faith, It blesses what goes, welcomes what comes.

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Laura Hennessy. Curl. Aluminum print. 26 x 23.2 inches.

Kathleen Henderson Staudt

Volunteer The tree sprang up, a volunteer After we lost the shade Of the oak tree that came down. It grew out of a thicket In a corner of the yard During busy years when we Were not paying attention. Then suddenly one spring, at cherry blossom time The yard filled up with blooms. Never invited, fed or tended Now the upstart cherry tree Spreads above the house Offering its summer shade Beyond the patio wall. In June its fruit draws birds Who stay to nest and grow. All summer long its glossy leaves Shelter hidden songs. In August and September, as the cricket-song begins, The cherry leaves are deepening to early autumn green Then turning yellow, one by one, they drift Heralding already the seasonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s turn In winter, snow and icy drops along its naked limbs Expose the gangly shape of a tangled, weedy tree It branches without symmetry, unlovely, growing free. We never would have chosen it or planted it there Yet in February light, its bark shines silver-bronze Reminding us of unsought gifts That bring us what we need. Unplanted, untended, steadily there: The grace that volunteers.

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Kait Burrier

Buzzing dripping sticky with sugared heat, working from the day she’s born, pouring honey on to send ‘em back off to the queen, sweet talker saccharine whispers turn, twist, til they get good and bitter tired—take me out for diner food, refuel, 2 a.m. works every time, feel around for a bottle of two-and-a-half dollar water in the shadow-black of the cell, honeycomb hotel worker bee, parchment-thin sheets for free, dollars spilling from the starchy collar, cold collard greens in the morning getchyer coffee to go, we can’t be seen, can’t be troubled eyes follow his hands, jingling keys jangle pocket change and scrape a flinty jade mug, chipped, to sip in a warm corner, sink into the loveseat by yourself and steep like the jasmine tea, choke back the fragrance with a steamy stream to cleanse, then coat, every bit, purging and perfuming the throat through the innards to seep out the smells, sediment sinking in the ceramic sunny, sweet honey: turning tea to morning mead apitherapeutic to a tee, persuading a semblance of apathy to stem from the red roots in two floating eyes cast downward to follow the contention between gold drops passing orbs of rising air; boiling, desperate bubbles release the essence, the image, the last breath of a pure white flower, drowned by a few squirts of honey

SHANNON SKELTON

John stands in the kitchen doorway and runs his fingers lightly along the corners of

the Christmas cards I’ve hung from the frame of the door. He does everything lightly these past months. He walks softly, sliding past me. He gets food from the pantry—no loud foods— no cereal, no packaged foods with aluminum wrappers. He gets bread. Then he shuts the pantry door like there’s a baby sleeping on the other side. If he could navigate through what is now our daily life in silence, and invisibly, I think he would. He feels guilty. And while my existence in this warehouse of old memories and empty silence with a tiptoeing ghost is a miserable one, I revel in his guilt. It’s like I’ve won every argument before it begins. He says, “I thought the Murrays usually send a Christmas card.” “They did. I didn’t think it appropriate to hang.” I leave it at that, sounding like a lunatic. He does not pry into it further. He leaves the kitchen, not getting what he came for. We go to bed at the same time tonight. He will get up at some point I’m sure. He says, “Think we need a new mattress.” “Probably so,” I say. We lie in silence, shoulder to shoulder. I stare into the darkness until it fills my eyes, fills the empty spaces between us, the weight of it pressing me to sleep. ________

In the morning I realize John must have meant Ted and Rhonda Murray, when he asked in the kitchen—Ted and Rhonda, our college friends. Daniel and Sara Murray, our son’s now married high school friends, sent a card. In it they are at the beach, her legs long and tan and all of what I imagine must be irresistible to men. I opened it a few days ago and tucked it neatly in the trash, though it was nice of them to send a card. Most young people aren’t sending Christmas cards now. Some send online greetings, but I can never open them. I’m behind on my own cards. This is why I am sitting at the kitchen table, the computer in

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front of me glowing a blue light, the cursor blinking. A cinnamon candle burns on the stove, and Christmas music drifts from the living room with a crackly nostalgia. It’s December sixth, and I haven’t even begun to type my yearly update, which I’ve sent out with our Christmas cards every year for the last twenty-two years, except for the year my dad died. It was easy the first ten years or so. We always had plenty to brag about. Degrees, children, new jobs. Then the kids started playing sports, winning school awards. This year I have it all planned out: Kara’s wedding, her trip to Paris with work, Chris and Bethany’s first baby on the way, John’s new department chair position, my volunteer work. We’ve all been keeping busy this year, it will say, as it always does. I will not, of course, include just how busy some of us have been. ________

I found out about John the night of his annual department banquet in May. I have been to so many of them they blur together. Not that I don’t enjoy them. John looks impressively academic, and the atmosphere is brimming with the hope that surrounds young people and awards ceremonies. Students are recognized. We shake their hands. He leans over to me and says something like, “That’s the one who called Tennessee Williams a ‘her’ during the oral examination.” He gets a good laugh out of this, and I giggle and enjoy the jokes I have with myself, that Tennessee Williams being a him is news to me—also the fact that they call it an oral examination. I imagine the professors staring into the mouths of the students, looking as far back as they can, examining their brains—and I take big sips of my wine and regret it as the stretchy band on my skirt gets tight and makes my skin itch. I take photographs for the department newsletter, and we go home. Before the banquet this year, John started acting funny. He said, “You don’t have to come with me to this silly thing, M.A.” This is his shortened version of Mary Anne. He used it more when we were young. Friends would say they might start working on an MA, and he would say he was working on his M.A. When the girl introduced herself to me, I knew. No other student has ever initiated meeting me in the ten years I have attended this thing. She was guilty. I confirmed it when he saw me talking to her from the other side of the room. His eyes were panicked. And while I knew it intuitively, it still seemed a shock. Lots of men do this sort of thing. And I know I am no prize, not these days. But I honestly thought he . . . well, I don’t know what I thought. I did not mention it to him for a good while. One night, three or four months later, I stayed up late tying tiny ribbons on the guest favors for Kara’s wedding. I went to get in bed. John is a light sleeper, and when he shifted I knew he was awake. I said, “I know about her, John.” My words went into the darkness awkwardly, like someone late to a small church service, steps echoing through the wooden building, their sound waves reverberating off the hard pews. I saw him nod his head quietly. I’m glad he didn’t try to talk about it. He just accepted the guilt, and I was glad for that. But I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Kara is having her bachelorette party tomorrow night. You might be interested.” He said, “I deserved that.” And we went to sleep.

________

I am cooking dinner. I’ve been out of the habit lately. I don’t see the point. But today I feel okay, and the kids are coming over tonight. I am skinning potatoes for soup, sliding the peeler mechanically as I have done so many times. Chris loves this soup, and his wife Bethany doesn’t mind it because it is vegetarian. Kara will eat anything. Her new husband, Avery, is still too nice to be honest, so I’m not sure what he really likes or doesn’t. John comes in and gathers the trash and stirs up a rotten smell. I use my thumb purposefully and with focus, sliding it over the potato, leaving it naked and smooth, shaking the slivers of peel into the trash like I’m under a deadline. When he shuts the door behind him, I get up and replace the old trash bag. Then I go back to my potatoes. John returns and pours himself a glass of water. He is quiet about it. I say suddenly, “Why her? Why that girl?” He is startled. “I don’t know.” He just shakes his head. “Because she is young and beautiful?” I say “is” because I don’t know if it is still going on. “No.” He pauses. “I don’t know.” “Well, of course. I’m not stupid. It’s just embarrassing.” I wait. He says, “I am sorry.” He opens his mouth, closes it. He says, “Nothing is going on now.” “She is so young. What if the kids knew?” He gives me a worried look. “I’m not going to tell them,” I say. He retreats from the room, and I put the soup on. ________

We are in bed, and I think he is asleep. I have been straining to see the plaster shapes in the ceiling and trying to fall asleep. His voice startles me: “I was excited, I guess. I know it sounds stupid, but I was surprised that she noticed me.” “I noticed you.” “She was young.” I am not sure whether this is in response to my comment or is just a continuation of his first thoughts. I notice that he says “was.” “I was young.” I say. “So my opinion weighs less, now that my body weighs more?” Ha. I let that sink in. I am angry now. It is the first time I’ve felt angry in the last six months. I think it is the sheer irrationality of it all. And yet it makes perfect sense. I get out of bed and slam the bedroom door, although we never shut our interior doors. It feels good, and so I also go to the kitchen, take the red ceramic teapot that is sitting on the stove, and throw it across the room. It shatters against the wall, and that feels good too. I leave the painted pieces of teapot scattered all over the kitchen floor, and I sit down at the computer and open up my yearly update, where all that I have previously typed is “Dear Friends and Family.” I type all the new information about the kids, and then I continue, just typing and typing. I explain what John has been up to. I am tired of trying to impress. I print it out and

ISSUE 26 Winter 201 2-1 3

proofread it. He will be humiliated. I print out fifty copies and stay up all night in a frenzy of folding, stuffing, and stamping. ________

Driving to the post office, I turn on Christmas music. The station plays the same ten Christmas songs over and over, day after day. And yet, the scratchy version of Mannheim Steamroller’s “Deck the Halls” is almost comforting. I remember when John and I would take the kids out for our family Christmas shopping day. This same song would be playing all throughout it. We don’t do that together now, now that the kids aren’t here. It is cold and dry outside, and the streets are glinting with garland and ribbon. I glance over at the letters sitting in the passenger’s seat. I haven’t talked to most of the names on the envelopes in at least five years.

I look up to see a bird swoop down in front of the car and I am thinking it will swoop again, upward, but with one hand on the wheel and the other holding my tumbler of tea, I can only continue straight ahead. It does not swoop up, and the face of my car nails it, like a target in one of my son’s old video games, except for the sick thud and flutter that follows. Feathers burst out from under the car and puff up beside my window, and I feel the bird roll and clamor beneath me. I want not to look, but I cannot help glancing into the rearview mirror, and I see as its limp body is flung out like a dirty rag toward the car behind me. ________

“Mom! You make me think something is really wrong when you call unexpectedly,” my daughter says when I call to tell her about the bird. When I hang up, I sit in the post office

parking lot for at least an hour. “Something is really wrong,” I say to no one. I get out of the car and put the letters in the trash instead of the mailbox. ________

It is Christmas Eve, and John and I are going to a party. Our friends, Sandra and Aaron, have this party every year, and every year people stand around and make small talk, gossip about the other people at the party, and slowly get themselves drunk enough to have some fun. Beneath my cardigan I am wearing a sleeveless purple blouse. It is covered with rows of shimmery yellow sequins. It is beautiful. I thought so when I saw it at Macy’s. It is also tacky, but I suppose it’s been somewhat liberating—for the worst to have happened.

“You look nice,” John says. I say nothing. I wonder if he means nice for a woman my age, or if there is actually any possible way he could think I look nice after being with a twenty year old. I arrive at the party feeling like a kid who was kicked out of school for throwing a tantrum and then shows up at a birthday party over the weekend. I wonder why I am so needlessly embarrassed. No one knows about John and me. Do they? I worry that it is obvious. Then I hope that it is. I sit with a group of women that I used to talk with regularly while we were sitting in the stands at school sporting events or watching our kids in community theater performances. It seemed we had so much to talk about then. We are now talking about an accessory store that has opened nearby and the television shows we are following. I wonder how to bring it up: I need someone to talk to! Something terrible has happened! I am so lonely. It all sounds ridiculously pathetic. John is leaning against the bar and talking with the host and his wife. People pass between us in a blur of colors. He is looking bored, and he catches my eye from across the room. I wonder how many times he caught her eye before he was sure it was safe to approach her.

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Sandra, the hostess, is listening to John. He is probably telling her a story about his students. She is about my age, maybe a little younger. She has a good figure. I notice her pencil skirt, how it clings to her round bottom and curves up to her significantly smaller waist. John reaches the end of his story, and she fake-clutches her tiny waist in laughter. Her husband seems drunk, and though I think it’s early for that, I feel I have gone a little overboard myself. My old friends—acquaintances—Jennifer and Carol are chattering next to me. I see Sandra reach out and touch John’s shoulder, and I am angry and jealous because she is thin, and because we are all at this stupid party, bouncing around like idiot clowns in thick costumes, our big plastic lips making it impossible to talk to each other. And because I have seen Sandra’s Christmas card hanger in the kitchen, and I wonder how many silent pleas flow invisibly between the written words. I make my way over to the bar. I grab on to John’s shoulders and turn him away from her grip. “Excuse me, Sandra,” I say. I pull John toward me to talk into his ear. “Let’s head out,” I say, like I am telling him a secret, but I am talking loudly. “This party blows.” My breath is hot in his ear, and I feel my stomach against his hip. “Don’t you know he is a low-life cheater?” I laugh to Sandra, though I realize I am still holding John and speaking toward the side of his face. Before I am sure what is happening, I feel my body being flung backward, and I think at first that John has finally had enough of my guilt trip and shoved me. I fly back, the ceiling in view, and I stop before I hit the ground. John has got me. And he is kissing me. I am stunned, but I kiss back. Right here in public. He slowly lets me down the rest of the way, and he lies down beside me, right down beside me on Sandra’s Oriental rug. We are making out, out in the open at a party, like middle schoolers. John is running his hands all over me, up and down my new blouse, over my jiggly stomach fat and all. My eyes flutter open for a second, and I see that the sequins on my shirt have sent a spray of dotted light across the room, and the dots are spinning and wiggling. I squeeze my eyes shut again and let my head spin with the light. I feel the jittery excitement of being pursued. We haven’t kissed in months, since even before I found out about the girl. I had not realized it, and other realizations are washing over me. I don’t think he is doing it for show. John is not one to embarrass himself. Either way I am flattered that he is embarrassing himself with me. My mind is filled with all of these thoughts at first. And then, I relax. When he finally slows down, he leans back and looks right at me with eyes carrying shame and gratitude. He rocks back on his heels and reaches his hand out, pulls me up, and keeps my hand in his. He looks at the people—some friends, some strangers, mostly acquaintances—who have gathered around, entertained and somewhat astonished, and he smiles his most professional smile, the one he uses for parents at the department banquet. “I think we’d better head out, like you said,” he says to me. Aaron, the drunk host (but what can I really say?) gives a little whoop and a clap, and a couple of the other men whistle. The women, with their tanned and sagging faces, look on with what I recognize is jealousy disguised as pity, the same look I give young girls who are whispy thin, eye-lined, and skanky. We go down the hall to get our coats, and everyone loses interest and rearranges back into their party pods. Outside, it is raining, and in the car we speak little. It is not an uncomfortable silence.

John puts on some of his music. It surges and swells, with a crescendo that reminds me of a storybook. We listen, and John takes the long way home, past a street known for its Christmas lights, where we used to take the kids to look when they were little. I look in the houses that flow past. They are large, with brick exteriors and hardwood floors, with wide windows so that I can see families sitting in living rooms, and people eating at dining room tables. I can see Christmas trees glittering past, and rain runs down the car window and bends the yellow light. ________

At home, we undress and get in bed. John rolls over and places his arm tentatively on mine. I feel his familiarity and wonder at the reality that this arm was wrapped around someone else. “I’m sorry,” I say. “You aren’t the one who is guilty.” He leans over and finds my eyes. “I am as guilty as the next person,” I say. The blinds over the window are raised, but neither of us gets up to lower them. It looks cold out, and I watch the rain pooling in globs on the window, shrinking and magnifying the moonlight and the houses across the street, distorting the view into blurry, pulsing splotches. “I wish it wasn’t raining,” I murmur. And then I close my eyes and think how odd it is that people used to wait helplessly on the rain, and when it finally came they would dance unfettered beneath it, praising God for the miraculous blessing. “Will you stay?” he asks. I know he has taken a risk with these words, letting them hang apprehensively over the sound of steady rain, and I recognize now that his staying is understood, has been understood, a recognition which fills my throat with dry heat, which wraps around my heart and stills the beat to a stifled quiver. I turn my face so that my lips are touching his shoulder. I can feel his skin on my lips, and I remember a story I once heard about a blind woman whose fingers would bleed from reading so much Braille, so that she would move on to reading with her lips. I think of my lips, imagine letting the tender pink skin of them brush against the pages until it toughens, feeling for the raised dots until they become letters and then words and then stories.

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Mary Jo Balistreri

Solace in December The cushioned arms of overstuffed chairs hold us, two old friends, as we sip licorice tea, steep in the slow burn of fireplace logs. It is almost quiet. The lowered sun streams through western windows, The Singing Bowls of Tibet hanging sound in the air. The meditation garden in the corner of the room, filled with plants and statues of Buddha is golden in this late afternoon. We begin to release what we had held withinâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the shock of cancer, a grandsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death. The shattered sound of letting go. As we talk, the Laughing Buddha near the door takes off his dull black coat, offers us one polished by light.

Julie Hensley

Winter Without A skim of ice covers the lake this morning, rotting leaves shining gray in the brittle light along the shore. January, and a few osage oranges still clot the frozen mud. Hardwoods pale as old bone. We have come again to walk the loop because I am following, as literally as possible, my mother’s advice: day by day, one foot in front of the other. How to proceed when only cliché endures? I search the frosted ground for an object I might hold up for my son— bright boy, strapped safe on my back, the only one who remains— for he still needs to hold the world at arm’s length, to shake magic down as snow from a globe. But this month the tracks of field mice are strange cuneiform snaking beneath the bridge. I would like to uncover a stone, warm it in my hands to anchor us deep in this world. I would like to fashion a needle from a sliver of ice, close the seam on this emptiness that still pulses within me. But nothing— not even that skein of geese clearing the tree line— can stitch me whole.

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David Oestreich

A Brief Note on Sovereignty So much rain this afternoon the landscape ran like watercolors;Â I made a game, sitting on my porch discerning green from gray. Â For a long time it mattered to me that I not be sad. Today I watched as sunlight put its paintbrush to a frown.

Renee Emerson

Flaws In the blue gray of tornado weather a blackbird left loose feathers on the pane of the sunroom window. A smear of blood like an atonement. Painting my daughterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s room I marry the color to the rim because gaps are flaws we will always see. I think of the blood spread across the doors of the Israelites. A symbol of shame, covered. You compare shame to furniture, And it is useful in that way. To create barriers in an open room To give you a place to curl up. Â

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Don Thompson

Those Hummingbirds Have you heard of those hummingbirds so small they couldn’t swallow a mustard seed? All winter long they live among the rocks beyond Reason, farther from here than Tierra del Fuego. How far is that measured in increments of impossibility? And yet they’re eager to come back as soon as the foul weather in us allows; to abandon their nests, those snarls of dry grass no bigger than the fist an unbeliever shakes at God, and take flight. Uplifted without effort, easily sustained, they feed on whatever the air has to offer and sleep on the wind, arriving—always—just when you have finally given up on them. One morning at your desk you write the word never, and there they are, hovering above your head as if your thoughts were the sweetest blossoms this side of heaven.

Scott Cameron

Remembering to Take Off My Shoes Nevada, driving I-80. A bush flowers into yellow and disappears, the memory of flame trapped in dry branches— holy aberration. How long did Moses follow his father’s sheep; how many bushes colored slowly through a season or burned crepuscular in falling light before his eyes would accept that one bush danced into flame? And afterward, were bushes forever God’s messengers, as leaves and branches bent in desert winds— reverberant revelation? My wife and I barrel through God’s momentary yellow, his graying silence at 82 mph, afraid to take in shadows that crack against the Trinity Range, afraid we will wake our children knotted uneasily in sleep. We are millennia too late to have heard God’s groans rifting up plateaus but in time for a bush to echo in our minds’ silence. How often has my wife burned before me, kneeling in autumned dusk fingers soil-crazed amidst coreopsis and delphinium, or bending over laundry in the path of sun-caught dust, Forgive me, Lord, forgive me for forgetting to remove my shoes.

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Scott Cameron

To Jessica for Bringing Winter Early to Missoula, Montana When I had fears that mountains might be more than I had thought, that forests might mumble night-long, words on the tips of leaves I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand, I took comfort in your phone call. You said you had unpacked winter with your autumn decorations, arranging snow along the foothills by mounding gourds upon the table, unfolding northern winds with your woolen sweaters. Though August had just ended, you predicted a half-year winter stretching across Missoula into March, certain that you had brought it on. The next day, 2,754 miles away, I wore my jacket, unsure if I had felt the cold, or if you had caused it. The roadside elms had yellowed; they had long remembered what I had spent a summer forgettingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; they had recreated forsythia so much better than I.

ARTIST’S NOTE

LAURA HE NNESSY:

BO O K

In my work I attempt to celebrate common objects of function through abstraction, transformation, magnification. When seen up close, all become nameless, free of identity and expectation. I find subject matter that has been reshaped or deconstructed to be more intriguing, less obvious. I strive to surprise, going to great lengths to make the ordinary extraordinary, whimsical, remarkable. Existing only as basic elements—shape, form, color, and texture—the subjects lack intended purpose but gain great visual importance. My series “Book” came about while scouring thrift stores for new ideas and affordable subject matter. I began looking at the many shelves of discarded, tired books and became inspired by the endless pages, worn paper shapes, and various past lives. I wondered how I could revive these books, realizing that first and foremost they were another’s proud literary work of art, discarded after only a read or two, now valued at nearly nothing. Wanting to do something to address this situation, while realizing the inherent potential of the material make-up, I bought a dozen books of various types and sizes and began. Covers removed, these books were free of previous constraint yet still very much intact as books. These overlooked, forgotten items became my temporary sculptural art, which I then documented in a highly detailed image, allowing them to live on with new dimension and significance, reborn as art objects. Many of these forms took hours to create, handled one page at a time, often over 1500 pages in length. Some were painted first, while others were simply pushed into nontraditional positions to accentuate inherent aspects of interest and beauty. With my images, I hope to bring insight and impact to the everyday object, appreciating and illustrating that in everything there is art.

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Laura Hennessy. Red. Aluminum print. 26 x 25.2 inches.

Laura Hennessy. 1 White. Aluminum print. 26 x 25.2 inches.

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Laura Hennessy. 4 Black. Aluminum print. 26 x 23.2 inches.

Laura Hennessy. Book Bend. Aluminum print. 26 x 25.2 inches.

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I Share a Wall with a Dying Woman HEATHER M. SURLS

Here’s how I imagine it. Sometime in the 1970s, during the war, an American soldier met a Vietnamese woman in Hue, a city on the backbone of Vietnam, knotted around the Perfume River. I don’t know if she was a woman of the night, or if he met her in a tea shop, or if they exchanged a few words as she sold him a bowl of rice noodles from a stand near the river—the river, full of skiffs with flapping red flags bearing yellow stars. But I do know that about nine months later, this woman gave birth to a boy, and that the two of them, mother and blue-eyed son, moved to Chicago when he was a young man. And I do know her name. Her name is Gio, and she and I share a wall.

On a snowy, late-January morning, Antony stood on the second-story porch smoking a cigarette, his free hand in the pocket of his jeans. My husband and I stepped out of our apartment and stopped to chat. “I go back to Vietnam in a few weeks,” Antony told us. “To take my mom. Back to the homeland, you know?” Austin and I nodded, but not understanding his words, we wished him a good day and continued our walk. Fifty feet away, as we trudged through the slushy parking lot, Austin said, “He means Gio will die there, doesn’t he?” That evening, on my way to borrow Internet, I paused to speak to Antony again. It was dark; in the absence of porch lighting, the flood lamp on the back of the township building provided a dim sketch of my neighbor. “So, will your mom come back with you?” I asked carefully, testing mine and Austin’s hypothesis. “No,” he said, cinders glowing on the end of his cigarette. “Doctor say she has only a few months to live.” “How are you doing?” I asked. He smiled a false, Cheshire Cat smile. “It’s the circle of life, you know?” “But that doesn’t make it easy,” I replied.

His face crinkled and he jerked with a sob. I stood with my computer clutched to my chest, unsure of the right response. A few seconds later, he beat me to it, reaching out to pat my arm. “I’m sorry,” he said.

We met Gio the day we moved into our apartment, which was in a low-income complex full of refugees and immigrants. She came to our open door, gesturing toward the parking lot. “What is it?” I asked. I stepped outside to find that another car had just scraped ours. While Austin examined our car, I stood on the porch with Gio, who lived on our right, and Ly, who lived on our left. Both women sat in plastic classroom chairs, their bare feet on the rustcorroded porch railing, watching the activity below: children shrieking as they played, someone driving to the Dumpster with a garbage bag on the hood of his car. They seemed about the same age—I later learned Gio was in her 70s—and they spoke to each other in a tonal language I came to recognize as Vietnamese. August and September were humid, and since running the air conditioner all day was expensive, most of our neighbors sought relief on their porches. We met Ly’s son, Tam, in those first weeks. Every morning, when the sunlight was already hazy with heat, he passed our window in his striped pajamas, holding a cigarette and a tumbler with one round ice cube swimming in black coffee. We also met Antony, Gio’s son, who was a janitor at a local school. Since he spoke English the best, we talked to him regularly. He said he had lived in our one-bedroom apartment for years, sleeping on a mattress in the front room while caring for his mom, who’d had breast cancer. He told us he had two children who lived with his ex-wife in a nearby suburb. He complained about the dirty apartment complex and about the neighbors beneath him who had church meetings late at night. He asked us about ourselves and inquired often about our families. As summer slid into fall, I continued to see Gio as well. She frequently sat on the porch, wearing a sleeveless polyester blouse and cropped pants. Sometimes she came out and brushed her hair after showering—long, black and gray hair. Once I brought her warm chocolate chip cookies, and a few times a week, I passed her apartment when the door was open. From where she sat, half-reclined with crossed ankles, she always smiled—showing the gaps in her teeth—and returned my wave.

Seeing a grown man cry broke something inside of me. When I returned to our apartment, I got on my knees in the front room and wrestled with God. He reduced me to a ball on the floor— cringing at the sucking, crackling blackness of eternity, a truth that I could not deny, one that still scares me in the middle of the night. I sat up, and with arms raised and palms out, begged him to claim every soul in the apartments around me. I turned to the wall we shared with Antony and Gio and asked him to throw out any evil influences there. I don’t know who won that wrestling match, but in the end, I lay exhausted on the floor, unable to fathom God or his ways. All I had left were a few whispered words: “O God, help. O God, save.”

The last time I saw Gio outside was in October or November. By then we knew that her cancer had returned and that it had entered her lungs. Her hair was loose, and she wore a brown wool

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coat over her polyester pants, an obvious hollow in the place of her mastectomy. She walked slowly through the parking lot filled with slanted sunlight, fingers dragging on the chain link fence.

On Tuesday, two days after hearing from Antony about Gio’s deteriorating health, Austin and I visited another Vietnamese neighbor for Tet, the lunar New Year. Ben welcomed us inside and had us sit on the couch. Offerings had been placed before the Buddhas, which sat in the closet without doors: a glass of wine, a small watermelon, red sticks of incense in a teacup of sand. As we ate traditional New Year’s sweets—candied carrots and ginger, small bricks of nuts and sesame seeds—our conversation turned to Gio. “We are very concerned for Antony’s mom,” Austin told Ben, who came from Hue as well. “It will be better for her in Vietnam,” he told us. “Antony is very busy. She will have friends there to take care of her.”

From where she sat, half-reclined with crossed ankles, she always smiled–showing the gaps in her teeth–and returned my wave.

Ben showed us pictures of his family and told us more about the New Year celebrations in his country. Everyone dresses up and goes to the temple, he said. In one picture, his family stood in front of a shrine complete with stone dragons. Another picture showed a Buddhist monk wrapped in a saffron robe, praying to the ancestors for a year of good luck. When it was time to leave, Ben handed me a roll of sticky rice filled with pork and bean paste, wrapped in banana leaves and fastened with plastic twine. I slipped the gift—solid, heavy—into my coat pocket as we stepped outside.

In the mornings that followed my wrestling match, I placed my hands on the living room wall and prayed for Gio. I felt like I had a brick strapped to my chest. This was hard, sharing a wall with a dying woman. All that first week, I looked in Antony and Gio’s windows whenever I passed—with groceries, with mail, returning from walks and errands. I strained to see inside, along the edges of the window that the flowered sheet did not cover. For half-seconds, I glimpsed furniture, an oxygen tank, the TV with VHS tapes stacked beneath it. One gray and damp day, Gio appeared at the window, the one covered by a screen repaired with packing tape. She was a bent apparition with dark eyes and half-opened mouth. I was walking; I did

not have time to respond. By the time I lifted my hand and smiled, I had passed her view. We planned to visit Gio on Saturday night, six days after hearing the news from Antony. We purchased a small potted cyclamen plant to take with us, one with magenta flowers with white edges. These flowers were special to me, because in Israel, where we had lived before moving to Chicago, they were protected by the government, illegal to pick. When we knocked that evening, Antony answered and we stepped inside, slipping our shoes into the pile near the door. He led us to the bedroom, where Gio lay on a twin-sized bed under a faded, pilled comforter, watching a television with washed-out colors. Antony roused her in Vietnamese. She sat up with wide, startled eyes, which softened when she recognized us. She stood, about 4’9’’ at her full height, and accepted the plant. “Tell your mom we have been thinking about her and praying for her a lot,” I told Antony. He immediately translated. “We’d like to pray for her now,” Austin said. “Can you ask her if that is okay?”

He and his friend climbed into the car, and all I could see distinctly were two white cigarettes bobbing in the shadows and a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard. She agreed, so Austin and I each put a hand on her shoulders. We prayed for safety in her travels to Vietnam, for her to sense God’s presence, for his peace that passes understanding. I peeked while Austin spoke and saw that Gio had her eyes closed and head bowed, too. When we finished, I embraced Gio and told her good-bye. Then Antony pulled a picture off the wall. “Look, she was a model when she was young,” he said. There were two women in the cloudy black and white photograph. Gio sat in the foreground, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and flowered pants that tapered at the ankle. In the living room, Antony told us that on this trip, he would use the sick days he’d accumulated for twenty years at his job. Twangy, single-instrument music drifted from a boom box, and behind me sat a plate of softening oranges piled up for the Buddha.

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Eight days after visiting his apartment, we asked Antony to come to ours. The sky was blue and sunshine filled our front room. “Would you like tea?” I asked, turning on the burner beneath the kettle. “No, thank you,” he replied. I placed glasses of tap water on the table instead. While the three of us chatted, I peeled two oranges, picked off the pith, and separated the wedges onto a white plate. Today, Antony said, they would go to the doctor for a CAT scan and to remove the liquid from his mom’s lungs. We talked about the weather, the details of their departure. A pause came. “Antony, I want to ask you a question,” Austin said gently. I knew where he was going to direct the conversation. Will it always be difficult to do, I thought, always sound canned and harsh? “Where do you think your mom will go when she dies?” “We are concerned for you and your mom,” I added, “and we want you to know the hope we have in Jesus.” Antony told us he believes she will go to heaven. “My mom visit temples and churches,” he said. We touched on what we believe is good news and asked about his Catholic background. He ate his first and only wedge of orange. As quickly as it came, it slipped away. He told us he wants to marry his Vietnamese girlfriend and bring her to the United States. He asked us to drive his car while he is gone. He asked us to help renew Gio’s green card, “because maybe she will get better and come back.” Before he left, Antony took a picture of Austin and me on his new iPhone. Then he shook Austin’s hand and they hugged. “Jesus bless you,” Austin said as he closed the door.

Today they left. As I was waking up, I heard them through the wall and imagined what they were doing as they prepared to go. When I got out of bed and pulled on my sweatshirt, Gio came out of her bedroom and pulled on her coat. As I drank a glass of water and sat on the couch, they turned off the lights, made sure the windows were locked. Then I heard them at the front door. I jumped up and watched from my window. A small entourage walked with Gio, who had a royal blue scarf draped over her head, a half-smile on her face. A woman helped her into the front seat of a van; Antony and another man walked to the white SUV below. I opened our front door and leaned out. “Good-bye, Antony!” I called. My voice came out too quietly, so I stood there until he glanced up. He waved to me, then motioned to his car parked nearby. “Thank you,” he said. “Good-bye.” “Good-bye,” I said. “Safe travels to you.” He and his friend climbed into the car, and all I could see distinctly were two white cigarettes bobbing in the shadows and a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard. The van backed up and rolled by, crusted with salty residue from the weekend’s snowstorm. I couldn’t see Gio’s face because the driver blocked my view. All I could see was her hand resting on the ledge near the window, gloved in dark cotton, twitching and settling for the journey.

Luci Shaw

So It Is with the Spirit The wind blows wherever it pleases . . . so it is with everyone born of the Spirit. —JOHN 3:8 How secretly the bones move under the skin and the veins thread their way through their forests, the trees of bones, the mosses of cells, the muscle vines. How privately the ears tune themselves to music heard only in the echoing cave of the head. And the tongue in its grotto tests the bitterness of unripe fruit, and wine, the mouth-feel of honey in the comb. How cunningly our shadows follow us as we walk. And our breath, how it moves in and out without great thought. Even rain, which needs no summons from us but flows, a gift from heaven, and the grasses, shivering, rise greenly. Just so, beauty besieges us unannounced, invading us, saving our souls. So it is with the spirit.

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James Hapke. Galileo Surprised. Aquatint etching. 31 x 29 inches.

PAUL STAPLETON

You would like to bet, a gentleman’s bet, no money involved, a bet for the sport of it, a

bet between gentlemen. You would like to bet with your stepson, Damien, the name his mother and father gave him, not you, the same name as the character with the 666 on his head in the horror flicks from the 1970s and ’80s, the flicks that were well-known to most Americans by the time Damien was born, a birth you had nothing to do with, absolutely nothing, though in certain contexts it is assumed you had everything to do with it. To little league coaches, to the other parents at parent-teacher night, to the barber, to the girl at the checkout counter, to the elderly lady sitting in the next pew at mass, you are the boy’s father, not his stepfather. When someone refers to you as the boy’s father, his dad even, you ignore the mistake. There is no time to explain to everyone because people don’t think in terms of stepfathers and stepsons. They think in terms of fathers and sons. It’s normal. You do it yourself, even though you are a stepfather and should know better, even though you are not Damien’s father, even though people think you are the one who named the poor boy Damien like the movie character doomed by the mark of the beast. People do make the connection. You see it in their faces, hear it in their words. Oh, what an interesting name, they say. But there is no time to explain to everyone that for generations the name had been in the family, a family not your own, passed down from father to son, a paternal tradition in an Irish clan of Damiens. Your father’s name was Barney, your grandfather Jim. It is Monday night. Damien’s mom is out, and the two of you are going to watch Monday Night Football together. Normally, Damien is not allowed to watch Monday Night Football because it ends too late. His bedtime is ten o’clock. He is eleven years old. You are a university professor in the department of religion and philosophy. You are forty-four years old. You have no bedtime. But there is no school tomorrow for Damien. All the kids at Immaculate Conception have the day off because of some kind of teacher’s conference. Damien is going to be allowed to stay up late and watch the whole football game with his stepdad, you, Stanley. This is the name he calls you, Stanley, your first name, not Damien like his father, grandfather, and forefathers, but the name your parents gave you, the name your friends call you, the name you decided upon with his mother as the best alternative for Damien to use, better than Dad, because you are not his dad; better than Uncle Stanley, because an uncle is not supposed to be sleeping with your mother; better than Mr. Farrell, because that is too

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formal, absurd even. Mr. Farrell, please pass the string beans. Mr. Farrell, we’re out of toothpaste. Goodnight, Mom. Goodnight, Mr. Farrell. Although now you sometimes wonder if Mr. Farrell would have been a better choice, better than Stanley, because now you think Stanley is perhaps too familiar. In Damien’s mind the household consists of Damien, Stanley, and Mom; not Damien, Stepfather, and Mom; not Damien, Uncle, and Mom; not Damien, Mr. Farrell, and Mom; just Damien, Stanley, and Mom. And Mom is clearly the different category, the name with the adult connotations, the name with the authority, not Stanley. Stanley is the name that is matched together with Damien: Damien and Stanley—and Mom—as if you are Damien’s friend or sibling or rival. The Monday Night Football game matches the Green Bay Packers against the Tennessee Titans. Damien believes the Titans are going to win. You disagree. The Packers are a much better team. Even though you are no more than a casual football fan, you at least know this. The Packers, after all, have won a fair share of Super Bowls over the years, led by legends of the sport, Vince Lombardi, Paul Hornung, Bart Starr, and a few years ago, by Brett Favre, their new legend. You don’t recall having ever heard of the Titans. Damien says no, the Titans are better. You ask him why. He says because their uniforms are better. You disagree about this as well. You prefer the Packers’ forest green and yellow. He says the Packer uniforms suck. You remind him he is not to use such words. He rephrases the statement. He says their uniforms bite. You decide not to press the matter. But the Packer uniforms do not bite. The Titan uniforms bite. They are powder blue and white. They look like children’s pajamas, not professional football uniforms. You tell Damien powder blue is not a football color. Damien says yellow is not a football color. You say, but yellow is representative of Wisconsin. Why? Damien asks. You tell him because of cheese. You recognize your tactical error, so you go on the offensive. You ask Damien why the Titans wear powder blue. He says he does not know. You knew he wouldn’t. The announcer mentions that the Titans were the old Houston Oilers and that after two years as the Tennessee Oilers, they have adopted the new name. You recall now having read about the team’s geographical relocation a few years back in the business section of the newspaper, an article about the supposed positive economic impact of professional sports franchises on their civic communities. You tell Damien the Titans are an expulsion team. He says, you mean expansion team. You say, no, expulsion. They were expelled from Houston. He does not get the humor of it. You tell him that’s why the Packers are going to win. He stares at you as if you are a lunatic, as if there is no logic in anything you say, the same way your more cynical students stare at you in class. But that’s another matter altogether. This is football, and you simply tell Damien expulsion teams never beat traditional teams. He asks who the traditional teams are. You name the Packers, the Bears, the Giants, the Steelers. He says the Titans can beat all of them—put together. You disagree, and, so he asks if you want to bet. You say, yes, certainly, you would. Damien’s mom is out because she is teaching an evening class. His mom is your wife, not your stepwife, just your wife, Anna. She is a professor in the English department at the university. That is where you met her. You have been teaching in the department of religion and philosophy for ten years ever since you left the Jesuits, before ordination, but after nearly eleven years as a member of the Society of Jesus. You left the Society immediately before ordination, as in two weeks before. Your superiors were shocked, angered even, by your explanation. You had none. They asked if it was an impropriety, meaning a woman. It was not. A crisis of faith? No. You simply could not do it. There had been no signs of your leaving. You had thrived during the years of formation, actually enjoyed the

whole process, the various steps, the novitiate, the two years studying philosophy, the three years teaching high school, then the theologate. But in these steps, perhaps, was the problem. None of them threatened permanency as holy orders did. When the time came for the sacrament, time to spend the rest of your life as a priest, time for what the theologians claimed was an ontological transformation, you could not do it, simply could not follow through. So you left the Jesuits after ten years with a pair of master’s degrees in philosophy and theology. You took the first teaching job you could find, at a university in the South, a university with an emphasis on science and technology. For ten years you have been the resident Catholic in a department of religion and philosophy at a technological university in the South, guiding engineering and science students through Introduction to Christianity, Biblical Foundations, Morals and Society. For a decade you have heard young men and women, children really, ask you

if you actually believe what you teach, if you really think there is a God, or if you have doubts. You try to be honest. Yes, you believe, and yes, you have doubts, but you choose to believe despite your doubts. After ten years of trying to explain God, you have resorted to the age-old argument that belief is a metaphysical wager. Either there is a God or there is not a God. You choose and live your life accordingly. There is no way to know in a classic epistemological sense, no scientific proof, no positive evidence, and perhaps even, no payoff. In some ways, belief is a gentleman’s bet, but with your life. This is what you tell your students, almost as an apology. Many at the university think you are a fool. Some even tell you so, twenty-year-old know-italls, fifty-year-old professors, some from your own department. Belief in God, you are told, just doesn’t add up.

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You met Anna soon after she was hired, not quite three years ago, at a joint facultyadministration colloquium, a colloquium on curriculum. Say it five times fast; it was still code for let’s decide where we can make some budget cuts. You raised your hand and made a case for not eliminating funds from your department. You mentioned the hackneyed arguments about the cultural importance of religion, the benefits it brings to society, the ethical and moral norms, even the medically proven effects of faith on the healing process. Then you felt compelled to preach from your soapbox. The minute a scientist in the physics classroom considers the conundrum of the material world, the inexplicable quirk of the coexistence of matter and antimatter, you proclaimed, or a literary theorist discusses the enigma of Derrida’s endless linguistic chain of differance, or a mathematician invokes the known yet unknowable quantity of infinity, questions of divine transcendence are brought into play. These questions are unavoidable in an intellectual community, you said, and it is the responsibility of the university to maintain a forum for these questions to be addressed. After the meeting, suspecting that you were perceived more like one of the self-appointed fanatics who ranted away each afternoon in the campus quadrangle than like a welcome member of the professoriate, you angled your way for the exit door, hoping to avoid the bland chitchat that would only confirm your suspicions, but someone tapped you on the arm, a woman, thirtyish, comely, shapely, sexy—Anna. She told you, to your surprise, that she had been thinking about such questions, almost the very ones you had raised during the meeting. It was as if she wanted, almost needed God, she said, although she had long ago stopped believing there was one. A PhD can do that to a Catholic girl, you know. She smiled when she told you this, so you smiled back and asked her if she wanted to grab a coffee and continue the conversation. In the coffee shop, she confessed she had found herself praying, at odd times, while driving the car, while washing the dishes, while lying in her bed at night, alone. Soon the conversation was no longer about God. Anna was married at twenty, pregnant with her son Damien, a shotgun wedding in the Bronx County Court House. Her family insisted it was the right decision, though it meant she had to quit college and renege on her scholarship. She was married only a year. The strong handsome fireman turned out to be a son of a bitch, a drinker, a womanizer, a gambler—and violent. When she finally decided she had to leave him, not wanting that kind of life for herself or for her son, she shrewdly filed away evidence to document her case, overdue rent notices, bounced checks, the report from the emergency room describing her bruises. Then one night in the early hours of the morning, by herself in bed because her husband was on duty at the firehouse, the telephone rang, and the voice on the other side, a captain, told her what she had sometimes wished for in her most desperate moments. An explosion of paint containers in a burning hardware store had caused a building to collapse. Three firemen were dead. The story would be citywide news. Her husband was given a hero’s funeral, the priest delivering a homily about laying down one’s life for others, and she was given a full pension and benefits for life. At first she moved back in with her parents in Yonkers, stunned, even wounded with remorse that she had ever wished him dead, and worse, that now she felt relieved. With time she learned to live with her remorse but not with the lurking temptation to do nothing with the rest of her life except read novels and watch Damien grow. So she returned to Fordham, graduated in less than two years, her mother and father tending to Damien while she attended classes. Then she was accepted into the grad program at the City University of New York, rented an apartment for Damien and herself on the

Upper West Side, earned her master’s, then her doctorate. She taught as an adjunct very briefly at one of the CUNY branches, searching constantly for a tenure-track position, and jumped at the first one offered, by the university, your university, in the South, although it was far from home, from her friends, from her parents, Damien’s Nana and Pop Pop. Amazed, you were rendered silent. But you knew implicitly, too, that it was your turn, that she was waiting to hear your story, though nothing you could say could match hers even remotely. So you were honest and told her, almost ashamedly, about the priesthood, adding, to your surprise, that perhaps you made a grave mistake in leaving the Jesuits. Perhaps you were meant to be a priest but had fled the call out of fear. There were admirable things a priest could do with his life. You understood that now more than ever, even marveled at the altruism in the priests you had come to know, the good they did, the sacrifices they made, the guidance they offered. You don’t have to be a priest to be human, Anna replied. Then she added with her smile, Besides, you don’t strike me as the priestly type. Her comment stirred you, as it was meant to. But let’s get back to the bet. Damien wants to bet five dollars. You tell him your bet will be a gentleman’s bet, no money involved, a bet for the sake of the bet, a bet of principle. He says, no, five dollars. You ask him what’s wrong with a gentleman’s bet. He says there is no such thing. You have made it up. He wants to bet five dollars. You ask him if he has five dollars. You know he doesn’t. He probably does not have five cents. He is a boy. He leads a full life without money, goes through weeks and months not having any need for it at all. He thinks in terms of things, not money. He wants things, expects things, accumulates things, more things than you ever had as a boy. He has video games and basketballs, fish tanks and stamp albums, baseball mitts and model airplanes, but no money. He admits this. But he also says that’s why he wants to bet, so he can get some money. You stare at him. Apparently, he does not fully understand the concept of betting. You try to explain to him that in order to bet five dollars, you must possess five dollars to begin with. He disagrees. He tells you that you are wrong. He says if you bet five dollars it means you get five dollars if you win. That’s it. You ask him what happens then if you lose. He does not answer. He recognizes the problem. On the television screen, the players line up for the kickoff. Thinking you’ve prevailed, you tell Damien the bet will be a gentleman’s bet, but he says, no. Then he adds, it will be a kid’s bet. A kid’s bet? You tell him there is no such thing. He says there is. You tell him he’s made it up. He tells you, no, it’s a kind of bet. You ask him what kind of bet it is. He tells you it’s the kind of bet where the kid doesn’t have to pay anything if he loses. You tell him that’s no kind of bet. He says, yes, it’s a kid’s bet. You tell him you’ve never heard of it. He says he just explained it to you. You say you prefer gentlemen’s bets. He says he doesn’t like gentlemen’s bets. He likes kids’ bets. You tell him if the bet is not going to be a gentleman’s bet, there will be no bet. He says, fine, no bet, but the Titans are still going to beat the Packers. You bet the five dollars. When Anna finds out, she will not be pleased you have bet money with Damien. She is very cautious about such activities. When you once offered Damien a sip of beer, she was incensed. She is afraid, you think, that Damien will turn out to be like his father. She is glad about the changes in Damien’s life since you married, not that anyone has been struck by lightning on the road to Damascus. Damien is still Damien. He had been baptized as an infant, but nothing

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more, and, even now, he has yet to receive his first communion. Instead he remains in the pew when Anna and you approach the altar to receive the eucharist. He stays in the pew and fidgets. He takes hymnals and ties the page markers together. He tears covers off missalettes. He puts the kneeler up and then down and then up again. When you talk to Damien about receiving his first communion, he says he doesn’t want to. He says it’s for second graders, not him. Besides, he does not believe it, that the round bread is God, so it has been decided that Damien will not make his first communion because his mother thinks, though you disagree, that it would be unconscionable to force him to. By the second quarter of the game, it is quite clear which of the two football teams is really better. It is quite clear because the Titans are kicking the living shit out of the Packers. The score is twenty-eight to nothing. Damien is very happy. You are not happy at all. You are praying to God that the Titans will somehow self destruct, as the Packers already have. But the Titans score

again, on an interception returned seventy-five yards for a touchdown. Thirty-five zip. You are no longer not happy. You are angry, more angry than you should be, with Damien, and with yourself for betting Damien, and with Brett Favre, the Packers’ quarterback, whom Damien refers to as Brett FAV-ra. This is not how you say the man’s name. You inform Damien of this, but he says the name this way anyway because he knows you are angry. He says FAV-ra and, of course, you correct him. You say, no, that’s not how you say the name, listen to the announcers. They don’t say it that way. But Damien retorts, it’s spelled out right there on his jersey: f-a-v-r-e. The “v” comes first, not the “r.” You say, it doesn’t matter how you spell it. You don’t say it that way. You’re supposed to say FAR-v. But he continues to say FAV-ra. Every time they show the guy, he makes sure to say his name—Brett FAV-ra. Brett FAV-ra is not playing well. Apparently, he has injured his hand. Apparently, one of the

oversized Titans has stomped on Favre’s throwing hand during one of the skirmishes on the gridiron. Between offensive series Favre stands on the sidelines, and the trainers press icepacks against both sides of his hand. Periodically, the camera focuses closely in upon the hand so that all of America can assess the bloody mess. The top of the hand looks as if it has been flayed, and the injury is affecting Favre’s game. One play in particular is absolutely comical. It is a broken play, and Favre scrambles out of the pocket. He finds a receiver downfield and stretches his arm to launch his pass. His arm snaps forward, but the ball does not spiral across the field like a bullet, as it usually does. Instead, the ball pops out of Favre’s hand and, fluttering like a fowl, lands behind him—behind him!—as if he has not thrown a football ever before in his entire life, like a two-year-old trying to toss a ball to daddy, not like a full-grown Super Bowl champion. To top it off, a linebacker on the same play crushes Brett Favre to the ground, who lands spread eagle, his facemask planted in the turf. The play is ruled a fumble, Favre’s third turnover, and it is not even half-time. Brett Favre might as well be playing with no hands. Damien asks why FAV-ra can’t hold onto the ball. You say, what do you mean? His hand is injured. That’s not why, Damien says. You say it is. They show the top of Favre’s hand again, and you say, see, it’s all beat up. Damien says, so what? You ask him, what do you mean, so what? He

says he means the hand is injured only on the top, not the bottom. You say, but one of the Titans stepped on his hand. He says, so? You say, so his hand was stomped on by a three-hundred-pound lineman. How can the top only be injured? He says, because they showed it, the blood is only on the top, not the bottom. You stare at Damien. Each Saturday, you visit the local prison with other men from your church. You sit opposite murderers, rapists, thieves, despicable people really, the dregs of society. Yet you find these people pleasant, friendly, amiable. Even the positivist, cynical atheists among your technologically minded students do not unsettle you the way this Damien does, this boy whom people call your son. He is sitting on the floor, resting on his arms stretched back straight behind him, his fingers spread out flat on the Persian rug centered in the middle of the terra-cotta floor

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of the family room. You are sitting on the sofa, holding your glass of beer, and you contemplate Damien’s hands on the rug, and the bet, and his pronunciation of FAV-ra’s last name, and now his comment about the top of Favre’s hand. You have an urge that takes shape in your mind as a kind of fantasy: you get up and stomp on Damien’s hands yourself. Then you ask him if the bottom of his hands hurt or just the tops. If you were a schoolboy, this fantasy would play itself out in time and space. Later you would be admonished by an adult, a teacher, maybe the principal. Your parents would be informed. You would be taught to understand that your fantasy was a temptation, and it was wrong of you not to resist this temptation because acting upon it caused harm to another person. Your action would be defined for you as a sin, clearly and simply. Afterwards you would enter the darkened tomb of the church on a Saturday afternoon, join the solemn line outside the confessional, and wait your turn to express your sorrow. But you are not a schoolboy, and you are disturbed and upset by your fantasy about Damien. Damien is just a child, watching a football game with his stepdad, you, Stanley. Not for the first time, you consider what you believe to be the motive for this brand of temptation marked for Damien, discerning that a shallow comment about a football player is in itself impotent. The temptation is forged deep within and patently not a simple matter. On a shelf above the television is a picture of you and Anna on your wedding day, walking down the aisle, hand in hand, the altar in the background. You are both smiling, looking ahead, eyes shining with hope and optimism. Behind you in the picture are your best man, a friend from college, and the maid of honor, Anna’s sister, and along the aisles on each side, your mother, Anna’s parents, and Damien. At the time, you and Anna both expected in short order to plant new faces in the landscape of the family, children of your own making to complement Damien. After a year of trying, you realized there was a problem, scarring of the fallopian tubes perhaps, from Anna’s first pregnancy. Even that could be undone with an operation, the doctor at the fertility clinic assured you. But the tests revealed nothing unusual, no scarring. Anna was fine. No problems at all, the doctor told her, everything is shipshape. So the doctor suggested that you be checked, for a sperm count. It was a simple process. It was the obvious next step in eliminating possibilities. At first you balked. You were not going to submit yourself to the indignity of masturbating in a doctor’s office. But you soon recognized in your adamance the latency of fear. So you scheduled the appointment, made your appearance, performed in a toilet stall equipped with pornographic magazines, which you ignored, needing only to conjure Anna. Then you took the warm cup to the waiting attendant, and three days later the doctor called. So you met with the doctor that afternoon to discuss the results. Your count was good, but the tails of the spermatozoa abnormal. Weak swimmers, she said, but there were ways even this could be remedied: artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization. You stopped her. You understood the options, you told her, but you were Catholic and preferred to leave such matters to . . . You paused, hesitant to lay bear your beliefs to what you assumed would be the sharp edge of her science. Grace? she asked. You nodded. I admire that, she said. In my line of work I often have to deal with a desperation that knows no limits. As you departed, you thanked her, feeling almost joyous about the strength you found in your faith. But you failed to recognize how deeply you were wounded. In the game, the Titans score again with still a minute left to play, in the first half. Damien rises from the floor. Game over, he announces. He is tired and wants to go to bed. He wants his five dollars. You tell him the game is not over. A whole half is remaining. But it is forty-two to

nothing, he says. You say, if the Titans can score forty-two points in one half, so can the Packers. Anything is possible. He says, but FAV-ra is not even playing anymore. You say you think the new quarterback looks pretty good. He has not fumbled the football. He is not injured. He has thrown only one interception. Damien ignores this. He stretches forth his hand and stands motionless, waiting for his five dollars with his eyes closed, as if you are not even worthy to look at. Then he blurts out, pay up, loser. It’s a harsh word, and you wonder if Damien understands its wider connotations, if his perspicacity extends beyond merely football teams, if he perceives in you an existential condition, one that you are afraid to admit even to yourself, though you know it is true, cannot be other than true, because in the end, it is always true. No one wins. We are all too wounded to claim any victory. In your worst moments, you feel unmanned about the probability that you will never have a child of your own, and as irrational as it may sound, even cuckolded, by the fireman Damien, the dead man whose virility you must contend with each time you are confronted by his living son. At these times, you cravenly lay the blame for your despair upon the boy Damien, upon the step-ness of your relationship, as if a natural father-son relationship would somehow be idyllic. Instead of Damien, you imagine a son with the likeness of you, Stanley, in his face, a son who takes your hand as you lead him to the playground, or who sits in your lap while you watch television, who seeks your advice as he gets older, who loves you as a friend when he’s a man, who mourns for you when you are dying. During the moments you are engaged with this fantasy, it’s an almost pleasant form of despair, but when it is over, you are left desolate, dry, sick in your disappointment with Damien, with yourself, with your God. Sometimes you try to avoid the despair with diversions: reading the newspaper, correcting exams, lifting weights. At other times you allow yourself to be appeased by the grim failures you descry in the lives of others: colleagues at work, friends at church, good people, responsible, seemingly caring, who have not spoken to one of their children in years, or whose child has rebelled against them, rejected their upbringing, its mores and codes. One colleague has a son whom he simply refers to as the Crook. But there is no easy remedy for despair, and you resort mainly to the tiresome exercise of self control, not allowing yourself to visit your fantasyland in the first place. In the end you know the stepson label is an excuse, and hardly an honest one. When you bring your concerns to your priest, his response is as simple as the lessons you learned as a youth. He tells you, Stanley, love this boy as you think a father should love a son, and no less. A car door slams in the driveway, and Damien springs into action, swings open the front door before the keyhole ever jiggles. Mommy, he shouts. You realize you should have paid the kid while you still had the chance, before Anna could discover you have been gambling with her son, but the minute she steps inside the house, of course, Damien spills the beans. Stanley bet me five dollars, he says, and now he won’t pay up. Anna considers you. You point out that the game is technically not over. You’ll pay up when it is. But she is not listening. She is kissing you on the cheek. You breathe in her perfume, the bouquet of her hair. She says she could not wait to get home. It was a challenging class, a discussion of Sylvia Plath. Damien wants Anna to put him to bed, but she tells him to brush his teeth first, she’ll be with him in a minute. Damien informs you that he wants the five dollars on his bureau when he wakes up in the morning. He leaves, but as you watch him depart, you decide to call him back. Give me a hug, you say, your arm stretched out, I had fun watching the game tonight. To your surprise, he comes back and does hug you, just

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as you asked, then hustles off to brush his teeth. Anna kisses you again. She is wonderful, this woman you love. You slip your arm around her. She presses herself against you, her breasts soft, her waist spare, her womb empty, as it well may always be. She asks if you want to finish watching the football game or if you want to come to bed. You turn the television off, grateful for her in whom you find consolation, and in the bedroom together you take delight in each other, souls assuaged by flesh, and in your ebullience you spill forth into her a hope for what some would call miracle, a simple conception of a new individual soul. But when it is over, and you have each rolled away, Anna into sleep, and you into rumination, your aloneness blankets you, uncovering your hope for what it is, fallen in the darkness, tremulous, the flip side of despair.

Diane Scholl

Graven Image, 1933 Both are shy, their eyes cast downward to their starched and empty laps. Only the mother smiles vaguely, a gift she offers the cheap, busy photographer for his trouble; the little girl scowls at such trade of her old life for this treachery, this broken law, a finger flaunting in the face of God. Perhaps there is a small dog left, a grandmother. Behind them the shtetel with its bitter bread and incantations; ahead, the fervid Babel of New York Harbor, a stranger’s bed. It’s as though she sees the winters without coal, the death camps and smoking ovens, the shameful yellow star. It’s as though she agrees sullenly, her resistance a mute frown, a storm that should fall across the bent, bleached, passport picture, but doesn’t. They are blonde, still radiant with health, only the mother resigned, turning slightly toward the child as if to coax a promise of silence from her small stubborn face.

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Joey Locicero

Sewer Grates Are Barren Isn’t it ironic that rust is the color of love. It’s infatuation sprawled out on the fire escape, clutching the thing which best portrays us: A canvas delved with watercolor, and no traceable brushstrokes. See this product of rain, down the ladder and past the dumpster as if a child mistook a penny for a crayon. Oiled in moonlight, a river luminescent amidst another river gleaming like comets in the asphalt. Is it a wonder these sewer grates are barren? Oh, always are the sour tornados of exhaust. And always we breathe we take them in. In out of the cold we take our orphans. Isn’t it so— Sardonic, that water sustains the living, yet can stifle it. The rape of wrought iron is this excuse to breed corrosion. It fixates the neck in a manner where lovers pass other lovers, yet must continue over them. The moon longs for tree branches to invade it. Darling we must be moons gargled in skies scoured with cloud. Humming lullabies to empty cribs before dawn. Glass-sheen ceramic stars backdrop so well, and in turn we flung a fistful there. I’m desolation and so are they. They’ll miss me when I leave them. Hear that darling. It isn’t ironic our lust is the color of blood. Congealed on the ribs, it attacks the way a broken alley attacks the man. How because there are eyes, there must in turn be beauty to astonish them. All these trashcans full of fire. What fun we have with ruination. As we were created and then later attempted ourselves to harness that outline. The structure in which the chest expands, and then diminishes just to be able to keep our hands warm

REVIEW

PHOTO GRAPHS OF M E M OR I ES : A Review of the Images and Narratives of Edward Sheriff Curtis BY LINDA MCCULLOUGH MOORE

To Catch the Lightning by Alan Cheuse • Sourcebooks Landmark, 2009 The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins • Simon & Schuster, 2008 Edward Sheriff Curtis by Joanna Cohan Scherer • Phaidon Press, 2008

The release of Alan Cheuse’s book To Catch the Lightning followed fast on the heels of

the paperback publication of Marianne Wiggins’ widely acclaimed novel The Shadow Catcher. Inasmuch as both writers fashion fictive narratives around the life and work of photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis, they are interesting to read together. And while we’re on the subject of catching lightning and shadows, these two books must also vie and reverberate with the stunning collection of photographs, Edward Sheriff Curtis, edited by Joanna Cohan Scherer. Edward Curtis was the visionary who charged himself with the task of photogaphing every American Indian tribe, the man who undertook to document in words and pictures both a people and a way of life that sadly and swiftly vanished. More than a century later, his work stands as the finest lasting visual record of this native tribal culture. Curtis devoted years of his life to the arduous enterprise, winning fame in his day, even photographing the family of Teddy Roosevelt and being richly funded by J. P. Morgan. His work necessitated drama and adventure. It also meant he often had to leave his wife and children in Seattle to live what lives they would. A novelist may be forgiven for thinking there’s a story here. Good art makes us lose consciousness. We look at Curtis’s sepia images of native faces, and we are rendered unconscious of anything outside the frame. The mastery of this artist frees us from all consideration of clunky cameras, nasty chemicals, and late nights spent in dank darkrooms. It’s just us and the image. So it is with fiction, properly conceived and executed. Within a page or two, we’re out cold. Such is the experience with Wiggins’ cunning book, The Shadow Catcher. At first I wasn’t sure if I was reading some long introduction, but by page three, I no longer cared. I was just happy to be reading anything this woman wrote, willing to let her take me where she chose to go. And a good thing too. Wiggins has her readers stuck in L.A. traffic before we have our seat belts on, then sweaty and disheveled, late for a posh lunch, and just as quickly (and convincingly) we are suddenly in the 1880’s in cold Minnesota making do on oh so very little, then packing up a life and moving it to Seattle, just before the town goes up in flames.

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Time slows, and we—flies on the wall—get to witness a falling into love that lets us feel so many things we will forever be so fond of feeling. And here’s the magic part. We buy every word. We believe it happened just this way. Then, just as we’re prepared to travel so deliciously with Curtis and wife Clara through their days, there comes a phone call in the middle of the night and Wiggins is told her father’s dying—never mind that he’s been dead for thirty years—and just like that we’re driving through the desert to Las Vegas. What’s interesting is how little any of this time and place and character shift matters. When you’re in good hands, you’re in good hands. And if you trouble yourself to wonder what any of this has to do with anything, you’re so happy just to be there, that you don’t much care. In the end, the widely disparate parts weave themselves together, and we sigh and say, Oh yes. It’s all one story. I had forgotten that time and place and personality don’t ever change that. (One quibble here, standard issue of mine: When will someone write a story where we do not find out in the end that the main character is gay? When will an author craft a conclusion in which sexual orientation is not made to stand for explanation of all that’s been and will be? It’s not just formulaic, it’s reductive and demanding all at the same time, asking homosexuality to answer all the questions, some of which might well be better met with: We just don’t know.) There is so much in this book to like. Drop dead gorgeous prose, perspective and philosophy. Writing that does what it was created to do. Wiggins writes: The sound my country makes at night. . . . the sound my nation exhales as it sleeps is the sound of prayer, the sound of Jesus Christ arising from the basalt in the Rockies, splitting hearts of granite as he shakes off chains of time . . . it is the metallic hiss of money in the forge, the sound of slavery’s jism misspent in anger and assimilation . . . the sound of History slipping into coma, cosmic silence—the sound my country makes—a note so confirming and annuncitory that it seems to bend into itself . . . the way a shadow bends . . . wailing gently. Out here on the edge, in California, turning in my bed, the nation at my back, I hear a single note, heralding arrival. The sound of a train whistle. The sound my country makes. I am afraid that my state of consciousness in reading Alan Cheuse’s book was different. I was conscious through the entire proceeding, awake the whole time. I was never unaware of the author hard at work crafting a story, however sympathetic with his strivings—scholarly and diligent and impressively researched—I might be. Cheuse, like Wiggins, experiments. Certain chapters in third person, some in first, with what too often felt like carefully considered phrases on almost every page. I don’t want to think about word choice and phrasing options while I’m camping in a fierce storm on the prairie. In alternating chapters, I felt I was reading a young

adult novel, that is, I felt I was there to be explained to, to be told, then told again, just in case I didn’t get it. Telling isn’t showing, no matter how many tribes get visited, no matter how often a man may royally disappoint his wife. I found the two central characters, Curtis’s scholar scribe and his Indian friend, contrived. They felt too purpose-built. I found too many images top heavy. Overreaching, overwritten. And the book is too long. At five hundred pages, way too long. Things suffer by comparison. I’m sorry, but they do. What Wiggins is able to offer is the experience of connections across generations and wide continents between the people then and there and the people we are now. Curtis does the same. We connect intimately, individually with the faces in the photographs that Curtis created, and I use the word advisedly. Curtis’s photographs have sometimes been questioned as to how representative they are of people and of time and place. There is a fair amount of fretting over whether he dressed his subjects up in clothes they might not have worn that day. Is the photo accurate? Is it genuinely the way that person was? In the end, we don’t care. We like the pictures. We love the pictures. And we know they tell us something that is entirely true. When I picked up Wiggins’ book I thought I’d want to later research the facts of Curtis’s life, but as I read I realized this was and would remain very much beside the point. I don’t know if I am meant to take her own memoir sections of the book as fact or fiction. And I like not knowing, much as my aged next door neighbor tells me that he likes not knowing the names of the flowers that bloom around his door. He says it is the flowers that he likes. I like not knowing because it allows me to get lost inside this novel in a way I am not able to do in Cleuse’s. Part of the appeal here is that we never wonder if it’s real, because we know that it is true. Now, what of the actual collection of Curtis’s photographs by Joanna Cohan Scherer? How shall I begin to describe these images that so beautifully unsettle, worry, chronicle and delight? I shan’t (I’ve been waiting years to use that word). You will simply have to upend the piggy bank, forgo lattes, sell your miniature spoon collection, and get yourself a copy. Page seventy-one alone is worth the price.

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Jean Tucker

Cooking Alone You cook for the jungle animals in primary colors on the curtains that hang above the sink. You cook for the one long dead who spelled “I love you” in clumsy brush strokes on the yellow wall. You cook for Carmen outside the cigarette factory (or on the stereo in the next room). You cook of course for the citizens of the garden who have given you their best. You cook for the great mulberry out back to strengthen it against the neighbor’s chainsaw. You cook against the blizzard on howling nights. You cook when there is nothing left to say. Oh yes—you cook for yourself and set the yellow-and-white decked table with a stoneware plate the color of moss, a glass with a fat stem, a candle.

CONTRIBUTORS

Mary Jo Balistreri was a concert pianist and harpsichordist, but with the death of her seven-year-old grandson, she looked for another avenue of expression that could better give witness to this child’s life. Poetry was the gift she was granted, and she found it not only accomplished her original goal, but also became a spiritual path as well. In 2009, with radiation for throat cancer, she had a cellular breakdown and completely lost her hearing and her words. The hearing never returned, but gradually, the words came. Today, Mary Jo cannot imagine life without poetry. She has been published in Windhover, Verse Wisconsin, Crab Creek Review, and Passager, among others. Her books include Joy in the Morning (Bellowing Ark Press, 2008) and Gathering the Harvest (Bellowing Ark Press, 2012). Kait Burrier is a graduate of Duquesne University with a BA in theater arts. She has recently been involved in theater and poetry communities within Pittsburgh and northeastern Pennsylvania, and abroad in regions of France. She is a candidate in Wilkes University’s Creative Writing MFA program. Her poetry has been published in recent volumes of the anthology Voices from the Attic, Duquesne’s :lexicon, Dionne’s Story, and a NAP lit mag e-chapbook, with forthcoming work in Word Fountain’s commemorative flood issue. Kait is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Scott C. Cameron’s poetry has recently appeared in Ascent, Dialogue, and the anthology Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-First Century Mormon Poets. His poetry has also won prizes in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Competition in 2009 and 2010. After short stints as a junior zookeeper, which included feeding frozen white mice to snowy owls, and a warehouse job boxing up products like Hollywood dog training videos, he completed a lengthy haul as a graduate student at Boston University and now has landed a more permanent job as an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University-Idaho. The effects of lengthy Idaho winters and wrangling four crazy kids often creep into his poetry. Richard Cole was born in Krum, Texas. He’s published two books of poetry, The Glass Children (The University of Georgia Press) and Success Stories (Limestone Books). He has also recently finished a memoir, I Have Wonderful News: A Catholic Conversion. Honors include an NEA fellowship, a Loft Mentor Series award, and a Bush Foundation grant. His poems and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Hudson Review, the Sun Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and Image Journal—Good Letters. He’s president of a business writing agency in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and two sons. He has never taken a writing workshop, though he has taught a few. More at www.richard-cole.net. Michelle Regalado Deatrick writes at a desk overlooking the eighty sloping, glacier-sculpted acres in Southeast Michigan where she, her husband and their children tend to orchard and farm, garden and native prairie. Recently named second runner-up in Boulevard’s 2012 Contest for Emerging Poets, Michelle also received an honorable mention in Copper Nickel’s 2011 Fiction Contest; she has been a Fellow

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at MacDowell, Ragdale, and VCCA. Her work appears in the American Literary Review, Best New American Voices, and other publications. Michelle blogs about writing, organic farming, and native prairies at www. michelleregaladodeatrick.com Renee Emerson teaches poetry at Shorter University, has her MFA from Boston University, and is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Where Nothing Can Grow (Batcat Press). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Indiana Review, among others. Born and raised in Memphis, she has never been to Graceland. James Hapke was born in 1986 in Newport Beach, California, and studied in Santa Barbara at Westmont College where he earned a degree in English with a minor in studio art focusing on printmaking. After graduating in 2009, he co-founded the Santa Barbara-based writing group and journal, FRAME, and co-wrote an ocean/ballad-based concept album, Water Will Rise, released in 2010 under the band name Patience. His interdisciplinary background broadens his work as a printmaker. Hapke received The Santa Barbara Arts Fund’s Individual Artist Award for printmaking in 2011. His work is privately collected and part of Westmont College’s permanent collection. He lives and works in Santa Barbara. Laura Hennessy writes: “I am a fine art photographer and freelance graphic designer originating from Oakland, California. Raised by an architect, an interior designer, and an art appreciator, I developed an awareness and affinity for art early in my life. I have always been fascinated with detail and design and studied both photography and graphic design in college. Drawn to photography for its ability to effectively present my perspective, I began to explore, expose, and expand on that which interested me most— the abstraction and appreciation of the everyday object. I began showing my work five months ago and have received awards and recognition both domestically and internationally.” laurahennessyphotography.com Julie Hensley grew up on a sheep farm in the Shenandoah Valley, but now she makes her home in Kentucky with her husband (the writer R. Dean Johnson) and their two children. She is a core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio, the brief-residency MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University. Julie has won The Southern Women Writers Emerging Voice Award in both fiction (2005) and poetry (2009). Her work regularly appears in a variety of journals, most recently in Superstition Review, PoemMemiorStory, Pinch, and Blackbird. Her chapbook of poems, The Language of Horses, is available from Finishing Line Press. Zacheriah Kramer was born and raised in Northern Colorado. An eager student of the humanities, he studied undergraduate philosophy at Covenant College, theology at Sangre de Cristo Seminary, and in the end, found his voice in traditional drawing and painting, receiving his education at The Florence Academy of Art in both Sweden and Italy. He has received many scholarships and prizes for his efforts in painting, including the FAA Fourth Year Scholarship and the Alumni Choice award for the best painting of the most recent alumni exhibition in Florence. He became an assistant instructor while still a student and taught in various capacities at The Florence Academy of Art until 2012. Zacheriah currently lives with his wife, Kristin, in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he paints and teaches privately.

Joey Locicero is a writer living in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. He studied film and creative writing in college and currently works in the medical field. Of course his freelance and creative writing is the absolute love of his life. In his spare time, he frequents poetry, espresso, and the gym, although not necessarily in that order. His work has appeared in Ruminate Magazine and the Penwood Review. Linda McCullough Moore is the author of a literary novel The Distance Between and a new story collection heralded by Alice Munro, This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon, as well as more than 300 shorter published pieces. She lives and writes in western Massachusetts, where she mentors aspiring writers by phone and email and pony express. www. lindamcculloughmoore.com David Oestreich is a human resources professional living in Northwest Ohio with his wife and three children. Every Sunday morning, he sits in his recliner, quietly jamming to Arvo Pärt. This past September he made a pilgrimage to the Southern Illinois blufflands to view the annual snake migration, which was was truly awesome. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lilliput Review, Eclectica, Tar River Poetry, and San Pedro River Review. Joshua Robbins was born in Berkeley, but left California after high school, and he hasn’t been back much since then. As a consequence of moving around the country, he’s not exactly sure where home is, though he seeks to locate or create “home” through writing poetry which explores religious faith within the context and confines of suburban landscapes. His recognitions include the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, and inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology. His poetry collection Praise Nothing is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in early 2013. He teaches poetry writing and literature at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville with his wife and son. Diane Scholl has taught at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, for thirty-five years. Originally from a Norwegian neighborhood in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York, she graduated from St. Olaf College and received her MA and PhD from The University of Chicago. A lover of history, she has taught and traveled in England and in China. Her poems have been published in the Cresset, College English, Christianity and Literature, and the Cider Press Review; currently she is at work on a volume of poetry and has also published articles on Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, on Nathaniel and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, on Henry James, and on Alice Walker, among other writers. The intersection between literature and theology remains a key focus in her work, both creative and scholarly. Luci Shaw is a poet, essayist, lecturer and Writer-in-Residence at Regent College, Vancouver. Widely anthologized, her writing has appeared in Image, Weavings, Books & Culture, Christian Century, Relief, Rock & Sling, Ruminate, Radix, Crux, Southern Review, Stonework, Nimble Spirit, and others. Harvesting Fog, her 30th book, was released in 2010. She works with Alms Ministry at St. Paul’s Church, Bellingham, Washington. Her new book of essays on aging, Views from a Steep Slope: The Reports on the Exhilarating Adventure of Living Long Enough to Get Old, is forthcoming in 2013. For further information visit www.lucishaw.com

Shannon Skelton is from Birmingham, Alabama. She studied English at Samford University and earned an MAE from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She now lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she teaches high school English. She is a proud aunt to two little nephews. One wants to be a superhero, and the other wants to eat balloons. She and her seminarian husband run together regularly, and they celebrated five fabulous years of marriage in November. “Guilty” is her first published story. Paul Stapleton is a native of Hoboken, New Jersey, and an alumnus of Boston College. Since 1988 he has been a teacher in various schools and colleges in New York City and North Carolina. He has earned degrees in theology, classics, and English. Previously, he has published stories in Aethlon, Dappled Things, and J Journal, and his story “The Fall of Punicea” has been anthologized in Pushcart Prize XXXVII. He first met his wife Karen Cruz while they were teaching at the Academy of Mount St. Ursula in the Bronx. They were married in 1995 and have been parishioners at St. Raphael the Archangel Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 1997. Heather M. Surls is a part-time freelance editor and writer. Her essays tend to focus on the people in whichever community she’s submerged in. Currently, she lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband, a PhD student, and (perhaps by the time of this publication) their newborn son. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Relief, The Literary Bohemian, and The Prairie Light Review. Kathleen Henderson Staudt works as an educator, writer, retreat leader, and spiritual director, teaching at Virginia Theological Seminary and Wesley Theological Seminary. Her writing has appeared in Weavings, Christianity and Literature, Anglican Theological Review, and Spiritus, among others. She is the author of At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics. Her poetry appears in two volumes—Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture and Waving Back: Poems of Mothering Life—and is also included in the anthology Imago Dei. Her blog is at www.poetproph. blogspot.com. Don Thompson writes: “I was born in Bakersfield, California, and have lived in the southern San Joaquin Valley for most of my life. Retired from teaching in a nearby prison, my wife Chris and I live on her family’s cotton farm. Publications include Been There, Done That (2002), Sittin’ on Grace Slick’s Stoop (2006), Turning Sixty (2008), Where We Live (2009), and Everything Barren Will Be Blessed (2012). Back Roads won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize for 2008. Allan M. Jalon’s profile of my poetry ‘Planted in the San Joaquin’ appeared in the LA Times in 2010.” Jean Tucker of Louisville, Kentucky, recently concluded a twenty-year second career teaching English to adults from all over the world and is enjoying the newfound freedom to indulge in travel, figurative and literal. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications including Sow’s Ear, Passager, the Comstock Review, Common Ground Review, White Pelican Review, and some local/regional markets. Jean is a long-time member of Green River Writers.

THOUGHTS ON “MARGINS” FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

LAST NOTE

It seems that the more you write and study poetry, the more you are told the profession is obsolete. The work of a poet is like that of a telegraph operator, milkman, a typist. Though poetry is marginalized in our society, it blossoms in the margins. Like those stretches of highway in East Tennessee, where the government plants seemingly useless wildflowers in the untread grasses between asphalt. Useless, until they blush the highway margins every shade of vermillion. Renee Emerson

POETRY

Chaim Potok writes in My Name Is Asher Lev that an artist must “learn to see between the blinks.” The untouched or unseen space between a person,and art seems a crucial substance for the work’s reception. Margins tend to be vessels or invitations into the presence of the blinkspace that Potok might be getting at. If engaged, the margins also provide space for interaction and self-insertion into a piece. We give our reactions, our joy, agreement, revolt, and compassion—whatever we have—to the margins. James Hapke

VISUAL ART

We stand on the porch in a nighttime rainstorm, my fouryear-old neighbor and me. By all definitions, he is among the marginalized. He is a Burmese refugee. He is autistic. His father is in jail and his mother doesn’t know how she’ll pay rent this month. But as I catch rain dripping from the gutter in my cupped hands and pour it on his upturned face, as we laugh together in the shattered white brilliance of flood lamp on wet pavement, I see no one more beautiful than this broken child. The words of Jesus press into my mind with new life: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Heather M. Surls

NONFICTION

When my mother died unexpectedly four years ago, my father gave me her Norton Anthology of English Literature—a copy so old that the famous Ditchley cover portrait of Elizabeth I is in black and white. Opening it, I discovered margins richly inked with my mother’s notes

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in the rounded handwriting of her twenties, the angular hand of her thirties and forties. Raised in a home with few books, she was married and a mother at eighteen; she took night classes for her college degree. She dog-eared Spenser, spilled coffee on the Wife of Bath, loved Milton— “Lycidas” especially is embellished, almost illuminated, by comments in red, paling blue, and black. While sewing my clothes and working as an operator, a saleswoman, a real estate broker, she joined wholeheartedly—in exclamation points and penciled questions—the great, sacred conversation about poetry that flows down to us from the Psalms and the Song of Songs, from Homer, and before. Michelle Regalado Deatrick

POETRY

I sometimes wonder if I love poetry. I wonder if poetry loves me back. We live together. My wife understands. There were years, though, when I wanted nothing to do with it. I thought it had failed me or I had failed it. Looking back, I think I was angry simply because I wanted poetry to be God, and it just isn’t. I’ve had the same contrary history with the company of poets, showing up at times but always hanging around the margins. Poetry is a little big world (or maybe a big little world) filled with interesting people, some of them wizards, and I see the value of that community. But I still have this sense, almost a wariness, of getting too close, of becoming distracted from the real business at hand. Richard Cole

POETRY

Margins—they’re all about where to draw the line, hold fears at bay, allow space to breathe. The edges between high tide and low tide. During my last hair cut my hair stylist forgot about margins. She was going through some personal drama and got a bit carried away as she told me about it, which meant that she kept cutting and cutting. And cutting. Finally, a moment or two before I was completely bald, I commented “I guess it will be a while before I need another hair cut!” Shocked, she dropped her scissors and let me go. It served as a good warning to me

to watch my words, my attitudes, my emotional outbursts before they do damage. On the positive side, margins are also possible places for trying one more thing, making a last effort, giving someone another chance. Luci Shaw

flames, definitions, imaginary creatures, and meeting minutes, all sitting atop piles of leaves! And would they wonder what was important? Shannon Skelton

FICTION

POETRY

To steal from Gerard Manley Hopkins, glory be to God for the margins of each day, when we remember the edges of leaves, the underbelly of clouds, the lace-like frost on weeds in the empty lot. The centers of my days are filled with sitting in front of a computer, meetings, grading papers, preparing lessons to teach composition; but in the margins, I get to wrestle with my kids, slowly wash the dishes, shovel snow in a cold wind, and tuck my right foot between my wife’s two feet as we slip off to sleep. Without margins, I would scarcely know what is precious, quirky, beautiful; without margins I might miss God’s whispering. Scott Cameron

POETRY

After I lost my hearing in 2009, I understood that a part of me had died, that I was living but in the margins with other challenged human beings. I never realized how isolating loss of hearing could be, how strange it was to live on the edge, a border person. Writing poetry brought me to a place of deep compassion and the beginning of acceptance. Mary Jo Balistreri

POETRY

In the margins I write grocery lists and make minicalendars for the week. I draw trees, ones that bend a little over my sentences, and their leaves might go swirling all around my notes. Sometimes, a pile of leaves ends up at the bottom of a page, growing bigger as the meeting or the sermon continues. One of my students draws sketches of imaginary creatures in her margins, and they are so good that I think I should have assigned the drawing of imaginary creatures to the entire class. If there were no margins? Future historians would read our notes—with grocery lists, calculus problems, swirls and

Look at the ink composing shapes on this paper but do not read the words. You failed. Why? Because you know that ink and paper are necessary but not sufficient to explain this text. They are means to convey meaning. We begin to forget to see the world thus. Rivers are literally H2O, but can molecules explain rivers? The heavens and earth tell glorious tales if we only listen. All things are our Maker’s verse, his brush strokes, his creative style; wholly gratuitous. The only true masterpiece. Test earth’s elements, only forget not earth’s primacy as poetry. Perhaps the ancients’ impulse to people nature with deities was not as far-fetched as we hope. Thinking our reductivist thoughts they might shout, “You miss the very point!” Immortal, when did you last leave the orange city glare, look deep into the heavens and let loose your imagination in the infinities of those ancient crystal lights? You will outlast them. You who are literally stardust. Zacheriah Kramer

VISUAL ART

Years ago, I explored the personal library of a favorite poet. He was a scrawler. His marginalia marked his conversations with the writers who shaped him. My shelves are also full of what I call my “critical editions” of books I have loved—with marks and marginalia that remind me who I was when I first read them. Recently I read a book that engaged me in new ways, but it was on my Kindle. I couldn’t figure out how to scrawl my responses. The notes I could write were too composed, too orderly; they missed the moment, stayed inside the lines. Can I get outside the margins of an electronic text, enough to leave my mark? Kathleen Henderson Staudt

POETRY

Zacheriah Kramer writes: “Engaging the world as directly as possible is an invaluable aspect of our experience of creation, and, in my view, is devastatingly lacking in our concrete and digital age. I, therefore, work only from life, memory, and imagination. A conscientious striving after goodness, beauty, and truth, my pictures are primarily narrative and symbolic in style, striving to excite the imagination and communicate using a timeless, innate, and universal image language—perhaps akin to platonic anamnesis—and often augmented by visual metaleptic references to texts, other paintings, and the like. My pictures can be seen as an intentional attempt to communicate visually a personal grappling with the breadth and depth of the human experience of a broken, yet wondrous creation, and as a grateful response to the gratuitous splendor that shines forth from every corner of it. Like the universe, and perhaps even Being itself, my pictures are to be felt, and even wrestled with, more than simply explained.” OPPOSITE PAGE Zacheriah Kramer. Self Portrait. Oil on linen. 25.5 x 20 inches. BACK COVER Zacheriah Kramer. Sower. Oil on linen. 33.5 x 29.5 inches.

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Issue 26: In the Margins

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